bearderic:

Here it is if you haven’t read it yet. The argument is between a Christian student and an atheist professor. It’s been spreading like wildfire on Facebook, Tumblr, and beyond once again. I know many see the flaws in the conversation’s argumentative structure, but I thought I would address a…

A sensible and thoroughly thought through analysis of a reasonably irritating meme.

This idea that the student was EINSTEIN (their capitals) is perhaps the most irritating aspect. For a start, this conversation didn’t happen and, as Eric so rightly points out, Einstein’s beliefs weren’t all that clear cut. But the fact that this was Einstein and ipso facto must be the correct side of the argument is the most nonsense, unscientific way of debating. This appeal to authority argument is used by the likes of Bill O’Reilly for christ’s sake. The point of scientific investigation is that you don’t hold any person to be infallible. Darwin was wrong or unclear about some things, so what future scientists did was identify these flaws and worked from there. Einstein was wrong about a lot of things before Relativity. It was in fact his particular brand of genius which lead him to persevere through these errors until he found a correct answer.

I won’t go on much longer about this ‘conversation’, but it is so patently written by another person wishing to justify their faith through mock intellectualism. “No one has ever observed the process of evolution at work” indeed. I hate to do it but I’m going to call bullshit here. For a starters there’s the evolution observed at bacterial level which is exponentially faster than that which brought about elephants and rabbits. And not only that but science, as explained again by Eric, also is not averse to dealing in probabilities and best guesses - very openly too. You won’t find a peer-reviewed holy text, but that’s another post altogether. That’s what a theory is. Even when you have all the evidence in the world you still have Cartesian doubt, but you report your best guess, safe in the knowledge that you were as thorough as possible and the methodology is there for anybody else in the scientific community to emulate.

Again, be you atheist or agnostic, you mustn’t ridicule belief but you must call out nonsense quasi-propaganda such as this.