His only trick is to tell everyone else that they aren’t certain that they are right, while he is absolutely certain that he is right, and therefore he must be right. Most of this video is taken up with wordy attempts to pin him down, but the simple solution comes up at the end: just tell him to knock if off with his one and only line of argument, and then he jumps up and goes away.
We now need to compile a list of magic words that make other creationists disappear.
The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.
Charles Bukowski
Done in one. The other thing that came to my mind to describe this attitude: “Arrogance equals evidence.”
Had Dillahunty (and us watching) only been so lucky.
There’s another version of this stance which I have actually heard, multiple times: Proof of the truth of The Gospel™ is the “fact” that “you know that you know that you know.”
I am not kidding.
I also like that textbook display of smugness. Trying to imagine that man surviving the presence of any imaginable version of a Jesus without a serious coating of angel vomit.
I’m kinda partial to “Proof by Blatant Assertion”, myself.
knowknot @3
That similar to the Muslim who told me that everyone is a Muslim, it’s just that some of us don’t acknowledge it.
Just out of curiosity, who’s the other fellow in the main part of the video, the one with beard, glasses, and dark shirt?
Argumentum ad Dunnant et Krugor?
I think they called him Dr. Jones, and he sounds like a Dr. Jones I’ve heard talking to a few atheists; in fact, AronRa has a recent interview posted up on his blog.
Sye is the ultimate one trick pony. The fact that he walks off the stage when it is pointed out that it is a cheap trick and he should stop it is only surprising in that he is stubborn as shit and will rarely ever quit using that same precious argument over and over and over and over. But aside from that, it is surprising, because it is the only card he has to play. He has nothing else up his sleeve. He has nothing even left in his deck. It is all the same argument, all the time. He literally has nothing else.
Without having watched that video, here’s what I’d tell Sye regarding what I’m sure about:
1. I’m certain I don’t know everything
2. I’m certain I’m not God
3. I’m certain Sye’s not God
4. I’m certain Sye doesn’t know everything
But how do I know any of that?
Well, if I knew everything, (1) obviously wouldn’t apply. If (2) was true and I was God, I’d know it (because if God knows everything, as Sye insists, there’d be nothing he couldn’t know). As for (3) & (4): if Sye was God and/or omniscient, he would firstly be able to convince me that he’s right very easily and secondly, due to knowing exactly how I think about things, be able to have that conversation without defaulting to what’s become his trademark bull-headed, scenery-chewing belligerence. Sye can’t, therefore he’s either not God/omniscient or, if he’s either, he’s choosing not to use his perfect knowledge to present a perfect argument and is instead screwing with me.
Having established to my satisfaction (and hopefully that of other people) that neither I or Sye are God or omniscient, I realise that I now have to proceed carefully with any truth claims made by anyone about anything and evaluate each one based on the evidence, prior plausibility or arguments provided for it.
Sye’s claim that he’s in the inner circle of somebody who does, in fact, know everything and that by extension Sye’s words are simply to be accepted as gospel, rests on a foundation of magical and demonstrably historically dubious claims made in texts written before the invention of the telescope and collated during the last gasp of Imperial Pagan Rome, which are then employed to support an argument of perfect and fully-enclosed circularity containing multiple false premises. In addition to being no better evidenced and no more logically watertight than any other ancient mystical origin story, Sye’s “proofs” are no more convincing than either the young-earth creationist apologist’s script standardised by Ken Ham or the shiny-suited used-god hard-sell of W.L. Craig.
As a bonus, Sye’s presentation style alienates, through insults to the intelligence and sheer blinding arrogance, anyone and everyone who doesn’t agree with him from the very beginning, ensuring that even if he was making a compelling case, few people would want to listen to him make it. If Sye truly is making the One Argument to bring them all, his unapologetic abuse of anyone who doubts it in the slightest degree will guarantee that almost noone will buy what he’s selling (if someone was trying to sell you a new Lamborghini for only $500 and spent the entire sales pitch insulting your intelligence, you might start to wonder about the car, even as you’re giving it a test drive – the obvious difference here is that Sye expects you to believe he has the car without even showing it to you, instead merely describing it to you in such ham-fisted terms that it sounds more like a rusty toy tractor with three wheels – and then berating you for doubting him).
Surely any omnipotent handler of Sye should be able to recognise that style is almost as important as substance and alter the plan accordingly, but that hasn’t occurred; across the board, even eloquent and educated apologists are very often arrogant & cocksure beyond any reasonable cause – that’s apart from them making arguments shot through with flaws so obvious that they have to be actively ignoring them. This fact shows me that either Sye’s God wants him to alienate potential converts so they go to Hell or that the obvious alternative – that Sye’s arguments are as close to pure, willful delusion as you can sail without falling off the edge of sanity – is most probably the right one.
Thanks, favog. I believe that’s Dr. Michael W. Jones. PZ has interviewed with him. Now to look into the “indexicality and deictic” argument he’s laying out. I think he’s suggesting that you can’t make assertions based on the Bible because of linguistic problems interpreting the text…maybe.
Al Dente,
Somewhere I read of an Eastern religion that acknowledges all religions are true. This is because every other god is an avatar of the True God, theirs. Even if you invent a new religion, it is still just a subset of the one all encompassing religion.
Previous efforts to figure out which religion does this have failed. Perhaps someone here can enlighten me?
Now I’ve watched:
THAT is the perfect response to Sye.
Who in the name of Adam Shadowchild is Sye Ten Bruggencate, and more importantly, WHY does anyone care what he blathers about?
Snake Foot: Sye Ten Bruggencate was a prolific internet troll whose only line of argument was “how do you account for logic without God” and then telling you that you couldn’t use logic to prove logic, so checkmate atheists. He got himself all over the atheist blogosphere, much like Mabus. Loud mouthed crank who would troll everywhere , and at length.
Now, he has become even more notable by enterring into some partnership from Hell with Eric Hovind, idiot creationist child of an idiot creationist felon. So he is getting to spew his same old presuppositional shit to new and bigger audiences now, talking about how Christians own logic while standing next to a fucking Young Earth Creationist.
Why do we care? Partially because some uninformed audience might think his blather is accurate. But it is also a good source of bitter, snarky humor.
I’d take a wild stab and say it could be Baha’i you’re referring to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bah%C3%A1%27%C3%AD_Faith
Snake Foot: If you want more than what anteprepro says, you can check out the RationalWiki article on him. Also contains some snarky humor.
Is there more of this debate available? I would be interested to know how Dr. Michael W. Jones got to indexicality and deictics in the discussion.
And what’s Dr. Jones’ story? The name of his website, The New Covenant Group, makes one wonder, and there are other hints that he might be a god botherer himself, though perhaps with some unconventional quirks. I can’t find anything about his background on the internet.
The other two fellows in the video are, I believe, Bob Graeves, described as an “unconventional pastor,” and Greg Brahe, described as the “resident biologist and atheist.” Graeves is the other man with a white beard.
I’ve read several Hindu authors who have made the claim that every religion is really just a branch of Hinduism. Of course Hinduism itself is a concatenation of many religions of the area of the Indian subcontinent in the first place, so the extension to embrace all the worldwide religions is but a short leap.
Baha’i and several variations of western mystical traditions (like Theosophy) hold that all religions are in some sense “right”, if I recall correctly.
Also we have many western authors (such as Huxley and Watts) who make the claim that every religion is just an interpretation of one underlying truth or experience, called by Huxley “the perennial philosophy”.
I suggest “Fewmets!” as a promising line of research.
( Cf. Previous thread. )
“how do you account for logic without God”
It’s inherently sniny, that’s how.
@20:
Re: “the perennial philosophy”, I regard Sye’s theology as “the perineal philosophy” in that I believe it originates somewhere in the vicinity of his anus.
What you don’t see in that clip is that Sye’s enabler, Eric Hovind was also present, and while he’s not quite as painfully single-minded as his friend, he continued to make Sye’s argument throughout the rest of the “debate.”
What’s worse, is that the other guys who appear in the clip later bent over backwards to apologize to Hovind for Sye’s treatment, saying that he should not have been dismissed from the stage like that.
The whole event was extremely painful to watch, even after Sye’s departure, so I would highly recommend you don’t waste your time watching the full video.
fuck me. Who were these fuckheads that lost a golden opportunity to applaud the appropriate behavior for both Sye and Hovind?
I’d like to know who to never bother listening to.
IMHO, the best way to counter Sye is to play his own game against him. The proper response, and IMHO the accurate response and honest response:
Everyone is a presuppositionalist. I agree. I can invoke the Münchhausen Trilemma, which proves that every coherent belief contains infinite regresses, circular reasoning, or unjustified statements (aka axioms, aka presuppositions). Human knowledge is finite, and so infinite regresses are out. Circular reasoning is fallacious. That leaves axioms.
Sye, you have axioms. Some of your unjustified starting premises – axioms – include:
– We can know something for certain. – Maybe that’s impossible. Maybe the best we have is probabilistic beliefs.
– There is a creature, god, which knows everything for certain. – Maybe there is no such thing.
– A creature which knows everything for certain can make a fallible creature like yourself know something for certain. – You’re fallible. You might be mistaken. You might have been fooled by Satan. Hell, we know that sufficiently advanced aliens could have rewritten your brain which we know rewrites your mind, and maybe aliens rewrote your brain to make you convinced, but still wrong.
– Even if your god exists, and even if it’s the god of Christianity, and even if the rest of your claims are right, you also believe that it logically entails that we should worship that god. – Fuck that I say. If Stargate SG-1 has taught me anything, it is that the proper response to evil gods is not to bow down and worship, but to blow them up. Nuke god! Even if we have to research magical explosives like the heroes did to blow up the Ori, we should do that. Finally, even if we fail, I’ll take a line from the Jaffa. “I die free.”
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IDieFree
That same sentiment exists as a core part of the American identity. You accept slavery. That’s what “Jesus Christ as my lord and master” means. We Americans instead say: “Give me liberty or give me death!” Also “Live free or die!” (The official state motto of New Hampshire.)
This sentiment is also older than print. “I am Spartacus.”
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IAmSpartacus
I take the following axiomatically: Logic, reason, I am sufficiently capable of logic and reason (but not perfectly competent), science, skepticism, humanism, and the notion that I am not the center of the world which allows me to conclude that these other humans have minds like me.
Sye Ten acts like a little child.
Did he stomp his feet as he walked off the stage and slam the door as he left the room?
@damnitidon’tknowbecauseican’tcopy commentnumbersorevensearchonthemsincethefreakingsitedesignchanged
Al Dente
Exactly. That knowing is just so damn deep that it allows us to see that we were right all along. So right, in fact, that any outside thought that touches on anything remotely similar to our rightness is actually of a piece. It might be distorted in various ways, but in the end it all points back to us.
Unless it doesn’t, in which case “die, apostate-renegade-infidel-blasphemer.”
(I’ve even heard serious fundamentalist Christians do the “[insert name of religion here] has a seed of truth in it” thing.)
@(anotherrantresitedesign) JohnnieCanuck
Yeah… Baha’i. In college, I roomed with a Baha’i guy briefly. That crap will make you VERY seriously dizzy. It’s like apple pie laced with acid and ecstasy served on a very dusty Compact Oxford… all the traditionalism, none of the reality, love and bliss like ever present colored lights, all dripping on a bed of probably knowledge (if you really wanted to bother).
LOL, lots of Christians do that, including apparently my Catholic mother. You won’t find a theologist saying it, but lots of laypeople think so.
This only holds for beliefs about absolutes.
Only the Sith deal in absolutes.
Bingo.
I don’t understand why you bring America into this topic, though.
Nope. Science can, at minimum, be easily derived from some of your other axioms.
@David Marjanović
We’ve been over this before, and last time you refused to play. In the end, I had some legitimate questions outstanding, and you ran away. I have no desire to play this game again, only to see you leave midway through. In short, you are wrong about science, and you are wrong that science can be derived from my other axioms. You are also wrong when you say Münchhausen Trilemma does not apply to beliefs which are held only to degrees of certainty.
Let me answer the implied question here:
Because I often deal with Americans, often patriotic Americans. I hope to set up a cognitive dissonance, by making them realize the values that this country are founded on stand in stark contrast to the values of their religion. One teaches that it is better to die free than be a slave. The other teaches that it is better to be a slave – even rejoice in being a slave. I say “I die free!”
@13, JohnnieCanuck
You may or may not be thinking of Cao Dai, my favorite hypersyncretic religion, which claims such notables among its prophets as Buddha, Jesus, and Victor Hugo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cao_%C4%90%C3%A0i
Strange, strange faith, but their churches look amazing. Like a Gaudi cathedral somehow got mixed up with a Robert Williams painting.
No, I played so slowly that in the end comments were closed on the thread before you were able to answer this comment of mine and the following one by a_ray_in_dilbert_space.
Sorry – that’s like over a month. I stopped watching the thread.
Continued here.
I’m sure I’ve already said that (almost) all knowledge (or all knowledge) is probabilistic. No beliefs are held to absolute certainty. That’s a strawman. Stop bringing it up. Why do you do this? You must know you’re strawmanning me. Are you being purposefully dense? Seriously.
Let’s do a recap. You said that your position is that one should always adopt a belief in favor of the most parsimonious explanation available. I called bullshit on that.
Consider a hypothetical situation where we have 4 competing models, where in Bayesian terms we might have 20% to 3 of them and 40% to the last according to the known evidence. With common English, we would describe such a situation with “we don’t know”. Again, your position is that we hold a belief when the evidence is 3 to 2 against. That’s insane.
Would you take a money bet that your hypothetical 40% “most parsimonious” upon further examination will be upheld? When you hold a belief, you act on the belief, and that would imply you should take the bet (barring other mitigating factors like an aversion to gambling, etc.). Thus, you would take an even-payout bet on that held belief, even though you have a 60% confidence that it’s wrong. That is by definition irrational.
Or you are using completely incompatible meanings of “belief”, “rational”, and other words in this conversion. I don’t know which would make me more upset and which would make you more unreasonable.
@a_ray_in_dilbert_space
Do you not understand the concepts of hypotheticals and thought experiments? Really?
Bullshit. We are talking basic epistemology here, and one should hold only one epistemology. When I ask you “how do you know that?”, you better use the same rules no matter what that question is (give or take which axioms are relevant, and which available evidence is relevant).
If you adopt a different epistemology for different parts of science, then you’re not practicing knowledge anymore. You’re not claiming to be learning about the real world. You’ve partitioned the real world into separate categories, apparently on a whim with no rhyme or reason.
As I said before, the boundaries between the sciences is completely artificial. It’s just a mere societal convention. There is no good reason why the boundary between physics and chemistry, or chemistry and biology, etc., are the way they are. There is also a huge amount of overlap. It’s ridiculous to say that you can partition scientific belief into non-overlapping magisteria, and then say different epistemologies apply for every magisteria.
This is a question of when are you justified to hold a belief given some available evidence. That’s what your parsimony is supposed to do. That’s what my Bayesian reasoning actually does. This is a question of basic epistemology.