Originator: Pino Carafa Printable Version Title: The Final Straw(man) Back to YouTube Discussions Attachments Add Attachment History From:  Pino Carafa On: 2008/07/08 14:00:27 To be human is to be curious. If there is one thing that distinguishes us human beings from other animals is that we have this drive to explore the world outside our immediate surroundings. We always want to know what is beyond that hill. We always want to know what is inside that cave. We always want to know what’s hidden underneath that cover. Give a kid a new toy, and you’ll soon find that it will be trying to figure out how the bits of it hang together. It will be taking it apart and putting it back together. That is why it is such a bad idea to give a young kid a fragile toy. But that’s beside the point. What is important is to realise that we humans are driven by this need to figure out how things work. To deny this is to deny that one is human. And this is exactly what Shawn is doing when he presents us with his final Strawman. Strawman number 10. The Strawman to end all Strawmen.   Shawn would have it that an atheist “believes in evolution”. Now THAT is a bona fide strawman. A strawman that deserves to be torn down, pissed on, drenched in petrol and set alight. And that is what I’ll do. Let’s not get bogged down in the fact that simply being an atheist does not preclude one from having strange beliefs, including strange beliefs surrounding the origin of life on this planet. For the purpose of what I’m going to say it is enough to note that a majority of atheists will accept that evolution is real. But “accepting that something is real” is not the same as “believing” it. Belief takes an act of faith. Belief requires trust. It doesn’t require an act of faith to know that I am here constructing this argument. That I am doing so is a fact. The evidence supporting this fact is the very video you are watching right now. Facts are established by looking at the evidence. And the evidence is something that one can discover for one’s self. It doesn’t take an act of faith, it doesn’t take BELIEF to know that the Earth is globular. The evidence speaks for itself. All it takes is for you to go about discovering it. The evidence for the fact that life on this planet has evolved over billions of years is overwhelming. It doesn’t take an “act of faith” to accept it. You don’t need to “believe” it. The scientific papers presenting the evidence are in the public domain. Go check them out for yourself. Do “belief”, “faith” and “trust” not come into the picture at all then when we think about science? Of course they do. We believe that scientists will present verifiable evidence. We have faith in their expertise in the field. We trust that they will do their work conscientiously. But we don’t need to be blind on that account. Our belief does not need to be without foundation. Our faith can be justified, and our trust need not be blind. Because, in the end, the option to go and check it all out for ourselves is always open. In the end, if we don’t believe that an individual scientist is presenting genuine evidence, we can go and check the evidence at source. If we don’t have faith in a scientist’s ability, we can get somebody else to repeat the experiment. If we don’t trust a scientist, we can rest assured that his or her peers will only be delighted to scrutinise their work and prove them wrong. The scientific establishment is certainly not without its problems. It has its authoritarian elites, its cliques, its politics, just like any other human endeavour. But underlying it all are the facts, and even if you trust none of them, you can interrogate Nature yourself by doing your own investigations. And Nature never lies. It just tells it like it is. And that is what science is. A celebration of that most fundamental human quality: curiosity. The sheer pleasure of finding things out, as Richard Feynman called it. And it will not accept authority.  Curiosity will not be told that there are areas that could be discovered but that are off limits. It will not be told that there is a tree of knowledge from which one must not eat.   This is what Shawn’s video is all about. It is not about Christianity. It is not about faith. It is not about the Truth of the Bible. It is nothing other than an attempt to undermine science. It is an attempt to stifle human curiosity. His goal is to turn us into mindless drones that cannot and will not think for ourselves. He wants to destroy that which makes us human. He strives to turn us into slaves. Of course belief, faith and trust are necessary for us to be fully human. We need to believe in ourselves and in our fellow human beings so that we can feel human ourselves. We need to have faith in those we love. We need to be able to trust many of our fellow human beings if we don’t want to spend all of our lives worrying that everyone would be “out to get us”.   If only Shawn had made his videos to defend those human qualities of belief, faith and trust I would have been very happy to support him, even if in his case he wants to apply those to his imaginary God. But Shawn is NOT here to defend anything. He wants to destroy. Destroy curiosity, intelligence and the human sense of wonder. THAT is Shawn’s goal, and that of every other Creationist, Fundamentalist and Biblical or Quranic Literalist. And that is something I will never tolerate. Thank you.