Monday, July 06, 2020

Mark your calendars: I am debating Ken Hovind on July 9

I've recently taken up a new hobby of debating young-earth creationists on YouTube.  (It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.)  I've done two of them so far [1][2], both on a creationist channel called Standing For Truth.  My third debate will be against Kent Hovind, one of the more prominent and, uh, outspoken members of the YEC community.  In case you haven't heard of him, here's a sample.  The debate will be this Thursday at 5:30PM Pacific time.  Come watch the sparks fly.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Ew.

Carmen said...

Hooo boy. We just watched it. Ron, i don't watch a lot of youtube debates and I thought you did great as far as not-buckling under that guy's craziness.

Ron said...

@Carmen: Thanks!

Denis said...

Good job. I like how you took a different approach than other debaters trying to teach Kent the meaning of science. Too bad Kent is incapable of listening ... all he cares is repeating the same nonsense. Also, the moderators didn’t help especially when they intervened on the relevant discussion on the definitions of science and religion. Good job calling them out at the end when Kent was rambling about politics and other nonsense. I particularly enjoyed the discussion on genetics and the comparison between the methodology for tracking population ancestry and common ancestry, i. e., the same!

Ron said...

@Denis: Thanks for the kind words. FWIW, my target audience in these debates is never the person I'm debating (I know I'm not going to reach them) it's the audience. For a data point on how they perceived it, see this comment thread on Reddit, which has been a real eye-opener for me.