Live Webcast – Christopher Hitchens vs William Dembski

Now this should be a lot of fun … just in case you don’t know, Dembski is a leading proponent of the intelligent design theory of creation … in other words he is a crazy religious kook.

Not sure about that? .. OK, lets put it this way … There are no scientific papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature in support of Intelligent Design, yet the Discovery Institute lists Dembski’s 1998 book The Design Inference under the heading “Peer-Reviewed Scientific Books Supportive of Intelligent Design”. And who exactly is the Discovery Institute? Well, Dembski is a senior fellow there, so in essence he is touting his own book as peer reviewed. Lets be 100% clear here, he is not a scientist by any reasonable standard, has not published any experimental or empirical tests of his claims, submitted his claims to the scrutiny of his peers or published in a scientific journal … in other words he is a complete religious nutcase making wild claims that lack any credible evidence.

Ok, so what about the details of this debate? The bad news is that its tomorrow at 08:30 am CT (Thats Thur 18th Nov), but the truly fantastic news is that it will be available as a live webcast … you can click here to see that.

More details are available by clicking here.

UPDATE: If you missed the webcast, apparently a recording will be available on Monday 22nd here. Now, since this was run by a “Christian” school, I can only wonder if it will be the complete webcast, or if they will instead edit to give it a bit of a spin in their favor … lets see.

UPDATE 2 (Mon 22nd): Apparently their servers have been flooded by demand, so they have taken the webcast archives down … hopefully they will become available at some point.

UPDATE 3 (Wed 24): Their site is now promising to have the webcast available by Wed evening

2 thoughts on “Live Webcast – Christopher Hitchens vs William Dembski”

  1. Hi Peter … nice try, but all you have done is link to the Discovery Institute … thats a religious group, not a scientific group.

    In 2005, a federal court ruled that the Discovery Institute pursues “demonstrably religious, cultural, and legal missions”, and the institute’s manifesto, the Wedge strategy, describes a religious goal: to “reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions”. They are the same people who say “evolution is just a theory so it shouldn’t be taught in schools”. You can’t take a founder or anyone in general from a place that ignorant seriously in the scientific community.

    I gotta tell you, for the first second or so I thought you gave actual scientists and then I scrolled down more and recognized all those names and I literally lol’d. Not only don’t people like Meyer, Campell, Chapman and Gilder have degrees in fields of science which have nothing to do with evolution, but they are advocates of the Discovery Institute.

    Notice the tactics they use are not those of scientists, and notice the long list of court cases ruling creationism/intelligent design from the discovery institute not scientific including the Dover trial.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13mBPRDNUY0

    Below is a video showing Meyer’s dishonestly, when he supposedly said the Discovery Institute doesn’t want to teach intelligent design in schools but then later on wrote a book on HOW to get it taught in schools

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCAvP_56mdk

    Thinking that writing down a bunch of names, dates, and pages, and expecting that I’d be too lazy to check them for accuracy isn’t a good plan. Try again, but this time make sure its from an actual scientist who is credible in the field of evolution. There is not a single person in the discovery institude who has a degree which relates to evolution.

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