Feuerstein’s folly

I never heard of Joshua Feuerstein before a couple weeks ago, when the BBC asked my opinion of his viral video. I contributed my bit to their trending News Magazine, but the video below only used a few seconds of that 30 minute interview.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GXup50UjI8

Before they posted this video, I got an email apologizing that something had happened to their recording, such that much of the audio was muffled.  I don’t think I should make another video about this, but I do want to post the missing bits of what I told the BBC.

Feuerstein opens his video repeating the 11th foundational falsehood of creationism, saying that evolution has never been observed.  Even mAcroevolution has been directly observed and documented dozens of times, both in the lab, and in naturally-controlled conditions in the field.

He then moves to the 15th foundational falsehood of creationism, saying that evolution is ‘just’ a theory, like atomic theory, the germ theory of disease, relativity, or the theory of gravity. A ‘theory’ is a body of verifiable facts, testable hypotheses, and natural laws within a given field of study. That field of study *is* the theory. Creationism has no theory, because they have no hypotheses, or natural laws. There’s no body of knowledge there, because there is no part of creationism that anyone can actually show to be true -the way we can with evolution.

Then he jumps onto the 6th FFoC, where ‘evolution’ somehow has to account for the origin of life, the universe, and everything. Actually evolution is only a theory of biodiversity and is limited to population genetics.

Then he evokes the power of will -as if that had anything to do with any aspect of evolution; as if that wasn’t a facet of his own religion instead, wherein Jesus says that anyone who has faith can will mountains to leap into the sea. “Mind over matter” is an aspect of religious faith, not facts like the study of evolution is.

Then he moves onto the 7th FFoC, arguing that evolution is an ‘accident’.  In that he misquotes thermodynamics, showing that he doesn’t know any more about that than he doesn’t know about anything else.  He has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about.

Laughably, he even evokes Bill O’Reilly’s most embarrassing gaff, “Tide goes in, tide goes out, never a miscommunication; you can’t explain that”. It was that line of idiocy with David Silverman on the show that sparked Silverman’s WTF meme.

Then he moves onto Fred Hoyle’s ‘tornado in the junkyard’ fallacy, only he changed the Boeng 747 to a red Lamborghini.

Finally, he wants to believe something that has already been disproved in a court of law a decade ago, and he wants that taught in school anyway, and he wants to expose his ignorance of that loudly and proudly.

I don’t know how he could possibly be sincere.  How could anyone still be that grossly misinformed once they’re immersed in this discussion?  Whenever someone is THAT dumb, they’re likely to be poe. But this guy appears to be making a living at it, and is getting famous with it, and that is another reason to doubt that he would ever concede any of his many mistakes here. Accuracy and accountability simply do not matter to professional creationists.  But I’m least happy that WIldwood Claire awarded him the title of ‘dim bulb of the week’.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHbQigqqF54