Fundamental Fallacies of Faith

and now yes we are down to our final speaker and he's one that barely needs an introduction if you've ever been on YouTube you know exactly who Aaron rah is he's the president of atheist alliance of America he hosts the Roman god cast podcast and he's the director I know I'm like I'm I'm zoning here Explorer project he's also the producer of living science lessons a classroom supplement series teaching biology to middle school students let's give a huge welcome for the first appearance in Sacramento Aaron ray alright thank you very much as Ray it's hard for me to believe that I was booked to come after Shelly Segal and booked to come after David Silverman I'm going to have to eat an underdog super energy pill see if I can get the energy that this man has I am I'm here there's a lot of good books and if you if you read it all if you got time to do that there's a lot to look at but I'm here to peddle mine and I want to give a little bit of a background on it see there's an opening there's a conversation of sorts in the first couple of pages and a lot of people may have some questions about what is why what am i referring to these couple pages well the idea for this and the thing that changed my life really was a conversation that I had was somebody that was upset but I was wearing a Darwin fish t-shirt and she says you can't prove evolutionism I said well the very fact that you call it that betrays the problem but then I can actually teach evolution you see those well prove it then so well I can't prove it standing here in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen but if you give me give me time I will create a presentation that will present the facts in a way that you can understand it's just you can't prove evolution because you'd have to prove that there is no God and I so whether God exists or not is irrelevant and she staggered backward at that thought because that is actually the first foundational falsehood of creationism the idea that you either have to accept God as a meaning the Bible I mean if they can't distinguish doctrine from deity that they may as well worship a book because if you disprove the Bible you disprove God right they are one the same all right you have to heat our hold this all-or-nothing belief or you have to if you're going to accept science at all then you have to reject God which is a false dichotomy now we know that many of the the leading voices the pioneers of evolutionary biology have been religious believers in some of the some of the voices like the star witness in Kitzmiller versus Dover you know Kenneth Miller he was a traditional Catholic so you can have the science you can have the superstition and you can do both you don't have to have this false dichotomy that's what makes it a falsehood and I want to tag on to what Silverman said a little while ago I mean a lot of these scientists say that you know you can't did something the science can't test for God can't verify guy can't indicate God can't can't falsify guy can't prove there is no God so science can't say anything about God all right and when I recorded the audio book with David Smalley and dog were debate studios he contested me on this and he said that there there are some scientists like Victor Stenger for example who say the one thing that science can say about God is that there's no support for that hypothesis because even if you meet a scientist who is himself a believer they have to concede at least that much but stinger didn't stop there he says that there's no value to that hypothesis either right they because there's there's no epistemological value there's no scientific value and got in Stenger went on and said that God is a meaningless concept because undefined and undeterminable and unfalsifiable and literally immaterial with no reason to believe it and I would add that there are several good reasons not to write so he said that you know there are the scientists to say that you can't see you can't prove that there is no god and so people would tell me that you can't say that there's no God because we don't really know right don't we what else debating Pastor Bob vineyard of Denver Bible Church he said that he started as this game where you know there's no evidence of evidence isn't evidence of absence and you can't prove there is no God because you haven't looked everywhere you don't know everything app don't have all knowledge and all that night I could see where he was going with that so I said well just answer me this are there leprechauns and I expected you know that he was going to realize where I was going and play the stupid game but he didn't he just said - no no there's no lever house how do you know have you looked everywhere I mean have you been to the end of the rainbow so he said he said he knows that there are no leprechauns because there's no evidence of them now if he's going to say that there is no evidence of a leprechauns and that's a sufficient for him to state as fact that there is no God or Jimmy that there are no leprechauns because there's no evidence of them I can state as fact that there is no God for the same reason hello okay yeah but you know I can actually go further than that I mean any art and I Bob and Ian and I could both cite Hitchens razor that positive claims require positive evidence and that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence right that in science there is only what is supported by Odets and what is not supported and whatever is not supported does not warrant serious consideration come back when you've got something to show when you can indicate that there's a there there or otherwise we literally have nothing to talk about so I also want to take this opportunity to address oh well you know what I got ahead of myself I didn't explain that the reason that I got behind this book I got to explain this girl asked me to do or she didn't ask me cuz you she kind of asked for it without asking for you follow me yeah so yeah she gave me this challenge and I'd spent years on the internet arguing with people and I spent a really unhealthy amount of my time you know on talked about origins and places like that arguing with believers and I realized that you keep coming across the same arguments again and again and again right there's no transitional species there's no beneficial mutations evolution is a fraud etc etc etc my favorite one being that evolution is just a theory not a fact which is so annoying because that required that I had to teach middle school biology to the chairman of the board of my State Board of Education she got angry that there was a hundred and fifty scientists giving testimony that the theory of evolution is actually better supported in the theory of gravity and she got upset she wrote down that these people were trying to demote the law of gravity to being just a theory so that evolution could look good by comparison and so I have to show her the multiple laws of Newtonian gravity and then compare that to Einstein's theory of relativity which replaced that there's also laws in Einstein's theory of relativity so theory is encompassing thing that includes the laws and includes the facts and includes the hypothesis right it's an overarching explanation it's a field of study you can't prove a field of study right because I like like I argued in high school that we hit a classes taught music theory and every walked and said you can't teach music in school it's just a theory it's never been proven nobody got the joke then one of the other items that we have on here is a personal to me is the tenth foundational false o2 creationism which is the claim that the Tree of Life is nowhere indicated in biology that it's somehow contrived that it's an illusion right this is when it this one inspired us when we got on to patreon patreon com4 slash aro NRA we accept donations yeah this is how we fund ourselves only what we've done we started the phylogeny Explorer project a lot of people have some trouble with that I was introduced one time recently in Denver they said that it was the phalange Explorer project that's an entirely different thing I might be into that too but that's later what it is we're trying to create a navigable online encyclopedia for the entire Tree of Life showing and is going to be illustrated with lots of explanations and literally an encyclopedia that you can navigate through to understand not the value of the species we're not talking to what the individual species are but what the parent classifications are like what does it mean to be a mammal what does it mean to be a vertebrate what does it mean to be an ape or a monkey for example and my favorite one to give an example is like one of the very early stages of development because you can be classify your characteristics as an adult but also by your development one of them is this it for all animals you develop versus a little ball of cells the very first trait you develop is a hole that erupts that ball one from one end to the other now in most animals that starts out with a mouth and so it is in ends in an anus except for the higher mammals all of whom develop backward from that the hole erupts - a mouth from an anus exactly back so that literally there is a stage in our life when you are no more than an exactly correct now I go through the list I don't really have time I don't think to go through the list right now I can't really keep trying keep track at the time that I have so I'm going to just jump ahead so I come up with this series videos and I sent the first four of them to this person to say here's my presentation so far I've got another for you to do but I want you to see what they've already done and her response was that I was hurting people people who want to continue believing why would you want to continue to believe something you now know is not true right why would you not want to know is something you believe is not true I mean for most of us I think in this room our sincerity is where we got to our disbelief because we care about what's really true rather than what we ever we would rather believe and I've encountered a lot of believers who say these may be what the facts are but I prefer to believe this I heard one Minister given speech to his own his own congregation saying I have evidence that exists but I prefer to believe be although everything points to a I'm going with be and he admitted later in that very sermon that he knew that that meant that he was delusional indeed he didn't care he did the truth is what the facts are and if you don't care what the facts are you don't care what the truth is and I've had many people walk away that make they come to that point because this this happens very often after you read this book so you'll notice that's happening for you too you have believers who believe what they do if we're sincere reasons because everybody believes around them they don't know any better they if they don't understand if it doesn't make sense of them they think that all these smart people also believe this thing then everybody in their family all their leaders if they look up to their obviously every politician in Texas if that's where you live they all believe the same so there must be some kind of credence to it but when you when they meet somebody who actually knows the subjects who knows the reputations of these argument and can show what's wrong with each of these arguments well let me very quickly have to make a choice whether they want to remain honest or whether they want to remain creationist because there's no longer possible to be both and I've seen people come to that crossroads and make that alternate choice now as I said it was when I recorded the I know I want to I want to take opportunity to address criticisms one of them being that some people in the Atheist community that said that I had overstated my case when I said that the Bible was absolutely wrong about absolutely everything I've said the same thing about creationist to now accept that there are some people who places that are mentioned in the Bible that actually existed right just like you know the creationist can be right about something occasionally they can discover that they're out of milk or butter and unless they're vegan they should go buy some more there what could be right about that but we're only talk about two relevant things right the claims made about evolution the claims made about creationism so for the relevant parts of this argument now one of the things we know that is not true let's see heaven hell nobody lived three days inside a fish right there was no army of the undead resurrected or reanimated by God Jehovah praying to the four winds which by the way is a pray again God is a beautiful part of the story that Bible that nobody reads woman didn't come from a man's rib man didn't come from a golem spell and what a golem spell is is that is where you in the old Jewish magic you make a clay figurine you breathe into it the breath of life and it comes to life right this is the old Jewish magic we know these things for absolutely certain there's no doubt that these are parables the tree of the fruit of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil there's no way that was a literal tree you couldn't chop that down and build a canoe out of it this is a parable everywhere in the Bible where it talks about the fruit of it's the result of choices that you make and it's abuse some obvious parable everywhere else clearly it's supposed to admit been meant to us a parable also in the Bible there's a lot of oldness we can compare it to that are making that kind of Association when it was originally told when stories like this were originally told people were not supposed to believe that they were historically true you know we're supposed to be just ideas that make you ponder things you weren't supposed to take it literally now think about if you tried to take it literally the fruit of the tree of life right you'd imagine gathering that up to make pies I would try that but now think about you know if the fruit of the tree of life actually what a literal thing and it falls off the trees imagine all the squirrels and birds and insects eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good needle and discovering what they're naked so let's look at the way that the earth is described in the Bible absolutely wrong right on really everything the way that the earth describes or the way that the Bible describes the earth for example is a flat disc not a circle not a sphere not sphere but it a circle literally a flat circle and it's a map of the earth divided into four quadrants sometimes mr. Kerem is translated as corners right so you basically you got a tabletop because it sets down on columns so the earth is standing on columns which of course we know don't exist and it's set at the bottom of an oceanic abyss hung upon nothing but standing on columns somehow how do you justify that doesn't tell what kind of ground it's that unusually got water all over it and then you got the firmament anybody ever read the Bible and said what the hell is a firmament I asked my mother about this she was always confused about that answer but eventually I found it it's in several different places in the Bible it describes a giant crystal dome over this flat disc shaped earth and it's got windows in it because remember it's a snow globe in an ocean now this was a common belief throughout Asia right there was a orient the Persians that all have a similar sort of belief it's not true right it was written from people that clearly didn't have any idea of the earth and its true relation to the cosmos the Sun in the moon are both inside the expanse of this firmament they're both the same size they're both lights they're both bigger than the stars the stars by the way have human characteristics personalities and in the Book of Daniel 3 stars come down to the earth to do battle with a mortal human being right note you endow the Sun stopping in the sky none of this is remotely possible right Samson's magic hair do I can see that one now this is not a hypothesis you're going to hear from anyone else this is probably I think is my own pet one but there is a kernel of truth in the story of the Tower of Babel one of the most ridiculous stories in the Bible and let me tell you what it is the tower is real the foundation of it really exists right in Babylon right where you expect it to be it was begun by Hammurabi around 1750 BCE when the Mesopotamian Empire collapsed the project stopped and Nebuchadnezzar picked it up again 650 BC or the bear bouts couldn't finish it either right but there it is now when Hammurabi started this back way back when when he did the Mesopotamian Empire was the most advanced society on earth they had just invented syllabic texts so they had the only real writing on earth and they had formal schools teaching classrooms full of children just like today to read and write in cuneiform which is pressing letters of a--sort into clay tablets which would then be baked into permanent documents now when the Mesopotamian Empire collapsed the schools closed if you remember what the story the people lost the ability to understand what they're saying right well now they've got tens of thousands of documents that we eventually found an Astra Bernal poles library dating back to 2250 BCE and are older we don't know how much older than that but down to at least 3,000 we know people are telling the stories some of these stories we've been able to able to date precisely so they lost the ability to understand the stories and those old stories that they now had in order to have cast in stone that they no longer understand how to read and write canal form are now kept alive in oral tradition being repeated again and again and again by different drives so we get you again have a form of evolution where things are enhanced or exaggerated or you know you start blending together certain stories so that what was originally dedicated to the guard Murdock is suddenly reappropriation a night god who's been promoted from another pantheon alright and we also know that this is important too we also know that that the Native Americans were already there thousands of years before this tower was begun same in Taiwan same in Australia all over the world people were already speaking different languages so that that's the only element of truth there is to that story you know we saw how legends are adapted I can give many examples but in fact you know my book I do there are many flood legends all over the world and they're importantly different there's one where there's a man and woman who survive by staying in a sea ettusais seashell and there's no animals with them and there's another one where all the people in all the animals turn into fish for the duration of the flood and then turn back into their old cells in Greece they survived the flood by going to the mountaintops now the creationist organizations don't tell you these important differences because they want you to think it's all based on the same idea but there's a handful of stories that seem to be virtually identical and they come from the same region what we now know is the Iraqi flood plain for a reason and we know that the Sea of Galilee was flooded around 15,000 BC and the Black Sea was flooded around 5.7 thousand BC and they've now identified geologists and archaeologists have both confirmed that there was inundation of the city of shuruppak in Iraq around 2900 BCE and importantly the date that they've ascertained for this roughly equivalent to 15 cubits that's 22 feet perhaps 7 meters I don't know I can't find a cubits 2 meters conversion ratio online but the important thing is that that depth is the depth of the flood and there's many other details that go similar with this to to the stories that were attributed to who are to to definitive Atrahasis Ziusudra and eventually noah after enough exaggerations now we know that that that that depth it would have wiped out everything in the area right except for the king and his little personal menagerie which wasn't every animal in the world it was just what he had on his farm right and most of that was livestock that's the only way it can make sense to have seven of the livestock animals and then you know two of the breeding pairs of whatever exotic thing you happen to have on hand there's no other way that that story can make sense we know that that flood would have inundated the whole area but it wouldn't have any effect at all I'm not Ararat which is three miles high and it wouldn't have had any effect on Egypt which is thousands of miles away one of my favorite youtubers Platteville or 50 for a high if if you're not familiar with him looking up he does great creationism videos he did one recently was talking about an article that was released by Answers in Genesis talking about how you can get from what they imagined to be a flood of 2188 BCE eight people surviving this flood to get to seven billion people today how do they calculate that by doubling the population every hundred and fifty years taking into account floods famines other sorts of you know disasters and ignoring everything we know about population growth over time over history because that's historic data and who cares about that but that means advances in Genesis is correct and when does that ever happen that if the entire global population were to collaborate on building Egypt's very first pyramid the step pyramid of zoser that they wouldn't have been able to do it because it would have only been 40 people in the world alive at that time now Answers in Genesis understands that there would have to be a society of at least 30,000 people for a project of that magnitude for the infrastructure to back that up so they how do they calculate that well they have another article that is not linked to the first article because they don't want you to read both articles where they say the population actually grew 10 times faster than the previously said without of course saying that they previously said anything now in the new analysis they say that one man and his one wife went to Egypt with eight children now one man and one woman in a marriage in the Bible is rare but this is immediately after a global extinction event and Answers in Genesis assumes that they had eight children in fact the Bible only says that this guy had four sons but daughters were never important enough to be named or even mentioned most of the time so they assumed because that's what apologists do that they also had four dollars and that each son married his sister and that they had eight children each / incestuous couple despite all of the inbreeding over 30 years per generation so that they would have from from 8 people to 150 years I would have 30 thousand people who by then would be so genetically disadvantaged that they would actually believe the things that Ken Ham says there's another problem with that of course as they're taking there's a lot of other things that they fail to take you to account one of the many mistakes or omissions that they made what their calculation of population was having to do with the exodus which is another thing we know didn't happen right it's a surprising thing with experts in biblical history can't be sure if there was a David or a Solomon or even if there was a Jesus right but we know there was no Adam and Eve no there was no Moses either that blows the whole out of everything right I mean there was a senior Rabbi David Wolpe he gave an a sermon or not a sermon what do they call it I don't know if Passover in 2001 he said that with very few exceptions every archaeologists agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened if it happened at all right undermines the whole thing we know that there's no place that Moses fits and when one of the things that we know that don't fit is the Hebrew slaves biggest problems Hebrew slaves is the numbers the numbers are always wrong in the Bible 40 of this seven of that we know that these are contrived even if there was a real we know that those are not the numbers right so there's a point where there's supposed to be two million Hebrew slaves living in one town in Egypt at a point where the entire population of the country was only three and a half million that means that these Hebrews outnumbered the entire natural national population all in one town how did they not own the place already how do you discipline two billion people with what 10 guys because remember when these guys cut loose they cut down everything around according to the Bible these desert brigands killed millions of people hundreds of thousands at a time right and more than Answers in Genesis can even we're alive at that point right and then you got to wonder about the god that's freaking out dude they're going to their promised land right well what's the promised land the promises are all they already had a half a dozen tribes living there and God says no I'm going to promise you this I know there's already people there but I'm going to send some angels to kill them all because that's what kind of a nice guy I am but he gets worse than that so let's imagine let's ignore the women and children and the elderly and so forth and just think about the 600,000 Hebrew men on foot that the Bible said lived in Rameses or was it rooms yes Ramsay and they're going to run to Canaan which is their promised land and if they follow the coastline the Red Sea up to the Mediterranean Sea and we walked 20 miles a day it would take him a fortnight to get there now let's say that they walked single-file one man one metre ahead of the next guy which is reasonable distance the first ones would get there before the last ones left that's how many Hebrews were supposed to be there and it's only 450 kilometers or 280 miles and it's hard to get lost when you're following a coastline but the Bible says that with God's help a two-week Trek turned into 40 years of wandering lost in the desert eating who knows what that's falling out of the sky how's that for divine guidance right and then there's 40 years of the blind leading the blind came at a time when most people didn't even live that long so nobody that started the trip finished it how's that for a promised land only the kids that were born along the way had any chance of getting out again so the creationists know that the numbers don't add up and they don't care because this isn't an attempt to understand anything this is all about make-belief they need to make you believe they'll tell any lie necessary to get many examples in this book where they know that what they're saying is not really true can't be really true and they don't care deceivers seek believers because they need the patsies to pay their tithe and to reinforce their preferred delusion and as I've already excited is a preferred delusion I've actually seen them not even kidding about this I've seen people when they start hearing the facts I do like that girl did where they say you're just hurting people why can't we believe what we want to believe even if we already know it's not true I've seen people plug their ears do the closing Leon I get it because they don't want to know it's like what Shelly was saying about the guy that doesn't want to have it confirmed you would continue to believe something that you know is not even probably true there's a fundamental difference in the way these people believe versus the way I think most of us do so the creationism I mean what I just described is true of any religion but creationism is more extreme yeah creationism is more extreme than that it's a it's a form of religious extremism that is so today to have to deny a reality and they're so willfully obtuse that their faith matches the description that psychiatrists give for psychotic delusion matter of fact if you look up the National Alliance on Mental Illness you'll see that they give the delusion or the definition of delusion is a fixed false belief that will not change despite evidence to the contrary matches everybody argued with our line doesn't it and what is psychosis it is a detachment from reality which kind of hits two but then in both cases for both definitions there is a caveat except when it's a person's religious cultural belief system and it's only okay when religion does it so in my book I give a lot of the science that's relevant to all of this and it's hard to find otherwise I don't think anybody's ever written a book like this that also talks about the dishonesty and the hypocrisy in the absurdities atrocities inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible as well as many of the prophecies we so often hear claimed that have actually failed rather spectacularly if you look up what the prophecy actually says and what what history and the Bible say so the purpose of this is to provide a biological and theological reference to explain how to refute the fundamentalist favorite fallacies in their attack on the sanity of science and secularism that's my presentation the books are available in Lobby thank you very much I take it there's no time for questions on the first page of a preface I explained that my name is not Erin it's Erin and everybody gets it wrong and I explained it's felt like Erin but pronounced like registered nurse are in hand for him thank you so much all right so here is what's going on here I would like to thank our volunteers who worked so hard to make this entire weekend possible I would also like to thank our sponsors applied office on-site computer training Paul story the original motto project reason center humanist association of the greater Sacramento area no more in God We Trust Freedom From Religion Foundation greater Sacramento chapter logic al Amy Thoth Insurance Services Central Valley Alliance of atheists and skeptics health care for all Sacramento foundation beyond belief Center for inquiry Los Angeles black humanists and non-believers of sacramento sunday assembly sacramento and i would also like to thank these champions for donating to support today's in event joseph morrow Angela Garvey Ian Garvey David Noel Nancy Sneed Fran of evanesce Coe nahee in Ruth Rizzo's Sarah Tygart Greg Martin and anyone else who donated especially those who supported us today thank you so much thanks to the secular coalition's for California and America and ever went attending today's secular advocacy day which is not today tomorrow thanks to camp quest West for providing our child care I'm now going to do a first position plie I will now come back up thanks to John Lucas and Rick tres well for our fantastic sound system our photographer Matt Martin and our videographer Rogers Abbe key our local affiliates of the secular Student Alliance and the organizers of local meetup groups from as far as Reno San Diego and the Bay Area reasons center for providing a home to many of our local groups John Vandenberg for yes John Vandenberg for helping us attain 501c3 status and making your donations tax-deductible al 11 for hosting our web site for many many years ray Howard Elaine to skin care and Courtney brothers for donating items to last night and today's silent auction Panera Bread Holiday Inn Hampton Inn and Round Table Pizza for discounted food and lodging and one more round of applause for all our speakers entertainers and authors and thanks to the California free thought day committee and David diskin once again thank you so much Murray how about that MC how about that let's give her a round of applause for doing such a wonderful job and I'm sorry that you didn't get a chance to see her perform while she did that little ballet thing but I trust me if you go to Murray bein calm much more than just the ballet thing amazing music her Kickstarter finishes tonight I want to thank Sperry commercial without whom we would be wet and outside in the rain all day long let's thank them for doing this letting us be here at no cost as you guys make your way out if you head out towards that direction back where registration is you're going to find that we still have a few items that are their snacks books all kinds of other things including some discounted items so please get your credit cards in cash and check ready to checkout over there and again give us one final support find a financial support if you'd like to help boy could we use it if nothing else just grab your chair and stack it on other chairs or against other chairs but if you can give us half an hour then you can help us clean up a little bit and get things loaded and organized and all of that kind of stuff and maybe if like two or three of you are free tomorrow morning come see me because we could use that help as well oh yes I have not forgotten about that and don't forget that it's six o'clock in fact probably in just a few minutes I want you guys to head over to Reason Center and we're going to get a march of people going that direction at six o'clock for their after-party they've got hors d'oeuvres and light snacks because they want to show off what an awesome community they have built for us for the secular community here in Sacramento let's give a round of applause for the reason Center and as randy said i hope that all of you are able to join us tomorrow morning at the Capitol in room 127 at 8:30 in the morning and I promise you although it doesn't sound like a lot of fun to wake up and do that it actually is kind of fun and it is so important I cannot stress enough how much important it is how important it is to make sure that your elected officials know that you are secular and proud right right all right and finally I want to see all of you here and so many more next year October 14th and 15th 2017 for the 16th annual freethought Day thank you drive home safely and have a wonderful day and remember hashtag one more time hashtag good enough have a good night you

Channel: AronRa

Views: 212,013

Keywords: Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Id: OF7I0KapSww

Length: 35min 33sec (2133 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 08 2016