Richard Dawkins: One Fact to Refute Creationism

fora tv' the world is thinking do you think there could be one sentence that could convince that co-creation is to seriously doubt their theory ideally if you go convince a believer in God to really doubt their belief but that's too hard not sure about a better sentence I think perhaps the single most convincing fact observation you could point to would be the the pattern of resemblances that you see when you compare the genes using modern DNA techniques actually looking at the letter to letter correspondences between genes compare the genes of any pair of animals you like pair of animals pair of plants and then plot out the resemblances and they fall on a perfect hierarchy a perfect family tree and the only alternative to it being a family tree is that the intelligent designer deliberately set out to deceive us in the most underhand and devious manner more and more over the same thing works with with every gene you do separately and even pseudo genes that don't do anything but are vestigial relics of genes that once that once did something I find it extremely hard to imagine how any creationist who actually bothered to listen to that could possibly doubt the fact of evolution but they don't listen I mean there's your question is a perfectly good question but it's not it's not really relevant because what they do is simply stick their fingers in their ear and say la la la they know what's true because it's in the holy book and that they're even in the most extreme case is the geologist curt wise who has a PhD in geology from Harvard and said if all the evidence in the universe pointed towards an Old Earth I would be the first to admit it but I would still be a young earth creationist because that is what Holy Scripture teaches me you cannot argue with with with a with a with a mind like that a mind like that it seems to me is well a disgrace to the human species [Music] [Applause]

Channel: FORA.tv

Views: 2,971,438

Rating: 4.5884652 out of 5

Keywords: creationists, darwin, theory, evolution, intelligent, design, history, dna, evolving, evolved, biology, life, god, faith, religion, creator, atheism, atheists, fora.tv, foratv, fora, tv

Id: TjxZ6MrBl9E

Length: 2min 34sec (154 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 30 2009

Reddit Comments

[u/Essar]

A very forceful statement at the end there. I like it.

[u/RedWing007]

FINISH HIM! Richard Dawkins mortal combat finishing move;

Punch through opponents chest pull out their heart and show them how the laryngeal nerve wraps around their heart "WHERES YOUR GOD NOW!?"

[u/[deleted]]

Dealing with creationists has less to do with explaining evolution and more concerned with the psychology of religion.

[u/[deleted]]

When we say 'creationism,' do we mean Young Earth fundamentalists or people who recognize the validity of empirical observation but still believe in a god?

Because if we're talking the 'fossils = devil-rocks' crowd, I'm partial to pointing out the fact that Genesis contains two distinct and often contradictory creation myths. How so many people miss this I don't know, as it is quite literally impossible to accept the narrative(s) in Genesis as literal fact without encountering some paradoxes.

[u/Keiso]

There is also the hurdle that is people ignoring large bodies of information due to not understanding; Willful ignorance. Making reference to DNA and most biology, you have to deal with this, and I've found that it's very very hard to get over.

[u/annoyedcamel]

I never get tired of seeing Dawkins' clips. I really need to read his book. That's next after I finish The Hobbit :)

[u/Att1cus]

Love it - exactly what there needs to be more of - clear, informed, unabashed facts :)

[u/Daemonax]

Traces of Sagan and Galileo's sentiments there. It is too malevolent a theology to think that some intelligent creator set things up in such a way as to fool us when we use our senses and intelligence to make sense of the world.

Andromeda, is 2 million light-years away, so we are seeing it as it was when the light from it set out on its long journey to Earth--2 million years ago. And when we observe distant quasars 5 billion light-years away, we are seeing them as they were 5 billion years ago, before the Earth was formed. (They are, almost certainly, very different today.) If, despite this, we were to accept the literal truth of such religious books, how could we reconcile the data? The only plausible conclusion, I think, is that God recently made all the photons of light arriving on the Earth in such a coherent format as to mislead generations of astronomers into the misapprehension that there are such things as galaxies and quasars, and intentionally driving them to the spurious conclusion that the Universe is vast and old. This is such a malevolent theology I still have difficulty believing that anyone, no matter how devoted to the divine inspiration of any religious book, could seriously entertain it. -- Sagan

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I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. -- Galileo

[u/Quarkity]

My word, what a dapper tie he's got on there. I wish I could pull a little pet Dawkins out of my pocket to spurt clips like this to people in my classes.