Is he serious? Evidence of evolution is everywhere, just open your eyes. And besides, as someone once said,” Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence”, VD’s constant attempts to conflate proof of god with proof of some scientific principle or historical fact not withstanding.

VD: ” What this argument fails to take into account is that nearly all of the great religious scientists were not merely religious, but Christians. . . ”

Well, yeah. The evolutionary challenges faced by early Europeans required them to think and solve problems to survive. The scientific discoveries that they produced were in spite of Christianity, not because of it.

VD’s ‘shredding’ of the argument from fiction is laughable. No examples (except anecdotal) and a propensity to exagerate and misinterpret bible passages abound.

Quantum mechanics, and general relativity for that matter, and string theory on top of those…stuff like that is a little less intuitive. It takes a lot of ground work just to get to the point where you understand what the people who came before you were talking about.

I’ve always kind of assumed that’s why those ideas aren’t targets the way Darwin always is, although lumping evolution and quantum mechanics together is a sort of start.

You’re right, that’s a bit unclear. What I meant was that when Sam Harris made his Red State/Blue State argument, Vox correctly pointed out that (a) the argument is statistically bogus and (b) if you break the numbers down by county rather than by state, the ostensibly “blue” counties have higher crime rates. Vox comes perilously close to making an equally bogus argument that Red County/Blue County shows atheists to be worse off sociologically, as I discussed before, but my main point above was that he’s not coy about parading around his evidence when he truly believes it’s good. He’s only shy about sharing his “evidence” for the supernatural because he knows it’s more of a personal belief than it is anything objectively solid.

However, what would happen if some scientist came along and said, ‘Hey! I just discovered an ancient manuscript claiming that, on Tuesdays, water boils at 0c, and freezes at 100c. Do we have ANY reason to trust this claim? How do we test it? I mean, we have no way of going back in time to test the physics of ancient Tuesdays. But we DO have a scientific database, as well as a lifetime of personal experience, that makes the claim most unlikely.

This all comes back down to that silly apologetics argument:

You admit you don’t know everything.
God might be one of those things you don’t know.
Therefore, God exists.

Well, I’m thinking that Vox is actually an atheist, only his brain is different from everybody else’s, so when he says “I believe in God”, he’s REALLY saying, “I DON’T believe in God.” And how could he possibly disprove my hypothesis, seeing that he doesn’t know everything? Also, in his own mind, the title of his book is ‘The Irrational Theists’. You know…TIT? Works for me.

Remind me again what hard evidence Vox has, because I must have missed that part.