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Originally Posted by kdbrich
He apparently is willing to debate it though, if paid $100 k
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[rhetoric warning: the money goes to a charity, not Dawkins himself]
I imagine his reasoning is:
- Dawkins never debates with creationists because it only helps the creationist cause by making it seem like there is a real controversy in the scientific community.
'Why I Won't Debate Creationists' by Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net (http://richarddawkins.net/article,119,Why-I-Wont-Debate-Creationists,Richard-Dawkins - broken link)
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The point is not [...] whether or not you would 'win' the debate. Winning is not what the creationists realistically aspire to. For them, it is sufficient that the debate happens at all. They need the publicity. We don't. To the gullible public which is their natural constituency, it is enough that their man is seen sharing a platform with a real scientist. "There must be something in creationism, or Dr So-and-So would not have agreed to debate it on equal terms." Inevitably, when you turn down the invitation you will be accused of cowardice, or of inability to defend your own beliefs [how prophetic...]. But that is better than supplying the creationists with what they crave: the oxygen of respectability in the world of real science.
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- However, what if the creationist is giving $100k to the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science?
- This money (quoting Dawkins) "will NOT be available for buying animatronic dinosaurs with saddles, or other similar nonsense". It will instead be used by the foundation to promote science education and other things harmful to creationism.
- Thus the benefits should balance out the loss.
I was not aware of Dawkins' debate with Lennox (in fact, I'd never heard of the man
). Was the debate about creationism vs evolution? Because this is what Ray Comfort is specifically asking for. Interestingly, he is
not on the Discovery Institute list of "scientists skeptical of evolution" (
not that his presence would mean much (http://tinyurl.com/dzw88f - broken link)).
By the way, did you know another thing about the Dawkins/Comfort not-debate? Ray Comfort didn't actually
ask Dawkins if he wanted to debate. That's right: he announced his desire to debate Dawkins for $10k (and made a few snarky remarks about "those evolutionists that never accept debates")
without bothering to contact Dawkins at all! It was days after the announcement that he received a mail about it from a journalist, whose relation with Comfort is unknown.
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