Preliminary Observations:
- Tom is a really good public speaker. One consistent observation was that Tom was good at controlling the conversations. He used the presumption of authority, along with his physical location at the center of the crowd, to cut people off when he wanted, get the attention when he wanted, and use at least 85% of the time for his own responses/preaching. I was told a few times that I needed to "let him talk", when in fact he spent no less than 85% of his time in the plaza talking, and in fact he had no claim to authority in that plaza. I am not (typically) a rude person, but Tom did well at making it seem "rude" to not just give him the ability to control the conversation.
- His manner was not offensive, per se. His doctrines, of course, are another story.
- He was extremely dependent upon argumentum ad ignorantium when appealing to the truth of Christianity, in his attempts to undercut naturalism generally.
- From (3), he often resorted to the false dichotomy: if not science/materialism/atheism, then Christianity.
- He seemed to have a rather poor grasp of the philosophy of science -- he didn't understand why the scientific method proceeds under the assumption of naturalism. He said this is a bias. He's right. But that's the difference between science and non-science. I tried to explain that there is no way to incorporate supernaturalism into the scientific method.
- When asked hard questions, Tom would fall back to analogies and anecdotes, as a good public speaker, I think he was using these to give himself time to gather his thoughts and also take away some of the "edge" of the question.
- Tom engaged skeptics, but the skeptics there only asked him a few good questions. One of the better questions involved the problem of free will and determinism as it relates to prophecy and omniscience. Tom completely changed the subject and seemed not to get the philosophical implications of the question at all.
- A Muslim young man had lots of questions and plugs for Islam that were interesting, and kept some perspective outside of the "Christianity or atheism" false dichotomy.
- I got into a short conversation with Tom about the question of whether Jesus and the Father had two different wills. I asked him this question point-blank, and he refused to answer yes/no. I asked him the question as he was arguing that Jesus always submitted to the will of the father, and that the Garden of Gethsemane was a good passage to refer to for this. I simply pointed to the absurdity of claiming that God can have different minds and different wills. I pointed out that we would all agree that something cannot logically be called "the same" if two of its representations have different properties: say, one object, the word "GATOR" being represented as orange in one instance and blue in another. We would recognize the orange GATOR as one particular, and the blue GATOR as different one. This is a deep metaphysical topic, but those who heard the basics of my outline probably got the problem: that if Jesus and the Father are the same God, we cannot say that they have different minds or wills.
- I spent a lot longer trying to explain the problem of the earliest manuscripts (MSS) of Mark, how the earliest version of the resurrection story in the earliest gospel showed much less detail than the later interpolated one. I tried to explain that when it comes to MSS, we use the earliest version to establish additions and interpolations. He made a terrible analogy about people who keep getting new information about a football game as it comes in, and how this is adding to the veracity of the overall account. The problem here is that 40 years or so had already passed at the time that Mark was completed. The story, up until that point, had been passed along by oral tradition only. How could "new information" come about? It is much, much, much more likely that the original story will get distorted with time than that somehow, a 40-year-old story has new information come in from new (reliable) sources. The difference in his analogy and my point is that MSS are supposed to be reliable copies of some original. If we have evidence, such as the pericope adulterae, and the longer Markan ending, that these MSS had been tampered with, why would we assume that our own oldest copies were not themselves interpolated? Our oldest (complete) MSS are from the 4th century. Knowing that things were already interpolated, when the story had been (supposedly-faithfully unrefined) and supposedly-faithfully copied for about 300 years, leads, by inference, to skepticism that these oldest copies can be reliably attributed to the originals. This argument didn't go well out there, because it is a subtle and serious argument that required more attention to the detail of what I was saying than he got. He either didn't get it on purpose, or because I wasn't articulate enough. His analogies were very poor.
- Tom loved the argument from design. He threw pocket change on the ground to establish inference of random processes, then lined up the pennies (stealing an example from Cressy Morrison) to show inference of design. First, I will just give some references for rebuttals to this argument: i) infidels.org; ii) skepdic.com; iii) Francois Tremblay. Along with the general refutations of this argument, I would also point to another sort of argument: the argument from evil design. Besides evil design, there is also the argument from maladaptive/poor design to consider.
- Another point in the argument from design that I made was that we are justified in claiming "design" for those processes that we understand, via induction and science. We are not justified in claiming "design" because of ignorance.
- Generally, Tom mischaracterized order/disorder. This is very very common among creationists. They do not understand the huge amount of disorder in the universe, relative to the order that occurs on the local scale. They do not understand that order on earth comes from the huge expense of work done by the sun's energy. They think that any order = design. They royally equivocate on the 2nd Law of Thermo.
- Tom went on for a while about pornography in a discussion with a liberal Christian. He chastised the young man pretty harshly when the young man said, "I don't think it's wrong b/c it doesn't hurt anyone." Tom went on and on for a while, citing verses about lust, etc. Then Tom moved on to talk about hypocrisy among Christians, and said something like, "I wouldn't tell you not to do something that I myself do." At this point, there was a quiet moment, and I injected (with perfect timing and tone): "Do you look at porn, Tom?" He was a little taken aback. He said, "No!" Then went on to say, "sometimes things pop up on your screen when you're doing a search...and you're tempted..." It seemed a rather poor justification and the opposite of his long spiel about unconditional repentance and admission of wrongdoing. People in the crowd saw this and gave quiet protests to his attempt to wiggle out of the contradiction I'd caught him in. I asked him how long it had been, and he wouldn't get specific: "a while".
- The most dramatic point I saw in my 3 days was when a young man, a skeptic, got in Tom's face and yelled at him not to malign science. This was during Tom's tortured attempt to try to argue that science is bad because it doesn't say "God might've done it." The young man was very angry, and I strongly disagreed with his outburst. It actually had me worried for a moment that the young man was going to assault Tom. He really got in his face and yelled. I booed at him.
- This led to a young man in the audience who had a question for myself and another skeptic (a different guy than the angry one) regarding science that Tom allowed (awful big of him, since it was a public square and free speech zone). The young man (with a large cast on his leg from a recent knee surgery) threw out the classic creationist canard, the PRATT: "Evolution is just a theory. Theories are just beliefs." I and the other skeptic kept interrupting each other in correcting this fallacy, but I don't know how effective it was, because too many people don't know the difference in the colloquial usage of the word, "theory" and the scientific usage.
- From that conversation, the other young skeptic was trying to explain cosmology a little, and I have no doubt that he knows some physics, but he was a poor public speaker, and the crowd lost a lot of interest. Tom saw this, and of course got their attention with more theatrics (jumping out of his chair and walking around briskly to recapture the audience). The young man never said: "The evidence for the Big Bang is in the red-shift of galaxies and the cosmic background radiation, as well as alignment with the equations of general relativity." This is what would've been best. He also failed to explain that some of the initial conditions of the Big Bang have been recreated in labs. I think not connecting the theories to the evidence and experiments is the largest failure in trying to convince people that belief in these theories is justified. Just describing the theory, rather than the evidence that supports it and the way it has been subjected to falsification, never helps.
- The second most dramatic point I saw was my involvement in the Hitler question, when he refused to read my quotes, or to allow me to have the papers back to read them myself, as I explained earlier.
I also hope to have a few people from our freethought group out there, besides the few I did see. I really think it is necessary to counter misinformation on evolution and creationism on a regular basis, because scientists have been largely isolated in ivory towers, leaving these people to inculcate doubt and falsehoods into the public. Also, it is nice to philosophize on topics like this, and intellectually-stimulating. A nice-sized "peanut gallery" could keep him on his toes a lot more than one or two people -- we all have different areas of expertise and strengths in arguing different topics.
What I want more than that, though, is a formal debate, in which question-begging and topic-changing, as well as equivocation, can be called out and clearly demonstrated during the response period (which I really didn't have much of). I'm working on setting one up at our campus.
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