The "Kent Hovind"-style challenge

Kent Hovind has for several decades been rather infamous for not only being a Christian young-earth creationist activist, who has made an entire video series of presentations about his wacky theories as well as making thousands of YouTube videos where he repeats the same things over and over, but more prominently because of his egregiously smug and condescending attitude towards "atheists" and anybody who disagrees with him.

Say what you like about apologists like William Lane Craig (who is the King of Sophistry, to the extreme degree), Ken Ham and others like them, at least they know how to maintain a modicum of politeness and good manners, regardless of how wrong what they say may be. Not Kent Hovind: He is extremely smug, condescending and egregiously patronizing when talking about "atheists" and their arguments. So very Christian of him.

Anyway, he is also somewhat famous for his "evolution challenge": At least in the past (I don't know if currently) he promised to pay 10 thousand dollars (or whatever the sum was) to anybody who can give him any "proof of evolution".

This challenge is very easy and safe for him to present. That's because it has two main problems:

Firstly, a bit of a more minor problem is that he has never specified (and quite deliberately so) the conditions for the "proofs" presented to him. He has never explained what he will accept as valid "proof" and what he won't.

The problem with this is that it leaves the judging of the validity of the presented proof completely open, up to the whims of whoever is judging, with no clearly defined parameters under which such a proof will be considered valid. It will be completely up to the whims of whoever is judging.

Which brings up to the second and absolutely major problem in the challenge:

Who will be judging whether a presented "proof" is valid, and thus earns the 10 thousand dollars? Well, what do you know, Kent Hovind himself, of course.

Indeed, he himself is the only and sole person judging the validity of the presented "proof", and his word is the final verdict, regardless of anything. Thus, he simply has to reject the proof, regardless of what it is, and what do you know, he doesn't need to pay. That's it. It's that simple. He doesn't even need to present any counter-argument or explain why he is rejecting the proof: He can simply reject it, and he doesn't have to pay, under his own self-imposed rules of the "challenge".

And, indeed, he has a stock answer to almost every single "proof" presented to him, which he almost always gives as a stock response: "That's not evolution."

It doesn't matter what the presented proof is, he just has to answer "that's not evolution", and he doesn't need to pay. Under his perspective the "challenge" was once again lost by the "evolutionist". Obviously he can then go ahead and boast about how his "challenge" has never been broken, and how "nobody can present a single proof of evolution." Which he does constantly.

Of course he never talks about the fact that he himself is the only and sole judge deciding whether his "challenge" has been broken or not.

Unsurprisingly, he is not the only one engaging in this exact type of easy and safe "challenge". Many other creationists, conspiracy theorists, flat earthers, and other such people have also presented the exact same "challenge": Provide proof that their claims are false and you earn X thousand dollars. Problem is, of course, that it's the issuer of the challenge who all alone will be the sole judge of whether the proof is valid or not. Thus, the challenge is very safe to issue: The challenger will never have to pay up because he can just dismiss any proof presented to him.

And then he can go ahead and boast about how nobody can prove he is wrong and nobody has ever won the challenge. 

Why the Manhattan "eruv" wire makes no sense

Orthodox Judaism has a huge amount of rules that are not directly found in the Torah or the rest of the Hebrew Bible (ie. "Old Testament").

As an example: In Orthodox Judaism you must make absolutely certain that you never, ever mix meat and milk. Not even a single molecule must be mixed. The strongest adherents of Judaism go so far as having divided their kitchen into two parts, where nothing crosses the line from one part to the other: Cookware, utensils, dishes, raw ingredients... Each half has its own set of them, and they must never, ever cross to the other side. Even the not-so-strong adherents will have at least some measures to make sure that no molecule of milk ever touches a molecule of meat by, at a minimum, never using the two ingredients at the same time and judiciously washing all cookware, utensils and dishes in between (although most prefer to just have two separate sets of them.)

Nothing like this is mandated in the Hebrew Bible, though (nor are there any mentions or examples of people doing anything like this). In fact, there is no commandment against eating meat and milk at the same time. Not even goat meat and goat milk at the same time. The only thing that's prohibited is boiling goat in its mother's milk. (This is a rather strange commandment, and some have hypothesized that it's actually metaphorical, and the people of the time would have understood what it actually meant. However, that's not important in this blog post.)

So if the prohibition is so specific, why go to such lengths and create a huge amount of rules that seem completely overblown and extreme?

The basic idea is that all these additional rules and mandates are there to protect a person from accidentally breaking a commandment. Rabbis themselves call this "building a fence around the commandments": In other words, follow rules that keep you as far as possible from even accidentally breaking a commandment. After all, if you have milk and meat in the same dinner, there is the remote possibility that the meat happens to contain goat and the milk happens to be from its mother, and if the meat is hot, it may end up being "boiled" in that milk, no matter how briefly. No matter how extraordinarily remote that possibility may be, it's better to err on the side of caution: Don't let even the remote chance become reality!

In other words, all these extra rules have the principle of "it's better to keep as far away from the line (of breaking a commandment) as possible, than to take any chances." No measure is too extreme to protect you from accidentally crossing that line. If using separate kitchen utensils protects you from even accidental breaking of the law, it's well worth it.

And, of course, this is only one example of literally thousands.

Naturally what can and can't be done has sparked endless debates among Jewish scholars and Rabbis over the centuries.

One of the topics that has sparked probably the most amount of discussion is what counts as "work", which is forbidden from being done on the Sabbath?

Obviously doing anything related to your job is clearly "work". But can something else also be considered such? What about doing chores at home, such as repairing something that's broken? Is that "work" that's forbidden during Sabbath? Again: Better to err on the side of caution and consider it such. Thus, you cannot repair anything during the Sabbath.

This "protective fence" around the prohibition of doing "work" during the Sabbath can sometimes go to rather ridiculous extremes. For example, a very common interpretation is that just switching on a light is "work", and thus shouldn't be done during a Sabbath. (The train of thought is that historically lighting up something required starting a fire, which can be quite exerting and requires tools and skill. Clearly it's work! Not so much different than eg. repairing something. Thus lighting a fire during Sabbath is best avoided. The modern equivalent is flipping a light switch to turn on the lights: Same thing, just a more modern version. Thus, once again, better to err on the side of caution: You shouldn't be switching lights during Sabbath.)

Carrying heavy loads, even if it's just inside your home, is also quite clearly considered work, as it's physically exerting, and it goes against the principle of the Sabbath being a day of rest.

But what about carrying very lightweight things? Can you carry your keys in a pocket, for example? Is that work or not? What if you have to carry something lightweight due to necessity, such as bringing food to a sick family member? Is that work?

After much deliberation the scholars and Rabbis came to the decision that carrying relatively light weights is allowed during the Sabbath, but only in your home. You must not carry anything further than that.

Of course the next question became: What exactly constitutes "your home"? Is it just the space confined inside walls? What about a patio, or a garden? Are you allowed to exit the door of your house carrying something?

A concession was made: Your property is your home, and that can include not just the house but also the immediate land around it, such as a patio or a garden.

However, in order to know where exactly the line is, it was decided that every Orthodox Jew who owns a home with property around it should clearly mark where the line is that must not be crossed while carrying something. This is marked with a so-called "eruv", which is a wire or string for this exact purpose: It marks the limits of the area where you can carry light loads, and must not be crossed.

And this is where the "abuse" of this allowance started happening. For example, if the properties of two neighbors were side-by-side, some of them would use a joint "eruv" wire that went around both properties, allowing them to carry stuff from one home to the other. After all, they didn't need to cross the line because the line was surrounding the joint property.

What if a third neighbor wanted to join the party? Well, extend the "eruv" to cover his property as well! Now all three could travel to any of the other two homes, carrying stuff, as no wire was being crossed.

And, thus, we get to the absolutely ridiculous end point of all this gameplay: The "Manhattan eruv wire". Which is an "eruv" wire that surrounds a good chunk of Manhattan. An absolutely humongous area.

Orthodox Jews who live within this area take this to mean that they can carry stuff within that huge area without worry. Which, rather obviously, goes against the original idea of limiting this area as much as possible.

In light of the other stuff about the "kosher" rules, which are designed to keep the faithful as protected as possible from breaking any commandments, going to absolute extremes to make sure of that, this ridiculous "Manhattan eruv" is certainly going to an absolute extreme... in the opposite direction! In other words, towards the line of what constitutes breaking the Sabbath and what doesn't. It's the exact opposite of the idea of keeping oneself as far as possible from breaching that line.

Which is why it just doesn't make any sense.

The actual reason O'Reilly's "tide goes in/out" argument doesn't work

There's a very memetic video clip of Bill O'Reilly, who had invited an atheist activist, David Silverman, to his show in order to have a discussion about religion vs. atheism, where O'Reilly quite (in)famously argued:

"I'll tell you why it's not a scam. In my opinion, all right? Tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can't explain that."

He became quite a laughing stock because of his argument primarily because rather obviously we know perfectly well how and why tides work, why they have the timing that they do, and we have known this for literally centuries.

However, most people miss the most important reason why it's an invalid argument. The most important reason is not that he is incorrect in his assertion that "you can't explain that". The most important reason is the implication, the deduction based on that.

Let's assume for the sake of the argument that science, humanity in general, had absolutely no idea why and how tides work. Complete mystery. We have studied and studied it for centuries, and to this day we have absolutely no idea. Science calls it "the great tide anomaly" (similarly to "the Pioneer anomaly" and "the flyby anomaly"). Let's assume that O'Reilly was 100% correct in that "you can't explain that."

What can we deduce from this?

Absolutely nothing, that's what. The only thing that we can deduce from it is that we just don't know. It's a mystery. Our science is not advanced enough to have any explanation. But that's it. That's literally the only thing we can deduce from it.

The main point is that "you can't explain that" is not a valid argument for the existence of God. Or any gods. Or even the supernatural. It's just an unknown. (This kind of fallacious argument actually has a name: Argumentum ad ignorantiam. In other words, "argument from ignorance", or more unambiguously and precisely, "argument from not knowing", ie. "argument from an unknown.")

We could perfectly well substitute the "tides" in O'Reilly's argument with something else that we genuinely don't yet understand. For example:

"I'll tell you why it's not a scam. In my opinion, all right? Mass bends space-time, causing gravity. Never a miscommunication, always works the same way. You can't explain that."

In this case the "you can't explain that" is actually correct. However, we still can't deduce anything from it. It's just that: An unknown. We don't have the technical details behind the phenomenon. We just don't know. But that's all we can deduce.

If I were a Catholic, I would probably be a Sedevacantist

"Sedevacantism" is a fringe movement within Catholicism, held by some Catholics, including some priests, that posits that all the recent popes are heretics and, thus, are not genuine God-appointed heads of the Catholic Church and, thus, the position of the Pope, ie. the Holy See, has been vacant for several decades, with no genuine God-approved Pope holding the office.

Which Pope was the last legitimate one depends a bit on the sedevacantist, but the most general consensus is that it was Pius XII (who was Pope from 1939 to 1958), and that the first non-legitimate heretical pope was the next one, John XXIII, under whose papacy the famous (or rather, infamous, from the perspective of sedevacantists) Second Vatican Council was held.

(There's probably no consensus on whether John XXIII started as a legitimate Pope and later became a heretic, or whether he was a heretic from the start, but that doesn't really make a lot of difference. Even if he was legitimate at first, in the sedevacantist view he lost his claim to the Holy See when he committed heresy, and thus stopped being the legitimate Pope.)

Sedevacantists do not deny the teachings of the Catholic Church nor the authority of the Pope (as long as he is the legitimate one). On the contrary, they tend to be extreme hard-line Catholics who very strongly believe in traditional Catholicism, and that the Catholic Church, with all of its teachings, has been the True Church of Christianity for two thousand years.

However, they deny the validity of many of the decrees of the Second Vatican Council, considering most of it heretical, and with it likewise all the subsequent popes who have accepted those decrees to likewise be heretics and thus not true Popes.

The Second Vatican Council was one of the most notorious ecumenical councils of the Catholic Church, generating fundamental sweeping changes to many of the official positions and teachings of the Church. In many ways this council made the Catholic Church significantly more "liberal" in its views, away from the very strict hard-line positions held previously. Some of the most significant changes were:

• Catholic Mass had been held in Ecclesiastic Latin for over a thousand years. This council freed all priests to allow them to hold Mass in their local language.
• The position that the Catholic Church is the only true Church of God was softened and replaced with a more ecumenical view where Catholicism acknowledges that other denominations may also hold some validity in the eyes of God.
• The council declared that not all Jews were responsible for the execution of Jesus.
• It also declared that all people have religious freedom, the fundamental right to choose which religion they follow (in other words, the Catholic Church cannot force nor coerce people into following Catholicism.)
• The position on studying the Bible by laypeople was changed: While previously the Church discouraged laypeople from studying the Bible without guidance and supervision from a priest, now the position was reversed and, on the contrary, laypeople were encouraged to do read the Bible even if there is no priest present.
• And related to that, the approach to scriptural interpretation was changed, encouraging taking into account the historical and cultural context of when the scriptures were written, when interpreting their meaning. (In other words, a more or less subtle hint that "not everything written should be taken literally, as if it applied in the exact same way to the modern world. Context matters.")
• The council somewhat de-emphasized the supreme authority of the Pope in all matters concerning the Church, and increased the role of bishops in those matters. (In other words, bishops became more free to make decisions without necessarily having to seek approval from the Vatican for every little thing.)
• Several changes were made to liturgies and church paraphernalia. 

At face value most of those changes seem positive. And, in fact, the Second Vatican Council was organized precisely because the pope of the time, John XXIII, felt that the Church was in need of such reforms. He felt that the animosity between the Catholic Church and other denominations had to end, as well as many other sweeping changes to make the Church more "people-friendly".

Sedevacantists, however, argue that most of those changes, and the entire motivation behind the council, were motivated by secular ideology, secular politics, and secular movements, rather than by God. They argue that John XXIII was not inspired by God to initiate this kind of radical reform, but by secular politics (and, thus, ultimately, Satan himself.)

After all, what is more likely, that the Catholic Church was completely wrong on those issues for almost two thousand years and only now, after all this time, and coincidentally alongside the rest of the world, decided to reveal the "actual truth" about those matters, or is it more likely that the Pope was inspired by secular politics rather than God?

Why would God wait for almost two thousand years, allowing the Church to have the wrong teachings and positions, before revealing the actual truth? And what a coincidence that this actual truth was revealed at the same time that the rest of the world was moving towards more liberal politics. Did God just come to the Pope and tell him "hey, you know what? Yeah, those secular philosophers, politicians and activists are actually right. Oops, my bad. I suppose we were both wrong. You'd better reform the Church."

Sedevacantists consider several of those changes to the official teaching and positions of the Church to be heretical, as they contradict the official positions held by the Church for almost two thousand years. And, consequently, they consider any pope who accepts those heretical views to be a heretic himself and, thus, not an actual legit valid Pope. Since none of the subsequent popes has denounced those reforms, they have all been heretics, and thus the Holy See has been vacant since that council.

An explanation of why the "watchmaker" argument doesn't work

Many Christian apologists and creationists love to use the so-called "watchmaker argument" to defend the idea that a creator god must exist and is the only logical explanation for why life, including us, exists.

In its simplest form it goes something like this: Suppose you are walking down a beach and encounter a watch. You examine and find out that it works, and about its complex internal details and mechanisms. It would be absolutely ludicrous to think that it came to be on its own, due to random natural phenomena only. Quite clearly someone created it. A watch requires by necessity a watchmaker. The same is true for life: Living organisms are way too complex for it to have happened by random chance, and thus there must have been an intelligent creator.

There are countless explanations and refutations to this that point out how biological organisms are quite different from artificial mechanisms like a watch, and how natural processes can perfectly well explain the formation and diversification of biological organisms.

Here, however, I'm going to approach that argument from the opposite side, the side that's very rarely if ever discussed. In other words, I'm going to tackle the claim that if we find a complex mechanical construct, it must have been created by an intelligent being.

Suppose that one day in the future we are able to traverse huge distances and visit other planets, and one day we find a planet that's populated by billions of robots of all sorts. These robots might look like spiders, crustaceans, perhaps even some kind of theropods. And they are fully mechanical, made of metals, tubes, intricate clockwork mechanisms etc, as well as some kind of strange electro-mechanical contraption that serves as the "brain" of the robot. Crucially, this is the only kind of "life" that exists on the planet; there is no biological life of any sort.

Quite naturally the first logical conclusion is that some kind of intelligent alien race created these robots and put them on that planet, maybe as some kind of experiment, or some kind of "robot zoo", or the like. This is the most logical conclusion because it conforms to our own experience about such mechanical constructs.

However, suppose that we keep observing this planet and its billions of robots, and notice that they actually have a limited lifetime, and they reproduce, and their offspring is always slightly different from its parents, rather than being identical copies.

This would be really interesting, and would already hint at something more complex going on, although the hypothesis that they were created and put there by some intelligent alien species would still be by far the most logical conclusion. Maybe the alien species made the robots like that.

However, suppose we start digging the ground, and we start finding dead robots. Fossils of sorts. And we keep digging more and more, and dating the different layers of sediment, and we observe that the deeper we go, and thus the older the robots we find are, the more different they are from the current alive ones. We go so deep that this geologic column goes back millions, tens of millions, even hundreds of millions of years. It turns out that these robots have existed for that long on this planet.

Moreover, as we dig deeper and deeper, going back in time hundreds of millions of years, the design of these robots become simpler and simpler, but we see a logical progression over the millions of years of how the current alive robots came to be from those simpler robots from hundreds of millions of year ago.

It might even be that when we go back enough in time in the geologic column, we find evidence of more organic compounds having been part of these ancient robots. Organic parts that have since disappeared in more recent robot "fossils".

Now this changes things quite a lot. This is strong indication that the current robots roaming the surface of the planet most likely were not directly created nor put there by some intelligent species. Instead, this is quite clear indication that the current robots literally evolved and diversified over hundreds of millions of years from more primitive forms to their current ones.

This is, in fact, what we observe in actual reality in our planet: We have strong evidence that current lifeforms were not somehow popped into existence as they are currently, but evolved over hundreds of millions of years to their current forms from more primitive life.

Of course this still leaves open the question of how the first ever robots on that hypothetical planet, or the first ever life in our real planet, came to be. However, the above alone is an argument against the "watchmaker" argument, as it's not completely impossible for complex mechanical devices to form without the intervention of an intelligent "creator".

Comprehensive refutation of the "Cosmological Argument"

Many Christian apologists love to present the so-called "Cosmological Argument" for the existence of God, as if it were some kind extremely strong and irrefutable slamdunk argument that's completely logically solid and sound, and which can't be counter-argued. The most common form goes like this:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.

Some apologists will add a fourth clause adding a boatload of (obviously completely unfounded) characteristics to that "cause".

However, the entire argument is unsound and invalid, through and through. Here is a full refutation:

"Whatever begins to exist has a cause"

This has several problems, not the least of which is that this is an ambiguous sentence. The main ambiguity lies in that "begins to exist", as it doesn't specify what kind of "beginning to exist" we are talking about.

Many apologists actually deceitfully play with and abuse this ambiguity, including big-name apologists who demonstrably know better (and thus have no excuse for their deceitful arguments), such as William Lane Craig.

In an interview discussing this argument he said (slightly paraphrasing): "Atheists often try to present a counter-argument that we don't have any example of something beginning to exist. Didn't dinosaurs begin to exist? Didn't I begin to exist?"

This kind of "beginning to exist" is so-called ex materia, in other words, matter and energy transforming to make something different that wasn't there before, fully within this existing universe. Craig is being deliberately deceitful here because in other contexts he has very clearly expressed that he perfectly well understands the difference between creation ex materia and creation ex nihilo, ie "out of nothing".

And that is the main problem with this clause: We indeed do not have a single example of something beginning to exist from nothing, we only have examples of things beginning to exist from existing matter, ie. existing matter and energy, fully within this universe, transforming from one form to another. But the premise isn't talking about the universe appearing ex materia, it's talking about it appearing ex nihilo, out of nothing.

We do not know if something can appear from nothing, and even if it can, we don't know if some kind of "cause" is needed for that to happen. Heck, we don't even know if absolute "nothingness" is even possible in this reality where we exist. Apologists (and many other people) merely assume that absolute nothingness, the complete non-existence of anything, is possible. But we don't know even that! This reality where we exist might as well be of a nature where absolute nothingness is impossible, and there must always exist something. We don't know!

The premise, thus, is completely unjustified. We cannot take it for granted, even though the argument in question does exactly that. We have no examples of things coming into existence from nothing, and we don't know if that's even possible, and we don't even know if "nothingness" itself is possible in this reality where we exist. We just don't know. We cannot assume it to be so.

That, in itself, completely nullifies the entire argument. However, for the sake of the argument, let's assume for a moment that it might be valid and continue to the next premise:

"The universe began to exist"

We don't know this either!

The apologists will hurry to argue from the Big Bang model, and "infinite regress" being impossible. However, the Big Bang theory only tells us that a long time ago the entire universe, including space and time itself, was compressed into an infinitesimally small point, which rapidly expanded, forming this universe. It does not tell us where that point, with all of its energy, came from.

Most particularly, it does not tell us that the initial point came into existence from nothing (which is the entire premise of this argument). The fact is that we don't know anything at all about that initial point. We don't know why it existed, we don't know how long it existed, we don't even know if it makes any sense to talk about a time "before" it existed (because time itself was created by the expansion of that point). It might or might not be completely nonsensical to talk about a time "before" the Big Bang. And even if there indeed was a time "before" it, we have absolutely no idea what it was like, and what was there, if anything.

We also don't know if there's some kind of "outside" to this universe of ours, or even if such a concept even makes sense. There might be, or there might not be. It might be that this universe is everything that exists, or it might be that there are other universes, and/or it might be that this universe of ours is inside some kind of "metaverse" of sorts, for the lack of a better term. We just don't know. Nor do we know anything about the nature of those other things, if they indeed exist at all.

There are hypotheses that this universe might not be the only one, and there may well be countless (perhaps even infinite) "parallel universes", or perhaps there's an "anti-universe" that's a kind of "negative" version of this universe of ours which formed at the same time (to balance things out). There are also hypotheses that this universe might have resulted from the collapse of another universe. But all these are just hypotheses, and the fact is that we just don't know.

In summary, stating as a fact that "the universe began to exist" is just false. It's not a fact. We don't know if this universe began to exist!

"Therefore, the universe had a cause"

The conclusion is unjustified because both premises are unjustified. For this kind of formal argument to be valid, the premises need to be valid. In this case, they are not.

The argument could be made logically valid if we reword it slightly: "If beginning to exist (ex nihilo) is possible, and if everything that begins to exist (ex nihilo) has a cause, and if this universe began to exist (ex nihilo), then this universe had a cause."

But that's a lot of assumptions to make, and it's kind of a trivial argument to make. It's like saying "if I had a lot of money I would be rich." Well, duh. Of course. It's a completely trivial and self-evident argument to make.

But even if we granted all the assumptions made in the premises, for the sake of argument, the argument would still not work.

Why? Because it's trying to argue for the existence of the Biblical God. In fact, it wouldn't work even if it were arguing for the existence of some unspecified "god".

This is because even if there was a cause for the existence of this universe, we don't know anything about it. Nothing. Nada. Nil. Christian apologists love to attribute characteristics to this "cause", but they are all just unfounded unjustified speculation and guessing, based on even more assumptions. (For example, they assume that this universe is the only one that exists, and that there are no other universes, or any kind of "metaverse" inside which this universe exists. This is not an assumption we can make because we just don't know.)

Some apologists love to say "we call this cause God." Why call it that? Even if there was a cause, it's a complete unknown. You should be calling it "an unknown", not "God". This is because that name, "God", carries with it a huge amount of assumptions, presumptions and extra claims, none of which can be factually attributed to that unknown "cause".

Why Kent Hovind's evolution challenge is nonsensical

The infamous young-earth creationist Kent Hovind has issued many times during the past decades a challenge to "evolutionists": He will pay 10 thousand dollars (or whatever sum) to anybody who can give him a proof of the theory of evolution.

Why is this challenge completely nonsensical?

Because he himself is the only and sole self-appointed judge of whether the proof given to him is valid or not. There are no predetermined terms or conditions or anything: He will judge the "validity" of the proof, as it is given to him. Whatever he determines, right there on the fly, will be the final judgment.

The blatant bias of this shouldn't even be necessary to be pointed out. After all, he can just reject any proof given to him, and that's it. He doesn't even need to give any counter-argument. He can just reject the validity of the proof, and he doesn't need to pay. Which, of course, makes this a very easy and safe "challenge" to offer, as there is no danger of ever losing it.

And, indeed, that's exactly what he does. In fact, he has a standard answer to any proof and evidence given to him, no matter what it is, which he almost always uses as a matter of course: "That's not evolution."

Yeah, that's it. "That's not evolution." Because not only is he the only and sole judge of whether the given proof is valid, but he himself is the one outright defining what "evolution" means. Never mind what the scientific definition is. He defines what it means, and thus whether any given proof fits that definition. Never mind that he has never given any definition, that doesn't matter. The definition is whatever he wants it to be, and always something (usually unstated) that rejects the given proof.

So, "that's not evolution." Nothing more needs to be said or argued. Proof invalid, challenge failed. He can then go boast about how nobody has ever been able to give him any proof of evolution.

Christian apologists love to distort Richard Dawkins's point

Many Christian apologists love to erode the credibility of Richard Dawkins by pointing to that one time when he (allegedly) said that even if something genuinely miraculous happened, like the stars in the sky suddenly moving and forming a readable message, he would still not believe in God (no matter what that message says.)

These apologists imply that Dawkins is just stubbornly denying and rejecting all evidence for the existence of God, based on principle rather than rationality, that no evidence could ever convince him because he just rejects all evidence as a matter of principle. They imply that Dawkins himself has openly declared that he will never believe in God and he will reject all evidence of his existence, as a matter of dogma. In other words, essentially putting your fingers in your ears and shouting "la la la, I can't hear you!" Thus, any rational discussion with him is useless and doomed to failure, because of his dogmatic refusal to accept anything.

This is not what Dawkins meant. It's not his point.

What Dawkins meant was that it's not possible to have definitive proof of God's existence. It's not that he will reject all evidence based on principle. It's that it's literally impossible to have such evidence.

And why is that?

Because even if something truly miraculous happened, there's no way to know its origin, its source, what caused it to happen. The only thing we would know is that something very unusual happened, that's it. Could be something natural from within this universe, could be something supernatural from somewhere else, but we have no way of telling which, and especially in the latter case what the actual source was.

Sure, the message in question could claim that it comes from the God of the Bible, but once again, there's no way to corroborate that's true. It could be something else just messing with us and sending us false messages for whatever reason. It could even be some kind of technologically extremely advanced alien race that's doing an experiment or just being evil (after all, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" and "any sufficiently advanced alien is indistinguishable from God.") There's no way to know.

That was Dawkins's point. That is what he meant.

And he does make a good point. Even if something unusual happens that we don't know the reason for, or how it's even possible, there simply is no way for us to discern and corroborate where it's coming from, what is causing it to happen.

He is not saying that we should reject all evidence for the existence of God. What he is saying that there cannot exist such evidence because it cannot be corroborated. It's literally impossible. All such evidence would, at most, point to an unknown phenomenon, unknown source, and that's it. An unknown. We can't deduce anything from that.

Short-form list of arguments for and against the historicity of Jesus

I will try to list as many arguments for the historicity of Jesus, often presented by Christian apologists, and brief responses to those arguments. This should be taken more as a "cliffsnotes" type document rather than a comprehensive detailed critique.

"There is an overwhelming consensus among historians and scholars that Jesus of Nazareth was a real existing person. Nobody of any repute doubts this, and it's taken as an almost certainty."

This is a claim only made by (some) Christian apologists and perhaps a couple of atheist scholars, but there is no evidence that it's actually true. I have never seen a comprehensive study or large-scale questionnaire asking the opinion of historians and scholars on this subject. Pretty much all sources cited for this claim are Christian apologists. For all I know, this claim has been completely made up by Christian apologists based on absolutely nothing.

Regardless, even if it were 100% true, this is simply an argument from authority and an argument from popularity. A consensus among scholars does not in itself make something true and factual.

"There is an overwhelming amount of historical and archaeological evidence for the existence of Jesus. There is more evidence for his existence than for most other historic figures."

This is just an outright untruth. In reality there is literally zero contemporary evidence for the existence of Jesus. No contemporary documents that have survived, no artifacts, no statues, no inscriptions, no paintings, no coins, nothing. Not a single piece of contemporary evidence exists. This is very much unlike the evidence that exists for other famous historic figures, like Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great.

Literally the only evidence that exists of Jesus is textual documents that were written many decades after his alleged death, and that's it. These documents were written either by unknown authors, authors who did not meet him personally, Christian authors who were religiously motivated, and non-Christian authors who were born after Jesus's alleged death.

"The texts of the New Testament are a completely valid and credible form of historic documentation supporting the historicity of Jesus."

This would make them the only documents in existence that are accepted as historically accurate regardless of all the supernatural claims made in them. These texts were written by people who were clearly religiously motivated and thus had a strong bias, eroding the credibility of what they wrote. Describing supernatural events, especially ones done by the person they are writing about, does not exactly strengthen the credibility of the text.

"There is plenty of evidence from early non-Christian historians for the existence if Jesus, including that of the historians Josephus and Tacitus."

In reality the amount of non-Christian sources about Jesus is completely abysmal. As mentioned earlier, there is literally zero contemporary evidence (Christian or non-Christian), and the earliest possible non-Christian sources that exist were written well over 60 years after Jesus's alleged death, by people who were born after said death.

Indeed, both Josephus and Tacitus were born after Jesus's alleged death, so they hardly were contemporary to him, and the brief mentions of what Christians believed were written over 60 years after his alleged death. And, indeed, even these mentions are very brief, and were merely repeating what Christians of the time believed. (There is a lot of deception and lying-by-omission among many Christian apologists when they mention Josephus and Tacitus because they very rarely mention when they were born, when they wrote those mentions of Christian beliefs, or what exactly they wrote.)

"The texts of the New Testament were written so early that most people who read them were alive during the life of Jesus and would have objected to the texts if they were not true."

Even the earliest texts of the New Testament were written several decades after Jesus's alleged death, and were distributed among a very small group of people who were essentially cultists. Most of them likely didn't live anywhere near where the alleged events happened, and had no reason to doubt the claims. It's very likely that some people believed the claims while other people dismissed or outright objected to the claims, but this had very little effect on the believers. Even if the doubters were able to convince a few believers, they were not able to convince all of them. Thus, the religious beliefs and texts survived and proliferated, and as more and more time passed, the less possible it was to corroborate the accuracy of the claims.

This isn't anything strange or unusual, as this exact thing happens all the time, even to this day, and even though nowadays we have much more ways to corroborate unusual claims than two thousand years ago.

"Martyrs wouldn't have died for a lie."

Martyrs most definitely would die for a lie, especially since they believed the claims and didn't think of them as lies and falsehoods. There is no reliable evidence that anybody who allegedly met Jesus (most prominently his apostles) was martyred, and later Christians had no reason to think that it was all just a lie not worth dying for.

"The criterion of embarrassment: If the story of Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, was made up, they wouldn't have made him into a weak person who was ignominiously murdered by the oppressors."

On the contrary, if you were making up a story about the Jewish Messiah having existed decades prior, it would have been silly to claim that he was victorious and liberated his people from the oppressors (ie. the Romans), because the Romans were still oppressing the Jews, as anybody could see. It would have made a lot more sense to write a story about a suffering Messiah (something that was supported by the scriptures, and one of the accepted interpretations of the Messiah by Jewish scholars of the time) who was martyred by the hand of the Romans.

Unlike these Christian apologists love to imply, the concept of good people being oppressed and killed by bad people in ignominious ways was a common trope in storytelling of the time, and had been for hundreds of years. Many myths and fictitious stories, even much older ones, involved good people suffering at the hand of bad people, without those bad people getting any sort of punishment for it.

(It should also be noted that, as far as I know, this entire concept of "criterion of embarrassment", as some kind of method to determine historic accuracy, was invented by Christian apologists for the only and sole purpose of trying to argue for the historicity of Jesus, and this argument has never been used for any other purpose by any historian or anybody else.)

"There were tens of thousands of eyewitnesses to the events."

The texts of the New Testament claim that there were eyewitnesses. That doesn't make it any more true than any of the other claims made there, such as the supernatural miracles. Notably the New Testament is the only source that claims that such eyewitnesses existed. There is no other credible evidence that tens of thousands of people witnessed Jesus in person (which, in itself, is quite notable, and a somewhat strong argument against the historicity of the man.)

"The New Testament claimed that women were the witnesses of the empty tomb. If the story had been made up, the authors would have used men as witnesses rather than women, who were considered unreliable."

This is in the same league as the "criterion of embarrassment": Making claims about writing tropes of the time that are simply not true. There are even older pieces of myth and fiction were women play very important roles, and are believed and taken seriously. There is no reason to think that a made-up story about Jesus wouldn't have used women as eyewitnesses. The argument is especially weak given the fact that the same story later has Jesus appear to several groups of people that included many men, including the apostles themselves. The "Jesus has risen from the dead" aspect of the story is not solely reliant on the alleged word of some women.