[Grizzly]

I felt this was not touched upon directly in GB's post:

The age of the earth, evolution, and the big bang are all things touched upon by seperate fields. For example, my field, Geology, simply states that the history of the universe starts with the Big Bang. Due to the nature of light, we still can observe part of the big bang as the light of the event reaches us from the far reaches of the universe (similarely to how you see a star as it was 8 years ago if it is 8 lightyears away). It also makes up 10% of the snow you see when you haven't tuned your TV set. We can't observe anything beyond the big bang, and therefore, we don't make statements about it. Not our field.

The idea that our world is not thousands but millions of years old was a point concieved by James Hutton, widely considered to be the first geologist. Before, it was thought that sedimentary stones were created by the Great Flood(tm). However, after visiting Siccar Point, James Hutton noted that many rocks were composited of layers. However, these layers were not always horizontal: Some were, for example, diagonal, but were then cut off by horizontal layers. Similar patterns can be found very strikingly in the grand canyon.

He concieved that these layers were formed on the seabed. Then the seabed would rise (or the sea itself would lower or dry out completely), which would cause the layers to shift. Eventually, the layers would be eroded, and new layers would be deposited on top of them. Such a process takes a very very very very long time, and thus James Hutton remarked that there was 'no vestige of a beginning, nor an prospect of an end'.

Currently, one way we can determine the oldness of things using radioactivity. Earth's athmosphere has contained a relatively consistent amount of radioactive particles troughout millions of years. By breathing that athmosphere, that amount stays constant. However, if you die and are buried, you stop exchanging radioactive particles with the athmosphere, and the remaining particles begin to decay. if you are dug up, one can use the particles in your body to determine how old you are. Those calculations are pretty conclusive.

To summarize: The question on how old the earth is, is irrelevant to the question on how the universe was created.

[AdmiralRalwood]

It also makes up 10% of the snow you see when you haven't tuned your TV set.

What year is this?

[watsisname]

However, you're making a key error by connecting Darwin to cosmology. Darwin's synthesis is biological.

I'd just like to quote this for emphasis.  The origin and evolution of the universe (cosmology) is quite another topic from the origin and evolution of life (abiogenesis and biology).  Furthermore, The Big Bang is not a model of how the universe was created.  It says nothing about what initiated the event, though as B.T. points out there is no shortage of ideas, many with good scientific merit, others not so much. 

The Big Bang also does not say 'everything came from nothing'.  The Big Bang, put most simply, says that the universe is expanding and cooling from a hot and dense initial state, and this behavior is well understood from physics (general relativity) and verified by multiple lines of evidence (cosmological redshift, background radiation, relative abundance of elements, evolution of structure, etc.)  We understand remarkably well the evolution of the cosmos back to fractions of a second after the first moment of expansion.  Beyond that is the Planck Epoch, where general relativity and quantum mechanics clash.  What happened before then?  We do not yet know.

[Grizzly]

It also makes up 10% of the snow you see when you haven't tuned your TV set.

What year is this?

Analog FTW  .

It also makes up 10% of the static you hear when you haven't tuned your car radio.

EDIT: As a meta-discussion point: I love the well thought out posts everyone makes during these discussions .

[zookeeper]

I'd have to say that "In the beginning, God made the world" is pretty reasonable compared to "In the beginning, there was Nothing, and Nothing made everything".

But those are the same thing in the sense that in both, something comes from nothing; the first one is not "In the beginning, God made the world", it's "In the beginning, there was Nothing, and Nothing made God, and God made the world". The universe doesn't require a creator any more than the creator would require a creator.

As Battuta said, it's a prime example of an argument which appeals to so-called common sense but which is ultimately just a rhetorical trick. Having to settle for "something came from nothing and that doesn't make any sense" isn't very satisfying, but that's what both of your options boil down to.

[InsaneBaron]

We studied political persuasion at MIT - I think we had one of the finest labs in the world on the topic - and our conclusion was basically this: it's impossible to persuade people with a sharply different opinion from your own, and it's very difficult to use substantial or complex arguments to persuade anyone.

Instead, you should stake out a position in the extreme corner of your own camp and never give any ground. Moderation or nuance will cost you possible converts. Your targets are the undecided. You'll push some away, but on net you'll gain more by having a clear, simple message that can be delivered over and over again. Your best response to criticism is to ignore it or to deride the source of the criticism as untrustworthy. You should paint the conflict as a binary us-or-them to encourage people to identify clearly with one of two camps. Make it all about identity: you don't just believe in [cause], you are a [causer].  When an opponent attacks you, your faithful only need to know they're not a [causer] to deprecate the argument. It's not even a conscious choice. It happens automatically.

These tactics are battle-tested. It's no surprise that political campaigns and mass movements converge on them.

I agree that we see enough of this rot to make you sympathetic to the Shivans. However, I'd make a distinction between a bad debate (American politics...) and a good debate, like Socratic debate, or the kind of discussion we're having right now. It comes down to respecting the other guy. I'd say Ham and Nye had a pretty civil debate, especially compared to what we had to endure last fall.

I did debate in high school myself. Loved it and did pretty well, though not go-to-turkey well. It's definitely something I'd recommend to any student.

That said, I disagree on your point, but I respect your opinion. I'm not convinced of young earth creationism, but I AM convinced that basic evolutionary naturalism has a lot of holes.

This is a great point! The Darwinian synthesis has come a long way, and Darwin's original theory was never adequate (even for him). But the constant need to defend basic science against attack prevents scientists from talking about what they've learned since then.

However, you're making a key error by connecting Darwin to cosmology. Darwin's synthesis is biological. I'm making a vow not to launch a science clinic here, since that big block of text I posted above explains why it's futile in a lot of cases, but I'll make one exception because you're cool.

Two points. First, I'm glad we can agree that Darwin's theory has problems that haven't been resolved yet- a lot of people deny that point. Second, you're absolutely right that Darwinism is a biologic rather than cosmological theory; unfortunately people on both sides equate the two, and I slipped into that terminology myself. Both biology and cosmology were involved in the debate

For example, the big bang: How did the matter for the bang get there in the first place? (A point that came up in the debate). I'd have to say that "In the beginning, God made the world" is pretty reasonable compared to "In the beginning, there was Nothing, and Nothing made everything". That doesn't mean I think the world was made in six days though... if you ask me whether the world is thousands or billions of years old, I'd give you the same response you'd get if you asked me who I expected to win the next world series: "You're asking the wrong guy."

This is a scientific question with a scientific answer - but not yet a single answer! We have a lot of theories as to what triggered the Big Bang right now, but our ability to select between them is hampered by the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity, both of which are required to explore the high energy density and tiny physical scale of the first picoseconds after the Big Bang. We're working towards a theory of quantum gravity which should let us fill in those missing first few fractions of a second...and then we can get to work on before, assuming that key information hasn't been lost behind an event horizon.

This is a very complicated issue. Basically, I'm concerned with Aristotle/Aquinas's "Uncaused cause" point: basically, there's an inherent contradiction in saying that this matter and energy got here without some cause. Whole volumes can (and have been) written on the issue, and my ability to delve into it is limited, but the universe- or multiverse if you go there- couldn't simply have created itself.

However, I plead guilty to oversimplifying the heuristic.

Your question is 'what happened before the Planck epoch'? And the answer should be, in simplest terms: 'we don't know'. Not 'God' or 'm-branes colliding' or 'a vacuum fluctuation' or 'a black hole formed in a superordinate universe' (though many of these are valid theories, if not yet falsifiable).

I agree here; I'll simply point out that not all of the above are mutually exclusive. Creation by God (which I'm convinced of) is entirely compatible with billions of years, biological evolution, and the big bang- and I admit I'm beginning to lean towards the above theories.

We're hitting on a vast issue that involves physics, biology, astronomy, and even theology; and quite frankly I don't have anything left to say other than that I'm not done exploring the issue. But I appreciate the opportunity to actually have a respectful discussion of the issue on the internet (what's the world coming to? ) I'm still not confident that I know all the answers here, but the whole matter has given me more to chew on.

Anyway, It looks like a lot got posted while my internet was out due to snow, so this all might be a dead horse post.

EDIT: Regarding the whole Ex Nihilo argument, my whole point was that there had to be something or Someone that wasn't created at some point- a self-existing being. I put it far too simply.

[Black Wolf]

To summarize: The question on how old the earth is, is irrelevant to the question on how the universe was created.

Almost, but not quite - the question of how old the earth is provides a minimum bound for the age of the universe. This was relevant in 1929, when Hubble calculated the age of the universe to be 2 billion years, at a point when we already knew the Earth was at least 3 billion years old. And it's also relevant today when you're trying to disprove young earth theories.

Insanebaron: I know you've said you're"leaning" away from young earth theories (and I applaud that), but just in case you needed more convincing, if you ever get the chance, spend an afternoon with a geologist. I can pretty much guarantee you that no matter where you live on earth, they'd be able to take you 25km out of your nearest city (much less in most places) and demonstrate to you ongoing processes that very cleary must have taken longer than 6000 years. You don't need a grand canyon - almost any sedimentary rock will do. A brief introduction to the geological timescale and the concept of gradualism isn't enough to prove a 4.5 billion year old earth - for that, we need radioactive dating - but it would be enough to disprove (aka falsify) a 6000 year old Earth.

[General Battuta]

Just a couple quick points I want to clarity-snipe, I don't have much to add:

Two points. First, I'm glad we can agree that Darwin's theory has problems that haven't been resolved yet

Well...I'm not sure I'd say that. There are fields within evolutionary theory still undergoing work, but it's usually case of which of these is true, not how the heck does...? Any criticism you've heard of Darwinian evolution is probably flat-out wrong. The point I was making is that Darwin's theory had problems which have been resolved: they've been studied by scientists, the theory has been improved, and now we know more than we used to.

This is a very complicated issue. Basically, I'm concerned with Aristotle/Aquinas's "Uncaused cause" point: basically, there's an inherent contradiction in saying that this matter and energy got here without some cause. Whole volumes can (and have been) written on the issue, and my ability to delve into it is limited, but the universe- or multiverse if you go there- couldn't simply have created itself.

As several people have pointed out, the Big Bang theory describes everything that happens to the universe after the Planck epoch. It doesn't try to explain where the initial singularity came from. There's no attempt to create the singularity ex nihilo - we're simply unable to figure out what happened before the Planck epoch with our existing mathematical and empirical tools.

[quote[I agree here; I'll simply point out that not all of the above are mutually exclusive. Creation by God (which I'm convinced of) is entirely compatible with billions of years, biological evolution, and the big bang- and I admit I'm beginning to lean towards the above theories.
[/quote]

This is very true. Belief in God should, I think, be based on faith, not the need for empirical proof. While I myself am an atheist I don't see why any particular scientific finding has to be an immediate threat to that belief. Conversely, faith should allow science to proceed by its own devices.

[Herra Tohtori]

For example, my field, Geology, simply states that the history of the universe starts with the Big Bang.

I don't think geology has any position on the history of universe in a scale larger than Earth itself.

To summarize: The question on how old the earth is, is irrelevant to the question on how the universe was created.

Precisely, but the universe must be at least as old as Earth is.

Of course it turns out to be significantly older than that, and contrary to what Genesis states, stars were not in fact made by a hyperintelligent shade of blue as a "by the way" during the fourth day of creation.


After watching the debate, I felt that Bill Nye did okay in a game that was always stacked against him (because reasons). Ham neglected to respond to repeatedly posed questions and instead deflected or obfuscated enough that there wasn't enough time to ask them again, and simply filled all gaps in his "arguments" with dogmatic drivel.

I was especially disgusted by the fact that he seemed to think "critical thinking" only applies to debasing science by taking apart things like cosmological principle, and simply discarding the basis of scientific observations like the ice layers, rock layers, and magnetic field line direction in the sea bed... on the most shamefully weak argument that since we don't know how these things came to being so we can't use them as evidence for anything.

While, on the contrary, a word-of-mouth account of nomadic tribes later put into writing and translated several times over is somehow a more convincing authority of what happened.


Considering how blatantly Ham was claiming to support "critical thinking" I was sort of disappointed by the fact that Nye did not question the authority of biblical history in contrast to civilizations that also have records from same times. What makes the bible a specifically good source of "historical science" as opposed to history of ancient Egypt, or Alchera (Dreamtime) of Australian aborigines? What about the Greco-Roman mythology? Or how about the creation myths from India?


I agree with Nye's point near the end of the debate. I think the US education system should put a bit more emphasis on ensuring that students leave the schools equipped with at least rudimentary level of scientific literacy. And, most definitely don't let young earth creationists to teach children about critical thinking. That would be a complete travesty. In similar vein, his questions about "where do laws of logic" come from make absolutely no sense - that's the same as asking where mathematics comes from. Mathematics is a formal science, not a natural science; it's an entirely abstract construct (some of which can be used to model real physical things and behaviours of simple and complex things in the world) but mathematics and logic both exists independent of anything physical - they would exist even without the universe, and they are the same in every possible universe.

The question also belies a fundamental problem in Ham's thinking - namely, ignoring the fact that the universe doesn't have any particular obligation to be logical in the HUMAN context. It only needs to be logical in regard to itself, which just means it follows its own consistent laws of nature that happen to be what they are (finding out why is what theoretical physics and cosmology are all about). In contrast, Ham's insistence that we have no way of knowing IF the universe behaves in a consistent manner is exactly the reason why I think creationistic world views will, at least, severely hinder a person in a scientific  career in most fields - because the moment there's a clear conflict between observation and preconception, a creationist will have to work overtime to make up explanations to get the observations to fit the expectations, and in the process they end up being only able to come to wrong conclusions every time such a conflict occurs.

Particularly in fields which can and will regularly conflict with creationist world views, such as biology, astronomy, cosmology, physics, geology, and most other natural sciences to be honest. YEC views would probably be less in the way in applied sciences such as engineering or medical sciences, or formal sciences such as computer science or mathematics.

They can be competent professionals, however it still does disturb me how they manage to reconcile their expertise and education with a world view that flies in the face of scientific literacy and still remain capable of doing their jobs. Clearly, they have to be aware of how things work, but then they have to come up with these vastly complicated and convoluted explanations for things such as why radioisotope dating isn't a reliable measure of age, or why indeed the fossil records don't show a mixture of earlier and newer animals in same layers...


By the way, the way Ham insists that the "terms need to be defined" (to suit his needs) and that the "secular" or "naturalistic" scientists have "hijacked" the terminology to use their "authority" to brainwash students into "naturalistic religion" is nothing new. It's been used by kooks since forever to obfuscate the actual issues and to move goalposts as needed. In that context, it doesn't surprise me at all that his term for "critical thinking" doesn't really correspond with established use of the term.

Good modern day example of this is Deepak Chopra who believes that scientists have hijacked the term "quantum" for their own nefarious purposes...

[Goober5000]

That's a strawman argument and you really should know it.

On the contrary.  Not only is it not a strawman argument, I'm not even making an argument at all.  I'm merely exposing the flaws in watsisname's statement.

He said that science is not settled by open debate.  A reasonable response to that would be to ask how it's settled.  Is it to be settled by closed debate?  Then that gives you science behind closed doors, subject to gatekeepers.  Is it to be settled by some open process that is not debate?  That violates testability, which is one of the key features of the scientific process.

Oho, rubbish.  I'm sure that if Bill Nye had won the debate, all the evolution enthusiasts would be rubbing it in the faces of the creationists.

That would never happen. Unless there was a serious mismatch in the quality of the debaters the creationists are always going to win simply because it's much easier to persuade people to believe a simple lie than a complex truth.

Okay, so let me summarize:

1) You agree with Bobboau that Ken Ham won the debate
2) You furthermore believe that in an evenly-matched debate between creationists and evolutionists, the creationists are always going to win.

I'll note that for future reference.

[General Battuta]

I provided you with a very good (and empirically grounded) explanation of why that's probably true right in this thread. Debates are not effective arbiters of truth. It is easier to convince people of simplicity than complexity.

Scientific truth is settled by the generation of predictions and the comparison of those predictions with empirical findings. That's basically all you need.

'Winning' or 'losing' a debate is a meaningless and fairly subjective metric. A lot of wrong positions have won debates. I've won debates with a lot of very wrong positions I was asked to assume.

[General Battuta]

A key fact to grasp is that persuasion is not based on empirical validity. Persuasion comes from the ability to game human cognitive heuristics. Persuasiveness means you are good at playing that game.

[Phantom Hoover]

yeah seriously, 'debate' as a form of intellectual discourse is what, your ability to sway the votes of a roomful of people with limited to no prior knowledge on the topic over the course of an hour or so? it's completely arbitrary and artificial, far more so than whatever goober's crazy idea of scientific discourse is

[Herra Tohtori]

He said that science is not settled by open debate.  A reasonable response to that would be to ask how it's settled.  Is it to be settled by closed debate?  Then that gives you science behind closed doors, subject to gatekeepers.  Is it to be settled by some open process that is not debate?  That violates testability, which is one of the key features of the scientific process.

Science is inherently open. Therefore the distinction between "open" and "closed" science doesn't even seem to be a relevant question. By definition there can be no "closed science" - although commercial R&D facilities could fall under this, they typically still publish their major research in the open science community.

Science is done in open fora. It goes through pretty strict peer review before it is published, typically in field-specific journal or letter magazines. These are all accessible to both general public AND media, although usually not for gratis.


The reason why science often appears to be "closed" process is that most of it is very specialized. Scientific papers require quite a bit of expertise on the topic to be legible.


What ends up filtering to general public through mass media (news organizations, mainly) is typically either a journalist's spectacularly grandiose embellishment of some research publication that happens to seem like it would make a good headline, OR a sensationalist claim made by non-scientists to get publicity to their "research" which hasn't passed the peer review process (either rejected, or never even submitted) but the journalists don't have the expertise to distinguish it for what it is, and end up publishing it anyway. And the next thing you know, all the news aggregate sites blindly copy the text verbatim from page to page and then it ends up in wikipedia until some ardent editor looks at it, notices that there's no actual scientific published source claiming this, and removes it.


The distinction here is not between open and closed, but whether general public has any valuable input to matters of science.

They don't.

Individuals in the crowd can certainly have enough knowledge and understanding of the topic to know what's being talked of, and to even generally form an opinion on where a particular research is applicable, but in general, a random sampling of general population even in the most educated countries in the world would fail to provide any meaningful input in the vast majority of scientific research.

That's why they are not involved in the process. If someone is interested in participating in the scientific process, they are expected to give the science the courtesy of educating themselves to a level where their input can be meaningful and make a difference.


Sadly in many countries this is not an option for majority due to economic constraints. Ideally, university level education should be free of tuition fees and funded by the state budget. But that's another, political issue.



Science, as it's being made, has very little to give to general public.

General public has nothing to give to science, as it's being made.


The end results turns out to be - predictably - that most scientists don't really consider how general public perceives science and scientific community, and vice versa the general public knows very little about how science is made, and makes random guesses as to how it must be (generally based on popular culture depictions of scientists, which are typically based on how the creators of that particular thing perceived scientists).

There are some rare people in the scientific community who actually have consideration to how the general public perceives science. Some of them have the drive to educate, good writing and oratory talents, and enough charisma to appear in prime time TV. To these rare specimens falls the majority of the unenviable task of popularizing science. Among them are individuals such as Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and indeed Bill Nye.


It's not like we're all walking around underground particle physics facilities wearing lab coats, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and waving crow bars at violently hostile anomalies (only some of us have to do that).

So that's why public debates have no relevance to science.


Politics, however, is a completely different thing. It turns out, in many countries, research funding requires a bit of politicizing, especially on the large scale. And, as a result, the few scientists who end up being the "representatives" of science at their time, end up being involved in politics and that includes trying to convince ignorant people that giving money to the research will benefit them.

That's where debates like this come into the picture...

[Herra Tohtori]

I provided you with a very good (and empirically grounded) explanation of why that's probably true right in this thread. Debates are not effective arbiters of truth. It is easier to convince people of simplicity than complexity.

I don't think that's completely accurate.

For example, creationism requires a lot of complexity to work around all the evidence to the contrary.


I would propose that it's easier to convince people of things that appeal to their everyday experience, than things that involve either really big or really small numbers, or unintuitive behaviour.

Good examples of such things would be billions of years for evolution to work through millions of generations of life, the incredibly small scale structures of quantum world, wave-particle duality, or the fact that the Moon is being pushed away from the Earth as tidal forces act to slow its orbital velocity.


I would also posit that it's easier to convince people to believe in an imaginary answer than the truth that no one knows an answer (yet).

[General Battuta]

Everyday experience is simple. Creationism requires complexity only when it's faced with the task of evading scientific evidence: it seems simple when you don't have a lot of information. Creationism also offers illusory certainty, which is enormously appealing to the human mind.

[karajorma]

For example, the big bang: How did the matter for the bang get there in the first place? (A point that came up in the debate). I'd have to say that "In the beginning, God made the world" is pretty reasonable compared to "In the beginning, there was Nothing, and Nothing made everything".

This is why I mentioned quantum physics though. The problem is that once you get into that field you start seeing things that make very little sense. For instance you can get diffraction patterns from a single photon (i.e  have a single particle go through two holes at the same time). This make no reasonable sense. How can one object possibly be in two places at the same time?

Science is very hard to understand. Many people prefer to go with a simpler explanation because they can understand it. But that doesn't mean it's the right explanation. If you want to believe in God, that's fine. Believe in God for faith based reasons. But don't kid yourself that you need to believe in God to fill in the holes in scientific theories. Most of the holes you think exist have been explained but you haven't had the years of education in science necessary to understand those explanations.

That's a strawman argument and you really should know it.

On the contrary.  Not only is it not a strawman argument, I'm not even making an argument at all.  I'm merely exposing the flaws in watsisname's statement.

He said that science is not settled by open debate.  A reasonable response to that would be to ask how it's settled.  Is it to be settled by closed debate?  Then that gives you science behind closed doors, subject to gatekeepers.  Is it to be settled by some open process that is not debate?  That violates testability, which is one of the key features of the scientific process.

Your argument comment is a strawman in that you know full well he meant public debate in opposition to scholarly review. Yet you try to paint this as there being gatekeepers for science. An elite that violates the openness of science.

If you truly believe your own argument, I urge you to never post on the SCP internal again. Because the exact same argument applies there. On a truly open source project, all decisions should be made in public. Otherwise we have gatekeepers to the SCP code. Which is fundamentally contrary to the goals of open source coding.

It's not a perfect analogy of course but it's close enough.

Okay, so let me summarize:

1) You agree with Bobboau that Ken Ham won the debate

Actually, I've not watched the debate, YouTube is blocked in China. But even if it wasn't, I probably still wouldn't bother. It would be a waste of my time for the reasons I mentioned in this thread. Hell, I further consider this sort of debate to be counter-productive in that it legitimises the creationist nonsense. You don't publicly debate creationists for the same reason you don't debate holocaust deniers. It simply gives them a public forum to spew forth more of their lies.

2) You furthermore believe that in an evenly-matched debate between creationists and evolutionists, the creationists are always going to win.

I'll note that for future reference.

As I said before, a complex truth is much harder to explain than a simple lie. And Young Earth Creationism is a simple lie.

And since most scientific debaters make the mistake of thinking "Since I'm in the right, I'll defend my position rather than attacking theirs" we rarely see debates where the audience can see how stupid a lie it is. Once you start digging, it gets complex and stupid very quickly.

[Herra Tohtori]

Everyday experience is simple. Creationism requires complexity only when it's faced with the task of evading scientific evidence: it seems simple when you don't have a lot of information.

Yeah, I guess I was still approaching it from the point of someone who does have science education. After all, that was part of the topic of the debate - not only whether creationism is true or false, but whether it's possible to be a creationist and a scientist at the same time.

And when you do have science education, the amount of evasion becomes quite incredible.

For scientifically illiterate people, yes, creationism is simpler but honestly, even cursory examination reveals lots of inconsistencies in YEC even without bringing scientific counter-evidences to the mix.

Creationism also offers illusory certainty, which is enormously appealing to the human mind.

Indeed (essentially same as what I posted but with less words).

[Mongoose]

Actually, I've not watched the debate, YouTube is blocked in China. But even if it wasn't, I probably still wouldn't bother. It would be a waste of my time for the reasons I mentioned in this thread. Hell, I further consider this sort of debate to be counter-productive in that it legitimises the creationist nonsense. You don't publicly debate creationists for the same reason you don't debate holocaust deniers. It simply gives them a public forum to spew forth more of their lies.

This is why I've been reluctant to spend any time watching the thing myself.  I mean I understand why Bill Nye would want to attempt to engage with this crowd, because in his mind that's a worthwhile cause, but doing so lends to the view that both sides are equally well-founded and worthy of consideration.  I think it's far more worthwhile to focus on making sure kids get a proper education in basic science, while just pointing and laughing at the goofy Jesus-dinosaur people.

[karajorma]

Exactly. When was the last time you saw a debate with Flat Earthers or Holocaust Deniers? You just pity them for their ignorance, you simply say "You're wrong" and you ignore everything they have to say on the matter.