Just listening to him talking for 5 minutes you notice all the hallmarks: word salads, use of long winded sentences with big words to say simple things, lack of self consistency, fallacious arguments, etc.
Among his highlights: the claim that good atheists don't exist because if you are good then you must be Christian by definition, his belief that there's no such thing as objective truth (all the while decrying postmodernists lol), his claim that ancient depictions of snakes mean the ancients knew about the DNA double helix (a personal favorite!), that prohibiting children from throwing snowballs in the school context is a cultural affront to masculinity and male development, attaching bad things a "feminine" value and good things a "masculine" value, etc, etc. It would be funny if not for his relatively large cultural influence.
Understood. We have to remember that knowledge is provisional. If you remain consistent, your growth may be questionable.
The reason why I like the guy is because his dialogue allows us to question our deep beliefs and then question them as such, while being scrutinized by another person/perspective. It gives us the ability to actually argue our reasonings and deep intuitions.
Although I don't agree with everything he says, I do appreciate his thoughts and novel approaches. Thanks for entertaining my question :)
Yes, our understanding is provisional and subject to change, but if we reject the notion of objective reality then we reject the notion of knowledge, provisional or not.
May I ask what "thoughts" or "novel approaches" of his do you appreciate? Because talking to a flat Earther can also allow us to "question our deep beliefs" but I don't think that's needed to achieve that same goal, and it can even be counterproductive. And giving people who are intellectually dishonest and/or willfully ignorant a platform and treating them like their worldview is worth considering is an affront to the human condition and perpetuates not only stupid ideas but scientific illiteracy (ie. perpetuates not only erroneous facts but more importantly perpetuates a complete disregard for all the tools we have for properly analysing, interpreting and assessing the worth of any data).
I have a different approach to "giving people who are intellectually dishonest and/or willfully ignorant a platform"...I tend to think that you have to give them an opportunity to speak or have a platform, in order for you to destroy it :)
I appreciate some of the following:
The reason I appreciate some of the things I disagree with is because I find them to be valid arguments. Even though we are no closer to finding "truth".