Call for Evolutionists for radio show

The aspect that I found most dishonest is his retroactive comments to his opponents rebuttals, ensuring that he got the last word.
If that is Fred Williams' idea of a fair and honest debate then I doubt anyone would be interested in taking part. I agree that what an individual person believes is rarely important (on it's own).
But the point of linking Fred's 'debating' was to forewarn anyone tempted to take part in the radio show.
(Arguing a case poorly is detrimental to the case.) I feel that the EvC debate is for people who are not sure.
I am not referring to the participants, but to the 'viewers'.
We cannot rely on people 'automatically' understanding that creationists mis-represent evolution, and so we have to be as vocal as creationists.To answer your question: education is the solution.

So far no takers? If the preference is to merely call in instead of first sending an email, I imagine this would be OK. If any interested parties, please contact me at fredw@usa.com. If I don't reply, it means its buried in my spam somewhere, so feel free to call the show's producer at 303-463-7789.If you listen to some of Bob's other debates, I think you'll find that guests are not treated with disrespect.Fred

It's not a matter of disrespect. It is the format. A radio program is a very poor format for discussing fossil morphology, as one example. Since many of your "evolutionary gems" disputes the transitional nature of fossils which necessarily requires a dissection of the fossils themselves it would seem a bit ackward to just talk about them without the audience being able to see what you are talking about.Audio only is a very poor way to discuss these topics. Even genetics would be nearly impossible to discuss. For example, I would want to discuss ERV's, and to do so I would need to use visuals showing how LTR's flank the viral genes, how the retrovirus inserts, examples of genomic distribution of retroviral insertion, etc.Also, staged debates are a very poor way to discuss this topic anyway. For any challenge there needs to be time for a well researched response. Are you really going to make you audience wait for 30 minutes while I do a Pubmed search and at least read a couple papers cogent to the points being made?This is why forums like these are a much better format for these discussions. Perhaps you could pick one of your "gems" and start a topic (either here or at your site with the agreement that you will let us post at your site). After a couple of weeks you could refer your listeners to the online debate and judge things for themselves.Edited by Taq, : No reason given.

I'm pretty sure it was Kenneth Miller who was being quoted, but one "evolutionist" said that despite creationist debates being deceptive circuses, he still takes every opportunity he can to debate and to address creationists. It's an opportunity to teach. Indeed, in his classes he's lecturing to students, many of whom are either bored or distracted, but in a debate when he speaks he has the audience's full attention. What teacher could pass up an opportunity like that?Of course, Miller is good, really good. I certainly know that I am not.

To illustrate the need for being able to research the opponent's claim in order make a proper response and how the debate format prevents that, there's the case of the 1985 Long Beach debate, Gish and H. Morris vs Awbrey and Thwaites. In response to Awbrey & Thwaites well-documented examples of the ICR making extensive use of quotes from out-dated and superceded sources, Morris proudly announced that a recent 1976 NASA document, written well into the space age, used direct measurements of meteoric dust to show that the moon is only thousands of years old, because if the moon were really billions of years old then it would be covered with a layer of dust over 200 feet thick.Now, if I had to respond to that, I wouldn't be able to. So I wrote to Morris for his sources and Gish sent me a letter by Harold Slusher in which Slusher worked out a formula into which he had plugged in values from that "1976" NASA document. Then one day in the government stacks of my university's library, I stumbled upon that NASA document. It was actually a 1967[/i] (nineteen sixty-seven) printing of papers submitted at a 1965 conference, which was all well before the first US moon landing, Surveyor I. The "direct measurements" were readings from a microphone attached to a membrane in a satellite orbitting the earth, a method that was later found to give inaccurate results. And Slusher misused his source, plugging in a factor of 10,000 that his source said did not apply and another factor of 100 which broke the rules of mathematics; when corrected for those extraneous factors, his layer of about 280 feet shrank down to a third of an inch.Fred Williams, that is the answer that I would have given to Morris' moon dust claim. But in the format of the debate, there is never enough time to do the research that is needed to properly respond to a wild creationist claim.

The careful research and refutation of that creationist claim is the difference between science and preaching.No wonder creationists favor that type of debate format! It's all they have, and they manage to fool a lot of folks.And no wonder they can't make any headway in the real world of science, where evidence matters.

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Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

I'll do it if you let me say fuck on the air.

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"What can be asserted without proof, can be dismissed without proof."-Hitch.

No, the child beating Pastor has standards for his show, and a potty mouth is not acceptable.- Oni

While there are a few questions I'd like to ask you, I can't comment on what you said on the radio last week because I wasn't listening. Nor, indeed, do I have a radio.While I can spot numerous instances of gormless stupidity in your article, in order to comment accurately on it in toto, I should need to read the fifteen papers referenced in the original article, and I do not currently have access to Nature.Nor, I presume, do you, since you never quoted a single word of any of the papers; and while this did not inhibit you from forming a view on their content and validity, it would provide me with certain difficulties, since I prefer to base my opinions on the facts.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.