I found this gem over at Unreasonable Faith. The scary thing is that I used to believe some of these claims. I believed in the water canopy. I believed in a literal 6 day creation. I believed that there may have been “dragons.”
I’m so glad I finally came to my senses. (Though, I don’t think I ever believed that dinosaurs breathed fire because they had small nostrils!)
I’ve never believed any of those things (except the 6 day creation when I was very young).
And I am pretty sure he was making an attempt at humor with the fire breathing part, thus the snickering from the other man and the smile on the presenter’s face. Don’t tell me atheism demands a loss of sense of humor, too?
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I just searched through his website. I cannot find any place where he repeats the “fire breathing” comments. Again, it seems pretty clear he was making a joke.
It’s annoying when one group of people tries to poke fun at another over things that don’t exist. The “big moment” in that video, in which the presenter wants us to make sure we’re seated, turns out to be an attempt at humor. What an idiot.
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Lifewish replied:
April 3rd, 2012 at 7:01 pm
You didn’t look hard enough. There’s a description of it here. It’s just below the image of the fly in amber.
Other creationists such as Ken Ham say the same thing about fire-breathing dragons. So this is not just a lone crazy creationist; it’s the entire frickin’ YEC movement.
I actually thought the comment that “no-one has discovered one element changing into another” was worse than the firebreathing dinos. I literally had to cover my eyes and whimper quietly for a minute when I heard that.
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Donny Pauling replied:
April 4th, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Thanks for finding that. It is beyond absurd that a “retired medical doctor” would believe “This faster breathing would have caused their nostrils to become quite hot due to the rapid passage of air through their proportionally small nostrils.”
What the heck?
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Lifewish replied:
April 4th, 2012 at 8:21 pm
No kidding. Unfortunately, that kind of barminess is more common than you’d think.
My suspicion is that the good doctor is a bullshitter, in the technical sense. On some level he really doesn’t care whether his belief is true or not; what he cares about is defending it to the world. If he’s smacked down in debate, I imagine he just uses that to feed a persecution complex.
Retirees seem more prone to this for some reason. Here in the UK there’s a retired actuary who keeps turning up to professional events and announcing his amazing plan for saving the UK pensions industry. As far as anyone can tell, the plan wouldn’t solve a damn thing, but he’s clearly too attached to it to ever accept that. I always feel quite sorry for him.
Of course, feeling sorry for someone is a luxury permitted by their complete failure to convince anyone else. Sadly, the Ken Hams of this world seem to be doing rather well.
Lifewish replied:
April 4th, 2012 at 8:23 pm
Sorry, link should go here.
Lifewish replied:
April 20th, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Incidentally… Donny, what is your standard of evidence for saying this claim is daft?
Apropos of your comment on the “Concept of Proof” thread, couldn’t Dr Kent simply say that “one group attributes a body of evidence to the existence of fire-breathing dinosaurs while the other does not”?
This is one example of a general issue: once you’ve accepted belief in God, what is your justification for not also accepting invisible pink unicorns, or what have you? I haven’t been able to find a good demarcation criterion so far – any standard of evidence that excludes the IPU also seems to exclude God. Will be interested to know if you have any suggestions.