Glen Davidson
Posts: 1100
Joined: May 2006
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What I like about the flat earthers is that, while ignorance certainly characterizes the great majority of them, they are often fairly honest (within the confines of a grand conspiracy theory, to be sure) and enthusiastic about their new "discovery." A number of them make observations and experiments to find out if the earth is truly flat, and so they're often naively empirical about it.
They're more like ID was once upon a time, when people both inside and outside of ID thought that there was some new science possibly being born. Of course there wasn't a damned thing being born, and mostly the leaders were merely appalling apologists who knew that there wasn't any science to be done with it. They may have believed it, but they weren't about to become exploratory and experimental, lest they find out that design really does fail to explain anything.
And by now they're all just denialists (at least the morons at UD), blathering about what evolution can't do, and assuming that God is the answer to anything that evolution "can't explain," without troubling to show that anything was rationally planned by anything at all.
Even if I think some of the flat earthers are relatively open and honest by comparison, though, the whole flat earth thing is too trivial to bother with more than occasionally. Of course there's the issue of things going over the horizon, stars different at different latitudes, different stars appearing at midnight in the summer than in the winter, earth's circular shadow during lunar eclipse, pictures of earth from space, the Coriolis Effect (opposite rotations across the equator, too, as it would be on a sphere), Foucault's Pendulum, etc., etc. How does one argue with people who either don't know, or don't care, about such massive evidence?
Of course, how does one argue with IDists, especially since most of them just rigidly stick to the mindless IDiot tripe put out there? CSI, semiosis, that sort of rot. I suspect that some of your flat earthers who put out videos and the like actually will give up their nonsense under the weight of the evidence, but you're not going to change the minds of any well-known IDists. The latter have swallowed their own nonsense, if due in large part to the fact that they were always in denial of the facts.
Glen Davidson
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http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p....p
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of coincidence---ID philosophy
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