- #1
rachmaninoff
I just walked out of the "Intelligent Design Theory" talk at my school (the one the other thread was about). It was entirely BS. All the "classic" I.D. arguments presented in the same way as always. Lots of quotes from "scientists" saying "evolution is clearly nonsense" - made up the BULK of the lecture. Every other breath was nonsense and shear idiocy. Then when it came to the questions/discussion, I immediatly jumped on his use of the 2nd law of thermodynamics - which he'd said "proved" increase in complexity was "impossible". I chose this point, as he has a PhD in physics (maybe he'll be reasonable?). I pointed out the distinction beteen local/global disorder, that dEntropy was clearly positive on the large scale, the T difference between the sun and the Earth was basically a heat engine that could do work, etc., etc... his response, was to quickly utter "well, there's Gibbs free energy, and Hemholtz energy and Enthalpy..., and well what you get is, you know, like how you can boil water at constant temperature and pressure? That's not an equilibrium is it? Well the Earth is at a quasi-equilibrium, so you're wrong" - and he pointed at the next speaker. I swear that's almost verbatim what he said. Oh god I persisted, I pulled the discussion back to that point THREE times, each time he became more and more slippery, and embarrasing me more and more. First he smiles and says, "you're smart, are you a physics major? What are you studying?" trying to lure me into calm, then bursting off another round of BS ("well, if you just do the canonical transformations of the equations, work through the algebra... Next Question.") God I was so persistent. I'm in the South of the USA, there were bible-nuts all over the audience. None of the physics or biology professors choose fit to attent. No one to defend me. How am I supposed to argue one-on-one with a physics PhD? I kept contradicting him, "no that's not true! Because..." and it was quite embarrasing, him keeping his cool while I was hyper-excited. I didn't "walk out" on his talk, I practically crawled out. I feel so horrible.
