Fresh from debating himself over whether Ellis Washington challenged him to a debate or not, Ed Brayton manages to completely miss the point of a column which was an introduction to a slideshow entitled Against the New Atheism that showed eight of the primary arguments made by the various New Atheists to be false:
I had to laugh while reading Vox Day’s most recent bit of absurdity at the Worldnutdaily. It is, like nearly everything he writes, little more than a string of ad hominems and arrogant pronouncements rather than any actual arguments. He really does seem to think that a haughty sneer and an insult regarding some entirely irrelevant trait of one of his enemies magically defeats their arguments…. Notice what’s missing from all of that? Anything even remotely resembling a substantive argument. Is that really the best he can do?
No, you dimwitted journalist, what defeats the New Atheist arguments is knowledge of history and the citation of copious statistical evidence combined with correctly applied logic. That column was simply the introduction to blowing the following arguments out of the water:
1. Religion Causes War (Harris, Dennett, Hitchens)
2. Religion Causes Violence (Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins)
3. Atheists Commit Less Crime (Harris, Dawkins)
4. The Red State Argument (Harris)
5. The Extinction Equation (Harris)
6. Religion Inhibits Science (Harris, Hitchens, Dawkins)
7. The Improbability of Divine Complexity (Dawkins)
8. Atheists are Very Intelligent (Harris, Dawkins, Lynn)
After conveniently ignoring seven of eight of these refutations, which are not only substantive arguments but also happen to be conclusive, Brayton unwisely proceeds to comment on my refutation of Dawkins’s Improbability of Divine Complexity.
“Ai yi yi, I missed that one. The proper response would be “OR…..the mere size of a genome is not the proper measure of complexity.”
Unsurprisingly, Brayton isn’t bright enough to avoid lumbering directly into the trap. Is he saying here that variance in genome size is not variance in information? Or is he saying that “complexity does not concern information”? And what, pray tell, is the proper measure of the complexity which Dawkins is utilizing in order to attempt proving Divine improbability?
You have to be pretty stupid to claim that I do not make substantive arguments. You also have to avoid actually reading anything I write. The clueless ignorance of anklebiters like Brayton borders on the artistic, indeed, it approaches the Platonic paradigm. Not even the most rabid Neo-Keynesian or fervent Chicago School Friedman fetishist would dream of suggesting that my arguments are insubstantial. Wrong, perhaps, but never insubstantial.