BH is bemused by a PhD’s resort to an amusing variant of the very atheist logic I mocked six years ago in TIA:
I’ve been parrying on FB with an honest-to-God PhD engineer at IBM who asserts “evolution must be true because GPS works.” His logic: because general relativity is learned from observing the stars, and the stars are billions of years old, therefore evolution is true.
Because I learned to eat crumbs that fall from the table of the most able Internet Cruelty Artist, I’ve been mercilessly pointing out his errors in reasoning, illustrating his absurdities, etc., while laughing at him. He demanded acceptance with the premise that “ALL science requires that evolution be true.” (He repeated it over and over, comment after comment… gee, Aspergers much?) So I asked him if my dentist needs to believe in evolution in order to clean my teeth. ‘Yes, they need to understand that bacteria evolved 500 mya before they can clean teeth.’
I hadn’t personally encountered this level of idiocy before.
As I have occasionally noted, it takes a considerable amount of education to reduce a formerly intelligent individual to the level of a complete idiot. A PhD isn’t absolutely necessary, but it does appear to help. The IBM engineer is merely engaged in the usual bait-and-switch; he’s trying to defend evolution by cloaking it in the protective veil of real science that provides reliable results.
