Well, this is a grand occasion indeed. PZ Myers has identified one of the greatest geniuses ever to walk the earth.
But you don’t have to take my or PZ’s word for it. Just listen to the prodigy himself:
Around 2007 upon arising from higher states I started awakening this strange innate ability for argumentation logic that I have which surpasses even Aristotle and William of Ockham.
…
My innate ability for argumentation logic is probably as high or higher than the innate ability that Euler or Ramanujan had for theorems and mathematics.
Clearly we are privileged even to be in the presence of such an ascended being.
Oh, and he really doesn’t like atheists.
It takes very little sniffing round the stench of his blog to realise that this guy’s nothing special, just another religious nut with a way more explicitly and unabashedly grandiose sense of self-worth than most. Perhaps it’d be wiser to just not get involved, but sometimes this is the kind of thing that it’s worth calling out, partly just to keep my eye in, and partly to make sure there is always a strong counter-opinion available to such hateful bilge.
Or maybe I’m rationalising because I’d already written a good chunk of this before realising just quite how far off the deep end he really is.
Anyway, here’s a comment I’ve just left on his ‘About Me’ page.
I’ll bite:
1. You claim:
My innate ability for argumentation logic is probably as high or higher than the innate ability that Euler or Ramanujan had for theorems and mathematics.
Since you also seem so fond of the principle sometimes known as “Ockham’s Razor”, I’m sure you’ll appreciate that, for someone who’s happened to wander onto your blog only recently, the truth of this assertion is a less parsimonious explanation than an alternative: for instance, that you greatly overestimate your own abilities. I’ve seen people do that all the time, but people more innately brilliant than Euler or Ramanujan seem much thinner on the ground that people too arrogant to know their own limits.
According to Wikipedia, Ramanujan “independently compiled nearly 3900 results (mostly identities and equations)”, the majority of which were true and original. He’s recognised as one of the great geniuses of the field, which of course is why you use him as a comparison. It would be a violation of Ockham’s Razor for us to accept your claim uncritically based on no evidence, so: how does your tally of publications in your own specialist field compare?
And, a follow-up: Ramanjuan died at the age of 32. You say you’re in college, so I’d guess you’re younger than that. How much do you expect to have changed the world by that age, and what evidence is there of your progress so far?
2. In defence of some of the accusations made against you, you say:
In the delusional atheist’s world:
“Newton was a crackpot, so Newton’s geometric proofs must be wrong”
“Ramanujan had no college education and flunked out of college more than once, so his theorems are wrong”
“Faraday had no education after the age of 13, so his experiments and ideas are useless”
As you imply, these would all be examples of ad hominem logical fallacies. Please point me to an instance of an atheist (ideally one in some way connected to the mainstream atheist movement) making any or all of the above claims.
3. You quote atheists as saying, among other things: “What’s wrong with being a Nazi?”
Please point me to an instance of an atheist sincerely asking this question, or making any of the relevant claims. I’m an atheist, I interact regularly with many atheists, and I’ve never heard any of them express the opinions you attribute to them and would be appalled were they to do so. The fact that your portrayal of atheists is so out of line with my own indicates to me that you don’t actually know what atheists or atheism are about that well. The fact that you actively assert they shouldn’t be treated as human beings – a more hateful, dehumanising, and frankly childish claim than anything I’ve heard from an atheist, or almost anybody else – further indicates to me that your characterisation of atheists as hateful doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously.
4. You say of atheists here:
They are terrible people, there is none that opposes racism and none that will ever voice any opposition to racism.
Claiming that no atheists oppose racism, or will ever voice any opposition to racism, sounds like a testable hypothesis to me. How could it be falsified, and how much did you test its soundness before asserting it? Did you encounter blogs such as Daylight Atheism, Greta Christina, The Crommunist Manifesto, or The Friendly Atheist in your research?
5. You discuss Ockham’s Razor a number of times. This has been phrased by past philosophers as, for instance: “Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities”, or “Plurality should not be posited without necessity”.
Your own “vastly superior” definition reads thus: “the conclusion drawn from making the least possible amount of assumptions”.
Your “vastly superior” definition does not take the form of a principle or a piece of advice, but rather a sentence fragment. What about the conclusion drawn from making the least possible amount (may I suggest “fewest possible” as a less clunky phrasing) of assumptions? Is it always true? Most commonly true? Do the relative plausibilities of the assumptions in question have any bearing on the principle? Is there any reason we should believe your phrasing actually is “vastly superior” than, say, Bertrand Russell’s, rather than that you just prefer to believe that because of your inflated sense of self-importance?
6. You recently disabled ratings for comments on your blog, after a lot of your own comments drew extremely negative ratings. You said:
…the rating (thumbs up or thumbs down) a comment gets is just an argumentum ad populum
The rating a comment gets is a reflection of how many people have rated it up or down, nothing more. An argumentum ad populum would be, for instance, if somebody were to claim that the truth or falsehood of statements made in a comment could be determined solely by examining their rating, regardless of the logical merit of the statements themselves.
Please show an instance of an atheist making such an argument.
7. Are you aware of what some might find ironic in the fact that you call atheists both “the lowest of the low, the worst people, the most disgusting form of life”, and also “the most hateful of all human beings” in the same sentence?
