Great! Another Creationist "Science" Book (a breakdown by Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz)

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz is the ethics director at the Creator Accountability Network of which I am privileged to be a part. He's also a podcast host for Embrace the Void and Philosophers in Space. Dr. Aaron, he's a buddy, so I like to call him Doctor. Aaron, what's your area of expertise and focus? What do you do?

[00:00:23]>> Yeah, so I'm primarily an ethicist. I'm interested in moral education and especially the topic of luck and how people think about luck, but I also really am interested in things like AI ethics, uh, skepticism.

[00:00:38]Um, you know, I come from our shared atheist background. So, um, interested in moral arguments and and philosophical arguments as they relate to atheism as well.

[00:00:48]>> Let me throw this question at you because it was thrown at me recently.

[00:00:52]Somebody called, he was a Christian. We were talking about if someone does something hateful to someone else, they're like, "Well, how would an atheist call that wrong?" Because let's say it benefits me to do something hateful, right? If it's all like sort of a social Darwinism, I come out ahead, I kill you and I take your resources, my life improves. How could an atheist say that that's an immoral or unethical act?

[00:01:19]So, Mr. Ethicist, how would you respond to that? No, it's a great question and it ties into uh an article that I got published in peerreview in our formal, you know, official side of things where I talked about uh what is called what I called an immoral non-believer stereotype. The idea that atheists are less likely to be moral. Um which you probably see manifest in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes very explicitly. We don't trust you. We don't think that you can act rightly. Uh sometimes it's the bit like the kind of motivational if you don't have the threat of God looming over you why would we trust you which is a weird confession. Um but oftentimes it also takes this kind of metaethical approach where it's like we're not saying that you can't act act ethically.

[00:02:08]We just think it's you have to acknowledge that it's irrational when you do it because you don't believe in God as the grounding of morality or something. you don't like >> shoplifting your morality from my God.

[00:02:21]That's, you know, another one that I hear. So, >> right. And I think this is just like a fancy doctorred up version of saying you're not as trustworthy as believers.

[00:02:31]Uh because look, if it's irrational for you to act that way, we really can't rely on you to act that way as much as the people for whom their worldview makes it rational for them to act this way.

[00:02:41]>> Well, I didn't mean to camp out here, but since I had you, I mean, but the argument was Well, it's moral for me because it benefits me. And I mean, how would someone say that? I don't know, killing you and stealing all your I mean, it wasn't immoral if it benefits me. That's the the take that I I was hearing. So, >> yeah. And I mean, like this is like not a specific problem for atheists. This is like anyone who's trying to understand ethics needs to understand why what we call egoism, right? the like, you know, take what is what I can get and screw everybody else kind of ethics is not ethical in a bunch of different ways.

[00:03:19]It's not pragmatically ethical. It's not actually in your best interests, right?

[00:03:23]But it's also not ethical because it causes harm to other people. And you can lay out all kinds of metaeththics that don't relate to God that explain why it is true that it is harmful and it is true that it is not something you should do. Uh, you know, whether you're a realist or an anti-realist about morality. Um, Shelley Kagan has a really great uh debate with William Lane Craig that everyone should watch where he's like, "I don't believe in objective morality, but I still have a much better explanation for how morality works than this guy."

[00:03:54]>> I don't hold to objective ethics. At least I don't think I do. Like the hard objective standard. I The example I come back to is lying. So I'm harboring someone in my house who's the victim of domestic abuse and the abuser pounds on the door and says, "Are they in there?

[00:04:12]intending to potentially do harm and I say no because I want to eliminate the threat as best I can and protect and keep people safe. So on the surface I have lied. I'm a liar. But it could be argued that was the moral thing to do.

[00:04:28]So I mean objective ethics, do you do you buy that?

[00:04:31]>> I mean that can be objective ethics like you can it could just objectively be true that you ought to lie to the Nazis at the door about the Jews in your attic because lying is ethical in that context. So objective doesn't mean insensitive to context. It means it's not purely up to us to decide what is ethical. There are facts of the matter about what are ethical above and beyond what we personally would like to have be ethical.

[00:04:56]>> Okay?

[00:04:56]>> So it's not just might makes right. It's not just whatever you want is ethical.

[00:05:01]It's it is true that you shouldn't cause unnecessary suffering. how that truth works out. We can debate a bunch and I don't want to lose whole audience explaining it, but like the short answer is there's plenty of good atheist answers to this question. And really, a lot of times people bring this up, they're really just trying to use it to like sound uh civilized while they say that atheists are bad people. Maybe I conflated that, you know, where I was thinking, well, a hard line or a basic surface level command would be an objective ethic, but you're saying it's more of um there is a an action that is always right regardless of context. I don't know. I didn't mean to get off in the weeds, Aaron. We maybe I'll call you.

[00:05:46]We'll finish this conversation. Go. I mean, I I always love like I first started doing talks in atheist spaces about moral realism and how to help atheists feel comfortable saying morality is objective and I'm going to prevent you from causing harm because it's objectively good to do so without feeling any need to believe in God or divine fate or whatever.

[00:06:08]>> The word objective I just get tripped on. I think I have to >> A lot of people do. That's totally okay.

[00:06:13]>> I Okay. All right. I don't want to I'm No, I'm a broken broken man. Aaron, >> just go into a room, close the door, and repeat over to yourself. The Nazis were wrong. They were objectively morally wrong. It'll it'll feel better over time. It'll get easier. I promise.

[00:06:27]>> Okay. So, the reason we're talking today is because you got into this book and you wrote a review for was it on Skeptic? Um, the Skeptic.

[00:06:37]>> Yeah, the UK one.

[00:06:38]>> God, the science, the evidence, the dawn of a revolution, and underwhelming apologetics. I can't pronounce the author's names. I don't want to butcher it. How do I say that?

[00:06:48]>> French. I would butcher them, too. I'll butcher them for you if you don't want to be the one responsible. Murder, but uh no, it's like uh Michelle Yeves Bolore and Olivier Bonosz.

[00:07:02]Um >> All right. Yeah, I'm buying that. Close as I would have gotten or better. So this a Trojan horse for creationism, you know, because I I saw science was the third word, God being the first, and I'm like, uhoh. So do I have reason to be a little wary of this one, Aaron?

[00:07:20]>> Yeah, a lot of reasons to be a little wary. Um, it is very much not just uh, you know, Trojan horse for creationism, but specifically a Catholic form of creationism. like it gets very Catholic in the second half of this book in a way that you would not in any way expect if you looked at the cover of the book or any of the material about it. Um, but that's that's the way Trojan Horses work. The first half is we're going to talk about science a lot and the second half is we're going to talk about Jews and miracles and other weird Do they use the word quantum? I think that's William Lane Craig did that a few times. Some others will say something about the quantum and I'm like it sounds impressive if you have you know if you walk in and you're blank and you see somebody with a supposed credential and they invoke the quantum you might be you know you might be tempted to go ah very very interesting I don't know what the quantum even is I don't know what to do with that. So >> yeah, I the piece I wrote before this one actually for the skeptic mag I t I was talking about why it's bad that we've made it normalized for people to just sell snake oil outright. And I went through a bunch of the arguments people often bring up for like woo cures and fixes and things like that. And I have a whole section in there about quantum because it's just such a common go-to for people to use as a basis for whatever they're trying to sell. And for sure it does come up in here. It's not the most central piece of what they're doing, but they do reference it at various points to talk about things like free will and stuff.

[00:08:52]>> Aaron, what is the Catholic take on creationism? Adam, Eve, in the garden, right?

[00:08:59]>> Yeah. Like what makes this one specifically Catholic is in the second half of the book, which they call the material from evidence from outside of science for the belief in intelligent design.

[00:09:11]>> Wait a minute. Wait a minute. evidence outside of science.

[00:09:15]>> Sure. Yeah. And you shouldn't even buy their premise that the first half is all evidence from inside of science because a good third of it is them just explaining how certain scientists were harassed and abused and imprisoned because they believed in like uh the big bang theory and they believed in like the heat death of the universe and uh because the the reason the ar the book is says that this needs to be in here is because the people who are prosecuting them were materialists who recognized that these thoughts were dangerous to our atheist dominance of society. And so we needed to murder the the scholars who were simp, you know, going to present a view that would inevitably lead everyone to acknowledge that there was a creator being.

[00:09:57]>> Well, help me understand that they were persecuting people who were proponents of the science of the big bang and the heat death at the universe because that doesn't sound religious to me, >> right? That's that's where the fun trick is. So the reason I got sucked into reading this I don't tech I don't often do a lot of apologetics because it does feel very repetitive I feel like um but I you know they this book was being batally promoted as science now suggests that there is good reason to believe that God exists. So the evidence has like shifted towards believing in God as being the right view on the views of science. So I was like okay what what new things is intelligent design trying to roll out here? Um, and a lot of it is like fine-tuning of the universe arguments for God that what we now know about the the cosmological constants that are needed for the universe to be the way that it is uh the early what we know about the early state of the universe quote unquote in the big bang and the singularity about the fact that the universe appears to be moving towards a finite end in the heat death of the universe. All of this they argue is best explained by a non-temporal um non-spatial creator being who specifically has the purpose of creating a world with consciousness like ours in it.

[00:11:20]>> Wow. Uh so it looks like a big bang and it looks like natural causes. Therefore God is kind of what you're saying.

[00:11:29]>> Yeah. It's your classic, you know, explain one mystery with another mystery kind of argument. Like if you if you look at the big bang, if you look at the singularity, which is the the idea is that like all of the mass is condensed into this thing that is so small it doesn't take up space and time, all of our like understanding of physics kind of falls apart at that point, right?

[00:11:50]Like our maths don't math in that particular space very well. Um and so that's kind of a mysterious problem like how did how did the world get here? Why did the big bang happen? Did anything does it even make sense to ask the question? did something precede the Big Bang since time doesn't exist prior to the Big Bang. Um, all of that is then answered with, well, there clearly has to be something magical outside of the system that that set it in motion deliberately and tuned it in such a way where we would come into existence.

[00:12:21]>> Do they retreat back to Kalam? You know, I mean, the cosmological argument, right?

[00:12:26]>> They explicitly reference it.

[00:12:28]>> Okay. Well, explain the calam cosmological argument. I I know it was a riff on cosmological because everything that begins to exist now has but explain it for those who might be new to the concept.

[00:12:40]>> Yeah. And I I find this a deeply frustrating argument because it basically spends all its time setting you up to not believe it. Um so the argument goes essentially things that come into existence or have beginnings must have some sort of cause.

[00:12:57]There are no uncaused create you know causes in the universe. Okay. Everything that comes into existence is caused to come into existence by something that precedes it. Um, the universe comes into existence. Therefore, there must be something prior to the universe that causes it and brings it into existence.

[00:13:14]That's the rough and tumble version.

[00:13:16]There are lots of variations on that.

[00:13:19]Um, >> but what William Lane Craig does on his site, and he's got a a huge he's got a massive article where he I think he throws out the quantum, but he takes cause, right? everything has a cost and then he literally takes a chasmsized leap into his specific religion and he doesn't explain how he got there. Do they they do the same thing and did they even mention God or Jesus in this sucker?

[00:13:43]>> Oh yes. So here's how the game's going to play. This is a 600page book. At the beginning of the book they say we're just going to make an argument for a very very narrow version of God. Right?

[00:13:54]your your classic non-temporal, non-spatial, unmoved mover, right? In some way, it cheats. This is why I hate the uh the colam argument is because it says nothing can be an unmoved mover.

[00:14:06]Therefore, I'm going to posit the existence of an unmoved mover. Like, if you're going to convince me of your first premise, don't then violate it with your with your conclusion.

[00:14:15]>> Yeah. Who created the creator? Who designed the designer? Blah blah. All of those arguments are, you know, all those follow perfectly, but like basically they start with a very thin version of God as an unmoved mover with a purpose.

[00:14:29]It it has a goal, but that goal is just nothing particularly, you know, like one version of a religion. It's just we want to have humans essentially. We want to create a world where humans can exist.

[00:14:40]That's its goal. Um, and then after 300 pages of talking about the history of science and the Big Bang theory, in the second half of the book, they're like, "Hey, and isn't it evidence also that God might exist? That the Jews have done really well for the past 2,000 years."

[00:14:58]>> Which is really weird and we don't like that, just to be very clear. Wow. Like, >> we as in the authors don't like that. I don't know.

[00:15:06]>> We as in Jews, we as in Jews do not like it when Christian apologetics starts veering into, hey, look at the Jews.

[00:15:14]Like, we don't like it when you pay attention to us and we really don't like it when you pay attention to us. And then start saying things like, "Haven't they really succeeded a bunch historically? Haven't they disproportionately done really well in the world?" Because that's kind of the basis for the Nazis views about us and we don't love it. uh very typical feeds into the deep state thing about you know the Jewish banking cartel and you know all taking over the world kind of deal >> right the most plausible explanation for why we have done so well is that we've had secret control of everything but mostly it also just gives the game away because there's no way that Vishna gives a about the Jews right like if you're talking about the Jews as your evidence for your god you're clearly talking about a very specific god right at least in Abrahamic one, let's say.

[00:16:02]But then you bring in a miracle. There's a whole chapter about a miracle that took place in Portugal in like the 1900s, early 1900s, where essentially a bunch of people saw the Virgin Mary put on a rave in a field.

[00:16:21]>> Like they it was a foretold miracle where the Virgin Mary was going to make the sun dance in the sky. And so a bunch of people showed up in a field and watched the sun dance in the sky. Seth, I don't know what that actually means.

[00:16:35]>> Awesome. Well, at least there's a little variety. At least it's not just But I was going back to the persecution of the scientists. Now, this isn't a perfect example of or it's not perfectly similar, but people like to say, apologists like to say thing about the uh the same thing about the apostles.

[00:16:50]Well, you know, they were tortured for their faith and murdered for their faith, therefore Jesus exists. And and that's a really lazy association that they make. And so, >> right, like they at no point in the book consider the possibility that, you know, let's even accept for the basis of argument that these individuals were persecuted because the Stalinists really did think that if the Big Bang theory was the dominant view, then people would start believing in God more. Okay, let's buy all of that. The the Stalinists can still be wrong. like that's still a very val like valid theory where all of that is totally unimportant because they were just wrong that this is actually a good reason to believe in God. But the book just sets it up as if a as a given that like this is further proof that we're on the right track while also using it to further bolster its overall kind of vibe of and you can't really trust the atheists and non-believers to seriously consider these arguments. Do they go hard at non-believers? You know, they say things about atheists in the book.

[00:17:54]>> They they in this in the like weirdly much shorter chapters about like philosophical arguments against God. Um so after spending hundreds and hundreds of pages on unimportant stuff, they have like five paragraphs on the problem of evil and you know a couple paragraphs on like if you know God is uh necessary for morality essentially. And in those spots, they reproduce the kind of arguments that you were talking about at the beginning where it's like, you know, uh this is the more rational basis for belief in morality. So, if you don't believe in this, you have a much harder time explaining why why we should care about individual autonomy or, you know, well-being, stuff like that. So they don't, you know, do the I'm going to we're going to explicitly say it, but there there's a very strong implicit thread throughout the book that atheists are not great people who do horrible things in the name of preserving their elucory view and don't have a fundamentally good basis for their morality.

[00:19:00]>> Do they mention do they invoke the tyrants who happen to be atheists?

[00:19:04]That's normally what I hear. And of course then I'll I'll go to Hitler and go well you know have you read mine comp? I haven't read mine comp but I've read excerpts where he invokes God and says he's doing the will of the Almighty and of course he was aligned with the Catholic Church and then they're like well that was that was a a political move. He he wasn't a true Christian. But how do they get to align Stalin with atheism and I don't get to say Hitler was a Christian or a Catholic? I I don't understand that. Did they go there in the book, you know, aligning the world's worst with non-belief?

[00:19:36]>> They do. They definitely love to play this move. like they don't I don't I don't remember if there's a part where they explicitly are like and this proves that you know these people can't be moral but they frequently call out things like um you know it's it's understandable quote it's understandable that materialists from all eras have consistently defended the eternity of the universe because they simply had no other choice from permenities Heracitus and then they start going into like from Lenin to Mao to Hitler you know they have all been obliged to affirm that matter is in one sense or another eternal. Yeah.

[00:20:11]>> Uh let's draw the lens outward then.

[00:20:13]Someone invokes a tyrant and aligns it with non-belief in a specific god. How do you respond to that?

[00:20:20]>> I I respond by like are we trying to talk about a specific individual? Are we trying to talk about the big claim, you know, uh religion is better overall for morality than atheism. And we're trying to do it by pointing to all of the history and adding up you like people do this game where they're like, "Well, there's six million people in this column and but all these like other people from the Crusades in this column.

[00:20:43]How do you do the math?" And like I think that's that's kind of a silly game in a sense. Um what I would say is this.

[00:20:50]I think there's good reason to believe that religions even even good ones even the good ones tend to still be legitimizing myths. And in that sense they create a permission structure for harm and the per like the the continued allowance of inequality and abuse um in ways that a secular worldview is less likely to do so. So less likely doesn't mean you can't do horrible things and have it be in a secular worldview. But I do think like there's good reason to believe because of what correlates with religion and religiosity in people's behavior and psychology that on average it would be better in the world if like most people were secular.

[00:21:36]>> Uh some people are hung up on the words good religion. How would you define a good religion?

[00:21:41]>> Uh I would define it you know in the like examples I would give would be like universalist salvationist religions. So, religions that say everybody gets saved, nobody ever goes to hell, God cares about everyone. Um, versions of Buddhism where the goal is for everybody to be released from the cycles of rebirth and suffering.

[00:22:03]um those kinds of approaches that don't rely on, you know, ideally don't rely on reinforcing dominance hierarchies, don't rely on abusive ideas are, I think, the least likely to cause harm and the most likely to cause good of religious systems while still unfortunately, I think, being legitimizing myths because they say it's okay if some amount of suffering happens in this time because it's going to be balanced out in the next life.

[00:22:33]>> I mean, it's true. They're in many ways untethered from the real world in these claims, but at least they're not uber dogmatic like the Christian nationalist and the Islamist who are out there trying to essentially dominate the world. That's why I have found and I used to be much more guilty of using religion. Religion is this, religion is that, religion is bad for the world.

[00:22:54]Religion infects minds. And I I have had to stop myself and say what what religion in what context in what part of the world and how is that religion practiced and it becomes this really messy conversation that a lot of people they sort of push back. They're like religion is you know insert meme here.

[00:23:14]>> Yeah. I have had a couple of conversations over on Embrace the void with like philosophers and and sociologists of religion just trying to you know answer the question what do we mean by religion? And I like I created my own meme once where it's like the the galaxy brain meme and it starts off with religion is belief in a supernatural power and it goes through the whole gamut of like religion is actually about ritual. Religion is actually a community thing. Religion is you know like and at the end of the day religion is about belief in a supernatural power like >> but then you've got the secular religions like satanic temple and whatnot. Does that make things even more messy?

[00:23:51]>> I don't think they're a religion. Like I wouldn't call them a religion.

[00:23:54]>> Okay, fair enough.

[00:23:55]>> I know like there's a legal definition for religion that they are using in order to push back on religiosity in our society and I'm fine with that. But like I think it's important. It's valuable to say that religion because look, words mean whatever we want them to mean in a sense. But I think the most informative definition of religion is still it's about beliefs, practices, and rituals relating to some sort of supernatural entity.

[00:24:21]and and generally to some sort of view about divine justice and whether there is cosmic justice in the world or not.

[00:24:28]>> Back to God, the science, the evidence, the dawn of a revolution. Uh, anything else in there? I mean, I I I don't know what first of all prompted you to invest this much of yourself into the book, but I mean, you're obviously sounding a bit of a of an alarm. So, kind of synopsize it for me if you would.

[00:24:48]>> Yeah, I'll be honest. like 600 pages of that kind of material doesn't take me that long because I've seen enough versions of it that like I know what they're doing. I don't need to do a close reading of every part of it. Uh the reason I got in into it is because it's apparently fairly popular in a lot of uh religious spaces right now. And so I figured it was possible that you know people would be hearing about it from their religious relatives. And so it would be useful to dig in and see if there's actually anything new or significant there. Um, and then, you know, for me, if I'm going to write a critique of it, I need to have read all of it so that I know that I haven't missed something or I'm not doing anything wrong. Um, if I can, there's one bit of it that I talk about in the article some, but I want to highlight for folks about >> uh the anthropic principle, which is one of my favorite kind of concepts within this whole space. So what I don't love is that they take this concept and I would argue manipulate it to be in theory the opposite of what it actually was originally intended to convey. So in the argument back and forth about like evidence for God, you have like the intelligent design arguments are all largely arguments from improbability, right? So, it used to be the eyeball was too improbable to have evolved or it's very they do they do in this book the you know life evolved on this planet on this earth from non-living things.

[00:26:13]That's incredibly improbable. These are god of the gaps kind of arguments and the the more improbable it is the bigger the gap is. Um and the fine-tuning argument is the biggest gap of all in theory. Uh but the anthropic argument goes like this. Um, no matter how improbable it seems to us or it is statistically that we would exist in this universe, we necessarily have to exist in a universe where we exist and therefore nothing follows from the improbability of this universe in itself. So I'll just I'll go through that again. Right. So there are >> Hang on Aaron. I'm I'm am I just that thick or is this that esoteric?

[00:26:56]I it is I think really straightforward once you understand it and it's a really great move for everyone to understand when they're trying to argue with people about fine-tuning. So let me try to simplify it as much as possible here.

[00:27:07]Right? Their argument is going to be the odds that our universe exists is a million to the 100 million to one kind of thing, right? And all you have to respond is yes. But from our perspective, the odds that we are in a universe that allows us to exist and therefore to observe it is one. It's 100%. We have to be in that universe. So this is this is this basically means no matter how improbable our universe may be and how weird it is that we live in it, we can't infer from that things like a god exists that chose to create that universe for us. We can't infer anything because it's just necess it's a truism essentially that for us to be able to look at the world for us to exist in the world to look at it has to be the kind of universe that allows for us to exist in it. Sure, if we beat the odds to be born and live and thrive and eventually die, but we are here. What else would we do? We of course we're alive. It doesn't mean that uh we are the product of divine destiny or there's a sort of cosmic other that made us. We just we're alive and what else would we think, right?

[00:28:20]>> Right. And we can we can try to figure out why how it is the case that we are living in such a objectively improbable universe. It might be multiverse theory.

[00:28:28]for example, they spend a lot of time in this book mischaracterizing, I would argue, the state of multiverse theory and also basically trying to downplay the idea that the multiverse account of things is a plausible scientific explanation. So like basically the idea would be yes we live in an improbable universe but if there's functionally infinite universes the odds that there's some some small number of them and contain people worlds like ours is not that you know surprising right that number like essentially when when someone says something is really unlikely you should always ask what's the denominator right go back to our math class for a second high school math right your fractions how unlikely something is going to be is the event occurring over the number of like possible chances for it to occur. Right? If you're going to roll a 100sided dice and you need to get a one, right? But you get a thousand rolls to roll that one, it's not actually that surprising if you roll a one at some point in that, right?

[00:29:33]So essentially what they cheat on is not like not wanting people to acknowledge that there might be a bunch of universes out there and many of them are dead universes but a very tiny number of them are not. The apologist made me crazy because a benevolent involved personal creator God would have already interacted with us in a meaningful way to prove that that God exists. And if it is an uninvolved sort of a first cause watch maker, I'm going to spin everything into existence and disappear and go do my own thing. For all practical purposes, for our purposes, that God might as well not even exist, right? Cuz we're still on our own. So, I mean, I'd like to ask the authors, hey, what the hell? Why does it even matter if God doesn't give a I guess is what I would ask Aaron. So, >> and this is where they make their own argument worse. If they had just started stopped with the first half of the book and just done the science side, they would have had a stronger case than if they had gone on to talk about how God sent the Virgin Mary to do a light show in a field in the 1900s. Like they have abandoned the possibility of adopting that kind of deist model as a way to avoid having to explain the problem of suffering for example, right? Um they are like this is a god who's directly involved in making sure the Jews control everything. like it's clearly not just hanging back. Um, which begs a lot of questions like it it makes their argument look much weaker and weirder than it than they I think they really wanted it to. But I like I I think there is such an instinct. You do you know the phrase gish gallop?

[00:31:12]>> Yes, I do.

[00:31:14]>> You know that it originates with the intelligent design folks.

[00:31:17]>> Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:18]>> Like there they really do have a need to throw the kitchen sink at you every time they make these arguments. It seems like even if it like and then they kind of hide the weird stuff in the second half so that they hope that people just get burned out on the first half and buy their view. For those who aren't familiar, and we know it as Gish Gallup as well, where there was a creationist who would blow through so much information or propose pseudo information, just you know, blow things out in such a shotgunny kind of way that the interlocutor couldn't keep up. And so this became known as the Gish Gallup.

[00:31:53]They actually named it after the guy Dwayne Gish. And uh we see a lot of that. You know, it sounds pretty impressive. you go and you overwhelm somebody with style and then they can't, you know, get into the substance or at least they can't keep up and you look like you won the debate on style alone.

[00:32:10]U is that a fair representation of Gish?

[00:32:13]>> Yeah, extraneous details like like a big thing in this book is there's chapters and chapters of like very fancy looking scientific explanations for how the universe comes into existence, but it's all totally irrelevant to the argument.

[00:32:26]It's going to overwhelm you with facts that aren't relevant, but it's going to make it look real and serious, and it's going to distract you from the the huge jumps at the beginning and the ends of the chapters where they're like, "And doesn't that kind of make you think that maybe God really actually does exist?"

[00:32:41]The article that you wrote in response to the book is, I think, helpful in general engagements with even armchair apologists who want to invoke the big bang and they want to talk about cosmology and design and purpose and fine-tuning and all of that. Any uh final thoughts on any of that? So, I'm going to point them to the article because I think your dissection of the book was actually really interesting and you saved me 600 pages.

[00:33:11]Someone someone accused me of being a poor skeptic by saying, "Oh, the review gave me the information I need." But I've I've dealt with so many apology.

[00:33:19]You know what I'm talking about, Erin?

[00:33:20]Like I'm just, you know, there is no almost nothing new under the sun. Every once in a while, I'll hear a zinger and go, "Wow, that's new." But mostly I I just feel like it's a a broken record.

[00:33:32]So anyway, what's the takeaway overall, Erin?

[00:33:35]>> Like the takeaway is if you want to read some science written by people with a religious motivation, there's some chapters in there that are interesting.

[00:33:43]Uh but you can get basically everything there from someone else better. Uh so definitely don't waste your time. And if somebody tries to convince you that you can't disagree with them until you've read the 600page book, I'm telling you that you can just you can just move on.

[00:33:57]It's okay.

[00:33:58]>> It's awesome, too, because ultimately they're pitching the Bible and then they say, "Well, what you need is the book to explain the book." I just don't like the people who screw the the human the flawed creations who screwed up everything else in the world are now going to explain God to me. It just I just don't get that at all, Aaron. So, that's just me. Dr. Aaron Rabinowitz, you're awesome, dude. I like to follow the work that you do. Embrace the void's a great show. I'll put links to everything in the description box and thanks for taking the hit so we didn't have to. Okay, >> thanks. Thanks for letting me uh come share invent a little bit about all of it.

[00:34:37]>> A lot of fun.