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Bill O'Reily challenges scientest to explain how moon got there...

Moon-Spinner said:
Your link takes you to the Colbert site, then we have to search for the clip. Here's a link that will take you directly to the clip (and yes, it's hilarious) :p
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You don't have to search if you READ MY POST!
"Thursday February 3, 2011 Segment on "Crisis in Egypt - Anderson Cooper & Bill O'Reilly", starts at 2:30 minutes." :rolleyes:

The YouTube clip was removed for copyright violation. I didn't waste more time looking for another version. Thank You for doing so.
 
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I thought Jackie Gleason built the moon as a place to banish his wife to whenever she burnt the roast, or something.
 
Psi Baba said:
:eye-poppi At first I just read the brief article below the video. That should have been enough. But no, I had to go back and click the link again and watch the damn video. The entire clip is only 1:43. I couldn't get past 1:21. Seriously, I stopped it at 1:21 and closed the window--I couldn't take another second. I didn't know it was possible to actually broadcast stupid! He has managed to convert stupid into a signal, send it out over the air, and beam it into our heads.
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Pretty much my experience with the video.
 
I didn't watch the video because I didn't want to waste the load time. I'm assuming O'Reilly is incredulous at the improbable "perfection" of the earth-moon system, in terms of it's ability to harbor life.

From a limited POV, he's right. The Earth-moon system is perhaps best described probabilistically as "rare", rather than "improbable". You won't find earthlike systems capable of harboring humanoid life on every cosmic street corner. And yet, if the universe is big enough (and NASA measurements strongly suggest it is), there would be an indeterminate number of exact copies of the Earth-moon system spread across the incomprehensibly vast cosmos, each one an incomprehensible distance from the next.

A system capable of harboring humanoid life is, by definition, a place where quite a few very improbable events have occurred, including, but not limited to events like the glancing cosmic blow that created the Earth-moon system.

But what O'Reilly fails to understand is, this kind of rare place is precisely the kind of place where we, specifically, would be found. Where did he expect us to find ourselves? At the bottom of Europa's cold, dark sea? Which, BTW, is roughly equally improbable. No. We are occupying precisely the kind of place we, specifically, should fully expect to be occupying, that being the kind of place where we could actually be, in a cosmos that is almost certainly incomprehensibly large.

Bill doesn't understand any of that. But let's cut Bill some slack. Bill might not be a genius, but he's not exactly stupid either. Bill is a very successful man, and clearly a very busy man and a very focused man. It is hardly surprising that astronomy and anthropic thinking would not be within Bill's areas of specific knowledge.

Where Bill went wrong was in stepping outside his area of expertise and challenging scientists in their area of expertise. Still, Bill might get away with it. It's his show, and time is limited. The scientists would almost certainly be unable to answer Bill's ignorant questions in the allotted time, or explain the meaninglessness of the ignorant questions.

As noted, I typed all this without watching the video. How far off am I?
 
Toontown said:
I didn't watch the video because I didn't want to waste the load time. I'm assuming O'Reilly is incredulous at the improbable "perfection" of the earth-moon system, in terms of it's ability to harbor life.

From a limited POV, he's right. The Earth-moon system is perhaps best described probabilistically as "rare", rather than "improbable". You won't find earthlike systems capable of harboring humanoid life on every cosmic street corner. And yet, if the universe is big enough (and NASA measurements strongly suggest it is), there would be an indeterminate number of exact copies of the Earth-moon system spread across the incomprehensibly vast cosmos, each one an incomprehensible distance from the next.

A system capable of harboring humanoid life is, by definition, a place where quite a few very improbable events have occurred, including, but not limited to events like the glancing cosmic blow that created the Earth-moon system.

But what O'Reilly fails to understand is, this kind of rare place is precisely the kind of place where we, specifically, would be found. Where did he expect us to find ourselves? At the bottom of Europa's cold, dark sea? Which, BTW, is roughly equally improbable. No. We are occupying precisely the kind of place we, specifically, should fully expect to be occupying, that being the kind of place where we could actually be, in a cosmos that is almost certainly incomprehensibly large.

Bill doesn't understand any of that. But let's cut Bill some slack. Bill might not be a genius, but he's not exactly stupid either. Bill is a very successful man, and clearly a very busy man and a very focused man. It is hardly surprising that astronomy and anthropic thinking would not be within Bill's areas of specific knowledge.

Where Bill went wrong was in stepping outside his area of expertise and challenging scientists in their area of expertise. Still, Bill might get away with it. It's his show, and time is limited. The scientists would almost certainly be unable to answer Bill's ignorant questions in the allotted time, or explain the meaninglessness of the ignorant questions.

As noted, I typed all this without watching the video. How far off am I?
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Way-off. His argument is much stupider and less complicated than that. All he says is "Who put the moon there?". That's his entire argument.
 
Bill Thompson said:
I actually watched the little video with Bill in it. Taken out of context, his remark seems stupid. OK, so Bill never learned that science pretty much knows where the moon came from. But I think (I hope) his point is that it is an endless argument. You can go on and on about one thing came from something else and there is no end. He is not really a scientist so he can't put this point using the right words. The fact is, our whole solar system came from dust from an exploded star. So, when Bill is told that he will reply "where did that come from?" and when you eventually get to the Big Bang, he might reply "how did that happen? How does existance itself exist?" and eventually we fall off the map of scientific knowledge completely. I believe this is what he means. So he does not know that we know where the moon came from. If you fault him for being uneducated, you will eventualy fault everyone.
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Yes, this is correct. Explaining to him how the moon and the sun and the planets got there wouldn't really get nowhere. This is all basically the Fine Tuning Universe Fallacy. That it is "so obvious" that the Universe was designed for us.

But this is also about the misunderstanding of faith. Because yes, these people are wrong to think that, but one can see how someone could find it logical to conclude that it takes more faith not to believe that everything that is, was created by a Designer with a Purpose, than to believe that everything just fell into place by "luck". Of course, the "everything just fell into place by luck" is a human perspective. We exist, we care. Therefore, the fact that we exist means something to us. But it doesn't necessarily mean anything to the Universe. It was luck for us. But we are just a tiny spec of stuff compared to all the other stuff in the Universe. All those other solar systems that almost made it but for some reason didn't make it because of a supernova or some other cataclysm. Nature does indeed act randomly and we, the ones who are alive, are indeed lucky. And just because we are lucky and alive and capable of meditating about how lucky we are, doesn't necessarily mean that there was a purpose to it. It's kind of like being the survivor in a plane crash and looking at all the people who died, and concluding "God must really love me, because he let me survive but killed all those other poor bastards".
 
Denver said:
It is probably true that engaging O'Reilly will not change his opinions. But, since he is a public figure, those challenges are seen by many others. Not everyone in his audience will be of the same mind: some, like O'Reilly, will not be swayed. Others may be more open. Others may be on the fence. Others may allow a seed of rationalism in, which over time may grow.

So I think it does make sense to engage him, and all irrational propaganda. The alternative is to leave it unchallenged. And certainly nothing good will come from that.
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I can agree with that but you'd think a douche like O'Reilly would have been so thoroughly discredited as being a know-nothing ideologue that it is a waste of time to even engage with him. I suppose, though, the bottom line is that he has a big megaphone and will keep up the stupid so someone has to keep calling him out. Some people genuinely are that dumb that they'll sit there and swallow his tripe night after night. Maybe that's the truly sad part.
 
-----------------------
Once in a Lifetime
-----------------------

And you may find yourself squinting in the bright sunlight
And you may find yourself under the pale moon's glare
And you may find yourself on a boat in the Bay of Fundy
And you may find yourself on a distant world, with its beautiful sky
And you may ask yourself -Well...How did they get here?

Letting the days go by / tide flows in and tide flows out
Letting the days go by / sun goes up and sun goes down
Into the blue again / with the timely water
Once in a lifetime (please!) / Schooling always made me frown.

And you may ask yourself
How'd the moon get here?
And you may ask yourself
How'd the sun get there, too?
And you may tell yourself
They can't explain that to me!
And you may tell yourself
They can't explain it at all!

And you may ask yourself
How come we have that and Mars doesn't have it?
And you may ask yourself
Magnets, how do they work?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right?...Of course I'm right!
And you may tell yourself
MY GOD!...HE IS THE ONE!

Same as it ever was...
 
Eric D said:
Way-off. His argument is much stupider and less complicated than that. All he says is "Who put the moon there?". That's his entire argument.
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Don't forget that he basically called the scientific community a bunch of "pinheads".
 
I just submitted his nonsense to Betty Bowers. I think she'll do a good job of promoting Christianity with it. :-)
 
MattusMaximus said:
Don't forget that he basically called the scientific community a bunch of "pinheads".
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The same scientific community that developed the technology that allows him to blast his willful ignorance to the general masses.
 
Toontown said:
~snip~
Bill doesn't understand any of that. But let's cut Bill some slack. Bill might not be a genius, but he's not exactly stupid either. Bill is a very successful man, and clearly a very busy man and a very focused man. It is hardly surprising that astronomy and anthropic thinking would not be within Bill's areas of specific knowledge.
~snip~
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You don't necessarily have to be a smart person to be successful, sometimes you can get lucky, or know somebody.

Look at Ted Turner and Donald Trump.
 
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