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That was exactly his point. It was illuminating to hear some Worst Arguments in the World that I have sometimes used without realizing. I don't see why everyone is getting so riled up.



Except for the first one (and even that's debatable - if memory serves me correctly, "George Washington was a traitor" is generally used by the left-wing to demonstrate why categories like "traitor" aren't useful, rather than as a serious argument against Washington) they're not actually examples of the Worst Argument in the World though.

For instance, the fact that guns kill people is still just as effective as an argument for gun control even though not all guns kill people. Or take his point about how only parts of evolution have been proved - that's actually a particularly obnoxious kind of fallacious reasoning that creationists use a lot. There's always going to be gaps in our knowlege of the exact details of evolution because not all transitional forms survive and because there aren't enough researchers out there to investigate every single gene and biological pathway. But not (yet) knowing the exact details is not evidence that evolution is impossible - indeed, pretty much all of the supposedly "irreducably complex" features that creationists claim couldn't have been created by evolution have been proved to have evolved.


But isn't that exactly the argument? Evolution itself isn't a fact. Parts of it are a fact, and the other parts can be reasonably deduced from the facts. It's a bit presumptuous to say that it's a fact, as you could probably say that about Newton's laws too, which were proved to be inaccurate in the end.




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