P.Z. Myers visits Winnipeg- demonstrates ignorance.

Saturday, January 10th, I had the misfortune of attending a lecture by famed atheist P.Z. Myers. To be honest, I had only recently heard of Myers because a friend and fellow Christian had mentioned the Humanist Association of Manitoba was organizing this event, and encouraged John Feakes and I to attend. (I didn’t know there was a humanist organization in Winnipeg either. I wonder if they would publicly defend their faith?) I expected to hear the newest supposed evidence disproving the Christian worldview; I expected to hear some form of argumentation. Instead we were treated to an evening of flagrant misrepresentations, blatant factual errors, and a truckload of enthusiasm akin to a high school pep rally. There was a lot of pontificating and amounts of bold proclamations void of substantiation, but no arguments were really put forward. From the opening and throughout there was no small noise made about reason being a core value of humanism. If this is true, no disrespect intended, I didn’t witness much.

It’s a little difficult to know where to begin detailing the erroneous and irrational claims made that evening. I had intended to write a rebuttal, but there weren’t really any arguments put forward to rebut. The purpose for this article, then, will be to correct some of the misinformation and poor reasoning of Myers and his congregants. For ease of reading and to simplify my thoughts, there are a couple of main areas, in no certain order, where Myers failed to live up to the hype, (he is the humanist of the year for 2009 in the United States); factual errors and/or misrepresentations of the Christian worldview; deficient and self serving moral claims; and, to borrow from his terminology, “epistemological emptiness” or just plain poor reasoning.

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