I disagree Hopefully Anonymous. Its important for Dawkins and Randi to address things like psychics and intelligent design, even though reasonably intelligent people could be talking about deeper things, because a lot of reasonably intelligent people still believe in them. There are a lot of well qualified philosophers (David Chalmers is even mentioned in the post) who believe this sort of thing and would probably very much like to have a discussion about it here.
It’s possible Eliezer’s rhetorical style is tripping you up (although if you’ve read much else of his it shouldn’t), but personally I think putting this argument in movie script form makes it much more accessible to lay-people. Sometimes intelligent discussion includes things other than finding the most plausible point in an opponents argument and attacking it with a detailed and well reasoned 10 page post.
I disagree Hopefully Anonymous. Its important for Dawkins and Randi to address things like psychics and intelligent design, even though reasonably intelligent people could be talking about deeper things, because a lot of reasonably intelligent people still believe in them. There are a lot of well qualified philosophers (David Chalmers is even mentioned in the post) who believe this sort of thing and would probably very much like to have a discussion about it here.
It’s possible Eliezer’s rhetorical style is tripping you up (although if you’ve read much else of his it shouldn’t), but personally I think putting this argument in movie script form makes it much more accessible to lay-people. Sometimes intelligent discussion includes things other than finding the most plausible point in an opponents argument and attacking it with a detailed and well reasoned 10 page post.