Professor Dave Debates a Fellow Atheist

[Valin]

Evolution News

David Klinghoffer

July 19, 2023

The Internet spontaneously generates characters like “Professor Dave” Farina, who isn’t a professor or a PhD but, judging from his own account, a failed academic who performs the role of a “science educator” on YouTube. His channel is called “Professor Dave Explains.” Well, just as nowadays a man can identify as a woman, so too it seems a random dude can call himself a “professor” and gain, in Dave’s case, some 2.45 million YouTube subscribers. The subscribers may or not be Russian bots (actual viewership for most of his videos is quite modest), and they may or may not think he is actually a professor. Who knows?

Why Bother, You Ask?

I’m aware of him only because Dave Farina is also an angry atheist who’s obsessed with attacking intelligent design folks in crudely dishonest videos. Why bother with him? Because he’s won the attention of serious people like Rice University chemist Dr. James Tour, for one thing, and for another, because he’s kind of bizarrely entertaining. He’s on Twitter, too.

Recently, Farina engaged in* a Twitter “debate” with our biologist colleague Jonathan McLatchie and then claimed that we had fabricated it, “a fake twitter conversation,” “literally slandering me.” What a strange thing to say. To represent someone with his own words, while pointing out his failure to respond to substantive critiques, is “slander”?

A fellow Twitter atheist, who found Dave to be an embarrassment to the cause, pointed out that this was not the case. The other atheist, who I’d like to think speaks for others as well, is called Secular Outpost. Also entering the conversation is one V. Catellus, self-identified as among other things, a “Nerdy Aristotelian but anti-racist and pro-LGBT+.”

It happened this way. First, Dr. McLatchie gathered together and posted here and then on Twitter a transcript from the “debate” with Professor Dave, with the cross-talk from other Twitter users cut out for the sake of clarity. The point was to show the quality of Dave Farina’s thought in a dialogue, or as close to one as you can have on Twitter. Farina did not come off well, confining himself to empty insults while McLatchie caught him out for errors in Farina’s video about Michael Behe. (As far as I know, Farina has NEVER responded meaningfully regarding ANY of the MANY misrepresentations he’s committed that we have pointed out.)

A Dialogue with the Professor

So, here is the latest conversation with Dave. You can find the relevant threads here, here, and here.

(Snip)

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* My “Debate” with Professor Dave

Farina: Get ready for the top search result for your name on both Google and YouTube being me taking a big steamy dump all over your dumb science denying apologist face.

McLatchie: I’m quaking in my boots…

McLatchie: Are you willing to acknowledge any of your mistakes and misrepresentations in your video response to Behe?

Farina: I didn’t make any mistakes, and I didn’t read your dog**t blog posts. But don’t worry, later I’ll make a video going through your lies and humiliating you just like I did your other idiot colleagues. Enjoy!

McLatchie: I’m curious how you know that I’m wrong if you haven’t even read my blog posts yet? 

Farina: Um, you’re a sh**bag apologist who works for a disgusting propaganda mill. You’re always wrong. All of you are always wrong. That’s literally your purpose in life. Just stop talking, dumba**.