“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.
Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.
If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.” – The Literal Meaning of Genesis
Here is Patrick Coffin’s star expert on the supposedly faked moon landings making such a huge nuisance of himself with hectoring accusations of “coward” and “liar” that he famously got punched out by Buzz Aldrin:
Aldrin, meanwhile, was exonerated of all charges because Coffin’s star guest is a massively abusive, self-aggrandizing bully.
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7 Responses
If it makes you feel any better, until now I had never heard of Mr. Timothy Gordon. Maybe that’s a good thing?
Blessed are you.
I have a friend who once started to go down the moon landing denial rabbit hole. I tried explaining to him that such an endeavor leaves a rather large trail in its wake: people, resources, logistics, third-party support, etc. Trying to fake all that would be a larger endeavor than simply going to the Moon would ever be.
However, I wasn’t quite getting to him. He couldn’t outright deny what I was saying, but he was still on the fence. That is until, brought up the fact of the reflectors that were placed on the Moon. “How did those get there, then?”, I asked him, to which he had no answer and sheepishly backed down. He never brought it up again.
For reference:
Adam Ruins Everything – Why the Moon Landing Couldn’t Have Been Faked | truTV
Your friend was clearly an inexperienced conspiracy theorist at the time.
For the mirrors, the obvious answer to most of them would be….aliens, of course!
The best evidence of the Moon landings is that there wasn’t one, there were six (out of seven planned). Why risk more than one landing and bring higher quality cameras to subsequent landings which would expose imperfections hidden by worse equipment?
The second best evidence is that if it’s easy to tell that the Moon landings were faked, Soviets would be all over that evidence, but they didn’t call out NASA on anything, they admitted to having lost the Space Race.
One more thing: the requirement that a lot of people would participate in a conspiracy and would need to keep silent is very weak circumstantial evidence. I watched a rom-com on Netflix with my wife titled “I believe in Santa” where the lead raises this as an argument for Santa’s existence: If Santa is fake, why do so many people willingly participate and lie to their children about him with everyone repeating the same story?
It’s risky to bring this up as the initial argument because if you’re not aware of the sheer scale of the project, you simply can’t fathom how many people were involved and how deep in details they were. It’s simply easy to dismiss this argument with: “Oh, sure, spacecraft, and rockets and engines all needed to be built, but the contractors simply made them to spec, they never questioned if these designs would make viable products to enable a Moon landing.” and: “So there were a lot of contractors who *thought* they were building those important things and delivered them, and the only people who were in on the conspiracy were those at NASA who were allegedly integrating them.”
It’s a good crowning argument once you understand how much effort that required and how many people were involved in the project, but I wouldn’t start with it.
What happens when you try to find out the truth: