A Friendly Challenge...

Phillip O'Donnell, who I've mentioned previously on here in this post about pterodactyls and as a snarky aside in my recent post about Ed Mitchell's alien silliness, has contacted me and proposed a debate between the two of us. Readers will remember O'Donnell as the YECer who wrote a book about living dinosaurs when he was just 14 years old. He now runs website called Living Dinos on which he attempts to show evidence for the modern existence of dinosaurs, as well as the reality of dragons and a 6,000 year-old earth, in the hope that advancing these positions will challenge the conclusions of evolutionary biology and provide support of a Biblical literalist view of reality.

Phillip has proposed that we do a recorded phone debate, which I admittedly don't have much interest in because I've no desire to, among other things, pay for several hours of long distance charges. I have instead suggested that, rather than debating privately over the phone, we should set up a formal, public debate over at the Internet Infidels Discussion Board. As with all the formal debates on that forum, this would be a moderated one-on-one debate with a mutually agreed upon topic and rules and would consist solely of Phillip, myself, and a moderator. There would be no dog-piling by supporters of either side. Naturally, more specific details about the debate would need to be worked out before IIDB moderators would approve it, but I've no reason to suspect that it would be difficult at all to put such a thing together.

I look forward to Phillip's response and eagerly await the opportunity to debate him on his evidence for the existence of modern dinosaurs.