Paul Burns' 10k Challenge
Mark Honeychurch - 5 August 2024
Paul Burns, a Catholic who sporadically emails us with inane arguments, wrote to us recently about our $100,000 challenge, in an email titled “My own challenge”:
Thanks for offering your $100k prize?
While as an individual, I may not have the same financial freedom as your organisation, I’d like to kindly reciprocate your challenge as follows (hypothetically presupposing that atheism is a true belief).
“I offer $10k to the 1st person who proves that either the scientific method &/or the merely human brain can reveal the TRUTH about anything (including that water boils at 100 degrees at sea level)”.
All the best and God bless.
Peace be with you.
Paul Burns (Burnsy)
I know of only one TRULY good person. He walked on water. Whereas I can barely stay afloat.
A few hours later he followed up his email with some more rambling:
Dear committee.
While $100,000 may mean a lot to some (especially those - whose false God is either Money, rationalism, empiricism etc), is there any committee member (who’s behind your $100,000 challenge) willing to pay the ultimate price - to back up their unproven faithful beliefs (eg the claim that there is neither any God, nor any good reason or evidence to believe in him)?
I ask this question because I (plus many other Christians) have either already and/or are gladly prepared to pay such an ultimately more expensive price.
Moreover, I don’t mean in the Hari-Kari or Muslim fashion, because I am instead referring to willing to be sacrificed by someone else.
Finally if you are not prepared to die for your beliefs, then why should anybody even remotely entertain your unproven claims?
Thanks again.
Paul Burns (Burnsy)
As I may have said before, Paul seems to be a nice guy in person. He’s come along to a Skeptics in the Pub event before in Wellington, and seems happy to listen to rational challenges to some of his ideas. But, behind a keyboard, he turns into a somewhat angry Catholic who likes to fire off communications containing half-baked ideas and poor arguments. Although we’ve realised over the years that ignoring him is the best course of action, I hope at least that writing these emails is cathartic for Paul, and brings him some peace. Certainly the fact that he seems to appear from nowhere, email us a few times, and then go quiet for months, suggests that his email blitz is satisfying him in some way - either that or he’s busy emailing other groups (and I happen to know that, at the very least, he also enjoys sending gotcha emails to the NZ Humanists).
This is not the only counter-challenge we’ve heard about recently - last year Bruce Robertson emailed us (in the third person) with his own $5,000 challenge, although sadly it’s already expired:
$5,000 Philosophy Challenge
Auckland resident, Bruce Robertson, is issuing a challenge to anyone who can find a flaw in his new philosophy. The philosophy is called the Pattern Paradigm. It is claimed that this philosophy describes a framework of ideas that is simple, logical, comprehensive and accurate. It has been developed from just a few powerful ideas that can be extended to all domains of philosophy and life. The challenge is open to everyone to find a significant flaw in the philosophy with a prize of US$5,000 for the first person to do so.
The challenge is open to everyone from students to philosophy professors from caregivers to astronauts and everyone in between. Details of the philosophy can be found on the website ThePatternParadigm.com or can be viewed on Youtube on the Pirate Philosophy channel https://www.youtube.com/@piratephilosophy5404.
The challenge starts on 13 July 2023 and will run for a year or until won.
The transcript can be viewed at https://www.thepatternparadigm.com/post/pp26-5-000-challenge
A copy of the transcript of the video announcing the challenge is appended below.
A photograph of Bruce Robertson is attached to this email.
Contact person:
Bruce Robertson
Auckland
New Zealand
+64 27 252 7144
Following this trend, I’m going to predict that our next challenger is going to offer us $50 if we can prove that we’re skeptical about our own skepticism or something similarly daft.