#1429: Sye ten Bruggencate

A.k.a. Sye tenB

Sye ten Bruggencate is an Internet … uh, personality, most familiar as Kent Hovind’s squire and herald. He is also a regular contributor to Eric Hovind’s “Creation Today” videos, which promote anti-science, biblical literalism and demonstrably false information about science with the goal of indoctrinating children and vulnerable adults because the Ten Commandments don’t apply when you are doing the work of Jesus.

Ten Bruggencate is particularly famous for what Rationalwiki calls “his aggressive indifference” toward evidence, logic or any reasoned response to his own claims, a trait that is notable for instance in his “defense” of a transcendentalist argument for the existence of God as a necessary presupposition for logic and morality. The basic strategy, then, is to argue that without (the Christian) God it is impossible to know anything (never mind the obvious self-defeating nature of that position), therefore nothing will count as evidence unless you presuppose the existence of a God or subscribe to a literal interpretation of the Bible; therefore evolution is wrong, Big Bang is a fraud, science is meaningless, and ten Bruggencate is free to believe whatever he wants. It is less intelligent than that description makes it sound (hint to ten Bruggencate: Your transcendentalist argument for God can at best establish the conditional “if knowledge is possible, God exists;” to show that God exists, you have to establish the antecedent, and any way of doing that will undermine the argument; not that he will ever see the problem, or that this is the most egregious problem with his argument.) He is generally not particularly willing to discuss the argument (here’s one example), however, and instead threatens any non-Christians (or Christians who disagree with him) them the fires of hell for their failure to agree that to engage in a conversation requires that they first acknowledge the existence of God and the Bible is inerrant.

Be warned about engaging with him, though: ten Bruggencate is well known for repeatedly using heavily, rabidly dishonestly edited and quote-mined discussions he has had with people who disagree with him for commercial purposes. Then again, he doesn’t believe in people who disagree with him anyways.

We have covered his creationist talking points so many times before that we can’t be bothered to repeat them. He has also said that he thinks a Christian theocracy would be the best form of government, which is not very surprising from someone who thinks that disagreeing with him or refusing to debate him on his premises is persecution.

Diagnosis: A sort of Platonic idea of lack of self-awareness – and a scam artist (though he probably doesn’t realize). He also really seems to be insane enough to believe that his arguments have some merit.