Professor Dave Explains is a cool youtube channel that has spawned some hilariously good disproofs of the flat earth "theory". I haven't watched his other videos, but I very much like his flat earth debunkings. He also debunked a couple other things, such as the electric universe garbage and some common coronavirus conspiracies, but there is one video on his channel called "A Challenge For Mr. Kent Hovind" wherein he debates "Dr." Kent Hovind, some christian evolution-denier rasha who lied about having a doctorate related to science, and attempts incomptetently to disprove the "Bible's" divinity. Oh boy is this a trainwreck of incompetence.
1: He lists some truly Ep1C bad-sounding verses from the Torah. 1 Melachim 7:23: "And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from one brim to the other". (he mentions this to discredit the Tanach by pointing out how it uses 3 as an approximation of pi, but this passage was written by a human; humans are not perfect, why would a human from that era be expected to use a more precise approximation?) He later asks about the relevence of these passages to our time, despite the fact that all these verses DONT APPLY ANYMORE SO WHY WOULD THEY BE RELEVENT (well they are relevent for lessons, but not as laws to keep) ANYMORE ANYWAY!?!
Vayikra 25:44: "Your male and female 'slaves' (he doesn't know what that word even means in the Torah, so he thinks it's talking about regular slaves, instead of "workers", which is a better translation)" (I won't go on because the whole premise of his "criticism" is based on a bad translation)
Bamidbar 31:17 which mentions killing Amalekites. This is not immoral because the Jews sent many peace letters to Amalek, and they refused peace; also, if an Amalekite agreed to observe the Noachide laws, they would not kill him.
2: Another issue is that he often believes that Kent Hovind's stupid interperetation of the Torah is the proper one. IT'S NOT. The Torah does not say that evolution doesn't exist, but Kent Hovind's OPINION is that it doesn't. He's using a strawman argument against... G-d...
I agree that evolution extremely likely exists, but I don't like how he uses Hovind to make the Torah sound wrong.
3: The part about Noach's Ark is the most (albeit still easy) difficult to debunk part of the video. Why do some species live exclusively in one part of the world? G-d led them only to that part of the world. How did they get there? G-d helped and led them. Where are the fossils? This is based on Hovind (not true and not the actual Torah view) saying that fossils form after only a year. How did Noach and his family populate the whole world? G-d helped them. Humans eventually migrated to the whole world again. He asks "Why aren't we all inbred?" This is a loaded question fallacy (and he made a whole video on fallacies). He never established HOW he believes we're not inbred. Thus I cannot answer his question without assuming that we are all not inbred.
Conclusion: This video is incredibly incompetent. Dave, don't try to debunk something you know nothing about. I am an """""expert""""" and I easily debunked him in ten minutes. Still, I have never seen a Torah "critic" that could not be debunked. I hope he never talks about the Torah again, and sticks to what he actually knows about. (Edit made on Teves 27, 5781) And as Avigdor Miller said in Rejoice O Youth! (p. 25), "We view these opponents, whether physical or ideological, who rise up against us in every generation, with a calm and seasoned eye; we know that they will go down into oblivion as did all the upstarts who preceded them."