Michael Shermer is a great skeptic and skilled debater, but there are those in the atheist debate community that didn't appreciate him for debating the young-earth creationist, Kent Hovind. They view it as giving credibility to a worldview that is too far disconnected from reality. Mr. Hovind is known as a manipulator of scientific data, and he relies on the ignorance of the layperson. I define ignorance here as being uninformed, not stupid. An example of this is Mr. Hovind's argument against radiometric dating. He cites as an example of an experiment performed on a ten-year-old rock from Mount St. Helen by the young earth creation scientist, Dr. Steve Austin. The analysis used potassium-argon as it's dating technique (On a ten-year-old rock) those of you who know how dating techniques work, already know the conclusion and why it's fraudulent. The sample came back as being up to 380 TYO (thousand years old) to 2.2 MYO (Million years old). Here is the deception that a layperson might not understand. This planet is 4.5 BYO, and potassium-argon dating is used on rocks expected to be billions of years old and has a margin of error that would allow for this especially on a ten-year-old rock. Other dating techniques would have flushed this out. Mr. Hovind knows that a large percentage of laypeople will view 380 TYO to 2.2 MYO as being a noteworthy discrepancy and therefore unreliable. To educate an audience on radiometric dating techniques with a 10-minute rebuttal is unreasonable and will leave people not understanding what to believe. I'm not for excluding any argument that challenges science however when an unquestionably deceptive argument is used to manipulate uninformed people in a debate platform, I believe that person should be sanctioned from any future debates.