Lot’s of people claim to know the earth was created in 6 days, but their claim is incorrect. You can’t know something unless it’s true.
If I ask “Say, do those people know the earth was created in six days,” the appropriate response isn’t “yes,” but rather, “The earth wasn’t created in six days, what are you talking about?”
-FrL-
Of course you can ‘know’ something that’s not true. The whole world knew that the sun revolved around the earth back in the whenever. They were wrong, but they didn’t know that.
I contend that by comparing the two “facts” or viewpoints he was trying to show one was wrong. Why the need to disprove the Bible’s account in a science talk? His science talk could have similarly disproved Flat Earth thinking, but he did not apparently single them out.
If “facts simply are”, why not just offer them without the ‘and so that disproves…’ qualifier?
[sup]I realize he wasn’t so literal, but I believe his intent was implied[/sup]
Again, just imagine I ask, about, say, Ptolemy, “Did Ptolemy know the sun goes around the Earth?” Do you really answer by saying “Yes?” Of course not, you answer by saying “The sun doesn’t go around the Earth.” The reason you don’t answer “Yes” is because you know that one doesn’t “know” what is not true.
People often claim to know things, and those things are often not true, but this doesn’t mean they know something that is false, rather, it means their claim to knowledge is itself incorrect.
-FrL-
Or
I think we have a winner!
Not to pop your intellectually superior bubble or anything, but “X” abbreviates “Christ”; therefore, the correct term is “Xians”.
Not if I believe otherwise. How dare you attack my belief system!
Well, I agree that it might be their claim to knowledge is false, but I disagree with the rest. But knowledge is flexible. Under your definition, there is almost nothing that can be said to be known, because further evidence might arise to contradict what we think is the truth. This applies to history, physics and pretty much everything else I can think of. “Knowing” something is, at best, expressing a high degree of confidence in your claim – whether or not that confidence later turns out to be justified because of some new evidence.
In terms of the common use of “know”, people “know” a whole lot more than is objectively unassailable fact.
And yes, Ptolemy knew the sun goes around the earth.
YMMV
Or did he just *believe * he knew the sun goes around the earth?
Is there really a need to invent incidents to demonstrate that?
You could always walk out. 
Do you really think I’m a moron? Seriously. I’d like to know.
Well, I didn’t have specific people in mind, just the general morons that we do hear about pulling shit like this.
However, if you really want to know on a personal note, then I say that it depends on what the meaning of “moron” is. I don’t think you are markedly intellectually deficient, but I do see you doing all sorts of hair-trigger knee-jerk overly-dramatic reactionary nonsense when it comes to religion. (Think reading “antagonistic” as “agnostic”, the whole “hand-stabber” business, and that it seems that you can’t help bringing up some defense of Christianity whenever possible, even if it’s completely irrelevant to the thread and nobody has attacked Christianity).
In that sense you share a good bit with the “morons” of this anecdote.
No, there is no need to invent this stuff.at all. The only thing we have to do is read a news papar. It’s all there for us. Hell, sometimes the self proclaimed “holiest and bestest” will invent this shit themselves, just to keep the “we are persecuted” propaganda going. War on Christmas anyone?
I am still not sure that we have any basis to understand what his purported intent was. The fact that several people got up and left at exactly the same time over a single statement implies (to me) that the “protest” was a setup. We still have no actual quotation of his exact words. We have no context in which he was supposed to have spoken them. It is entirely possible that he was taking a dig at biblical literalism (not Christianity), as I know that he has taken shots at Intelligent Design and various other demonstrations of anti-science.* However, it is also possible that he was using a specific aspect of a line from Genesis, one with which he would have presumed that everyone could easily recognize and agree, to make a separate point, (not recorded) regarding not conflating scriptural or mythological descriptions with science. If he reuses a lot of material from one lecture to another, I could easily see some group of nutcases going to the lecture for the express purpose of showing their anger when he got to that (innocuous) point.
Could he have been mocking anyone? Perhaps,
Was he mocking anyone? Not demonstrated.
Funny story. In the last few years, my CEO started on a questionable venture where each month he answers questions “from the masses”, which seem, incredibly, to not be screened very well. In one of them last year someone wrote in to complain most vociferously about:
At that point, I turned my head about 25 degrees to the right, where I gazed upon the official “Company Event Calendar”, which, of course, listed Christmas and not Diwali. Then I went out on our intranet site to our entire “Christmas Holiday Cheer” section, and scanned the pages out there. Etc., etc. This person was so convinced of something completely false they did not even have the God damned intelligence to look at the official company calendar on their desk, the intranet site, the fact that each year we set up Christmas trees and have presents and santa’s village and…oh, fuck it.
Well, thank goodness. I knew that we weren’t best buddies or anything, but I would have been disappointed if you really thought I was stupid. I do think I’m naive in many ways, possibly including the ones you’ve enumerated. But I’ve worked very hard to educate myself. A lot of that education has taken place right here on Straight Dope. And as much as you and I may be poles apart on almost everything, I do learn from you.
It looks too much like some sort of space-alien race that way. 
tomndebb: do we have any sort of timely cite that anyone walked out at all? I still want someone to show the entire incident has not be made p out of whole cloth.
Some of the blogs that cite the newpaper are dated to within a few weeks of the apparent incident, use the same wording, and cite a now defunct url that leads back to the paper.
I would guess that Nye really gave a lecture (an event that has other citations) and that some people walked out in a manner that called attention to their departure. Beyond that, everything is a bit too vague. samclem or other posters with access to newspaper archives and electronic morgues might be able to dig up the original story as it was printed. I suspect that it, too, however, will be sufficiently lacking in clear details to permit genuine conclusions regarding the motivations behind any particuolar action or statement.