RCimT: some resources for #atheists attempting to debate with #creationists

Not up to doing a full RCimT today either. So I’ll pick out some tabs that I had in the Religion category that are good resources for people debating on the internet to rebut specific lines of argumentation.

“Evolution is just a theory!” — Learn what a scientific theory is: a good general explanation of the difference
“If God exists, you stand to lose everything; if he doesn’t, I stand to lose nothing” (aka Pascal’s Wager) — Why it’s not a “safe bet” to believe in God: a dissection of this argument and why it fails utterly (hint: “which God?”)
“Surely if so many people believe in God, they can’t be wrong!” — Why do we believe in God?: BBC on Robert Winston’s book The Story of God
“Why are the laws of physics as they are, and not some other way?” — Turtles much of the way down: an excellent explanation on why the question may not even matter, and how we should be unafraid to say “we don’t know” when we don’t, actually, know.
“The Bible condemns abortion!” — What the Bible says about abortion: a list of every salient proclamation about the personhood of fetuses in the Bible, not that the Bible is in any way an authority.
“America is a Christian nation!” — Americans: not as religious as they think they are (though I’d be tempted just to say “so? Popularity doesn’t make something right.”)

And while we’re handing out resources for debate, if you’re ever in over your head on a particular topic, you can always look to the intertubes for help. It is often the case in debate — the Dunning-Kruger Effect has a side-effect of causing people who don’t know what they’re talking about to believe they know for sure, and people who know a little about what they’re talking about to undervalue their opinions because they realize they’re not authorities in the matter. However, whatever line of argumentation stumps you on the spot, you can be relatively assured that someone has heard it and put forth a convincing argument against it at Talk Origins, complete with sources in most cases. Additionally, you’d be well advised to brush up on Logical Fallacies for a list of places that humans often go wrong in the completely human-created endeavour of logic.

The backlog of tabs is a bit onerous at the moment. Perhaps I’ll start merely tweeting links instead of saving them up forever to build some larger narrative, then never managing. That might be a better way of doing things. Also, I’m going to attempt to include appropriate Twitter hashtags in the titles — hope you don’t mind seeing extraneous #’s everywhere.

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RCimT: some resources for #atheists attempting to debate with #creationists
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