debate-points, scienceIn arguing for atheism various science and science-y topics and debate points creep into discussion. I generally prefer to talk about things I’m knowledgeable of, and avoid making tenuous connections where I shouldn’t. What specific scientific arguments have you seen stretched too thin, how can I avoid them, and what alternatives are there?
For my own part, I try to avoid using science in religious discussion. It gives false legitimacy to religious perspectives, and reinforces the whole idea that religion and science are two equal sides that you have to choose between.
The worst thing you can do is try to argue something you don’t fully understand. If you don’t understand evolution well, then don’t allow yourself to be drawn into that argument. Likewise geology, physics, etc. Even uneducated debaters on the religious side will often have a few scientific factoids to throw at you, and if you don’t know enough to refute them, you’re going to lose ground.
What I prefer to do is to structure the discussion so that they are forced to concretely state their beliefs, so I can ask questions and force them to defend their statements. So, instead of letting them make it a discussion about evolution, make it a discussion about creationism. Ask them what they believe, in detail, and then try to get them to explain the inevitable contradictions.
The scientific things that creationists have the hardest time explaining are actually quite simple. They have immense trouble with geology, and geology is very easy to understand and argue. I’d stay away from biology and evolution, more because they’re extremely complicated than any other reason. Even if you know them well, when you’re refuting the creationist, you’re going to have to go into the sort of abstruse detail they can claim to be jargon or bullshit.
Creationists are wedded to the catastrophe theory of geology: it’s the only way they can explain things like the Grand Canyon in their 4000 year timespan. The theory of continental drift is impossible for them to accept, but extremely well proven (the rate of drift has been measured from orbit). Sea-floor spreading and fossil magnetism give you easy timelines that cannot be explained through anything but Uniformitarian geology. They’ll deny anything that smacks of evolution, but fossils themselves are hard to explain, because bone and wood do not transition to stone in thousand year time spans.
All of them. Atheism is the rejection of a particular set of conjectures about the universe because they lack scientific evidence. When said evidence is presented, only then will that particular scientific field become relevant.
None of them.
Regardless of whether the discipline is theoretical or practical in orientation, it can help to establish the distance between analytic and critical thought employed in the scientific process and the ‘magical’ thinking characteristic of moral and theological exegesis.
In particular, we shouldn’t think we can abandon either the human science or the humanities as unhelpful in this regard. For instance, psychoanalysis can help us understand the festering resentment behind the ‘reverence’ the religious hold for their ‘benefactors’; sociology can help disclose some of the political and economic reasons religious affectation has such a stranglehold upon the human imagination; comparative literature can be helpful in revealing the divergence and repetition of the mythological impulse throughout history.
Finally, we shouldn’t neglect the hard or natural sciences here, either – chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics and astronomy can each offer contraindications to a religious metaphysic. Perhaps evolutionary biology in particular offers one of the strongest ‘antidotes’ to a moral interpretation of reality.
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