Posted: Apr 02, 2018 5:19 pm
Calilasseia wrote:Quite simply, the question I ask before I start, is "will this individual abide by the proper rules of discourse?" before starting. The reason being that I've had more than enough experience of supernaturalists who won't.
Now it may be the case, that someone turns up who doesn't actually understand those rules in the first place.
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Yes, absolutely.
In the case of my friend, I'd say he doesn't really understand the rules - yet. Rules such as burden of proof, for example. He's still steeped in apologetics, and we all know how corrosive that is.
I may or may not be able to get him to engage in honest discourse; if the barriers are too high I'll give up.
But it's like working with someone with a disability. There's no point being aggressive, or overly demanding, or expecting more than the person is capable of. For instance, I pointed out that he applies a different standard of evidence to the religious claims he makes, than to other things in his life, and this caused him no little difficulty. The cognitive dissonance kicked in quite quickly.
I've been able to get him to read Jerry Coyne's excellent "Why Evolution is true", and he's got far enough through it for me to also point out that the implications of his faith are that God ignored homo sapiens for perhaps 200,000 years, while he lived a wretched, short life, replete with suffering and danger, and only then chose to reveal himself to a bunch of bronze age (iron age?) nomads in the middle of nowhere.
He's honest enough to admit that that does cause him problems.
We'll see. He's an old friend, and (at risk of a false dichotomy) either he's wasting his life on fairy stories, or I'm going to burn in hell for all eternity.