Expert: Austin Cline - 3/18/2005

Question
hi,
I have problems with christians. They really are not convinced by logical reasonings and evidence.
Many times I thought that I really have convinced them in some ways that the the bible is just a myth and christianity a setup. But they all seems immune to reasoning! I got some killer punch lines from www.infidelguy.com but it's useless. I've debated with them for years without progress. It seems like they really are infected by some sort of virsus that cannot be cured. Is there any ways to convince them?
Thanks.  

Answer
I think that you are setting your sights too high and, as a consequence, keep being disappointed. No one has ever been "converted" from a single conversation. Even when it seems that way, the conversation is simply the culmination of a long process of building doubts.

Instead, you should probably aim for encouraging people to do better at skeptical, critical thinking. I call this "planting a seed of doubt." Get them to question and reconsider, not reject religion completely.

Key to this is getting them to build their critical thinking skills. Most people aren't very good at this, not even atheists, but the better a person becomes the better off they are. An important obstacle to this is the fact that being bad at critical thinking actually prevents a person from *realizing* that they are bad at it:

http://atheism.about.com/od/logicalflawsinreasoning/a/unskilled.htm

So getting people to do better at being skeptical is not easy. In the long run, though, teaching someone how to reason better should bear fruit. They may not become an atheist, but their religious position should become a lot more liberalized.