By the stars, I think the boy may have just become a man! :)

(Also, you can see adversity anywhere you look for it. Doesn't mean there's any intelligence behind it - I mean, really, you think the government is capable of that level of coordination? You give your fellow humans too much credit by far!)

Sneaky, yes, but effective.

Well, to be fair, we are talking about rhetoric here - y'know, the art of persuading people to believe things they don't already believe. Ergo Ratio already made a good point about efficacy, so I'll not repeat him; I'll just add the clarification that how you say it often makes more difference than what is being said.

Would that really be so different to God impregnating a teenager with himself and therefore being both father and son at the same time?

I mean really, you can't apply these kinds of standards to religion. It just doesn't work.

Like telling a good joke, you don't give away the punchline at the beginning. You have to sneak this one up on the theists. Start by pinning down their objections to evolution along the lines of "So, you don't see any way that complex beings can arise from simple conditions?" (or preferably get them to say something like that) and, assuming their agreement and bedding it down with a few more examples, you could ask "well, how complex would you say God is?"

Bingo, Joffan. I think Ergo Ratio (#12) is right that, if we present this argument flat-out, the typical theist will respond with something like, "But God doesn't need a creator because he is the First Cause," or some other thinly disguised form of special pleading. But that's true of any argument, really: If you openly lay out a whole string of deductions from premises to conclusion, you're inviting your opponent to reject all of them. It's like showing everyone what weapons you're carrying before you go to war.

It's much more effective to state your premises without revealing where you're going with them right from the beginning - state them in a way that seems harmless or even congenial to the opposing view, get your opponent to agree with them. Then, once you've cut off the obvious escape routes, do you lower the boom. Sarah Braasch showed us how this is done just two weeks ago. Sneaky, yes, but effective.

"The new Audi Quattro XVI is so perfectly engineered, you'll think it was designed by a god.

-fully equipped model shown, see dealer for extras, factory rebates subject to revision visit audi.com for details..."

Well, they have more practice because religion is a joke.

Also, on an unrelated note I just wonder if you'd be intrested in this piece of very poor polling:

http://forums.narutofan.com/showthread.php?t=554264

Athiests seem to massively prefer the idea of Reincarnation to Heaven or Oblivion.

This is the argument many theists will use to counter the "infinite regression of creators" problem. They'll say, "The universe couldn't have just always existed/ come into being by itself, since the universe is physical, and physical things have to follow laws of physical cause and effect. But God is magic, and he doesn't have to follow those laws, and therefore... (insert fuzzy thinking here)."

It's a terrible argument -- mostly because it just defines its way out of the problem without actually thinking about it -- but it is the argument many theists will make, and we have to be ready for it.

I know from experience that this argument will fall flat with any theist.

Ergo: Are there any arguments that don't fall flat with theists?

Theists have an answer for everything. Not a good answer, but an answer: from "God is magic and the rules of cause and effect don't apply to him," to, "Not everything can be understood by evidence and logic," to, "I feel it in my heart."

But I think making the arguments is still worthwhile. When I did a survey in my blog asking non-believers what finally convinced them to let go of their beliefs, the reasons they gave were many of the reasons we give in our debates with believers. Getting those ideas out in the world will (hopefully) mean that fewer people will have to re-invent the wheel. Also, a surprising number of people said that they were convinced, at least in part, by talking with or reading atheist arguments... reassuring for those of us who often feel like we're banging our heads against a wall. (And the reasons they gave were all over the map: there wasn't just one knock-down argument that convinced everyone.)

I know when I was deconverting, one of the things that made a big difference was that every single argument I made could be shot down by non-believers. It wasn't that one particular argument was so unanswerable: it was that all of them together looked like a much stronger case than mine: more rational, less rationalizing.

I would say, however, that in general the punchline approach to debate is far more proficiently used by the religious side than the atheists, so you may not get away with it.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him think.