The mistake is in their basic approach to logic. Once faith, which is belief without confirmation, is accepted as a legitimate means of discerning truth, evaluating things logically is no longer a priority. Everything just becomes a label or tribal identifier.

Here's something I wrote about the comparison in Lux's homosexuality thread:

For the majority of people, in the majority of technical discussions, their thought process can be articulated as, “Which talking head do I listen to?” To an extent, this is practical; it's always smart to get second opinions before going through a major procedure, for instance, but there's a certain point where you have to defer to things like expertise and reputation in deciding whether to listen to a doctor. They can give you a layman's description of the problem and their solution, but it's unlikely a real representation of it, and also unlikely you'll have much of a basis to argue with their reasoning (whether it's valid or not). The problem arises when we take the practical limits to our knowledge to be limits inherent to knowledge itself. Just because I don't understand why, from a technical standpoint, a course of antibiotics is supposed to help with an abscessed tooth, it doesn't mean there isn't something to know; that there isn't a very specific framework under which the process of its function can be explained from start to finish. Preachers and their ilk use the opaqueness of technical understanding to portray every belief as a blind deference to authority, because, well, in their case it probably is. I've never seen it demonstrated that there is some precise, consistent content to be understood about religion that really reconciles it with reality or substantiates its claims. There could be, but among vocal proponents of religion, I've seen no such thing.

Also, if no evidence is necessary to promote a concept to a belief, why is there a distinction between the two at all? If there is no objective criteria by which to sort truth from otherwise (including the contradiction/non-contradiction with reality, or even internally), there's nothing to distinguish between the validity of one faith and another, and every concept must be treated as believable for the mere fact that it can be conceived. This is why Sam Harris called faith a "conversation stopper." 

I guess it is true in a sense, that most atheists are devout rationalists in the only sense that we typically (generalizing here) have "earnest or sincere" belief in the virtue of rationality.

I also noticed something else that hasn't been brought up. The believer is lifelong, which presupposes , imo. that they think the believer is the default postion whereas the atheist must come to be one.

It doesn't matter if you 'believe Darwin was right' or not; evolutionary theory is factually correct, and as a result has produced countless applications that we take advantage of. If you do not understand the theory or care to understand it, that's your own perogative; being disinterested or ignorant of a topic does not somehow invalidate it.

Spuriously asserting that:

A) Nobody here has read On the Origin of Species

B) Evolutionary theory has not succeeded in successfully predicting what we have discovered in contemporary genetics

Is a rather bad start, as both claims are flatly incorrect. Now, you're right that Charles Darwin's own extrapolations on evolution were incomplete and glossed-over rather important details, but given that cellular theory wasn't even around in Darwin's day, I think we might be able to cut the man a bit of a break.

If evolution via natural selection is demonstrably false, then demonstrate it. What predictions does the theory make that are known to be wrong?

Here's a question you can go ahead and answer, since apparently religion should have equal footing to science: what applications do you see emerging from religious practice and study in, say, the next decade or so?

Most theist I know barely have a working knowledge of English. It's probably something they picked up from their preacher. You know... monkey see, monkey do.

You efficiently proceed to detonate this claim by establishing to everyone present that you do not in fact have any understanding of genetics.

No. Darwin was not able to account for the mechanism of inheritance because it was as of yet unknown. Darwin had proposed a principle for the modification of lineages over time on the basis of the fact that inherited characteristics which changed from one generated to the next could be acted upon by natural selection, not the mechanism behind which descent characteristics presented themselves from one generation to the next. Descent with modification had been observed. The mechanism behind it was not yet known at the time. I suggest you read On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection before making spurious claims about evolutionary theory or it's modern incarnations.

Quite the opposite. Originally, prior to the discoveries of Mendel, the then accepted principles of blending of descent were presented as counterarguments to Darwin's principle of natural selection of descent with modification, on the basis of the fact that inherited characteristics would tend to dissipate over generations. Needless to say, that was refuted with the discoveries of Mendel. Darwin's original theory does not contain a mechanism for descent with modification. It just works with the premise that there are variations in the characteristics of individuals in a population. After the work of Mendel, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis was formulated in order to formalize the principle of descent with modification in terms of particles of inheritance. The principles of the neo-Darwinian synthesis remain in acceptance today. The modern theory of evolution therefore contains the notion of evolution acting on populations by virtue of alterations in frequencies of alleles over time. That notion was not present in Darwin's original work (there was no such concept as "allele" when Origin was published). But the essence of the principle Darwin first proposed, that evolution acted upon populations exhibiting variation by natural selection, remains unchanged. The modern principles are the ones I have shown below. Principle #4 is the one which was inserted due to the work of Mendel:

Evolution: Over time, the characteristics of a lineage change.

Common Descent: All organisms have diverged from a common ancestor

Gradualism: Every organism, however different and distant from each other, is related, some distantly. Radical changes in phenotype and genotype have occurred by incremental processes by which lineages diverge from a common ancestor

Gene Frequency: The method by which evolution (the change in lineages) occurs is by changes in gene frequencies of populations. It is the change in proportion of individuals which have certain characteristics that determines the characteristic divergence of a lineage.

Natural Selection: The process by which gene frequencies are altered is characterized by the variations of organisms in a population, and how those variations determine the ability of the organism to survive and reproduce. The selection of alleles over others in a population will accordingly alter the frequency of genetic particles and hence the phenotype of a lineage.

Give me a break. What, did you actually think that you had found something that the entire genetics community had somehow missed or failed to take into account?

The neo-Darwinian theory is a formalization of what Darwin had originally proposed. Darwin never actually provided a mechanism for variation. Variation was merely taken as observed. The principle that Darwin put forth, namely, that variation in populations is acted upon by natural selection to produce alterations in lineages over generations, is not different from that proposed by the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

No they don't.  Relativistic kinematics (the thing that most "science types" use) is not a "modified version" of Newtonian physics. It is a completely different set of principles of mechanics! The first posulate of special relativity is a generalization of the principle of Galilean Relativity but the invariance of c and therefore the invalidity of the Galilean transforms would be foreign to Newtonian mechanics. As a consequence, there is almost no resemblance between Newtonian mechanics and Special Relativity excepting the equivalence of all inertial frames in both systems of mechanics. The consequences from a special Relativistic point of view (Relativity of simultaniety, Lorentz contraction, time dilation and variance of mass) are completely differnet to the consequences of the postulates of Newton. This is not in any way analogous to the formalization of evolution in terms of the neo-Darwinian synthesis after the discovery of particles of inheritance.

Darwins theory was certainly NOT based on any theories of how offspring aquire their characteristics from their parents. It was based on the obvious FACT that offspring are not identical with either parent, even though they usually ARE a blend of their parents. There is nothing ridiculous about the idea of them being 'a kind of average' of their parents, and it is actually true to a first approximation, but it was not understood what sort of mechanism controlled the contribution each child acquired from each parent. This was clarified when genetics, the actual mechanism of inheritance, was developed.

The starting point for Darwin was the observation that the individuals within a species DO vary amongst themselves, and from their parents, and from their siblings. One of Darwin's key assumptions was that this observed inter-generational variation could continue indefinitely and was not constrained to be purely a blend of existing characteristics, but could progressively change to an indefinitely large amount, with distant descendants possibly becoming unrecognizable from their ancestors. This assumption is actually NOT in any way based on ideas of 'averaged inheritance', it is arguably not consistent with it.

Once you assume there is some source of change like this, you have the raw material for Natural Selection' to work on.

So Darwin was basically correct, Genetics has shown that his assumption about variations from generation to generation being able to continue indefinitely was, in fact, correct, although he had no direct evidence for it. Apart from the fact that, given such an assumption, he could provide an explanation for the rich diversity of life and how different organisms adapted to different environments and ecological niches. It not only explained how life could branch into so many different varieties, but why many details of their structure were as they were, because the changes at each generation had to be small and still viable. This ruled out large changes from one generation to the next, and explained many less-than-ideal 'designs', like the vertebrate eye with the blood-vessels in front of the retina.

Again, genetic studies, especially gene-sequencing, have revealed that all life does seem to be related in the way Darwin's theory predicts.

Regarding the checklist:

1. Of course not. That is the mechanism of religious faith, where you 'pretend' to believe some proposition, in the hope that earnest committment will eventually lead them to accept it.

2. A no-brainer - if it was actually 'compelling', then by definition I would accept it. The question is are there, or can there be, any such arguments.

3. No.

4. It is a fact that persons who measure higher on various intelligence measures, and educational achievement, do tend to be less likely to believe in God, and understanding the nature of reality as uncovered by science requires more intellectual effort than simply accepting the arguments from authority which are the basis of religious 'teachings', scripture, etc.

5. I am on the 'side' of the methodical systematic investigation of reality, as against the empty ontologies of 'faith' and 'revelation'.

The study by the University of Aarhus was even better, but I messed up the link. 

http://tiny.cc/cQ6vx

Edit: Yay! Does the forum code not accept any urls beyond a certain length?

Was that meant to be a serious response? If so, you have added further support for the graph - if you are dumb enough to actually think that chart implies that "Atheism causes higher intelligence " rather than simply that people who can handle more complex arguments are more likely to be atheist, well....

Seriously, Capt, are you actually trying to make yourself sound dumb??

If it was meant to be sarcastic, you shouldn't have bothered. It's this sort of response which gets many of us quite irritated with you.

Pineapple, surely you've been in this forum long enough to know that's not what we meant, not to mention that your IQ is, I presume, much higher than average.

So, perhaps, the question is slightly misleading. For any guest of this forum, I should emphasize that the chain of causality is intelligence >>> atheism, not atheism >>> intelligence. On the other hand, I suppose it could also be argued that non-theism often promotes a deeper look at many philosophical questions, but even if this is true, I doubt it's nearly as significant as the opposite relationship. Also, of course, this study is simply an estimated average of the entire population, albeit, a good estimate. Applying the statistic to individuals would be absurd.