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CynicalOptimist comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
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There seems a tacit assumption here that all people who read the bible believe it is to be taken literally. Now I'm not stating my own religious views or lack thereof here, but it seems to me that this "talking snake" approach fails on entirely other grounds... namely, that it assumes that the "talking snake" story is not an allegory or metaphor. These are very old stories, told in a very poetic voice, and to take them literally is certainly absurd... It seems to me that Maher joins the absurdity by assuming the premise that "all things in the bible are to be taken literally." This is NOT a premise believed by all or even most Christians. Many interpret the bible and it's stories in an attempt to glean the meanings of those stories. Naturally there are ignorami who DO believe that the bible is to be taken literally. To extrapolate their beliefs to all Christians is to perpetrate the most basic of logical mistakes: if A is B, and A is C, then all B's are C. (e.g., If Bob is a Christian, and Bob believes in talking snakes, then all Christians believe in talking snakes.)
I think this just underscores the original post's point.
The lesson here isn't that Christians are probably right or that Christians are probably wrong. The lesson here is that you can go very wrong by relying on the absurdity heuristic. And that that's true even when the claim seems really absurd.
Let's take a hypothetical atheist who really does think that all Christians believe in the literal word of the Bible. This atheist might reject the whole of Christianity because of the absurdity of talking snakes. Having rejected the entire school of thought that all of Christianity represents, he never has the opportunity to find out that he was wrong (about all Christians taking the Bible literally). Therefore be never realises that he had flawed reasons for rejecting religion.
The woman in the story has a similarly inaccurate understanding of what (many) evolutionists believe. The flawed understanding is part of the issue.
This bias applies to people who reject an idea on the grounds that it seems absurd, but their assessment of 'absurdity' is based on their limited, probably inaccurate, understanding of the topic.