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sam0345 comments on Book trades with open-minded theists - recommendations? - Less Wrong
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I think Dallas is going in the right direction here. It's not enough to convince someone that God is impossible- you need to give them a replacement. (And convincing someone that the Church is a harmful force- when they don't get the impression their local church is- is difficult and probably not worthwhile.) For example, as mentioned elsewhere the primary argument of Mere Christianity is probably "Christianity is an optimized meme for getting humans to believe it- that's evidence for humanity being built around the meme." The counterargument is that the meme is built around humanity- but to do that you need naturalistic explanations for all the pieces that Christianity relies on, like the feeling of universal (i.e. built-in) morality.
If you are going to recommend Dawkins, I suggest The Selfish Gene, as it's the best explanation of evolution that I've come across (and once they believe in evolution, they're on the path to realizing God is unnecessary).
Evolution is no threat to religion. Natural selection, explaining and predicting evolution is a threat to religion.
Indeed, one can usefully define any belief system as quasi religious if it finds natural selection threatening. If that belief system piously proclaims its admiration for Darwin while evasively burying his ideas, attributing to him common descent, rather than the explanation of common descent, then that belief system is religious, or serves the same functions and has the same problems as religion.
The trouble is that natural selection implies not the lovely harmonious nature of the environmentalists and Gaea worshipers, but a ruthless and bloody nature, red in tooth and claw, that is apt to be markedly improved by a bit of clear cutting, a few extinctions, and a couple of genocides, and of course converting the swamps into sharply differentiated dry land with few trees, and lakes with decent fishing, by massive bulldozing. And a few more genocides. Recall Darwin's cheerful comments about extinction and genocide. It is all progress. Well, if not all progress, on average it will be progress.
My understanding is that wetlands are massively useful from an ecological point of view, particularly when it comes to absorbing large amounts of water (like you get during floods or other extreme weather events).
Evolution, paleontology and geology and biology in general are definitely threat to religion in both forms most popular today - strict Bible/Koran conservative literalist faith and fluffy liberal one.
The first is simply proven wrong - the world was not created in six days, there was no worldwide flood, etc.
And the case for all-loving, all-forgiving god or "spiritual force" is refuted even more decisively.
What is left open is the case for the supreme bastard of the universe, the obssesive-compulsive psychopathic sadist who painstakingly designs 500,000 species of beetles and then watches how they devour each other. ;-)
Firstly, looks to me that the predominant religion is environmentalism, and evolution is no threat to environmentalism, but natural selection is.
Secondly, if you insist on religion strictly defined, religions that frankly admit that they are religious, these days most of them propose theistic evolution. Only a minority of believers propose that the world was created a few thousand years ago.
What the Fish and Wildlife service attempts to enforce, looks very much like theistic evolution also. Consider, for example, the red wolf controversy and the Californian spotted owl controversy. If you believe in natural selection, they should not attempt to enforce their official government species definitions on nature, when the creatures concerned keep having sex with each other regardless of official species boundaries. The barred owl is superior to the spotted owl, which may well be the reason why female spotted owls like to have sex with barred owls. If you believe that nature should take its course, let nature take its course.
Natural selection refutes the case for a nice god. However, the Fish and Wildlife service is attempting to enforce a concept of nature and evolution that owes more to Disney films such as "Bambi", which version of evolution is entirely compatible with a nice guy god.
I think Evil had the right idea.
The idea that destroying the environment will make the remaining species "better" by making sure that only the "fittest" survive betrays a near-total misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution is just the name we give to the fact that organisms (or, more precisely, genes) which survive and reproduce effectively in a given set of conditions become more frequent over time. If you clear-cut the forest, you're not eliminating "weak" species and making room for the "strong" — you're getting rid of species that were well-adapted to the forest and increasing the numbers of whatever organisms can survive in the resulting waste.
And if you massacre coyotes and deport grey wolves so that the alleged red wolf "species" will not have sex with other canids, what are you doing?
If you slaughter barred owls so that they will not compete with or have sex with spotted owls what are you doing?
We are preserving dead wood so that spotted owls will have suitable nests, but due to fire prevention, there is a lot more dead wood in forests than would ever happen naturally, a lot more dead wood than there ever has been in the history of the earth. The spotted owl really is an inferior species to the barred owl - and female spotted owls don't seem to think it is a species at all.
Even if ignore all problems ofderiving ought from is, there is problem which parts of nature we are supposed to follow.
If Darwin says "kill them all, the strongest will survive", then Kelvin would say "kill yourself, why bother waiting to heat death of the universe?"