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gwern comments on Open Thread, May 1-14, 2013 - Less Wrong
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You may find this helpful: http://prosblogion.ektopos.com/archives/2012/02/results-of-the-.html
This is interesting. It shouldn't be surprising coming from philosophers, but it can be instructional anyway. There are as many atheists who have never heard a decent defense of religion as there are religious fundamentalists who have never bothered to think rationally.
This seems improbable, considering that there are vastly more religious people than atheists.
Props for being technical. You know what I meant.
Even in the non-technical sense, he's still making a relevant counterpoint, because it's much, much harder for atheists to go without exposure to religious culture and arguments than for a religious person to go without exposure to atheist arguments or culture (insofar as such a thing can be said to exist.)
I don't just mean being exposed to religious culture and arguments, I mean good arguments. I know, practically everyone here was raised religious and given really bad reasons to believe. But I think those may become a straw dummy—what I'm skeptical of is how many people here have heard a religious argument that actually made them think, one that has a chance in a real debate.
good arguments don't in general have a chance in a real debate, because debates are not about reasoning. But that's a nitpick.
I've seen a lot of religious people claiming to have access to strong arguments for theism, but have never seen one myself.
As JoshuaZ asks, you must have a strong argument or you wouldn't think this line of discussion was worth anything. What is it?
I'm going to second JoshuaZ here. There's a lot of disagreement among theists about what the best arguments for theism are. I'd rather not try to represent any particular argument as the best one available for theism, because I can't think of anything that theists would universally agree on as a good argument, and I don't endorse any of the arguments myself.
I would say that most atheists are at least exposed to arguments that apologists of some standing, such as C.S. Lewis or William Lane Craig, actually use.
So why not present what you think these good arguments are?
A-causal blackmail, once I thought deeply about why it might be scary. Took about an hour to refute it (to my satisfaction) - whether it would have a chance in a 'real debate': debate length, forum, allotted quiet thinking time and other confounds make me uncertain of your intended meaning.