Consider: If all the rest of the religious framework were granted, would the talking snake be an additional problem? No. The talking snake is only absurd if you refuse to grant the rest of the religious framework. The fact that a snake is talking is not, of itself, the source of any additional problem - unless you were to argue that it fits the mode of a classic bias like minimal counterintuitiveness or thinking that "talking" is a simple feature that can easily be grafted on, etc. But the point is, the part where a talking snake is in this story, is, presuming the story's other premises, not the proper subject of the dispute.

The problem is the other premises, and notions like sin passed down through generations, or that the sin was contained in an easily accessible tree put right there in the Garden (trap much?), or the fact that a supernatural God is in the story - and so on and so on.

When you look at it from that perspective, then indeed, saying "Ha ha, a talking snake" is the exact mirror image of saying "Ha ha, a monkey birthed a human", because it takes refuge in absurdity instead of addressing the most important part of an argument as a whole.

If I were talking to a Muslim (on this level) about evolution, my next questions would probably be: "Are you aware that humans give birth to deformed babies?" and "Do you think a monkey could give birth to a deformed baby that looks like a human baby?"

Do I think that a snake could produce sounds that can be interpreted as words? Well, yeah. "Can I eat this apple?" "Sssss..." "Sounded like yessss to me, let's eat."

The use of absurdity seems more like a tool to enforce group norms than a means of conversion. That doesn't mean the beliefs aren't absurd, just that pointing out the absurdity of outsiders is common practice by in-group members. Most creationist-minded believers would use some similarly absurd way of describing evolution, with the group benefit of passing along "evolution is stupid" meme. That said, it is important to start to tease apart just how many other enforcement strategies are out there, as they are going to need to be dealt with one by one.

What the lady in Cairo regarded as absurd (a monkey having a human baby) has almost no relation to what educated people who believe in evolution actually believe. What Bill Mahers regarded as absurd (a talking snake) is exactly what many Christians actually believe. The two assertions of absurdity are therefore not alike in the way that you suggest they are.

I agree with your underlying point about the absurdity heuristic not working well, but do any of us not realize this already given what modern physics tells us of the universe we live in?

I agree with your point about the absurdity heuristic.

However, I'm not sure that the three following points are relevant to the case of theism:

• If a large number of intelligent people believe something, it deserves your attention. After you've studied it on its own terms, then you have a right to reject it. You could still be wrong, though.

• Even if you can think of a good reason why people might be biased towards the silly idea, thus explaining it away, your good reason may still be false.

• If someone cannot explain why something is not stupid to you over twenty minutes at a cafe, that doesn't mean it's stupid. It just means it's complicated, or they're not very good at explaining things.

What if we have strong evidence that the people who hold the seemingly absurd belief all have similar biases? More, what if a very large fraction of these people admit that they're biased, and are even proud of it?

That's exactly what the situation is with regard to theism, of course. Most theists admit that their religious beliefs are based only, or mostly, on faith. Some state it outright, others hide it behind circumlocutions and nebulous metaphors, and yet others need to be pushed a bit before they'll admit it, but the result is the same.

Does it still matter, then, that many of these people are intelligent, or that some of these religious beliefs may be very complex, or that I haven't studied some of them with great attention?

"What on Earth makes you think monkeys can change into humans?"

It seems - based upon personal experience - that the difference between the rational and the irrational is that the rational at least attempts to present a cogent answer to such questions in a way that actually answers the question; the irrational just gets mad at you for asking.

"The absurdity heuristic doesn't work very well."

• indeed. It even seems that it is an inconsistent heuristic. The existence of an omnipotent God sounds only finitely absurd. But once you grant the existence of said God, any event, no matter how absurd, becomes plausible (for example, a talking snake). Just add the explanation "god wanted it to happen, so it happened".

But "There exists a talking snake" is strictly more likely to be true than "There exists a talking snake, and it was created by The God Yahweh".

FTW... (read more)

"Haha, no, of course I don't believe in monkeys transforming into humans! That'd never work. I just think they diverged from a common ancestor, many hundreds of thousands of years ago. Surely you're aware of the differences between, say, sunni and shia islam, despite both believing that all the same prophets said all the same things, and splitting only a few hundred years back? To say nothing of the other Abrahamic religions.

Think of a living organism as being like a city, with cells like individual households, each keeping their own copy of DNA scrip... (read more)

Anything sufficiently beyond the bounds of what you've accepted as normal is 'absurd'. Rejecting a point, an argument, or a conclusion on the grounds that it's absurd is unreasonable. It is, in essence, refusing to consider the possibility of something on the grounds that you don't already affirm it.

" I think theism is wrong. "

I believe you are likely to be right.

"I think it can be demonstrated to be wrong on logical grounds."

I'm really intrigued. How?

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 t... (read more)

As a previous poster has said, the absurdity heuristic works very well indeed - if something seems absurd to me, I need a lot of evidence before I'll believe it. As Hume said:

"no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish."

If someone claims that a talking snake is the reason for every bad thing that anyone has ever done, they're going to have to provide some evidence that this is the case. If they claim that peop... (read more)

How about this: if you think a belief is absurd and someone else disagrees, listen to their explanation of why it's not absurd.

This allows us to keep the heuristic while avoiding her mistake. The heuristic allows us to tell very quickly upon observation of their claims whether something's gone wrong in someone's reasoning process. This is justified in a similar way to how it's justified to be skeptical if someone tells you they've discovered a new prime number that happens to end with a 2.

The absurdity heuristic does work well. Almost every possible absurd claim is false. Like most heuristics, it only becomes a problem when you continue using it outside its realm of usefulness.

I just don't think it's as easy as saying "talking snakes are silly, therefore theism is false." And I find it embarrassing when >atheists say things like that, and then get called on it by intelligent religious people.

Sure, there is some embarrasment that others may not be particularly good at communicating, and thus saying something like that is just preaching to the choir, but won't reach the theist.

But, I do not find anything intellectually wrong with the argument, so what one is being called out on is being a bad propagandist, meme-gen... (read more)