I can assure you, I have personally seen atheists make arguments that are just as misinformed as the frog thingie.

For that matter, I've seen people who don't know much about evolution but are arguing for it tell creationists that a counterpoint to their claim exists somewhere, even though they don't actually know of such a "knock-down argument". And they were right.

Well, that's why I said ideally. Lots of people believe evolution as a matter of faith rather than reason. I'd tend to say it's a far more easily justified faith - after all you can find the answers to the questions you're talking about very easily, or at least find the general direction they're in, and the more rational people seem almost universally to believe in it, and it networks into webs of trust that seem to allow you to actually do things with your beliefs, but it's true that many people engage with it only superficially. You'd be foolish to believe in evolution just because Joe Blogs heard that we evolved on TV. Joe Blogs isn't necessarily doing any more thinking, if that's all he'll give you to go on, than if he'd heard from his pastor that god did it all.

Joe Blogs may be able to give you good reasons for believing in something without giving you an answer on your exact point - but more generally you shouldn't believe it if all he's got in his favour is that he does and he's got unjustified faith that there must be an answer somewhere.

A heuristic tends towards truth, it's the way to bet. There are situations where you follow the heuristic and what you get is the wrong answer, but the best you can do with the information at hand.

Also, you seem to be modelling religious people as engaging in bad faith. Am I misreading you here?

I consider someone who, without good basis, tells you that there's an answer and doesn't even point you in its direction, to be acting in bad faith. That's not all religious people but it seems to me at the moment to be the set we'd be talking about here.

Sure, but that was what we call an example. Creationists often make far more complex and technical-seeming arguments, which may well be beyond the expertise of the man on the street.

Maybe so, but going back to our heuristics those arguments don't hook into a verifiable web of trust.

In case I wasn't clear earlier: I do believe that when many people believe in something with good basis they're often believing in the work of a community that produces truth according to certain methods - that what's being trusted is mostly people and little bits here and there that you can verify for yourself. What grounds do you have for trusting pastors, or whoever, know much about the world - that they're good and honest producers of truth?

Maybe I parsed this wrong. Are you saying no incorrect argument has ever been made for atheism?

No, I'm saying that to my knowledge no Christian has yet corrected someone who's reasonably rational on their reason for disbelieving.

Well, many do open with what they consider to be knock-down arguments, of course. But many such arguments are, y'know, long, and require considerable background knowledge.

Knockdown arguments about large differences of belief tend to be short, because they're saying that someone's really far off, and you don't need a lot of evidence to show that someone's a great distance out. Getting someone to buy into the argument may be more difficult if they don't believe that argument is a valid method, (and a great many people don't really,) but the argument itself should be quite small.

If someone's going to technicality you to death, that's a sign that their argument is less likely to be correct if they're applying it to a large difference of belief. Scientists noticeably don't differ on the large things - they might have different interpretations of precise matters but the weight of evidence when it comes to macroscopic things is fairly overwhelming.

If you have such an unanswerable argument, why aren't you "singing it from the rooftops"?

I don't think that people who believe in god are necessarily worse off than people who don't. If you could erase belief in god from the world, I doubt it would make a great deal of difference in terms of people behaving rationally. If anything I'd say that the reasons that religion is going out of favour have more to do with a changing moral character of society and the lack of an ability to provide a coherent narrative of hope than they do with a rise of more rationally based ideologies.

Consequently, it's not an efficient use of my time. While you can say 'low probability prior, no supporting evidence, no predictive power,' in five seconds, that's going to make people who don't have a lot of intellectual courage recoil from what you're suggesting - if they understand it at a gut level at all - and in any case teaching the tools to understand what that means can take hours. And teaching someone to bring their emotions in line with justified beliefs can take months or years on top of that. Especially if you're going to have to sit down with them and walk them through all the steps to come to a belief that they don't really want very much in the first place.

Okay, sure, 'that which can be destroyed by the truth should be' - but at what cost, in what order? Don't you have better things to do with your time than pick on Christians whose lives may even be made worse by your doing so if they don't subsequently become more rational and develop well actualised theories of happiness and so on? Can you really provide a better life than a belief in god does for them? Even if you assume that making someone disbelieve god is a low-effort task, it wouldn't be as simple as just having someone disbelieve if you were to do it to promote their interests.

If there are a more efficient way of doing it then I might be up for that, but I'm just more generally interested in raising the sanity waterline that I am with swating individual beliefs here and there.

Minor point, but you realize EY wasn't the first to make this argument? And while I did invent this counterargument, I'm far from the first to do so. For example, Yvain.

I do yes, I was made to read Dawkin's awful book a few years back in school. =p