A Guide to Creationist Tactics

I think you're forgetting "proof by martyrdom", which is merely to incubate the most infuriating, dishonest, and objectionable style of posting possible, making sure to break as many completely fair rules as possible, and then declare unconditional victory in the debate as both sides of the forum take steps to reign in your unruly behavior.I don't understand why "argument by providing evidence and defending against rebuttal" is such a rarely-employed creationist tactic. (Well, I mean I guess I do, but I'm wondering why creationists think creationists never use it.)

Consider me one atheist who soundly rejects what is basically a word-game - there's no difference between lack of belief and non-belief, by the law of the excluded middle. God has to exist or not-exist; it has to be one or the other, not both or neither. You can have varying levels of confidence in either position, all the way up to levels that are probably not logically or evidentiarily justified (Strong Atheism and Strong Theism, perhaps), or you can take absolutely no position on the matter at all.But there's really no basis to say that "lacking a belief in the existence of God" is different than "believing that God does not exist, to a specified degree of certainty." Those really are the same thing. The only way for them to be different would be that someone who had never even heard of God really does lack a belief in God yet takes no conscious position on the existence of God at all. Persons who do not believe in the existence of Zeus and Ares must necessarily be people who believe in the non-existence of Zeus and Ares. I certainly agree (not that you asked.) But the tendency among many is to cite this in support of a supposed difference between non-belief in existence and belief in non-existence, and that's invalid. The reason that the majority of atheists nonetheless leave the possibility of being convinced is because of their position on certainty, not their position on God.

Sure, but as soon as we inquire as to their position, and explain to them exactly what we're talking about, they're by definition now someone who has heard of God B.So the case where someone has no conception of what we're talking about is really very much a corner case. Anyone actually participating in the discussion can't be described by that case; certainly anyone who says "I don't believe in the non-existence of God; I just don't believe in the existence of God" is someone for whom, logically, that statement can't be true. True. Of course, one of the privileges of parenthood is the right and ability to instruct your child in whatever you think is right. As long as atheists are a minority, working to end that privilege is far more likely to be harmful to our children than helpful to theirs. Neither would it be contentious to say that he was white (assuming you are), or that he was British. If you ask me it's largely the result of the fact that we allow positions on matters of fact to be considered issues of personal identity.

Again I continue to be of the position that this is a result of someone's position on certainty, not their position on God.

I apologize if you feel that you've been misleadingly quoted. Perhaps I just didn't understand what that example was meant to get at.

I changed the names to their Greek equivalents because I didn't want to have to say "the Gods" to distinguish them from the planets. It wasn't my intent to engage in shenanigans, I promise.

Forgotten!

Yeah, that's probably true. I hadn't considered it, but maybe it is a function of language that we tend to not consider a middle ground between "certain" and "no idea", unless we've been trained to do so.

There's nothing illogical about it. We have statistical tests to detect randomness. They're the foundation of all scientific experimentation.

I told you. Because we have a statistical test for randomness.

There's a substantial field of mathematics, the results of which have indicated that order can frequently be derived from chaos. (And chaos from highly ordered rules.) Weird, since they're opposites, but true.