KungKras said:
Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennet and Harris use strawmen? When? Of course you can back that statement up by pointing out the arguments and explaining how and why they are strawmen. Oh, and when they try to defend scientific integrity in schoolbooks, is that being agressive too? |
You've just established a good starting point. They make the constant assertion or implication that religious people don't believe in the scientific method. This is clearly a strawman argument, I personally don't know any religious people who don't believe in science (although I have come across some on the Internet, I don't know where these people come from), so I am not sure how this is a valid argument against me or anyone else in my church. For starters, the Cosmological and Teleological arguments for the existence of God, nowadays, rely purely on scientific evidence as supporting points (especially the big bang theory).
If you are looking for a documented strawman argument from those 4, you don't have to look further than the thesis statement of the biggest book among them: The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins. The central point in The God Delusion is as follows: "If God created the Universe, who created God?"
The straw man he is beating up is some form of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam who believe in a created God. In reality: Christians, Jews, and Muslims do not believe in created Gods.
In other words, the central argument of the most popular book of the Neo-Atheist movement is a textbook example of a strawman argument.
I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.