As someone who enjoys debunking myths and misconceptions, I found The Debunking Handbook by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky interesting. It is only six pages long, but includes some tips that will be useful for teaching in general as well as in debunking efforts.

[The New Atheist's] embarrassing incapacity for philosophical reasoning … that raises the wild non-sequitur almost to the level of a dialectical method

David Bentley Hart in Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, as quoted by Ian H. Hutchinson in the article Engaging Today’s Militant Atheist Arguments. The same article quotes Terry Eagleton as writing:

Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.

The fact is, however, that the historical conflict between science and Christianity is historical only in the sense that it is the creation of historians.

This is an important point that needs to be understood by more people. Far from being the historical Christian view, Young Earth Creationism did not gain wide popularity until after the 1961 publication of Whitcomb and Morris’ book The Genesis Flood. The spread of the ideas in Whitcomb and Morris’ book contributed to the wide acceptance of a distorted view of the early debates over natural selection. This view has become so prevalent that even many christians do not realize that the Young Earth Creationism and a war between religion and science is not the historical Christian perspective, but a recent development. Livingstone’s book is a welcome contribution to correcting this myth.

Now, to find a good book on Galileo…

BibTeX citation:

@book{Livingstone:1987,
	Author = {David N. Livingstone},
	Publisher = {William B. Eerdmans and Scottish Academic Press},
	Title = {Darwin's Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter Between
	             Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought},
	Year = {1987}
}