Description

Over a space of fifty years, Frank R. Zindler took part in more than four hundred informal discussions and debates on radio and television and in dozens of formal debates on public platforms. Lamentably, most of them were not recorded at all, and most of those for which recordings were made were of such low quality that they could not reliably be transcribed for publication. Out of the remainder, only three were deemed suitable for annotation and use for instruction of Atheists and others who regularly are challenged by religionists to defend the scientific and skeptical position of the Free Thinker. Annotated transcripts of those three debates comprise Volume Ill of Through Atheist Eyes.

In the first debate, Zindler engages John Koster, the author of a nasty book?The Atheist Syndrome?in which he argues with book-length ad hominem that Atheists basically are mentally ill due to absent or abusive fathers. Unable to define his god, Koster loses the debate even in the eyes of devout Christians in the audience. In the second debate, Noah’s Ark hunter/geologist John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research is challenged to show evidence that there is an ocean liner-size boat perched atop an extinct volcano in Turkey. In the third debate, superstar creationist debater Duane T. Gish is tricked into admitting that creationism is not science.

Elaborate notes help readers to gain a better understanding of the factual dimensions of the subjects under dispute and are intended not only to give readers a sense of Zindler’s strategy and support base in these debates but also to help them better intuit the strategies and purposes of Koster, Morris, and Gish.

About the Author

Frank R. Zindler has been an atheist activist since 1959 when he began publicly to defend the teaching of evolution and to criticize religious encroachments upon the public sphere. A professor of biology and geology at SUNY for almost twenty years, he was forced to give up teaching when he joined Madalyn Murray O’Hair in a lawsuit that attempted to remove ?In God We Trust?; from American currency.

A linguist and editor of scientific literature, he is a former member of The Jesus Seminar and the current Jesus Project and is the author of The Jesus the Jews Never Knew. He is a veteran of more than 400 commercial radio and TV interviews and debates in defense of atheism.

Details

ISBN-13:?9781578840137
Publisher:?American Atheist Press
Page Count:?293