A new wave of iPhone applications is giving both sides quick points to use in the debate over the existence of God
Paul Vitello
An explosion of smart-phone software has placed an arsenal of trivia at the fingertips of every corner-bar debater with talking points on sports, politics and how to kill a zombie. Now it is taking on the least trivial topic of all: God.
Publishers of Christian material have begun producing iPhone applications that can cough up quick comebacks and rhetorical strategies for believers who want to fight back against what they view as a new strain of strident atheism. And a competing crop of apps is arming nonbelievers for battle. "Say someone calls you narrow- minded because you think Jesus is the only way to God," says one top-selling application introduced in March by a Christian publishing company. "Your first answer should be: 'What do you mean by narrow-minded?""
For religious skeptics, the "Bible Thumper" iPhone app boasts that it "allows the atheist to keep the most funny and irrational Bible verses right in their pocket" to be "always ready to confront fundamentalist Christians or have a little fun among friends, "The war of ideas between believers and nonbelievers has been part of the western tradition at least since Socrates. For the most part, it has been waged by intellectual giants: Augustine, Spinoza, Aquinas, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche.
Yet for good or ill, combatants entering the lists today are mainly everyday people, drawn in part by the popularity of books like Richard Dawking' "The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great."The fierceness of their debate reflects the fractious talk show culture unintentionally described so aptly in the title of the Glenn Beck best-seller "Arguing with idiots." In a dozen new phone applications, whether faith-based or faith-bashing, the prospective debater is give a primer on the basic rules of engagement - how to parry the circular argument, the false dichotomy, the adhominem attack, the straw man - and then coached on all the likely flashpoints of contention. Why Darwinism is scientifically sound, or not. The difference between intelligent design and creationism and whether either theory has any merit . The proof that America was, or was not, founded on Christian principles.
Users can scroll from topic to topic to prepare themselves or,in the heat of a dispute, search for the point at hand - and the perfect retort. Software creators on both sides say they are only trying to help others see the truth, But most applications focus less on scholarly exegesis than on scoring points.
One app, "Fast Facts, Challenges & Tactics" by LifeWay Christian Resources, suggests that in "reasoning with an unbeliever" it is sometimes effective to invoke the "anthropic principle," which posits, more or less, that the world as we know it is mathematically too improbable to be an accident.
It offers an example: "The Bible's 66 books were written over a span of 1,500 years by 40different authors on three different continents who wrote in three different languages. Yet this diverse collection has a unified story line and no contradictions." "The Atheist Pocket Debater," on the other hand, asserts that because miracles like Moses' parting of the waters are not occurring in modern times, "it is unreasonable to accept that the events happened" at all. "If you take any miracle from the Bible," it explains, "and tell your co-workers at your job that this recently happened to someone you will undoubtedly be laughed at,"
These applications and other - like "One Minute Answers to Skeptics " and " Answers for catholics" - appear to be selling briskly, if nowhere near as fast as the top sellers among the book apps in their iPhone category: ghost stories, free books and the King James Bible.
Sean McDowell, the editor of "Fast Facts" and some textbooks for bible students, said he has become increasingly aware of a skill gap between believers and nonbelievers who he feels tend to be instinctively more savvy at arguing. "Christians who believe, become 'Bible-thumpers' who seen dogmatic and insecure about their convictions," he said."We have to deal with that." "Nowadays, atheists are coming to the forefront at every level of society from the top of academia all the way down to the level of the average Joe," added McDowell, a seminary PhD candidate whose phone app was produced by the B7H Publishing Group, one of the country's largest distributors of Bibles and religious textbooks.
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