(March 16, 2014 at 2:47 pm)OGirly Wrote: Thanks so much! Lot's of great recommendations here for sure, and I appreciate the videos as well. I'll have quite a bit to work through over the summer with these I'm sure.Don't overwhelm yourself. Like any learning process, if you try to take in too much at once you can wind up confused. If you seek out information to bolster a decision you made (particularly one that can be pretty emotionally and mentally draining) you may wind up a bit disillusioned.
If you are "new" to atheism, then Dawkins' God Delusion is a good place to start, as I think it lays out the background of the debate in a straightforward manner. Harris or Hitchens are a good step up from that in any order, IMO.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
