Principia

Having gone to several of these evo-bashing Xian get togethers in my days, let me suggest that you bring along your favorite biology professor, preferably one who is also Xian. The first thing I usually ask at these types of meetings is "How many of you have a degree in biology or work directly in the field." If I get whining about how everybody in the room is an intelligent human being capable of weighing "objective" facts for themselves or if I see no hands raised, I just stand up and walk out. Atheism has nothing to do with evolution. Atheistic evangelism in evo discussions is inevitably going to backfire. Just a friendly reminder

Shpongle

I second this. Trying to teach evolution to a bunch of people who aren't interested in learning about it in the first place will be futile. Rather, just concentrate on showing the flawed reasoning, poor science, and outright lies behind whatever creationist arguments get thrown your way.

DivineOb

Alright thank you everyone for your input. I think maybe I should be focusing my effort on arguing against a young earth etc instead of defending evolution (though I will bring up transitional forms).

Principia:
Most of the meetings have been on general apologetics (how can we trust the gospels, the historicity of the resurrection, etc.). The evolution topic is just starting up.

Principia

Hey, I am wondering if t.o. or anyone else has the Ev/Cre faqs up in some form of pdf or formatted output so that people can readily make pamphlets out of them. I think it'd make a great resource for people going to the kind of meetings DivineOb is.

Secular Pinoy

They have pdfs, but they're not phamplet material. They're not even good to look at if printed, IMO. Making a few of them printer friendly is going to take a lot of work. Give me a week and I might be able to make a few, probably the one with the five major misconception.

Don't hold you're breath though, as I tend to get distracted rather easily with these kinds of projects.

pz

Another resource is the NCSE.

Principia

Hey, let me know how I (or anyone else) can help.

Shpongle

One other point is I think you should make sure to rigidly define the topic of debate. IOW, if you are going to be debating biological evolution, then make sure things like the origin of the universe, etc, are kept out of the debate. I mention this, because I notice it's common tactics among some creationists to perform to old "bait 'n switch" and/or lump all sorts of things in with evolution (ala "Dr." Dino).

DivineOb

Well thank you everyone for your input into what I should go over at the meeting... Just letting you all know how it went which, unfortunately, was pretty much a waste of time.

These meetings haven't been drawing very many people usually (only about 6 total) but I figured since this time was convering a pretty contentious issue there would be more. Unfortunately there weren't. Also, most of the people there (except for the leader) were pretty much ignorant of both evolution and creation (other than that creation is 'right') so whenever I would say anything it would basically be me and the leader talking, and I would feel like I was hijacking the meeting.

Anyway, I pointed out when the leader raised points which weren't valid (he brought up the moon dust argument and the moon receding from the earth argument) but he didn't really offer much defense when I did and I didn't really feel comfortable going on the offensive too much (I don't know why but I always get wimpy at these meetings... I feel too much like I'm their guest or something). I really wish I had taken the offensive in demonstrating why creation is not a valid hypothesis but oh well...

Hastur

Edited because I should learn to read the whole thread before posting.