Book trades with open-minded theists - recommendations?

The argument from metaethics was outdated from the beginning, at least for Christian apologetic purposes. Moral laws of all tribes and civilizations are compatible and are completely opposed to message of Jesus.

Natural law says: love your family. Jesus says: abandon them and follow me. Natural law: love your friends, hate your enemies. Jesus: love everyone. Natural law: defend yourself. Jesus: do not resist. Natural law: defend your property. Jesus: give up everything etc, etc....

Without evo psych, they're flawed. With evo psych, they're entirely destroyed.

Different things are appropriate for different people. Is the mesorah an issue to this person? The problem of suffering? Logical problems of omniscience? Here) are things on the integrity of the tradition. That's something unique to Judaism, so I mention it here; I don't mention it because I think the same writings would be most recommended to everyone.

There is a principle in laws relating to being kosher, a utensil is cleansed by the same process that got it contaminated with unkosher contamination. I think there is wisdom in this principle. To the extent one believes in a religion for social reasons, it is worthwhile to introduce countervailing social forces, no more and no less force. Likewise for those who believe in religion because they believe in the integrity of the tradition, confronting them with the problem of evil is probably not too productive.

Help: how do I create a hyperlink to an address ending in a closing parenthesis?

I can't see Oppy or Martin (or Mackie, or Sobel, or Everitt, any of the many other kinda-similar books) being the best recommendation for someone whose choice of Christian book is "Mere Christianity". (One can do much, much worse than "Mere Christianity", but it's not exactly a work of rigorous philosophical investigation.) ... At least, that's if M.C. really was intended to convince rather than merely to describe.

Incidentally, there's a paperback edition of the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology coming out real soon now, at something like 1/4 of the (eyewateringly high) price of the hardback.

Reading a book.

Seconded. Heck, even the Catholic Church says there is no conflict.

Today, the Church's unofficial position is an example of theistic evolution, also known as evolutionary creation,[2] stating that faith and scientific findings regarding human evolution are not in conflict, though humans are regarded as a special creation, and that the existence of God is required to explain both monogenism and the spiritual component of human origins. Moreover, the Church teaches that the process of evolution is a planned and purpose-driven natural process, actively guided by God.

Evolution is no threat to religion.

Evolution, paleontology and geology and biology in general are definitely threat to religion in both forms most popular today - strict Bible/Koran conservative literalist faith and fluffy liberal one.

The first is simply proven wrong - the world was not created in six days, there was no worldwide flood, etc.

And the case for all-loving, all-forgiving god or "spiritual force" is refuted even more decisively.

What is left open is the case for the supreme bastard of the universe, the obssesive-compulsive psychopathic sadist who painstakingly designs 500,000 species of beetles and then watches how they devour each other. ;-)

that is apt to be markedly improved by a bit of clear cutting, a few extinctions, and a couple of genocides, and of course converting the swamps into sharply differentiated dry land with few trees, and lakes with decent fishing, by massive bulldozing

My understanding is that wetlands are massively useful from an ecological point of view, particularly when it comes to absorbing large amounts of water (like you get during floods or other extreme weather events).

The idea that destroying the environment will make the remaining species "better" by making sure that only the "fittest" survive betrays a near-total misunderstanding of evolution. Evolution is just the name we give to the fact that organisms (or, more precisely, genes) which survive and reproduce effectively in a given set of conditions become more frequent over time. If you clear-cut the forest, you're not eliminating "weak" species and making room for the "strong" — you're getting rid of species that were well-adapted to the forest and increasing the numbers of whatever organisms can survive in the resulting waste.

Lewis doesn't argue that the trilemma proves Jesus was God - he uses it to dismiss the wishy-washy agnostic position of "Well, Jesus was a great moral teacher, and worthy of respect, so whether he was God or not doesn't matter."

Lewis' position is "No, hang on a minute, this is someone who's spouting moral platitudes that everyone already agrees with, not anything new as far as the morals go. But he's also claiming to be God - he's saying, over and over again, that he is God. That leaves only three options, really - either he's actually God, or he's a liar, or he's deluded. Whatever he was, he wasn't an exceptionally decent human being, so get off the fence."

Perhaps it's my own philosophical upbringing coming to rear its ugly head, but Plantinga is practically worthless as a true defense of Christianity. "Basic beliefs" in particular are such an obviously nasty hack, and the resulting epistemological relativism is frightening to behold.

Questions about deities must fade away just like any other issue fades away after it's been dissolved.

Compartmentalization is the last refuge for religious beliefs for an educated person. Once compartmentalization is outlawed there is no defense left. The religious beliefs just have to face a confrontation of the rational part of the brain and then the religious beliefs will evaporate.

If somebody has internalized the sequences they must (at least):

1. be adapt at reductionism,
2. be comfortable with Bayes and MML, Kolmogorov complexity,
3. be acutely aware of which cognitive processes are running.

If you habitually ask yourself "Why am I feeling this way?", "Am I rationalizing right now?", "Am I letting my ego get in the way of admitting I'm wrong?", "Did I just shift the goal post?", "Did I make the fundamental attribution error?", "Is this a cached thought?" and all those other questions you become very good at telling which feeling corresponds to which of those cognitive mistakes.

So, let's assume that for these reasons the theist at least comes to this point where he realizes his earlier reasoning was unsound and decides to honestly re-evaluate his position.

A typical educated person who likes a belief he will continue to believe it until he's proven wrong (he's a reasonable person after all). If he doesn't like a belief he will reject it until the evidence is so overwhelming he has no choice but to accept it (he's open minded after all!). This is a double standard where the things you believe are dominated by whichever information enters your brain first.

The next step is to realize that religious beliefs are essentially just an exercise in privileging the hypothesis. If you take a step back and look at the data and try to go from there to the best hypothesis that conforms to the data there's just no way you're going to arrive at Hinduism, Taoism, Christianity or any other form of spirituality. All those holy books contain thousands of claims each of significant Kolmogorov complexity. We're dealing with a prior of 2 ^ -100000 at the least. Only if you start out looking for evidence for a specific holy book you can end up with a "lot" of evidence and believe that it can't be coincidence and that therefore the claims in the holy book have merit. Start out with a thousand holy books and a thousand scientific theories on equal footing (zero evidence for each, prior based on Kolmogorov complexity) and then look at all relevant things we know about the world. There's no way a holy book is going to end up as the best explanation because holy books are just really bad at making explanations that lead to predictions that can be tested. A holy book has to make more and better accurate predictions than the equivalent scientific theories (to compensate for the unlikely prior) to come out on top after all evidence has been examined.

I don't think it's possible at all to internalize the sequences and still believe in a deity. I consider this almost a tautology because the sequences are basically about good thinking and about applying that good thinking in all domains of life. Religious thinking directly rejects the concept of rationality about religious topics. So if you decide to be rational in all things (not cold and unemotional; just rational) then religion just has to go.

I'm not making an argument that it must, just an empirical observation that sometimes it does.