We studied political persuasion at MIT - I think we had one of the finest labs in the world on the topic - and our conclusion was basically this: it's impossible to persuade people with a sharply different opinion from your own, and it's very difficult to use substantial or complex arguments to persuade anyone.
Instead, you should stake out a position in the extreme corner of your own camp and never give any ground. Moderation or nuance will cost you possible converts. Your targets are the undecided. You'll push some away, but on net you'll gain more by having a clear, simple message that can be delivered over and over again. Your best response to criticism is to ignore it or to deride the source of the criticism as untrustworthy. You should paint the conflict as a binary us-or-them to encourage people to identify clearly with one of two camps. Make it all about identity: you don't just
believe in [cause], you
are a [causer]. When an opponent attacks you, your faithful only need to know they're not a [causer] to deprecate the argument. It's not even a conscious choice. It happens automatically.
These tactics are battle-tested. It's no surprise that political campaigns and mass movements converge on them.
I did debate in high school myself. Loved it and did pretty well, though not go-to-turkey well. It's definitely something I'd recommend to any student.
That said, I disagree on your point, but I respect your opinion. I'm not convinced of young earth creationism, but I AM convinced that basic evolutionary naturalism has a lot of holes.
This is a great point! The Darwinian synthesis has come a long way, and Darwin's original theory was never adequate (even for
him). But the constant need to defend basic science against attack prevents scientists from talking about what they've learned since then.
However, you're making a key error by connecting Darwin to cosmology. Darwin's synthesis is biological. I'm making a vow not to launch a science clinic here, since that big block of text I posted above explains why it's futile in a lot of cases, but I'll make one exception because you're cool.
For example, the big bang: How did the matter for the bang get there in the first place? (A point that came up in the debate). I'd have to say that "In the beginning, God made the world" is pretty reasonable compared to "In the beginning, there was Nothing, and Nothing made everything". That doesn't mean I think the world was made in six days though... if you ask me whether the world is thousands or billions of years old, I'd give you the same response you'd get if you asked me who I expected to win the next world series: "You're asking the wrong guy."
This is a scientific question with a scientific answer - but not yet a
single answer! We have a lot of theories as to what triggered the Big Bang right now, but our ability to select between them is hampered by the incompatibility between quantum mechanics and general relativity, both of which are required to explore the high energy density and tiny physical scale of the first picoseconds after the Big Bang. We're working towards a theory of quantum gravity which should let us fill in those missing first few fractions of a second...and then we can get to work on
before, assuming that key information hasn't been lost behind an event horizon.
As for 'asking the wrong guy', your answer should always be a confident 'billions'. The reason is that the 'billions' number comes from a theory with
explanatory power. This is a key difference between science and pseudoscience. A big-picture scientific framework makes
predictions: it says 'okay, based on what we have here, we should see a pattern of background radiation in the universe', or 'we should see distant pulsars receding at
this fraction of the speed of light'. This makes the theory FALSIFIABLE. When a theory makes a prediction, but we observe something different than that prediction, the theory has been falsified. It needs to be reworked or thrown out.
The lambda-CDM model of cosmology and the Big Bang are our best explanations for the universe because they made a ton of predictions which turned out to be true. They were able to tell us things
before we could even observe them, and when we did observe them, they lined up. We're always looking for places where the universe DOESN'T match up with the predictions of theory, because these are the spots where we can improve our theories.
Lastly, this:
I'd have to say that "In the beginning, God made the world" is pretty reasonable compared to "In the beginning, there was Nothing, and Nothing made everything".
is a great example of a bad heuristic. It's the kind of thing we're always battling against in science. Don't try to confabulate explanations and then arbitrate between them on the basis of which seems simpler or more 'reasonable'.
Your question is 'what happened before the Planck epoch'? And the answer should be, in simplest terms: 'we don't know'. Not 'God' or 'm-branes colliding' or 'a vacuum fluctuation' or 'a black hole formed in a superordinate universe' (though many of these are valid theories, if not yet falsifiable).