Why is it so hard to talk to people with theistic tendencies? As someone who has tried to debate a number of topics it always tends to boil down to one thing, simplicity. People are comfortable with seeing the world in simple terms. Every animal alive has to abstract the environment and make best guesses about everything in life. 'Is it better to attack this prey right now or find something easier' 'Is that noise something dangerous?' 'Should we head out to new hunting grounds even though we've only had a few bad weeks of hunting'. All of these are perfectly valid questions that tend to be answered quickly, with gut instinct, based on our previous experiences and ingrained common sense about the world.
Science flies in the face of this approach to life. Science is methodological, sometimes slow, and always has caveats. It is not in our nature to adapt to this mode of thinking without effort. Basically, its not easy. Even the simplest form of straightforward facts can be fraught with subtle complexity. For instance :
'Water becomes ice at 32deg F.' Well, water isn't really becoming anything fundamentally different, crystallization is a physical process that doesn't change its chemical makeup. This assumes that you consider 'becoming' as a fundamental chemical change. Crystallization takes time as well, so just because water has reached 32F doesn't mean its all instantly ice. Pressure, impurities, and other factors can influence the crystallization. Water can be super-cooled under th right circumstances, dropping below 32f without ever freezing. You can add salt to water to lower its freezing point. In short, 'Water becomes ice at 32F' is really 'Pure water, at 1 atmosphere of pressure, analogous to the normal habitual conditions of humans on Earth, given sufficient time, will crystallize into the form of non-spin Ice'. And even that could be specified further taking into account the different water ions and temperature scales, ect, ect.
Now, as scientists, we know that these caveats exist and we communicate in terms of the most common assumptions and if we know those assumptions need to be modified a good communicator will let the reader/listener know. Say you are talking about super-cooled water you might open the sentence with 'Under the arctic ice (denoting an exceptional location) water can reach -5F.' Does this mean that the statement 'Water becomes Ice at 32F' is wrong? Not really. Under most circumstances that's a correct statement, its just that its more complex than that.
And this is where the road block is hit with theists, especially with subjects that threaten their world view. Sure, a fundamentalist christian is probably ok with science explaining how to create electricity but start speaking about human origins and you can bet you are in for a fight. The most common attacks are to attack/quote mine individuals like Dawkins that are seen as the paragons of the 'Evolutionist' movement. Usually they take small quotes, that say something simple, and use them as evidence of evolution failing to address some fundamental question such as how complex structures have evolved. A statement like 'Its strange that the eye could have evolved at all' is taken to mean that there's no explanation for that event. Or statements about the proposed evolutionary path of humans being different as new finds are made. Both of these show the lack of critical thinking and the reliance on simplism, that a statement must stand on its own at face value instead of taken in context for the larger over all argument. It IS strange that the eye evolved when you first think about it, but as you research more you begin to see how it happened and then its no longer strange, just amazing.
Likewise, as new fossils are discovered it changes the path that scientists believe took humans from proto-monkeys to ...well monkeys still but more advanced ones we consider human. The shape of the path changes but the fact that there is a path at all is never really doubted. Changing the form of water does not make it any less water. But a theist will shout 'SEE science said water was liquid above 32F and now they say it isn't, how can you believe them?' Its simple, its because things are not as simple as you think they are. One statement is not a comprehensive list of all possibilities, it is usually just the most common outcome. Finding corner cases where special conditions apply does not invalidate the general case.
Sometimes its just not that simple.
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