Why Do They Repeat Defeated Arguments?

As Cephus pointed out in a recent post, there is this phenomenon that most atheists will have seen if they have spent much time arguing with the religious. The theist will present an argument and it will be completely destroyed, perhaps they will be shown to have a faulty assumption, have faulty logic, or just be factually incorrect on some point. Nevertheless, on a later date that same theist will present the exact same argument which you debunked previously. No revision of the argument to account for your correction, no admission that there could be some flaw, nothing, it's as if your conversation with them never happened. It's infuriating, but what is really going on here? There are a few possibilities as I see it.

One which seems easy to jump to immediately is that they are lying. They know that their argument is flawed and they don't care, they think repeating it as if there are no flaws will be effective for the general population. I definitely think this is true of (most of) the professional apologists. They know the arguments extremely well and they generally seem to be intelligent. Certainly they can see the enormous glaring holes in them. They are either true believers who are only interested in converting people (or keeping their flock), or they are profit motivated. Either way, fuck those guys.

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Another possibility is that they didn't really understand your counterargument. It might have looked to you like you were convincing them, but really they didn't follow you and didn't feel like having you repeat yourself or clarify, perhaps they were bored with the argument, or embarrassed that they don't follow and didn't speak up. It might have even seemed reasonable to them during the argument, but later when they were reviewing the confrontation in their own mind they couldn't remember some key step. At any rate, things weren't communicated as properly and that is the source of the problem here. In this situation we need to be patient and explain once again the flaw in their logic. Ideally it will be explained in a slightly different way, but simple repetition might be enough.

But a third possibility is what has really interested me and has been rolling around in my brain going for the last few days. These are people who are bouncing back and forth between what they can see through logical argument and the indoctrination that is embedded deep within their minds. I find this the most interesting because I was in this state for a number of years. To be fair, it was mostly internal argument that I was having with myself on long car trips, but I'm pretty sure it would have been similar if I had a regular debate partner.

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I'd be driving home from college to visit my parents and I would be thinking about something I learned in church that had been bugging me. I had a few hours here, and I would run through all of the reasons I thought the church was feeding me garbage. It would either be various messages that conflict with each other, or the problem of evil, or the existence of hell, or whatever. I'd run through all of the reasons I thought it was nonsense, and I would completely convince myself I was correct. But then a few days later I'd be driving back home and I would consider everything from the opposite perspective. What would the church have to say about my points? Is there anyway I could explain those things away from their perspective? Usually I could, especially near the end, it took some pretty extreme mental gymnastics, but I could justify some pretty crazy stuff. My indoctrination was deep and implanted at an early age, counter arguments were installed in my brain, and I knew how to make new ones if necessary.

Even when I thought I had a perfect argument against Christianity on one day, I was able to convince myself on another day that there was a flaw in my previous argument. Now, imagine if I had been arguing with atheists rather than with myself. How would this have played out? The atheist would have produced an argument against me, and perhaps even convinced me that they were right. I would have thought about it the next day and convinced myself that the atheist had been incorrect, then I would have gone back to my original argument as if my conversation with that atheist had never happened. I wouldn't be lying, and I understood the atheist's argument (at least at the time), but nevertheless I would have been back to square one. Indoctrination is a bitch!

So I ask myself, how did I break out of this? It's all about repetition. Each time I had to do the mental gymnastics it was a little bit harder. There's a new wrinkle to the argument, a new aspect I had to get around.  I was able to do it for a long time, but eventually the house of cards came falling down. I've always been a detail oriented person, so I was only able to push my concerns to the side temporarily. Eventually they would push themselves to the forefront of my mind and I would have to admit to myself that my patchwork to explain them away wasn't quite adequate. I did this mostly on my own, but I think a lot of people could use a push to keep considering their arguments. They aren't going to reevaluate their patchwork themselves, they need someone else to keep poking at it. Every time they present their poor argument, someone needs to point out the flaws. It's that repetition that is necessary to get through the indoctrination.