Why are evolution, atheism, and religious faith such popular topics of discussion and debate on the Internet, when people rarely discuss these issues face-to-face?

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All the answers I read pointed to the obvious, that people have strongly held opinions and are prone to get mad if their beliefs are challenged. This is true, but I’d like to offer another rationale.

These things are simply too complicated for a face-to-face discussion to really scratch the surface of. And the main ideas are pretty much universally understood. I don’t have to tell you what evolution is, if you’re fairly educated then you know what it is.

For religion, the question of how can God be both all-powerful and good is so common it has an academic name, theodicy. Religions tend to devote a great deal of time answering the question. If you want to say something on the matter, chances are someone’s already said it and it’s in a old book somewhere gathering dust.

Arguments for atheism generally tend to be arguments for materialism, and a common philosophical definition of materialism that accounts for things like minds and thoughts rests on the principle of supervenience. The definition / argument, simply stated, is that everything supervenes on the physical. This definition is technically called Physicalism, and it’s closely related to its epistemological counterpart, Positivism. Positivism is the theory that all knowledge ultimately derives from empirical methods, using information gathered solely from sensory input.

Career academic philosophers have devoted their entire lives to examining the nitty-gritty details of these things, we are exceedingly unlikely to be able to bring anything new to the table. So instead we just state our intuitive understanding of how the world works. And since we experience the world differently than other people, those intuitive understandings just aren’t going to jibe, and we, not being trained philosophers, will not have the language or the logical tools in order to really dig into the differences.

This is more readily apparent in person than in textual medium, so people are quicker to avoid it in person.