Not everyone has the intellectual talents or interests required for arguing the issues, it's just that they shouldn't be in the position of hearing it all for the first time from unbelievers. That's deadly.
Why? Seems like Christian fundamentalists have absolutely no problem dismissing anything unbelievers have to say.
At any rate, do you really think it's possible for Christians to accurately portray the atheist arguments? I've seen how you people butcher evolution; I've got a few of your pamphlets sitting here on my desk.
The church's teachers aren't going to get it right, and so when the college-age believer hears the arguments, and they're a lot more compelling than they remember, they're going to say "huh, I wonder what my church was trying to hide, exactly?"
Look, you're just going to lose Christians to college. It's just going to happen, because a fair number of Christians entering college are Christian because they don't know any better; because that's the only religion they've ever really seen, the only way they know how to live.
An expansion of knowledge and opportunity, of education, is going to pull a lot of those people away. It's just going to happen. Exposing them to that knowledge earlier is just going to pull them away earlier.
It is possible to be a genuine Christian and yet too much on the level of head knowledge,
This is what I was talking about to Randman, about Christian anti-intellectualism. "Damn that uppity book-larnin!"