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Well, firstly you should not worry too much about their IQ.Sure, you have to target your message to people’s levels of understanding, but if you “frame” somebody in your own mind as having a low IQ, you’ll talk condescendingly to them and that won’t help them at all. It also probably will mean that they will actually act more dumb around you than they actually are.Also be sure to not equate “low IQ” with “not agreeing with me”. Obviously, on average, atheists have a higher IQ than theists, in the USA at least. So even if your friend is not academically gifted, there are other people much more intelligent than you or I who do agree with your friend. Be charitable, and help make his case for him. You want dialogue, right? not just to win an argument?I’m also confused why you bring up Biblical exegesis. Some of the best exegesis is done by atheists. Also, exegesis isn’t a great gateway to discussing issues of theism or atheism, which are of course more about epistemology and metaphysics.I’m not sure where you’re getting access to peer-reviewed academic journals about theology (which I assume is where you’re getting your Biblical exegesis), but I’d suggest that you use it rather to look into the philosophical literature instead. Biblical exegesis is a dry discipline, not that likely to excite a non-Christian from a non-Christian background. I mean, are you excited by Quran? or exegesis of the Hadiths?For the basics of the philosophy about the existence or otherwise of God, you don’t really need peer-reviewed papers, though. There’s a lot of good stuff available for free on the Internet. Starting with simpler explanations is much more likely to impress your less academically gifted friend anyway. For example, Stanford has some really good philosophy resources for this sort of thing: Search (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)Put simply, exegesis is how you know what the Bible really meant and what it really said. It’s only interesting to people with an interest in the Bible. This interest might be academic, like yours, or it might be religious (I guess you somehow manage to balance those two competing interests). But if your friend is not academically gift and not someone with a religious belief about the Bible, then he’s unlikely to be particularly interested for either of those two reasons, and you can’t blame him for that any more than I can blame you for not being totally familiar with the Baghavid Gita!But I assume he is interested in the idea of God. If he’s not, why the hell are you arguing with him??? If he is, then first convince him that God exists. This is not the domain of the discipline of theology. It is the domain of the discipline of philosophy.Then once you have convinced him that God exists, then you can convince him that the Bible is a better insight into God than the Quran, even though we know the literal words of the Quran but have not one iota of the original manuscripts of any of the Bible, and know that parts are missing, can’t even agree which books should be in the Bible, and most Christians only read it in translation (unlike the Quran which is still recited in the original words in the original language).

There’s a famous quote from Chapter 6 of the first edition of Origin of Species that seems to turn up on many creationist websites:Organs of extreme perfection and complication. To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.The take-home message being that “Well, if even Darwin thought that evolution of something so complex as the eye was absurd, how come my tax dollars are payin’ the salary of that 10th-grade teacher who’s sayin’ that we done come from monkeys!”What nobody ever seems to do is read the next sentence of the chapter. It’s a long and complex sentence—Darwin can sometimes be a fine English prose stylist, but this isn’t one of those times. But it goes like this:Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real.Breaking that down: If the following things are true:other animals have simpler eyes than humans, which lack some of the complexity of our own eyes, but are still useful to them;eyes vary, and at least some of the variation is heritable;at least some of the variation in eye structure could be useful to an animal;Then eyes can in principle be explained as the product of natural selection, even if we might not be clear on every last detail. If you can’t imagine how the human eye evolved, that doesn’t prove that the human eye didn’t evolve. It just means you’re not smart enough to figure it out yet.So are those propositions true? #1 is true. Many animals have eyes that are less complex than ours, ranging from the lensless “pinhole camera” eyes of the chambered nautilus down to the tiny light-sensitive spots of some flatworms, starfish, and even some single-celled organisms like Euglena. Here are some eyes found just within the Phylum Mollusca:Don’t read this as an “evolutionary progression” from (a) to (e); that’s not what this is intended to show. All you need to take from this is that many animals have less complex eyes than our own, and these eyes are still useful to the animals that have them in their own environments. The modern creationist line is that “’half an eye’ can’t exist because it would be useless, so there’s no way a complex eye can evolve from anything simpler!” But that is empirically false; there are plenty of animals with what looks like “half an eye” compared to our own eyes, and they survive and reproduce just fine.#2 is true because it’s just basic genetics. Features of eyes (human and otherwise) can vary, and at least some of the time, that variation is inherited. A very simple example would be the color of the iris in human eyes, which is controlled by multiple genes. There’s also a genetic effect on the shape of the human eye—i.e. how nearsighted or farsighted you are. (Although there’s also a strong environmental effect as well; nearsightedness is not a simple, neat Mendelian trait. See Don't Be Myopic About Heritability or The myopia boom for a quick summary of a recent study of this.) Mutations in other genes will cause part of the eye to fail to develop; the best-known example is congenital Aniridia. And so on. Darwin didn’t know about genes at all—Mendel didn’t publish his results until 1865, six years after Darwin published Origin of Species, and Mendel’s work was mostly ignored or misunderstood until 1900. But he’d seen plenty of examples of eye traits that tended to be inherited.#3 is basically a statement that natural selection can operate on eyes, and to me it seems obvious: in a species that relies on its eyes, genes that downgrade optical performance (like aniridia) should on average give the individuals that carry them a lower chance of successful survival and reproduction. But a famous paper from 1994 by Dan-E. Nilsson and Susanne Pelger tried to look at this in a more rigorous way. They created computer models of eyes that ranged from simple eyespots to camera-type eyes, and then calculated how long it would take each model to evolve into the next if features like layer thickness, refractive index, etc. were allowed to vary by up to 1% per generation. And here’s what they got—the numbers represent the number of virtual generations of model eyes:Here’s a link to the original paper: http://www.rpgroup.caltech.edu/courses/aph161/Handouts/Nilsson1994.pdfThis may not be exactly how vertebrate eyes evolved, and it simplifies some anatomical details. Don’t take it too literally! The paper’s not intended to show exactly and specifically how the eyespots of an amphioxus gave rise to your peepers. What it shows is that, under very modest assumptions—very slight degrees of random, heritable variation—it’s not only possible to evolve a complex human-type eye, but it may take less time than we thought. Even for long-lived species like humans, 364,000 generations is only about 7 million years—roughly 1% compared of the total length of time that animal life has existed. In species like most molluscs, which might have a generation time of 1–2 years, 364,000 generations is hardly detectable in the fossil record.Anyway. . . you were asking about what Darwin said about eye evolution, so I’ll leave off my exegesis and refer you back to Chapter 6 of Origin of Species, courtesy of The Online Literature Library:It is scarcely possible to avoid comparing the eye to a telescope. We know that this instrument has been perfected by the long-continued efforts of the highest human intellects; and we naturally infer that the eye has been formed by a somewhat analogous process. But may not this inference be presumptuous? Have we any right to assume that the Creator works by intellectual powers like those of man? If we must compare the eye to an optical instrument, we ought in imagination to take a thick layer of transparent tissue, with a nerve sensitive to light beneath, and then suppose every part of this layer to be continually changing slowly in density, so as to separate into layers of different densities and thicknesses, placed at different distances from each other, and with the surfaces of each layer slowly changing in form. Further we must suppose that there is a power always intently watching each slight accidental alteration in the transparent layers; and carefully selecting each alteration which, under varied circumstances, may in any way, or in any degree, tend to produce a distincter image. We must suppose each new state of the instrument to be multiplied by the million; and each to be preserved till a better be produced, and then the old ones to be destroyed. In living bodies, variation will cause the slight alterations, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions on millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass, as the works of the Creator are to those of man?If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find out no such case. No doubt many organs exist of which we do not know the transitional grades, more especially if we look to much-isolated species, round which, according to my theory, there has been much extinction. Or again, if we look to an organ common to all the members of a large class, for in this latter case the organ must have been first formed at an extremely remote period, since which all the many members of the class have been developed; and in order to discover the early transitional grades through which the organ has passed, we should have to look to very ancient ancestral forms, long since become extinct.

Some universities do offer PhD through prior publication.For example, see the guidelines of Griffith University for this path to a PhD and those of Kingston University London.If the university granting your PhD by publication is reputable, you will usually need to have several papers published as lead author or sole author in well-regarded, international peer-reviewed journals, be admitted as a PhD student, and write a substantive acompanying exegesis to put the papers into context. The thesis (comprised mainly of these published papers) will then need to be assessed by experts in the field to ensure that you have made an original contribution that advances the state of the field (the same criteria used for a traditional PhD thesis). Depending on the university, you may also be required to pass an oral defence that will probe for weaknesses in your work or in your knowledge of the field.