I enjoy a good discussion about the differing perspectives of theism and atheism. I enjoy witnessing the unfolding of such a discussion in the hands of others who are capable of carrying it out. But some of the formal and somewhat-formal debates I have seen on line...I mean, they tax one's patience. You know what I'm talking about.

Subjecting an audience to a half hour preamble wherein two logic lathes burn hot and send shavings everywhere over who has the burden of proof.

Those exchanges where forty minutes stand aghast as both sides--and one or both are non-physicists--argue over the definition of 'nothing' and whether an actual infinity is possible. Where two non-mathematicians joust repeatedly in front of a snoring crowd over 'infinite sets' and 'irrational numbers'.

I get the idiotic formal scoring system, how merely adding up the numbers of arguments presented minus those rebutted renders a lame excuse for 'x number of points', but come on!

No one makes decisions about who or who not to worship because they have scoured the floor counting how many split hairs have been dropped by either side of the question. Bill Craig tells a physicist that said physicist does not understand the implications of his own math, based on which I am suppose to accept as fact that a teenage girl got knocked up without ever once spreading her legs in the presence of a male organ! And the physicist gets sucked in by it!! Jesus Hamilton Christ!

I know this is a bit of a rant, but what the fucking fuck? Is anyone else annoyed by this?

Yes. I see it too often in Craig debates, atheist debaters getting sucked in. I've even seen it on evolution creationist debates where a biologist gets sucked into trying to answer, say, Ken Hovind's complete bollox. A good debater on evolution, like Donald Prothero, wouldn't even listen to Kent Hovind (and rightly so) and get caught up in trying to "debunk" him, instead he ignores all of that and argues his own case in a simplistic and devastating manner and tends to convince far more people (if the accounts of creationists coming up to him after the debates are true) than any evolution debater who gets caught on scoring points for the team.

...a teenage girl got knocked up without ever once spreading her legs in the presence of a male organ! And the physicist gets sucked in by it.

If, after Elijah embarrassed the prophets of Baal by having YHWH answer his prayer by burning up the sacrifice while Baal remained silent, the prophets of Baal had calmly explained that "we have no right to expect Baal to put on a crass display", and that "Baal sometimes answers Yes, sometimes No, sometimes not yet", and had they then gone on to say, "Let me tell you what Alexander Valenkin says about how the universe must have had a beginning", Christians in Bible studies the world over would be mocking the story with raucous howls of laughter and shaking their heads over the lame excuses of the early pagans, who clearly deserved to be wiped out and their virgin daughters subjected to sex slavery by the Israelites.

I mean sheeeeeeesh! These fucking debates!!

Ugh the debates. The same dreadful heads spouting the same dreadful arguments. Honestly, they've gone from tiresome to harrowing.

I much prefer watching a lecture or address from a character I like. Hitch or Stephen Fry or whoever. Perhaps it's just the comfort of having my own world view reinforced with a wit and eloquence I can only envy.

Another thing -- why is WLC considered such an awe inspiring figure? Even amongst some rationalists and atheists there's an unseemly "oohing" and "ahhing" when the name of the Great Man is invoked. I can understand it from the churchies, but from our mob?

I remember his exchange with Harris, despite the profound tone and dignified bearing all Craig did (to my mind at any rate) was employ a version of the notorious 'Gish Gallop'.

Bill Craig has always struck me as a unremarkable thinker and an indifferent scholar. Take his Kalam Constant stuff, how does that pass for substantial academic work?

Bah! Humbug!

Treat these "debates" as nothing more than an attempt by one individual to sell his made up shit as purportedly dictating how reality behaves, without bothering to ask if reality agrees, and the requisite word games become far more entertaining. Especially if the opponent realises this, and milks this for all its comedy worth.

Because at bottom, the sort of shite WLC peddles is only fit to be pointed and laughed at. How this charlatan managed to develop a lucrative career selling his shite, speaks volumes about the parlous state of the American arena of discourse. But of course, any arena of discourse that treats apologetics as something other than made up shit, is by definition crumbling and decrepit.

Yeah, these debates are useless.

Actually they are worse than useless. You allude to this a little bit in the OP. Nobody does make up their mind based on this crap, because brains don't work that way. Theists, however, understand that brains don't work that way, and atheists, for the most part, do not.

A real historian immerses him or herself in the culture, art, language, coinage, topography, eating habits, linguistic idiosyncrasies and idioms of a specific time and place; then proceeds to sift and weigh evidence, consult contemporary literature and correspondence, and spend years living in the location itself. He or she then publishes a thesis or a book which becomes a standard reference for students of the particular time and place.

Then someone reads that book and uses it as a reference for a popular book, which is then quoted by an author writing for a magazine, which is then quoted out of context in a book by a Christian apologist who reaches conclusions that are OPPOSED to conclusions reached by the original actual historian.

Then a punk who "got saved" as a teenager, and who studies theology, lifts a sentence from that apologetics textbook to "prove" his point about history, tells the historian who originally researched the data that he or she is mistaken in their conclusions, and claims that "so-called historians" only disagree because of an anti-religious bias.

And his debate opponent falls for it, and plays into the hands of the theist by getting involved in minutiae. When all of the claims that your religion makes are false, minutiae and your opponent's willingness to get suckered into it are all you've got.

SheeeeZus Fuck King shitpants Ceee-rist, these fucking debates!

pelfdaddy wrote:I enjoy a good discussion about the differing perspectives of theism and atheism. I enjoy witnessing the unfolding of such a discussion in the hands of others who are capable of carrying it out. But some of the formal and somewhat-formal debates I have seen on line...I mean, they tax one's patience. You know what I'm talking about.

Subjecting an audience to a half hour preamble wherein two logic lathes burn hot and send shavings everywhere over who has the burden of proof.

Those exchanges where forty minutes stand aghast as both sides--and one or both are non-physicists--argue over the definition of 'nothing' and whether an actual infinity is possible. Where two non-mathematicians joust repeatedly in front of a snoring crowd over 'infinite sets' and 'irrational numbers'.

I get the idiotic formal scoring system, how merely adding up the numbers of arguments presented minus those rebutted renders a lame excuse for 'x number of points', but come on!

No one makes decisions about who or who not to worship because they have scoured the floor counting how many split hairs have been dropped by either side of the question. Bill Craig tells a physicist that said physicist does not understand the implications of his own math, based on which I am suppose to accept as fact that a teenage girl got knocked up without ever once spreading her legs in the presence of a male organ! And the physicist gets sucked in by it!! Jesus Hamilton Christ!

I know this is a bit of a rant, but what the fucking fuck? Is anyone else annoyed by this?

This is where I think Darwin’s early defenders were clever, in that they adopted an agnostic stance for the purpose of arguing against theists in favour of science and Darwin’s theory of evolution. By proclaiming in advance that of course they had no way of disproving the existence of a god who doesn’t do anything visible to science, they headed off all the First Cause and ontological arguments at source. It seems to me that this is still the most sensible strategy, because when atheists allow themselves to be drawn into ontological-type arguments which they cannot win, this makes the case for theism look stronger than it is and I do get annoyed. Perhaps now, with less need to be careful around religion, it’s more vivid to say that there could be any number of spaghetti monsters (or whatever) as well as gods, but it’s essentially the same point.

I also agree with Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker when he says that William Paley’s argument for the existence of god was a good argument in 1802, when Paley’s book was published. Living things really do look very much as if they were pre-designed by some human-like intelligence, and when Charles Darwin, a knowledgeable young biologist, joined the Beagle expedition in 1831, he was planning to become a clergyman.

In the early nineteenth century Paley’s argument from design used good solid scientific evidence for god; the problem for theists is that Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection has since then swept all that evidence away, leaving nothing. For some time after the Origin of Species was published in 1859 there were still scientific arguments against evolution. For example, it wasn’t clear why the earth is as warm as it is; an inert lump of rock in space at our distance from the sun should be too cold to support life. Physicists thought that the earth had originally been too hot for life and had been cooling down ever since, but that didn’t leave enough time for evolution (or the geological evidence). Then radioactivity in the earth’s rocks was discovered, and Darwin and the geologists were shown to have been right. Similarly, Mendel’s discovery of genes showed why blending inheritance was not a problem for evolution, and the evolution of altruism and cooperation was put on a mathematical basis by William Hamilton and George Price in the 1960s (as popularised by Dawkins in the unfortunately titled ”Selfish Gene”). There was once scientific evidence for god, but all of it has now been shown to be evidence for far simpler and more powerful (but more counter-intuitive) hypotheses.

pelfdaddy wrote:I enjoy a good discussion about the differing perspectives of theism and atheism. I enjoy witnessing the unfolding of such a discussion in the hands of others who are capable of carrying it out. But some of the formal and somewhat-formal debates I have seen on line...I mean, they tax one's patience. You know what I'm talking about.

Subjecting an audience to a half hour preamble wherein two logic lathes burn hot and send shavings everywhere over who has the burden of proof.

Those exchanges where forty minutes stand aghast as both sides--and one or both are non-physicists--argue over the definition of 'nothing' and whether an actual infinity is possible. Where two non-mathematicians joust repeatedly in front of a snoring crowd over 'infinite sets' and 'irrational numbers'.

I get the idiotic formal scoring system, how merely adding up the numbers of arguments presented minus those rebutted renders a lame excuse for 'x number of points', but come on!

No one makes decisions about who or who not to worship because they have scoured the floor counting how many split hairs have been dropped by either side of the question. Bill Craig tells a physicist that said physicist does not understand the implications of his own math, based on which I am suppose to accept as fact that a teenage girl got knocked up without ever once spreading her legs in the presence of a male organ! And the physicist gets sucked in by it!! Jesus Hamilton Christ!

I know this is a bit of a rant, but what the fucking fuck? Is anyone else annoyed by this?

I got incensed over the infinite set stuff. To me, the theory of infinite sets is really cool in its own right, and it is obscene that William Lane Craig condenses and distorts that theory through his lens of apologetics into a soundbite premise in his juvenile Kalam argument. I spent years figuring out a decent set of mathematical analogies that show why Craig's presentation of the maths is completely fucking retarded.

But then, how many people give a shit about infinite sets? Hardly any. How many people are just after soundbites for their cherished beliefs? Most people.

I can't be fucked anymore.

epepke wrote:Yeah, these debates are useless.

Actually they are worse than useless. You allude to this a little bit in the OP. Nobody does make up their mind based on this crap, because brains don't work that way. Theists, however, understand that brains don't work that way, and atheists, for the most part, do not.

That's not true. I've seen many a debate which start of with X amount on one side of the debate, Y on the other, and Z amount undecided. Usually after a debate the Zs will decrease in number while the Xand Y increase and the 'winner' is decided on the side with the larger increase.

pelfdaddy wrote:A real historian immerses him or herself in the culture, art, language, coinage, topography, eating habits, linguistic idiosyncrasies and idioms of a specific time and place; then proceeds to sift and weigh evidence, consult contemporary literature and correspondence, and spend years living in the location itself. He or she then publishes a thesis or a book which becomes a standard reference for students of the particular time and place.

That's a bit of an over the top expectation pelfdaddy.

I disagree that debates are useless, they certainly helped in my deconversion and as Animavore said exit polls show marked changes in pro and cons after debates.

Thomas,

Sorry about the misunderstanding...it's not an expectation; it is what many historians actually do. I am not requiring this of a debater. It is an example of how much more qualified a real researcher is than an apologist who abuses that researcher's work in his apologetics.

Please do not miss my meaning; some debates are good and interesting, and I have actually benefitted from them. I hate the ones that get mired in these words games, logic sieves, and definition contests.

Oh, and my understanding of WLC's procedure is that he preps the local churches by encouraging their members to attend, telling them that they should be as objective and open-minded as possible. As such, he is in fact encouraging them to mark "undecided" on the opening poll, shifting the score in his direction at the end. Another trick.

Animavore wrote:

epepke wrote:Yeah, these debates are useless.

Actually they are worse than useless. You allude to this a little bit in the OP. Nobody does make up their mind based on this crap, because brains don't work that way. Theists, however, understand that brains don't work that way, and atheists, for the most part, do not.

That's not true. I've seen many a debate which start of with X amount on one side of the debate, Y on the other, and Z amount undecided. Usually after a debate the Zs will decrease in number while the Xand Y increase and the 'winner' is decided on the side with the larger increase.

Yes, it's true, and you don't understand. Debates do work and do change people's opinions, but they don't do it by the things that debates are ostensibly about. They don't work by reason and logic. They work by skilled psychological manipulation. The idea that the reason and logic are what you have to get right is insidious.

Consider the Bush and Gore debates. Gore had great evidence. Bush had the "aww shucks" act down to a T.

Or consider Reagan versus everyone else. People who disagreed with Reagan on every issue still trusted him.

pelfdaddy wrote:Thomas,

Sorry about the misunderstanding...it's not an expectation; it is what many historians actually do.

It really isn't.
Anthropoligists probably, but historians, not so much.
If alone for the danger of modern idiosyncracies corrupting your perception.

Thomas,
I'll re-phrase that to: Apologists for religion taking issue with someone who has real expertise as if that expert does not understand their own data drive me FUCK KING NUTS.

Thanks

pelfdaddy wrote:Thomas,
I'll re-phrase that to: Apologists for religion taking issue with someone who has real expertise as if that expert does not understand their own data drive me FUCK KING NUTS.

Thanks

I have said it before, but I believe that William Lane Craig does not argue in order to convince anyone. I think he's playing a much more sinister game.

Observation 1: It's a human predilection to accept arguments that favour our own stance. Thus, if someone argued in favour of opinions I hold, I will accept his arguments with much less investigation into whether they are valid or not.

Observation 2: WLC's arguments are fairly bad. Often, they're so bad that the only way you could believe them is if you already are convinced of his conclusion.

Observation 3: It's a common point in Christian rhetoric that unbelievers hate god, or that they have consciously decided to reject the idea of God in 'rebellion'.

Observations 1 & 2 taken together lead to the situation where believers think they've just heard convincing vindication of their own beliefs, and a convincing rebuttal of the beliefs of the non-christian side. That, taken together with observation 3 leads to the conclusion that every non-believer in the room who was not convinced either genuinely hates god or at the very least suspend reason whenever god tries to reach them. Thus, they are Christ-haters.

The result of this is to widen the chasm between religious and non-religious people even more, a thing I think William L. Craig wants to do, as this means the believers will be less influenced by the non-believers and less willing to take anything we say at face value.

Zwaarddijk,

In addition to what you say, there are other factors as well. Many believers are only believers because they have been subjected to the psychological tricks of evangelists, wherein they experience a feeling of rapturous joy in the act of worship or of asking for Jesus' forgiveness. This is the only thing they need to believe, and they generally feel that their beliefs really do stand on FAITH ALONE, separate from--even opposed to--any and all contrary evidence.

Then these apologists arrive on the scene saying, "Actually, the evidence from science supports Christian doctrine", and the average believer says, "Wha--huh!? Really!?" Fascinated by this surprising development, they tune in. Then, while atheists watch a debate in which the apologist plays time-consuming word games to the frustration of the non-believer, Christians see the same exchange and are amazed to see one of their own reeling off "facts" while the godless enemy stammers in confusion, and they are mightily impressed.