The Debate *They* Don't Want You To See

Remember the 2000s? How should I know. I mean someone born in 2000 is 23 now. People born in 2005 can get into the clubs this year. Someone has to go to the clubs. 

For me, they were less about low rise jeans and emos and more about the war on terror and "new" atheist debates. Ostensibly book tours, I struggle to think of the "New Atheist" retail trend as a movement. 

Put simply, the Terrorist Attacks on the World Trade Centre Towers polarized the populations of people who take religion seriously, and those who don't. There was a sudden demand for articulate voices to facilitate explaining why people shouldn't take religion seriously and that demand was supplied largely by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennett. 

At this point, let me highlight this: As an Australian I get the Flanders, neighbours of the Simpsons. To my Australian context, the Flanders are Christians. Which is to say, really weird people that say prayers before meals, prayers before bed, go to Church on Sundays, don't curse, have no hard edges etc. I grew up knowing strange people like the Flanders. What was incredibly weird was that an ostensibly normal family like the Simpsons, far more relatable, go to Church on Sunday and say prayers before meals. That's weird, for normal people to do that.

All of this is to say, the United States is a strange country, and a strange context, in that it seems uniquely socially acceptable to take religion seriously amongst the WEIRD nations (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democracies or whatever it is). 

And it has the subsequent most advanced and sophisticated apologetics for a mainstream religion in the world. Having said that...

"Spiritual but not Religious" is just "Superstitious" Misspelled

I want to cast the net wider than just the world's largest religion. This post is more about a mode of thought, patterns of behaviour. There are people who believe in Astrology, Ghosts, Psychics, Crystal Therapy, Machine Elves, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, Ancient Astronauts. 

If the 2001 attacks on the world trade center was a wakeup call for people who don't take religion seriously, that people out there actually do; the Covid pandemic was a wake up call for me that there are people who do not take "alternative facts" seriously.

The "they" in "The Debate they don't want you to see." are motivated rationalizers. 

That is someone who starts with something they want to believe, and work backwards from there.

I'm going to pick on the alternative history crowd, but it could also be the DEI crowd, in fact both these crowds have much in common when it comes to the debate they don't want you to see.

So alternate history is usually based on the theories (whether they know it or not) of Ignatius L. Donnelly which usually is something like humanity was really advanced, and then a meteor hit that wiped humanity back to the stone age and now there's a coverup of an ancient global advanced civilization, typically Atlantis or Alien Visitors.

People who are enthused by this idea and frustrated by it's lack of acceptance by people that are professionally obliged to build solid arguments and cannot arrive at any conclusion they want.

Alas the case for proposed alternative histories, specifically the case for the proposed alternative histories is weak. With any crowd there's a spectrum of presentability, reasonableness, articulateness etc. However, it is still the case that alternative histories generally need to be presented uncritically, for example Graham Hancock's Netflix series "Ancient Apocalypse" allows the presenter to constantly criticize "mainstream" archaeology (aka "archaeology") while at no point featuring any criticism of Hancock's theory.

Hancock has submitted himself to a debate, notably with Michael Shermer on Joe Rogan's podcast. Alas it was a debate we are permitted to see, though I've seen Shermer reflect on it and characterize their arguments as akin to "God of the Gaps" which I believe to be an application of "argument from ignorance" and though I can't recall that debate, I could concede that Shermer the skeptic "lost" the debate, alas, that debate was more "History is not definitively settled" which is certainly true and not "There was an ancient advanced global ice age culture" and that's a debate they don't want you to see.

Because having to provide a positive case, the alternative history crowd would constantly trip over fallacies. Here is a non-exhaustive list of the "greatest hits" fallacies committed by alternative history proponents in the opinion of Historian Dr. Miano part 1 and part 2.

Now, any discussion of fallacies, needs must I feel, include an acknowledgement of the fallacy-fallacy. Right, where someone can be correct and just argue fallaciously, meaning we can't reach the correct conclusion via the fallacious arguments. Like if someone argued that the "sun will rise tomorrow" why? "because my dad said so." Just because they argued an appeal to authority (and an inappropriate one) the conclusion isn't wrong.

If you had debates that refereed 1. facts and 2. fallacious arguments, it wouldn't be unfair, or suppressive, it would simply demand that debate participants present sound and valid arguments, instead of fallacious ones.

For example, if an alternative history enthusiast said "you can't explain how the Egyptians created the King's chamber, therefore aliens!" just would get sent back to the drawing board. And you could come back with, I guess, something like "look we can extrapolate a trajectory of archaeological discoveries that any new technology is likely to be older than the oldest example we have." or something, I really don't know what a non-fallacious argument for the popular alternative histories would sound like. 

All Arguments for God are Bush League

Youtuber Cosmic Skeptic is a smart guy, I would certainly not expect to win a debate against him and would regard such an endeavour as potentially a valuable learning experience for me and a complete waste of his time. That said, he's an Atheist youtuber that tickles some intuition in me that in 20 years time he may become one of those rare annoying Christian apologists that says "I used to be an Atheist". In part it's because he feels it is irrational to not want the Christian God to be true, which could be a rational position if there was some kind of consensus as to what the Christian God is (or even an intelligible definition).

I digress.

He released a video I must confess I did not get through, putting the "Arguments for God" into a gamer style tier list. These tier lists are usually created by gamers for the purposes of competitive play, for example ranking the roster of characters in a game like Street Fighter, Guilty Gear, Mortal Combat or Smash Bros. as to which characters are competitively viable and which aren't.

I didn't finish the video because I feel it didn't deliver what was promised on the package. 

All rational arguments for the existence of God are F-tier, you could then rank them within F-tier. 

I make this proclamation using a context where an S-tier argument for God would compel a reasonable person to accept the conclusion (there is a God) and furthermore what would make it S-tier rather than say A-tier is if it's simple to understand and explain, and forces a rational person to accept a conclusion that a specific God exists.

For example, the Cosmological Argument is F-tier. In it's simplest form it is posed as the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" without answering the question "Can there be nothing?" nothing is an abstract concept never observed. Everywhere we look we find something. There's probably never actually been nothing in your fridge. 

In it's more accurate and articulate expression the cosmological argument states that everything that exists has a cause, the universe exists therefore it must have a cause. Apologists then tack on, therefore that cause must be God, and not just a God but the God that made use of a human womb even though he doesn't need sperm to incarnate himself as a dude that goes to Jerusalem gets arrested pretty much immediately and sentenced to death by crucifixion that turns out to be a sacrifice of himself to himself to forgive all of humanity in perpetuity of the sins of breaking the rules that he made up and also knew everyone would break until this gesture.

They digress.

So this argument can be relegated to F-tier because: as explained by Bertrand Russell via the law of parsimony, if you need to posit an unexplained entity like God to explain an entity like the universe, and retreat to a position that God needs no explanation (everything has a cause except God) then you can just cut out God and say the Universe requires no explanation. That's kind of combatting laziness with laziness, and Bertrand Russell also slaps down the cosmological argument by pointing out it's fallacy of composition. 

The fallacy of composition is where you conclude that say because H2O molecules are not wet, water therefore isn't wet. Or because all men and women have a mother, humanity has a mother. So if all things we have observed in the Universe have a cause, it actually doesn't follow that we can conclude the Universe has a cause. I mean it almost certainly does, but it could be its own cause, it could have emerged from an unthinking unstable geometric shape. William Lane Craig might argue that these other possibilities can rationally be excluded. William Lane Craig might be the best apologist there was. William Lane Craig though, is bush league.

The Debate They Don't Want You To See

So all arguments for God are bush league, F-tier, 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 does not equal one. A reasonable person can reject all the arguments for God without resorting to thought suppression, cognitive distortions or other psychological defences. I'm not saying Atheists don't commit fallacies or reveal cognitive distortion or thought suppression, merely that it's not necessary.

Many debates that are televised public events are kind of impossible to lose. They aren't a court of law where the state rules on a verdict or declares a mistrial. Perhaps the closest to a competitive event as opposed to a promotional event are the debates hosted by Munk where the live audience is polled as to where they stand before the debate and polled again as to where they stand after the debate. 

This still has flaws though, for one the audience must self report and it wouldn't take much savvy for a bad actor to want some side of the debate to win so report themselves "for" a resolution with every intention to switch to "against" or vice-versa. More commonly I suspect that many audience members at first polling have misinterpreted the resolution, or set it up as a dichotomy (where it isn't merely incumbent to say the resolution is true or false, but that the opposite of the resolution is true or false) etc. and the debate doesn't so much persuade as merely educate the audience as to what the debate was about. 

Or someone like Malcolm Gladwell could just tank one's side chances of winning. Which is a handy segue to the debate that many don't want you to see.

So imagine two people, or six sitting in chairs on a stage or faces on a video chat waiting for their turn to speak for or against a proposition. The first speaker gets up and says "Two thirds of the world's population pray to a personal god every day..." and a klaxon goes off, a note pops up on the screen alerting the audience that the argument is fallacious - "argumentum ad populum" the number of people who hold a belief have no bearing on the truth of that belief. - kind of like when counsel yells 'objection' and the judge either sustains or allows the objection. 

The speaker a little rattled tries another approach leaning on Aquinas' five ways "an event may or may not happen so everything needs to be created by something that must exist..." another klaxon, another pop-up "special pleading" and "fallacy of composition" the speaker scratches their head familiar with Kant and Hume's rejections of Aquinas' first three ways moves onto the fourth "no good thing is supremely good, so..." another buzzer "presupposition" or maybe "begging the question" or just plain "wrong premise". The speaker says "what about final cause?" "begging the question."

And so on and so forth through ontological, argument from beauty, argument from consciousness, teoliological argument, rational warrant (doesn't require anything supernatural to exist), Witness testimony, historical events, historical personages, anecdotal evidence...

At some point, the team speaks up "if you want a debate in which we don't use fallacious or presumptive arguments, then we have nothing to debate!" 

This post isn't just to say that all extant Apologists are charlatans that should be out of a job. I gravitate towards the Theist-Atheist/Deist debates just because IT'S A VERY LARGE DATA SET. Just a small portion of which are the archives of "Atheist Experience" call in show, where weekly for two decades theists have called in and never presented a compelling argument for the existance of a god let alone THE God.

The ancient astronaut crowd, or the ancient lost mother civilization by comparison is a very small dataset. There is also the very recent phenomena of Postmodern/Critical Social Sciences positions that simply assert and don't even argue (as at writing you still can't find any recording of Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi engaging with a critic of theirs). 

I guess there's two things, maybe three, that characterize the debate *they* don't want you to see. 1. A world of facts/a constitution of knowledge and 2. fallacies are demonstrable, hard won achievements of human thought.

I posit that there is some population of public intellectuals, academics etc. that would be willing to participate in a debate right up until presented with terms of the debate including a) fact checking and b) a fallacy buzzer at which they would withdraw their participation. 

I've recently been binging videos from the Youtube Channel "World of Antiquity" a channel that dedicates many hours to fact checking and debunking claims of the Ancient-Astronaut or Ancient-Atlantis type crowds. It's admirable work, a noble attempt to combat the motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and outright dishonesty of that crowd. 

It brings to my attention the tactic of "Gish Gallop"; a tactic that exploits ye olde saying "A lie can travel halfway across the world before the truth even has its shoes on." Simply, you can use 3 minutes in a debate to make 100 claims that each would take 3 minutes to debunk. A debate with fact checking ie. a refereed debate wouldn't leave the debunking of gish gallop claims incumbent upon the debater. 

For a year, maybe two, I was an adjudicator for DAV, I would be told to go to various high school campuses on different dates and get paid $50 to judge student debates. That style of debating, I cannot recall if there was ever an instruction to adjudicators that was like "if a team makes a fallacious argument or factually incorrect claim, the other team doesn't have to respond to that point." To be honest the judging of debates was highly subjective and almost arbitrary. I believe standard practice was to score all speakers 75 out of 100 and then add or subtract a point or two based on whether you felt they did a good job. Adjudicators were not even trained to recognize fallacies.

I propose it would be humiliating for Dinesh D'Souza or the like to have to sit and have a moderator painstakingly fact check his speech consigning most of his talking points to the trash heap before his opponent has to respond. 

The Tech is Nigh

I recall Trump getting frustrated early in his presidency that CNN often used its news ticker to fact check claims as he made them. It is within the realm of possibility that AI or algorithms could fact check claims made in youtube videos as they are uploaded. No suppression of speech or take downs, just a thing where if you want to claim that nothing but diamond can cut granite in a video, any viewers will be informed that this is not the case. 

If Jordan Peterson wants to fudge the conclusions of research into psychedelics as "the only cure for alcoholism is a religious experience" his fanbase could get notified that this is misleading - the term is "mystical" experience there's no suggestion of an equivalence between being moved by singing in church and ingesting psychoactive drugs.

I feel persuaded by Timothy Snyder's notion that we are living through a period analogous to the introduction of the printing press. There were teething problems then, people published anonymous hogwash pamphlets that confused the general public and lead to things like literal witch hunts and pogroms. Eventually they introduced solutions like "authorship" and "table of contents" "publishers mark" etc. that gave information a degree of quality assurance. 

Prior to the global pandemic, facebook, twitter and especially youtube had no real quality controls on information. Because of the infodemic, some measures were introduced. Those measures will continue to evolve.

Some platforms might drag their feet. But just as Google knocked Yahoo off what seemed an inassailable position by delivering better search results, someone could knock Youtube off its pedastal if via nothing but word of mouth people come to appreciate a channel that controls for horseshit. A "this channel prevents me from winding up in weird cults" appeal.

Is Debunking Suppression?

David Miano host of "World of Antiquity" beautifully articulated a common dubious claim/characterization of Ancient Atlantianologist/Psuedohistorian Graham Hancock and ilk that their narrative is being "suppressed" by mainstream archaeology or "the establishment" but I'll have to paraphrase because I can't recall which video he said it in - "These claims haven't been suppressed, they've been examined, evaluated, debunked and consigned to the garbage. But there will always be people willing to pull it out of the garbage, polish it up and try and sell it again."

This is the most interesting point of the debate, that juicy idea of "epistemic exclusion", or as I intuit it, and I'll be upfront about that, that it is not just suppression but oppression to tell someone they "cant" believe what they want. 

So, say you are one of the people that believe all the Jews called in sick and subsequently did not die in the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001, a claim that is easily fact checked by simply going to the list of victims and (to lean on stereotypes) simply hitting ctrl f and searching the list for "stein".

Or say, you are one of the people that believe that the Egyptian sarcophagi are made impossibly precise, a claim that again is easily fact checked by the measurements (or even observations of the naked eye) show that they aren't precise. (Or claims that nobody knows how something was moved or made, when we have the tools, the quarry, and sometimes even documentation by the culture as to how they did it).

Or you claim that people know when they have gender dysphoria and know when to transition socially and medically, a claim easily refuted by producing the testimony of a single de-transitioner.

This behaviour extends across the political spectrum and beyond. It is something astrology girls have in common with QAnon, that DEI consultants have in common with Young Earth Creationists. That Anti-vaxxers have in common with Out-of-India proponents.

It is simply motivated reasoning, rationalization and when one comes up to a conflict between holding the belief and rationality, that conflict is simply avoided to maintain the belief. Like juggling a man made bubble through a field of very real and spontaneous thorns.

But as to the question of whether debunking is suppression, we can see an intellectual effort that takes it a step further. Where people want to preserve flimsy bubbles of their own creation, they cry "no-fair" that thorns exist.

Which is to say, maybe you take a Deepak Chopra approach and with no relevant expertise attempt to quote quantum physics research findings to conclude that anything is possible if we just believe it, or you take an "applied post modernist" approach and lean heavily on words being infinitely deconstructable proxies for the things words attempt to describe and insist that basing knowledge on predictive power is but one paradigm of oppression.

Geology, archeology, genetics and linguistics for example are domains of real expertise that often stand at odds with wishful thinking. They say things like 'sorry it's just not that old' or 'sorry it's just not that young' or 'sorry the family tree is substantially bigger than that' or 'sorry but it comes from over there not here.' etc.

Youtuber Ryan Chapman makes the point that physical things are usually not controversial. We do not have men and women engaging in bitter disputes on BBC news programs over whether water is wet, fire is hot and whether things fall up or down.

It's probably a less incindiary version of pointing out that when people organize a psychic convention they do not simply levitate to the appropriate place at the appropriate time, but instead tend to use email, phone, planes, trains and automobiles to gather and discuss the untapped potential of the human mind.

Rejecting the concept of knowledge itself is I'll concede an interesting and confounding move. It isn't ever a persuasive one. If you want to talk entitlement and privilege, nothing gets more self-entitled and privilege preserving than special pleading. 

And you might, just maybe, resist that charge by saying "I'm not pleading for a special exception to empiricism and rationalism, I view those and other 'sound' epistemologies as a universal tool of oppression." and then... your house gets robbed. It gets robbed by bumbling idiots that have criminal records, leave fingerprints all over everything, drink from glasses they left behind, take ipads and laptops and smart phones with them and forget to disable the 'find my phone' applications, one of them even drops his wallet with drivers license in it.

You tell the police that when you searched for the location of your devices they all turn up at the same address as the ID in the wallet, and they say 'whoah, that's weird, the name on that ID matches the name in our database when we ran the prints and DNA.' you breath a sigh of relief 'phew, so this'll be one of the rare cases where we get our stuff back...' and the police officer stops you 'not so fast. Who's to say what appears to have happened, did in fact happen? Unfortunately, we can't rule out the possibility that this is the work of mischievous fairies, nor a dark city scenario where alien beings in search of a soul are altering our memories of who we are every night and none of this has any consequence. We also can't rule out that property is whiteness and that in fact the theft of your property is actually an act of reparation and the real injustice would be to recover your goods and return them to you...'

I don't want to rehash previous posts about 'alternative ways of knowing' and the dishonesty with which these are described as 'alternative' again. I merely wish to make the point that if you want a bounded exception for non-evidence based beliefs you are special pleading. If you actually think the wholesale relaxation of epistemic standards is a good thing, you are probably fixated on your niche interest in arriving at a particular conclusion and haven't thought through what would happen if everyone could do this.

So let's leave this here and get back to the debate.

A Particularly Egregious Thing

Imagine you see a poster on a notice board with the vaguely sensational title "Free workshop: Double your income!"  intrigued by its incompetence you resolve to go. Hosted by a local church, there's 8 or 12 people there. The presenter presents his case:

"We all know the saying 'tails never fails' right? If you are going to bet on a coin toss, you bet tails. Why? Because it's the simplest way to double your money. That's why when you get your paycheque, you'll never find someone willing to bet their paycheque against yours over a coin toss. Right? If they did we'd all be doubling our money right? Well! What if I were to tell you that there are institutions that will take that bet? Okay, get ready for it, I'm going to reveal the best kept secret of the mega rich - they are called casinos. They hide their coin flip on a game called roulette, and 'tails' is 'black' the secret of the rich is 'always bet on black'..."

So while mercifully succinct, I will extend to you the credit that your brain is breaking under the strain of how egregiously wrong this presentation is down to the roots of every single premise.

You interrupt, you point out, that tails often fails, that such a fact is something you can demonstrate here and now for the entire group because you have a coin in your pocket. Furthermore, you point out roulette is not analogous to a coin flip because of '00' so putting everything on black every time you get paid is actually worse than betting it on a coin flip, because you can statistically expect to lose. 

Okay, okay. It's fine if other attendees start coming out with 'hey man shut up!' that's on them. What is heartwarming is that the presenter holds out open palms and says 'No, no, no. I'm sorry, I think they are actually correct. My strategy is actually on second thought a high-risk low return strategy. Sorry to have taken your time.' People mumble disgruntled sentiments under their breath as they shuffle out.

You chat with the presenter for a bit, ask him how he makes money from this free presentation, is he an employee of the casino in town or something. He says it's from his self-published book sales, but tonight is going to be a bust and he'll probably have to go back to the drawing board.

Months pass.

While going for coffee, you notice a familiar poster taped to a light pole. It's the same presentation. Unable to help yourself, you resolve to go again.

And this is where my dick would get twisted. You go along, and the presenter presents the same presentation that you corrected him on. Exactly the same. He hasn't even shored up the problems with the old presentation, he has simply moved on to a new audience.

This is largely how debates work, or at least what they permit by their structure. The audience is left to adjudicate and the audience is simply not competent. Firstly, right, did you know there are more neurons in your gut than your brain? You don't, because it isn't a fact, I just made it up and we can't trust audiences to be in possession of the facts in order to fact check debaters, furthermore we can't even trust the audience to identify claims that require some argument or justification.

Even in the situation of gish-galop where someone like Dinesh D'Souza is just throwing out claims left, right and center, have fact checkers that function much like line judges in tennis. Ten to a table that just take a claim left to right and just give it a google, or search snopes. British panel show Qi has research 'elves' that look shit up during recordings, often within one or two minutes and that is achieved with BBC money. Youtube autogenerated transcripts are getting pretty good and certainly useful, and AI powered chatbots I understand are getting pretty useful too. It is not far away that fact checking a live debate could become automated.

Secondly, as prolific and annoying as keyboard warriors are that just call out fallacies but most often forget the fallacy fallacy, audiences can't be trusted again to identify fallacies particularly trickier ones like the prosecutors fallacy (confusing the probability of A given B with the probability of B given A) most people aren't up to the task of identifying basic ones like ad hominems and appeals to personal incredulity.

Refs don't call foul, or hand out yellow and red cards in debates. I'm sure the large part is because audiences don't turn up to see a forfeit. The other thing is, is that it's hard to set up a Mayweather vs Alvarez, a Tyson vs Hollyfield, an Ali vs Foreman in debates where two people with comparable records and comparable physics can match off against eachother and create some degree of uncertainty.

Most often, debates simply don't have outcomes. They are something you watch and turn off and everyone leaves convinced that their side owned the other. 

Debates Done Wrong

In my lifetime, the indigenous sport of my home country Australian Rules Football, or AFL has undergone numerous changes. I like to imagine that before my time, it was even cartoonish with 70s players eating meat pies and sausage rolls during half time, and downing a pint of beer before walking back out and immediately getting in a fist fight.

In a hostel in New York I sat with some locals watching an NBA game that featured the San Antonio Spurs, then with franchise player Tim "The Big Fundamental" Duncan. Duncan is undeniably an NBA champion, perhaps one of the all time greats. I contend, if your nickname is "The Big Fundamental" the game has a problem. Tim Duncan was one of the least exciting, most boring, most sensible players to ever play the game. My favorite articles from the Onion almost all involve Tim Duncan and how boring he is, on and off the court.

And how boring Tim Duncan is/was came up in conversation with the locals, and I made the point that in AFL rules change for two reasons - safety and excitement. Often in a pre-season the league tries out new rules like shot clocks and super goals (goals worth 9 points). Some of these rules get adopted.

Many are designed and tested to eliminate stuff that gums up the game and makes it boring to watch. Others are to increase the games' safety. A memorable one being the change from an unpredictable bounce to kick off a ruck contest to the umpire throwing the ball up. Owing to the odd shape of an AFL football, it is very hard to bounce straight up in the air, veteran umpires could still absolutely screw up a bounce and where two increadibly large men are unable to predict where they will collide, those collisions got much more dangerous.

Play doesn't just conform to rules though, but also to the meta. Like AFL used to have much more all out brawls in the 80s and 90s than it does now, players used to get into punch ons. It was never within the rules that you can punch other players in the face, chest and kidneys, so how did it stop? The umpires used to stop the game and wait for the fights to resolve, where now they continue play so you can fight simultaneously to letting your side down and jeopardizing the game. The umpires started making fighting the coaches problem who in turn made it the players problem by dragging them off the field to the bench.

So here's a primo example of the debate they don't want you to see. Actually, admittedly I'm going a bit more meta than that, here's a review of a primo example of a debate they don't want you to see: "Is Christianity Rational?" I will disclose I didn't watch the initial debate, because I've seen enough of Matt's debates to trust his reviews of the debates, particularly debates hosted by that Youtube channel. 

It sounds like an example of a debate we still haven't seen because the affirmative (Christianity is rational) didn't argue that Christianity is rational. 

To compare this youtube channel that hosts debates to the AFL. The AFL can say 'we are tired of rucks getting career ending injuries - we'll change the rules, no more bounces, the ball will be thrown up into the air, and rucks can't grab the ball, they have to tap it out, basketball style to minimise the hard tackles rucks are subjected to." aka this sucks, lets get rid of it. Anyone hosting a debate could resolve "gish gallop sucks. It doesn't make for good debates, let's get rid of it." and now I'm just going to make up some anti-gish-gallop rules that could be tried - so an obvious but bad solution would be to mute a speaker if they make more than three arguments, or make three claims without arguments. 

Another potential solution, is to not just constrain a speakers opening statement by time, but by the number of arguments they could make. It is quite reasonable to instruct and restrict participants to start with your best argument. Where part of the format is 'opening statements' it seems reasonable to obstruct speakers from making any arguments and simply define the terms eg. what do you mean by rational? What do you mean by Christianity? Do you want to defend biblical literalism and inerrancy, or a more flexible and abstract interpretation of scripture?

Another potential solution would be for ajudicators to inflict time penalties for gish gallop eg. due to the overwhelming number of arguments you made, we'll allocate your next 5 minutes as additional time for your opponent to respond. Or combine this with calling Hitchen's Razor where any and all unjustified claims or unsubstantiated claimes are declared by the adjudicators to not require a response from the opposition...

Here I feel it is worth comparing the entertainment form known as debates to an institution like a court of law.

The first thing debates get wrong, is they pit two individuals or teams against each other. The above debate topic "Is Christianity Rational?" is a yes/no question. It should be distinguished from a seemingly equal but in fact opposite topic of debate "Is Christianity Irrational?" which has an equal and opposite burden of proof. (but not an equal and opposite paucity of proof) Debates can be construed as both teams having an equal task (though they don't) - eg. that one side has to make the case that Christianity is rational, and the other team has to make the case that Christianity is irrational.

However, that gives us 4 potential outcomes - 1. Someone makes the case for Christianity's rationality, 2. Someone fails to make the case for Christianity's rationality, 3. Someone makes the case for Christianity's irrationality and 4. Someone fails to make the case for Christianity's irrationality.

And the thing is, if both participants of the debate have an equal burden of proof, we can produce four combo-outcomes. Both make their case, both fail to make their case, one makes their case or the other makes their case. The munk debates with their pre-and-post polling of audience disposition while giving one of the more meaningful results to debates available I feel still produce results based on this 4 outcome model.

Burden of proof is often counter-intuitive, which is why much of the pseudo-scenes (real scenes oriented around a pseudo science) so frequently leave members unchastised for trying to shift the burden of proof, "yeah if you don't think the Egyptians learned to build pyramids from aliens you move a 800 tonne slab of granite." etc.

Now there is a degree to which debates and legal trials converge - usually in organizing a debate, there is an email exchange where the participants agree as to the wording of the debate topic. This is by my reckoning, the closest approximation of a preliminary hearing by a judge. I, as a lay person may not have my legal jargon right, but I understand that before a trial judges generally have an opportunity to decide whether there is a case at all. If not, the judge throws the case out.

Debates are entertainment, they are not inconsequential but they do generally achieve little-to-nothing. I guesstimate it to be in that range. Someone like Matt Dillahunty who might do more than 12 debates a year, I feel achieves much in the aggregate, but little in any one debate. The same could be said of his tenure on the Atheist Experience.  

That said, I feel strongly a topic like "Is Christianity Rational?" is a good topic to debate. It is simply likely to be structured incorrectly - the preliminary hearing should be the first step of the debate. So the burden of proof lies in the affirmative, and it's a pretty low burden - produce a rational argument for...specifically Christianity. 

Probably, there's no way to prevent a participant from defining "rational" as something "irrational" by the sound of Matt's review, it sounds like his opponents main line of argument was an ad populum, or ad hominem line. Other tactics might be an attempt to conflate "irrational" with "insane" so you can go "look Christians clearly aren't insane therefore they must be rational."

Most importantly though, if that's where the debate is: "what is a definition of rational we can all agree to?" that is where the debate should get arrested. Generally speaking, when it isn't a high-school sport, but more public entertainment, adjudicators do almost nothing. At most in my experience they attempt to keep speakers to time. 

Currently permitted, is for a participant in a debate to turn up and not even debate the topic of the debate. For example, see Dillahunty's subsequent review of and prerequisite debate on Pascal's Wager with Sal Cordova. That's how hands off adjudicators are they would literally allow a speaker to rant about their cheating ex-wife in a debate about "Which Crusade was the worst?" so long as the speaker doesn't run overtime.

If the gold standard currently are the Munk debates, there is plenty of room to raise the standard of debate above "of little-to-no consequence" 

Why I think "Is Christianity rational?" is a good topic for debate, is that could promote innovation in apologetics. Unfortunately...

Recycling is Not the Answer

Having had numerous debates myself with friends as part of a fairly typical secular Australian upbringing, it's strange to think of it, but the first Atheist v Theist (Christian) debate I saw was probably Dawkins vs Lennox.) 

What struck me immediately was that Lennox conformed to my preconceived notion of Christians as being fundamentally stuck in some past. British philosopher Bertrand Russell had had a speech of his published as a pamphlet "Why I am not a Christian" some 70+ years earlier. 

A very clever man had made his case, sufficiently, that none of the proposed rational arguments for God hold up. Quite charitably he had even given any Christian a pass on having to prove the resurrection was a historical event.

Lennox had nothing new or innovative, I'm not sure what the most innovative argument for God is. What I suspect, keeping in mind I am an Atheist, is that that lack of innovation is probably a product of the arguments for God being identical to the process by which the God hypothesis was created. Namely, by naive intuitions observing the causal chain and extrapolating it out to an imaginary agent. Or like almost everyone prior to Charles Darwin, seeing things like how a lizard looks like the rocks it lies on and inferring that some intelligence designed that.

Turns out, the world is counterintuitive, like Dan Dennett's TED talk on Darwin's inversion "We don't like chocolate cake because it is sweet, chocolate cake is sweet because we like it." and with time and smarts we figured all that counterintuitive stuff out, which unlike our intuitions works to explain the world we find ourselves living in.

Feel free to be as skeptical as you like of my next claim, but I am open to being persuaded that a God exists, even that the God exists. It just isn't going to happen if you keep arguing from first cause because that just makes it clear that I understand appeal to ignorance, the fallacy of composition and Occam's razor, and you don't.

And of course, say you come up with a novel argument from God, like 'The argument from fromagerie' or something, I hope you understand that my openness is not equal to: present me with a novel argument and I will be convinced by default. The argument from fromagerie is likely, judging by the name to be total horseshit.

What's not going to happen is that I will be convinced ever, by repitition, or simply pointing out that Thomas Aquinas was a "smart guy".

I'll conclude on this, and maybe do another post about what fallacies have been given passes in modern discourse. 

Screw you guys, I'm going home

One probable outcome to anyone experimenting with more responsible and constructive debate formats, is that everyone will pull an Ibrham X. Kendi, Robin Di Angelo and simply not participate in debates, or any engagement with critics, ever.

To take a stance similar to the US regarding the International Court for War Crimes in the Hague and simply refuse to subject your team to its authority.

People make money from debates as is, and they are almost inevitably unbalanced. If you do not allow participants to ramble out fallacious arguments, misinformation and sheer irrelevance, there will be no debates. The world will become siloed. 

I don't think so. Here's why. 

The Church has always participated in debates, it just use to be like Jesuits vs the Franciscans debating topics like "are beavers fish?" and therefore edible on fridays. They skipped the big questions of whether God exists, assumed it and got down into the narcissism of small differences style debates that cause the perpetual schisms among believers.

Now, the Church sends theologians to debate atheists at events that are attended or viewed by more people than attend Church. Because the Church in many wealthy industrialized democratic nations has basically been neutered and in long slow decline. Religious groups participate because they could do with the publicity. That could change as Pentacostal congregations using Hillsong style models cannibalise Catholics and Protestants at a rate of 35,000 people a day and they just stop turning up to debates because people are donating to the collection basket via credit-card.

Di Angelo and Kendi don't condescend to debate anybody because their racket is riding a peak. They don't need the publicity, their pews are full. I think postmodernists and DEI and Critical Theorists will get eager for debates when their own good times end, and that's probably coming soon because their claims tend to be more readily falsifiable than superstitious ones.

No what would happen if debates innovated to not be a shitshow, is likely two things - the baton of apologetics would pass, and we'd be living in Millian era of being enriched by actual progress. Like legal precedent would exist, except for arguments. Participants wouldn't have to respond yet again to an ontological argument or Pascal's Wager.

Looking yet again to Matt Dillahunty, what I observe, is that as host of the Atheist Experience, callers are held to account and face yellow card (being put on mute) and red card penalties (being hung up on) if they persist with fallacies or counterfactual claims. Yeah, they still recycle the same old arguments, very few learn anything, but that's because it is a call in show and like American Idol or whatever, Dunning-Kruger explains a lot. People are way overconfident that their anecdote about a dream they had will convince a skeptic.

And in his debates, you just get people hungry to take his head. The problem Matt appears to face, is that people just want the publicity in their small world from taking on Matt in a debate, hence they will agree to defend the undefendable Pascal's Wager and then not even do that on game day, just make whatever arguments they like.

So the other likely outcome will be that the kind of people that agree to debate on the side of psuedoscience and irrationality, will go from malicious-dishonest over to just genuinely incompetent. The participants will move closer to the critical faculties of the audiences of much psuedoscience and superstition and they will get to watch someone like themselves get humbled.