That’s awesome. Thanks for doing that. I can only hope you got something for yourself out of typing all that out.
However, couple of things:
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I know it’s long, I didn’t expect everyone to watch the whole thing…in fact I started to post it after just the first few minutes. While a summary is nice, the actual conversation itself is what is important for this thread. It’s not so much the gist of what is being said that is relevant…here I’m more concerned with how they are conversing and the dynamics of how they are putting forth their arguments and how they are responding to one another. It is here I think a few lessons can be drawn.
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There were some things about the summary that don’t quite capture the real picture of what happened…for example, the three assumptions Thunderf00t puts forward from the very beginning (the first time he brings them up 11:24) are: the universe exists; we can learn something about reality, and models with predictive capability are better than those without. I never heard him say anything about “reality exists” being one of the three basic assumptions. (I think that’s implied in assumption 1).
Another example: “Eric begins to states his position that everything that is [lists examples of objects nearby] is- Thunderf00t interrupts Eric’s point by asking him if God behaves according to the laws of scientific naturalism”…this is kind of misleading. The way I saw it Thunderf00t didn’t just interrupt him and not let him finish his point before he moved on to another question…He interrupted him because he saw where he was going with his long list of examples of objects and in response asked an at least semi-rhetorical question to make a point based on Eric’s answer: “so your god works through scientific naturalism [that’s what you’re saying, or what is at least implied by what you’re saying].”
In all, while a summary is nice, and it’s great that you included one, I think you can only really get the effect from listening to the actual conversation.
Yeah, those are more common after-school-special things that I think everyone essentially already knows. This thread wasn’t intended to be one of those pretentious “look at how civil these guys are…we could all learn something from this” things. To be honest, more often than not, posts like that come off as condescending and do nothing to help any situation. They mostly serve to stroke the ego of the person saying them, making him feel superior, more rational, more mature, and therefore better than people who are “wasting their time” in “frivolous debates” and “being nasty” to each other. It’s a way of presenting oneself as above the fray, and allows someone seeking validation and attention to inject himself into an argument without actually having to make an argument of his own and defend it. This way he can’t be attacked or proven wrong or made to look foolish, because all he’s done is reprimand others not for their ideas, but for their manner of discourse, and essentially just said they could be “nicer”. How do you argue with that? It’s really similar to the whole nonsense of advocating “awareness”.
This more or less usually works the way they want it to, as it tends to always appeal to at least some people in the observing audience, plucking their pathos strings and pulling them out of the actual debate and instead getting them to venture into ad hominem territory in which they start to judge the people making the arguments instead of the arguments themselves. (And of course as a nice little ancillary benefit for the douchebag who started the whole thing, he comes off looking more rational and reasoned than everyone he’s just berated. And he didn’t even have to put forth an argument!)
No, my purpose in putting this up was more for a sort of case example in how debates can go, and what the arguments sound like, and how they are responded to…from an argumentation and logic perspective.
In the first segment I felt it was a great example of part of the reason why atheists don’t do well in debates like this. From the point of view of any observer, Thunderf00t was being evasive, uncooperative, and not really engaging in the conversation. This made him look weak and scared. And in large part, it’s because he was. He knows Christians like this can be very crafty, and he didn’t want to allow any possible crack that the Christian (Eric) could slip through. It’s basically like Anarcho-libertarian says, he didn’t want to even allow for the possiblility of “god”, which is absurd. (I mean he said himself that he even had to assume that the universe exists in the first place.) My guess is he was so apprehensive about even conceding the possibility because he saw the result of when Richard Dawkins (for all intents and purposes, Thunderf00t’s god) kind of did this in his famous interview with Ben Stein.
You’ll also see how he tries to avoid any possible traps by not playing along when Eric attempts the Socratic Method to lead Thunderf00t where he wanted him to go. Eric would ask a question and get a solid answer, or make a statement and attempt to get Thunderf00t to agree with it before he would move on to the next point, which, of course Thunderf00t wasn’t born yesterday and understands how the method works, so instead of answering, he ends up saying “just cut to the chase” on multiple occasions. Again, Thunderf00t is afraid of how Eric might trap him into a contradiction or some other corner which, in Thunderf00t’s view would hurt the entire institution of science (not kidding. Listen to any video where he drones on and on about why he does what he does on Youtube. Here’s one.)
Eventually Thunderf00t is able to turn the tables and work the argument into his favor, as Eric basically has his two or three tactics and can’t really see past them, let alone adapt his argument to the particular conversation. Basically his entire understanding is that without god, there is no such thing as knowledge and we can’t know anything…so all he has to do is get an atheist to either agree to the possibility that god exists (in which case he considers his battle basically won), or get him to state that he knows for an absolute certainty that god doesn’t exist (which Eric could then claim is a contradiction because “without god, there is no knowledge”).
This is why he clings so strongly to the “but you don’t know that” thing (leading to the pretentious “retard count” that Thunderf00t litters the screen with almost the whole time.) Eric needs to remind everyone (and himself) that no one can be certain that god doesn’t exist, because this is obviously central to his argument. It’s hard to tell if he truly doesn’t follow the point made by Thunderf00t or not. I personally think that for the most part, he doesn’t. He seems to me to be so indoctrinated with the idea that “atheists can’t maintain their argument without ‘abandoning their atheism’ and asserting that they know something…which implies that god exists” that he can’t see the point being made by Thunderf00t about Eric’s own assumptions.
This is another place I think something can be taken from the exchange. I think they could have saved a lot of time if they weren’t so hell-bent on their own argumentation method. I think Eric is probably at a disadvantage here because his method is really his only tool, as he is the one making an unprovable claim. However, he could easily avoid this direction of conversation by going about his argument in a different way. He may learn something from non-atheist scientists such as Francis Collins. But I’m not sure he’s interested in making a sound argument so much as just reassuring himself that he’s right. (Something mentioned here as a reason why creationists love to sponsor these debates…“In a creation/evolution debate, the audience is there to hear their champion”. When you have a foundationless belief — which you literally base and live your entire life around — about an unprovable notion being “absolutely true”, it’s really important to constantly immerse yourself in propaganda, lest your natural doubts begin to gather too much steam.)
Thunderf00t on the other hand could have easily at any point just “cut to the chase” himself, and made Eric’s argument for him and then picked it apart (because again, the entire basis for Eric’s position is “knowing” for an “absolute certainty” something that is unprovable and unknowable). I’m not completely sure why Thunderf00t didn’t do this. I would have assumed he was familiar enough with Christian argumentation methods and techniques that he would be able to identify the angle Eric was taking and simply proceed accordingly. It makes me wonder if Thunderf00t’s lack of social skills played a role here in contributing to his inability to see where Eric was going and meet him there head on, instead of dancing around like he did for so long.
This is another point I think can be taken from the conversation. Again I think a lot of time could have been saved and more progress could have been made if Thunderf00t (and I supposed Eric as well) would have paid more attention to what the other was saying, and tried to actually understand the argument they were making. The way it came off was that each was so afraid of the other trapping him that they both just clung to their own core arguments in their head and instead of really listening to the other and anticipating the path, they both simply kept reverting back to their own planned out argument thoroughfare.
Of course I think Eric was more guilty of this than Thunderf00t, as later in the conversation Thunderf00t began to relax and started to go along with various things, posing hypotheticals and the like, to which Eric just attempted to characterize as admissions and claim victory. This is another place I’m not completely clear whether this was just a tactic to take the pressure off himself and his losing position, or if he really believed he was gaining victories. I lean toward the former, but I’m not certain there’s not a bit of both. Of course it’s a pretty effective tactic, as if anyone wasn’t really paying attention, they may actually be fooled into thinking a victory had been achieved (because of course no one would just come out and claim their opponent just said something he didn’t actually say. I must have just missed it.)
Ultimately I think the exchange is instructive not because it has something to teach us about civil discourse or politeness, but because it is an interesting display of various “techniques” and shortcomings that should be avoided when engaging in debate.