atheists-vs-theists-why-debate-is-impossible
Debating with most people is difficult to impossible. It requires two critical thinkers to engage in dialectic, which is the back and forth that resolves differences in academic and legal settings. The sine qua non of debate that distinguishes it from other forms of dissent is the rebuttal, without which dissent is not debate, rebuttal being a counterargument that if sound falsifies a claim. Without that, there is no resolution of differences of opinion of fact. Other kinds of statements that, even if true don't make a previous claim untrue, are meaningless in debate. Those are the commonest kinds of responses we see to rebuttal here. A claim is made by a believer, a critical thinker rebuts it with a compelling argument, and no counter-rebuttal is forthcoming - just some other form of dissent or nothing at all.
Consider PRATTs, or points refuted a thousand times, meaning somebody makes a claim, it is rebutted, there is no counter-rebuttal, and the claim is repeated later unchanged. That debate ended after two posts, the second being the only rebuttal of the discussion.
Debate is what a couple of trial lawyers do. The prosecution makes a case for guilt. If it is plausible and the defense fails to rebut successfully, the verdict will be guilty. It the defense provides a plausible alibi that is not rebutted, the verdict will be not guilty. However, if the prosecution successfully rebuts that alibi and that rebuttal is not successfully rebutted, the verdict will be guilty, assuming a fair and intelligent jury. If one side or other decides to not rebut the other side's last plausible argument, but instead, merely expresses dissent and goes off on a tangent that doesn't contradict that last plausible argument, the trial is over and ready for jury deliberation. It's the same with any debate. The last plausible, unrebutted claim prevails.
You already said that. I asked "why". If you can't answer or don't know, just say so. It's just a waste of time to continue going in circles like this.
And there it is. It's nearly impossible at times to get the other person to focus on what's been said and give a responsive answer, like the PRATTs I just mentioned, also an endless loop if one allows it to continue rather than declaring the discussion over and disengaging. How often do we see a critical thinker posting over and over and over trying to get a faith-based thinker to engage, to answer a question or rebut a claim, and it never happens? Like I said, after one or two requests, I declare that the other guy has no answer. He's still free to provide one even at that point if he has one and been holding out, but that never happens anyway.
I have never known a day that I didn't have as much air as I could ever wish to breathe. That doesn't reduce the value I place on it.
I believe he was talking about economic value - what you would pay for air in this case. Because it is plentiful and you have as much as you can use at no cost, you'll seldom be paying for it - perhaps if you go scuba diving.
An eternal afterlife already has lasting meaning. Anyone who is there will not have a meaningless existence which ends with death.
Lasting meaning? That's correct. Others have commented about diminishing value of endless life, but there is more to consider. An eternal afterlife is a terrifying proposition if there is no way out. Eternal unconsciousness can be a friend. Here's a serious question. You can choose now to remain conscious or unconscious eternally after death, but you can't change your mind. You have no prior knowledge of what the afterlife will be like or how it might evolve over time, or how you might evolve, such as becoming beyond bored unto despondency. Maybe you find that eventually, you've seen and done it all, and are just tired of going on. I know that you believe that bliss is guaranteed, but it's not if your Bible is the words of men, and even then, who can say what the biblical god will do in an eon or forty. He's been known to regret his decisions and turn on both men and angels.
Incidentally, anybody who says that life has no purpose without an afterlife is telling us that his present life is meaningless, just as anybody who wonders why an atheist behaves morally absent a god belief has no conscience.
If anything imo the more we find out the more evidence we have for God and so religious beliefs.
The critical thinking community sees it the opposite way, hence the god of the gaps, which narrows with each discovery that assigns a function previously assigned to a god to the laws of physics, which makes the god concept increasingly unnecessary. Before the Renaissance, the Western god was the builder and ruler of the cosmos. Following the first wave of scientists, a clockwork universe was revealed that ran itself without intelligent oversight, and the ruler-builder god of Christianity became the builder god of deism. The second wave showed how the universe could organize itself from seeds according to natural law into filaments of galaxies of solar systems cooking heavier elements. With that gap closed, the builder god wasn't needed, either, and atheism became tenable.
But to somebody that has decided by faith rather than by reviewing and analyzing evidence critically that a god exist, everything is supporting evidence to him.
But people who accept only empirical evidence have no evidence either way because science gives none and they reject any other evidence there is.
All evidence is empirical evidence. The phrase is redundant (pleonasm, tautology). Empirical means, "based on, concerned with, or verifiable by observation or experience rather than theory or pure logic." Evidence is the noun form of the adjective evident, meaning apparent to the senses. Whatever you are calling nonempirical evidence is either empirical if it is evident, or not evidence if it is not.
Without an afterlife, life is meaningless in the long run.
We don't live in the long run. And we don't live in the grand scheme of things. We occupy several decades on a particular planet on the scale the naked senses report to us. It's true that at the scale of a galaxy or a proton, it's all meaningless. There is no evidence of life or mind on either scale. And eventually, there will be no evidence of either on any scale. And in a few millennia, none of us will be remembered or have any residual impact on the world except perhaps through our DNA. But we don't live at that scale.
One of the more unfortunate aspects of Abrahamic religions is their tendency to disparage life and nature in order to make what they are promoting seem more valuable than what we have here and now. How many believers live life as if they were waiting at a bus stop for something to take them away to a better place, like a child in an unhappy home waiting to be able to move out some day to a better place?
