A clash of ideas can not only be a great illuminator of those ideas but also a great illustrator of how those ideas best get presented. Sometimes you can have all the facts on your side and still lose the argument. These can be the most frustrating experiences. Conversely, someone contrary to your own ideas can use little facts to support their argument and still seem to win the debate. This can leave you scratching your head and wondering what went wrong. I would grant that it’s often the case where some people are just good debaters. But I would also say there is more to it besides just debating skills.
I was recently watching a debate between two people debating the topic of theism (belief in God) vs. atheism (no belief in God). What I was watching more were the tactics rather than the specific answers each one gave. It was interesting to see how one responded to questions from the other and vise versa. The presenter on the theistic side, while I agreed with most of the ideas he was presenting, I had trouble agreeing with the way he was presenting it. He had a buttoned-up approach and seemed to easily get flustered with the other presenter when he avoided questions or didn’t answer them properly. The presenter on the atheistic side was more casual and, while he seemed to be responding to the questions with a series of non-answers, he appeared to have a better connection to the audience. And a lot of what he was doing was just casting religion, or people of faith, in a negative light. He was basically throwing mud on the other guy and his ideas to make himself look better.
While I was watching it the best analogy I could think of was a scenario we can all relate to from the classroom. It reminded me of the prim and proper teacher standing in front of the classroom, with all the facts on his side, trying to get through to the students, while the kid in the back of the classroom was sitting with his feet up on his desk spit-balling the teacher. Now, the class clown in this scenario might not have facts to support anything he says, but he can certainly make the teacher look ridiculous by shooting spitballs in his face. Naturally, this endears him to much of the class because he’s taking a stand against this authority figure.
But that was pretty much my perception of this debate. The problem with debates is that even if you agree to the terms of a debate it doesn’t necessarily mean that the other side will. When a person has no standards by which they debate you then there are no standards by which they can lose. They can just stand up there and shoot down everything you say, and they don’t have to take any solid positions on anything. All they have to do is cast doubt on any of the positions you hold to. I once heard Ravi Zacharias say, “Shooting down someone else’s positions while you hold to none of your own is akin to theological terrorism.” But I think a more pertinent approach is to make this statement at the outset, “If you have no desire to come to a conclusion other than the one you already hold then it’s meaningless for me to present the evidence. You have a predisposed bias and you’re not a real truth seeker.”
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