Faith and belief are useless in the pursuit of truth
The debate is finished. The distribution of the voting points and the winner are presented below.
After 2 votes and with 9 points ahead, the winner is...
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- Standard
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- 3
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- One day
- Max argument characters
- 30,000
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- One week
- Point system
- Multiple criterions
- Voting system
- Open
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- That cause and affect exists as all as natural phenomenon;
- That our observations of past events can give us insight into future events;
- The physical world is governed by laws which are consistent everywhere and throughout time;
- "Humans are highly superstitious animals, and it is actually the norm to be delusional in human societies." - Though irrelevant to the point at large, I will note that "delusions" are generally defined and identified by their abnormality.
- "The scientific method was designed to ascertain object truths about the physical mechanics of reality" - While I do not object to this simplification of the scientific method, I will note that its role in history runs counter to instigator's argument. The modern scientific method was largely built upon the views and ideas of Karl Popper. While Popper eschewed the role of induction in science, he did not object to the use of beliefs in the pursuit of science. In fact, he embraced their use! Rather than eliminate beliefs (which he calls "conjectures") Popper provided a method by which we can choose among them. The goal was not the elimination of conjecture, but to criticize it and, through falsification and empirical testing, arrive at the one that best describes reality[3]
- "A scientific thinker is someone who has no beliefs or opinions about reality, and only holds to speculation, inquiry, theory and proven facts." - I will note that the instigator offers no support for this definition of "scientific thinker." (Indeed, it is presented as instigator's own opinion, which is ironic). Every person on Earth has held beliefs and opinions about reality (by any definition). We must then conclude that there are no "true" scientific thinkers, or perhaps this definition is incorrect. Given the purpose of such a definition as to classify something that exists in reality, we must discount this definition as flawed. Plenty of "scientific thinkers" throughout history have held beliefs or opinions about reality.
A belief in the context of my argument is something that you hold to be true, but which is not necessarily true.
- Beliefs cannot be avoided;
- Beliefs are necessary in order to build up to additional truths;
In order to win the debate, it is necessary to not only provide more convincing arguments, but also to specify the information sources, to demonstrate respectful attitude to the opponent and to write text with a minimum amount of grammatical mistakes.
Pro firstly defines belief as something that is automatically not factually true... You can believe a fact but a fact is beyond a belief that's how science works at least.
What Con does is dodge this nonsense by masterfully turning the definition of 'belief' against Pro. GG it's over tbph :)
You see, science is based on the belief other scientists aren't lying about their findings and methods and on top of that assumes the simplest explanation is the true one (Okham's Razor).
We see Pro throw out man insults to Con by tone alone.
Let's showcase some of Pro's grimiest Conduct moments:
"Pretty much everything you said was complete and utter bollocks, mate."
Here's a funny one (he is backing up Con's point that we blindly trust what other research says its found as true) by Pro saying "if you think the majority of humans can't be wrong about a lot of things then I don't know how to help you other than to refer you to the nearest psychiatric ward." Pro just insulted their own perspective here.
"Oh come off it you soddy pillock, this is a philosophical debate not something that can be addressed with references and citations, especially when your citation consists of cherry picked definitions and arbitrarily deciding that Karl Popper is the sole authority on how to think scientifically."
As for S&G, Pro had worse S&G and genuinely thinks the word 'accept' is spelled as 'except' but I never like to vote this as it's offensive to dyslexics and non-native English speakers.
When it comes to sources we are left at a bit of a loss with Pro, he goes so far as to say "his is a philosophical debate not something that can be addressed with references and citations." well... Then Pro concedes to lose the sources votes as Con used reliable sources throughout and justified their use of Wikipedia.
Conduct goes to con. "Oh come off it you soddy pillock" is not acceptable. Sources go to con as they were the only ones who used it. I'll analyse the arguments later.
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oldest updated debate. Let's bump it shall we?
Interesting topic. Tried to read it to the end but Pro your formatting makes it kinda hard to follow what you're saying. Drafters on the other hand is very easy to read. Maybe consider sub headings and dot points for the sake of the readers, cuz I stopped trying halfway through R2.