Saying this, however: while pro successfully explained it that some of those elements are not part of abiogenesis - con does raise the concept of irreducible complexity as supporting creationism.
This makes things difficult to score here - as creationism and abiogenesis don’t cover the same broad aspects of origin of life.
I somewhat conclude that while pro defends abiogenesis successfully, I have to give con some credit on his argument here.
6.) improbable.
Con raises 3 issues relating to abiogenesis is improbable.
First it has too many steps. Pro argues scope of abiogenesis - I accept his rebuttal on the count of creation of the universe being outside his burden given the scope of abiogenesis, I don’t think more was necessary, including for the solar system.
Pro builds up a further rebuttal that indicates that con assumes configurations of DNA etc that are based on life now, rather than life as it could have been established - this is a good argument, as it points out con presupposes that life hasn’t changed - which pros entire opening argument contradicts.
7.) Faint young sun.
I thought pro initially dropped this, but it appeared in his penultimate round. Pro initially uses sources to show that the earth was indeed habitable by other studies. This would have been enough, but he pointed out the solution to the FYS from cons own source. This put a nail in the coffin on this argument.
In all, though, pros initial arguments on the science were broad and pretty well argued - the only part of this I could consider in doubt is the issue con raised about energy. If accepted on its face, it seems inadequate as a rebuttal to all of which pro raised and was left unrefuted; especially as Con put an emphasis on the MU rebuttal which, IMO, failed.
3.) Law of biogenesis.
In my view, pro gives me reason to expect the law of biogenesis that are true now, may not have been true in the past (previous conditions). Pro also gives a practical and reasonable explanation of why organisms cannot be spontaneously created now (they’ll be instantly eaten because the earth is biotic)
4.) Cell theory.
Con doesn’t actually make a distinct point that I can see other than referencing irreducible complexity.
Pros response, however - implicitly explained information about how the cell specifically could still function - just not technically be a live - in itself helps pros case of explanatory power - as any unknowns that pro explains with abiogenesis helps bolster its supposed explanatory power.
5.) irreducible complexity.
Cons argument defines the concept and gives examples of items that he deems to be irreducibly complex.
Pros responses, in terms of explaining the origin of the cell, and referencing his original argument with regards to RNA catalysis. He also expertly explains a whole host of evolutionary elements for the evolution of mitochondria and marine mammals. For the final example of neurons - pro gives a good reason of why this is out of the scope of abiogenesis.
In my view, in terms of cons counter, I agree that the explanation creationism is able to explain facts better, a material mechnanism isn’t required.
2.) The technical science.
Pro provides a detailed mechanism, explanation and citations for how abiogenesis is understood to happen. Cons response was essentially that a number of aspects of the basic science have been overturned or shown to be false.
This includes the MU experiment, primordial soup, and issues relating to replication of DNA. The latter explanation I felt was particularly damaging in its own right to pro.
On the MU - pros referencing recent MU experiments and explanations were pretty devastating, giving specific reasons why cons objections on reducing atmosphere was incorrect.
Cons side argument about the MU being intelligently designed was also very well batted away - I really felt that pros argument was succinct, to the point and showed the issue - yes it was intelligently designed, and this intelligent design showed that things can happen without intelligent interaction. I thought that was a great point well argued.
For the primordial soup - I found that pro didn’t do quite as well. I found that while pro provided an explanation of catalysis, con raises issues with lack of available energy.
In this respect I don’t think pro was refuting the point con was making.
Pro to his credit, finished up with a good reference back to his original points relating to hydrothermal catalysis.
Rfd - backwards as I’m writing on my phone:
Sources:
Pros opening round was perfect for sources, every step was sourced and bolstered with a link, which we’re direct scientific resources. This makes pros rebuttal much harder - as particular information and steps have to be attacked in a broader sense.
Pro points out no less than 3 individual sources con provides that effectively refuted or undermined cons position.
Conduct to pro for the forfeit. While neglecting to post a last round, I always and invariably vote for conduct on forfeits unless the rules explicitly except it.
Arguments. Note: I am not giving any feedback as part of my vote - because we can’t have nice things - if you would like feedback separately let me know.
1.) Creationism.
Pro points out that Creationism is an act, with no attempt to explain the mechanism behind that act. In his response in round 3, con agrees citing a quote that ID, and Creationism, is not a material mechanism, but an intelligent cause. (Though con calls this a mechanism) He uses this to explain why the Cambrian explosion is better suited to Creationism rather than naturalistic causes.
Con references the Cambrian explosion several times throughout: I can’t see a single example of pro mentioning it, so I have to give the Cambrian explosion as an example of something Creationism explains better than pro.
My lack of reply, is actually because I’m putting together a more formal reply.
I disagree with much of your Opinion, but feel you deserve a full response. I appreciate also that your head moderator, so think I feel I have to explain the issues I find with your interpretation in more depth, because as it stands, I feel your response makes it harder for any other moderator to not reject my vote as stands without a clear and as concise as possible explanation from me.
I want to get to the point where you may not accept my conclusion, but you don’t think it’s unfair.
My primary issue here, is that it’s not possible for me to determine whether argument A beats argument B without using my opinion; nor is it possible to determine where the sum of those arguments is more importantly to the contention than the opponents with my opinion either. Indeed, if I take your side based on criteria not in the CoC, not outlined in the debate nor agreed with your opponent - that would be based on my opinion too.
The burden you’re demanding, is such that as a precedent it would allow moderators to remove ANY vote from anyone made on any debate.l, as the burden is impossible to meet.
I don’t consider argumenfs that are dropped to be truth, I don’t consider all the arguments you say to be dropped to be dropped (and I will get to both of those).
At the end of the day, I must use my opinion and my reasoning when assessing your arguments. I must be complete, I must transparently justify what that reasoning is and why, I must not use any external facts, nor rely on my personal opinion when it comes to whether I like your argument or not, I like the position or not, or if I like you or not. I must be logical and reasonable - but I am forced to used my opinion.
While you may not like my conclusion - and I will go into more detail - I do not believe you can fault me on any of the grounds above.
Okay, so the issue is not that my analysis of the kritik is unfair or incorrect, or my comparative weighting is unfair or unreasonable, but that you feel I have failed to consider that pros dropping the K argument conceded the debate. And in so doing, I have unfairly used my opinion to circumvent basic debate rules where a dropped point is a concession?
If pro makes argument A, and con refutes with B
The con makes argument C and pro refutes with D
As a voter I have to:
Inject my opinion as to whether B refutes A
Inject my opinion as to whether D refutes C
Inject my opinion as to whether A matter more than C.
It is literally impossible not to inject your opinion into the debate when assessing rebuttals, and importance of different arguments. I have to assess pro va con on each argument, then compare each argument in the debate as a whole. That’s the whole point of voting.
With this Kritik, I am injecting my opinion - NOT to determine the winner of that argument, but to determine whether this Kritik is more important in the context of this debate than the remainder of all the other arguments. The same way I have to do so for any other argument.
I’d be expected to inject my personal opinion to determine whether Pro refuting A is more important that Con refuting C - and I have done that in the same way for the kritik as for any other argument.
The issue is not the way I’m weighting arguments - which is the only way it’s really possible to weight argument A against argument C - it’s that I’m not awarding all the points due to one kritik.
If the kritik you made was a regular argument and I weighted it against the others - pro would still win.
You’re telling me it’s unfair to award points to pro for having better arguments because I should inject my personal opinion that a technicality should count for more than all the remaining arguments.
I absolutely have inject my opinion either way - and I happened to choose the one that more fairly and reasonably reflected the individual that had the better arguments on balance.
As voting requires me to take a position on whether A refutes B, how strong A is, how strong B is. And on balance whether all A is worth more than all Bs, it requires people to “inject their opinion”, weighting, and who wins B or A in a particular argument is also fairly subjective and is downt to the person injected opinions. Writing down why I weighted it the way I did is every bit as down to my personal opinion as every other person weighting on anyone argument in anyone else’s debate. I feel my opinion is justified and have written many pages of RFd to that effect, but it is all my opinion.
The issue here, is that you feel that if you had won the kritik you should win the debate. I think that’s a fair question. while your opponent didn’t refute the kritik, I have to assess the weight of the Kritik. Is the kritik strong enough to award you all the points? Should it override everything said? Should I ignore everything else pro said and just pretend he said nothing else? That call would be injecting my personal opinion either way I made the decision.
As a facetious example, if your kritik had said “ducks are yellow, con wins”, and pro didn’t refute it, should I be compelled to asside the win regardless of all other arguments even though kritik didn’t invalidate the premise? I have to inject my opinion somewhere, if I had awarded it to you, or would have been injecting my personal opinion that your argument was sufficient enough to override all the other arguments.
On its face, I thought the Kritik was poor (obviously not ducks are yellow poor, but poor), and I had a choice of whether I should override what I felt was a reasonable win by pro on all other arguments, because there wasn’t a substantial enough rebuttal of a poor kritik.
Respectfully, I don’t think so.
Of course this, like every other portion of every other vote, is down to my opinion - but I don’t think it’s either unfair or unreasonable to have come down that way.
Given that, and given that in my RFD, I’ve tried to justify why I think that: and hence I don’t think it’s unfair to award points the other way.
For the omnipresent-omniscience issue, I almost added a comment requesting clarification on this. I’m going to legit admit I didn’t understand the argument, and didn’t feel it was clear what you were saying. While I don’t think I’m stupid by any means, but I could find a way to ask the question that wouldn’t give you the opportunity to affect my decision outside the context of the debate. Given that I rarely have issues with understanding, I chalked this one up to a lack of clarity. If there were fewer points, I would have asked for clarification to ensure it wasn’t me being stupid (which has happened).
After reading your reply here, I actually think it was fair - I don’t think it was particularly well explained, and thus I can’t judge the argument appropriately in context.
I was actually trying to be fair: I didn’t think it was fair to give you a chance to clairify a point in comments that wasn’t well explained in the debate for the purposes of altering my vote. This is a particularly gray area: and one I am happy to discuss for future debates.
So for the Kritik - while you have shared BoP, for the Kritik that’s all on you, while I feel pro didn’t fully counter everything you said, my analysis of your argument was such that I didn’t feel it was compelling enough or substantial enough to give you the argument points. I don’t think it’s either fair or appropriate to hinge a debate win on some technicality when two sides both present a reasonable argument in good faith.
While I will definitely agree that there are some technicalities upon which I could have awarded you points: I think I’m the context of the debate, I’m trying to assess the arguments to determine who presented their case the best - who made the best arguments. While it’s true that pro did drop a number of points, I felt that many of these were already refuted; it was somewhat mitigated by the volume of arguments (16 individual points or rebuttals if not more), or were rebuttals to arguments I didn’t feel were particularly compelling.
In this respect as a voter, it’s hard to know what to do. I could either award you a win on the basis of a perceived technicality - or award the win to pro because I felt on balance the argument presented was better on the whole. I generally try and err on the latter side , as I feel it fairer for everyone. I’m the case of the dropped rounds and the Kritik, for these reasons I felt it wasn’t sufficient to award you the points.
This is my feeling in general - I won’t make pros arguments for him, or yours for you: but I very much will use my own analysis, interpretation, and opinion on determining how much weight to give your arguments. This is mainly so that I can generate a transparent and consistent set of reasons why one sides arguments are “better” than the other.
The summar of my RFD is really that there were a series of small arguments that were either largely (in my opinion) inconsequential, with one well argued, and quite solid argument that I feel was not addressed.
Just as a couple of low hanging fruit points: in terms of omnipotence - I was treating pros counter in round two on omnipotence as the definition, his final round appeared more of a clarification.
On the grounds of infinite regress - you provided a syllogism that an infinite regress could be possible, pros primary contention was that it wasn’t. In terms of the infinite regression (and I touched upon the same thing in the OA). The problem with the KCA as pro phrased it, is that it’s a pretty convincing appeal to common sense - that it’s impossible from a philosophical point of view, I consider cons response in round 2 in the creation portion of his debate to mostly establish that (that’s why I wrapped the creation part into the KCA), I thought I had pointed out my thinking on the infinite regress side from both sides in my RfD. So in that respect I felt that pro gave enough reason to come down on his side for the purposes of the infinite regress as a result.
With the force, I simply mistyped - I meant omnipresent. With the force, here’s my issue with the argument and what I was trying to convey. When I read your argument on the force, it felt - excuse the pun - forced, it wasn’t intuitive how it applied, and your application of omnipresence vs a maximally great being wasn’t clear to me from your argument. As a result, and as pro pointed this out - though I’m giving you my take on that argument, I felt that pro gave me more of a reason, and an understandable reason to discount it than your argument in support.
Can I confirm something? You mentioned that you agreed in PMs that “Objective: moral facts are true independent of human opinion”, and in pros body “P2: Objective moral facts exist (not in dispute)”.
Could I ask whether con contended either of these two statements? I couldn’t see that these were contested anywhere, just wanted to check before I start reviewing.
Due to size, complexity and the way I approached this, I wanted to let you both raise any objections (if any) before I post my vote in case I missed anything, or to give me the chance to clarify.
So before I begin, I have read this debate about 4739194819 times and didn’t spot any errors, I couldn’t fault any sources, and conduct was impeccable.
I’m going to treat pro and con as adults here and make the following vote caveats.
I feel like this vote is both a critique and assessment: I have included my own view on the arguments, and a summary of their strength and weaknesses to both be constructive to both sides, and to help provide a rationalization of the weighting I have given arguments - I am not using my view of these arguments to declare who argued it better.
This vote has taken a while to write - and there is much missed and poorly explained I’m sure, I wanted to leave this RfD up for a few days to give pro/con a chance to object if they see anything outright contentious. If both think it’s okay, I will post it.
Also - I am a hardcore Atheist, I have heard most of these arguments before, as a result I have found it a very difficult balancing act to score fairly. I feel that overall that con had to do more to win my vote after scoring this - but overall I feel the position is fair. I flipped back and forth on several points - the OA is specifically one I felt was the most difficult to score.
Pro presents this well. The weakness of this argument in my view is in the 1st, (and thus 2nd) and 3rd premise: What is a MGB? Why can you assume such a being could exist? And why if it’s possible for it to exist should it actually exist?
Pros support for 1 and 3 is fairly minimal - in my view he doesn’t fully define the MGB, nor provides an cohesive set of reasons why I should presume such a being could exist. I also felt that Pro didn’t defend the 3rd premise at all: specifically for what logical reason should I presume that the possibility of existence could be translated to actual existence.
Con presented multiple rebuttals. This actually harmed his arguments as he was probably best focused on just on good and well explained point. It’s taken me a while to write this RfD because of this.
I’m ignoring the paradox and “I proved it was impossible” portion from con for now, as this will be reflected in my analysis of cons “4 Os” - and I reserve the right to come back here.
I don’t believe cons second point that this begs the question is strong in its own right as a separate point. That it “assumes it’s possible”, seems wishing washy compared to showing “its definitely not possible”. As with shared burden of proof - it feels like the mere possibility must be granted at least until shown otherwise.
I agree with con on principle here: but I feel it’s injecting too much of my own view to rate this part as convincing as I felt he needed to do more.
In terms of the force analogy: I would side with pro on this count, that con did not do quite enough to convince me the force is analogous. The omnipotence of God is intuitive, whereas the force isn’t quite so. In my view con didn’t seem to do quite enough on this count.
Finally, with regards to the different laws of logic, this is what took me a week to settle this particular point in my head. Con has objected to pro as begging the question, then with his argument concerning the logical rules of the universe, essentially does the same thing - if I am to assume it’s invalid to think God was possible without justification I must do the same with cons argument on the grounds of logical rules in different universe.
The best part of this exchange in my opinion was pros response to con in a later round - specifically objecting to pros formulation of God not being possible - I felt this really undermined this portion of pros position.
I’ve gone back and forward on this - but on balance I have to give a slight edge to pro here: with his force rebuttal and this one above - I felt he did a very slightly better job in defending than attacking. (Though note I include multiple parts in the 4 os section).
Pro needed to better defend the first and 3rd premise - and I felt cons argument was harmed by the scattergun approach - it would have been better to mount a single direct attack on one or both premises directly - the argument lost its teeth as a result.
I felt pro formulated the KCA very well here: the main issue with the KCA is definitional in nature. You can call the first cause “a duck”, but you it’s illogical to claim the first cause quacks. Pros argument here did well to provide a neat rhetorical flourish which made it harder to notice this is what he was doing. While I don’t agree with con on the KCA, he argued the strongest variation of it - one that can only be challenged on definitional terms - in my opinion.
Cons response was two fold: first was a reformulation of the logic to indicate the universes cause has a cause. I did not find this compelling due to the issue of infinite regress pointed out by pro - it doesn’t seem logical that there can somehow be no stop of causes - which is where the strength of the KCA is rooted.
Secondly, was the quantum theory argument, this is good in its own right - but falls short of being compelling for similar reasons: where did those rules come from? Pro pointed out.
The inductive proof for as Con mentions in his third point which falls afowl (heh) of the initial problem I mentioned.
It is very convincing to me, to point out issues with infinite regress and causation - this lends itself very well as a proof of God. And I felt in this, and in the rest of cons replies - I didn’t feel he chipped away at this portion of the validity.
As a result, I felt cons position on this one was very strong, and this argument very much fell on pros side.
I felt this was the weakest of all three of pros argument. The form was good, but pro neglects to give really justify his reasoning for why Everyone agreeing on right and wrong necessarily requires God. The weakness here, means that all Con has to do is provide a reason justification of why everyone can agree on a moral fact - and this point is refuted.
In the first argument - con confuses the logical with the moral - it is logical to maximize wellbeing for everyone - but morality is as much about feelings. Pro came close to mentioning this issue, with historical rationality - and by talking about a duty (or compulsion).
I felt this whole exchange a bit messy, but on the whole I feel con did much better at throwing mud on this point than pro did. So I would have this fall down on cons side.
I especially felt pro mostly refuted his own position - building up his view of objective morality saying its something everyone could agree with - then specifically giving an example of humans disagreeing on moral matters. That sealed this one for me.
4.) Omnipotence.
Con mentions the free will/omniscient issue. To me as a start this was not convincing as I don’t think any terms or definitions in the debate were contingent on free will existing. So in this vein the only thing being refuted is the moral argument - not God.
Pros rebuttal here was very weak here, and didn’t give me any reason to side with him.
For this reason, I’m think this argument has no additional impact to the contention.
5.) onnipresent/omniscient
I found this argument poor on its face. While it’s possibly my understanding, After reading several times, I don’t feel con really presented what the real paradox was, or justifies it to me as a voter.
To me, I can know all the facts con lists at all times (I know I will write, am writing, and have written my RfD) at all various times - that to me seems self evidently possible.
While this could well be me being dumb, I can’t ask for clarification, and I’m going to be just as dumb reviewing pros arguments too: so will simply skip this point.
6.) omnipotent paradox.
Con points out the true definition of omnipotence is paradoxical - pro agrees but clarifies “what is meant” philosophically by omnipotence.
Con is right, that he refuted the idea of omnipotence as he defines it, but as pro presents a philosophical definition (diet omnipotence - now with less paradox), I view pros argument on the meaning of omnipotence as better.
I may have viewed this differently in other contexts - and I think I have given this in other debates - so while I don’t agree with con that he should be given the debate on this - pro needs to be more careful about losing on a technicality in this way - it’s very lawyery - and as such for me requires a higher burden and better argument to be accepted, but it did come close.
7.) PoE.
Con raises the standard problem of evil. This is a good attack against the existence of a loving God. The immediate issue for me on this argument, is whether con gives me a reason to suspect that the good done by allowing evil to exists is less than if no evil exists. To me, this has to be a detailed proof as evil is contrasting, without evil you will have at most more of neutral system. But that’s just my opinion.
The way con set up the problem of evil, however was weak as he didn’t address the neutrality problem - just argued the weaker “God should stop things” position.
I didn’t feel that Pro defended this well either, he needed to provide me a justification of why bad things happen to good people (a massive summarization), he did point out that good and bad requires free will - this wasn’t massively convincing as it strikes me as just as effective for God to allow humans to murder each other without making torture a thing.
As a result, while I think con didn’t do as well as he could have here, weakening his position (due to the above), I didn’t feel it was really refuted. Do have to let this one fall down on cons side.
8.) Creation.
Con argues that something can come from nothing. The problem here for me comes on the definition of nothing - even if there was nothing, the laws of physics that cause the something from nothing are not nothing. Because this was really mostly covered and argued as part of the KCA, I won’t consider this separately. I feel this has already been covered.
9.) OA revisited.
So after revisiting the 4o argument - which I felt overlapped with with the OA rebuttal points con raised - I wanted to go back, given cons set of supporting arguments. I don’t feel he has really justified the “God is not possible”, on its own and so I feel my initial assessment of the OA still stands.
I left this one till last. I’m going to summarize my understanding of this - and it’s essentially that we have no frame of reference for God, so arguing about his existence or not is largely irrational and a debate on the topic is largely nonsensical
For me, Kritiks need to be slam dunks to be accepted. Pros response is pretty devastating upon first read - atheism and theisms positions are specific and in cases predictive - though pro needed to cite examples- and thus it is possible to draw conclusions about God when the claims are specific.
The inherent nature argument, I feel is moot - as this debate is inherently focused on specific referencable definitions, and thus I feel doesn’t merit awarding of arguments on the basis of the Kritik.
For me to have awarded this, con needs to show me that arguing about God in the context of this debate, is like talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. While it was an interesting kritik, con didn’t pull me along for that ride.
So: summarizing this all: it boils down to the KCA - I felt pros argument here, the nature of its presentation was stronger in nature than any of cons rebuttals, of the smaller won arguments. So I must award arguments to pro.
This was an EXCEPTIONALLY hard vote to come up with as both sides did a pretty good job; though there were many missed opportunities on both sides.
I felt pro definitely dropped more arguments, but I weighted this against con throwing more smaller issues as pro, neither of which, in my view were ideal.
I haven’t forgotten about this one, I’m finding it very time consuming writing an RFD, I’ve been looking at this for a while and I’m barely through the ontological argument part! I will say this is a pretty high quality debate. Thought I’d bump it so that others don’t forget it’s here.
“(in certain other religions) a superhuman being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature or human fortunes; a deity.”
You missed off the specific condition of deity.
“A real or imaginary living creature or entity, especially an intelligent one.”
You missed out the key distinction at the end: where being in this sense is not abstract but especially implies intelligence.
You should probably correct these definitions in the next round: because it would be very easy for con to win this debate by simply pointing out these definitions and refute you based purely on semantics and selection of definitions.
That’s not up to me to decide, I’m just saying that It would be VERY easy for your opponent to argue that the sun is not an entity in the context of the definition you linked of “being”.
Well no, not inconsequential at all. If the correct definition was used this would be an excellent discussion on God and dependence.
Using the wrong definition means that Con could win the argument by correcting your definition rather than disproving God. I’m sure that wasn’t your intent.
I’ve spotted a significant copy and paste error MAR. You copied the wrong definition for “being” from the dictionary.
It’s obvious that you meant to past was:
“A real or imaginary living creature or entity, especially an intelligent one.”, which is the correct definition for “being” in the context of a personality or God.
Instead you actually pasted the more generic “existence”.
I wanted to point this out, as it must have been an accidental copy and paste error, and it would detract from the quality of the debate if both sides accidentally mistakenly argued the wrong definition.
The only specific thing you said was your complaint about BoP - which was corrected by Raltar.
The second thing you said was that Raltar claimed you didn’t provide an effective rebuttal - and then say yor rebutdak destroyed Mopac. That’s pretty generic to me, nothing specific, no arguments mentioned, no particular issue outlined.
I would completely disagree with your assessment that you “destroyed mopac” too - you were effective, but you by no means destroyed him, in any way shape or form. I can underand how someone could come down the other side on your position for that very reason. I’m not saying this to annoy you, I’m saying this because it seems that you’re just getting annoyed with Raltar because he didn’t vote the way you think he should, rather than because his reasons were wholly unjustified.
You won, the system worked; why not ask something constructive - such as what you could have done to win Raltars vote.
I’m actually going to back up Raltar here. While I completely disagree with his conclusion, and his vote: I have no reason to conclude it was done for any other reason than this is how he viewed your debate.
I frequently have people that make exactly these same accusations when I have gone to fairly great lengths to justify the vote I have made. By all means, clarify if you think one of the things he’s said is not correct, that both makes people better debaters and better voters; but I really can’t stand people making bland and non-specific allegations of bias like this.
I will personally say that while I believe your arguments did win, and refuted pros position - I disagree with you that you absolutely destroyed his position, I can happily explain what you could have done better, or while I feel like that: but I can see people coming down the other way on this as a result.
Well it kind of is your problem: because without that justification it’s just an assertion (which you seem to have denied), which makes it a weak argument (which you also denied), and wasn’t a conclusion that was supported by a source (which you denied), which, along with the fact you didn’t support any of your other arguments conclusions with sources (which you denied), is why you got marked as losing sources (which you angrily object led to).
So, if you have no response to any of it any more, then I accept your apology.
Feel free to quote the place in round two - or anywhere - where you provided a justification of why people are going to be framed at a materially equivalent rate. Throughout, you hvs simple said this would be the case.
It’s stuff like this that shows why no one takes you seriously, and sometimes wonder whether you have genuine issues in either communication or intelligence:
I am simply wrong? What part specifically, and why? What I said is close to verbatim what the code of conduct says about how you should vote and what ways it is valid, so not only am I not wrong, your vote got removed because you’re wrong.
I get the feeling that you are not capable of even comprehending that people don’t agree with you, and you appear to be resorting to the eroneous conclusion that your utter inability to present a reasonable argument is a problem with all the innumerable people who find your argument irrational, rather than in the one person who made the argument.
For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that these points were considered and factored in to the vote: these arguments depend on the assertion that people or are going to be framed at a materially equivalent rate - an assertion that nothing you quoted serves to directly justify.
If your Aussie source implies that PB is only used when a crime is already proven from multiple angles - then this directly supports your opponents contention that PBS are unnecessary. Right? So in actuality your source actually harms your argument, rather than supports it.
Now, secondly: I am always willing to hear objections to my interpretation. So, you claimed the innocent people would be framed any way with or without Pb. In the context of the contention of the debate, for your argument to be valid, framing must be so prevalent for innocent people, it must be equivalent to the existing bargaining system. You offered no evidence of that, and as the argument is inherently hypothetical, you have to offer practical justification of why it is reasonable to conclude this would occur. This argument was mostly asserted, meaning that you have just argued as if this is an inherently proven point. As you offer no real supporting justification of what would motivate prosecutors to do this and why it is reasonable to conclude this was the case: this was an incredibly weak assertion - and was dismissed accorsingly.
Quite frankly though, if you have specific issues or particular areas in a way I determined the vote - I will be happy to discuss.
Whenever anyone strenuously objects to a vote I make with such generic summaries as “you made a poor vote”, or “you have poor logic” it makes me think that there wasn’t anything that specific you could really point out, but you have to hate on the vote anyway - because it’s critical of you.
Your sources did not support any of your conclusions. The first was delayed to psychopathy which was entirely irrelevant to the contention. The second was supporting the idea that cartels hurt snitches, which you then used to support a conclusion - but didn’t support the conclusion itself and the third (which you posted twice) gives some background information on PB but does not support your argued conclusion that - people would be framed otherwise, that you need PB to catch criminals, and that people would otherwise be framed. None directly support your conclusion. Pros main position is that it leads to the innocent pleading guilty, and he provided direct evidence of that in sources. They support his position much better than yours as a result.
If you had paid a little more attention to my RFD, you would have noticed what I was talking about when I was looking at the list. I was specifically looking for rebuttal points to the first argument about innocent people - one of your points I felt was a direct rebuttal, the other points included claiming people would be framed anyway, which if you read the whole RFD I covered - and mostly rejected as incredibly weak - on its own, and two points about the effect in the guilty. So only one of them - as I pointed out - was directly relevant to the point I was discussin at the time.
You mixes up a lot of your rebuttals for multiple points with your argument in multiple places - while there was somewhat of a good reason for doing so, it lead to a stilted and unstructured argument (which is what I was also pointing out), and made it hard to judge this debate in a linear fashion.
All the relevant points on your list were covered elsewhere in the RFD - all of which, if you spent more time reading it rather than accusing me of having poor comprehension - you would have noticed.
No, your argument didn’t “go over my head”. I point out what was strong and what was weak, and feel I summarized your points fairly consistently.
You posted 3 sources, and none of the really supported pretty much your key main contentions you made. If you think I misrepresent or misunderstood the point you were making, go ahead. I will say a substantial bulk of your arguments were absolutely unnecessary, added nothing to the strength of your argument, and appeared at best tangental to the resolution -
Your sources backed up the facts, you then used those facts to draw a conclusion. Pros main sources in the first round backed up the conclusions he was drawing. That key distinction means his sources helped make his argument much stronger, while yours did not.
If you had posted links about how plea bargains had helped take down major criminal gangs, then I would have probably have awarded sources either to you or as a tie for that reason a but you didn’t.
You can’t vote based on the arguments you would have made, of the reasons you are thinking of for why one side is wrong. You vote based on what both sides argue.
To start with, don’t do multiple debates at the same time. You obviously didn’t have time to really dig into things, it probably cost you both these two last debates.
It would incite people to frame the innocent. I found this very difficult to disentangle what con was attempting to argue here: it was spread over multiple posts. In my view con offers very little in the way of actual justification here, and seems to be more opinion than anything else.
While I feel pro offered no direct rebuttal: I can’t score this for con either.
From all of this added up, I have to award arguments to con. To summarize:
- the benefit con presented to plea bargaining was not refuted
- The direct blame of Plea Bargains (rather than just as an element of the problem) was not established.
Pro was a victim of the contention here, and the lack of real substantive rebuttal in two rounds. If the contention was “reform” or “is problematic” rather than “abolish”, his arguments would have been weighted more strongly. Burden of proof was shared, but what you needed to prove was shifted.
Sources: Pro. Pro underpinned his primary points with factual sources that made it far harder for con to attack pro from a factual basis, as a result, pros sources directly underpinned his position. Con needed to establish more factual evidence for some of his claims, and the lack of these made his position weaker as a result.
This is a good initial point, but has some fundamental problems for me: specifically con does not provide a good justification of why fear of death due to powerful cartels is a problem for informants, but not for PB, so in my view this substantially weakens this arguments.
Pros counter to this point was with data indicating PB informants (from his source) are a major source of wrongful convictions, this obviously adds weight into his wrongful conviction argument in a roundabout way, but doesn’t address pros claim, nor does it offer plausible alternatives to PB for hardened criminals.
As a result, I felt that the core of this primary argument is left mostly unrefuted. I found this argument to be somewhat weak however as mentioned: con needed to come up with examples of big criminals caught with PB, and all pro has to do was do the reverse. I was a little disappointed neither side did.
Con 1.5: 0.5
The guilty have no reason to plead guilty.
This was a very short and weak argument. Con points out that if there is no plea bargain, there is no incentive for anyone not to go through a major trial. Con didn’t argue or set up what benefit this gave, or why this is preferable. As a result, even thought this wasn’t directly refuted by pro, I can’t score this very strongly.
Saying this, pro did not really offer any substantial analysis here. Offering a very narrow set of conditions that non PB systems fulfill as well as PB conditions. His argument and source does show that in Alaska, they CJS hasn’t fallen apart, and there are some differences, but I do not feel pro justifies the claim that PBS are unnecessary with the arguments presented. Given the limited subset, I felt even the argument that non-PBS were “better”, was limited and therefore also weak as a result.
Pro needed to have spent more time justifying the perceived benefits and ensuring that all of them are unaffected without PB, I think this may have been pros intent with this argument, but this didn’t appear clear.
Importantly the unnecessary argument was eroded by cons argument about major criminals, this wasn’t fully rebutted, and in my view, presented a clear case that PBS are necessary. Thus, I have to award this point to con on rebuttal.
Con 1:0.5
It’s the only way to catch big criminals.
Cons primary opponent in this debate was his own argument and logical style, which I felt massively detracted from my ability as a voter to understand the core of his argument. His position was frequently muddled by unnecessary explanation and irrelevant information, and to me this meant that he had both himself and pro as debate opponents.
Cons key point in his opening argument, is that law enforcement needs plea bargains in order to catch the really bad criminals. That informants don’t work (as they get killed).
Con argues that pro has failed to establish that PB is the reason the innocent pled guilty, which I reject as an argument- as i feel pro did a good job in outlining why this is the case originally.
So, I felt pros position had key flaws here, but con did not fully capitalize on this weakness with more than a throwaway line. I can’t give a full point, but will give half to pro as a result.
Pro 0.5-0.
PB is Unnecessary.
Pros position is that PBs are unnecessary. He supports this by claiming that if prosecuters can’t prove a defendant guilty at a trial they shouldn’t be using a PB.
While this seems reasonable, in my view, pro needs to establish that it is the case that most PBs are made because prosecutors can’t prove the defendant guilty, vs for other reasons (time, resources, etc). He doesn’t do this, with this being a gaping structural flaw in this argument.
Cons primary argument and objection, is how plea bargaining has usage other than simply to allow prosecution of those who they don’t have enough evidence to convict in court. Cons response here, in my view: refuted this point in essence by showing that this wasn’t the case.
Pro argued in addition that when removing PBs, it made police investigations better, and improved disposition time citing an example of an Alaska ban - and claiming (with no citation) that the same is true elsewhere.
I actually thought this was the most compelling of pros arguments - but he did not spend any significant time on it.
Pros argument is almost self explanatory. Plea bargains allow the innocent to be unfairly punished, and criminals to have unfair reduction in punishments. I felt these claims were fairly well supported by the sources pro provided.
My main issue with this argument, is that I felt pro needed to establish that the issue was with the plea bargain itself - rather than prosecutors usage of them: pro mentions PBs in relation to multiple facets of the criminal justice system but fails to adequately separate cause - which weakens his position. Con points this out with a minimal rebuttal - which casts substantial doubt on this part of the argument, but due to brevity I did not consider a full rebuttal
Pro undermines his case with the second part: he muddies the water between guilt and innocence (which is a fair argument), and then presents statistics he claims applies to the guilty. This somewhat erodes his second point, which is further muddied as he doesn’t provide a justification of causation rather correlation. How much does the conciliatory admission of guilt vs not accepting their actions play into this?
As a result I found pros first argument lacking some key ingredients to make it particularly compelling.
Con, offered little in the way of rebuttal here. (I consider the turning of this on its head as a new argument - not a rebuttal). The primary response that I felt was offered to rebutt this was essentially cons argument that “it’s not like prosecutors are going to view them as innocent, they’ll still be prosecuted”. Out of the list of 4 items con presents, this is the only example that is obviously relevant - the others appear laboured and to me, I’m not sure how they play in. In this case, I feel cons argument fundamentally ignored much of pros case that the availability of PBs causes prosecuters and police to be lazy and charge people that they wouldn’t necessarily prioritize in trial.
Saying this, however: while pro successfully explained it that some of those elements are not part of abiogenesis - con does raise the concept of irreducible complexity as supporting creationism.
This makes things difficult to score here - as creationism and abiogenesis don’t cover the same broad aspects of origin of life.
I somewhat conclude that while pro defends abiogenesis successfully, I have to give con some credit on his argument here.
6.) improbable.
Con raises 3 issues relating to abiogenesis is improbable.
First it has too many steps. Pro argues scope of abiogenesis - I accept his rebuttal on the count of creation of the universe being outside his burden given the scope of abiogenesis, I don’t think more was necessary, including for the solar system.
Pro builds up a further rebuttal that indicates that con assumes configurations of DNA etc that are based on life now, rather than life as it could have been established - this is a good argument, as it points out con presupposes that life hasn’t changed - which pros entire opening argument contradicts.
7.) Faint young sun.
I thought pro initially dropped this, but it appeared in his penultimate round. Pro initially uses sources to show that the earth was indeed habitable by other studies. This would have been enough, but he pointed out the solution to the FYS from cons own source. This put a nail in the coffin on this argument.
In all, though, pros initial arguments on the science were broad and pretty well argued - the only part of this I could consider in doubt is the issue con raised about energy. If accepted on its face, it seems inadequate as a rebuttal to all of which pro raised and was left unrefuted; especially as Con put an emphasis on the MU rebuttal which, IMO, failed.
3.) Law of biogenesis.
In my view, pro gives me reason to expect the law of biogenesis that are true now, may not have been true in the past (previous conditions). Pro also gives a practical and reasonable explanation of why organisms cannot be spontaneously created now (they’ll be instantly eaten because the earth is biotic)
4.) Cell theory.
Con doesn’t actually make a distinct point that I can see other than referencing irreducible complexity.
Pros response, however - implicitly explained information about how the cell specifically could still function - just not technically be a live - in itself helps pros case of explanatory power - as any unknowns that pro explains with abiogenesis helps bolster its supposed explanatory power.
5.) irreducible complexity.
Cons argument defines the concept and gives examples of items that he deems to be irreducibly complex.
Pros responses, in terms of explaining the origin of the cell, and referencing his original argument with regards to RNA catalysis. He also expertly explains a whole host of evolutionary elements for the evolution of mitochondria and marine mammals. For the final example of neurons - pro gives a good reason of why this is out of the scope of abiogenesis.
In my view, in terms of cons counter, I agree that the explanation creationism is able to explain facts better, a material mechnanism isn’t required.
2.) The technical science.
Pro provides a detailed mechanism, explanation and citations for how abiogenesis is understood to happen. Cons response was essentially that a number of aspects of the basic science have been overturned or shown to be false.
This includes the MU experiment, primordial soup, and issues relating to replication of DNA. The latter explanation I felt was particularly damaging in its own right to pro.
On the MU - pros referencing recent MU experiments and explanations were pretty devastating, giving specific reasons why cons objections on reducing atmosphere was incorrect.
Cons side argument about the MU being intelligently designed was also very well batted away - I really felt that pros argument was succinct, to the point and showed the issue - yes it was intelligently designed, and this intelligent design showed that things can happen without intelligent interaction. I thought that was a great point well argued.
For the primordial soup - I found that pro didn’t do quite as well. I found that while pro provided an explanation of catalysis, con raises issues with lack of available energy.
In this respect I don’t think pro was refuting the point con was making.
Pro to his credit, finished up with a good reference back to his original points relating to hydrothermal catalysis.
Rfd - backwards as I’m writing on my phone:
Sources:
Pros opening round was perfect for sources, every step was sourced and bolstered with a link, which we’re direct scientific resources. This makes pros rebuttal much harder - as particular information and steps have to be attacked in a broader sense.
Pro points out no less than 3 individual sources con provides that effectively refuted or undermined cons position.
Conduct to pro for the forfeit. While neglecting to post a last round, I always and invariably vote for conduct on forfeits unless the rules explicitly except it.
Arguments. Note: I am not giving any feedback as part of my vote - because we can’t have nice things - if you would like feedback separately let me know.
1.) Creationism.
Pro points out that Creationism is an act, with no attempt to explain the mechanism behind that act. In his response in round 3, con agrees citing a quote that ID, and Creationism, is not a material mechanism, but an intelligent cause. (Though con calls this a mechanism) He uses this to explain why the Cambrian explosion is better suited to Creationism rather than naturalistic causes.
Con references the Cambrian explosion several times throughout: I can’t see a single example of pro mentioning it, so I have to give the Cambrian explosion as an example of something Creationism explains better than pro.
My lack of reply, is actually because I’m putting together a more formal reply.
I disagree with much of your Opinion, but feel you deserve a full response. I appreciate also that your head moderator, so think I feel I have to explain the issues I find with your interpretation in more depth, because as it stands, I feel your response makes it harder for any other moderator to not reject my vote as stands without a clear and as concise as possible explanation from me.
I want to get to the point where you may not accept my conclusion, but you don’t think it’s unfair.
My primary issue here, is that it’s not possible for me to determine whether argument A beats argument B without using my opinion; nor is it possible to determine where the sum of those arguments is more importantly to the contention than the opponents with my opinion either. Indeed, if I take your side based on criteria not in the CoC, not outlined in the debate nor agreed with your opponent - that would be based on my opinion too.
The burden you’re demanding, is such that as a precedent it would allow moderators to remove ANY vote from anyone made on any debate.l, as the burden is impossible to meet.
I don’t consider argumenfs that are dropped to be truth, I don’t consider all the arguments you say to be dropped to be dropped (and I will get to both of those).
At the end of the day, I must use my opinion and my reasoning when assessing your arguments. I must be complete, I must transparently justify what that reasoning is and why, I must not use any external facts, nor rely on my personal opinion when it comes to whether I like your argument or not, I like the position or not, or if I like you or not. I must be logical and reasonable - but I am forced to used my opinion.
While you may not like my conclusion - and I will go into more detail - I do not believe you can fault me on any of the grounds above.
Okay, so the issue is not that my analysis of the kritik is unfair or incorrect, or my comparative weighting is unfair or unreasonable, but that you feel I have failed to consider that pros dropping the K argument conceded the debate. And in so doing, I have unfairly used my opinion to circumvent basic debate rules where a dropped point is a concession?
If pro makes argument A, and con refutes with B
The con makes argument C and pro refutes with D
As a voter I have to:
Inject my opinion as to whether B refutes A
Inject my opinion as to whether D refutes C
Inject my opinion as to whether A matter more than C.
It is literally impossible not to inject your opinion into the debate when assessing rebuttals, and importance of different arguments. I have to assess pro va con on each argument, then compare each argument in the debate as a whole. That’s the whole point of voting.
With this Kritik, I am injecting my opinion - NOT to determine the winner of that argument, but to determine whether this Kritik is more important in the context of this debate than the remainder of all the other arguments. The same way I have to do so for any other argument.
I’d be expected to inject my personal opinion to determine whether Pro refuting A is more important that Con refuting C - and I have done that in the same way for the kritik as for any other argument.
The issue is not the way I’m weighting arguments - which is the only way it’s really possible to weight argument A against argument C - it’s that I’m not awarding all the points due to one kritik.
If the kritik you made was a regular argument and I weighted it against the others - pro would still win.
You’re telling me it’s unfair to award points to pro for having better arguments because I should inject my personal opinion that a technicality should count for more than all the remaining arguments.
I absolutely have inject my opinion either way - and I happened to choose the one that more fairly and reasonably reflected the individual that had the better arguments on balance.
As voting requires me to take a position on whether A refutes B, how strong A is, how strong B is. And on balance whether all A is worth more than all Bs, it requires people to “inject their opinion”, weighting, and who wins B or A in a particular argument is also fairly subjective and is downt to the person injected opinions. Writing down why I weighted it the way I did is every bit as down to my personal opinion as every other person weighting on anyone argument in anyone else’s debate. I feel my opinion is justified and have written many pages of RFd to that effect, but it is all my opinion.
The issue here, is that you feel that if you had won the kritik you should win the debate. I think that’s a fair question. while your opponent didn’t refute the kritik, I have to assess the weight of the Kritik. Is the kritik strong enough to award you all the points? Should it override everything said? Should I ignore everything else pro said and just pretend he said nothing else? That call would be injecting my personal opinion either way I made the decision.
As a facetious example, if your kritik had said “ducks are yellow, con wins”, and pro didn’t refute it, should I be compelled to asside the win regardless of all other arguments even though kritik didn’t invalidate the premise? I have to inject my opinion somewhere, if I had awarded it to you, or would have been injecting my personal opinion that your argument was sufficient enough to override all the other arguments.
On its face, I thought the Kritik was poor (obviously not ducks are yellow poor, but poor), and I had a choice of whether I should override what I felt was a reasonable win by pro on all other arguments, because there wasn’t a substantial enough rebuttal of a poor kritik.
Respectfully, I don’t think so.
Of course this, like every other portion of every other vote, is down to my opinion - but I don’t think it’s either unfair or unreasonable to have come down that way.
.. cont.
Given that, and given that in my RFD, I’ve tried to justify why I think that: and hence I don’t think it’s unfair to award points the other way.
For the omnipresent-omniscience issue, I almost added a comment requesting clarification on this. I’m going to legit admit I didn’t understand the argument, and didn’t feel it was clear what you were saying. While I don’t think I’m stupid by any means, but I could find a way to ask the question that wouldn’t give you the opportunity to affect my decision outside the context of the debate. Given that I rarely have issues with understanding, I chalked this one up to a lack of clarity. If there were fewer points, I would have asked for clarification to ensure it wasn’t me being stupid (which has happened).
After reading your reply here, I actually think it was fair - I don’t think it was particularly well explained, and thus I can’t judge the argument appropriately in context.
I was actually trying to be fair: I didn’t think it was fair to give you a chance to clairify a point in comments that wasn’t well explained in the debate for the purposes of altering my vote. This is a particularly gray area: and one I am happy to discuss for future debates.
So for the Kritik - while you have shared BoP, for the Kritik that’s all on you, while I feel pro didn’t fully counter everything you said, my analysis of your argument was such that I didn’t feel it was compelling enough or substantial enough to give you the argument points. I don’t think it’s either fair or appropriate to hinge a debate win on some technicality when two sides both present a reasonable argument in good faith.
While I will definitely agree that there are some technicalities upon which I could have awarded you points: I think I’m the context of the debate, I’m trying to assess the arguments to determine who presented their case the best - who made the best arguments. While it’s true that pro did drop a number of points, I felt that many of these were already refuted; it was somewhat mitigated by the volume of arguments (16 individual points or rebuttals if not more), or were rebuttals to arguments I didn’t feel were particularly compelling.
In this respect as a voter, it’s hard to know what to do. I could either award you a win on the basis of a perceived technicality - or award the win to pro because I felt on balance the argument presented was better on the whole. I generally try and err on the latter side , as I feel it fairer for everyone. I’m the case of the dropped rounds and the Kritik, for these reasons I felt it wasn’t sufficient to award you the points.
This is my feeling in general - I won’t make pros arguments for him, or yours for you: but I very much will use my own analysis, interpretation, and opinion on determining how much weight to give your arguments. This is mainly so that I can generate a transparent and consistent set of reasons why one sides arguments are “better” than the other.
The summar of my RFD is really that there were a series of small arguments that were either largely (in my opinion) inconsequential, with one well argued, and quite solid argument that I feel was not addressed.
Just as a couple of low hanging fruit points: in terms of omnipotence - I was treating pros counter in round two on omnipotence as the definition, his final round appeared more of a clarification.
On the grounds of infinite regress - you provided a syllogism that an infinite regress could be possible, pros primary contention was that it wasn’t. In terms of the infinite regression (and I touched upon the same thing in the OA). The problem with the KCA as pro phrased it, is that it’s a pretty convincing appeal to common sense - that it’s impossible from a philosophical point of view, I consider cons response in round 2 in the creation portion of his debate to mostly establish that (that’s why I wrapped the creation part into the KCA), I thought I had pointed out my thinking on the infinite regress side from both sides in my RfD. So in that respect I felt that pro gave enough reason to come down on his side for the purposes of the infinite regress as a result.
With the force, I simply mistyped - I meant omnipresent. With the force, here’s my issue with the argument and what I was trying to convey. When I read your argument on the force, it felt - excuse the pun - forced, it wasn’t intuitive how it applied, and your application of omnipresence vs a maximally great being wasn’t clear to me from your argument. As a result, and as pro pointed this out - though I’m giving you my take on that argument, I felt that pro gave me more of a reason, and an understandable reason to discount it than your argument in support.
Can I confirm something? You mentioned that you agreed in PMs that “Objective: moral facts are true independent of human opinion”, and in pros body “P2: Objective moral facts exist (not in dispute)”.
Could I ask whether con contended either of these two statements? I couldn’t see that these were contested anywhere, just wanted to check before I start reviewing.
I’m going to vote in be he next day or two. As an amateur EDM DJ I nearly accepted this myself.
Due to size, complexity and the way I approached this, I wanted to let you both raise any objections (if any) before I post my vote in case I missed anything, or to give me the chance to clarify.
Aaaaannnnnnd scene.
So before I begin, I have read this debate about 4739194819 times and didn’t spot any errors, I couldn’t fault any sources, and conduct was impeccable.
I’m going to treat pro and con as adults here and make the following vote caveats.
I feel like this vote is both a critique and assessment: I have included my own view on the arguments, and a summary of their strength and weaknesses to both be constructive to both sides, and to help provide a rationalization of the weighting I have given arguments - I am not using my view of these arguments to declare who argued it better.
This vote has taken a while to write - and there is much missed and poorly explained I’m sure, I wanted to leave this RfD up for a few days to give pro/con a chance to object if they see anything outright contentious. If both think it’s okay, I will post it.
Also - I am a hardcore Atheist, I have heard most of these arguments before, as a result I have found it a very difficult balancing act to score fairly. I feel that overall that con had to do more to win my vote after scoring this - but overall I feel the position is fair. I flipped back and forth on several points - the OA is specifically one I felt was the most difficult to score.
1.) The Ontological Argument.
Pro presents this well. The weakness of this argument in my view is in the 1st, (and thus 2nd) and 3rd premise: What is a MGB? Why can you assume such a being could exist? And why if it’s possible for it to exist should it actually exist?
Pros support for 1 and 3 is fairly minimal - in my view he doesn’t fully define the MGB, nor provides an cohesive set of reasons why I should presume such a being could exist. I also felt that Pro didn’t defend the 3rd premise at all: specifically for what logical reason should I presume that the possibility of existence could be translated to actual existence.
Con presented multiple rebuttals. This actually harmed his arguments as he was probably best focused on just on good and well explained point. It’s taken me a while to write this RfD because of this.
I’m ignoring the paradox and “I proved it was impossible” portion from con for now, as this will be reflected in my analysis of cons “4 Os” - and I reserve the right to come back here.
I don’t believe cons second point that this begs the question is strong in its own right as a separate point. That it “assumes it’s possible”, seems wishing washy compared to showing “its definitely not possible”. As with shared burden of proof - it feels like the mere possibility must be granted at least until shown otherwise.
I agree with con on principle here: but I feel it’s injecting too much of my own view to rate this part as convincing as I felt he needed to do more.
In terms of the force analogy: I would side with pro on this count, that con did not do quite enough to convince me the force is analogous. The omnipotence of God is intuitive, whereas the force isn’t quite so. In my view con didn’t seem to do quite enough on this count.
Finally, with regards to the different laws of logic, this is what took me a week to settle this particular point in my head. Con has objected to pro as begging the question, then with his argument concerning the logical rules of the universe, essentially does the same thing - if I am to assume it’s invalid to think God was possible without justification I must do the same with cons argument on the grounds of logical rules in different universe.
The best part of this exchange in my opinion was pros response to con in a later round - specifically objecting to pros formulation of God not being possible - I felt this really undermined this portion of pros position.
I’ve gone back and forward on this - but on balance I have to give a slight edge to pro here: with his force rebuttal and this one above - I felt he did a very slightly better job in defending than attacking. (Though note I include multiple parts in the 4 os section).
Pro needed to better defend the first and 3rd premise - and I felt cons argument was harmed by the scattergun approach - it would have been better to mount a single direct attack on one or both premises directly - the argument lost its teeth as a result.
2.) KCA
I felt pro formulated the KCA very well here: the main issue with the KCA is definitional in nature. You can call the first cause “a duck”, but you it’s illogical to claim the first cause quacks. Pros argument here did well to provide a neat rhetorical flourish which made it harder to notice this is what he was doing. While I don’t agree with con on the KCA, he argued the strongest variation of it - one that can only be challenged on definitional terms - in my opinion.
Cons response was two fold: first was a reformulation of the logic to indicate the universes cause has a cause. I did not find this compelling due to the issue of infinite regress pointed out by pro - it doesn’t seem logical that there can somehow be no stop of causes - which is where the strength of the KCA is rooted.
Secondly, was the quantum theory argument, this is good in its own right - but falls short of being compelling for similar reasons: where did those rules come from? Pro pointed out.
The inductive proof for as Con mentions in his third point which falls afowl (heh) of the initial problem I mentioned.
It is very convincing to me, to point out issues with infinite regress and causation - this lends itself very well as a proof of God. And I felt in this, and in the rest of cons replies - I didn’t feel he chipped away at this portion of the validity.
As a result, I felt cons position on this one was very strong, and this argument very much fell on pros side.
3.) The moral argument.
I felt this was the weakest of all three of pros argument. The form was good, but pro neglects to give really justify his reasoning for why Everyone agreeing on right and wrong necessarily requires God. The weakness here, means that all Con has to do is provide a reason justification of why everyone can agree on a moral fact - and this point is refuted.
In the first argument - con confuses the logical with the moral - it is logical to maximize wellbeing for everyone - but morality is as much about feelings. Pro came close to mentioning this issue, with historical rationality - and by talking about a duty (or compulsion).
I felt this whole exchange a bit messy, but on the whole I feel con did much better at throwing mud on this point than pro did. So I would have this fall down on cons side.
I especially felt pro mostly refuted his own position - building up his view of objective morality saying its something everyone could agree with - then specifically giving an example of humans disagreeing on moral matters. That sealed this one for me.
4.) Omnipotence.
Con mentions the free will/omniscient issue. To me as a start this was not convincing as I don’t think any terms or definitions in the debate were contingent on free will existing. So in this vein the only thing being refuted is the moral argument - not God.
Pros rebuttal here was very weak here, and didn’t give me any reason to side with him.
For this reason, I’m think this argument has no additional impact to the contention.
5.) onnipresent/omniscient
I found this argument poor on its face. While it’s possibly my understanding, After reading several times, I don’t feel con really presented what the real paradox was, or justifies it to me as a voter.
To me, I can know all the facts con lists at all times (I know I will write, am writing, and have written my RfD) at all various times - that to me seems self evidently possible.
While this could well be me being dumb, I can’t ask for clarification, and I’m going to be just as dumb reviewing pros arguments too: so will simply skip this point.
6.) omnipotent paradox.
Con points out the true definition of omnipotence is paradoxical - pro agrees but clarifies “what is meant” philosophically by omnipotence.
Con is right, that he refuted the idea of omnipotence as he defines it, but as pro presents a philosophical definition (diet omnipotence - now with less paradox), I view pros argument on the meaning of omnipotence as better.
I may have viewed this differently in other contexts - and I think I have given this in other debates - so while I don’t agree with con that he should be given the debate on this - pro needs to be more careful about losing on a technicality in this way - it’s very lawyery - and as such for me requires a higher burden and better argument to be accepted, but it did come close.
7.) PoE.
Con raises the standard problem of evil. This is a good attack against the existence of a loving God. The immediate issue for me on this argument, is whether con gives me a reason to suspect that the good done by allowing evil to exists is less than if no evil exists. To me, this has to be a detailed proof as evil is contrasting, without evil you will have at most more of neutral system. But that’s just my opinion.
The way con set up the problem of evil, however was weak as he didn’t address the neutrality problem - just argued the weaker “God should stop things” position.
I didn’t feel that Pro defended this well either, he needed to provide me a justification of why bad things happen to good people (a massive summarization), he did point out that good and bad requires free will - this wasn’t massively convincing as it strikes me as just as effective for God to allow humans to murder each other without making torture a thing.
As a result, while I think con didn’t do as well as he could have here, weakening his position (due to the above), I didn’t feel it was really refuted. Do have to let this one fall down on cons side.
8.) Creation.
Con argues that something can come from nothing. The problem here for me comes on the definition of nothing - even if there was nothing, the laws of physics that cause the something from nothing are not nothing. Because this was really mostly covered and argued as part of the KCA, I won’t consider this separately. I feel this has already been covered.
9.) OA revisited.
So after revisiting the 4o argument - which I felt overlapped with with the OA rebuttal points con raised - I wanted to go back, given cons set of supporting arguments. I don’t feel he has really justified the “God is not possible”, on its own and so I feel my initial assessment of the OA still stands.
10.) The kritik.
I left this one till last. I’m going to summarize my understanding of this - and it’s essentially that we have no frame of reference for God, so arguing about his existence or not is largely irrational and a debate on the topic is largely nonsensical
For me, Kritiks need to be slam dunks to be accepted. Pros response is pretty devastating upon first read - atheism and theisms positions are specific and in cases predictive - though pro needed to cite examples- and thus it is possible to draw conclusions about God when the claims are specific.
The inherent nature argument, I feel is moot - as this debate is inherently focused on specific referencable definitions, and thus I feel doesn’t merit awarding of arguments on the basis of the Kritik.
For me to have awarded this, con needs to show me that arguing about God in the context of this debate, is like talking about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. While it was an interesting kritik, con didn’t pull me along for that ride.
So: summarizing this all: it boils down to the KCA - I felt pros argument here, the nature of its presentation was stronger in nature than any of cons rebuttals, of the smaller won arguments. So I must award arguments to pro.
This was an EXCEPTIONALLY hard vote to come up with as both sides did a pretty good job; though there were many missed opportunities on both sides.
I felt pro definitely dropped more arguments, but I weighted this against con throwing more smaller issues as pro, neither of which, in my view were ideal.
Hey boys, Hey girls, Superstar Djs. Here we go!
Tej can’t vote. What if his vote is reported???
I haven’t forgotten about this one, I’m finding it very time consuming writing an RFD, I’ve been looking at this for a while and I’m barely through the ontological argument part! I will say this is a pretty high quality debate. Thought I’d bump it so that others don’t forget it’s here.
“(in certain other religions) a superhuman being or spirit worshipped as having power over nature or human fortunes; a deity.”
You missed off the specific condition of deity.
“A real or imaginary living creature or entity, especially an intelligent one.”
You missed out the key distinction at the end: where being in this sense is not abstract but especially implies intelligence.
You should probably correct these definitions in the next round: because it would be very easy for con to win this debate by simply pointing out these definitions and refute you based purely on semantics and selection of definitions.
That’s not up to me to decide, I’m just saying that It would be VERY easy for your opponent to argue that the sun is not an entity in the context of the definition you linked of “being”.
Well no, not inconsequential at all. If the correct definition was used this would be an excellent discussion on God and dependence.
Using the wrong definition means that Con could win the argument by correcting your definition rather than disproving God. I’m sure that wasn’t your intent.
I’ve spotted a significant copy and paste error MAR. You copied the wrong definition for “being” from the dictionary.
It’s obvious that you meant to past was:
“A real or imaginary living creature or entity, especially an intelligent one.”, which is the correct definition for “being” in the context of a personality or God.
Instead you actually pasted the more generic “existence”.
I wanted to point this out, as it must have been an accidental copy and paste error, and it would detract from the quality of the debate if both sides accidentally mistakenly argued the wrong definition.
The only specific thing you said was your complaint about BoP - which was corrected by Raltar.
The second thing you said was that Raltar claimed you didn’t provide an effective rebuttal - and then say yor rebutdak destroyed Mopac. That’s pretty generic to me, nothing specific, no arguments mentioned, no particular issue outlined.
I would completely disagree with your assessment that you “destroyed mopac” too - you were effective, but you by no means destroyed him, in any way shape or form. I can underand how someone could come down the other side on your position for that very reason. I’m not saying this to annoy you, I’m saying this because it seems that you’re just getting annoyed with Raltar because he didn’t vote the way you think he should, rather than because his reasons were wholly unjustified.
You won, the system worked; why not ask something constructive - such as what you could have done to win Raltars vote.
I’m actually going to back up Raltar here. While I completely disagree with his conclusion, and his vote: I have no reason to conclude it was done for any other reason than this is how he viewed your debate.
I frequently have people that make exactly these same accusations when I have gone to fairly great lengths to justify the vote I have made. By all means, clarify if you think one of the things he’s said is not correct, that both makes people better debaters and better voters; but I really can’t stand people making bland and non-specific allegations of bias like this.
I will personally say that while I believe your arguments did win, and refuted pros position - I disagree with you that you absolutely destroyed his position, I can happily explain what you could have done better, or while I feel like that: but I can see people coming down the other way on this as a result.
Well it kind of is your problem: because without that justification it’s just an assertion (which you seem to have denied), which makes it a weak argument (which you also denied), and wasn’t a conclusion that was supported by a source (which you denied), which, along with the fact you didn’t support any of your other arguments conclusions with sources (which you denied), is why you got marked as losing sources (which you angrily object led to).
So, if you have no response to any of it any more, then I accept your apology.
Feel free to quote the place in round two - or anywhere - where you provided a justification of why people are going to be framed at a materially equivalent rate. Throughout, you hvs simple said this would be the case.
I’m still waiting for you to give me a reason why you think my interpretation of the code is conduct is wrong.
It’s stuff like this that shows why no one takes you seriously, and sometimes wonder whether you have genuine issues in either communication or intelligence:
I am simply wrong? What part specifically, and why? What I said is close to verbatim what the code of conduct says about how you should vote and what ways it is valid, so not only am I not wrong, your vote got removed because you’re wrong.
I get the feeling that you are not capable of even comprehending that people don’t agree with you, and you appear to be resorting to the eroneous conclusion that your utter inability to present a reasonable argument is a problem with all the innumerable people who find your argument irrational, rather than in the one person who made the argument.
For the moment, let’s ignore the fact that these points were considered and factored in to the vote: these arguments depend on the assertion that people or are going to be framed at a materially equivalent rate - an assertion that nothing you quoted serves to directly justify.
If your Aussie source implies that PB is only used when a crime is already proven from multiple angles - then this directly supports your opponents contention that PBS are unnecessary. Right? So in actuality your source actually harms your argument, rather than supports it.
Now, secondly: I am always willing to hear objections to my interpretation. So, you claimed the innocent people would be framed any way with or without Pb. In the context of the contention of the debate, for your argument to be valid, framing must be so prevalent for innocent people, it must be equivalent to the existing bargaining system. You offered no evidence of that, and as the argument is inherently hypothetical, you have to offer practical justification of why it is reasonable to conclude this would occur. This argument was mostly asserted, meaning that you have just argued as if this is an inherently proven point. As you offer no real supporting justification of what would motivate prosecutors to do this and why it is reasonable to conclude this was the case: this was an incredibly weak assertion - and was dismissed accorsingly.
Quite frankly though, if you have specific issues or particular areas in a way I determined the vote - I will be happy to discuss.
Whenever anyone strenuously objects to a vote I make with such generic summaries as “you made a poor vote”, or “you have poor logic” it makes me think that there wasn’t anything that specific you could really point out, but you have to hate on the vote anyway - because it’s critical of you.
Your sources did not support any of your conclusions. The first was delayed to psychopathy which was entirely irrelevant to the contention. The second was supporting the idea that cartels hurt snitches, which you then used to support a conclusion - but didn’t support the conclusion itself and the third (which you posted twice) gives some background information on PB but does not support your argued conclusion that - people would be framed otherwise, that you need PB to catch criminals, and that people would otherwise be framed. None directly support your conclusion. Pros main position is that it leads to the innocent pleading guilty, and he provided direct evidence of that in sources. They support his position much better than yours as a result.
If you had paid a little more attention to my RFD, you would have noticed what I was talking about when I was looking at the list. I was specifically looking for rebuttal points to the first argument about innocent people - one of your points I felt was a direct rebuttal, the other points included claiming people would be framed anyway, which if you read the whole RFD I covered - and mostly rejected as incredibly weak - on its own, and two points about the effect in the guilty. So only one of them - as I pointed out - was directly relevant to the point I was discussin at the time.
You mixes up a lot of your rebuttals for multiple points with your argument in multiple places - while there was somewhat of a good reason for doing so, it lead to a stilted and unstructured argument (which is what I was also pointing out), and made it hard to judge this debate in a linear fashion.
All the relevant points on your list were covered elsewhere in the RFD - all of which, if you spent more time reading it rather than accusing me of having poor comprehension - you would have noticed.
No, your argument didn’t “go over my head”. I point out what was strong and what was weak, and feel I summarized your points fairly consistently.
You posted 3 sources, and none of the really supported pretty much your key main contentions you made. If you think I misrepresent or misunderstood the point you were making, go ahead. I will say a substantial bulk of your arguments were absolutely unnecessary, added nothing to the strength of your argument, and appeared at best tangental to the resolution -
Your sources backed up the facts, you then used those facts to draw a conclusion. Pros main sources in the first round backed up the conclusions he was drawing. That key distinction means his sources helped make his argument much stronger, while yours did not.
If you had posted links about how plea bargains had helped take down major criminal gangs, then I would have probably have awarded sources either to you or as a tie for that reason a but you didn’t.
You can’t vote based on the arguments you would have made, of the reasons you are thinking of for why one side is wrong. You vote based on what both sides argue.
To start with, don’t do multiple debates at the same time. You obviously didn’t have time to really dig into things, it probably cost you both these two last debates.
Feel free to ask questions for any clarification or information for future improvement.
Well, I guess I’m the sex panther of voters.
50% of the time, I vote for Virt every time.
It would incite people to frame the innocent. I found this very difficult to disentangle what con was attempting to argue here: it was spread over multiple posts. In my view con offers very little in the way of actual justification here, and seems to be more opinion than anything else.
While I feel pro offered no direct rebuttal: I can’t score this for con either.
From all of this added up, I have to award arguments to con. To summarize:
- the benefit con presented to plea bargaining was not refuted
- The direct blame of Plea Bargains (rather than just as an element of the problem) was not established.
Pro was a victim of the contention here, and the lack of real substantive rebuttal in two rounds. If the contention was “reform” or “is problematic” rather than “abolish”, his arguments would have been weighted more strongly. Burden of proof was shared, but what you needed to prove was shifted.
Sources: Pro. Pro underpinned his primary points with factual sources that made it far harder for con to attack pro from a factual basis, as a result, pros sources directly underpinned his position. Con needed to establish more factual evidence for some of his claims, and the lack of these made his position weaker as a result.
This is a good initial point, but has some fundamental problems for me: specifically con does not provide a good justification of why fear of death due to powerful cartels is a problem for informants, but not for PB, so in my view this substantially weakens this arguments.
Pros counter to this point was with data indicating PB informants (from his source) are a major source of wrongful convictions, this obviously adds weight into his wrongful conviction argument in a roundabout way, but doesn’t address pros claim, nor does it offer plausible alternatives to PB for hardened criminals.
As a result, I felt that the core of this primary argument is left mostly unrefuted. I found this argument to be somewhat weak however as mentioned: con needed to come up with examples of big criminals caught with PB, and all pro has to do was do the reverse. I was a little disappointed neither side did.
Con 1.5: 0.5
The guilty have no reason to plead guilty.
This was a very short and weak argument. Con points out that if there is no plea bargain, there is no incentive for anyone not to go through a major trial. Con didn’t argue or set up what benefit this gave, or why this is preferable. As a result, even thought this wasn’t directly refuted by pro, I can’t score this very strongly.
Con: 1.75: pro: 0.5
Saying this, pro did not really offer any substantial analysis here. Offering a very narrow set of conditions that non PB systems fulfill as well as PB conditions. His argument and source does show that in Alaska, they CJS hasn’t fallen apart, and there are some differences, but I do not feel pro justifies the claim that PBS are unnecessary with the arguments presented. Given the limited subset, I felt even the argument that non-PBS were “better”, was limited and therefore also weak as a result.
Pro needed to have spent more time justifying the perceived benefits and ensuring that all of them are unaffected without PB, I think this may have been pros intent with this argument, but this didn’t appear clear.
Importantly the unnecessary argument was eroded by cons argument about major criminals, this wasn’t fully rebutted, and in my view, presented a clear case that PBS are necessary. Thus, I have to award this point to con on rebuttal.
Con 1:0.5
It’s the only way to catch big criminals.
Cons primary opponent in this debate was his own argument and logical style, which I felt massively detracted from my ability as a voter to understand the core of his argument. His position was frequently muddled by unnecessary explanation and irrelevant information, and to me this meant that he had both himself and pro as debate opponents.
Cons key point in his opening argument, is that law enforcement needs plea bargains in order to catch the really bad criminals. That informants don’t work (as they get killed).
Con argues that pro has failed to establish that PB is the reason the innocent pled guilty, which I reject as an argument- as i feel pro did a good job in outlining why this is the case originally.
So, I felt pros position had key flaws here, but con did not fully capitalize on this weakness with more than a throwaway line. I can’t give a full point, but will give half to pro as a result.
Pro 0.5-0.
PB is Unnecessary.
Pros position is that PBs are unnecessary. He supports this by claiming that if prosecuters can’t prove a defendant guilty at a trial they shouldn’t be using a PB.
While this seems reasonable, in my view, pro needs to establish that it is the case that most PBs are made because prosecutors can’t prove the defendant guilty, vs for other reasons (time, resources, etc). He doesn’t do this, with this being a gaping structural flaw in this argument.
Cons primary argument and objection, is how plea bargaining has usage other than simply to allow prosecution of those who they don’t have enough evidence to convict in court. Cons response here, in my view: refuted this point in essence by showing that this wasn’t the case.
Pro argued in addition that when removing PBs, it made police investigations better, and improved disposition time citing an example of an Alaska ban - and claiming (with no citation) that the same is true elsewhere.
I actually thought this was the most compelling of pros arguments - but he did not spend any significant time on it.
Arguments:
Perversion of Justice.
Pros argument is almost self explanatory. Plea bargains allow the innocent to be unfairly punished, and criminals to have unfair reduction in punishments. I felt these claims were fairly well supported by the sources pro provided.
My main issue with this argument, is that I felt pro needed to establish that the issue was with the plea bargain itself - rather than prosecutors usage of them: pro mentions PBs in relation to multiple facets of the criminal justice system but fails to adequately separate cause - which weakens his position. Con points this out with a minimal rebuttal - which casts substantial doubt on this part of the argument, but due to brevity I did not consider a full rebuttal
Pro undermines his case with the second part: he muddies the water between guilt and innocence (which is a fair argument), and then presents statistics he claims applies to the guilty. This somewhat erodes his second point, which is further muddied as he doesn’t provide a justification of causation rather correlation. How much does the conciliatory admission of guilt vs not accepting their actions play into this?
As a result I found pros first argument lacking some key ingredients to make it particularly compelling.
Con, offered little in the way of rebuttal here. (I consider the turning of this on its head as a new argument - not a rebuttal). The primary response that I felt was offered to rebutt this was essentially cons argument that “it’s not like prosecutors are going to view them as innocent, they’ll still be prosecuted”. Out of the list of 4 items con presents, this is the only example that is obviously relevant - the others appear laboured and to me, I’m not sure how they play in. In this case, I feel cons argument fundamentally ignored much of pros case that the availability of PBs causes prosecuters and police to be lazy and charge people that they wouldn’t necessarily prioritize in trial.