I’m so ashamed. But it’s local, I got talked into it, and it turns out the subject is actually something I’ve been researching lately, so I figured sure, why not. I still think it’s a bad idea, but I’ve been paying too much attention to that debater guy, Matt Dillahunty, and figured I’d take one more stab at it.
It will be held in Fargo, on 12 February, at the Ramada Inn, with Fuz Rana, an old earth creationist from Reasons to Believe. The topic is “Is There Evidence of a Creator or Not?” (guess which side I’m taking). It’s also being organized by the Seventh Day Adventists, so I expect a house stuffed with preconceptions — do feel free to come and balance the scales to some small degree.
Also, I’ll be in Los Angeles on 15 March, to talk with the CFI-LA crowds, which I think will be a little less crazy than what I encounter in Fargo. You can come to that one, too! I’m still thinking about what to talk about there, so suggestions are welcome.
Also, I just reviewed their planned ad for the Fargo debate. They misspelled my name. I am unsurprised.
I hope you wash your hands thoroughly before returning to work.
Well, I guess you can call me a fan of bloodsports, but I do enjoy this type of debate.
Can I get popcorn?
:D
Why does PZ’s opponent always misspell his name?
What do you mean? My friends misspell my name.
So people I respect say don’t dot his. And they they do this. Make up your fucking mind.
At least the opponent is ripe for Skyrim jokes.
Have you ever thought that maybe it’s you who is doing the misspelling?
hmmm?
Oh, I guess Myers is a miss-spellable name. ^_^
It’s hard to know what to do when Important People You Like send mixed messages, I know. It’s almost as if things aren’t always clear-cut, and that it’s a good idea to be able to make your own judgment in changing circumstances.
I’m sure you know how to prepare, but the first thing I’d do is research the sort of arguments the other side uses. You obviously want to state your own case, but it would be nice to be able to prepare for the sort of arguments the other side is making (first cause, presuppositional, etc.)
You’re going to need a session in an autoclave to get the ickies off.
Eh, wrong continent. But you will confound all their expectations by being all mild-mannered and clearly a nice person and such :-)
They won’t be expecting this, and will be Very Confused and Disconcerted.
William Lane Craig thinks Hugh Ross, the President of Reasons to Believe, is a bit over the top. Now that’s comedy.
Hmmm…. Seems to me that the topic should really be:
Is there GOOD Evidence of a Creator or Not?
Good evidence almost always results in the majority of observers reaching very similar conclusions — pretty much what we see in all branches of science.
Bad evidence always seems to result in widely disparate conclusions, i.e. every religion to date.
O.k. well that topic should be fairly easy.
A) No. Since none of the so-called evidence that creationists site actually counts as evidence. “Because the bible says so.” Certainly doesn’t count.
Dillahunty is a good person to watch for practice – he’s exceedingly good at this kind of thing. He doesn’t let a single claim go by without stopping and examining it. I watched a bit of one of Rana’s videos, and within the first 3 minutes of his exposition he declares that New Atheism’s doctrine is that “science disproves god’s existence.” Sigh.
If you do half as well as Matt, I’m sure you will mop the floor with him.
Shit, it’s Cite, not site. Duh. I don’t seem to be able to edit my post.
Agreed, but the point is to make the creationists understand that if their particular “evidence” doesn’t allow the majority of observers to reach the same (or very similar) conclusions, then it isn’t evidence at all.
Remember, these people have a belief system that allows them to commit dishonest or even criminal acts with a clear conscience, because they’re doing it for Jesus. Don’t trust them on anything. Here are some suggestions for precautions, off the top of my head:
– Demand a live recording, with you receiving an unedited copy, to do with as you wish. Better yet, have someone independent recording the event.
– Make sure that they don’t change the title at the last minute. Don’t let them put evolution on trial without any scrutiny going the other way.
– Have a debate rule that clearly states that only one subject may be brought up at a time and no other subjects may be raised until the current subject has been dealt with.
– Demand that any proceeds from the event be donated to a mutually agreeable charity.
– Get everything in writing and bring copies to the event, so you can expose them
ifwhen they try weaseling out of the agreed terms.I have listened to several debates on this subject, in which a watchmaker/ID argument is made, and I am surprised that no one responds with how bad the watch analogy is when com[ared to biological organisms. Watches cannot produce offspring and thus no evolution from a simple to a more complex watch.
@parasiteboy:
I’ve heard a better one. If creationists are using the watchmaker argument to demonstrate that a created thing is immediately intuitively apparent, they can’t also claim that the universe is created. Otherwise, how would you pick out the watch as being created? It’d be like finding a watch in a forest of watches.
February in Fargo – not exactly April in Paris, but it’s a reason to get out of the house. Be sure to post about it again in late January.
7DAs are presuppositionalists all the way down. And they’re YEC through and through.
Look at that beautiful sky…evidence of a creator.
Look at that malaria parasite…evidence of a creator who needed to introduce death into the world after the fall. Because without evil, how would you know good?
And on and on. They start with, continue with, and end with presuppositional positions.
Miracles. Lots and lots of miracles. Rainbows = god’s promise after the flood (which they believe in wholeheartedly). Did routine surgery cure your appendicitis? Thank dog for that — it’s a miracle!
Even though we can tell by science that nothing supernatural has been proven to have happened since the universe was a Planck sphere…it’s all evidence for a creator. And especially the gaps.
Seems like a poor choice of question to me. Obviously there is evidence of a creator, the existence of the universe is difficult to explain when non-existence would be a much more logical situation. So there is evidence but it is hardly conclusive.
The real question is whether there is any evidence that the creator had any continuing involvement from a billionth of a second after the big bang on. And there we don’t have any evidence at all. The scientific version of creation is remarkably complete and consistent and gets better all the time, the theological account only gets worse and requires more explanations.
For organized religion to make sense, a God who lights the fuse and then disappears isn’t enough. A God has to deliver benefits in this life or the next to be considered viable.
Back in the days when groveling to kings was the order of the day, the idea that God demanded groveling made some sense. Today it doesn’t.
One of the things I’ve seen cited as “evidence” frequently is how the Bible is so totally consistent and contains no conflicts despite having been written by X authors over Y time… it might be a good idea to bring a copy of the Biblical Contradictions Chart to shut that one down easily, and move on to other things. (Warning: The pdf is gigantic.)
@HappyHead:
Pssh, none of those contradictions are real. Give a creationist enough time, and they’ll be able to justify ever single one. Of course you could take their explanations and chart the contradictions between them, but each of those has a justification as well. Then you could find contradictions between those, and more justifications…
Whoever gives up on the process first loses.
I can sympathize.
I think a debate of this nature would hinge largely on definitions. What do they see as the definition of “evidence”? How do they determine whether a given fact is evidence in support of a conclusion? I suspect that the answers Creationists would give are not the same answers you and I would give.
It’s not poopyhead’s friends and unfriendies who misspell his name. Not at all. Everyone but him spells it wrong…
</snark>I have been discussing something on the Atheist Experience board, about how truth is not necessarily “factual correctness.” That might be an interesting concept to explore, insistence that all evidence has to be “factually correct” in a demonstrable sense.
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I think LykeX has good points and I would wonder if it is even worth debating with people who are not commited to honesty and insisting that all information brought must be factually correct and demonstrable by peer review or explcitly stated that it is a matter of opinion and cannot be verified by controlled unbiased expreiementatin.
… the subject is actually something I’ve been researching lately, … The topic is “Is There Evidence of a Creator or Not?”
Why would our esteemed host have been “researching” that – and how?
Is there going to be food? Seventh Day Adventists are vegetarians and make some really good food. Go for the buffet, it will put you in a good mood for the debate.
PZ, dude. I grew up in a creationist household. You’d have a better time just staying home and sipping on bleach.
But I agree with leontiev above. Seventh Day Adventist vegetarian food is excellent! Load up as much as you can!
Dollars to fucking donuts that the creationist, debating a biologist about evolution, is gonna focus on how a Creator is proven to exist due to shit that involves cosmology and astrophysics. Every fucking time.
Well, Rana used to be a biochemist, so I hope he can focus on biology…but I have seen some of his talks where he glibly drifts into the privileged planet trope. We’ll see.
You know, I’ve heard that postmodernist argument a number of times, but I can’t ever recall hearing it from people who actually have the facts on their side.
Every now and then humans need to repeat their errors to be again vaccinated against them.
Fuz Rana has such a big paper (electron?) trail that it shouldn’t be hard to figure out what his arguments are going to be. It’s just there will be a lot of pain in doing the requisite research. I find it hard to get through more than a few hundred words without having to fight the urge to throw my computer at a wall.
But the answer to the debate question is “yes”, by definition, as it’s of the form “is X either right or wrong?” And of course this is true for most values of X. How can you have a debate about that?
@ John Small Berries
In context the point I was making with the argument is that the moral truth of something like a parable does not translate into the statements of the parable becoming measurable facts. I.e.: just because the tortoise and the hare is “true” philosophically that does not mean that a tortoise needs to have beaten a hare in an actual race. So to individuals who are dogmatically committed to Biblical literalism I have mentioned that the Genesis story can have meaning even if we can go back in time with machines and determine thorugh secret observation that the events described never actually occurred. That is something many who DON’T have the facts on their side (like evangelists) have often never considered. And as I typed this it hit me.
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Maybe PZ Meyers here should focus on finding out what arguments the group he will be debating with has not been exposed to and concentrate on exposing them to that. Sometimes planting a few seeds and getting people curious to find out for themselves is the best that one can hope for in the long run.
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For example, I recently exposed a pseudo-creationist (he didn’t really believe in Genesis being literally true but did not buy that evolution was factual either) to the principle of chromosome fusion in humans, how the human chromosome 2 looks just like fused chimpanzee chromosomes including internal telomeres and an extra centromere. Albeit he got into one of those “I can’t be wrong” type of attitudes and started making claims about there not being transitional species. The people around us started laughing when I directed him to whole books and research projects on transitional species. It at least planted a few seeds in the people listening.
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In all honesty I think the reason the guy I was talking to was anti-evolution was more political than scientific or religious, which it often seems to be. It was more about him “towing the party line” of conservatives who have some sort of agenda whne it comes to that.
I don’t see the logic behind that at all. What sound, logical argument is supposed to get us to the absolute non-existence of anything at all? And if there’s nothing, why even talk about a situation or the logic of it? How is it not assuming that there’s something, even when paying lip service to the idea that there’s nothing?
Of course, you can argue that life is a kind of evidence for a creator who wanted to make life, but only in the way that volcanoes are evidence for a creator who wanted to make volcanoes. That doesn’t mean it’s likely that there’s a volcano-loving god, just that such a being is somewhat more likely given a universe with volcanoes than a universe without. The mere presence of volcanoes counts for something, certainly, but it’s still really fucking unlikely. So, because of this evidence that there are volcanoes, the volcano god has some tiny but non-zero probability as far as anybody can tell, but overshadowing that is that there’s nothing problematic about understanding and explaining volcanoes in a naturalistic universe which doesn’t have a god. So there is evidence, in this minimal sense, but it’s not “good evidence” in the sense that it should lead you to believe this theory is true, as some people above were saying.
But then you get to the question about the whole thing, not just little pieces of it. The logic starts breaking down even more there. What kind of phenomena or experiences are we supposed to assume we have about existence itself? For fuck’s sake, what would that even mean? Who knows what else might exist, besides the universe we inhabit, and how are we supposed to know anything about any of these other possibilities? If we decide to forget about them, then we may as well forget about asking the question. And if the idea is that something we’re calling a “god” simply had a hankering for existence of some sort, wouldn’t it suffice that this god exists, that many other possible universes or states of existence might be, etc., not this specific universe with its specific laws and objects and us standing in the middle of it all imagining ourselves to be the most important and most inexplicable thing around? How is this supposed to explain anything, about the world we live in, much less all of existence itself, or even be a convincing argument that there exists even one specific thing (a god)?
This is not logic, in any form that I’d recognize. It’s a bunch of assumptions and prejudices that are dressed up in fancy clothes and paraded around, until you get tired and go home without ever seeing Santa in his sleigh at the end.
I’d like to see you take on HBD. You have a few posts dismissing it as academic racism so why not really dive in and build a talk around it. Some guy named JayMan even made a “best of HBD” reading list.
http://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/
Exactly. Let’s define what we mean by “evidence”:
• Falsifiable
• Independently verifiable/repeatable
• Consistent
• Measurable
I would like to see, given a limited set of evidence decided prior to the debate, the argument based upon said evidence that leads to one’s conclusion. If anyone can pick any evidence, then it will be a waste of time for everyone involved.
For example, evidence might include:
• The speed of light
• The orbits of the planets
• The speed and direction of the various galaxies in the universe
• The shapes and compositions of the planets
• K/Ar dating of rocks
• Fossils
• Specific differences between two species of closely-related birds
• Physical artifacts
Evidence may not include
• One or more holy texts that are not corroborated by independent first-hand accounts and/or physical artifacts
• Conclusion from observation (“nature is beautiful, therefore god”)
• Feelings
• “I know” (e.g., the Sye Ten Bruggencate defense)
Too ambiguous. If bad evidence counts as “evidence” then he’s got you there.
Make it easy on yourself. Combine the two. Tell the CFI-LA crowd all about your creationist debate in Fargo, North Dakota.
@Usernames! #44
You are asking people who know that they cannot win by playing fair (which is what I see falsifiability as, if you can’t be wrong how do you know that you are right?).
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They think like politicians, winning to them is a matter of convincing people that something is true if it is popular, not if one can actually demonstrate it through repeatable unbiased means. As far as they are concerned the tortoise and the hare must have really happened if they believe it strongly enough. It is basically William Lane Craig’s defense when he claims divine witness of the holy spirit and StB’s “I know” because “It has been revealed to me in such a way that I can know…”. If that worked in science and medicine one could blow their brains out with a shotgun and have it healed using the “divine knowledge of the holy spirit.”
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ONe mgiht as well just plant doubts in their mind using whatever means you can.
frankgturner:
Maybe “truth” needs to be defined as well. Your definition, for example, seems odd and idiosyncratic to me.
What are are really saying is that when you see something odd you find it more plausible that a human-like creature spontaneously came into existence and created something odd than that said odd thing just came into existence by itself. It’s a cognitive bias–our brains are wired to pop humans into existence from just about anything. For example :) That’s about as unlike an actual person as you can get, yet it lights up a huge portion of your brain and bypasses the fact that an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent creature that transcends time and space is far less probable than quantum fluctuations making a big bang.
As a joke instead debate that Sabbath is Sunday.
I’m guessing they’re thinking of an idea that roughly amounts to “slow and steady wins the race,” which is not about the pre-Socratic “philosophical” arguments about atomism, the possibility or impossibility of motion or change, and so forth. They have nothing to do with one another, except some superficial features in how the myths are told and what kinds of characters are part of the story.
Anyway, if the former is what is supposed to be true (or “morally true” or “practically true” or “approximately true” or whatever), then it’s a general statement about the way things tend to be. But those things are physical processes, which are measurable just as much as atoms or motion in the other case. Of course it’s not that everything is always better when it’s done slowly and steadily, but that simply means it isn’t universal and absolute and all-encompassing in every sense. Just dial back those wild expectations you might have had about how to interpret the statement as something that’s totally inviolable or inevitable, and you’re fine. It’s still a measurable statement of fact about general, statistical properties of the physical world, in the same way that “this coin lands up heads about 50% of the time” is a measurable statement of fact. That is, unless you think there’s something nonphysical going on in the workings of a person (who does or doesn’t act according to the parable, for instance), in which case there are still measurable facts about how the physical part interacts with the nonphysical part. Anyway, if there’s anything to the idea at all, maybe you’d want to pick a different example.
Make this a pre-condition: Fuz Rana has to present his one or two best arguments. None of that fifty lies in five minutes BS so you don’t have time for a complete counter argument. He either has his best game on or nothing.
Good example: tide goes in, tide goes out. You can’t explain that.
Well, since Los Angeles is “ground zero” for the adult entertainment industry in the U.S., perhaps you might want to address how religious beliefs have formed the basis for the exclusion of some forms of sexual speech—so-called “obscenity”—from the First Amendment’s speech protections, and how those who once worked in the adult industry have been discriminated against when applying for employment after they have left adult performing, often based on those employers’ religious beliefs.
I like SugarFrosted’s idea of using the Saturday/Sunday sabbath in the debate, but as an illustration of how religious ‘truth’ cannot be falsified.
Any chance you can get slides from this to illustrate some of your arguments? It’s pretty much a guarantee that you will run across some of them.
*shrieking giggles*
They had to! They were contractually obliged!
Many Christians are quite happy to declare that all other Christians are horribly wrong and are corrupting the Bible’s plain simple truth. I don’ t think Seventh Day Adventists would be fazed by the idea that most Christians are celebrating the sabbath on the wrong day.
Can be annoying trying to pin down which particular interpretation someone you’re arguing with has, all the while having them claim they don’t interpret the Bible at all.
Record the event and post on youtube pretty please :)
gillt #43
I like this idea. Related, and possibly easier to tackle in the time allowed: Problems with Evolutionary Psychology as she is Practice.
(Full Disclosure: I’m the one what first invited PZ to CFI-LA.)
If it’s any consolation, Stephen Meyer gets his name misspelled a lot too. Oddly enough, I don’t think Ernst Mayr had a problem.
Other people have said it but I think it needs saying again
Another way to approach the question would be ‘does religion provide any answers that science and philosophy not’. Note that this is not the same as ‘does religion answer any questions’ since religion does answer a lot of questions, the problem is that the answers aren’t very good or self consistent.
If we try to get moral guidance from the bible we have the problem that the God of the old testament has the moral compass of Genghis Khan.
On the origins of the universe, the Bible is pretty rubbish. While science provides a theory of creation with predictive power, religion requires us to constantly explain the disparity between observed facts and theology.
@60
Right.
The bible is scientifically proven to be incorrect 10 words in. “In the beginning, dog created the heavens and the earth.” Wait…hold on. Science has proven that the Earth was created as part of our solar system about 4.7 billion years ago, and the universe itself is about 10 billion years older than that. How in the world does that count as “the beginning”.
That’s like saying that “the beginning” of the week is Thursday afternoon.
And by “created”, I mean “formed by accretion and gravitational forces using materials ejected from the deaths of at least two other stars, one of which exploded in a supernova.”
Of course not. That belief is an important part of their dogma!
Only with a lot less religious tolerance.
Easy: .
They claim to worship a god. They worship their mirror image; that’s what gods are after all.
kevin,
let’s not forget the bible says insects have four legs.
@anteprepro # 47 and conciousness razor # 50
Let me put what I am talking about in context to give you an idea of my main point.
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Some years ago I was at a laundromat (a few times actually) and one of the part time employees there happened to be a Jehovah’s Witness (he had never knocked on my door but I doubt he would have liked to, then again he was a decent man). Obviously the Bible came up and I started talking about parables and how metaphors can mean so much (I was raised by pro evolution liberal minded Catholics BTW, think Kenneth Miller, but still not prone to full disclosure).
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He asked me how I could believe that the Bible was not “true.” I explained to him that in many regards I did think it was true, just not factual. That surprised him and he said that did not make sense. I pointed out that sure it did, Jesus spoke in parables plenty didn’t he?
Now he was a bit confused because those parables are explicitly stated that they are not factually correct, and I pointed out that it did not matter, one can derive “moral truth” from it anyway. I used the story of the tortoise and the hare as an example of something that is true but not factually correct. Generally speaking, particularly when engaging in long physical events like marathons a slow and steady pace will do better than and attempt to sprint. That is obviously not true under all circumstances, race car drivers tend to push their vehicles to go at the maximum speed that the road will allow.
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He still did not seem to get why things can’t have value if they did not occur. So I pointed out that if we went back in time and recorded a person telling the story of Job and recorded their whole life and saw that the story had never been witnessed by anyone, would he still think it a valuable story. He was sort of stumped and said something to the effect of, “I think so,” and I followed up with an explanation that insisting that Job only has value as a potential “moral truth” if it was witnessed fact for fact by someone is like insisting that under no circumstances at all will a racer EVER benefit from a slow and steady pace unless someone had actually witnessed a tortoise beating a hare in a race at the time of the original telling of that story.
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He was kind of dumbfounded and I asked him flat out, had he ever considered the possibility that some of the stories he had read in the Bible were parables even though they were not explicitly stated as such, particularly when they contained things like dragons and unicorns and giants? He admitted that he had but thought that it was wrong to think those things and I asked him, “Why would it be wrong to get a greater understanding of the Bible and the purpose of the stories and where they came from?” He asked if one can study that and I said, “Oh definitely, one can study Hebrew and Greek, some of the original languages of the Bible,” and went on to discuss that Job was most certainly a parable given that it has a disclaimer at the beginning (he was unaware of this).
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So that is where I get into the idea that the word “truth” does not always mean “factual correctness” and one should be careful as to think about if that is what one really means by the word “truth.” And the point of this that a lot of what I was doing was exposing him to things that he was unaware of, planting seeds. And this is long before I read Peter Boghossian. This is what I think PZ Meyers might want to focus on.
Every time you start speaking the audience will stop listening and remind themselves instead, that whatever you are saying, it will be easily explained away by the speaker on the side of religion.
Phillip Hallam-Baker (#26):
Why? Can you spell out the logical steps that lead to this conclusion? And if non-existence is more “logical”, wouldn’t that “logically” rule out the existence of a “creator” as well?
And if you needed an explanation for the existence of the universe, why would a creator be a go-to explanation at all?
Last February, Fuz Rana was in Fargo giving two talks. His daytime talk (from what I learned from others- I did not attend) was about ideas from Steven Meyers’ Signature in the Cell ‘. He was speaking in the Century Theatre of the Student Union, NDSU, to an audience of about 15 people. By happy coincidence, I was speaking just down the hall about the evolution of the Creationist movement as part of ‘Darwin Days’ put on the Zoology Department of NDSU- to a packed small room of more than 50 people.
An interesting note about that event. The sponsors of Fuz Rana put out a full page add in the Student Newspaper (The Spectrum) making it appear that Fuz Rana’s talks were part of the Darwin Days events. I did save two copies and will document their actions again this year as well.
@Iain, 67
It is a question of being precise in the language used. Since we live in a society that is largely shaped by a certain theological approach, the term ‘creator’ is usually a weasel word for ‘God’. But it doesn’t have to be.
Lets imagine we are debating sun-worshippers and the topic of debate is ‘is there a Sun?’ Well thats a silly argument to have because we agree that there is a sun, the question is whether the sun has god-like properties. At minimum sentience, free will, immortality. To justify sun worship the sun god would also need to be capable of listening to and responding to prayer, sacrifices etc.
Applying this to the question of a ‘creator’ we all agree that there is a process of creation. The question is not whether there is a creator, it is whether the creator has god-like properties or is merely some fluctuation of quantum soup.
Just wondering if you should stir the pot by claiming that they’re right. And YOU are the creator. And you created the universe last week, with everyone’s false memories, etc.
I know, I know. Still, it would be completely unexpected. Wondering how exactly they’d backpedal. It’d be a scream.
Your recent medical escapades. Bring pictures.
Phillip Hallam-Baker, #69:
I don’t. There’s no evidence that something hasn’t always existed. The big bang, in case you’ve gotten the wrong impression, is only the extent of our knowledge right now — our knowledge to some approximation, because inflationary theories and quantum gravity (e.g.) are still being worked out even if they are partly supported by evidence and can potentially give us a little more insight about the question. It’s also not clear that existence itself is something that only applies to the physical universe or multiverse or whatever that we happen to live in. You can toss in the existence of gods or supernatural realms too, but in any case where did that assumption come from? Why think we have any access to such knowledge, when we clearly don’t even in the case of our own local piece of existence?
It wouldn’t even make sense on that level. Quantum soup exists, presumably. If you’re saying something like that is what “caused existence,” I have no idea what it could possibly mean, whether you decide to call that a “creator” or use some other term for it. You can certainly ask what that is and what it’s doing (or might have done), but in no sense are you asking the question you apparently think you’re asking.
I was reading some replies to an analysis of a debate between Sye Ten Bruggencate and Matt Dillahunty and I saw something from a Kertesian Taker that I thought applied here.
I have been trying to get into the minds of creationists and apologists for some time. It is important for me to understand the psychology of “why” they do what they do. I mentor a child who is very into sports and can’t seem to comprehend anything other than “winning.” It occurred to be that that is all apologists and creationists want to seem to do, give the impression of winning. I read some comments on debates given by William Lane Craig from creationists. Despite my thoughts that Craig performed horribly, giving no practical information and basically functioning more like a politician and learning how to make his views sound charismatic and confident, many readers felt that Craig had “won” the debate. And my thought was, it is not a football game!
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Many of the listeners of debates of creationists DO think that it is a game though. They somehow think that if you can “win” the debate that your side comports to reality. As if you could make a good argument for a pink unicorn appearing over Tibet next thursday and you “won” a debate against someone who said that it wouldn’t could somehow cause that to happen.
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I think the more important part of the debate is to expose people to areas they have never thought of before (I mention Kenneth Miller a lot as it surprises many a creationist that I have known that a person can be Xtian and STILL believe that evolution occurred). However, one might need to make others feel that you have “won.” Giving the impression of winning to people who don’t know that it is not whether you win or loose but how you play the game (they think it important that you do give the impression of winning) may actually be important to them. I know as a scientist Dr. Meyers, Sir you probably don’t think that way, but many of the listeners might be thinking that way.
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Later in the comment on the debate with StB and Matt Dillahunty (who you mentioned that you would be communing with anyway) it is brought up in the closing argument by StB not to “follow” Matt and that StB was on a power trip and cared less about being agreed with and more about being followed. I have heard similar comments from WLC when people asked him about starting a foundation and Craig said something to the effect of allowing his ideas to die with him. Showing people that you are not interested in power by ARE interested in educating them might also be a good idea AND something that they are NOT expecting from their local preachers.
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Anyway i thought that important, take it or leave it.