Why You Can’t Debate Creationists

Post Reply New Topic

Probably the same reason you can't have a debate with any dogmatic individual whether their area of expertise is religious, political, or just one of their own ego-fueling isms.

In most cases when you try to debate an ideologue on their position you won't even get good apologia for their beliefs. Most often you'll get incredibly low-hanging fruit backed the rest of the way by brawn, brow-beating, and possibly threats of violence.

The point of engaging them, in my opinion, is for the benefit of casually interested bystanders. The internet is not favorable ground for creationists. Their arguments can be attacked in detail. That's why they prefer oral debates where they can practice the Gish Gallop where you lie twenty times and just keep moving. Dawkins and others have a point there but internet creationists are a gift to atheists. It's rope a dope at this point and thankfully there are still reasonable people interested in talking to creationists. I'm not usually one of them. Blech.

I think the recent decline in faith is probably linked to the internet. People see these arguments and usually the believers are coming off very poorly. It would be in the interest of more reasonable believers to help their co-religionists see reason but...

For a long time, that was my view too. I was always very frustrated that people couldn't appreciate the wonders of evolution because of their religion, and saw no reason why it was incompatible with belief in God.

A few small problems though:

1) If God is controlling evolution, why isn't he stopping bad things from happening?
2) Evolution involves the weak being killed horribly. What sort of God does that?

I think maybe the Deists might be on to something with a clock maker God. That is, He made creation to run itself, and that involves bad things happening as that's the nature of things.

techstepgenr8tion is onto something here.

It's because the worldviews are fundamentally different. There's nothing particularly 'special' about a Creationist position in this regard.

To have a meaningful debate anywhere, you first have to agree on what is being debated, and what the accepted grounds of 'proof' are that both parties might be able to come to an agreement. A Creationist and, say, Darwinist are unlikely to agree on those grounds, or the accepted 'proof'.

You can, however, have a really good bicker such that both parties come away convinced of their rightness and the others' idiocy.

It's not that the worldviews are different, it is that one side consistantly ignores the facts. You can debate fact-free people, it's just not that useful except to make them look stupid.

Years ago I used to debate with Jehovah's Witnesses who came to my door. I used to invite them in and we had long discussions. Ultimately the discussions were fruitless. Their basis of proof was "if it is written in the bible it is true" and mine was "evidence verified by science is true". They simply didn't care what evidence science had for evolution etc; their bible told them otherwise and that was the end of it... evidence for evolution has been faked by the devil to deceive mankind and turn him away from God. God put dinosaurs on the Earth to keep the vegetation down until he created mankind... and so on. Their arguments became more and more ridiculous. It soon becomes apparent when debating creationists that they are clueless about reality.

They're far from having a monopoly on ignoring facts though - that was more my point.

trollcatman is not exaggerating here. The debate IS that one-sided. What facts do scientists ignore? Win a Nobel Prize by providing EVIDENCE that evolution is false.

To summarize: all the scientific evidence found so far supports evolution and none falsifies it (but it is falsifiable), while NO evidence yet found supports a Young Earth Creationist viewpoint and while most of YEC claims cannot be tested (and are therefore not science), those that can be tested have been falsified.

ALL the facts support evolution (multiple independent lines of evidence all pointing to the same reality) and NO facts support young earth creationism. All Creationists have is their interpretation of the Bible, and in order to justify that they have to ignore some of the strongest evidence for evolution and deny or distort what they do not ignore. Creationists who deny the fact of evolution are among the most badly misinformed people of any subject considering how blatantly dishonest Creationist web sites, books, speakers and videos are.

And to make clear, when I say Creationist I mean someone who denies the fact of evolution, not necessarily someone who believes the universe and life had a Creator. It is quite possible to still believe in a God and accept the reality of the physical universe including the fact of evolution (yes, even macro evolution). If evolution did not happen, that would make God a malicious prankster to plant so much evidence of so many different types that clearly show it does happen.

I see again and again that when asked if any amount of evidence would change their minds, Creationists say "No, absolutely not" and scientists say "Yes, of course!" That is a rather big difference. It is NOT a case of looking at the same evidence with different world views. No amount of evidence or logic can convince a religious nut he or she is wrong because they have been brainwashed so much and LIED to about this subject (and possibly they are too stupid to understand the evidence, or insane).

Last edited by TheBicyclingGuitarist on 24 Apr 2014, 11:02 am, edited 1 time in total.

I wasn't finger-pointing anyone's individual beliefs and best assemblage of the facts, nor was I trying to edify YEC. Just stating that this happens everywhere.

You can not argue with the brainwashed and the deranged. they will only reason out excuses to fit their own agenda.
Their about like an alcoholic that cant resist their favorite drink, you cant make them quit, they have to decide to do it on their own.

Its because they are desperate by making up their excuses to try to make their stories believable because they have no proof their "it's in the bible" will always be their excuse and a cop out.

You can disprove most of the bible, but not the god. It does not have to be a christian version of it. God is a very tricky concept in logic

Hey Willard, what did you mean by conscious universe

They are different, though. The world looks fundamentally different from a Creationist perspective compared to a Darwinian one. One particular worldview does not consider the facts to be such, or perhaps does not see/value them in the same way. To who do you intend to make them look stupid? They don't think they look stupid, but they will see people mocking them, which simply resolves their faith. Their explanation will cover the facts as much as yours - true, such covering may involve the dismissal of certain facts in accordance with the logic of their explanation - to their satisfaction.

If I were to suggest we debate which is best, a fieldmouse or a unicycle, I hope your response would be, 'eh?'. And not because it's clearly the fieldmouse, but because there's no obvious measure by which to judge, so we'd first have to agree what we we're actually talking about, how to measure the bestness, and how we'd resolve it, etc. The problem Darwinists and Creationists have is it really looks, to both parties, that they are talking about the same thing, that there are actual agreed grounds for debate and resolution of said debate. They're not, and there aren't.

And I think this happens a lot. It's a conceptual, metapysical issue, rather than a 'what are the facts' matter.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSxgnu3Hww8[/youtube][youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfZFsXfCy6s[/youtube]*yawn* Bring it on creationists! Take all the time you need to desperatly prove the existence of your skydaddy by making up more lame excuses like its in the bible loop again and again! We won you lost that's all there is to it!