Crushing an atheist’s spirit

[EDITOR’S NOTE: After one last scan of the article, it occurs to me the title needs some explanation. This isn’t the actual goal of Mr. Doopy–he’s trying to convince the other party in their debate that STL actually has a soul that can be crushed. No one was physically harmed in this battle of wits, if that’s what this should be called.]

Personally, I’ve begun to shy away from engaging with liberals or atheists in debate on the Internet because it’s a tremendous time-suck, I’m not getting any younger, and my books unfortunately won’t write themselves. It’s just not a very productive use of my time, in my opinion, because the typical online debate adversary tends to assume several things that are inevitably untrue: these include the supposition opposing arguments cannot be supported by evidence, that arguments believed by consensus must be accepted as true, and that modern religious beliefs are only held by uneducated fools. Most often, this anonymous Internet opponent proves to be immune to all logic and reason, and devoid of any common sense.

The effort usually strikes me as a colossal waste of valuable time so gradually, I’ve removed myself from groups where the trolls lurk, never seeming to have anything better to do than try to annoy me with ridiculous, ill-conceived arguments that usually degenerate into nothing more than childish insults or ad hominem. Nobody is ever going to admit, “You’re right. I concede that my argument is inferior to yours.”–no matter what transpires in the course of the debate, it has been my experience that the opponent never admits defeat, even when their argument has been completely and utterly destroyed.

What’s even more surprising is to witness the phenomena in person…when I met Ed Buckner, former president of American Atheists, in a public debate a few years ago, I was excited for the opportunity to face off against such formidable competition to test the validity of my Counterargument for God due to be published the following month. However, I was also nervous because Ed was a very experienced debater whom had even been flown to the U.K. as a guest of a Muslim organization in order to face off against one of their top scholars, and by comparison I was a nobody writing as the Atlanta Creationism Examiner who somehow caught Ed’s attention and inspired him to issue a formal challenge to debate.

I learned two things that day…first, against logic and reason, the very best arguments for atheism don’t stand a chance. The second thing I learned was that if you can figure out how the opponent will respond or better yet, what the opponent plans to say, you can effectively destroy their best arguments with a preemptive strike before they ever get to open their mouth. Ed simply assumed that any argument for atheism was superior to the best arguments that a Christian could glean from the Bible, and obviously his plan was to attack what he believed to be my only source of information. Because Ed was so confident that his argument was unassailable, he didn’t worry about me or anything I might say, and he took for granted that his argument would win. He was so confident that he insisted that I begin the debate so he could be assured of having the final word.

Frankly, I was thrilled to start, because I’d studied a two hour video of Ed’s debate against Muslim scholar Hamza Tzortsis and knew his arguments would not be dramatically different when it came to attacking Christianity. Ed presented an argument with seven major points that under closer scrutiny, weren’t even original arguments. He’d cobbled together bits and pieces of arguments against religion from Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and other prominent evangelists of atheism. What Ed didn’t seem to have was any sort of an original argument that he’d thought of himself. He had a nicely packaged, memorized spiel that he could probably recite in his sleep. But what Ed didn’t have was anything that resembled a serious rebuttal to my utter destruction of his argument point-by-point, in my twenty minute-long opening statement.

I still confess I’m a bit shocked and a little disappointed that Ed didn’t even make a serious effort to respond to my opening statement, and instead simply repeated the same argument that I’d just refuted. You know, I’ve tried to avoid judging the outcome of that debate for myself because I feel like that determination is best left to the audience, but then I recall that in the few times Ed did try to factually challenge or argue against some point I’d just made, his challenges were rather easily refuted by facts and he subsequently was forced to acknowledge he’d spoken in error, for example when I mentioned Charles Darwin once scribbled the words “Monkeys make men” in a notebook and Ed accused me of presenting false information, yet later had to retract the accusation and acknowledged that my claim was indeed factually accurate.

Yet even though in retrospect I have come to believe I won that debate rather decisively, I don’t think anyone in the audience who had come to see Ed was convinced by my argument, and I can assure you that no one who came to the debate predisposed to my argument left convinced by Ed. Was it worth it? I wasn’t convinced that it was worth the work I’d put into it, because there wasn’t a sudden spike in my book sales or anything like that.

Today, I’m seeing things in a slightly different light. I just witnessed an online debate that was so brilliantly conceived that I was concerned I’d wake up the house by literally laughing out loud, the argument was so perfectly executed. Maybe these debates aren’t a total waste of time…if even one person got the same reaction I had to my Internet friend known as Doopy’s presentation of the Modal Ontological Argument, it is definitely worth the time and effort, if even one person has that same cathartic reaction from seeing a debate so convincingly won.

In this exchange, Doopy is playing the same role I had in my debate with Ed Buckner, and the person identified as STL represents the argument coming from someone who would have initially sided with Ed in our debate. I must confess to not only being impressed but a bit jealous of Doopy, because what took me hours of research and two hours of verbal debate to accomplish against Ed Bucker, he managed in about ten minutes with STL.

Without further ado or fanfare, the argument in its entirety:

Wow! Game, set, and match to Mr. Doopy. This was beautiful.

I think it’s probably safe to say that STL never saw it coming and still isn’t quite sure what just hit him like a freight train.

Now, being somewhat of a natural cynic, in spite of thirty years of marriage to an eternal optimist, I see a potential weakness in MOA that someone smarter than STL might exploit, and that is point #8 — God has necessary existence. Atheists will argue against the idea that God is necessary for the universe and life to exist, but that is primarily due to ignorance because they don’t understand the only real alternative to God is good luck, if we are to believe the work of physicists on the subjects of cosmological fine tuning and inflation, and the synthetic chemists on the origin of life. Not only do scientists lack credible solutions to those gargantuan problems, they apparently aren’t even asking all the right questions.

Because I’m not formally trained in constructing a philosophical argument like the MOA and wouldn’t trust myself to not make a mistake, it isn’t an argument that I would attempt of my own volition. But to see it executed so flawlessly, with every “clever” retort STL could imagine anticipated and addressed before it even occurred to STL, was sheer joy to witness.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.