The Internet Atheists Are Giving the Other Side Too Much Credit

I watch a fair amount of the online debate between atheists and Christians, and the current generation of atheist debaters, the polite, philosophically trained ones with large audiences, are far better than the generation before them. They know the arguments. They steelman. They concede points. They treat their opponents as honest interlocutors who have reasoned their way to a different conclusion.

That last part is the problem. They are extending a courtesy the evidence does not support, and the courtesy is costing them the argument.

The Default Assumption

The working assumption of the polite debate is that both sides are doing the same thing: examining evidence, weighing arguments, and reporting where they land. Under that assumption, a disagreement is a puzzle. If two honest people looking at the same facts reach different conclusions, one of them has made an error, and the job is to find it.

So the atheist debater treats the resurrection claim, the fine-tuning argument, the moral argument, as if they were the actual reasons the person across the table believes. He engages them on their merits. He wins, usually, on the merits. And nothing changes, because the merits were never the point.

What Is Actually Happening

I have written about the two kinds of believers, the literal and the sophisticated. The sophisticated one is who shows up to debates, and the debate format flatters the picture that his belief is the output of his arguments.

It is not. The arguments are the output of the belief. He believed first, for the reasons people usually believe, birth, family, community, comfort, and acquired the arguments afterwards, as fortifications. This is not a hidden fact about him; he will often tell you so if asked about his biography rather than his syllogisms. The Kalam did not convert him. He found the Kalam because he was already looking for something to say.

Once you see this, the polite debate is revealed as a category error. You are refuting the fortification and expecting the fortress to fall. The fortress was never held up by the fortification. It was held up by the things nobody debates.

Lies and Self-Deception

The uncomfortable word here is lying, and the polite atheists will not use it, so let me be precise about what I mean.

A sophisticated believer who says in a debate that the resurrection is the best explanation of the historical data, and who would not accept that standard of evidence for any comparable claim about any other religion, is not making an honest inference. He is saying what his position requires. Whether he knows he is doing this, in which case it is a lie, or has arranged not to know, in which case it is self-deception, is a question about his inner state that I cannot settle and do not need to. In both cases the words are not a report of reasoning, and treating them as one is a mistake about what kind of speech act you are hearing.

The polite debaters know about motivated reasoning. They discuss it in the abstract. What they do not do is apply it to the person in front of them, because that would be rude, and because the debate format cannot survive the application: you cannot have a debate about the truth of X with someone whose statements about X are not truth-apt.

Why the Generosity Is Not Free

There are two costs.

The first is to the audience. A viewer watching a courteous exchange in which both sides are treated as reasoners concludes that this is a live question among reasonable people, that the evidence is roughly balanced, that thoughtful individuals differ. None of that is true, and the format manufactures the impression. The politeness is not neutral. It is a claim about the epistemic status of the disagreement, and the claim is false.

The second cost is to the debaters themselves. Having granted that the other side is reasoning, they must explain why the reasoning keeps failing to converge, and the only explanations available within the frame are that the arguments are subtler than they look or that the atheist has missed something. So they go deeper into the philosophy, and the philosophy is bottomless, because it was built to be, and after ten years they are experts in a body of argument that was never anybody's actual reason.

What Would Be Better

Not rudeness. Accuracy.

When the believer offers an argument, it is fair to ask what would change his mind, and to notice when the answer is nothing. It is fair to ask when he came to believe and whether the argument preceded the belief. It is fair to ask whether he would accept the same argument for Islam. These questions are not insults; they are the questions you would ask any witness whose testimony you had reason to think was motivated, and they move the conversation from the fortification to the fortress.

Most of all it is fair to say, out loud, that a person defending the tenets he was raised in, with arguments he acquired to defend them, using standards he applies to nothing else, is not engaged in inquiry, and that the conversation should be understood accordingly. The old-style atheists said this bluntly and were called strident. The new ones do not say it at all and are called reasonable. I would rather be right about what is happening than be liked for pretending it is something else.