This month I was invited to two debates at Debatecon 6 in Nashville hosted by Modern Day Debate: the existence of God with Michael Jones of Inspiring Philosophy and Christian Nationalism vs. Secular Humanism with Andrew Wilson. It was okay. But I have thoughts. I’ll first describe my personal impressions. Then summarize why the Wilson debate was useless (though telling) while the Jones debate was refreshingly traditional—and actually productive—but nevertheless similar in one respect: as I’ve recently discussed (in On Getting Confused by the Idea That Atheism Predicts Nothing, and articles links therein) and as evinced by others (in my Continuing List of Examples of Alt-Righters Escaping Their Delusions), I think the reason Christians are Christians (and conservatives conservatives) is that they are bad at this—but think they are good at it. But for that, they’d have left long ago. They are trapped in a kind of pseudo-rationality that entirely places emotion before reason, but they have convinced themselves of the opposite—and that’s why they never notice (they rage at even the suggestion).

Personal Impressions

I knew this would be a conservative conference, but I did not realize it was, essentially, a full-on Christian Nationalist conference. Apart from a few stragglers (mainly the invited liberals and some of their staff and supporters, and perhaps some center-rights keeping their head down), the entire audience and most of the roster were Christian Nationalists. Not just Christians. Not just conservatives. But full-on Nationalists. And not just any nationalists, but the isolationist, anti-Zionist, anti-Libertarian pro-nanny-state wing of Christian Nationalism (which is even to the right of The Family or The Armageddon Lobby or The Dominionists).

This was clear from my conversations, and observed audience reactions. Everyone was nice, polite, and generous. We were welcome and no one felt threatened in the present (just in the future). Even Wilson was reasonably well behaved on stage (I say that in relative terms, as anyone unfamiliar might think otherwise seeing it, but he’s usually much worse), and even more off stage. And like my adventures at a Muslim debate conference twenty years ago, this afforded a rare opportunity to converse with and learn about people on the other side, what their desires and obsessions are, what their reasoning was, and their actual beliefs and epistemology—how they arrive at and become convinced of anything (they were also super nice). But these were still, essentially, people who wouldn’t mind taking away women’s right to vote, among a lot else. And predictably the audience was around 95% men (including a very strong manosphere presence), and the few women about were mostly the wives of men attending.

Compelling “marriage to save the race” was a recurring theme. Although ethnosupremacism was never overtly declared, it was behind a lot of dogwhistles, which evidently could be plausibly denied by the handful of conservatives attending who couldn’t pass as white. And though no one ever outlined how they’d compel marriage, again, that they somehow would was often dogwhistled, too. Wilson mocked my mention of the state paying women to marry and raise kids, and I suspect they all disdain that idea (women must be dependent on men, not the state: see Is Gynocentrism a Thing? and my series on Thinking Ape). Wilson has elsewhere spoken of state propaganda promoting it, but we know that never works. And I explained why in our debate: the reason people aren’t having enough kids to his liking is not (as they argue) sexual deviance, but the mere simple fact that kids are expensive.

So you can’t solve that problem unless you are willing (literally) to pay for it. They aren’t willing to pay for it. Conservatives always (irrationally) want everything for free. That’s why they keep running up the national debt (the only administration in my lifetime to start paying down rather than adding to that debt was Clinton’s) and cut services and then complain about the lack of services. This is also why, despite insisting they won’t, conservatives always end up resorting to the cudgel to get what they want, when they can. More than one audience member tried to sell me on the death penalty for everything, because “surely that would put an end to crime,” and “crime” is everything they don’t want anyone doing, like choosing not to marry or have kids. Likewise anything the state can do to make life harder for noncompliers is “good” (entailing a full-on nanny state). Hence the faint buzz of coerced marriage under every denial of it.

Nevertheless, though many fantastical delusions were on display (I shall follow this article with an example from a debate on feminism I wasn’t in but watched, and casually debated with some of the audience over lunch—stay tuned), most were muted or avoided (often deliberately, I could feel), so we didn’t get the reality-denying laundry lists of the likes of Axel Kaiser (see my Anatomy of Contemporary Right-Wing Delusions). And the Bible was rarely cited as evidence or support of anything (it never came up in either of my debates), even though it was clear from my discussion with attendees that they think it should have (so even the absurdities of Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America didn’t come up, and nowhere near Behold Babylon USA!), and its being avoided appeared strategic. Wilson has often hinted that he doesn’t really believe in Christianity and never intends to defend it, but merely construct its promotion on a basis of nihilistic will-to-power, as a means of bending society to his will, “for the greater good” or something (in much like a Platonic or Straussian way). That explains a lot of what happened in our debate.

And one thing that came across repeatedly: none actually understood why their families disown them, calling it a mere disagreement, when in fact these are people arguing for the misery and ruin of all those family disowning them and all their friends and colleagues and neighbors. It’s not “just a disagreement.” It’s a real threat to personal rights, liberty and happiness, the bedrock of the American Declaration and Constitution, and the welfare of humanity itself. And that’s not just an opinion.

The Wilson Debate

Debating “which is better,” Christian Nationalism or Secular Humanism, with Andrew Wilson was a complete waste of time. He was better behaved than usual. He conspicuously never resorted to any ad hominem, against me or anyone I knew (which those who know his SOP will find astonishing). But he also never resorted to actually debating at all. The whole thing only illustrated in bold the pseudo-rationality of right-wing ideology. Wilson burned what must have been 80% of the clock arguing over the definition of fascism—which was not the subject of the debate. So he spent almost all the debate avoiding debating the actual proposition we were there to debate.

Wilson clearly had been emotionally triggered by my use of the word in my opening (which I admit was inconsistent and could have been left out without any effect on my argument), and then he couldn’t get back on track to actually address the tabled proposition, instead of this irrelevant time-wasting pedantry over what gets to be called “fascism.” And then 80% of the remaining 20% of the debate Wilson argued only whether he could use a secular humanist political system to institute Christian Nationalism—which was also not what we were there to debate. No one doubts one “can” do that. The proposition on the table was whether we should do that. Not whether we could. Likewise with the time-wasting over defining fascism: it doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is whether it’s a good idea. Wilson hardly ever argued that.

Indeed that all left barely 4% of the clock time on anything even remotely resembling debating the actual topic, that his worldview would be better for society (not just “possible to implement” or “not called fascism”). And there Wilson just used obfuscation, verbal trickery, dubious fact-claims, and changing the subject when cornered. All tactics designed to make it look like he was arguing rationally when he was actually avoiding any rational debate at all. He hardly rebutted any point I made in my opening in support of my proposition. And he never even defined what his proposition was, much less defended it. I’m not kidding. He never explained what specific morals or policies constitute Christian Nationalism as distinct from Secular Humanism, or why they were good. He almost entirely fell into his usual obsessions over sex (this guy is so obsessed with sex and genitals, in videos often to an emotional fever pitch even, that one has to side-eye what’s going on there), but he never defended any coherent position even on that, and didn’t get any relevant facts right either.

Sex Is Destroying the World! (Or Not)

For example, Wilson burned maybe 80% of that remaining 4% of the clock devolving the debate into whether the state should outlaw sex to stop STDs (only monogamous sex within heterosexual marriage would be legal in his imagined utopia)—and still he ignored all my arguments over why draconian controls always end badly: they increase conflict and injustice (contrary to everyone‘s actual interests), are too expensive (consider the drug war vs. tax-and-regulate), generate too much net misery (consider the entire history of Prohibition and anti-homosexuality laws), and fail to work, e.g. people just have sex anyway and you get STDs again, in fact as I documented, more STDs, exactly the opposite of what the draconian policy was supposed to stop in the first place. This was a dumb argument for him to make, from start to finish. It got nowhere, accomplished nothing, and only barely had to do with what we were supposed to be debating. This was manifestly nonrational. (It also was sex-obsessed: he was emotionally triggered by one sentence in my opening about STDs, ignoring all my data regarding crime, prosperity, and health outcomes.)

Worse, mid-debate Wilson tried to “do his own research” and cherry picked a headline from his phone that said legalized prostitution increases sex-trafficking—to counter the studies I mentioned that it reduces STD rates across the entire associated population (study, study, study, study, study, study, study), refuting his claim that letting people have sex causes disease, which he meant to rebut my opening point that STD rates in the U.S. correlate with Christian populations, thus challenging the claim that Christianity solves any problem while supporting the claim that the Secular Humanism does. This was already a non sequitur. If it were true, the solution is not outlawing sex, but better policing trafficking—just as the solution to yearly automobile deaths is not outlawing cars, but better government of the transportation system (from car safety and driver training to road and traffic design); just as (as I pointed out) disease spread by the food industry is not rationally solved by banning the entire food industry (all meat production, fruit and vegetable harvesting, restaurants, church bake sales). The rational solution there is obviously (and always will be) effective regulation, so you can have the entire food industry and a reduction of its disease vectoring. Evidence-based, human-centered reasoning. My point. Which Wilson never could rebut the whole debate.

But Wilson’s claim is also false. He cited debunked studies. Oops.

Sex trafficking actually halved after Germany legalized prostitution (Report, p. 253) and on average hasn’t risen significantly across the EU since (Report), and the EU is mostly legalized (Report). A spike in just trafficking in Germany in 2022 was not for sex but labor, particularly in the beverage and meat industries (so I guess Wilson will have to outlaw burgers and beer now: Report, pp. 11, 27; and other common fates include houskeeping and agrolabor, so now we have to ban maids and agriculture, too). In Nevada, sex trafficking victims (under two hundred a year are confirmed) predominately come from counties without legal prostitution—in fact, mostly just one city, Las Vegas (Report, pp. 1, 2, 3). Prostitution has been legal in Italy since forever and sex trafficking there is not unusually high, and in decline (Report, p. 9). The Netherlands legalized prostitution in 2000, with no actual increase in sex trafficking since: increased numbers resulted from improved policing (not increased victims), and remain comparable to other developed nations, and thus not exceptional (Report, p. 92). Whereas Canada outlawed prostitution in 2014 and human trafficking victims increased. And so on. Check out Finland, for example; or Switzerland, with consistently less than 200 sex trafficking victims a year for a population of nine million, a rate far lower than almost any U.S. state.

Try as you might, there simply is no data confirming any relationship between legalized prostitution and sex trafficking. And though the only real data we have are known cases (not unknown ones), when policing remains constant, the proportions will reflect totals, so there is no way to “imagine” your way to different results. There simply is no evidence here.

The fact that Wilson even thought this was a sound way to form beliefs (just cherry pick a headline mid-argument and believe it, checking nothing as to its merits, flaws, or counterstudies) is pseudo-rationality. Checking sources and boasting of the results looks rational (“Hey, I’m doing my own research! I’m citing a source!”). But it’s not. Because rational behavior means implementing critical research, not gullible verification bias. Where are the numbers coming from? Why are there conflicting numbers? Are they reliable? Does an uptick mean increased activity or only improved policing? Are we counting all trafficking or only sex trafficking? Are we looking at places that actually have legal prostitution, or including counties without it? And so on. And that’s just to establish the correlations. You have a lot more work to do to ascertain causation, and then what would actually reduce the activity. Increased food industry slavery is not wisely solved by banning restaurants, but is solved by inspection, investigation, and other proactive policies. The solution to crime is outlawing and policing crime; not “everything” that that crime replicates or feeds on. For example, if you want to outlaw illegal sports betting, it makes no rational sense to do it by outlawing sports. “But if there were no sports, there’d be no sports gambling” is “true” (almost) but a phenomenally irrational way to deal with the problem. You don’t fight bootlegging by banning alcohol, or bank robbery by banning banks. Not only does it not work, it makes everything worse.

Of course, rational behavior—the behavior of a real intellectual, not a poser—would mean commitment to researching carefully what the truth is, something that live debate makes impossible (one of its unfixable defects: see my concluding remarks). But pseudo-rationality is also on display in the non sequitur, as I just pointed out (overreaching oppression is not rational problem solving—nor for anyone “good”). By contrast, how we should treat sex work and why is something I discuss in Sexy Sex Sex!! (for Cash on the Barrel!, where each argument (as here) remains flexible to what the evidence actually is (not unchecked headlines or armchair assertions), what reasoning actually follows from it (not pseudo-conclusions), and the net metrics (does an approach cost more or actually make revenue; do more people end up better off or worse; is it needlessly meddling, or effective; is it lax, or well governed; and so on).

Another indication of his pseudo-rationality is that Wilson couldn’t believe that having more sex could lead to fewer STDs, simply because of safe sex behavior, which has to be taught and encouraged—something peculiarly reduced in the U.S. relative to other developed countries, which he ignored when trying to cite statistics abroad, where everyone, even the Christians, have good training and practices compared to Americans. In actual fact how much sex you have does not correlate with STD risk because safe sex reduces STD exposure (and increases testing, quarantine, and treatment), engaging a contrary force, which is why monogamous people end up with more STDs per partner than polyamorous people: monogamous people cheat, but can’t be caught with a condom or engage in any other quarantine behavior (like testing or communication); while competent nonmonogamous people know how to play.

This was like assuming more jumping out of planes surely must cause more falling deaths, forgetting about parachutes and dive training. It’s also like wanting to outlaw skydiving because very rarely someone still dies from it—or sprains an ankle, which is analogous to the fact that most STDs are trivial illnesses easily cured, and thus don’t even warrant the absurd stigma Wilson attached to them simply as an excuse to implement a draconian police-state ensuring widespread human misery. And this obsession with sex and disease was almost the only thing Wilson ever talked about that had anything to do with whether Christianity is better for society—yet he never presented any actual evidence it was better even by this sex-obsessing metric. Whereas I presented evidence that it was not (the more Christian states in America tend to be worse).

There Was No There There

In such a fashion the real issue of policy Wilson never debated. Does it care about all the humans involved (humanism)? Is it genuinely evidence-based (secular)? That’s it. Wilson never produced any sound or valid argument against organizing society that way, or for organizing it any other way. What use is Christianity here? Not only did he never even talk about Christianity in any clear sense, he almost never discussed personal morality at all, even though I made the point that a secular humanist worldview entails both a public policy position and a personal morality position, and though they will be consistent, they won’t be identical, because the purpose of government is to maintain a civil society, not enforce anyone’s morality on anyone else. That’s why we outlaw murder, fraud, and theft but not eating bacon or steak—and thus why implementing Christian pruderies would be as bad as implementing Jewish or Hindu ones. But Wilson never engaged with this point either. “You can’t stop us doing it” was all he had, nihilistically ignoring the question of whether it’s what anyone should do.

Even Wilson’s obsession with population maintenance (the tip of a Great Replacement iceberg that his audience seemed keen on) was never defended. As I pointed out, we had a booming civilization in 1940 with almost three times fewer people (the Roman Empire had even less), so obviously we don’t need to maintain the population for anything. So why is maintaining the current population even good? I was ready to respond to the usual arguments (de-growth is a learning curve). But he didn’t even argue it. The whole debate was like that. He didn’t even try the obvious but dumb argument that reduced fertility would always bring a population to zero—which forgets that fertility will increase with, and when there are, incentives, and thus is not a permanent problem; and that in a couple centuries we will all be living in virtual worlds anyway, nerfing the fertility question altogether. But we never got there because he never brought it up. And when I pointed out that we are currently maintaining with immigration anyway, he attempted some vague rambling that handwaved some muddled racism, literally intermixing the dogwhistle of “heritage” (sic) spiced with a little ‘but they are all barbarians so how can you want them here’ style of discourse (which is my own paraphrase of his word salad on this, because he never said anything even as coherent as that).

In the end, anyone who actually puts reason before emotion watching this debate will have no coherent idea of what position Wilson was even defending, and will be annoyed he never really engaged with the actual position I was defending. He may have won his fan audience over with emotional appeals and Great Clipz. But he certainly never did anything to rationally persuade anyone of anything. Since 96% of his time was off-topic, and he rebutted almost nothing I said, and what he did attempt to rebut I defended by end of clock, any technical professional scoring would secure me the win by a mile. Because in real debates, to score you have to actually make an argument (state premises, which have to be true, entailing a conclusion, not a non sequitur), not merely assert things. Those don’t score. It also has to be an argument relevant to what is being debated to score. And it has to survive unrebutted by the end of clock. And whoever has the most of those wins. Also technically, one can win a debate and still be wrong—because clocked debates disallow thorough and competent inquiry and fact-checking and logic-diagramming. But it was clear Wilson has no professional interest in any of those things anyway. He just wanted sound-bites and gotcha-clips. Which is irrational. Indeed, pseudo-rational, because he wanted all the appearance of being rational but not the substance of it.

And this is how we can confirm the pseudo-rationality of his fans. Because pwn clips are all they got out it it, yet pwn clips exemplify the lack of intellectualism in modern conservatism. To be uninterested in whether your man defended the proposition or rebutted the other, and only care about irrelevant slips, and arguments never establishing the point at issue, is to be deeply unintellectual. A real intellectual would by definition be very concerned by this failure to defend the proposition and recourse to evasions and distractions. That would red flag a genuinely rational person that the position can’t be defended, if even the supposedly best defender of it avoids even trying to. That games have replaced thought is the death of intellectualism. When feels have replaced reason, rationality has left the building. And it looks like everyone simply reacted to what happened in this debate by how it makes them feel—not by whether any sound and relevant argument was to be found in it. They have not yet learned The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking.

To get a start on that, see my Appendix below for every source I cited in my opening, which Wilson ignored.

The Jones Debate

Debating the existence of God with Michael Jones the afternoon before was a far better experience. Still not great. A lot of posturing and wheel spinning was there. And it was a bit high level for many in that audience (as some confirmed to me after), so it may have gone over many of their heads (since we didn’t have time to really develop the philosophical and science literacy that our arguments depended on). But all the audience questions were really good, demonstrating some did follow the level we were at. It was another technical win for me but with some actual fight. Jones actually stayed on topic and actually addressed many of my arguments, while making analytically serious arguments himself (even if ultimately silly and naive). By professional scoring, Jones dropped several of my arguments, while I dropped none of his; and his responses to my arguments often ignored or got wrong the premises or logical structure of the argument, while I met his arguments as given. He did better than Wilson in at least holding the line on several points, leaving some at a wash for want of clock time to run them to ground. But any complete tally of points, pickups and drops would score for the atheist side.

My case was (1) precedent, (2) simplicity, and (3) evidence was as expected on N (naturalism) but not on T (theism), without gerrymandering, i.e. all observed predictions are entailed by N but not T, so T needs an endless stack of unprovable and indeed even improbable excuses to fix all this. Jones never answered the argument from precedent (T has never turned out to be the explanation for anything before, it’s always turned out to be N before). He failed to answer the argument from simplicity (he attempted word games about what counts as explanatory simplicity, all of which I called out). And he never succeeded at any reversing of the evidence to get T over N—it remained exactly what was predicted by N and not T. This included examples he needed for his own case.

For instance, Jones leaned heavily on his Argument to Idealism but had no effective response to all the evidence I presented that is exactly what is expected if Idealism is false; and he never presented actual evidence for Idealism. He just kept repeating circular arguments from how things seemed, rather than presenting evidence that that is how things are (like I did). Indeed, his case for Idealism seemed completely divorced from any science of consciousness at all (instead he gullibly relied on the crank Bernardo Kastrup). It was entirely a naive armchair argument, of a kind that was already obsolete thousands of years ago, when Herophilus proved localization of brain function, compelling scientifically literate philosophers (like Aristotelians, Stoics, Skeptics, and Eclectics) to admit minds have to be embodied, and that body comes prior to mind (I cover this in The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire). The evidence has only multiplied a billionfold since then, as I made a point of (see my summary of the Argument from Consciousness and its converse case under theism).

The Universe Is a Giant Brain, Therefore God!

Science illiteracy became very apparent when Jones actually sincerely (!) presented the evidence of similarities in structure between galactic clusters and neurons in the brain as evidence Mind precedes Body (an example of something he got from foolishly trusting Kastrup). I pointed out (correctly) that that is an inevitable effect of thermodynamic dissipation (and I said anyone could discover this who bothered to Google it competently, but here you go: physics, physics, physics, and even the original physics). Jones tried to respond by saying I was appealing to magic (not his exact word, but essentially) and therefore not explaining the similarities but just handwaving, which is (as I also noted) false. But all of this shows how scientifically illiterate Jones is, and that his Christian belief is a product of that ignorance. And his emotion-driven refusal to be told this keeps him trapped there (once again never learning The Scary Truth about Critical Thinking).

Jones is thus a Christian because he is not well versed in science. He is a Christian because he doesn’t know how to research and fact-check an internet claim about network structure being magic. And he is a Christian because he doesn’t know that inevitable physical structuring is an explanation, not handwaving. He should have already known everything I said about this before this debate, before even allowing himself to be convinced by such a naive “bumblebees can’t fly” kind of argument, and then (in result) getting blindsided by the scientific facts in a live debate, and then do nothing but try to deny everything he was just told, making it go away with false accusations of my supposed handwaving. Instead, once blindsided, he should have known that I was not saying it was magic, but that it’s literally a deterministically inevitable result of heat dissipation in networked systems, similarly to why coastlines share structural patterns with trees. That doesn’t mean the Tree God controls beachfront property. It’s simply that physics inevitably falls into those structures when left to itself—without mind or design.

I call this pseudo-rationality because even though Jones was being serious and sincere, it was all an illusion. He structured his arguments to look sound and “academic.” To look intellectual. And as such it is intellectual. But it’s incompetent intellection. He’s trying. He is mimicking well. It satisfies him emotionally that he sounds like he is reasoning and arguing rationally—but he isn’t. Not fact-checking the science on this is a failure of rationality. Being convinced by a superficial argument you didn’t fact-check is a failure of rationality. Thinking you can make a scientific argument without really knowing any of the relevant science is a failure of rationality. Being so emotionally resistant to being told any of this that you try intentionally misunderstanding a point so as to avoid it is a failure of rationality. Not knowing when your argument was just refuted is a failure of rationality. And this is why theism is not rational.

We didn’t have time to get into it (a fatal flaw of all live debate—see my concluding remarks), but Jones also never seemed to understand that consciousness (rational thought, perceptual modeling, memory, preferences and personality encoding, etc.) is not produced by the fractal arrangement of neurons. That arrangement itself can’t do anything. It’s like randomly connecting a bunch of wires together: that does not produce a computer; but you could connect them in a way that “looks” like a computer. The difference is that each neuron (and possibly glial cell attached to each synapse—a structural feature of the brain already not matched in galactic networks) has an I/O protocol (a mechanism that decides what output to run for each input) which almost certainly exists as a series of methylated genes in the nucleus (and possibly even mitochondria) of the cell, which has no structural analog in galactic networks. Galactic nodes are essentially empty cells. Which therefore have no I/O protocol, and therefore could not compute anything. They are indeed just a bunch of wires randomly connected together, not arranged to think.

Neural and galactic networks share the same structure because of how physics displaces heat in certain fractal systems. But no one has filled the galactic nodes with computer components, like a motherboard with no microchip. In the brain, this synaptic structure evolved because it is the most efficient way to build the needed network in as small a volume as possible. In the cosmos, it’s simply how gasses collapse into galaxies. Neither is intelligently arranged to produce consciousness. That’s the machinery inside the cells. But if you do not know all this, you can easily fool yourself into Jones’s mistake, that any “arrangement of wires” that “looks” the same is a “computer” and therefore a “mind.” Like thinking elves must arrange rivers and tree roots the same way. No. It’s just physics. The actual computation is a completely different mechanism that is not present in galaxies.

Note that I knew this the moment I heard the internet legend that galactic networks are brains years ago, because I strive for science literacy, and thus I already knew synaptic structure is not the computing part of the brain (just naive people think it is). So I was immediately suspicious of the woo headlines Kastrup fell for. This led me (unlike Kastrup and Jones) to check the original study, discovering that it didn’t say this (it said what I said in our debate). And because I continue to follow stories like this, as time went on I found more studies discussing the role of inevitable thermodynamics producing such shapes automatically. That Jones never did any of this, and was surprised that anyone would—and even rejected the results of it out of hand—is pseudo-rationality. Again, he makes arguments that look like rational reasons to keep believing this cockamamy thing, but they aren’t rational at all. They are simply emotional salves, a way to convince himself that he is being rational when he is not.

There was a lot more in our debate. We got into it over explanatory simplicity and its effect on probability under random selection, why theism is maximally unparsimonious (while godless cosmological theories exist that are vastly more parsimonious), including my nothing-field hypothesis as a counter to brute theism cosmology, how differential explanatory power actually works mathematically, how science establishes objective moral facts, the is-ought problem, mind-brain physics, even Kant vs. Foot on morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives. And more. Often Jones misstated the articles of mine he claimed to have read (which suggests he did not read them carefully but just rage-skimmed them for out-of-context soundbites to attack, another irrational behavior), and I didn’t correct every one for want of time (I just hit the points necessary to meet his arguments in this debate, and pick up mine). So whenever he claims I said something, 2 in 3 times, I didn’t. So you have to check what I actually said instead of trusting his account of it. And you certainly won’t get anything like correct scientific knowledge of anything from his presentation or responses.

It wasn’t a bad debate. But it was not a very useful debate. The audience will have reacted more to his emotional posturing than to the actual logical validity or soundness of any argument he made or any premise I established or rebutted, and where the audience will have gotten lost, they will need to spend time researching each item later so as to learn it, not merely to “rebut” it—to confront and understand it, rather than just make it go away. And that simply is not in the toolbox of most attending. Many stalwartly don’t even believe in doing that kind of research, much less know how to carry it out in anything but a self-defeating way (a society-wide problem, as I explain in my Primer on Actually Doing Your Own Research). The rest will have just gone in one ear and out the other as Jones threw up constant semantic sand, confusing rather than enlightening each matter. Which is more pseudo-rationality, with barely any point beyond comforting the emotions of unreasoning viewers with maybe the vague feeling that he must have won because he never admitted to ever being wrong about anything.

But that is not how debates are professionally scored, or should even be scored at all.

Conclusion

Overall, albeit in different ways, both debates only confirmed and reinforced my growing conclusion that live debate is of no intellectual value. Anyone who refuses a written debate (where careful citation and fact-checking occurs and fallacies and word-games are more easily called out) is thereby declaring their disinterest in any real debate. The only people who insist on live debates are demagogues who want to exploit its defects to emotionally manipulate audiences rather than inform them or discover the truth about anything. Live debate is just a game. And as such, it is only pseudo-intellectual. It fakes the appearance of intellectualism, but then chucks out every actually intellectual thing they could be doing.

This doesn’t mean live debate has no value. It can present opportunities to educate audiences otherwise siloed and “controlled.” My experience with Christian audiences over twenty years of debate is that we get a compound rate of return around 5%—meaning, 1 in 20 members of the audience will hear something that troubles their conscience enough to investigate and discover they have been trapped in a delusion for most or all of their lives, and escape after a year or two of their initial exposure to something I said. Cognitive dissonance usually resolves in the other direction: excuses will be found for everything I say to be emotionally dismissed or forgotten. But people who see that in themselves and don’t like it will go the other way, and get out. Occasions of debate like this are also good ways of learning about your opposition, first-hand and unfiltered, which has some utility as well, even beyond ensuring you’ve not been duped by societal filtering and misunderstand something.

But this is not a high rate of return. So it has to be balanced against costs (like the emotional labor, inefficiently speaking to the same audiences, the opposition’s exploitation of the event for propaganda). Most of the time it won’t be worth the bother. Sometimes it will, but for my part, only if I’m very well paid to endure it. Because it is increasingly hard to take seriously, and the stress of having to be 100% on, and perfect, and avoid their game playing is exhausting to the point of my being tired of it after two decades now. My written debates have been far more serious, genuinely intellectual, and productive (example, example, example, example). My live debates, almost never (very rare exceptions include Crook and McKay—and, ironically compared to the Wilson travesty, The Carrier-McDurmon Debate: Which Worldview Produces the Better World?).

Even my debate with Jones would have generated far more intellectual payoff in written format. As is, it got some interesting ideas across, but never explored any of them beyond the shallows, and often in petty gameplaying ways rather than serious ones. It just wasn’t what a genuinely intellectual debate would be like, and that was owing mostly to the very structure of live debate itself (and thus isn’t fixable): artificially limited to clock time, lacking any fact-checking, easily exploited by word-games and emotional tactics—playing to an audience rather than seeking truth. A more disciplined opponent could have avoided these pitfalls, but disciplined debaters are rare. And they have to take seriously the possibility they are wrong, and have to actually want to understand what their opponent is saying rather than only looking for ways to dismiss it or make it go away or sour the audience to it. They have to want to learn rather than merely win. Everything else is pseudo-intellectual emotionalism.

Which is why disciplined debaters, being exactly that way, prefer written to live debates—not the other way around. Anyone who instead prefers live to written debates is thereby advertising their lack of this intellectual character. And that explains pretty much everything about the decay of debate as useful discourse today. And I am not the only one to notice: everywhere from The New Yorker, Medium, and The Rubicon to The Jesuit Review, the Educational Psychologist, and the Cornell Daily Sun is noticing this now. It’s even been scienced (more and more). And my own experience only confirms this. The Wilson debate was useless. The Jones debate was only marginally productive. And both could have been genuinely intellectual only in a fair written format, and only if both sides cared about truth rather than appearance.

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Appendix

For both debates my most relevant articles have always been the McDurmon debate followup and then Justin Brierley and the Folly of Christianity, which point in turn to That Christian Nation Nonsense (Gods Bless Our Pagan Nation) and No, Tom Holland, It Wasn’t Christian Values That Saved the West, which breadcrumb to everything else. In both debates the grounding of moral facts came up, to which the most important (and cited) starting point is my peer-reviewed study in the journal Religions, “Objective Moral Facts Exist in All Possible Universes.”

The Jones debate: sources I cited were (or were in) my articles here on my blog, so you can just search each subject to find it, like What If We Reimagine ‘Nothing’ as a Field-State? which discusses the Lincoln-Wasser study I cited to Jones regarding ultra-simple first-cause cosmologies.

The Wilson debate: sources I cited in my opening were these (Wilson never engaged with any of them):

• Martin Ravallion, The Economics of Poverty: History, Measurement, and Policy.
• Michel Mollat, The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History.
• Guido Alfani, “Economic Inequality in Preindustrial Times,” Journal of Economic Literature.
• Hector Avalos. Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence and The Reality of Religious Violence: From Biblical to Modern Times and The Bad Jesus: The Ethics of New Testament Ethics and Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship.
• Stephen Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.
• Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science Makes Us Better People.
• Phil Zuckerman, Society without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us about Contentment (2nd ed.).
• Zuckerman et al., The Nonreligious: Understanding Secular People and Societies.
• Kasselstrand et al., Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society.
• Gregory Paul, “The Chronic Dependence of Popular Religiosity upon Dysfunctional Psychosociological Conditions,” and “High Religiosity and Societal Dysfunction in the United States during the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century,” both in Evolutionary Psychology, and “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look,” in the Journal of Religion and Society.
• Gary Jensen, “Religious Cosmologies and Homicide Rates among Nations: A Closer Look,” in the Journal of Religion and Society.
• R. Georges Delamontagne, “High Religiosity and Societal Dysfunction in the United States during the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century” also in Evolutionary Psychology.
• Roger Bergman, “Why Be Moral? A Conceptual Model from Developmental Psychology,” in Human Development.
• Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Moral Psychology, 5 vols. For a link-list, as well as several other studies making the same point I did in the Jones and Wilson debates, see appendix to The Real Basis of a Moral World.
• Stephen Morris, “The Complex Relationship Between Morality and Happiness Around the World,” in Selin & Davey, Happiness Across Cultures (2nd ed.).
• Robert Axelrod, The Complexity of Cooperation and The Evolution of Cooperation.
• Digital Gnosis, “Fascism, Christian Nationalism & Andrew Wilson.” See the brief summary at Violence, Fascism, and Christian Nationalism at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture and The Dark Roots of Christian Nationalism and Why It’s Still Denied by Tanner. And pretty much everything by Three Arrows.