In high school I was on a debating team, and I can remember eventually forming the view that it was a potentially corrupting exercise, because you had to argue for the position you were given, not the position that you believed or the position that you might rationally favor.
I have always found the debates that we had to do in school difficult and painful, mostly because of having to argue for points of view that I didn’t believe. The problem wasn’t, however, that I believed strongly in one side but had to argue the other–it was usually that I didn’t strongly believe in either side, found the arguments for both sides reasonable, and found it hard not to play Devil’s Advocate with myself during a debate (warning: this will annoy the rest of your debating team!)
It’s not that I don’t have beliefs or opinions–it’s just that they tend not to be black-and-white, and I’m constantly questioning myself, i.e. “No, I don’t think God exists, but I do think the question of what humans experience when they claim to experience God’s presence is really interesting and should be studied more, and I think faith-based institutions usually do more good than harm, and I can empathize with the emotional state of someone who believes in God, so if they say their belief makes them stronger, who am I to question that–I think it’s a fact about the world that God doesn’t exist, and a fact about my brain that believing true things makes me stronger, but I know people who’ve experienced a lot of emotional trauma and they might be right that, in the short term, faith does make them stronger in the sense of being able to cope better with the randomness of day-to-day life...” I’m like that even more on questions where I don’t think I’m educated enough to have any kind of opinion. Imagine how that would go over in a standard debate.
Then again, the usual debate question is something like “does violence in video games make children more violent?” That may be an empirical question, but at least back in high school when I had to debate on it, it hadn’t been researched enough for someone to argue either side based on the evidence. Also, the answer you get when you study it probably depends on how you define your terms, since “children”, “violence”, and “video games” are all imbedded parts of a massively complex system with many, many inputs and outputs much more complicated than just a sliding scale of violent tendencies. To me, the ability to come up with arguments for why one side is true won’t actually help you do anything more intelligently in your life.
The first example you give doesn’t sound to me like exploring multiple sides of the question “Does God exist?” so much as exploring multiple questions I might ask instead: is what humans experience when they claim to experience God’s presence interesting? Should it be studied more? Do faith-based institutions do more good than harm? Can I empathize with a believer? Can belief in God make one stronger, and if so under what circumstances? Etc.
You’re right, they aren’t the same question–but that’s what my brain brought up when queried with “what would you say if asked to debate the existence of God?” Somehow just saying that “no, I think that God doesn’t exist for reasons X, Y, Z” doesn’t seem to be enough. I think this may be because of the “arguments as soldiers” approach–if I tell someone I’m an atheist, but don’t go on to clarify my beliefs on all those other questions, the assumption tends to be that I must think theists are stupid, stupid people.
I think it also might be a strategy I use to increase the feeling of “being on the same side” when talking to people who I know are theists, since not clarifying might lead them to believe that I’m, in some sense, their intellectual enemy.
Oh, absolutely. Answering a different question than the one I’m asked is often a useful rhetorical technique, for lots of reasons, including the ones you list.
I have always found the debates that we had to do in school difficult and painful, mostly because of having to argue for points of view that I didn’t believe. The problem wasn’t, however, that I believed strongly in one side but had to argue the other–it was usually that I didn’t strongly believe in either side, found the arguments for both sides reasonable, and found it hard not to play Devil’s Advocate with myself during a debate (warning: this will annoy the rest of your debating team!)
It’s not that I don’t have beliefs or opinions–it’s just that they tend not to be black-and-white, and I’m constantly questioning myself, i.e. “No, I don’t think God exists, but I do think the question of what humans experience when they claim to experience God’s presence is really interesting and should be studied more, and I think faith-based institutions usually do more good than harm, and I can empathize with the emotional state of someone who believes in God, so if they say their belief makes them stronger, who am I to question that–I think it’s a fact about the world that God doesn’t exist, and a fact about my brain that believing true things makes me stronger, but I know people who’ve experienced a lot of emotional trauma and they might be right that, in the short term, faith does make them stronger in the sense of being able to cope better with the randomness of day-to-day life...” I’m like that even more on questions where I don’t think I’m educated enough to have any kind of opinion. Imagine how that would go over in a standard debate.
Then again, the usual debate question is something like “does violence in video games make children more violent?” That may be an empirical question, but at least back in high school when I had to debate on it, it hadn’t been researched enough for someone to argue either side based on the evidence. Also, the answer you get when you study it probably depends on how you define your terms, since “children”, “violence”, and “video games” are all imbedded parts of a massively complex system with many, many inputs and outputs much more complicated than just a sliding scale of violent tendencies. To me, the ability to come up with arguments for why one side is true won’t actually help you do anything more intelligently in your life.
The first example you give doesn’t sound to me like exploring multiple sides of the question “Does God exist?” so much as exploring multiple questions I might ask instead: is what humans experience when they claim to experience God’s presence interesting? Should it be studied more? Do faith-based institutions do more good than harm? Can I empathize with a believer? Can belief in God make one stronger, and if so under what circumstances? Etc.
You’re right, they aren’t the same question–but that’s what my brain brought up when queried with “what would you say if asked to debate the existence of God?” Somehow just saying that “no, I think that God doesn’t exist for reasons X, Y, Z” doesn’t seem to be enough. I think this may be because of the “arguments as soldiers” approach–if I tell someone I’m an atheist, but don’t go on to clarify my beliefs on all those other questions, the assumption tends to be that I must think theists are stupid, stupid people.
I think it also might be a strategy I use to increase the feeling of “being on the same side” when talking to people who I know are theists, since not clarifying might lead them to believe that I’m, in some sense, their intellectual enemy.
Oh, absolutely. Answering a different question than the one I’m asked is often a useful rhetorical technique, for lots of reasons, including the ones you list.