Debating Bitchspot Blog Part 2: My Rebuttal to His Rebuttal to Me

Is theism a good theory?

1 Introductory framework

I’m doing a written debate with Bitchspot blog’s (henceforth BSB) author about theism. Here’s my opening statement, here’s his rebuttal. It is, as I shall argue, wholly and comprehensively non-responsive, almost entirely reliant on a mistaken epistemology according to which one can never get evidence for anything, and neglects every major point in the article.

Why am I doing this? Well, I think BSB represents a pretty common yet indefensible view among atheists, that theistic evidence is somehow categorically impossible. I thought it would be worth showing, at great length, that this position is wholly untenable.

The first main point I make in my article is that the quality of a theory is determined by its prior probability—how likely it is before looking at the evidence, determined by simplicity and such—and how well it explains the data. In response, BSB says:

Plausibility is not really worthwhile if you’re trying to figure out what’s actually going on. As everyone knows, I care only about truth, not faith, not fee-fees, only demonstrable truth in the real world. I don’t care if Bigfoot is plausible, I care if Bigfoot is real.

A view is plausible just if it’s likely true. We’ll never have certainty in such things, but we can be justified in thinking things are real just if it’s plausible that they’re real.

Arguing that Bigfoot could exist doesn’t mean that Bigfoot does exist.

But if it’s plausible that Big Foot exists then it’s at least decently likely. I’m arguing that the existence of God is likely, not certain.

What you really need to bring to the table in these instances is evidence. Verifiable, demonstrable evidence that everyone  can look at freely without having to hold a particular belief in any position first. In the given example of cheating at poker, the question isn’t would person X cheat if given the opportunity, it’s are they actually cheating in the game in question?

To explain this framework I gave the example of a person cheating in poker. If you see a dealer get a bunch of royal flushes, you should think they are probably cheating. This is because the cheating hypothesis is a decently initially likely hypothesis and best explains the data. There are other theories that explain the data like that they just keep getting lucky or that a fairy did it. But these are bad theories because they’re less initially probable than the cheating hypothesis.

The reason that it doesn’t make sense, in normal circumstances, to try to psychoanalyze people in order to figure out if they’re cheating is that this is a very fallible method. But it’s not totally irrelevant to ascertaining if they’re cheating. If Alex Bertoncini, famous Magic The Gathering cheater, keeps getting good hands in Magic, you should think he’s probably cheating, while if a random old loving grandmother gets good hands, you should think the luck hypothesis is likelier.

An infinite number of views can always explain the evidence. To adjudicate between them, therefore, one must use prior probability. Evidence isn’t irrelevant, but it’s not the only thing that matters. How likely a hypothesis is before you look at the evidence is also important.

2 Simplicity is a virtue

Next I argued that simpler theories are better. Both the theory that the world works as we think it does and that it will work as we think up until one second from now and then become a giant lizard explain the relevant data, but the lizard hypothesis is worse because it’s less simple. Additionally, lacking arbitrary limits is a virtue—before anyone discovered that the speed of light existed, you should think it didn’t, because it’s an unexplained limit. Similarly, you shouldn’t think space just ends for no reason, because that’s an unexplained limit. Theism, therefore, does very well because it posits a single being of unlimited goodness. It’s very simple, and no arbitrary limits.

That’s not really workable though. Simple doesn’t mean true

But simplicity gives you evidence that a theory is true because it posits less stuff. If you deny simplicity is a virtue you have no reason to think that there is not a random Giraffe just created in your room.

and “arbitrary limits”, perhaps not the “arbitrary” part, but there have to be limits based on what we have reasonable evidence to support.

I agree that we can get evidence for the existence of a limit. My claim is that prior to getting good evidence for such a limit you should suspect that there is none. This is good news for theism because it lacks arbitrary limits. Any considerations of prior probabilities can be outweighed by sufficient evidence, of course, but they will still affect how initially likely something is.

When we’re talking about reality, there are inherently going to be limits. You can’t talk about magic unless you have demonstrable evidence to back it up. I use “invisible, intangible, universe-creating pixies” a lot as an example, which is a Matt Dillahunty creation that just caught on, but I cannot use them as a reasonable explanation for anything unless I can show that they exist first.

These are not a good theory because they don’t explain anything. If all you knew was that there were such beings you’d have no specific expectations about reality. Additionally, they’re inherently improbable. Why do they make universes rather than some other thing? You can always make up an explanation, but something isn’t a good explanation if it’s just gerrymandered to explain one data point.

It is not reasonable to invent an explanation in your head and say “X did it!” because the idea makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Noted!

Theism and evolution are nothing alike because evolution is built on mountains of evidence, whereas theism is built on nothing but bald supposition. Paleontology, comparative anatomy,  biogeography, embryology, molecular biology and many, many more, all lend credence to the undeniable fact that evolution happened, and continues to happen in the real world.  As Theodosius Dobzhansky said, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” You can’t get to anything similar with theism. You just can’t.

I gave an analogy between theism and evolution. It makes sense to believe in evolution because it explains lots of otherwise puzzling things even though it’s always possible to come up with an alternative explanation. Theism is similar in that it explains lots of puzzling things. But to parse this out, we must look at the evidence.

My claim is that the evidence for theism works like the evidence for a rigged coin. No particular flip is decisive. It’s always possible that that particular flip came up heads because of chance. But if you see things over and over again that are explained by one hypothesis but not explained well by other hypotheses, then you should believe the first hypothesis.

3 Is theism simple?

For the reasons I described earlier in the article, I claim theism is very simple and lacks arbitrary limits. BSB claims:

Except it isn't. Theism isn't simple at all. It posits, entirely without evidence, that an immensely powerful, in fact, all powerful, entity exists and did, somehow, perform creative acts that are not remotely demonstrable.

This is just an assertion. I gave an argument for why theism is, in fact, simple. It posits just one kind of thing—goodness—to an unlimited degree. That’s very simple. That of course entails being powerful but it doesn’t assume it. The goodness explains the power, not the other way around. I won’t address the claim about it not being demonstrable yet, for that’s about the evidence for theism—right now I’m just talking about its prior probability.

Simplicity is determined by the fundamental posits of a theory. One has no reason to reject the multiverse, even though it means there’s lots of stuff, because it follows from simple fundamental mathematical laws. Theism is like that—all of the various properties follow from the single, simple, fundamental property of unlimited goodness.

Here, we see the real problem behind religion. Everything that was said is just an empty claim, based on emotion, not demonstrable fact. Who says that God is a single being of unlimited goodness?

For the record, I’m not religious. God is defined as a maximally great being. That’s the thing we’re arguing about, as I clarified prior to the debate in an email to BSB. It’s not an empty claim—I in fact gave an argument for it that was not addressed.

This is a definition that has just been invented. In the real world, you don't just get to invent definitions of real things. We know what a cow is like, only because we have observed real cows. People cannot declare that cows have wings because they would be wrong.

How do we know the definition of a unicorn then? When we’re arguing about something, we should start by assuming the definition, and then argue about whether the thing as defined exists in reality. Which is what I’m doing.

You could, of course, invent the word shmow, which is defined as a cow with wings. That wouldn’t mean it exists, but it would be a fine definition.

4 Is the thing that made me take theism seriously a fallacious appeal to emotion fallacy? Spoiler: no.

I gave a brief description, in my opening statement, of the things that made me become more sympathetic to theism.

For many years, I was a confident atheist. But as an atheist, there were certain things that I felt I couldn’t explain--things that theism are naturally explained. So here, I’ll talk about 4 of the various facts that are best explained by theism, that really kept me up at night when I was a confident atheist. As an atheist, I began to feel like a denier of evolution, having to sweep facts under the rug that are well-explained by the alternative, simple hypothesis. The more I studied philosophy, the more of these puzzles I found, where I felt like some new deep problem emerged, that was impossible to solve absent theism.

In response, BSB suggests:

Your feelings don't matter. A lot of people have a real problem saying "I don't know". The idea makes them uncomfortable, but their discomfort doesn't change actual reality. This is why faith is irrelevant because faith doesn't point to anything demonstrably real. If we don't know what caused a thing, we don't get to make something up because it makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside.

I wasn’t giving the story as evidence, just introducing it as a way to think about the evidence. Obviously, the fact that I felt like atheism didn’t solve many big puzzles isn’t the evidence but the fact that, as I went on to argue at length, atheism doesn’t solve many big puzzles is. The evidence is the relevant facts, not my feelings.

Now is the fact that some theory explains otherwise unexplained things evidence for the theory? Yes. To use an example I’ve given in a previous article:

John (speaking to his three year old son): who ate the chocolate cake?

Little Timmy (his son): I’m sure it was the dog.

John: Then why do you have chocolate smeared all over your face?

Timmy: The dog eating it caused it to be on my face.

John: What? That makes no sense. Why would the dog eating it get chocolate on your face?

Timmy: That’s just how things work.

John: That makes no sense.

Timmy: You’re committing the appeal to personal incredulity fallacy. Just because something doesn’t make sense to you doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. For many years, a naturalistic explanation of lightning didn’t make sense to people to they inferrred Zeus did it. You’re just like that—just because the view doens’t make sense to you doesn’t mean it’s true.

The reason it doesn’t make sense to make up explanations like that Zeus did it is that they either have a low prior probability (why would a being throw thunderbolts out of all the things it could do) or poorly explain the evidence (why would random pixies make a universe?) But if a theory genuinely explains phenomena, such that the phenomena are likely if the theory is true but unlikely if it’s false, then that’s good evidence for the theory. The more things there are like this the better evidence that is.

The reason to believe evolution is that things like morphology are deeply mysterious if it’s false but likely if it’s true. But that’s the same way I’m reasoning: lots of things make no sense if theism is false but are explained by atheism.

Of course, it’s always possible that there’s an unknown explanation. But even if there might be, if theism better predicts the evidence, then that still favors theism. There could be an unknown non-cheating explanation of why someone keeps getting royal flushes in poker, but you should still expect they are cheating.

There are no facts that are best explained by theism, only things that make theists emotionally comforted. Once you understand that theism is just claims and no evidence provided for those claims, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards.

This is, again, just a claim. As Hitchens said “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence."

5 Fine-tuning evidence

I presented the fine-tuning evidence in two forms. First, I argued that as a conceptual point, chaos is easier than order. None of the simplest laws produce anything interesting. Second, the constants are finely tuned—tweak them slightly and no life could ever form. Because the initial probability of finely-tuned laws and constants is absurdly low, atheism makes it very unlikely the universe would have life—or anything of value. BSB says:

Except we don’t. This is the problem that we always see in these discussions. “I don’t understand it, therefore God!” That is an irrational position to hold. It is a purely emotional one. It is the assertion that “God”, this thing that nobody can demonstrate is real, did things that are unverifiable, simply because it strokes the egos of those who believe it. Instead of “I don’t understand it, let’s go look for a real explanation,” we get people who just want to invent something in their heads that provides comfort, but comfort isn’t reality. It might allay fears, but that doesn’t make it true. So far, and I can only respond to what I’ve responded to since I haven’t read any further than this, this comes off as a giant appeal to emotion. “I really want it to be true!” Even if everything that he’s said is true, which it’s not, you still haven’t gotten one step closer to any gods. God is just an assertion and assertions don’t mean anything without corroboratory evidence.

What? I didn’t say that God exists because it’s a nice idea. I gave evidence. Any time B is evidence for A, B will be something where we think it’s unlikely that it would happen absent A but likelier if A is true. Imagine if someone reasoned in the same way about evolution. One way we know evolution is true is that there are transitional fossils.

But someone could always say “it’s fallacious to infer that evolution did something just because you don’t understand it.” No, it’s not, and neither is this. In both cases, we have something very unlikely happen that’s naturally explained by some theory. That’s therefore evidence for the theory, especially because it’s deeply mysterious conditional on the theory being false.

The way one determines how strong evidence is for a theory is they look at the probability of the evidence if the theory is true and divide that by the probability of the evidence if the theory is false. Theism makes it very likely that there would be fine-tuned laws and constants—but let’s be conservative and say the odds are only 50%. Well, as I argued, the odds are minuscule—well below 1 in 1000—on atheism, for any of the initial conditions is possible on atheism, and the ones that aren’t life-permitting vastly outnumber the ones that are and are simpler. Because any values of entropy are equally initially likely on atheism—for there’s no special reason to think one is likelier than others—then the odds we’d get such a low entropy range are, as Penrose suggests, 1/10^10^123.

I’ll skip the next few things he says because they’re basically just repeating the same point about how appeals to emotions aren’t good arguments.

Other religions are doing the same thing you’re doing. “I don’t get it, therefore Allah!” “I don’t get it therefore Krishna!” “I don’t get it, therefore the Flying Spaghetti Monster!” At least people aren’t serious about the last one. Desperately hunting for an answer that makes you feel good doesn’t make that a legitimate answer. There are things that we don’t know, things that we may never know. That’s just the way it goes. Whether that makes you comfortable or not is entirely irrelevant.

But if a theory explains otherwise unknown things then that favors the theory. You can always hold out for an unknown explanation—like in the case where you guess the coin isn’t rigged despite being heads 125 times in a row. But if a theory explains some otherwise unlikely event, that’s evidence for it. Then, to figure out which theory is right, we’ll have to stack up all the evidence. I think that will favor bare theism over a specific religion—and it certainly favors it over a being like the flying spaghetti monster which isn’t at all simple and has totally arbitrary limits and makes no predictive expectations. In response to the fine-tuning of the constants, BSB says:

How can you demonstrate that the god that you’re talking about is your God?

By definition! That the God I’m talking about is my God—where my God is just defined as the God I’m talking about—is a triviality. Of course, we can argue about the properties of God, but that’s outside the scope of the debate—we’re just arguing about whether there is such an entity.

How can you know anything demonstrable about your God at all?

Through reasoning, as I’ve done here.

This is why I’ve pointed it out repeatedly on the channel that when theists use “God done it!” they are just substituting “God” for “I don’t know” so they can pretend that they do know, but they still don’t. Inventing an explanation doesn’t make that explanation true.

But if a theory does actually naturally explain things, in the sense that those things are expected on the theory and surprising if it’s false, then that theory will be supported by explaining those things.

If you want to demonstrate a god, which is what you said you could do, then you need to leave your beliefs behind and walk me through the specific steps that you took to verify that a god, any god, is actually real. Not “it seems to me”.

Well, the way we know things is ultimately through seemings. The reason I trust induction, the truth of moral and mathematical claims, and the existence of an external world is that they seem real. But I wasn’t just arguing that God seems to exist but instead adducing evidence for it.

6 Pyschophsyical harmony

The problem of psychophysical harmony is the problem of explaining why the mental and the physical go together in such a harmonious way. The first part of the puzzle that I discussed is why there are complex mental states in the first place. The vast majority—and by far the simplest—pairings between the mental and the physical would produce no interesting or valuable mental states, just random noise. BSB claims:

The simplest way that gets you where you want to go. Whether you like it or not, we don’t have all the answers. We will probably never have all the answers. How you feel about that is entirely irrelevant.

I think I’ve already suitably addressed this. Yes, sometimes we should think the answer is unknown. But othertimes, we should think it is known if there are lots of puzzles that are resolved by one simple posit.

We really need to do away with the idea that our ideas are automatically right because we were brilliant enough to dream them up. Sorry, that’s not how it works. You are proving that the real and the mental are not harmonious. There are tons of different religions out there, all of which have different ideas about reality.

But we still have a mostly accurate map of reality. Our conscious state isn’t random noise—it’s influenced by the world. I see a table in front of me because there really is a table. The claim isn’t that we’re omniscient but that there is a pairing between the mental and the physical in a way that’s striking and unexpected. It thus has nothing in the slightest to do with religious pluralism.

In my article, I describe the three puzzles of psychophysical harmony:

Why are there complex conscious states at all? The simplest pairings would produce nothing interesting of valuable, just very basic experience.

In response, BSB says:

Oh good, an appeal to common sense. “It seems to me” doesn’t mean anything. Here, you are just interpreting things in a way that you find comforting, not in a way that is demonstrably true.

All knowledge is ultimately based on seemings, as I described before. Of course, if something is an arbitrary or absurd seeming then one shouldn’t take it seriously. But my claim is pretty straightforward and obvious—laws that produce simple consciousnesses are simpler than ours that produces a complex and rich variety of internal states.

“Complex” is a wiggle word. Complex according to who?

Reality! Something is complex if there are lots of different components to it.

Complex in what demonstrable way? All of the words that you’re using are wiggle words.

If you don’t think that complexity exists then you can’t have a reason to favor simpler theories. But if you can’t do that then all of science is ruined, which looks for the simplest explanation. It’s always possible to posit more things, but there’s no reason to do it absent any explanatory advantage.

The next puzzle I present is why the mental and the physical causally interact. BSB says:

Because the mental IS physical. You are nothing but the electro-chemical output of the 3-lb sack of meat in your head. I know that makes a lot of people unhappy, but too bad. Your emotions mean nothing to objective reality.

I think this is false, but even if it were true, it doesn’t explain the puzzle. As Richard Chappell says:

Instead, I think, physicalists should agree with dualists that the brain gives rise to (rather than just is) the mind.  Their view can remain distinctively physicalistic insofar as they insist that there is nothing metaphysically heavyweight about this "generation" -- the mind comes along "for free", in something like the way that computer hardware gives rise to a running software programme.  Your web browser is not identical to any of the circuitry upon which it runs, but nor does it create any deep metaphysical mysteries. (Of course, I think consciousness is different, but I'm playing Devil's advocate for the physicalist here.)

An interesting upshot of this (it seems to me) is that physicalists should be epiphenomenalists too.  These "virtual" or abstractly generated mental properties do not push atoms around, and so lack fundamental causal powers (though we can always invoke them when speaking loosely, as in correlative explanations).  This isn't a problem, since there's nothing wrong with epiphenomenalism, but insofar as many physicalists believe otherwise, it does put them in a funny position.

The third puzzle of psychophysical harmony that I present is:

Why does it interact in a harmonious way so that, for instance, the thing that causes me to move my arm is my thought “I want my arm to move,” rather than some other mental state.

BSB suggests:

Because that’s how you evolved.

But I already addressed that! I said:

3 isn’t explained by evolution because a disharmonious world—where you behave the same way but your thoughts are different—would produce the same kind of selection.  Evolution cares about what you do, not what you think, and the puzzle here is explaining why what we think matches what we do.  

BSB’s “response” to this is:

Sure it can, you just don’t want it to. You, like most people, seemingly want to feel special, but you’re not. Humans are just animals and when we inevitably go extinct some day, which absolutely will happen, nobody is going to miss us. If aliens find our remains, we’ll be a biological curiosity, nothing more. This is the reality that you actually live in, like it or not. If humans had never evolved in this universe, then things would still be going on as they are because the functioning of the cosmos doesn’t depend on us. Stop reacting emotionally because so far, that’s really all that you’ve been doing. Nobody cares what you want to be true, only what actually is.

This does not address the argument, which has nothing to do with whether humans are special. BSB then goes on an irrelevant tangent about methodological naturalism, one that has nothing to do with my point, which I will thus skip.

7 A priori knowledge

I suggest that theism is the best explanation of our ability to grasp a priori facts. We have moral knowledge, yet morality doesn’t explain the movement of atoms. So if our beliefs come purely from the movement of atoms, then the moral facts don’t explain our moral beliefs, which undercuts our justification in believing them. I give two examples of a priori knowledge: knowledge of which worlds are likelier than others—which one needs to justify induction—and moral knowledge that torturing babies is wrong. I say “So if you think you’re justified in thinking the world won’t be replaced with a cucumber tomorrow, you need a priori knowledge.” BSB replies:

We do? Since when. Granted, you’d need to provide an better example of such that stands up to critical scrutiny and if you want to provide that, we can revisit, but the example here is just nonsense.

Yes, we do, for the reason I explained. Both the theory that the world will and won’t turn into a cucumber tomorrow explain all the evidence up until this point. So absent a priori knowledge, one can’t have any reason to think one of those worlds is likelier than the other.

You were raised in a society where torture was considered to be wrong. You believe it  because you were indoctrinated into it from a young age. That’s how morals work, after all. It’s empathy mixed with enlightened self-interest. We don’t want to be tortured, so we don’t torture others, in hopes that other people will reciprocate.

It seems like torture is wrong and would be so even if no one believed that. You’re justified in following your seemings in the absence of a defeater—which we don’t have. I am justified in believing in the external world absent a good reason to doubt it. But morality is analogous.

Saying “God says torture is wrong” doesn’t mean anything, aside from the fact that it’s demonstrably untrue. God, in the Bible, is perfectly fine with murder and torture and rape and slavery. There isn’t one place in the Bible where God or Jesus say “don’t keep other people as property”. Your god is kind of a dick.

Does BSB realize that I’m not a Christian but instead a generic theist? He keeps making this error! The argument is not that we get morality from the dictates of a book but instead that only theism accounts for how we can come to reason about morality and correctly intuit facts about morality—and other types of a priori knowledge.

Atheism doesn’t have to account for anything because atheism is the answer to one and only one question. “Do you believe in any gods?” If you answer yes, you’re a theist. If you answer anything else, you’re an atheist. there is nothing to atheism but that. There are a number of secular solutions, secular humanism and the like, but I don’t necessarily agree with any of them and I’ve done videos on that if you want to go and look.

These are about what the right moral view is, not how we come to know about it. They thus have nothing to do with the puzzle as applied to moral knowledge, and certainly nothing to do with it as applied more broadly to a priori knowledge. BSB then notes that lots of people think torture is fine. True but irrelevant. People can be wrong about morality.

8 Anthropics

In my piece, I present the anthropic argument which says that theism predicts that every possible person would be created because creating a happy person is good and God could make every person happy. Therefore, if theism is true it’s very likely that I’d exist. But because there are Beth 2 possible people at least—a large infinite—and no atheistic model that’s consistent with Beth 2 people, my existence is much likelier on theism than atheism.

Again, all just assertions. I’m not going to suppose anything. I care what is actually real, not “what if”.

But anytime you apply Bayes theorem you look at what we’d expect if a theory is true vs what we’d expect if it isn’t. The reason that you should think a coin is rigged if it always comes up heads is because that’s what we’d expect if it were rigged but not if it weren’t.

Give me what  demonstrably is. You are just making assertions about this imaginary father figure in the sky that you can show no reason whatsoever to think is remotely true.

Well, I gave an argument for it: that a perfect being would make every possible persons because making a happy person is good. BSB did not address this argument, preferring to posture and repeat the otiose claim that believing something or wishing it doesn’t make it so.

Atheism isn’t true or false. It is the state of being unconvinced by the claims made by the religious. It isn’t a positive position.

Atheism is the position that there are no Gods. Otherwise, how does one argue about it? No one doubts that BSB doesn’t believe in God. We’re arguing about what’s reasonable to believe. But fine, if you go with the silly lack of belief definition—according to which most atheists are brainless atoms, for atoms aren’t convinced of God—then replace my claim about what atheism predicts with what the non-existence of God predicts.

There is an upper limit to the number of possible unique individuals, just given the number of unique combinations of our DNA, but that doesn’t make any of them impossible to exist, other than those whose DNA makes life impossible.

But the number of possible people is more than the number of possible arrangements of DNA because there can be multiple people with the same DNA. BSB even admits this when he says:

It is possible that sometime in history, there was someone on the planet that was genetically identical to you. That doesn’t make them you.

Yes! That’s exactly the point. Next, in my article I said:

Why think that the existence of more people is more likely? Two reasons. First, it follows from the straightforward probabilistic reasoning I gave before. If there are more people, it’s likelier that I’d be one of them.

BSB replies:

It’s not all about you. You are not important. This is just ego talking and ego doesn’t matter either.

No, it’s probabilistic reasoning. I exist, so that favors theories that make it likelier that I’d exist, like theism. This is exactly the way I’d reason about anything.

I then argue that alternative to the view that more people is more likely get absurd results—see here for a more thorough explanation. BSB says:

Now you’re just piling all of your own personal wishes and dreams on things, which is not rational. “Absurd results” in the sense of results that you do not personally approve of, are irrelevant. I care about true results.

The absurd results I talk about are that you could guarantee that you won’t get pregnant by making sure that you’d have a lot of offspring if you did and that you could move boulders with your mind. It’s not that I don’t personally approve of them, it’s that I can see that they’re mistaken probabilistic judgments.

Next, I present Bostrom’s case about Adam and Eve. BSB responds by iterating vociferously that Adam and Eve aren’t real. Again, I agree—that’s why it’s a hypothetical.

BSB finally says:

Everything that you’ve said has been wishes and dreams and no evidence presented for any of it. “It seems to me” is irrelevant. I am not going to go into this with your assumptions intact. I expect you to be able to back all of this up with something other than “I like it!” So far, that’s really all you’ve done and I have debunked every last bit of it. You might not like that, you might not agree, but the whole point of a debate is to convince the other side that what you are saying is true. It’s not to make claims, it’s to provide evidence. So far, you haven’t done it. I’m certainly willing to give you the opportunity to do better in the future, but you are not debating with someone who is going to automatically take your faith seriously. I don’t care about your faith. I care about your facts. How about we focus on that from here on out?

The idea that he’s debunked anything is a bit silly. All he’s done is repeat that feelings aren’t evidence and erroneously assume that you can’t get evidence for A from B if there might be some unknown explanation of B.