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PhilosophyNut's avatar

I just watched the debate, and I was absolutely stunned by Dillahunty's incompetence. His strategy was to (a) repeatedly deny a theorem of the probability calculus and (b) falsely accuse you of misrepresenting him. What a total moron. It's a damned shame that young atheists look up to him.

(Believe it or not, this is the first time I've ever called someone a "moron" on the internet. But it's well-deserved in this case.)

My one critique for you is this: Dillahunty leaned heavily on his double-sixes example. You should have taken several minutes to explain what was wrong with the example in your rebuttal, rather than trying to address every point he brought up in his opening statement. Most YouTube audiences don't know what "prior probability" means, so although your response to the example was utterly decisive, it went over most viewers' heads.

(Okay, maybe I have one other critique: although the anthropic argument is a good argument, it's almost impossible for laypeople to understand. I'm a PhD student in philosophy who's read several books about infinity and Bayesian epistemology, and it took me a long time to see the force of the argument. The other arguments you gave were much easier to understand; although I don't think Dillahunty is a moral realist, the argument from moral knowledge would have made a nice substitute for the anthropic argument in this debate.)

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Vesper's avatar

This was a pretty unsatisfying debate to me as member of team atheist. I was only listening to it in the background so maybe my assessment is a little off, but my impression is that a lot of time was taken up by Dillahunty repeating in various ways that we have no empirical evidence from which we can determine a list of potential causes of the universe and what their probability distribution should be, nor it seemed in his view could there be any such evidence obtainable from within the universe (hence the story about how if God showed up and told us he created the universe, how would we know he was *really* God rather than just a powerful alien?). And so without that empirical evidence from which to determine a probability distribution of universe-causes, any reasoning based on the assumption that *there is* some probability distribution of universe-causes (in particular one that includes God as a viable option) is invalid in his view. I think.

And since that disagreement was never really clearly communicated and understood, you two spent a lot of time talking past each other.

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