Here I’ve collected a variety of general tips you may find useful for debating, whether you are doing a live formal debate, a formal written debate, or anything more informal online. It’s not a comprehensive tutorial. Just some of the first things you should know about and make use of in order to be a more effective and successful debater. Including a discussion of the actual goals of debate; as in, why you should even bother. This all comes from careful study and a lot of experience.

In General

Counter-apologetics is a mass media exercise. In other words, if someone wants to argue with you, always make it as public as possible so others can see what goes on. Your primary objective is not converting the one arguing with you. Usually you’d be wasting your time with that. Instead your primary objective is to advertise to the general public how ridiculous, foolish, uninformed, or illogical your opponent’s position is, and how unwilling they are to concede this even when shown. The ultimate objective is (a) correcting the record, and educating the public, as to what is factually true or logically sound (so that the only information the public has available is not only what the dissemblers and liars and manipulators have provided them), and (b) diminishing your opponent’s influence among the public, as more and more people will cease trusting them as reliable sources or thinkers.

Liars and demagogues also know this, which is why they’ll seek to accomplish (b) with fallacies like ad hominem, straw man and poisoning the well. Through a straw man, for example, they will attempt to make your position look ridiculous, foolish, uninformed, or illogical by misrepresenting it. Your objective, as an advocate for the truth, must be the opposite: if an argument when represented accurately is not ridiculous, then it is not ridiculous, and ought not be ridiculed; but if when represented accurately an argument really is ridiculous, without any twisting or forcing but just laying bare what actually is being argued and how, then it actually is ridiculous, and warrants ridicule. This is the difference between telling the truth about what your opponent is arguing, and lying about it. The dishonest will likewise seek to accomplish (a) by disinforming or misinforming the public, reporting falsehoods as facts or presenting facts dishonestly—such as by selecting which facts to mention and then omitting facts that quite change the picture when accounted for, or by exaggerating or playing semantic games with the facts. Your objective, as an advocate for the truth, must be the opposite: you want to make sure people know the whole truth and the accurate truth, and are not being manipulated by semantic games. So don’t use them.

Timed debate gives the liar the advantage. Because it takes far less time to make a false assertion than it does to explain why it is false. Therefore, the liar can make more assertions before the clock runs out than you will have time to rebut before time is called. This fact is readily exploited by dishonest debaters and should be called out when attempted. Disarm this weapon by using a few words to direct the audience to further resources online or in print that fully rebut your opponent and expose why what they are saying is factually false or illogical. Written debate affords a slight advantage in that you can take the time to choose words carefully so as to rebut everything in the given word count, or easily direct readers to where those rebuttals are provided. You can also take the time to research the claims and assertions your opponent makes—such as actually reading any articles they cite, so as to expose what those articles really say, and not what your opponent claimed they said.

The result is that written debates, limited by word count, will tend to be more honest and useful than spoken debates, limited by a clock. This is especially the case given that spoken debate requires many more skills, which one mostly only acquires from experience—creating the Catch-22 that you can only become good at debating by debating badly until you get better at it. But alas, that’s what you have to do. Such skills include the ability to speak quickly but still clearly, to instantly determine on the fly the best things to say and the most efficient way to say it, to rapidly set priorities effectively, to know immediately what arguments it’s safe to drop, and of course, to already have enough information at your command that you don’t have to look anything up but can access it in memory, instantly, no matter what claims your opponent rolls out. Of course you also need a good command of perceiving the logical structure of any argument just spoken to you, so you can immediately identify the most salient mistake of logic in it, or the most faulty premise.

The “most salient mistake of logic” will be that mistake which is the most easily explained and the most impossible to fix by improving the argument (think, steel man rather than a straw man) and the “most faulty premise” will be that premise which is either false or undemonstrated and the most impossible to replace (as opposed to an argument that could still be made with a different premise instead, or a premise that could be restored by being better worded, for example).

Why Debate?

Because you can aim for fifty birds with one stone, and death by a thousand small cuts. Statistically, if one more person is persuaded by you than by them, even if that’s only one person in a hundred, you are contributing to a continuous net gain for the truth. And really, the real rate is often much higher than a mere 1 in 100.

Contrary to what you’ve heard about the Backfire Effect, whereby giving someone more information against their belief can actually (paradoxically) strengthen that belief, in actual fact (as one can discern here and here) a small percentage of people are actually converted by hearing contrary or corrected facts. Some backfire studies show that at least 10% of those hearing facts contrary to their beliefs change their beliefs to align with the facts, even as others are instead radicalized by the same information and believe more strongly in the false. The backfire effect is also short lived, so it’s inconsequential: those prone to it simply continue believing what they did before, as strongly as before; nevertheless, the short-lived counter-intuitive effect is more sensational and thus the one you’ll most likely hear about. Likewise, in every study, it is always the case that those more knowledgeable on a subject have beliefs more in line with the facts even when just as biased towards a contrary belief as others less informed, which entails that educating people with facts actually does increase the percentage of people who change their beliefs to accord with the facts. The net effect, in other words, always trends towards the truth.

And this remains the case even if the resulting progress is slow. Each time someone is exposed to the truth, and to challenges exposing the lies and manipulations and errors of those defending the opposite, a cumulative effect ensues: they may not be persuaded right away, but cognitive dissonance will grow, and many will start checking things themselves, and they will eventually get there on their own, often as soon as a year or two later. I can personally confirm this happens quite a lot. I’ve lost count of how many times a recent de-convert has told me it was a debate they saw me in one or two years before that started them on the road to apostasy. Their mind wasn’t changed right away; rather, the debate triggered a sequence of events that led to their mind being changed. They read more, watched more debates, thought more about what was happening.

Thus continually exposing people to facts and challenges to their beliefs has a long-term cumulative effect which increases the percentage of people who switch beliefs. If we get even so little as 10% per year, and they get around 4% (the average tracked growth rate of any evangelizing religion in first world nations), the net compound interest is 6% in our favor. We win. It’s just a matter of time. Therefore, keeping the pressure on, and the facts and truth as much in the public eye as possible and as readily accessible as possible, is key to shifting any population demographic toward true belief or away from false belief. We see this not only in debate over religion, but politics and society as well—for instance, the process was maddeningly slow, but respect for the dignity and rights of gay people has cumulatively increased from a fringe position to a social norm. Persistent and increasing exposure to facts did this. As did death. Like Thomas Paine once said, “Time makes more converts to reason.” Often because the die-hards die off and are replaced with a more informed generation. But even that wouldn’t happen if no one was getting the information out there and seen. Debates are a vector for that.

So yes, you can debate all day any social or political or moral issue and people will still remain in their stubborn convictions; but you will have planted seeds of doubt in a statistically significant segment of those watching that debate (hence the importance of making sure as many people as possible are watching, reading along, or listening), which will eventually lead them to question and doubt their false beliefs. Eventually a percentage of any audience will abandon those false convictions. Which will often cause them to shift on many other social and moral issues as well, since belief systems are so mutually intra-dependent.

That’s why losing belief in God often (and I do mean often, not always) results in losing the conservative morals and politics attached to that belief. They might not move on every issue, but they will often move on many, since the religious basis for them will have collapsed, leaving only humanism and the facts; as well as a deep distrust of every lie their religion told them—including on moral and social issues—inspiring them to re-examine everything anew. This is how with one debate you can win ten other arguments at the same time—in the long run. Thus, trying to change people’s religious convictions is a means of spreading humanist values and beliefs. And the cornerstone holding up all religious convictions in the U.S. is the existence of God. This is why belief in God is the most commonly targeted, and should continue to be. But it shouldn’t nor needn’t be the only belief debated.

General Advice

(1) A good debate is not as much about arguing as educating and outreach: atheists learn they are not alone, secret doubters learn they are not the only ones thinking these things, open minded people begin to doubt, believers begin to question (as they start hearing things they won’t have heard or been allowed to hear before), activist organizations gain members, and the audience learns something about atheists and atheism, and hear reasons and evidence previously unconsidered or unfamiliar, contributing to a slow net gain in belief-shift over time.

(2) Approach any debate as simply explaining to the audience why you are not persuaded by what your opponent has said, why his or her arguments and evidence aren’t good enough, and hence why you remain an unbeliever. Endeavor to appear reasonable and rooted in common sense. It is necessary to be completely honest and frank about your reasons and reactions to your opponent’s arguments and evidence. Sophisticated or high-brow rebuttals are not necessary, and in general are usually counter-productive, since most audiences won’t be thinking on that level anyway—they want to hear common sense prevail over obfuscation, not what might look to them like more obfuscation. Just give them the simple reason why you don’t buy it.

(3) Preparation requires knowing the outlines of the basic arguments. Only a limited number of arguments exist, and usually they’ve already been well studied. To each one you should come prepared with a quick, generic, catch-all rebuttal that dismisses the argument in some way in just a few sentences. You can opt to go into more detail on the spot as creativity moves you, but always prepare as generic and basic a response as you can, so you can be flexible. Remember you have limited time or word count. So you have to start simple, and only expand when forced to by a challenge to what you said. It will also help to have some basic familiarity with any scientific or historical facts relevant to each argument, so you’re prepared to bring them up if called for. Although logical fallacies are the easiest to detect and point out on the fly—if you get good at spotting them. So get good at spotting them. Fallacy Files and Logically Fallacious are good resources to explore. Wikipedia also has a list.

(4) Preparation is also aided by having prepared generic responses to general, sweeping categories of argument, such as:

• Arguments that don’t matter. If some argument or evidence doesn’t even relate to what’s being debated, you can say so and be done with it—don’t get baited into wasting time arguing a point that doesn’t matter. A funny sentence or two is okay if the spirit moves you, but it’s a common tactic of dishonest debaters to say something irrelevant but false to bait you into wasting time or word count correcting it, so you’ll have less left over to address what you’re actually supposed to be debating. Don’t fall for it.
• Arguments that can be bracketed. To “bracket” an issue is to set it aside for another day without conceding the point. If you don’t know enough or have no time to get into it, for example, you can appeal to the fact that qualified experts, scholars and scientists, already dispute the claim or do not agree with each other on it, so the issue is not a settled fact, and then move on. Note how to distinguish here between a genuinely scientific argument and an argument that only uses scientific facts as premises: the latter is not a scientific argument but a philosophical one and thus should not be paraded as something science or scientists have proven, but admitted as something yet to be proven. You can simply say that in a single sentence and that’s adequate to dismiss the point.
• Evidence that sounds bogus, contrived, or mistaken but you have never heard before. You can simply say that you find the claim doubtful and improbable, and not something all scientists or experts agree with, so your opponent must present better evidence than they have—or properly peer reviewed evidence that it’s true or that they’ve correctly understood it—before it can carry any weight in the debate.

The latter can be dealt with in two different ways, depending on what just happened. For example, when Dan Wallace made the shocking claim about a “first century manuscript of Mark” in a debate with Bart Ehrman over the reliability of the New Testament text, a fact-claim never before heard of or published, that was dirty pool. It turned out the claim was bogus. But before you know that, the correct response is to note that there is no peer reviewed publication establishing such a thing, so it’s not admissible as evidence yet, and that your opponent ought to know that. Call out the dirty tactic for what it is, and explain why it’s dirty.

On the other hand, when in a debate with William Lane Craig over the resurrection of Jesus I rebutted his use of Gary Habermas’s bogus statistical claim about how many experts “agree” there really was an empty tomb, and Craig then tried to recover by claiming he wasn’t relying on Habermas but some other scholar whose name I’d never heard of and whose supposed study I could not possibly examine in the course of the timed debate. It turned out Craig was lying. There was no other study; he had been relying on Habermas all along, and the mysterious other person he named was someone who just made an off-hand remark somewhere that “most” experts think that, without any evidence or argument backing that opinion. When debaters outright lie to you like this, you won’t be able to tell until after the fact. That makes this the dirtiest of pool. The only thing you can do is express why you doubt the legitimacy of the claim. For example, in my case, it was pretty obvious Craig was actually citing Habermas, and had some other study existed, I’d have heard of it. So I called bullshit. I suggest you even go one step more and ask the audience to check for themselves after the debate and commit to no longer trusting your opponent if they discover he or she misrepresented their source.

(5) Decide whether you want to debate a fact (a straightforward debate) or your opponent’s epistemology (debating how they claim to know what they are saying is true and whether that’s a reliable way of knowing that). In so-called “street epistemology” the focus is on the latter, and with a nonconfrontational approach (thus, effectively, the opposite of a debate). It requires painstaking personal interaction so it isn’t adaptable to most debate arenas. There aren’t any scientific studies that establish that this is any more effective in long term results, but it’s surely a useful approach to have happening alongside every other. Because it can get past emotional barriers to hearing out facts, and can get at an underlying problem inherent to all false beliefs: that a person’s means of deciding what to believe about anything might be fundamentally broken, and getting them to realize that (which, admittedly, is exceedingly difficult) can serve a wider range of goals and improve the person in a more general way—as they might then be inspired to change their epistemology to one more reliable. That said, debates can also deploy a “target-the-epistemology” approach, by asking how or why an opponent believes some fact they asserted, and exposing to the audience how that is not a reliable means of knowing.

(6) Finally, even a rudimentary grasp of Bayesian reasoning can be very useful. I show how this can totally transform a God debate in my article on Bayesian Counter-Apologetics: once you get it, every argument for God can be turned around into an argument against God. It doesn’t have to be explicitly mathematical—indeed, you don’t even have to mention you are using math at all, much less Bayes’ Theorem. My entire book Why I Am Not a Christian is a model example of this: it is thoroughly Bayesian—yet never once mentions that. It contains no equations or even allusions to any. Emulate this procedure in any debate. It can help you zero in on what’s important and how to make that clear to any audience.

Indeed I think understanding Bayesian reasoning is endlessly useful. Because it teaches you that all debates—all debates—over any matter of fact are really just arguing over three numbers: (1) the prior probability of the claim being debated (which means, the usual base rate of the kind of explanation of the evidence being proposed), and (2) the probability all the evidence we have is the evidence we would have if the claim were true, and (3) the probability all the evidence we have is the evidence we would have if the claim were false. That’s it. All arguments reduce to that. Whether those arguing over a claim are aware of this or not. How often, usually, does that claimed explanation of similar evidence turn out to be true; and how well does the evidence, altogether, fit the debated explanation over any competing explanation of that same evidence. Understanding that every argument is really just over those three numbers is a powerful tool. It teaches you to look for what you are actually debating, and how to effectively demonstrate one explanation is more likely than another, and thus more warranted to believe.

As to a whole set of skills for winning arguments or catching their flaws, I give more tips and advice in How to Successfully Argue Jesus Existed (or Anything Else in the World) under the rubric of debating the historicity of Jesus, but as the subtitle suggests the points there made are actually applicable to any and all debates. Similarly useful might be my articles on Innumeracy, Burden of Proof, and Arguments from Consensus.

Time and Tactics

You only have limited time or word count. Even in an open ended debate, the longer your responses get or go on, the sooner people get bored and stop paying attention, defeating all the purposes of debate. So you should endeavor to enforce narrow time or word limits on yourself to keep the audience engaged. Think “concise” rather than “verbose.” One way to do this is to not bother making any of the weaker or less-clear or less-certain or harder-to-defend arguments you might have for your position. Don’t burn clock or count on that. Use those limited resources to make the best possible case, with the best arguments and ample time to make them intelligible.

That’s not the only reason you should drop all such weak arguments. Don’t even present them. There’s some evidence that people presented with a weak argument and a strong argument for the same conclusion, will ignore the strong argument and attack in their minds or casually dismiss only the weak argument and assume they’ve rebutted or dismissed both. Therefore, only ever use strong arguments, and thus resist the temptation to “be thorough” and give “every” argument you know or want to voice. Instead choose the strongest one or two or three arguments and only focus on them, continually defending them against rebuttals, either to force your opponent to confront them, or to call them out when they avoid them—thus exposing to all watching that they are avoiding your arguments, which I have noticed can often be a crucial turning point for the audience. (This advice only applies to debate and social persuasion though; in deciding what to believe a rational person should fairly consider all arguments, weak and strong, and avoid falling prey to the fallacy of confusing the two.)

To do this most effectively, learn the concept of pickups and drops. In formal debate, when someone rebuts you or makes an argument, you have to “pick up” that thread again and re-establish your position as correct (with a rebuttal or counter-rebuttal). When your opponent does not do this, that is called a “drop,” and you should call the audience’s attention to the fact that they have “dropped” that argument and thus have failed to rebut it and thus have failed to establish their case as correct.

Ahead of any debate, write down on your pad all the core points you want to make sure the audience walks away convinced of. Keep those points as few as possible (hence “core” points). Because, remember, you will have limited time. Your objective in the debate is to defend those points against every attack, and have as much time as possible to do so. By having them listed like this, you can remind yourself to pick them back up every time you are up. If your opponent rebuts any of them, you can put a check or star beside that point (and perhaps some key words to remind you what their arguments against it were). Then you’ll know which ones you have to pick up, and also which ones your opponent dropped (since they won’t have marks by them), which if you have time left over you can remind the audience that those points were dropped and remain unrebutted. Which adds to an audience’s impression against their case.

On that same pad, below those points, write down every other point your opponent makes that isn’t a rebuttal but that you have to rebut (but ignore points that are irrelevant or that you don’t have to rebut). This will remind you that you have to answer them. Points they make against the points you wrote down before you’ll already be marking on the list above. But your objective with this second list is to make sure you don’t drop any crucial new points they added to the debate—so they can’t call you out as having dropped a point. You still must proportion your time wisely. You can dismiss all their premises with rapid rebuttals (to avoid being called out for a drop), then use all the time that that saved you to more extensively tear down the most important of their premises (their “most salient mistake of logic” or their “most faulty premise”)—rather than trying to extensively rebut their every premise.

Related to this is to avoid being sucked into tricks designed to get you to waste clock time or word count. I’ve mentioned one example of such a tactic already. But in general, always stick to a single disputed fact or small list of facts. Don’t let your opponent re-frame the debate. Call out fallacies—for example, if they use poisoning the well or straw man or ad hominem, or start arguing disingenuously or in bad faith, actually call the audience’s attention to the fact your opponent did that and why it is an attempt to manipulate them. For the same reason, call out drops. But dropping might also be a red flag for an attempt at re-framing. Don’t let your opponent frame the debate by deciding what points to address and debate and what to ignore. The points they drop are often more important, so don’t let them. In that sense, Motte and Bailey is a re-framing tactic. Be ready for it. For more examples see Three Common Tactics of Cranks, Liars, and Trolls.

A more subtle re-framing tactic to be on the alert for is the opinion-fact bait-and-switch: an opponent will often blur the line between facts and opinions, and then end up using an opinion as if it were a fact in building the remainder of their argument. Facts are just what actually exists, what has actually happened, a straightforward description of things or events. Opinions are conclusions you draw from or feelings you have about that collection of facts. Opinions that follow logically from facts can be honestly treated as themselves facts but only to a lesser probability than the facts themselves; and often that probability is still too low to treat it as a fact at all, but rather as a conclusion from the facts, which is precisely, usually, what you are actually debating.

This can explain the difference between, for example, conclusions of the sciences, including some of the content of other empirical knowledge fields like history: sometimes the probability of the conclusion is demonstrated to be so high that that conclusion ought to be regarded as a fact, while sometimes it isn’t—and outside science and history, the latter is going to be most things. Such moderate-probability conclusions are really opinions, albeit opinions for which one can argue (assuming their probability really does follow from the facts). Identify when this is happening, and re-frame the debate as what it should be: arguing over what that probability really is, given the facts as they really are. If, instead, an opponent uses a conclusion from the facts as a “fact” to argue for that conclusion, this might be a fallacy of circular argument. If so, call it out. Likewise if they appear to be using how they feel about the facts as a fact from which conclusions can be drawn (about anything other than themselves), point that out. All too often “I don’t like it” or “I don’t like them” becomes a fallacious argument for dismissing that hated thing, or something that hated person said, as false. Call that out when you see it.

This last point leads to a broader one: debate can be useful, but often is a side-show that can simply just end up a dance through a hall of mirrors erected by your opponent to escape their cognitive dissonance. There is a way to bypass a lot of that. When someone takes a weird, fanatical position (like “global warming is a hoax” or “transwomen should not be allowed to use women’s restrooms” or “we shouldn’t call gay marriage, marriage, but something else, like civil union”), often arguing over the facts with them right away will be a waste of time. They will have embraced a defective epistemology tailor-made to defend false beliefs; and attacking their epistemology might be equally fruitless, as they will evade or obfuscate to avoid admitting any faults in it.

Sometimes there is a more effective way to expose to themselves (and, even more likely, to the audience) what’s really going on here: ask them why they care. Make the debate about that. Why do they care which restrooms a transwoman uses? Why do they care whether global warming is real? Why do they care what we call gay marriage? And so on. This line of questioning will expose their motives, and rapidly zero in on which facts actually matter, so you can cut straight to the chase of debating those facts, rather than the litany of red herrings and other re-framing baskets of facts they’d rather be arguing with you instead because they need those side-debates to keep their hall of mirrors up. Getting right at the facts that really matter, and why they care so much as to maintain false beliefs about them, can expose the whole charade.

Building Skills and Advice

Ultimately, getting good at debate requires not just an advance knowledge of skills and tactics and arguments and evidence, but also two general things: (1) experience and (2) using that experience to improve, i.e. being critical about your performance after every debate to see what things were difficult or weak or problematic and how to get around them or improve on them. Always keep in mind the most important outcome measure, which is not “changing your opponent’s mind,” but educating and inspiring the audience to start questioning whether they are right, to provoke them to do their own analysis and fact-checking. This requires being informative and clear, not obscure or rambling or confusing. Brevity is important, as long winded verbosity will lose an audience. But above all, it requires caring about getting better at it—and making a continual effort to.

I’d like readers of this article to add more tips and advice about debating (whether debating live against a clock or online against a word count or a fickle audience) in the comments below. All useful suggestions will be posted.