It works. TNX.

It should be fixed now. There was some sort of plugin mismatch going on.

Yes. Apart from abundant anecdotal evidence that some debate played a part in a lot of atheists leaving religion (by laying seeds that over the long term led them to realize they couldn’t defend their faith against the arguments made), there is solid empirical evidence that it can change minds even immediately in the Fry-Hitchens team debate.

But the latter is rare. Usually before-after polls of the audience show minimal movement, but that’s true for everything anyone believes. You don’t just turn it off like a switch; you continue affirming belief as it erodes instance after instance after instance until it erodes so far you just can’t bring yourself to affirm it anymore, and that requires more than one debate or event or book, but a series of them, but a series requires individual elements to constitute the series, and a debate can often be one of them.

Click the picture. It takes you to the sales page (it’s not mine; someone else beat me to it, but they deserve your patronage).

Counter-example?

I’m pretty sure I make clear my point is in-concept and not “we know how life began.” But it’s possible that nuance gets missed by the hearer when I’m presenting so much material in so short a time.

Doesn’t that sound like yet another rule?

It’s logically necessary. And what is logically necessary always exists (so you don’t have to explain why it exists). If, indeed, the position that only nothing comes from nothing could be proved logically necessary, then that rule would be necessarily true. Instead, it’s not necessarily true. So having it requires explaining where it came from (it therefore cannot exist when “nothing” exists; only what is logically necessary will, by definition, necessarily still exist when you take everything else away, the only kind of “nothing” that’s logically possible). As I’ve formally proved here.

There shouldn’t be any reason why the preview function isn’t showing for my blog. I’ll report that to our webmaster.

However, you are a fantastic debater. It’s rare to see someone put out all the fires and question time only to find out that they have plenty left to keep pouring the water on. I wanted to chuckle and shake my head when he had his second section and accused you of not answering objections he hadn’t raised yet to your moral argument.

The only thing I would have gone on about in the spare time in the first section was pointing out that we can’t expect life to exist in a universe that can’t support it, but that it exists in a niche that can support it is the only thing we can expect. This also ties into the morality argument. Should we expect a species to survive if every single individual in it has a chief urge to kill every other individual? No, it cannot and will not survive. Only a species that has at least a bare minimum of cooperation can live on.

I have to admit I was scared for him when he mentioned multiple independent attestations. I was hoping for you to shred into that directly a bit more.

Because “God exists” actually doesn’t entail a position on any moral, economic, or political issue whatever, since God can be made to advocate literally anything (and has been), simply depending on what sect of believers you fall in with by mere global happenstance.

Accepting “[noun] exists”, sure.

But a knowledgeable interventionist god that persuasively whispers its opinions into the heads of particular followers. One that ostensibly is the source of authority a sect uses to insist members share those opinions…

The proposition itself doesn’t entail specific positions either way, it may entail reassessment of many other positions.