WizardTFT

Reddit Atheists only appear to have “won” if you accept their presupposition that materialism is true. Every debate these people have ever had began with them presupposing their own metaphysics to be correct like that was just laying out the rules of the debate rather than a subtle attempt to rig the entire thing from the start. And they got away with it so often because they were debating a specific strain of Evangelical Protestants who had become so ingrained in dualistic thinking over the centuries that they had basically no frame of reference to push back. It was like trying to debate a liberal who presupposes that history has ended without pushing back before any conversation could be had about liberalism itself. Of course you’d “lose” such a debate. This is exactly what has happened to conservatives over the last 30+ years. But I’ve never once seen a Reddit Atheist enjoy debating the presuppositions of their own worldview. How many of them want to debate the Observer Effect or the Measurement Problem? Or Bell's and Leggett's inequalities? Or the Hard Problem of Consciousness? Or the implication of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems on their physicalist worldview? Or whether science can justify scientism? None of these things prove organized religion as we commonly understand it to be true, much less Evangelical Protestantism. But they do show that the metaphysical picture which Reddit Atheists usually put forward as obvious right from the start is actually not obvious at all. That’s where the entire debate has to begin, and the Reddit crowd wants to skip this step entirely because it gets in the way of making themselves feel intellectual by dunking on people who think the Earth is 7,000 years old. But the moment the debate shifts from them tearing down strawmen in the form of sky daddy to whether the foundation of their own belief system is valid, their teleology crumbles apart because the entire premise is built upon the incredibly disingenuous attempt to pretend they have none. But everyone has a teleology, including Atheists. Atheism itself is not pure negation, no matter how many times they try to insist otherwise. It’s a worldview of its own, with its own presuppositions and its own axioms. And those axioms almost always entail materialism, liberal humanism, scientism, or progressivism, which are very much open to attack.