I had been more apatheistic for quite some time and ultimately decided to reevaluate a lot of my core beliefs. I felt like a lot of my views came about primarily from anti-Christian bias rather than true evaluation of the evidence (one example is that I was a Jesus mythicist just out of hearing that there existed historians that supported the position and then looked for evidence to support it). I felt like I had finally reached a point I could reevaluate my beliefs.
I ultimately changed my epistemological standards to be less hyper-skeptical, as I realized I used different standards when analyzing religious and religious adjacent claims than when analyzing everything else, became a moral realist after reading into Neo Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, etc.
Eventually it came time to reevaluate my religious views. Ultimately, a combination of Swinburne's Argument from Religious Experience (via Reid's Principle of Credulity) and Greer's Argument for Polytheism from the Diversity of Religious Experience made me take polytheism seriously. Ultimately, it became a cumulative case to me that if theism is true that it is probably polytheism. Before I knew it, I was convinced that both atheism and polytheism are rational positions one can take depending mostly on epistemological standards and I just happened to fall moreso on the polytheistic side. My personal experiences since then have only solidified it for me.
Ex-atheist here. In fact, on DDO I did numerous debates and participated in the forums quite a bit as an atheist (SNP1). Anyone can use me as an example of an atheist that became a theist, or they can use the list provided by ChatKnight.
Can you actually break down what of my arguments was uncompelling? As it is, your vote doesn't even show that you actually read the debate with how little you actually addressed the substance of either RationalTheist's or my arguments.
If you found certain elements of the arguments I used uncompelling, I would love to know so that I can better learn from this debate.
Just realized no one pinged you like you asked
" I am expecting a first argument to be a strong case for your BoP"
I guess this is where a lot of subjectivity comes into play. A lot of polytheists that reasoned their way to polytheism tend to say that this was the most convincing argument/line of reasoning that ultimately convinced them, even if other factors also played a role. From that perspective, it really comes off as being a strong case, but there are so few monotheists or atheists that address polytheistic arguments that I had no perspective on how strong an argument those that remained unconvinced found it (even if they ultimately thought it wasn't enough). I guess that makes me think it is a stronger argument than it might actually be.
I figured I would put the strongest arguments first and last, the one that has had the most impact on polytheists first and the one I personally find strongest last, putting what I personally found to be the weaker argument in the middle. A sort of start strong and end strong approach.
Thank you for the vote. I do hope to learn from what criticisms for my rounds you provided so as to do a better job debating in the future.
"rather than assuming readers would have basic grounding in their meaning" I apologize for that, and that is clearly an issue that I need to address. I have spent too much time debating in dedicated philosophy discord servers where such ideas are considered well understood, and so I failed to realize I should properly define these terms here. I will have be better about that in the future.
I do think you are a bit overly harsh with your criticism in places, like the "Why am I reading about cats and rats and not about gods as most interpret that concept?" critique in regards to a section where I opened by saying I was using an analogy argument. I can tell from the critique that I need to do a better job in the future mapping the analogy to the debate topic, as it does seem clear that it wasn't as intuitive as I thought it was, so I do thank you for that insight. Thank you.
I do not understand the relevance of the section where you say "Further, the citation's P1 explanation seems more of an argument against any theism, let alone polytheism: "Premise 1 is a prima facie acceptable claim for most monotheists, hence the amount of literature trying to explain the god of the old testament ordering genocide and prohibiting murder." Is that a pro or con theist argument?" Why does it matter the source I used defends each premise rather than how the premises are defended in the debate itself? I am not sure how I can make use of this criticism to better improve in the future. I only provided that source to reference where the argument ultimately comes from, never did I use the Reddit post to defend any of the premises for the argument.
"one example of a reference on the list, "Quarticles and the Identity of Indiscernibles" which I do not see in the argument."
That was a spacing issue. If you follow the philpaper URL directly below it you will see that it is the name of Nick Huggett's paper which I referenced. I need to watch out for that more, as I noticed that I often had to respace things after copying from Word.
I do thank you for taking the time to read the debate and vote. I did learn a bit on what I need to do better in future debates from it.
Probably could have done a lower character limit.
I mostly chose the limit I did because I remember when I did debates on DDO that I would often not have the characters for all the sources I used, but in hindsight I also did often quote the arguments I was responding to more than needed, leading to much higher character usage.
If you want to do this debate a second time, I am game.
Eh, I mean, that depends entirely on what definitions of agnostic and atheist are in use.
By in large, within philosophical works, atheism is the view that there are no Gods while agnosticism is the view that whether God(s) exists is unknown, or unknowable, without a commitment one way or the other.
In that context, one cannot be both an atheist and an agnostic.
