Although it may seem counterintuitive, the art of asking good questions is an essential conversational tool and debate tactic. The majority of people are already in the habit of asking questions in conversations, like a simple "How are you?" or "How did your job interview feel?" The main focus of this article will be to explore the art of asking good questions in a debate situation.
Often times we make the subconscious correlation between who is talking more and who is "winning" an argument. This is seen frequently in politics, where the group that can out-shout and out-chant the other assumes a sort of dominance or victory over a topic of discussion. It is not uncommon in the scientific world for credible researchers and authors to be silenced for proposing and arguing for the existence of an intelligent designer. So how does asking a question help you? How does handing the mic over make your point stronger or more convincing?
The answer lies in the purpose of asking questions in the first place.
Questions:
- Clarify your opponent's position.
- Prevent you from misunderstanding their logical process and pathway to a conclusion (which includes premises, arguments, and assumptions).
- Can expose inconsistencies and foundational flaws in faulty arguments.
To address the first point: one of the most annoying things that can happen to you in a debate is when your argument is misunderstood and twisted by your opponent. So? Don't do it to your opponent! Show your opponent that you respect them enough to put the intellectual effort in to grasp their position. Too often a position is reduced to only the conclusion. This is only partly true: a person's position includes everything from the reasons they have, the logical connections they make, and the syllogisms and assumptions that generate their conclusion.
A person's position is the product of many steps, and the only way to truly understand (and eventually break down) someone's argument is to take the time to learn all those parts.
And that's where asking questions comes into play! For example, let's suppose you're debating someone about whether or not God exists, and Bill takes the position that "God doesn't exist," what does that really mean? The mistake would be to plant your feet and respond, "Well, God does exist." Notice how ridiculously ambiguous both of these positions are: the lack of detail and evidence of complex thought often signals the need for well-structured questions. For example:
Bill: God doesn't exist.
You: Fair--how did you come to that conclusion?
See where this could go? This debate could go in one of any dozen ways! Here are just a few possible responses:
- If there was a God, bad things wouldn't happen in this world.
- There is no need for a God, because Darwinian evolution explains the existence of the natural world without one.
- I can't sense God, so why should I believe in something that I can't observe?
My point is NOT to give you a grocery list of every possible argument out there that could occur. I want to demonstrate how suddenly we're talking about something many times more specific than our starting position: "God doesn't exist." By asking the simple question, "How did you come to that conclusion?" you have effectively forced your opponent to be explicit and expose the behind-the-scenes premises and ideas that led to their decision to take their general position. This allows you to directly address them and select a highly specific position that meets the immediate and unique situation.
To expound on this concept, let's take the second example response:
Bill: God doesn't exist.
You: Fair--how did you come to that conclusion?
Bill: There is no need for a God, because Darwinian evolution explains the existence of the natural world without one.
This is where good debating requires effort. You need to pay close attention to small details: Bill is still being relatively vague here. He doesn't address other existing theories for the existence of the natural world, so you have more than one option: address how he conveniently left out that there are other competing theories for the existence of the natural world or address the topic of the validity of Darwinism as an explanation for the existence of the natural world. These may seem similar, but they will fundamentally alter the trajectory of the conversation.
The best point in this situation would probably be to address how Bill left out over competing theories: if Darwinism is his position, then that means he had to have logically determined that Darwinism is the best explanation out of all the explanations proposed. You see where this is going? Bill will now have to defend and justify how he came to the conclusion that Darwinism is a better explanation than, say, Intelligent Design Theory. Often times this discussion leads down the road of either forcing them to contradict themselves or at least acknowledge that Intelligent Design actually offers a valid approach to explaining the existence of the natural world.
It's important to note that this does not necessarily mean you will convert Bill to abandon his beliefs and join your camp. What it accomplishes is rock Bill's boat a bit. He now must reconcile this idea that competing beliefs can be argued logically that disagree with his beliefs. This doesn't always create converts, but that's fine: the purpose of debate is to civilly exchange ideas and expose participants to the immense quantity of nuance found in many controversial topics.
I think it's important to note how powerful details are in these questions, and even more important how to respond to the answer to your question. Quite unexpectedly, you're suddenly in the driver's seat, directing the course of the conversation and placing the heat on the field of your choice. This comes with a responsibility of course: choose wisely. Don't pick a fight over an unproductive and ultimately pointless disagreement. A horrible response to Bill's comment would be, "Well, Darwinism has been debunked already, so God exists." Now you would be engaging in the same dreadful ambiguity and lack of detail that was the exigence for you asking the question in the first place!
Exposing inconsistencies and logical flaws is a common side effect of asking good questions. It's important to distinguish between debates focused around universal truths and subjective ideas. Political policy debates, for example, are NOT debates focused around universal truths most the time. There is no singular correct answer to the question "Is raising taxes good?" If you take the side of agreement or disagreement, you aren't siding with truth or not truth. It's subjective. It's not based around universal truths. However, arguing the existence of God is discussing a universal truth, because God either does exist or doesn't exist, and the outcome has great consequence.
I make this distinction now to set up this final point: if you're in a debate over a universal truth, and you know you're right, it will be able to stand up against scrutiny. If your position truly is the truth, then nothing can stand against it or knock it down. On the other hand, false positions will crumble under scrutiny, because they are, well...false. Darwinists must reconcile conflicting ideas: for example, evolution requires existing things in order to evolve from, but it's been empirically proven that the universe was once at a zero point, where there was absolutely no matter of any kind. Another contradiction that arises is that Darwinian evolution requires millions of years for enough changes to occur to produce new types of living organisms, but the Cambrian Explosion demands an explanation from Darwinists as to how the diversity of animal life exploded within only a very brief geological time frame.
So...
Go out there and ask some questions! Ask good questions. Have fruitful conversations. Learn something. And I'll see you next time.
~Caleb Alons
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