Devil's advocate debates

Playing devil's advocate in a debate can be fun in a way that other debates aren't. In both cases, you can be in it for the gamesmanship of it, but if you're defending a view you actually hold, and especially if it's something that's important to you, you're probably going to feel a little anxiety over the possibility of failing. When you play devil's advocate, you can enjoy the gamesmanship of it without that anxiety. You still have a little anxiety because you want to win, but since there isn't anything at stake, they're more enjoyable.

But they have practical advantages, too. Most people primarily read material that reinforces what they already believe. When they anticipate opposition, they delve even further into it in hopes that they'll be prepared when the opposition comes. When we read opposing points of view, we often don't read them as carefully or as charitably. We kind of hop scotch through it, picking out little issues here and there that we can take issue with. That is not how you should read something if you really want to understand it.

Preparing for a devil's advocate debate changes all that. It forces you to put yourself into the other person's shoes, to see things how they see it. I have seen people play devil's advocate half-heartedly, of course, but if you're really trying to win the debate, then you'll try to come up with the best arguments you can. That forces you to read your opposition in the most charitable way, and it enables you to understand their point of view better. That's a good thing.

The more deeply you delve into a topic, the more flaws or snags will appear. For example, a professional physicist is more aware of the snags in general relativity than most others are because they've studied it in more depth. If you study Christian apologetics in any depth, and if you do it with a desire to arrive at the truth, then you will come up with objections to things on your own. Sometimes, you'll come up with better objections than the opposition typically does because the opposition will not understand the arguments as well as you do.

Playing devil's advocate allows you to test those objections. It's kind of like how, in science, you test a hypothesis by trying to prove that it's wrong. You put it up against situations in which it might be falsified. You may be able to come up with answers to your objections on your own, but testing it by trying to defend it in a debate allows you to see how well it holds up to the scrutiny of other people. And maybe those people will have something to say that you didn't think of.

You could just ask people how they would respond to an objection, but the temptation in that case is to accept whatever answer they give you , even if it's not a good answer, just because it gets you out of a problem area. But if you actually try to defend it in a debate, then you're going to force the other person to try to give better responses to it, and if they succeed, then you'll have better confidence in their answer.

Playing devil's advocate can also help in dealing with objections you come up with because in your effort to defend those objections, you'll be forced to delve more deeply into them, to think about them more carefully. In the process, you'll be able to see the flaws in them more clearly. Just as delving deeply into the side you agree with raises objections you might not have otherwise seen, so also does delving more deeply into the opposition reveal more objections you might not have otherwise seen. So you can actually find objections to your objections by trying to defend them rather than trying to dismiss them.

Somebody told me recently that they thought devil's advocate debates are dishonest. I don't think they're dishonest as long as you're upfront about the fact that you're playing devil's advocate. You may be concerned that playing devil's advocate might inadvertently change somebody's mind in a way that you don't want their mind to change. You don't want to accidentally cause somebody to deconvert from Christianity if you're a Christian. When I have devil's advocate debates, if I don't think the person I debated with did a good job, then I'll explain in the comment section or something why I don't think the arguments I gave in the debate work. That way anybody reading the debate will at least get to hear a refutation of them in case my opponent didn't refute them, or they didn't refute them the way I thought they should have.

So I'm all for devil's advocate debates. I've participated in many of them. They were fun and constructive for me.