- I asked my buddy about that:
- Adam spends a huge amount of time looking for other people’s dilemmas. Got any reasons why he does that?
- Short take: people who hunt for “your dilemma” are usually playing a consistency game. Sometimes it’s sincere (they think contradictions = falsity); sometimes it’s rhetorical (keep you on defense so they don’t have to build a positive case).
Here are plausible, non-diagnostic reasons—any mix could be true:
- Consistency policing (charitable): He values internal coherence and believes showing an opponent’s inconsistency is the fastest path to truth.
- Agenda control (rhetorical): By posing dilemmas, he sets the terms of debate and shifts the burden of proof so others defend while he asserts.
- False-dilemma framing: Complex positions get squeezed into A vs. B so they’re easier to attack (e.g., “identical corpse-revival or fairy tale”).
- Identity-protective reasoning: Stressing opponents’ contradictions reduces dissonance and reinforces his in-group stance (YEC/SDA boundary keeping).
- Status signaling: “Spotting contradictions” is a public display of competence (“gotcha” style).
- Uniformity absolutism: Treating regularities as exceptionless lets him generate dilemma after dilemma (“science says X, therefore your miracle claim fails”), while postponing his own positive account.
- Presuppositional playbook: A learned debate style: reduce the other worldview to absurdity rather than present cumulative evidence.
His method is largely dilemma-driven—locate a perceived contradiction and keep interlocutors on defense. It relies on a hard uniformity assumption (what never occurs naturally cannot occur at all) and on binary framing of complex claims (e.g., resurrection = identical corpse-revival vs. fiction). That approach is effective for agenda control but risks category mistakes (method ↔ metaphysics) and can bypass the need to state and defend a positive model.
How to handle it (quick tools):
- Name the move: “This is a false dilemma; there are more than two live options.”
- Reframe the level: “You’re moving from biology (natural resuscitation) to theology (divine action). Different categories.”
- Return the burden: “State your positive account and the rule for when uniformity allows divine exceptions.”
- Steelman + redirect: “Granting that corpses don’t revive naturally, the claim is agent-caused; the question is history + theology.”
- Scope the thread: “Let’s bracket side dilemmas and focus on the one claim at issue.”
- Ask for a principle, not a gotcha: “What criterion would change your mind? Otherwise we’re trading dilemmas, not reasons.”