Being agnostic is more logical than being atheist

Pro forfeit one of the rounds without apologizing for it.

R1:

Con opens his argument with a very basic argument - it’s relatively facile - but gets the point across.

R2: Pros rebuttal is essentially that there is no evidence for either side in the theism debate - so agnosticism is the most appropriate position to hold.

Pro challenged the comparison, requesting clarification - pro appears to indicate the analogy is invalid as this example contains evidence - and in the real agnosticism example this isn’t the case.

Con rebuts by clarifying pros challenge to the analogy.

Con continues by explaining why simple absence of evidence can be used of evidence of absence - using Santa as an analogy, and additionally examples of failed predictions - this seems to imply that when there should be evidence of something if it were true, lack of evidence is evidence of something being false.

Round 3: Forfeit/extend.

Round 4: pro reiterates that it’s better to be agnostic when there is no evidence.

There is some haggling over definitions - but I’m not certain what pros argument is here. Ad a reader, it does not seem that the new or old definitions are different in terms of the context being argued as I can tell.

Pro appears to implicitly concede cons claim that evidence of absence can be treated as absence of evidence - though pro offers additional disproof for Santa, this doesn’t appear to refute cons position - that we can construe absence of evidence for Santa as evidence of absence.

Pro also dismissed examples of failed prophecy examples con shared as claims, rather than evidence.

On balance, here, the argument falls down to pro saying there is no evidence, so no sides should be taken - con says that there is evidence, so the middle ground is logically invalid.

The key points are that pro implicitly conceded that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, and pro offered examples of evidence that in my view weren’t refuted by pro. As a result, as pros argument is fundamentally that there is no evidence either way - the fact that con has explained some of the evidence, invalidates pros position.

Ugh, someone made this a "winner selection" vote, instead of the typical points system, which denies me the chance to award points on appropriate issues like conduct, sources, etc. Thats always annoying, and often to the disadvantage of debaters who might have done well in those categories.

Round 1:
Pro opened his argument by repeating verbatim what he said in the debate description, then challenged his opponent to present their "take" on the issue. As far as opening statements go, that was one of the weakest I've ever seen. Con's rebuttal was better stated and presented, but also fairly weak, in that he resorted to an analogy in which a hypothetical person argues that the characters in a proven fictional movie are deities. This struck me as a poor opening argument as well, because the analogy seemed like a false comparison. Neither side accomplishes much in the first round.

Round 2:
Pro pointed out the flaw in the analogy Con used in round 1, being that the movie analogy has an obvious piece of evidence to point to, where as real-world discussions of the existence or non-existence of God have no such conclusive evidence for either side to use. Pro better states his case that in the absence of evidence, the logical course of action is to abstain from joining either side by being agnostic instead of atheist. Con initially tried to defend his analogy by claiming his opponent's failure to cite a specific deity to discuss made his analogy valid, but that didn't strike me as being very valid. Con then made a better argument by accusing the agnostic position of being a middle ground fallacy (with a link to the balance fallacy, which is effectively the same thing). That was a good. Then he made another poor argument by criticizing religion broadly by complaining about the minority of religions which have made false end of the world predictions. Even to the limited extent the point is true, it only applies to a minority of religions and seemed to have no real place in this debate.

Round 3:
Pro forfeited the round. Con reminded the audience of his accusation of a middle ground fallacy, which was good, since it was his strongest point thus far.

Round 4:
Pro reappears in round 4, but his argument became rather difficult to follow. He did make a good rebuttal that the agnostic position is not a middle ground fallacy because it doesn't agree with or try to compromise with either of the other alternatives. Then he started talking about Santa Claus, which sounded like he was responding to an argument from earlier, but this was only place anywhere in the debate that Santa Claus was mentioned, which seemed very disjointed. Pro did seem to make a summary statement at the end of his argument, once again restating his position that lack of evidence for either side makes a refusal to draw either conclusion the "logical" answer. Con responded by accusing Pro of moving the goalposts, which I didn't really see... but Con did accurately point out that Pro claimed to have cited particular sources, but never actually provided those sources during the debate. Pro even specifically said round 1, but his round 1 argument was super weak, so he definitely didn't cite any sources there.

Argument wise, this debate was weak on both sides. I understand Pro's argument, but he didn't do much to reinforce it. Con offered several rebuttals, but only the middle ground fallacy accusation held much water, and Pro did provide at least a minimal response to it. On arguments this would be a tie. If this were a normal point system vote, I would award both conduct and sources to Con, since Pro forfeited a round and lied about his (lack of) sources, while Con provided excellent sources, such as his link explaining the "middle ground" (balance) fallacy. Being limited to only choosing a winner, I have to give victory to Con, due to the sources and forfeit issues.