God does not exist.

I'll give a brief overview of what I'll be talking about, then I'll talk about it. Overview 1. Semantics vs. Debate 2. "Superhuman" Semantics vs. Debate The is one of those unfortunate debates that necessarily gravitates away from the intended subject matter and into the murky swamp of "semantics". I attempted to preempt this by making it abundantly clear in round one that I didn't want to talk about the sun, but the opponent endeavored anyway. (A quick glance at the opponent's past debates reveals that he has made this argument before. ) Generally speaking, the scenario is this: Debater A posts some topic, which clearly focuses on some issue. For instance, "Illegal aliens should be allowed in the U. S. " Debater B accepts this debate, then opens up with an argument based upon the technical definition of some word in the resolution, an argument which is largely unrelated to the debate. Continuing our example, it'd be as if Debater B responded, "We do not know what types of advanced weaponry aliens possess, but we can assume it's significantly powerful as they would need to have traveled thousands of light years to reach our planet. Clearly, this is. .. etc". Note that Debater B is "technically" arguing within the resolution, but they are not arguing within the obvious intended scope of the resolution. Debater A was clearly extending an invitation to debate illegal immigration, but Debater B hijacked the debate and is now discussing extraterrestrials. What makes this type of argument even more egregious is that Debater B is arguing for a position which is clearly true. There is no longer any value in having the debate as the original topic isn't being explored in any meaningful way and the new topic is either obviously true or too trivial to be worthy of discussion. It is clear that the opponent has made such an argument in this debate. The resolution clearly intended a debate regarding god as it is commonly understood (some intelligent, powerful being with divine powers) but the opponent hijacked the debate and, based upon the technical definition of a word, is now arguing that the sun exists. It is not difficult to see that debating whether or not the sun exists is a trivial, uninteresting task devoid of any potential to educate readers or debaters. ---------------- This type of argumentation has little to no value. In fact, were the opponent and me to sit here and debate the sun's existence for 30,000 characters -- it would literally be detrimental to the readers. The opportunity cost of spending time reading (and writing) such a debate is greater than what can be learned from the debate itself. The argument presented by my opponent is antithetical to the purpose of debate as an activity and as a concept. A person who makes this type of argument should receive a reward that corresponds to its quality -- a loss. I admit it is *fun* to construct such an argument, post it, then think to yourself "lol, checkmate". Buy as fun as it may be, it's not constructive, meaningful or useful. The opponent should lose this debate based upon the merits of his argument. "Superhuman" The above argument should be sufficient in explaining why the opponent deserves a loss. However, some readers may still want a little more from me this round. Because of this, I will show that the opponent's argument doesn't even use semantics correctly, meaning there was not even a technical justification for presenting the argument he did. The exact word in question we need to consider is "superhuman". The opponent has two responses to this: 1. The etymological description of "superhuman" doesn't denote that the adjective can only modify intelligent beings. 2. My argument makes an appeal to tradition and an appeal to population. Both of these statements are correct. However, they are not sufficient reasons to dismiss my claim. Consider that words are used exclusively by humans to communicate ideas. A word does not have a meaning because a dictionary says it has a meaning; words have a meaning because of a mutual understanding between groups of humans as to what those words mean. A dictionary's purpose is to attempt to collect and organize these meanings for reference purposes. The important takeaway is that a word's meaning is based on how people use the word, not what a dictionary says the word means. Humans are the primary reference, a dictionary is not. As such, my appeal to population and tradition are *not* logical fallacies in this context, as both appeals reference how humans use a particular word. I'm basing the meaning of a word based upon what humans understand the word to mean. As we saw above, this is the best way to understand what a word actually means. It is valid to claim that "superhuman" only modifies nouns that also have the quality of "intelligent" because that's how humans use the word. I provided a litany of examples demonstrating this fact and what's doubly amazing is that I didn't even cherry pick. I just googled the word "superhuman" and took the first few use cases of "superhuman" that I found. I urge the reader to do this; simply look up the word "superhuman" and note how it is used in every sentence you come across. You'll find that the overwhelming majority of "superhuman" use cases refer to intelligent beings. And this isn't even a surprising result because most English speaking people know that they would never refer to the sun as "superhuman" simply because it has qualities that humans do not. Summary In my first argument, I explained why the opponent should receive a loss for presenting the argument he did. It was a semantic argument which effectively hijacked the debate in an attempt to force us to debate a trivial and non-educational topic. ("Does the sun exist? ") In my second argument, I showed that the opponent's semantic argument isn't even sound. I explained words have meaning, not because of a dictionary, but because of how humans use those words. As such, when determining how some word is properly used, it is best to see how humans generally use it.