Well said, Buz. I think a phrase you might recognize is "iron sharpening iron"?
This notion of one's ideas and positions emerging from the scrap battle-tested, tempered, and sharpened is the very reason for debate. It's not to win or lose; it's to
fight and in doing so, have one's ideas either withstand the onslaught or be cast aside.
It's a critical component of the scientific method. Most people are aware that the scientific method is some combination of "Observation, Hypothesis forming, Experimentation, Conclusion, Communication." Perhaps few are aware that the last step - communicating your results - is the most important step, because that's when your ideas are subject to the withering criticism and scorn of the scientific community.
I think a lot of people don't know that about science - that peer-review is an adversarial process. I think creationists in particular misinterpret scientific skepticism of their submissions as innish rejection of opposing viewpoints, but evolutionists get treated this way, too. I wish I could show you some of the comments on some of my wife's papers! It's the
default mode of the peer-review system - you submit the result of perhaps a decade of your life's work, 4-6 people you've never met tell you how terrible it is, what a bad researcher you must be, ask questions you don't have any answers to, make imprecations against your mother's sexual habits, give you 200 impossible and inconsistent demands for your next resubmission, and so on. That's if you're lucky. If you're unlucky they take one look at your work and tell you "thanks, but no thanks." If you're
extremely lucky they give you 90 days to fix all the problems with your work and resubmit, and then you get to go through it all again.
Foreveryoung is upset that his ideas were presented to an audience that turned out to be hostile when it wasn't completely disinterested. I think most people are surprised to find out that that's par for the course for scientists. Easy acceptance of ideas is what you want to be suspicious of.