Extremely roughly paraphrased, "bullshit triumphs when reason does nothing"
No one believes that anything we say will make people like James say, "Oh, my, I never thought of it that way. You're absolutely correct!"
The objective is to have a sensible alternative position available to the vast majority of well-intentioned people reading this stuff who do not have hard positions on these subjects, and read them to see what's going on.
Now obviously I don't reply to every thread, or even most of them, since I do have a life. Sort of. But it is not useless to drop the voice of common sense into the mix every now and then.
By the way, the foregoing also applies to the arguments I make in political threads when I'm dealing with unrepentant leftists and liberals. At least most of them aren't looney. Much.
Space/Science » in reply to Why do I do this?
There's a very good reason to reply to these people