Smith vs. Kern at OCCC

Just a few thoughts and takeaways on the debate last week between scientist Abbie Smith and pastor Steve Kern here in OKC.

This debate ostensibly centered around a policy question on what should be taught in public schools, but it immediately and perhaps inevitably came down to a contest between scientific and religious views of human origins. At this event, opposing views were not merely discussed, but physically symbolized by the opposing speakers. The age-old struggle between science and religion found itself incarnated in two persons: Science presented as forward-looking, edgy, smart, young, stylish and sexy; religion presented as the polar opposite on all points. Science rides in on a motorcycle, carrying a slide deck on a colorful MacBook, and talks excitedly of continually expanding the scope of human knowledge. Religion, by contrast, shows up in a grey-toned suit, with a sheaf of paper notes, and talks phlegmatically of how we'll never surpass the cosmogony of the Bronze Ages. At this point one might be forgiven for assuming that the debate was not merely organized, but actually choreographed.

The substantive content itself turned out to be overwhelmingly, almost sadly, one-sided. The only way for an ID-advocate to come off well in a public debate is to dive way down into the weeds using technical jargon in order to create the false impression of expertise to an audience of laypersons. For example, William Dembski can throw out a load of advanced (albeit misapplied) mathematics to back up his idea that it's virtually impossible to add useful information to complex genotypes, thereby obscuring direct evidence that this has in fact happened time and again by various processes (some of which were central to Smith's argument for common descent). Kern does not have a background in mathematics or microbiology or any other scientific field, so he is unable to avail himself of the jargon fire-hose gambit. He might could have gone for a Gish-gallop, but probably lacked the background to pull that off as well. Abbie's previous opponent was more formidable on all counts, and that is about the most damning thing I've ever written in any context.

Many people have asked me what the point is in holding debates at which the audience is already firmly in the tank for one side from the get-go and few people are lead to change their thinking significantly during the course of the evening. The answer to this is that the live audience isn't really the intended audience. The real audience is the YouTube audience, students who will hear one view in their biology classes and a different story entirely on Sunday morning, and need to see how a faith-based and reason-based stack up against each other when put head-to-head. The real audience are our children and their peers, those who will decide whether America will ultimately fulfill the theocratic vision of its Puritan forebears or the scientific vision of its Enlightenment Founders. Far more people will see this event online than in person, and with any luck it will help to tilt the balance in favor of truth, justice, and the scientific method.

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Unbeliever rating: 4.5 stars
Believer rating: 1.5 stars
Overall rating: 3 stars

Krauss vs Craig at NCSU

Every time Craig debates someone new, I get my hopes up that maybe this time he will have finally met his match. Alas, I am consistently disappointed, and this event proves (yet again) that scientific genius and lecturing skills are not sufficient for debate.

Opening statements
Craig leads with five arguments, as usual, almost but not quite the usual five. Is he evolving, perhaps just a little bit?

His first argument is one which depends on the validity of an arbitrary conceptual distinction between contingent and non-contingent existence, one which he does not attempt to support but merely assumes. Basically, everything that we know exists, exists contingently, that is, it could have been otherwise. However, we really like the idea that something exists necessarily, and although we have no evidence to suggest that this is indeed an actual mode of existence, we can safely assume that God exists in this way.

His second argument relies on the impossibility of actual infinite regress. Seems like this argument should conclude that space-time itself is finite and bounded, rather than divinely ordained, but Craig manages some clever rhetorical legerdemain here to distract the audience from this conclusion and over to the theistic hypothesis. He slides into a basic Kalam argument here, in which (as per usual) he equivocates between "cause" meaning what it is usually taken to mean, that is "natural forces rearranging existing matter into new form over time" and instead uses the term in a completely different novel and metaphysical sense. I know he has been called out on this before, so it seems downright dishonest at this point to keep banging on the same old drum.

His third argument is the usual argument from fine-tuning. The key premise here is this: "We now know that life-prohibiting universes are incomprehensibly more probable than any life-permitting universe." How can we know this? To calculate the probability of any given event, we need to have enough samples of that event taking place in order to mathmatically estimate the probability density function of the underlying natural process, this is essentially what we mean when we use the word probable in its technical sense. What Craig is implicitly claiming here is that he has observed so many universes created that he now has a good sense of which particular fundamental universal constants determine all the major features of a universe, the ranges of those few fundamental constants, and what their histograms look like within their possible ranges. Sythesizing all these observations together, Craig can mathematically estimate the apriori probability of an ensemble of fundamental constants which would allow for some variety of self-reproducing molecules, carbon-based or otherwise. In other words, Craig has the sort of knowledge which we might only expect of all-knowing transcendent beings, since these are the only sort of conscious observers who could possibly witness multiple universes coming into being and either generating life or failing to do so. Therefore, we can safely assume that if Craig is indeed correct in his unique assertion of precise mathematical knowledge regarding the probability distrubition of fundamental universal constants, He is in fact God incarnate. QED.

Craig's fourth argument is the usual argument from objective moral values. It goes like this:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values cannot exist


2. But objective moral values do exist


3. Therefore God exists

Of course, by "objective moral values" Craig really means values which are universally valid because they are held by a universal mind. Sort of begging the question a bit there, eh?

Craig's fifth and final argument is the argument from the gospels. He makes his usual minimal facts argument, by which he takes certain of key facts of the gospels to be true and thereby concludes that other key facts from the gospels are also true. Of course, there are plenty of biblical scholars who see it very differently. Krauss starts out his case by making it clear that he intends to be combative and even a bit of an arse. That doesn't bode well, and it goes a bit downhill from there, when Krauss starts lecturing on QM, a subject which I usually enjoy. Once again, it seems that Dr. Craig showed up for a debate while his learned opponent cannot help but fall back into lecture mode. Por el amor de Dios, why does this keep happening? Does no one ever heed Luke's warning? Does Krauss actually make any coherent atheological arguments at all? Eventually, Krauss stops lecturing and gets around to attempting a few rebuttals of Craig's alleged evidence. Just for reference this is what a rebuttal should look like:

• Here is the key premise in my opponent’s argument: *quotes premise*


• Here is why it is false: *makes argument*

Alternately, one could show how a given argument is deductively invalid, on account of an equivocation or some similar problem. By my estimation, Krauss makes no affirmative arguments for the truth of metaphysical naturalism, and only attempts to falsify only one or two of Craig's arguments before running out of time. Typical professorial logorrhea has claimed yet another skeptical public speaker, and yet again I find myself reaching for the blood pressure meds.

Rebuttals
Craig cannot seem to find any particular argument to rebut, so he just picks out a few particualr claims made by Krauss and rebuts those. For example, he takes apart the notion that nothing is unstable. He also has a go at both Krauss' moral views, claiming that without Someone transcendant to whom humans are finally morally accountable, morality must be ultimately down to our own human values. Krauss leads his rebuttals with the statement that we do not know how the universe began, and we should do more science on the problem rather than simply filling in the epistemic gap with a divine miracle. This is actually a fairly decent retort to both the cosmological and teleological arguments, both of which depend upon a default to theism in the lack of a working scientific theory. Such a theistic default may well be irrational, but Craig has "common sense" on his side here, as evidenced by the fact that almost all human cultures continually propogate the meme of immaterial minds.

Throughout the rebuttal periods, Craig continually calls out Krauss for failing to rebut his opening, and eventually Krauss gets around to addressing most of it. Some of this he does well, some of it not so well. Krauss is clearly comfortable talking about cosmology and much less so when dealing with philosophy and history. Even so, Craig manages to hold his own on account of a fundamental asymmetry built into the nature of cosmology. It would take Krauss a load of time to properly flesh out a working multiverse hypothesis and connect it to first principles of quantum mechanics, but it only takes Craig half a minute to appeal to human intuitions about infinity and first causes.

Lessons learned
I've always said that no one should debate Craig without first reading up on his usual arguments and coming prepared to rebut them swiftly and effectively. That applies here as well, and it is clear that Krauss did not take Craig seriously enough to prepare for his usual arguments, since the only arguments that were well-rebutted were those in Krauss' own area of expertise, that is, fine tuning and cosmology. But there is another lesson here: Never go into a debate in which you are called upon solely to rebut the evidence for theism. Krauss never once makes an affirmative case for naturalism, and it is unclear whether this is due to unpreparedness on his part or because of the way he allowed the debate to be framed. Either way, it is damn sloppy.

Overall rating: 3.0
Believer rating: 4.5
Unbeliever rating: 1.5

Hitchens vs. Berlinski in Birmingham, AL

Christopher Hitchens versus David Berlinski. Need I say more? The most ostentatiously highbrow debate about theism and atheism of the 21st century, and it transpired, of all places, in Alabama. I know, right?


Both men manage to impart such a degree of authoritative superciliousness to their voices as to make weak-minded undergrads instantly believe everything either one has to say. This would blow out the motherboard of an early-model electric monk, seeing as they were not capable of simultaneously holding incompatible beliefs to be true. Undergrads are, thankfully, far more mentally flexible than electric monks.


Berlinski essentially makes the case that without the fear of God to hold people in check, they would be capable of all of the atrocities we saw from the various mass-murdering Communist regimes. Hitchens retorts that once people believe they have God on their side, they are equally capable of horrific acts of torture and murder. Both men are right, of course, but neither one quite draws out the underlying commonality between Hitler's purges, Stalin's purges, Pol Pot's purges, Torquemada's purges, and centuries of European witch hunts, presumably because they are each interested in making the case that the other side's mass persecutions and murders are somehow more significant.

Just to be clear, I will go ahead and state the obvious: People who faithfully follow a system of faith-based beliefs and believe they are the bearers of the One True Way will be willing commit any crime, however horrific, if it is justified within the faith which they hold. This goes for Fascism, Communism, Medieval Catholicism, Christian Nationalism, ancient Judaism, modern Wahhabism, and just about any other politicized philosophy which separates out a Chosen People and justifies their persecution of the Other in the name of the One True Way. Whether the faithful are blindly following the commands of gods or men doesn't really matter, what matters is that they are following blindly.

Okay, enough of my editorializing. I just wanted to make it quite clear why I found both of these debaters unpersuasive in their respective attempts to declare either theism or atheism to be invariably poisonous. Hitchens makes the case that theism inevitably leads to the worst atrocities of worst theistic regimes, while Berlinski makes the case that atheism inevitably leads to the worst atrocities of worst atheistic regimes. Neither one is nearly persuasive, but they both sound terribly smooth and learned and witty and cultured. If you value style at least as much as substance, this is the one to see. Otherwise, you can give it a miss.

Buckner vs. Tzortzis in London

Debate: Islam or Atheism? With Hamza Tzortzis & Ed Buckner on Vimeo

This is a must see debate, if only to get a sense of how Islamic apologetics compare to Christian and Jewish apologetics, with which English speakers are doubtlessly more

Tzortzis runs an argument for the existence of God, which is not terribly original or interesting. He then provides two arguments for the truth of Islam, the second of which runs parallel to that of C.S. Lewis regarding Jesus, claiming that the Prophet is either deluded, a liar, or else he is telling the truth. His most interesting and detailed argument, however, was that the Arabic text of the Quran is so downright amazing that it is evidently a miracle in and of itself, as attested by experts in the relevant field of Arabic textual analysis. At the end of his opening statement, he pulls a dirty WLC-style debate trick, and requests that his opponent tear down his arguments for Islam before building an argument for atheism. Overall, though, he comes off as quite poised and polished.

Buckner leads with several minutes of ingratiation, which were a few minutes too many. Seems like a nice guy, though. Eventually, he gets down to a handful of briefly stated arguments, including an argument from divine hiddenness, theological incoherence, from evil and suffering, from the dominance of demography in theological biogeography, and a few others, none of which are fleshed out enough to make sense if you aren't already familiar with them, and none of which are stated in a deductively valid form.

On rebuttal, Tzortzis hammers away at Buckner, directly and forcefully countering his arguments. Buckner makes a pathetic attempt to counter Tzortzis, and ultimately fails to mount anything resembling a convincing counter-argument. I suspect that the mostly-Islamic audience went away happy and assured that their faith is far more rational than disbelief.

Three lessons may be learned from this debate:
1) Know your opponent's arguments in advance so that you can prepare your counterarguments
2) Do not debate against some religion unless you are familiar with it and the peculiar arguments that it puts forward
3) If your name is Ed Buckner, get off the debate circuit altogether.

Overall rating: 3.0
Believer rating: 4.5
Unbeliever rating: 1.5

Frame vs. McGrath on the radio (UK)

This debate between Martyn Frame and Joanna Collicut McGrath centered on the question of whether religious beliefs are a trick of the mind, that is, do they arise from inherent quirks in human thinking or do they result from the proper apprehension of actual supernatural reality? Both interlocutors are trained in psychology, but alas, neither one is an experienced religious visionary.

Frame contends that our religious beliefs are best explained in terms of a natural human propensity to over-detect for agency in nature, and to process agency-based explanations in a separate way from mechanical causal explanations. McGrath concedes some of the psychological phenomena mentioned by Frame, but will not allow that theism is so readily dismissed. Then they have a pleasant if a bit rambling discussion on such matters for about an hour. This one really isn't a debate, more like conversational easy listening. Still, they do make the occasional good point and there is a bit of give and take.

Corbett vs. McDowell at Saddleback College

This debate quickly degenerated into a one-sided debacle, in which the young aspiring apologist aggressively argues to the point, while the elderly tenured professor lackadaisically lectures on various topics more-or-less unrelated to the question under discussion, which was how morality might be grounded on either theism or atheism.

McDowell opens with three assertions which he takes as given:

1) Moral values must transcend human preferences, constituting a "law above the law"


2) Indeterministic free will (IFW) really exists and morality cannot exist without it


3) Humans are inherently valuable rather than merely cosmically insignificant


Essentially, McDowell is appealing to three intuitions about reality which are widely held (largely without much reflection) and thus he puts the skeptic in the position of arguing against propositions which most will find intuitively appealing. A perfectly practical apologetical approach, I dare say. Since Professor Corbett didn't so much as attempt to refute these assertions, I will have a go at it here.


1) To the contrary, moral values must be grounded in actual human desires in order to be at all relevant to humans. By way of example, suppose we are all simulated minds living in a simulated world created by a sadistic but superintelligent graduate student in a computer lab. Would his (undoubtedly transcendent) preference for human suffering provide us with a good reason to make each other suffer? Or would we choose to defy our creator and cling to our own values?


2) No evidence has been presented for the reality of IFW, either by McDowell or anyone else. It has neither been tested nor proven, merely asserted. Our intuition to the contrary has little value, since we are generally mistaken to assume that folk psychology can tell us anything about the way our brains actually work. To the contrary, every neurological finding to date has supported the assertion that human brains function as electrochemical machines subject to the very same laws of nature as everything else in the world.


3) To say that humans do indeed value other humans, especially those physically and genetically close to them, is uncontroversial. McDowell is not so easily satisfied, and insists that humans must be valued on a cosmic scale or else it doesn't count. Again, he offers no evidence in support of his assertion, but merely counts on the audience to make the intuitive leap. After all, who doesn't want to be inherently valuable in the cosmic scheme of things? Or, to put it another way, "Atheism is the arrogant view that billions upon of billions of galaxies were not created with us in mind."

Despite having lead with three intuitively appealing but evidentially unsupportable assertions, Corbett does little to refute his opponents case and, what is worse, does almost nothing to build a positive case for purely humanistic ethics.

Tenured profs, once again, I implore you in the name of all that is good and true, stop dabbling in debates on topics for which you have no formal training or academic preparation. It's just embarrassing. Go back to your classrooms and captive audiences.

• Overall rating: 3.0
  
• Believer rating: 4.5
  
• Unbeliever rating: 1.5
  

p.s. For further critque of this debate and ideas about how atheists can improve their performance, please read Luke's thoughts on these matters.

Peter Atkins vs Stephen Meyer on the radio (UK)

This wasn't so much a debate between Atkins and Meyer, as an hour-long promo for a certain propoganda film with occassional bouts of scientific talk from the token skeptic, who is placed in conversation with no less than three dedicated creationists, one of whom is the host and producer of the show. If ever I pull such a one-sided stunt on my show feel free to hang me in effigy and label me as a hypocrite and a fool. In any event, this episode was more-or-less much worth my time, because it provided a reasonably concise and accurate summary of the positions articulated by both naturalists and intelligent design creationists.

Ehrman vs. D’Souza at UNC

I purchased this debate so that you will never have to do so. Seriously, don't bother, there are far better debates available entirely for free online, many of which include video.

Ehman does a fine job of unpacking the problem of suffering, just as he has done in plenty of other debates. D'Souza, to his credit, dose a fine job of muddling the issues by bringing in a few facially plausible analogies to childrearing and parenting, along with the bizarre idea that a decent respect for human free will obliges one to stand back and allow rapists and murderers to act as they will. He makes it sound better than that, of course.

The rebuttal period was lamentably short, such that no one really digs into the problems of whether the free-will defense is soundly grounded upon facts about the world, although Ehrman runs a clever rebuttal based on the putative nature of the Christian afterlife. Moreover, the soul-building theodicy is put forth but never really examined. There just wasn't enough time to do so.

Overall, both speakers do a decent job, given severe time constraints, but they never really get beyond the first level arguments and hinting at a few possible theodicies. Best take a pass on this one and find another one of Ehrman's several debates on this topic.

Ayala vs. Craig at Indiana University

Luckily enough, I spent a memorable fraction of my early childhood in my Puerto Rican grandparent’s home, which means that I’m somewhat used to hearing English spoken with a strong Spanish accent. That said, I’m guessing that many people will find Dr. Ayala hard to follow on account of his accent, and that despite the relatively high quality of the audio recording.

Ayala leads off by drawing a distinction between designed artifacts and non-designed objects. He notes that organisms were left out of the original scientific revolution (which posited that the rules of nature are universal) because of the kind of thinking put forth by Paley and other intelligent design theorists. Ayala claims that Darwin’s great advance was to show how purposeful complexity may arise naturally, thus bringing life finally within the penumbra of a scientific revolution which had begun much earlier. He goes on to adduce several common evidences of evolution by natural selection operating over geological time. Ayala believes (as I do) that the most convincing evidence for common descent is that we find from a branch of sciences unavailable to Darwin’s contemporaries, that is, the evidence of molecular biology.

Craig leads off by defining intelligent design as a set of theories for inferring design from evidence. He briefly alludes to Bill Dembski’s argument from highly improbable complex patterns, and argues that the inference to design is justified on those grounds alone. Craig does not contest common descent (for which Ayala had argued) focuses his efforts entirely on the mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection. He makes an interesting argument that studies of the HIV genotype over a couple decades can give us any idea of what mutation is capable of producing over a time span very many orders of magnitude longer. He also argues that evolutionists must show definitively that mutation plus natural selection is powerful enough to get everything done in only a few billion years.

Ayala, on rebuttal, seems at first to ignore Craig’s opening statement, but he is actually trying to give an example of the power of mutation and selection in practice. He refers to a test tube experiment in which low-probability mutations can be made to take over an entire tube merely by changing the environment in which the bacteria breed. He then goes on to reiterate some of the evidence for common descent.

Craig picks apart Ayala’s opening statement and rebuttal, quote-mining from various fringe scientists to show that mutation plus selection doesn’t drive the creation of new biological mechanisms in under a hundred years or two. Funnily enough, Craig accuses his opponent of undue extrapolation, even as he stretches timelines from 10^2 to 10^9 in attempt to show that Darwinian mechanisms just cannot get the job done in the time available. Craig seems to conclude that while the universe is impressively fine-tuned for intelligent life, it is not fine-tuned enough to expect intelligent life to arise more than once.

Overall impressions
This debate demonstrates amply that expertise in public debating and debate prep can overcome expertise in the topic under debate. Ayala clearly knows more about the subject matter, but he seems overwhelmed by Craig's relentless focus on the problem of how often mutations arise within a given population. I'd be interested in hearing a debate focused on that paritcular issue, but to my knowledge that's never been done.

Wolpert vs. Cowburn in London

Wolpert makes the case that religious faith is a natural outgrowth of human psychology, such as agency detection and causal attribution. He even goes so far as to claim that mystical thinking was itself advantageous in the infancy of our species. He has to restrain himself when speaking of Papal ethics, which I find perfectly understandable.

Cowburn leads off with both his scientific and Christian bona fides, claiming to believe wholeheartedly in both of these frameworks for understanding the world. He claims that science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God. Personally, I'm somewhat sympathetic to this view. If God is above and beyond and behind all natural laws, you should not be able to use those laws to suss Him out. He goes on to enumerate a few outstanding abuses of science (involving the naturalistic fallacy) and tries to erect a conceptual wall of separation between the spires of Christian churches and ivory towers of scientific academia.

Wolpert comes back at Cowburn with a demand for some evidence or argument for the existence of God, and for evidence of the human soul and other such Biblical claims.

Cowburn rejects Biblical literalism on theological grounds, and completely avoids the question of souls because Wolpert had phrased it badly (inaptly using the term ‘reincarnation’) and goes on to praise science for a bit. He alludes to the first-cause and fine-tuning arguments as hints of the divine, and finally goes on to preach the gospel of Jesus using the high Christology of John. For some bizarre reason he calls this story a "pinch-point experiment" which can allow us to determine the deepest truths about life. Perhaps this was truly so, for those few women who first encountered the risen Jesus in the flesh, but for the rest of us, though, the gospels are hearsay piled upon hearsay, passed along orally for decades before being put to paper by authors who neither named themselves nor their sources.

Overall, this was not a particularly enlightening debate, and that despite both men managing to sound fairly intelligent and articulate. I wish that they had picked something narrower to dig in and really debate about.

Humphreys vs. Holding on the radio (UK)

In this episode of Unbelievable, James Patrick "JP" Holding (http://www.tektonics.org/) debates Ken Humphreys (http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/) on the question of the historical Jesus. I should wrn you that they don't really get into anything like substantive debate until after 25-30 minutes have gone by.

On his website, Holding defends extravagant miraculous and theological claims about what Jesus actually said and did in his life on Earth, but in the course of framing of this particular debate he manages to stake out a far more defensible position, essentially that Jesus of Nazareth was an actual rabbi who was alive during the early first century and had disciples and a wider following. Humphreys, by contrast, actually tries to defend the same position that he advocates on his website, namely, that Jesus was never an actual historical figure but merely and emergent mythic figure like William Tell or King Arthur.

Since Holding abandons his own actual position and defends the moderate middle ground of agnostic leaning scholars such as Bart Ehrman, he manages to come off as the seemingly more reasonable interlocutor in this discussion, but not without some cost to his reputation as a forthright and stalwart defender of the whole gospel.

Humphreys comes off as well-informed and passionate, thought (alas) a bit more of the latter than the former. He tries to show that the gospels and other source materials are "late and fake" but does not make nearly so strong a case as someone like Richard Carrier or Earl Doherty could have done. He should have focused more on the appearances of more and more biographical details of Jesus later and later in the game.

The only particular point that I'd like raise about this debate is that Holding is treading on very dangerous apologetical ground when he brings up the "edifying fiction" defense around 39:30 or so, because it plays right into the myther hypothesis that all of the gospels were also created in precisely the same way, and that they would be shelved under devotional fiction to this day if only we knew all the details of their origins.

Wood vs. Gulam in Romulus, MI

Normally, I have some sense of whom I consider to be "on my side" in a debate, but this debate was between someone who claims that Jesus died for only three days and someone who claims taht Jesus somehow survived crucifixion.  The apriori probabilites of each event seems relatively low, since we only know of one person who allegedly survived crucifixion (from Flavius Josephus) and we have relatively few historically verifiable stories of reainmated corpses, despite a recent resurgance in the popularity of zombie flicks.

Oddly enough, I found that the Muslim debater was making arguments which I am used to hearing from skeptics such as Richard Carrier, Bart Ehrman, and Robert Price.  Part of his argument is essentially that since the gospel accounts are inconsistent on key points, we cannot trust them on their crucifixion accounts.

Of course, the Christian has the better arguments here, because pretty much all of the accounts which might possibly be construed as historical narratives are on his side.  That said, he doesn't do nearly so well as one might expect given such an overwhelming advantage.  

Bacrac vs Keller on the radio (UK)

This episode of Unbelievable quickly disgressed into a debate over the origins of moral thinking, as they so often do. They go back and forth and mostly past each other for quite awhile.

Around 48 minutes in, they finally get down to brass tacks, when the Christian asks why we shouldn't simply prefer our cooperation to comptetiion in structuring our ethical systems? Alas, Bacrac's answer is essentially question begging, or else so poorly expressed that we cannot tell why he labels certain actions as immoral. What he ought to have said, "Those actions are wrong because they increase suffering and decrease well-being. In fact, that is precisely what we consequentialists mean when we call something immoral or wrong." He eventually gets around to saying something like this almost ten minutes later.

Keller puts theistic ethics in a nutshell around 1:05:30 "I'd rather submit to a tradition than set myself up as the arbiter of all truth. I don't trust my own heart."

Overall, I'd say that Keller manages to sound calmer and more reasonable than Bacrac, though he gets more than a little help from the presenter.

Buckner vs. Bocchino at Georgia Tech

This one was a geniune debate, but in an odd format. Instead of opening statements, the moderator asked the interlocutors a series of questions, starting from very basic assumptions about reality. Questions such as "Does our reality need to be scientifically verifiable or falsifiable?" and "How does one's belief or non-belief in God alter one's perception of reality?" and "What is the reality of free will?" and "Is there any ultimate purpose to life?"

With such questions as these, you may well imagine that the debate might be somewhat weak tea, and you'd be correct. While things do pick up a bit later on, I'd say that this on is not exactly worth an hour of your time, expecially given the annoyingly scratchy audio.

Here is a more uplifting review.

DiCarlo vs. Boot in Oshawa, ON

This debate is unique in any number of interesting ways. The skeptical speaker is avowedly agnostic on the question of deism, and he's not "down on religion" but thinks that religious belief does plenty of good. Moreover, the believing speaker is clearly well-versed in post-modern philosophical thought, which is something that I don't usually hear from priests or theologians.

Also, the extent of crowd participation and number of applause lines were exceptionally great in this debate. Lines like "it is impossible for all world religions to be right, but it is possible for all world religions to be wrong" and "I don't need a divine hand patting me on the back to do good" get big applause, and even this guy gets a big shout out from the peanut gallery.

As to the arguments themselves, I think it is accurate to say that each speaker talked past the other to some extent. The skeptic went after Biblical literalists, while the believer went after communists, existentialists, and nilihists. I suppose there are those who might suppose most believers and unbelievers fall easily into such categories, but surely this is not so.

• Unbeliever rating: 3.5 stars 
  
  
• Believer rating: 2.5 stars
  
  
• Overall rating: 3 stars
  

Dennett vs. Plantinga in Chicago, IL

In this presentation (which mutated into a debate) one certainly gets the sense that Alvin Plantinga is just plain bluffing.  He throws up plenty of nifty maths onto the whiteboard, but these serve primarily to obfuscate his false premises rather than bring enlightenment to the audience.  Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism was thoroughly rebutted some time ago, and he seems even not to be unaware of these cogent criticisms of his position. Moreover, he seemed not to notice when Dennett explicitly rejected and refuted his key premise.

A bit of background is necessary here, because Plantinga's argument is fairly technical and most people don't much grok maths, especially Bayesian probabilities.  Suffice to say that for his argument to go through he must show that humans most always form true beliefs about the world [ P(R)≈1 ] and that probability of this happening if metaphysical naturalism and evolutionism are true is low [P(R|E&N)≈0].    

Alas, Plantinga fails to substantiate either of these claims in anything like a rigorous logical fashion.  He more or less assumes the truth of the former premise and pretty much hand-waves his way to the latter.  When a brilliant logician such as Alvin Plantinga is waving his hands instead of outlining a deductive argument, well, caveat emptor.

A couple points must be made here.  Metaphysical materialists cannot assume P(R)≈1 since we believe that all talk of gods, spirits, ghosts, chakras, etc. is all so much bunk.  People around the world make up all sorts of wacky beliefs about disembodied minds and imaginary forces emanating therefrom, thus, P(R) is evidently nowhere near unity.  Moreover, since most religions (with a few interesting exceptions) assert that all other religions make up all sorts of untruths about the world, which are integrated into their devotees worldviews, it seems odd for any religious person to argue that humans almost always form true beliefs about the world. Finally, it should be evident from the abundance of material at sites like http://www.snopes.com/ and http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ that we humans are prone to all manner of irrational thinking, not least of which is a tendency to attribute agency where none exists.

Secondly, while the probability P(R|E&N) is nowhere near unity, it is neither so low as to allow Plantinga's argument to go through.  The crucial question here is whether we would expect naturalistic evolutionary mechanisms to select for true beliefs over false ones.  This question is not nearly so simple as it sounds (or as Plantinga's treatment suggests) but it should be fairly obvious that it is generally far easier to program a neural network to solve problems of adaptivity by providing adaptive goals and good data than by providing maladaptive goals and bad data.

Dennett managed to raise some of these points by way of an awkward analogy, but to be fair he was dealing with a mathematical smokescreen while standing up.  This is something no one should be expected to do.  

Hitchens vs. Wilson in Glenside, PA

This debate went down in a curiously logic-free way (at least at first) since the opening statements seemed not to include anything like a cogent argument from either side.  The closest that Wilson got was an appeal to the premise that naturally evolved biological neural networks are no better at processing information than fizzy cans of soda, an utterly ridiculous meme which nonetheless seems to be making the rounds.  As I noted earlier, I cannot think of a chemical reaction more perfectly disanalogous to the amazingly complex processes studied by modern neuroscience than the shaking up of a can of soda – the only thing these things seem to have in common would have to be an abundance of carbon atoms.

In any event, once these guys got past their opening statements, which were mostly paeans to the beauty and truth of their respective views and the depravity of the other guy’s views, they got into a genuine back-and-forth which was fairly fun to watch.  Hitchens would do well to make most of his debates into mostly cross-ex with relatively little time upfront for openings and rebuttals.   

Overall rating: 3.0 stars

 

(30-Oct-2008)

 

 

 

Shermer vs D'souza in Nashville, TN

This debate covers a lot of ground, but it has far more breadth than depth. Michael Shermer is almost always careful and circumspect in his assertions and arguments, while Dinesh D'Souza is almost always overreaching in his arguments and hasty in his inferences. This event provided no glaring exceptions to these general rules.

Hitchens vs. Boteach in NYC

In this debate, Christopher Hitchens meets his rightful match in Shmuley Boteach, an interlocutor who is as keen on rhetorical flourish and as short on valid arguments as Hitchens himself.  This debate is massively entertaining though fairly non-substantive (like reality television) and all too often it sounds as if both men are running the playbook from Schopenhauer’s 38 Ways to Win an Argument, which remains the definitive text for cynically unscrupulous rhetoricians.  Perhaps I’m being a bit too hard on these guys.  They each make at least two-and-a-half arguments which might possibly be recast as valid deductions.  I leave that as an exercise to the listener, and good luck with it.

Hitchens quote of the day – “I have rather a crazy salad of slanders to respond to and I don’t want to miss any of them out.”

 

Shook vs Craig at UBC

University of British Columbia, 29 Jan 2008

Craig leads with his usual five arguments: cosomological, teleological, moral, historical Jesus, and personal experiences. If you've not seen it before, this debate provides a fairly representative sample.

Shook leads off with the old "atheists believe in only one less god than monotheists" trope, which I consider cute and witty but unpersuasive. He goes on to describe atheism and naturalism for a bit, and finally starts in on an argument, which is really more of an analysis and rebuttal of Craig's theological positions and arguments. What he ought to have done instead is put forth his own arguments for the truth of metaphysical naturalism, as we've seen from the likes of J.J. Lowder and Rick Carrier. To be fair, he alludes to possible arguments (e.g. incoherent properties) but an allusion does not an argument make.

Upon rebuttal, predictably enough, Craig spanks Shook like a naughty schoolboy for failing to make an affirmative argument for naturalism. He does this quite efficiently and effectively, leaving himself time to review, restate, and reinforce his own affirmative arguments. Not looking good for naturalism by this point in the debate. Craig admits that hypothetical oughts can be objective in the same sense as other truths about how to attains one's goals (e.g. if you want to stay healthy, don't eat poison) but goes on to once again confuse objective moral values with subjective divine preferences.

When it comes time for Shook to rebut, he gets scattershot and hits a few targets on accident, but for the most part fails to point out where Craig's carefully and clearly constructed arguments go awry.