Last night I was well-filled with cheap pizza and pricey booze, and much like the Biblical character Boaz on the threshing floor, perhaps not in the best possible condition to make a dispassionate and rational assessment of the situation. With that caveat out of the way, I have to say that I thought Sam Harris pretty much held his own against William Lane Craig last night. I'll put up a more detailed review whenever I find an mp3 copy, but here are my first impressions for now.
Openings
Craig makes the argument that morality must be objective, not in the usual sense of the term, but rather in the sense of being universally binding upon all persons on account of what he calls a "Competent Authority" by which he means the God of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. Here is the argument in deductive form:
1. Objective morality requires moral rules laid down by God.
2. Objective morality, in this sense, really does exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.
The argument is deductively valid, but both of the premises are evidently false. Craig's argument for the first premise is essentially that morality can only be understood as a set of rules laid down by an authority figure. He begs the question really hard here, but he does it with the flair of a showman and the conviction of a true believer. Craig's argument for the second premise relies on the audience not noticing when Craig makes the subtle shift from the almost universal moral outrage at the examples he provides to the idea the we cannot be properly outraged unless God is as well. Okay, well it doesn't sound at all subtle when I put it that way, but I promise he does is smoothly.
Harris, for his part, tries to make the case that we should not think of morality as binding rules handed down from above, but rather as a set of ideas derived from our best scientific understanding of how to bring about the flourishing (and avoid the suffering) of conscious and sentient creatures such as ourselves. He makes a strong analogy with the field of medicine and the idea of health versus illness. We assume that health is better for everyone, then we use science to derive ideas about how to get there, e.g. stop smoking, do your cardio, eat your vegetables, wear your rubbers, etc.
If you want a better sense of Harris' opening statement and basic arguments, you can have a look at this video or others like it, in which he stakes out his position and unpacks a sort of simplified utilitarianism for the 21st century.
Rebuttals
During the rebuttals, I noticed that Craig retreated a bit further into philosopher mode, in which he seems to assume that everyone in the audience is taking an undergraduate degree in philosophy and can understand what he is saying even when he doesn't bother define his terms. Meanwhile, Harris stuck with plain language, powerful analogies, and memorable one liners. He also takes a direct shot or two at Catholicism at Notre Dame. He falls short just a bit, though, when he failed to make it perfectly clear that this debate ultimately consists of a sematical struggle over what it means to act morally. The entire debate can be summed up thusly:
WLC: Morality consists in following rules issued from above
SH: No, morality consists in helping people because we happen to like people.
WLC: No, no no, it is all about binding rules from a Competent Authority.
SH: There is no such Authority, and have your read those rules? They are God awful.
WLC: OBEY GOD'S RULES!
SH: HELP OTHER PEOPLE!
And so forth. Basically, it comes down to the question of whether we are morally motivated by fear of God or by the love of people, and I have trouble believing that anyone showed up to the debate truly agnostic on this issue, because one has to settle the question of whether any gods exist before you can really get on with the moral arguments. I agree with John Loftus that the best anyone can do against Craig is break even, but I have to give Sam Harris major props for very nearly doing so, especially on a topic like morality, where both our language and our intuitions are strongly biased towards a dualistic and theistic understanding.
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:
If God does not exist, objective moral values cannot exist
But objective moral values do exist
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.
If you've already seen the earlier debate between these two men, you'll find this debate to be highly repetitious of those same arguments. At least Williamson seems a bit more prepared this time.
Craig starts out very strong, giving his usual five highly-polished arguments for theism. No surprises there.
Williamson starts out weak, fumbling about for a bit, speaking haltingly, and seemingly generally ill-prepared. I experienced a sinking feeling at this point, but he goes on to put together a few interesting arguments, one of which was an unusual presentation of a form of incompatible properties argument. Points for novelty at least.
On rebuttal, each speaker does a fine job ot tearing apart their opponent's arguments. Indeed, Williamson's rebuttal demonstrates that he did his homework, immediately singling out one of Craig's premises and demonstrating how that particular premise begs the question in favor of theism, and giving some reasons to doubt the premise itself. This is generally a good model for how to rebut deductive arguments put forward for theism. (His rebuttal of the fine-tuning argument could have been better, by providing an argument showing how the universe may have been naturally finely-tuned, and not conceding so much ground to Craig.)
Here is an example of what that rebuttal technique might look like in practice: Craig's argument from objective moral values assumes that morality can only be "objectively real" if it is grounded in the mind of a transcendent moral being, which we call God. Thus, by claiming that morality is indeed objective (in this peculiar sense of the term) Craig is claiming that god exists, right up front in one of his premises. But this is precisely the question under discussion, and so we should be debating instead about the actual nature of moral value, rather than simply assuming that they are transcendent in the theistic sense which Craig supposes.
After the rebuttal period, the two debaters cross-examine each other for awhile, a format which I always enjoy. Craig gets the better of Williamson here, but it wasn't terribly one-sided.
Overall, it was a decent debate in which both sides were examined in some depth, but better arguments for naturalism exist, and may be found in betterdebates.
This panel debate (YouTube) is unique in several ways. Firstly, it is bilingual, with direction and narration in Spanish, and substantive debate in English. Secondly, it features three men on each side but only gives each one a few minutes at a time to make an argument. Thirdly, the speakers talk in front of what appears to be the world's largest 1980's themed screensaver including flying polygons. Finally, the lectern is in a boxing ring. No, really, an effing boxing ring. Evidently the Mexican version of TED talks have quite a bit more flair than the sober lectures they do here in the Estados Unidos.
Matt Ridley leads off with a decent joke which doesn't translate well to those unfamiliar with the idiomatic English meaning of "recreational area" and then briefly makes the case for emergent order as opposed to top-down design, in both society and the biosphere more generally.
Craig, as per usual, makes the case that purposes which don't last forever just aren't worth having, that if we don't have a holy being to obey and worship forever, then everything must be meaningless. Evidently, he values servitude so much as to make it the end all be all of human existence. He goes on to (somewhat idiosyncratically) define "evil" in strictly theistic terms and then smoothly equivocate by claiming that atheist must therefore claim that there is no evil in the world, in the ordinary sense of the term. Clever rhetoric, to be sure, but as a philosopher he has to know better than to think this is a valid mode of argument. Finally, he briefly lists his usual five arguments for theism.
Shermer wastes some time upfront by talking about wishful thinking and the prosperity gospel, but then gets into his own case for purpose in a naturalistic world. He lists a few purposes which available to ordinary people leading ordinary lives without the hope of eternal life, and he does so fairly well. He might ought to have pointed out that most people spend the vast majority of their lives pursuing such ordinary purposes, rather than grovelling at the feet of their favored deity.
Wolpe argues that the debate ought to be about whether the universe as a whole has a purpose, and suggests (without a hint of embarrassment) that the purpose of the entire cosmos and its billions of galaxies and quadrillions of stars was to eventually produce people who will come to know and worship the God of the Hebrews, which just happens to be the his personal area of expertise. He does have one memorable line, though, in which he says that one might say the universe has purpose in the sense that the kitchen has a meal, that is, it has all the ingredients needed to create purposes. True, and what is more, a decent summary of the thrust of Shermer's talk.
Dawkins leads by insultingly comparing the opposing panel to children who have never grown out of the having of believing that everything can be explained in terms of what purpose it serves. He then gets into the nature of designed objects, which have a given purpose, and designoid objects, which merely seem to have one. At one point he accidentally gives away the farm by calling natural selection a "brilliant process" which makes it seem purposive, unless he meant "brilliant" in some sense more about luminosity than intelligence. Overall, he makes a decent case that we can explain everything in the universe without resorting to any universal purposes, especially with respect to living things.
They then go into rebuttal period, in which it becomes clear that the theistic bench has put somewhat more time into teamwork and planning so as to create a flow between their arguments with little overlap. Nevertheless, both sides have a go at the other side, and as usual, Craig is polished and precise, while Dawkins is scathing and condescending.
Overall, this is a must-see debate, no because of the substance so much as the style. I personally prefer dry and cultured Oxford style debate, but as they say, en la variedad está el gusto.
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.
Craig leads off with his usual arguments from first-cause, fine-tuning, objective moral values, minimal historical facts argument for Jesus resurrection, and the non-argument from subjective religious experiences.
Interestingly, Craig dismisses the world ensemble theory by claiming that he knows exactly what our universe (of all the universes) should look like if the ensemble existed. Perhaps he should publish in journals of cosmology rather than apologetics, if he indeed he has so greatly outstripped the finest minds working in theoretical physics.
By "objective moral values" Craig evidently means moral values which are universally binding upon all moral agents on account of having been laid down by an immaterial atemporalnonspatial transcendent cosmic supermind. Seems to me he is question-begging a bit by building this in as a premise to his argument from moral values.
Williamson starts off rather weakly, avoiding any positive arguments from the truth of metaphysical naturalism, and instead brewing us some weak tea on the burden of proof and the nature of unbelief. He thereby wastes at least a third of his opening statement time before finally getting around to arguments from incoherence and a version of the argument from evil. His presentation of the arguments from incoherence is not particularly strong, and his argument from evil isn't fleshed out. Also, he completely muffs the closing of his opening.
During rebuttal, Craig systematically dismantles Williamson's arguments, although Craig's ideas of nonspatiality/atemporality/immateriality amount to little more than hand waving, since he does not even attempt to show that these attributes can be coherently applied to a mind. Williamson's rebuttal is nearly as ineffective as Craig's was effective, mostly because Williamson rambles on various topics while more or less failing to directly address any of Craig's arguments until he pretty much runs out out of time. At this point, those of us hoping for a robustly two-sided debate start looking for the concession stands.
Seriously, where does Craig keep finding these guys? College profs, please realize that a career spent lecturing to undergrads, however good you may be at it, does not at all prepare you to debate someone who is experienced at the art of public debate.
About a score of freethinkers from all around OKC converged on Trinity Baptist Church in Norman, OK for this event. Good times were had by all on hand, so far as I could see. Theists and atheists sat cheek by jowl, and were generally polite and respectful each to another. It was quite a fine and rare sight to behold.
None of these arguments are at all novel, and Craig makes most of them in mostly the same way in most of his debates, so Hitchens had absolutely no excuse for failing to directly address at least a few of them, even if philosophy is not exactly his bag.
Hitch leads with a bit of methodological criticism which sounds fairly ad homish, and then pretty much just goes off on the history of the Xn church and its various abuses of power and privilege. He also makes the argument that it seems absurd to expect a revelatory deity to only reveal Himself in to a few illiterate peasants in ancient Palestine relatively late in human history. Surely, it is absurd, but Hitchens pretty much leaves the details as a proof for the reader.
In the rebuttals, things go from bad to worse, as Craig pretty much refutes Hitch's main points and repeatedly pounds him for failing to return the favor. At first, this is just unfair, since no one should have to rebut during their own opening, but eventually the accusation sticks and goes on to become the overarching motif of the debate. Hitchens increasingly rambles and mumbles, and one begins to fear the debate may become too one-sided to prove illuminating to all concerned.
Mercifully, though, someone at BIOLA decided beforehand to put aside time for cross-examination, and that is when things finally got interesting. Craig conceded the possibility of allegorical layering in the Matthean gospel, as well as giving away a few other tidbits to the schools of higher criticism. It was particularly gratifying to see these two stumping each other and pausing to gather their thoughts.
All things considered, this debate was worth attending, if only for the almost perfect ying/yang combination of these two particular speakers. I'd watch it again, once it hits the internets. Meanwhile, I can take out my frustration at Hitchens by watching this video over and over.
This long-awaited clash between two men who are arguably the most learned representatives of the far-left and far-right of Biblical scholarship took place right here in the flyover states, of all places. I'd seriously considered making the drive out, and after hearing the quality of the only mp3 file posted thus far, I sort of wish that I'd taking the time and effort to do so.
On style and persuasiveness, Craig takes this one hands down. He was working with three significant advantages: the affirmative position, home-field advantage, and an inherent human tendency to prefer explanations based on intention to those based on the contingent results of unplanned natural processes.
On substance and logical coherence, though, Carrier almost pulled even about halfway into the Q&A, during which he managed to flesh out his valid arguments enough to make them more-or-less sound. Here is one, paraphrased and formalised a bit:
If early Christians were creating mythic tales instead of recording history as it actually happened, we would expect Mark's writings to be more detailed and fabulous than previous Christian writings, as well as less detailed and fabulous than later Christian writings.
In fact, this is precisely what we do see, inasmuch as the later canonical and non-canonical Christian writings generally do include more details and more fabulous stories than earlier ones.
Therefore, it is probably that Mark (and his contemporaneous oral historians) were making myth rather than recording historical events.
I'm not going to go into Carrier's empirical support for premise #2 here, but suffice to say it was expansive and difficult to rebut. However authoritatively and however many times Craig boldly declares that he has "multiple independently attested sources" it still doesn't make it so, and Craig at no point refutes the Carrier's arguments that the various resurrection accounts bear the marks of literary dependence one upon another.
This was a panel discussion in which several popular Christian apologists have a go at the Hitch. Perhaps surprisingly, he manages to hold his own.
At first each speaker makes very brief outline-style arguments (less than five minutes per speaker) none of which are nearly fleshed out and all of which are quite the usual fare. Then they all start going back and forth (perhaps inevitably) on the theological problem of evil and the nature of evil.
Hitchens moves on a bit with his usual hypothetical question "Can you name any moral action that can only be taken by a religious believer?" The theists respond, funnily enough, with tithing and worship. Hijinks ensue. This part wasn't particularly enlightening, as far as I can see. Of course Christians frame morality in terms of obedience, and of course secular humanists do not. The interlocutors then have a go at the veractiy and verifiability of miracles, and then go aroudn on various topics in the field of philosophy of religion. As usual, the theists argue strenuously that any morality based upon one's own moral feelings of empathy for others is clearly and obviously inferioir to the morality of the slave who takes joy from obedience to his master. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
Overall this was an enjoyable discussion, but don't expect too much depth on any given topic.
Kagan leads with the idea that moral actions are simply those which either help people or avoid harming people. This is not terribly different from the moral theory alluded to by Louise Antony in her debate against Craig, although Kagan is more explicit in his explication of the theory. Kagan goes on to sketch out a few possible moral theories which work without reference to any supervening transcendent minds.
[ This is where I would ordinarily summarize both opening statements, but it seems that Wintery Knight beat me to it and did so in some depth. Suffice to say that Craig's opening was almost verbatim as his opening in the debate against Antony.]
Kagan does a better job than Antony at demonstrating the possibility of ethics without gods, but he may have seemed more effective primarily because the two men were exchanging interrogatives in a relatively relaxed and informal manner, as opposed to alternately monologuing. Also, it may be that Antony and Kagan fared better than more nontheist debaters because the ground rules called for discussion on fairly narrow topic, which to some degree hobbles Craig's firehose approach of overwhelming his opponent with a half-dozen arguments and then repeatedly calling them out for failing to address each of them in a relatively brief rebuttal period.
That said, Kagan certainly deserves some credit for elucidating the differences between their views in plain language that the audience can follow, and for calling out Craig on certain unsubstantiated presuppositions, such as the fantastically egotistical idea that only ultimate cosmic meaning may make metaethics meaningful.
In this televised debate the interlocutors spend much of the hour going around in circles over the argument from evil, but never quite manage to drill down to the details. This is a bit of a shame, really, because one gets the sense that they could if only given the chance. Just when it seemed they were about to address the likelihood that all of the evil and suffering in the world is always for the greater good (as Craig asserts) they go to commercial and change the subject.
Payton makes some inroads at refuting Craig’s argument from fine-tuning, noting that we would expect to see such fine-tuning if intelligent life evolved (somehow, anywhere, at any time) to suit its environment. Again, when it looked like we just might flesh out the relevant issues, we move on to the next topic. Ah, television.
Craig makes an excellent point about 34 minutes into the recording, “Someone like Dawkins may be a good scientist in his field, when he begins to talk about philosophy and theology, he is merely a layman, and The God Delusion is a very unsophisticated book, intellectually. As a philosopher, I was just appalled by the arguments that he gives in that book, it was an embarrassment, really.” I am no philosopher (and hopefully I’ll never become one) but this was more-or-less precisely my reaction to that particular book. This is a digression, of course, but I cannot help but notice here that precisely the same criticism may be leveled at apologists (such as Alvin Plantinga and William Dembski) who makes philosophically sophisticated but scientifically naïve arguments against naturalistic evolution. All of these guys would be far better off doing their homework before sallying forth and getting published.
All things considered, I was quite surprised at how well a youngling like Payton managed to hold off Craig’s ordinarily overwhelming lines of attack. Possibly this was because of the moderation of the host, but that cannot account for too much, given Coren’s expressly faith-based stance on these issues. More likely it was the format of the show, styled as a somewhat conversational back-and-forth.
Craig leads with his usual arguments, each of which ought to be readily rebuttable:
Cosmological argument from a cosmic first cause
Teleological argument from universal fine-tuning
Objective moral values cannot exist apart from God
Jesus lives! (empty tomb / post-mortem appearances / Xn belief)
Altar call / subjective experiences
The first two arguments basically fall back on the following dichotomy, either the universe came to be the way it is because of (a) natural processes we do not fully understand or (b) some sort of immaterial non-spatiotemporal über-mind. Craig puts forth nothing even resembling a valid argument which ought to lead a rational person to prefer the latter option over the former, but instead relies on a bit of hand-waving and an inherent human bias in favor of explanations rooted in agency rather than more difficult natural explanations (the details of which may or may not be forthcoming). It blows my mind that Craig keeps getting away with this spouting this sort of question-begging poppycock from an academic pulpit, but there it is.
Craig’s third argument is just pointless, since “objective moral values” is a wholly nonsensical idea. Values are by definition subjective, even if they happen to exist in the mind of a Cartesian evil demon or any other sort of bodiless spirit (only hardcore Platonists can even hope to contend otherwise). Moreover, divine moral values are no good unless they are good values. What good would it do the human race if the divine values permit slavery and genocide?
Craig’s fourth argument more-or-less assumes the reliability of the gospel narratives, an approach which only has persuasive force to someone who is already a Christian. Few people believe that other people’s scriptures are anything other than myths, and this is just as it should be, since they usually contain all manner of fabulous stories which are completely unattested outside of their particular faith tradition.
Brown wastes a fair bit of time talking about classical arguments for and against God, before getting around to the problem of evil and a few moral conundrums related to theistic morality. On rebuttal, Craig manages to make mincemeat of these, since Brown failed to start in on a properly evidential argument (at least not until his closing statement). He also wastes a bit of time on the nature of faith, again, because he fails to make a positive argument in favor of metaphysical naturalism. This is a serious shortcoming, since merely pointing out that faith is not an argument is not an argument in itself. If there are some people in the audience who could be convinced by the sorts of the arguments presented in a debate, they are surely not fideists. Finally, Brown grants the existence of objective moral truths, at which point he may well have delivered his flag to Craig’s camp. Considering the inherent weakness of the arguments from objective morality, this should be considered a gratuitous bit of self-harm on Brown’s part.
On rebuttal and on cross, these guys mix it up and both demonstrate a high-level of familiarity with various subjects while managing to cast substantive doubt upon almost all of the affirmative arguments which were given during the opening statements. Brown, to his credit, manages to point out a number of the major problems with Craig’s arguments, though he does so a bit confusingly at times. Brown makes up a good deal of ground after the opening statements, but never quite catches up. It seems to me that Brown could have had Craig pinned and writing if they had been given another hour for cross-ex. Alas…
Altogether, this is one of the better debates because of its high level of substantive interchange. Definitely worth a listen.
This debate stands out for a bizarre lack of debate, and this seems like the unfortunate result of a poorly framed topic question, “Does God matter?” Essentially, Craig makes the argument that life is ultimately meaningless without God, while DiCarlo counters “Meh.” The problem is that Craig assumes that only ultimate meaning is worthwhile, but DiCarlo claims to be perfectly content with proximate meaning. Between these two competing sets of intuitive and subjective premises, there is no common ground over which to contend and perhaps stake a claim.
On the other hand, it was pretty cool to hear Craig deviate from his usual script for a change.
In the rebuttal period, Craig easily dispatches De Sousa's arguments, mostly because the freethinker failed to frame any of them in any sort of rigorous way. De Sousa has a bit of a go at refuting Craig's usual five arguments, but he is far too long-winded to do so at all effectively. He does at one point make an interesting case regarding Craig's misuse of prior probabilities in the fine-tuning argument, but doesn't quite stick it.
The cross-ex was, as usual, more entertaining and enlightening than the openings and rebuttals, but even so De Sousa fails to acquit himself as should one armed with better facts and arguments. Alas!
Craig leads with his usual five arguments, after getting a bit of a dig in at Shook’s website.
Shook leads with an unusual deductive argument which might be formalized along these lines:
Only those propositions for which there is good evidence are probably true.
There is not any good evidence for the claims of supernaturalism.
Therefore, supernaturalism is probably false, and naturalism probably true.
This is not a particularly good argument, but it is an argument nonetheless. Craig claims that Shook made no argument whatsoever, but Shook clearly elucidated both premises during the course of his opening statement. It is not to Shook’s credit that he failed to make more varied and affirmative arguments for naturalism, but taking this approach did free up some time to go after the arguments for theism.
On rebuttal, Craig actually sounds a little bit shook up - I’ve never before heard him interlarding his speech with disfluencies in the manner of mere mortal men. He argues that even if there are no good arguments for God, that we still might reasonably believe in God, and then goes on to call this problem a “huge lacuna” in the debate. I must agree, but surely such a gap would favor agnosticism rather than theism (Craig rightly points this out on cross). Craig goes on to say that a “changeless self-conscious being” is a totally coherent concept, despite the fact that our inevitably subjective understanding of the phenomenon of consciousness is inherently and invariably temporal. As Indigo Montoya once said, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”
During his rebuttal period, Shook goes directly after Craig’s five arguments, which puts him ahead of almost all the freethinking debaters I’ve heard. He fails to refute the bizarrely self-contradictory idea of an objective morality (existing solely in the mind of god) but he does have a go at Craig argument from objective morality. More generally, Shook’s counterarguments are not quite as strong as they could have been, but kudos to him for having a go. Interestingly, Shook uses something very much like the analogy to planetary (as opposed to universal) fine-tuning which I wrote about on my other blog so mega-kudos for that. J
Although Shook ought to have made a few positive arguments for naturalism (as Austin Dacey does) both debaters did a fairly fine job of casting reasonable doubt on their opponent’s arguments, and thus we have witnessed yet another AGNOSTIC WIN!
In this debate Craig leads with the argument that it is impossible for there to be any objective moral truths apart from the (implicitly subjective) preferences of a creator deity and that morality cannot possibly arise in a primate species which exists merely as another branch in a vast tree of life. He does not show how this follows from any particular view of biology or meta-ethics, but merely assumes that morality must be rooted in a stern and powerful father-figure who threatens punishment for sin and promises rewards for righteousness. One might suppose that the catchy verse enjoining us to “be good for goodness sake” never made much of a mark on his intellect and conscience.
Craig closes with three challenges to his opponent:
Explain the basis of objective moral values
Explain the source of objective moral duties
Explain how ultimate moral accountability exists
Antony rightly ignores Craig’s challenge during her opening statement, and goes on to elucidate the idea that objective truths about the suffering of sentient beings should be all the facts we need to necessitate moral action. I did not find her arguments convincing as to the existence of objective moral facts, but certainly they were no worse than equating the naked fear of divine wrath (however arbitrary) with moral absolutes. Antony lucidly lays out and roundly rejects the idea that moral action must involve submission to a higher power, and recounts the Euthyphro dilemma to the audience in clear terms. She provides some background on what moral action should be taken to mean and makes the case that only the moral agent who is uncertain of eternal rewards or punishments may indeed be perfectly pious, doing good for the sake of goodness alone. By the time both opening statements were finished, I was cautiously optimistic that Craig had finally met his equal in a public forum.
In the rebuttal period, Craig chastised his opponent for failing to use her opening statement as a rebuttal period in which to address his three challenges which he made at the end of his opening. This is a standard Craig debating tactic, which he pulls on most of his opponents, e.g. “…he must first tear down my five arguments, then erect a case for naturalism in their place.” Presumably Craig does this not because he is unaware of the ground rules of any given debate (he is far too experienced for that) but merely as an attempt frustrate and fluster his opponent with a quick below-the-belt jab. This tactic doesn’t seem to work particularly well on Antony, who seems quite unflustered as she expertly dismantled most of Craig arguments, pointing out exactly where and how he went awry.
In Craig’s counter-rebuttals he asserts that his opponent had not addressed his arguments (as he always does) but for once his words ring hollow. They go back and forth for awhile, Antony reasserting that moral action is that which objectively alleviates suffering of any sentient creature, Craig reasserting that moral action can only be defined in terms of obedience to the commands of a Grandly Objective Deity. They also go back and forth on the Euthyphro for a bit, and Craig tried to sound authoritative as he argued that we can avoid either horn of the dilemma by positing goodness as inherent to God’s character. Of course, this merely gives rise to a slightly different dilemma, “Is God inherently good because he always desires good things, or does God’s desire for good things make him inherently good?”
The overall theme of the debate was that naturalists may well identify actions which are objectively good in the sense that they are rooted in objective facts about the world, such as desires thwarted or fulfilled, while supernaturalists have the blessing of being permanently retarded in their moral development, always and ever looking upward like wee toddlers for their moral advice, rewards, and punishments. Having sustained the argument that only the moral values of a fatherly deity should count, a theist may go on to link those desires to our own individual desires by invoking promises of divine retribution and reward, thus executing a complexly paradoxical philosophical pirouette which allows for one to smuggle the central tenets of ethical egoism into the heart of divine command theory. I’ve heard something sort of like this at least once before, “If you kiss Hank's ass, He'll give you a million dollars; and if you don't, He'll kick the shit out of you.”
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.
William Lane Craig and Bart Ehrman debated the question "Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus" at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts (mp3, transcript). This debate featured a fair bit of poisoning the well and a few genetic fallacies (from both sides) but we'll overlook that for the moment.
Craig made his usual argument, firstly, to the establishment of the following four historical facts:
Jesus' burial
His empty tomb
Post-mortem appearances
Disciples' belief in resurrection.
From there, Craig goes on to argue that the bodily resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation for these four facts.
Ehrman attempts to refute this argument by showing that any of these facts might easily have had a perfectly natural explanation. The third point, for example, might be explained by enthusiastic religious visions or by the possibility that grief stricken followers may have mistaken someone else for their beloved rabbi, cruelly taken from them. Interestingly, both of these hypotheses enjoy some support in the Christian Scriptures, the former in the writings of Paul (who claimed to have personal visions of Jesus and who counseled his parishioners in the proper methods of receiving divine revelation while in communal meetings) and the latter in a handful of gospel pericopes in which Jesus' forlorn disciples do not recognize him at first but later come to believe they had seen him.
For the empty tomb, Ehrman comes up with an off-the-cuff scenario which is too good to pass up:
Jesus gets buried by Joseph of Arimathea. Two of Jesus' family members are upset that an unknown Jewish leader has buried the body. In the dead of night, these two family members raid the tomb, taking the body off to bury it for themselves. But Roman soldiers on the lookout see them carrying the shrouded corpse through the streets, they confront them, and they kill them on the spot. They throw all three bodies into a common burial plot, where within three days these bodies are decomposed beyond recognition.
This seems perfectly plausible to me, although we do not have any evidence one way or the other. Once an empty tomb is actually found, it is only a matter of time until the resurrection rumors and claims of personal revelation start flying around the community of those who once followed Jesus and considered him to be the Messiah promised of God.
Ehrman comes up with a few other naturalistic scenarios, few of which Craig even seriously considers even for a moment. When he does do so, however, he does so badly. Here is an example:
Well, look at these other hypotheses. Perhaps, for example, family members of Jesus stole the body. Isn't that more probable?" I don't think so. Notice there's no motive in that case for stealing the body; the family members of Jesus didn't believe in him during his lifetime. Nobody else other than Joseph and his servants and the women disciples even knew where the body had been interred. The time was insufficient for such a conspiracy to be hatched and launched between Friday night and Sunday morning. Also the grave clothes in the tomb disprove the hypothesis of tomb robbery; nobody would undress the body before taking it away.
Here, Craig assumes facts quite apart from those which he established earlier as part of a widespread scholarly consensus, such as the grave clothes in the tomb. Earlier in this same debate, Craig maintained that "the presence of inconsistencies in a later, less reliable source does nothing to undermine the credibility of an earlier, more credible source" but fails to note that the earlier more credible source in this case is that of Mark, which makes no mention whatsoever of grave clothes lying in the tomb! He also seems
Possibly the most unique part of this debate was an admirable but quixotic attempt at Bayesian maths by Dr. Craig. He gets the basic idea right, but mischaracterizes how the formulae ought should apply to his own position as well as that of his opponent. I'm boring myself just recounting this part, so I'll move on.
I'd give each debater 4.5 stars on substance, with -0.5 for snarkiness and circumstantial ad hom. Overall, this was a four-star debate.
The first Dacey/Craig debate hits many of the major strong points on both sides, and therefore is a good place to start if you are unfamiliar with the arguments usually given by theists and atheists in favor of their respective positions.
Craig gives his usual arguments. Dacey responds with 5 facts that fit better with atheism than with theism: the hiddenness of God, the success of science, the mind-brain connection, evolution, and the abundance of pointless suffering. Craig says that it’spossible to fit all these with Christian theism. * * *
In general, Dacey does a better job of being clear and organized than most of Craig’s other opponents, but in the end Craig is still more organized and had good-sounding responses to Dacey’s arguments that Dacey didn’t get a chance to rebut.
That asute blogger also points out that more than once Dacey “chooses just about the weakest counter-argument he could have picked” which is why I found this debate ultimately disappointing, though both debaters started out quite strong in their opening statements.
Most disappointing of all was that Dacey more or less allows Craig to get away with a “retreat to the possible” in which Craig asserts that each of Dacey’s five facts might somehow be made to fit within a Christian worldview. Of course, nearly anything logically fit within nearly any worldview, given enough flexibility in the fundamental premises. God might be a really subtle fellow who prefers to remain inscrutable and indiscernible, with a fetish for the workings of natural law as a means of creating and sustaining intelligent life, and divine indifference to the mind bogglingly massive amounts of earthly suffering. Craig suggests as much in his rebuttal to Dacey, and Dacey pretty much lets it slide. This is particularly galling as Craig is not arguing for the god of deism (towards which many avowed atheists are actually agnostic) but rather the god of Christian theism, which is far more difficult to reconcile with Dacey’s list.
The crucial epistemic problem here is that metaphysical naturalism (the view that everything that exists is natural and operates naturally) strictly requires every one of Dacey’s five points to be true, whereas theism neither predicts nor requires any of them to be true. If Dacey’s audience is convinced of his five points, they have to conclude that these facts are necessary to metaphysical naturalism, while they are merely compatible with deism and only arguably possible on Christian theism. It doesn’t take a Bayesian mathematician to figure the odds here.
Altogether, I'd give this one 4 stars, 3.75 for Dacey and 4.25 for Craig.
In this debate Craig makes his usual five arguments and Victor Stenger (to his everlasting credit) stands out as one of Craig's fairly few freethinking foes to frankly address each of them during his rebuttal period. However, Stenger’s positive arguments are relatively weak, or at least not nearly as strong as those we have seen from stronger debaters such as Tabash and Dacey. Moreover, Stenger has a bit of trouble parrying Craig’s well-aimed rebuttals.
I definitely got the sense that Stenger has his head wrapped around the fine-tuning problem, but it is by no means easy to articulate the answers without resorting to maths, which would doubtlessly lose the audience. Not sure that this problem can be dealt with by explication in a time-constrained debate environment.
Altogether, Stenger made a strong showing against a most formidable debater.
