Shermer & Ridley & Dawkins vs. Craig & Wolpe & Geivett in la ciudad de las ideas (Puebla, Mexico)

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.

Shermer & Harris vs Chopra & Houston at Caltech (ABC News)

http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/FaceOff/nightline-face-off-god-future/story?id=10170505

I've got to say right off that televised debates just up and wig me out. I'm not sure what it is about television which makes televised debates feel so different from ordinary debates. Maybe it's the animated watermark in the lower right corner. Possibly it is the thought of millions of pairs of eyes and ears. In any event, this debate consisted of a panel of four people, apparently chosen based on a combination of controversial ideas and sex appeal. Every panelist is given a brief period to make an opening statement.

Michael Shermer’s opening makes the case that religion is a cultural construct, as is obvious from the geographical and temporal distribution of religious ideas. He also makes an argument from the efficacy of methodological naturalism, and points out the cross-cultural tendency of human beings to over-detect agency-based explanation.

Deepak Chopra leads with a nod in the direction of science followed by a barrage of rather fuzzily-defined terms, such as “infinite consciousness” and “agent of downward causation.” He also alludes to the apparent fine-tuning of the universe to allow for the evolution of life.
Sam Harris makes it clear upfront that he wants to talk about religion as it is usually practiced rather than the god of the philosophers, who is “so denuded of doctrine as to more or less be synonymous with pure mystery or pure information or pure energy or pure anything.” He also makes it clear that the god of the people is the one that matters in politics and policy.

Jean Houston provides a story from an old Australian aborigine woman, and another even more amusing story from an old white American woman. She also makes it clear that she reads Dante without the benefit of translation, for some reason.

After their openings, the panelists start going back and forth. Predictably enough, Chopra spews a barrage of woo-woo talk and Shermer calls him on it. Eventually, Deepak drops this gem of pseudo-profundity, “In the absence of a conscious entity, the Moon remains a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.” The crowd audibly boos. This is the both low point and somehow the highlight of the event. Damnable televised debates.

There is a constant tension throughout this debate between the skeptic panelists and the New Age panelists over whether they should be talking about religion as it is traditionally (and most widely) practiced, or religion as it is being re-conceptualized by authors like Chopra and Houston. On this point, at least, the woo-wooers have the title of the event on their side. On the other hand, the skeptics have the fierce urgency of the now on theirs.

Throughout the event, I found myself wondering if Deepak Chopra understands and believes what he says. I also found myself wondering if Jean Houston was going to at any point say something insightful and on topic, rather than merely telling stories and dropping names. Most often, I found myself wishing that the folks at Nightline Faceoff had found Harris and Shermer a more worthy opponent or two, but then again, this is television and I ought not expect ratings-driven producers to give two shits about philosophical rigor.

• Overall rating: 3.5


• Believer rating: 2.5


• Unbeliever rating: 4.5
  

Shermer vs. Robertson on the radio (UK)

Oh joy! Another debate on whether secularism is the root of all social ills. If you want to read an upbeat review of this debate, please do click here. My assessment will not be nearly so flattering to either opponent as that one.

It would seem that Pastor David Robertson is not merely a Christian and a Scotsman, but a well and True Scotsman and an authentic True Christian (TM) to boot. He also seems more than happy to toss off the spurious claim that some people just don't fit the bill, and he'll give True Christians full credit for any and all instances of moral progress in Western culture, while disclaiming the role that devout Christians played in maintaining the subjugation of slaves, women, witches, apostates, and so on. Evidently, Christianity gets the credit for everything good, while the nasty secularists get credit for everything else. Such a transparently biased rewriting of history should not go unchallenged, but it would seem that skeptical champion Michael Shermer was having an off day.

Shermer weakly contests Robertson's skewing of history, fact, and logic. He never once calls him out on the True Scotsman fallacy, nor does he do a fine job of unpacking the negative correlation between religious faith and positive social outcomes even though the only significant peer-reviewed cross-national study was favorably reported in his own magazine. Even a cursory review of the data reveals this correlation between lesser social outcomes and higher levels of faith, so one really has to wonder why Shermer fails to hammer this point home. He alludes to it only once and then fails to stem the massive tide of bullshit that Robertson brings on regarding the indisputable facts on the ground in most secular nations in Europe.

Moreover, Shermer stays relentlessly on the defensive, painstakingly explaining his own position (which he does fairly well) but never pointing out the glaring holes in his Robertson's worldview. Next time, he should ask Robertson a few pointed questions of his own. I'd be happy to suggest a few. Here's one: Has any study ever found a positive correlation between religious faith and moral behavior, at any level of social organization, among similarly situated nations or societies?

Prothero & Shermer vs Meyer & Sternberg in Beverly Hills

Shemer argues that we should reframe the ID/evolution debate from a scientific debate to a skirmish in the culture wars. He does a fairly good job of backing this up, but he is also careful not to commit the genetic fallacy and thereby conclude that his opponents arguments must be faulty because they have an vested ideological interest in fitting the data into a certain model. He also provides a couple of affirmative arguments for evolutionary theory.

Prothero characterizes the central argument from ID something like this:

1. There are only two explanations for functional complexity: Evolution or intelligent design
2. We found something functionally complex and we cannot imagine how it evolved naturally
3. Therefore, it didn't evolve naturally (via argument from personal incredulity)
4. Therefore, it must have been intelligently designed

He also does a fair bit of prebuttal, briefly addressing some of the common arguments for ID and alludes to arguments for evolutionarily driven abiogenesis.

Meyer starts off by attempting to reframe the debate, he desires not to discuss intelligent design theory, but only to address the question of whether neo-Darwinian theory (including natural selection acting on mutation-induced variations) adequately accounts for the observed pace of evolutionary change. He argues that the trilobite eyes, for example, arose too quickly (a few million years) to be explained by selection acting upon variation.

Sternberg expands on the argument from not enough millions of years, going on at some length about the number of morphological changes necessary to convert land mammals into cetaceans. He then asks “Was there enough mutational grist for the mill of natural selection?” He then does a few maths, waves his hands, and concludes that the answer must be in the negative. All in all this was a very solid presentation, but we cannot evaluate it without seeing the formulae themselves and (damn it) I only have an audio copy of the debate. Perhaps Sternberg published his results somewhere?

Meyer retakes stage and does the maths-heavy hand-waving about functional proteins, apparently assuming that proteins are created from scratch molecule-by-molecule via a uniform random process. It is hard to tell though, since he doesn’t show his work. My maths profs would have flunked him on this part. He does manage to sound smart, though, using hardcore jargon such as “combinatorial sequence space.” Maybe he is hoping to impress the nerdy girls.

Oddly enough, between Meyer and Sternberg I did not hear any arguments about the debate topic, that is, the “adequacy of Neo-Darwinian natural selection and mutation to explain the origin of life.” Perhaps they thought it was supposed to be about the biological origins of aquatic mammals in particular, though it is unclear how they could have made such a mistake.

The rebuttal periods get a bit haphazard, and here I'd like to pseudo-randomly quote from Margaret Atwood, “The chaos smells very bad.” Somewhat surprisingly (to me) the ID guys manage to hold their ground here, but only by first conceding a massive amount of ground to the evolutionists (ancient earth, speciation via by natural selection acting upon mutational variation, etc.) and staunchly defending the notion that one can squeeze God into the very tiny conceptual gap between plenty of mutations not nearly enough mutations. I mean, really, if that is all God has to do was toss in a lucky mutation every so often, why not give Him just a bit less credit? That is so weak tea, it makes Episcopalianism look like an uncompromising theological juggernaut by comparison.

Overall, though, I'd recommend this debate because it is one of the few in which I've heard cdesign proponentists intelligent design advocates giving nuanced arguments which clearly stake out a position between ordinary creationism and scientific theories.

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.