Bradley vs Flannagan at Auckland U. (NZ)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HIIjOfuJZM


Ray Bradley comes not to praise God, but to bury Him. He does a bang up job of it, slowly grinding through the worst bits of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures and demonstrating the total depravity and utter ruthlessness thereof. He lectures phlegmatically onward, building up a towering Argument from Evil firmly rooted in scripture and history. He characterizes the God of Abraham as “that than which no viler can be conceived” and does a fairly decent job of backing up his thesis.

Bradley then lays out the following statements for consideration (paraphrasing):

1. What God proposes for our beliefs and actions are what we ought to believe and act upon


2. In His Holy Scriptures, God commands various atrocities
   (e.g. killing witches, gays, Canaanites, etc.)


3. It is morally wrong to command, cause, or condone such atrocities


4. God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good (definitional premise)


5. A morally perfect being wouldn’t order us to do anything which is morally wrong

Bradley contends that sincere theists have to deny at least one of these premises, for the sake of logical consistency, and then unpacks the consequences of denying any of these premises. At the end of his opening, he challenges his interlocutor (and the audience member) to deny one of the five premises and deal with the consequences.

Matt Flannagan, for his part, defends a version of divine command theory (DCT), and claims that premise (3) assumes to the contrary that God is a moral agent having moral duties, rather than being a moral lawgiver whose commands are moral no matter how arbitrary or harmful they seem to us. He sort of paints himself into a corner here, falling firmly upon one horn of the Euthyphro dilemma. He also tries to reframe the genocidal and homicidal divine commands of the OT Scripture as wholly hyperbolic, and the NT references to a “Lake of Fire” as mere metaphysical metaphor. Nice try, Matt, but that's a no-go unless you can produce evidence that these passages were indeed taken as metaphors by their original audience in the relevant cultural context. For example, did the early Church Fathers who read the NT books in original Greek see it as a metaphor or parable? If so, who did so and in which epistle do they make this clear? Instead of taking such an honest approach, Flannagan cites to modern scholars who have an obvious motivation to soften the harshness of these ancient passages.

During their respective rebuttals, both men do a fine job of contending that the other debater fails to engage with their own particular conception of God and ethics, which seems about right. This is the only notably weak feature of this debate: Each man has defined the words “God” and “morality” in different ways, and thus they talk past each other a bit when arguing about the putative relationship between the two. Overall, though, this is a MUST SEE DEBATE.

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Sizer-Watt vs. Grinbank in Ontario

This was a somewhat formal debate (and informal beard-off) between two young Canadian men, both familiar with the basics of philosophy and theology, but not experienced in the art of public communication.

Michael Sizer-Watt debated Mariano Grinbank not on whether any gods really exist, but on whether one can make more sense of morality by grounding it in the assumptions of either naturalism or theism. They both have a go at the question, but ultimately they both miss the mark because neither addresses the key question "Why be moral" within the framework of his own worldview. Had they done so, they might have realized that they are both talking about acting in the interest of fulfilling one's own values, but operating on very different assumptions about the nature of reality under which one might go about doing so.

Sizer-Watt starts off with a concession that it is harder to establish what is right and wrong in a naturalist paradigm than it is to simply say "Morality is doing what X says" where X is a deity or a set of deities to whom we defer. He wants to argue for an alternative theory of ethics. He then goes on to describe the results of contemporary research at the boundaries of ethics and neuroscience. This is truly fascinating stuff, but it doesn't really prove anything about the nature of morality withoout throwing in several unspoken premises, such as "If morality has characteristics X, Y, Z, then it is

Grinbank, for his part, defines morality in terms of obedience to God and goes on to argue that it can only exist if God is there to obey. Not very convincing to the truly fence-sitting agnostic.

My advice is to skip this one, unless you really dig old man beards on young men.

Hitchens vs. Wolpe in New York, NY

This debate started out fairly straightforwardly, but eventually moved on to a back and forth on theistic vs. non-theistic morality.  It seems obvious to me that a holy man who preaches from a particular holy book should be held more closely accountable to the ethics of that particular book than a Jeffersonian secularist should be held to account for, say, Stalinist atrocities.  Nonetheless, the rabbi repeatedly attempted to get pin communist ethics on Hitch's worldview, while denying or ignoring rebuttals directed at the genocidal ethics of the Hebrews in taking the so-called promised land for themselves.  Ah well.

I've found it exceedingly challenging to attempt to recast Hitchen's rhetoric as atheological arguments.  Here is one example:

1. If religion X is true, then its conception of morality must be correct
2. For a moral theory to be correct, it must be lead to moral action
3. [Insert litany of relevant religious atrocities here]
4. Therefore, religion X is not true.

Mostly, Hitch sticks to step #3 and leaves the rest of the proof and all inferences to the listener. I should point out that most religionists I know will explicitly reject step #2, if the question is put to them directly.  

Overall, this debate lacked heft and substance, and was long on rhetoric.   Both speakers rate about 2.5 or so.