This radio segment from Hugh Hewitt’s radio show is not particularly lively or insightful, but it was quite cordial and covered a good deal of ground related to Hitchens’ original polemic against religious belief. Worth a listen if you are unfamiliar with Hitchens and if you prefer conversational back-and-forth to formal debate.
[2007-06-06]
This debate, I’m sorry to say, is not quite worth the 15Mb that it takes up on my mostly blank 250Gb HDD. It centers almost completely upon the cosmological argument framed in terms of necessary being as opposed to contingent being, and even so fails to elucidate whether this distinction is coherent and may be validly applied to the cosmos as a whole. Moreover, both debaters misconstrue the nature of the Big Bang, and fail to relate their arguments to developments in modern cosmology. The best that can be said about this exchange is that it overloads your rebuttal buffer, like listening to political talk radio.
[22-05-2007]
This debate is among of the best I’ve heard on deep matters of metaphysics, though it strayed a fair bit from the topic question at times. Muchos kudos to the Veritas Forum for bringing together two presenters who were articulate, brilliant, cordial, & downright erudite, for good hearty intellectual jousting.
Since I’m an unregenerate cynic, thought, I’ll start with the low point of the event. Probably the worst argument of the talk was this one from Dr. Alexander:
Of course, he fails to make premise #2 explicit in his argument, presumably because if he had done so he would have seen this argument as unsound and not bothered to utter it aloud. Perhaps there is some way to salvage this argument by recasting as inductive, but I cannot see how right at the moment.
p.s. I’ve developed a bit of a crush on Jenna Levin. Why didn’t we have any girls like that in my old physics department?
This debate could have been better than it was if only the speakers had been given more of an opportunity for direct cross-examination. As it was, they only went head-to-head on a few issues, most notably that of the validity of meme theory as a viable paradigm for the social sciences to research. McGrath manages to sound fairly erudite when talking on such matters, as when he quite cleverly quipped that memetics is not awaiting its Watson and Crick, but rather its Michelson and Morley. Of course, a thoroughgoing scientist would have to leave both possibilities wide open, but McGrath seems to disregard the former altogether when he peremptorily rejected memetic theory (along with religious unbelief more generally) without first examining its rational foundations.
Dennett (alas) doesn’t fully elucidate the key point at issue here, which is that while some genes and memes may be merely parasitic others are far more symbiotic with their hosts. Just as we humans cannot live without our inborn intestinal fauna, so also we could not thrive as ultra-social civilizational beings without any number of meme-complexes, such as language, ethics, and law. However, just as many protozoa are not particularly helpful to human hosts, so also there are ideas which, while spectacularly successful as self-replicators, are not particularly helpful to human minds and bodies (e.g. capital punishment for apostasy, blasphemy, carving deities, etcetera). Such parasitic ideas as these survive not by conferring survival benefits directly upon their host, but rather by creating strong incentives for memetic replication along with threats of reprisal against those who fail to adopt them.
McGrath utterly fails to appreciate the distinction between adaptive (symbiotic) memes and maladaptive (parasitic) memes, and thus cannot see how it might be that some memes spread because they are true and useful to their hosts, whereas others will spread merely because they well-designed to do so. The lesson here is that a little humility goes a long way in allowing one to see the full import of a novel and difficult idea. Perhaps more importantly, one ought not create straw-man simplifications of one’s opponent’s views and then crow proudly about burning them down.
Overall, though, this was a good exchange between two deep thinkers who manage to keep cordial even as they are lobbing rhetorical barbs. Not a bad listen.
Overall rating: 3.5 stars
This radio segment isn’t nearly quite so insightful as one might expect from the names involved. Alas, the conversation was lightly moderated and rarely focused, and Richard Carrier did not manage to ask all of the pointed questions which he had prepared for the broadcast. As a result, the two apologists covered more-or-less the same ground that they always do, and rarely took the opportunity to dig deeper. Worse yet, they derailed the conversation a few times to discuss such sideline issues, such as what precisely Herodotus wrote about Zalmoxis. Alas!
All things considered, you may safely skip this broadcast, unless you are completely new to Christian apologetics and hope to hear an overview of the minimal facts model advocated by Habermas and his young apprentice.
[2006-10-27]
