Konner vs. Williams on the radio (UK)

You may want to fast forward to around 17 minutes into this episode of Unbelievable when they finally get around to the interview and debate portion of the show.

Joan W. Konner reveals that she isn't precisely an unbeliever so much as a journalist with a mish-mash of religious ideas. Also, she believes in "sound bite wisdom." Anyone care for a nice spot of weak tea?

Peter S. Williams is a typically arrogant apologist, who wants to call himself a 'sceptic' while at the same time assuming the Bible to be loaded with trustworthy history, unlike every other allegedly holy book.

Around 40 minutes in, they finally get around to having an argument, and yet they all manage to sound fairly pointless. Indeed, the first bone of geniune contention get thrown in around 42 minutes into the show, and it is thrown back at the host when both guests agree that most religions have some truth.

Williams makes the claim that morality can only be properly considered in terms of obedience to a Divine Moral Authority, thereby begging the question of morality in favor of theism, as is popular in apologetical circles. In reply Konner quotes a number of secular moral thinkers. At this point I grow drowsy and crash my tiny car into a privet bush.

Barker vs. Butt in Columbia, SC

In this debate Dan Barker comes on strong with an ark-load of Biblical contradictions, and not a few snappy rhetorical jabs to boot. He really lays the boots into the God of the Bible, in much the same fashion as that used by DiCarlo only a few days later.  I find myself wondering whether these two guys exchanged notes.

Kyle Butt comes back with a teleological argument and a moral argument.  The former of these is not given in a particularly strong form, it is basically an update on Paley’s original argument but with a bit higher technology.  The latter argument was framed in precisely the same terms as the moral argument repeated time and again by Thomas Warren during his 8-hours marathon debate with Anthony Flew back in 1976, that is, the reiteration that the Nazis acted justly in their own moral and cultural context.  Both of these arguments are downright silly, though common enough in these sorts of events.

Butt’s rebutting is a bit better, but this debate doesn’t really get interesting until the cross-ex.  If not for an outstanding lack of restraint on the part of the audience, this bit would have been fairly fun.  I especially enjoyed the part where the alien invaders forced Dan to commit unspeakable crimes upon thousands of innocents.  Also, the blatant plug for www.ApologeticsPress.org was a nice touch.

• Unbeliever rating: 3.5 stars
  
  
• Believer rating: 2.5 stars
  
  
• Overall rating: 3.0 stars
  

 

Should Schools Teach Creationism? - Panel debate held at National Library of Scotland

Dr. Tiffany Jenkins is the first person I've ever met or even heard about who combines the title of Ph.D. with the given name of Tiffany. Is it odd that this strikes me as odd? She is both brilliant and beautiful, like my wife. Unlike my wife, she evidently knows how to control a room full of opinionated and arrogant men.

Alex McLellan (http://www.reasonwhy.org) leads off by noting (with disapproval) examples during which the evolution/creation debate has been squelched within academia. He goes on to claim that whenever science teachers teach science (particularly cosmology and biology) they are stepping on the toes of the theologians. I'm not sure that I disagree here, but it seems to me that this is not a particularly strong argument for supplmenting science textbooks with mythology or pseudoscience.

Christopher Brookmyre (http://www.brookmyre.co.uk/) leads off with a decent number of various creation stories, none of which would ever get a hearing in public schools except the one from the Book of Genesis. He then gets highly interactive with the audience (which I admire) and makes the case that intelligent design creationism (IDC) is essentially built upon a false dichotomy between evolution and one particular religious cosmogony.

Marc Surtees (http://edinburghcreationgroup.org) tries to advance a scientific case for creationism, using something resembling a fusion of Kalam cosmological and fine-tuning arguments. He moves on to biological arguments against mutation as an adaquate generator of genetic diversity (new information) and particularly the amount of diversity we see in the Cambrian era. He pretty much manages to hit on all the major points of IDC in just under five minutes, and this is actually fairly impressive. It would have been quicker, though, to simply quote Stephen Colbert, "There must be a God, because I don't know how things work."

Julian Baggini (http://julianbaggini.blogspot.com/) attempts to put IDC in its place by pointing out that it doesn't make any scientifically testable claims, or advance any actual research, and this should be taken as reason enough to keep it out of science classrooms. He allows that these things should perhaps be discussed in meta-classes on philosophy of science and such like.

Dave Perks (http://www.davidperks.com) makes the argument that science teachers should only teach scientific theories and facts, and avoid unscientific meta-questions of meaning and purpose. I'm not sure why the science teachers would want to stand in for the high school counselors (during the week) or youth ministers (during the weekends) in their respective vocations of helping students choose their purposes for life. No matter how bright this guy actually is, he is clearly the least prepared and least articulte speaker on the panel. During the cross-ex, it becomes clear that he is the least polite as well.

Around 35 minutes in we go into a back-and-forth cross examination of the various panelists by one another. Baggini gets the first good argument in with an appeal to Hume (a great Scotsman) and his notion that we cannot extrapolate from the real world (matter moving in space over time) outward to the transcendent (beyond space and time). After that, things get a bit more chaotic and more familiar to fans of the daytime television brawls.

Overall, this debate makes it obvious why IDC is not scientific enough for the science classroom, and as such it is worth watching.

Kagan vs. Craig in NYC, NY

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.

Overall rating: 4.5 stars

Barker vs. D'Souza in Minneapolis, MN

Dan Barker and Dinesh D’Souza are both articulate, fun, and easy on the ears, which is a big plus.  For the most part, they lack (or avoid) the supercilious tones and lofty language which unfortunately all too endemic to these sort of debates. 

Barker leads with his secular conception of ethics, that is, avoidance of harm.  He points out that ethics are necessarily rational (requires some thought) and situational (i.e. relative rather than absolute) and must be more than blindly following a list of rules handed down by an authority, a position he derisively refers to as “toddler morality.”  He also points out the exceeding virtue of various skeptics and unbelievers, both classical and modern.  He ultimately fails, however, to make a solid argument in favor of a secular conception of morality as opposed to a sacred morality, though he does perhaps make the case that neither version of morality results in a uniform and consistent set of moral principles.

D’Souza makes a fascinating and relatively unusual argument that the ethics of Christianity lead to the cultural superiority of Christendom, which points to the truth and superiority of Christian belief.  He claims that when atheists behave virtuously, it may be because they grew up in a culture inundated with traditional Christian values.  Here is a representative sample, “These are the virtues of our civilization, and the question I want to ask is, ‘What is the source of these virtues?’ in other words if you make a list of these virtues, and take a look at the list I think you’ll realize if you have any historical sense whatsoever that these virtues came into the West (and in some cases into the world) because of Christianity.”  Remarkably, D’Souza includes the following virtues in this part of his argument:

• Sanctity of human life
  
• Scientific progress
  
• Individualism
  
• Abolitionism
  
• Compassion
  
• Feminism
  

Now, one can easily make a case that each and every one of these virtues get some treatment in the Bible (e.g. Jesus elevated women well beyond what one expects of a first century Jewish rabbi) but it is equally true that all branches of the Christian church have opposed each of these virtues on any number of quite significant occasions, at least as often as they moved these values forward.  Barker points this out, although not nearly in the level of detail which one might hope. 

D’Souza also makes the argument that only societies founded on Marxism truly represent the ethics of godlessness, because these societies incorporated godlessness as a core tenet of their political culture.  This is a very difficult argument to meet, because it is undoubtedly true that blind faith in the prophet Marx and his prophecies have caused at least as much human suffering as any (other) religious system.  About the best one can do here is to point out that the post-enlightenment western philosophies of rationalism and freethought bear as little resemblance to the irrational faith of Marxism as Christianity does. 

The rebuttal periods are really quite fun, both debaters do a fine job of more or less directly addressing each other’s arguments without too much in the way of misconstrual or prevarication.  Indeed, this debate is relatively free of such things, at least until near the end of the Q&A, in which D’Souza attributes to Barker an impulse to believe and practice Dostoyevsky’s claim that, “If God is not, everything is permitted.”  The implicit premise in any argument claiming that metaphysical naturalism implies moral nihilism must be that the only possible reason to be moral is the fear of divine retribution.  I had thought that “toddler morality” is perhaps too strong a phrase for the theistic position on the nature of ethics, but it would seem that D’Souza has chosen to flesh out this strawman on his own.

All told, I’d give each of these guys four stars, and I look forward to hearing more of them.  

Payton vs. Craig on Micahel Coren

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.

Overall rating: 3.5 stars

 

 

Noonan vs. Durston in Windsor, ON

These guys are not professional debaters, but rather professors or lecturers, and it really shows.

Durston makes two theistic arguments which are essentially the same as Bill Craig's first (cosmological) and third (moral) arguments for the existence of God. Since Durston takes his time with these two arguments, they sound even sillier than they usually do when given rapidly and smoothly by Craig. Essentially, Durston's moral argument is this:

1. Objective moral values cannot exist except in the mind of god

2. But objective moral values really do exist

3. Therefore, god exists. QED.

To quote Arif Ahmed, “[He] says objective moral values exist, and I think we all know it. Now that might pass for an argument at Talbot Theological Seminary, and it might pass for an argument in the White House, but this is Cambridge, and it will not pass for an argument here.” Baldly baseless assertion ought not pass for an argument on this side of the Atlantic, either, especially not in a university setting. More a more extended refutation of the deductive argument from objective morality, see this post.

Alas, even with such a weak opponent as Durston, the skeptic in this debate nonetheless manages to fall on his face. Like Christopher Hitchens, he makes almost nothing resembling a coherent argument, but just rambles on for a bit about the efficacy of science. Here is a hint for those arguing in favor of metaphysical naturalism: Try making an argument that starts with “If naturalism if true…” and includes “whereas on theism we would expect” before going on at length about the efficaciousness of methodological naturalism. You cannot expect the audience to connect the dots for you, especially if you only provide some of the dots.

Overall rating: 2 stars