Justicar has very kindly produced a much-improved version of the audio of the debate between myself and William Lane Craig. The original audio recording was pretty ropey. This is much better and the blurbs are largely edited out too.
Go here.
I am hoping the video, when released, will have better audio. I was kitted out with two shirt mics plus there were two lectern mikes so I assumed the audio would be fine. It wasn't.
Go here.
I am hoping the video, when released, will have better audio. I was kitted out with two shirt mics plus there were two lectern mikes so I assumed the audio would be fine. It wasn't.
Comments
If it was put up somewhere I missed it.
By his third attempt he was rushing, and fumbling... and well aware that he had not answered your challenge at all.
The spontaneous applause that he got was his fans panicking... joyous to listen to.
Well done.
Add yourself to the short list of people who put Craig in his place.
As an aside, my opinion is that it's frankly pretty useless to debate him. Specifically, I mean, it's not going to stop him from simply regurgitating the same stuff the next time he debates someone. Honestly, just watch the Shelley Kagan debate: where Shelley explains rather easily how, say a naturalist, can have meaning, even deep meaning. Yet, I've heard him repeat the argument(herp derp) that deeper meaning is illusory on the naturalistic account. He's got a job to do, and as correct as your arguments are, they won't get in the way of his evangelizing. Nonetheless, well done! Sorry for the rant.
I just finished listening to your debate with William Lane Craig and find myself at a loss to understand why you refused to engage most of Craig's arguments. That is exactly what the popular atheists have done in their debates with him, and it makes our side look terrible--like we don't have science and logic and reason on our side (which we do!). In the Q&A session afterwards you kept expressing a fear of "being trapped"---which I'm afraid gave the impression that you were afraid you did not have any good answers for them.
I was frankly hoping that as a philosopher you would engage in an intellectually rigorous discussion. Craig responded to every point you raised. By my count, you responded to maybe one quarter of his points, and very late in the argument at that.
Is there ANY professional atheist out there who is willing to seriously engage and refute Craig's arguments for theism? His arguments are all out there on youtube and in books, just waiting to be knocked down! We need a champion for our side. Right now it looks like we are running scared.
-A concerned atheist
If you are genuinely an atheist, then you should know that I focussed on Craig's God as Craig defines God. The cosmological argument does not support Craig's God over an evil God. Neither does fine-tuning, etc. So I could, and did, safely ignore those arguments and simply targeted what was left - the moral argument. A very good strategy, I think which sidesteps all the largely irrelevant bullshit Craig and other theists (like yourself?) try to get us bogged down in. I can see that must be frustrating for you.
Thank you very much for sharing this with us. I had previously felt that Craig's moral argument was by far his weakest argument and the best point of attack, though I wasn't entirely sure why others hadn't properly confronted him on it.
You demonstrated this weakness beyond the reasonable doubt of any rational listener.
As a physics student I find the cosmological and fine tuning arguments interesting, and I'd love to see someone destroy those arguments in a debate, though I feel they are too complex to be done justice within the timescale, and you were obviously right to sidestep them.
Craig, D'Souza and Turek all basically use them as a red herring to waste their opponent's time and distract from their real weakness.
Thank you,
Dave.