manicstreetpreacher analyses an occasion where for once William Lane Craig gets a proper pasting.
I have referred to this debate countless times on my own blog and comments on other blogs that I thought it was high time I supplied all the links together with all my comments in one post.
Victor J Stenger, American cosmologist, atheist and author of Has Science Found God? The Latest Result for the Search for Purpose in the Universe and God, The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist debates Christian apologist William Lane Craig at the University of Hawaii in 2003 on the motion “Is there a God?”
The YouTube video (which goes to audio-only for the cross-examination, closing statements and audience Q&A) starts here:
The whole debate is available to download as an MP3 audio.
Analysis
Opinions among the commenters at Debunking Christianity and on YouTube are divided, but personally, I think for once Craig received an absolute flogging! Stenger may not be a great showman, but what he lacks in flare, he more than adequately makes up for in authority and clarity.
William Lane Craig ought to be easy to beat in a debate since he uses exactly the same arguments every time, but frustratingly he is not. This is due in part to many of his opponents failing to research his arguments and tactics properly, but also because Craig has a range of dirty tricks up his sleeve. One of such dirty trick is to shift the burden of proof onto his opponent when he is the one making the positive claims.
However, Stenger skilfully refutes every single one of Craig’s lame “arguments” and presents positive reasons for non-belief over and above mere the absence of evidence for God. Craig fails to respond to three quarters of Stenger’s opening address: the failures of revelation, the ineffectiveness of prayer, the existence of non-believers, and the absence of special knowledge in the Bible. Stenger even trashes him in areas that one would think would not his forte, such biblical scholarship.
In his first rebuttal Craig actually agrees with Stenger that naturalistic explanations are preferable to supernatural explanations, but then argues that when naturalism falls short, we have no alternative but to resort to a supernatural explanation.
So basically Craig’s cosmology boils down to, “The zeros after the decimal point are too many, it’s all too complex and improbable for my tiny mind… I’VE GOT IT!!! It must have been The Thing That Made The Things For Which There Is No Known Maker!”
Stenger runs so many rings around Craig that this is the only debate where I have not heard Craig finish his closing statement by preaching to the audience how JC changed his life forever and that they should try reading the New Testament as well.
Make sure you listen to the tape all the way through to the Q & A after closing statements because Stenger even manages to steamroller Craig on his biblical scholarship thus: “Dr Craig continually talks about ‘majorities of scholars’. I don’t know where he takes these polls. Does he take them at Bob Jones University?!” Genius!
Highlights
I’ve published the transcript of Stenger’s three main speeches on another post, but listen carefully at the following points on the audio where Stenger produces some real gems:
| 32 minutes | Stenger demonstrates philosophically that the mere existence of the universe is evidence against God! |
| 38 minutes | Stenger points out that saying “God did it” is about as useful as saying “Santa Claus did it”. |
| 39 minutes | Stenger sticks two fingers up to NOMA by informing us that the world’s greatest scientists do not see God with their telescopes, microscopes and other powerful instruments. |
| 42 minutes | Stenger points out that we’ve waited too long for JC’s Second Coming and it just ain’t gonna happen. |
| 46 minutes | Stenger cites the failed double-blind prayer experiments and imagines an alternative universe where doctors prescribe “prayer aspirin”. |
| 68 minutes | Stenger rubbishes Craig’s argument from improbability by asking what is the probability of God and then showing that every person’s very existence is stupendously improbable without requiring any supernatural aid. |
| 70 minutes | Stenger asks why we would automatically expect “nothing” rather than “something” if God does not exist and why there is God rather than nothing. |
| 71 minutes | Stenger puts paid the notion that modern cosmology confirms Genesis (!). |
| 102 minutes | Stenger exposes Craig’s “arguments” as nothing more than gap theology. |
| 108 minutes | Stenger would come out of retirement at the prospect of the all the funding opportunities that scientists would be presented with if evidence of a personal creator God were discovered. |
| 110 minutes | Stenger movingly shows up Craig’s rancid theodicy for what it is by saying that he would gladly accept eternal punishment if he could stop the suffering of a child dying in agony of leukaemia if he had the power. So why won’t God? |
| 114 minutes | Stenger floors Craig on his argument from “the universal opinion of modern scholarship”. |
| 122 minutes | Stenger wonders how the hell Craig can possibly know what he has just said! |
| 143 minutes | Stenger quotes the Good Book to show that God admits that he is the cause of evil (Isaiah 45: 7). Further along Craig appeals to “context” and “translation” to show that the passage should not be taken literally. The King James Version is not the inerrant edition of the Bible, I take it? Biblical scholarship FAIL! |
| 152 minutes | Stenger tells Craig that most of the evil and suffering in the world most certainly does not come from humans. And child torture and the Holocaust are wrong. With or without God. |
Finally! One of Craig’s opponents who actually did his homework, which alas Christopher Hitchens did not. Why, I do not know. Hitchens bangs on about how great Stenger’s God, The Failed Hypothesis is and even wrote the foreword for the paperback edition. He ought to have re-read it in preparation for meeting Craig, since Stenger demolishes Craig’s arguments within its pages!
Stenger and the New Atheism
Stenger has recently published a booked called The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason where he summarises the arguments of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens and his own in the God debate as well as the often underhanded attempts by religious apologists to refute them, such as misrepresenting what they actually say and quote-mining prominent atheist scientists to give the impression that they support theism.
I haven’t read Stenger’s new book for myself, but I’d recommend this recent lecture where he comments that he refuted Craig’s cosmological argument during their live debate on the basis that Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time recanted his and Roger Penrose’s earlier thesis and now state that the universe did not begin with a singularity known as the “Big Bang”. According to Stenger, Craig is clearly “lying” to his scientifically ignorant audiences by continuing to use the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
William Lane Craig and evolution
In years gone by Craig has been non-committal about his belief in the truth of Darwinian evolution. In his 2007 debate in London against British embryologist Lewis Wolpert, author of Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origins of Belief, Craig stated that he neither believed nor disbelieved in evolution, but reserved his opinion on the grounds that the evolution of Homo sapiens may have been so “improbable” that there simply isn’t enough time for the process to be completed before the sun burnt out.
As Wolpert pointed out at the time, this is complete nonsense. However, in the last year or so Craig has hardened his scepticism towards evolution and has turned around its plausibility as only he knows how. During his debate against Christopher Hitchens at Biola University in April, Craig cited John Barrow and Frank Tipler’s The Anthropic Cosmological Principle stating that there were ten stages in human evolution each of which were so “improbable” (!) that the amount of time required to complete the process would be so great that our sun would have ceased to become a main sequence star and exploded into a red giant.
In Craig’s world, if evolution did occur it would quite literally be a miracle and therefore evidence for God’s existence. This next clip is from another event, but it is virtually identical to what Craig said in his debate against Hitchens:
Since then, Craig has become what he claims a tentative advocate of Intelligent Design “Theory” and debated theistic evolutionary scientist Francisco Ayala at Indiana University on 5 November 2009. Contrary to the fawning opinions of certain Craigophilies, Ayala did reasonably well against Craig. I’m not going to review that debate as well but Ayala is a lecturer, not a debater. And besides, Craig did his job for him by using fallacious reasoning by arguing that end products of unguided genetic mutations are too improbable and therefore an invisible, undetectable, unknowable designer is a rational alternative.
Stenger actually corrected this flawed argument in their debate six years ago. From Stenger’s first rebuttal:
Argument from improbability
In this argument and other arguments about the design in the universe, Dr Craig claims that the universe and life are too improbable to be solely natural.
The improbable happens
However, this is a fallacious argument. To use probability to decide between two alternatives requires a comparison of the probabilities of each alternative. Dr Craig claims that these natural probabilities are exceeding low. But he hasn’t told us anything about what the supernatural probabilities are and yet it’s a comparison of these two that must be made.
What’s the probability that the laws of nature are violated? What’s the probability that there’s an all-good, all-powerful, all-knowing but undetectable super-being behind all of this? Complex things are common. We see natural events every moment. We’ve never seen a supernatural event.
Furthermore, low probability events happen every day. What’s the probability that my distinguished opponent exists? You have to calculate the probability that a particular sperm united with a particular egg, then multiply that by the probability that his parents met, and then repeat that calculation for his grandparents and all his ancestors going back to the beginning of life on Earth.
Even if you stop the calculation with Adam and Eve, you are going to get a fantastically small number.
To use words that Dr Craig has used before, “Improbability is multiplied by improbability by improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.”
Well, Dr Craig has a mind-reeling, incomprehensibly low probability – a priori probability – for existing. Yet here he is before us today.
Modern versions of the argument from design – both the fine-tuning argument and the intelligent design argument – share this fatal flaw. They are based on the idea that natural causes can be ruled out by some arbitrary notion of low probability.
My point is that Craig has been told that his arguments from fine-tuning and improbability are fallacious on many occasions. Outright dishonesty – in effect, “telling lies for God” – is the only inference to the best explanation we can draw in respect of his pronouncements.
manicstreetpreacher 