Accidental

I've heard a lot of debates between Christians and atheists where the Christian has presented the options for the origin of life on earth as being either (a) intentional design by a creator, or (b) an accident. That is, the word 'accident' is used as if it is the opposite of the word 'design'. I don't think it is, and I think this is a biased way of phrasing the question.

The word 'accident' carries with it loads of negative connotations. People die or are injured in car accidents. Accidents are generally when something goes wrong. The word accident does not just convey the idea of a random event, but it carries the connotation of an unfortunate random event. The word actually implies that there is some right-occurrence which could have happened, but did not happen, and the wrong-occurrence happened instead. The claimed dichotomy between design and accident is false.

The naturalistic atheist does not claim that life evolves by a sequence of unfortunate random events, if anything, the opposite is true. Live evolves because of beneficial, positive random events. Not accidents. There is a better word for this: Serendipity.

Of course the question remains, is life the product of design or serendipity? But that is a better question than is usually presented in these debates.

The simplicity fallacy

Just listened to last week's Unbelievable show on "Can atheists believe in human rights?"

The basic argument put forward by the Christian guest on the show was that humans would have no 'human rights' if there was no creator God to give those rights to people. The atheist guest on the show more or less conceded this point and claimed that human rights are a human construct, and are not really inherent.

The details of the debate are largely irrelevant to the point I want to make here. But it struck me, while listening to this podcast, that I've heard the same basic form of argument for God in debates (both on Unbelievable and elsewhere) many times over.

The basic, underlying, argument is this:

The [thing we are talking about] is much simpler to explain in a universe created by a God than it would be in a universe not created by a God. Therefore we can conclude there is a God.

The same argument has been made concerning human rights, morality, reason, science, etc., etc.

Its just not a very good argument. The fundamental flaw in this argument lies in its implied appeal to Occam's Razor. Two options are presented, one is made to look simple, one is made to look complex, thus the simpler one is the preferred (by which it is assumed we mean 'true') option.

I agree, human rights would be much easier to justify if they were granted by a higher power, relative to if they were not. But the two opposing sides in this situation are not:

1. Complex justification of human rights with no granting authority, vs.
2. Simple justification of human rights with a granting authority, 

but rather:

1. Complex justification of human rights with no granting authority, vs.
2. Simple justification of human rights with a granting authority PLUS very complex justification of the existence of the infinitely powerful granting authority.

Given that the argument itself is usually being framed as an attempt to prove the existence of God, it usually overlooks all the circular reasoning and begging the question that is going on here. The whole thing presupposes that God can do anything, which of course makes anything that God can do into a simple task. But you can't have that presupposition when trying to justify the existence of God.

God is anything but 'simple'. Any argument suggesting that something would be 'simpler' by assuming God is fallacious. 

The Unbelievers

Just watched "The Unbelievers" a 2013 film documentary following Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss about at various speaking events (its on Netflix). It had a few interesting moments but was largely pointless. It would have been better to have watched or listened to just one of the Dawkins/Krauss discussions in full than to have watched this series of clips. Indeed, given that I did listen to one of those shows in its entirety, it was more interesting than the film.

But this film has lots of short snippets of other celebrity atheists (Woody Allen, Cameron Diaz, Ricky Gervais, etc.) at the beginning and end, so maybe that makes all the difference.

Does this film make a compelling case for non-belief? No.

Does it even give a coherent scientific message? No.

The entire point of this film is to say "look, there are lots of atheists out there and some of them are very clever and very popular" to the intended audience, which I guess is mostly American atheists. I guess the film makers hope that some believers (of whatever flavour) will watch it too.

Not sure that was 80 minutes well spent though. If I was you I wouldn't bother. Watch a full debate between a theist and an atheist on YouTube, you'll probably learn more.

Faith is extrapolation...

I started writing this post ages ago, following an Unbelievable show featuring Peter Boghossian and Tim McGrew. It languished in a semi-finished state for a few months. I thought I may as well finish it and post it now. Apologies if it seems half-baked. It probably is.

I'm not going to say too much about that show as it was simply annoying, Boghossian (the atheist) grinding his axe the whole time, while McGraw repeatedly pointed out that it wasn't an axe, it was something else. Or something. Anyway, the discussion was fairly pointless, as it never really got beyond a dispute about what the word 'Faith' actually means.

Boghossian asserted (without evidence) that faith really means "believing something even though it is not supported by evidence"and "pretending to know things you don't know".

McGrew pointed out that the dictionary definition was more along the lines of absolute trust, and made a few examples of faith that is basically putting your trust in something where you have no control of the outcome, but choose to trust someone or something; for example taking a parachute jump - you trust the guy who packed the parachute, with your life... you get the idea.

Anyway, I don't think that the majority of believers use the word 'faith' the way that Boghossian claims, but neither do I think that believers generally use the word the way that McGrew claims either. The truth is somewhere in the grey area in between.

So what is faith? Or rather, what is religious faith? 

I'm currently putting my faith in the chair that I'm sitting on. But that doesn't tell me much about religious faith. When I go to the dentist I put my faith in his ability to detect decay in my teeth, and occasionally have to put faith in his ability to fix the decayed bits. But that doesn't tell me much about religious faith either. One of the problems here is that we have the same word used in different contexts and there are nuances to the word that we miss if we assume it means exactly the same in all instances. It doesn't.

"Faith", without a given object of faith is not a useful concept to debate. If someone says "I have faith" or "I'm a person of faith" it means nothing without saying what it is they have faith in. Even saying "I have faith in God" doesn't help much, because to understand your meaning for that phrase, I have to understand your concept of God, or more importantly, your interpretation of what your God has apparently promised to do.

Most of the Christians I know (so we're talking about British evangelicals, for the most part) use the word faith to mean something like this:

In situations where I do not know what the outcome will be, I will act in a way consistent with my past experience and my understanding of what the biblical promises say the outcome will be.

That is, the believer essentially extrapolates from their understanding of the bible and their understanding of reality and, if exercising faith, will behave as if this extrapolation is true.

Of course, a good many Christians would omit 'past experience' and 'reality' from that if you asked them. The promises of the bible should trump experience. In theory, given enough faith, they can move mountains or walk on water - the bible explicitly says that they can do this - but experience and reality tend to temper those biblical principles, so nobody really expects mountains to fall into the sea if commanded to do so.

So its not a question of believing without evidence, its a question of deciding to take a particular course of action, when there is no evidence (or, perhaps, when the evidence is not known by the person taking the 'leap of faith').

Occasionally Christians use the word faith to mean this:

I will obey the commands of scripture, as I understand them, even though my past experience and understanding of the situation would suggest that this isn't the best course of action, from a human perspective.

This is, of course, what most Christians mean by living by faith, even if few Christians actually exercise this kind of faith regularly. Note that this version of faith doesn't claim to know anything without evidence, it just seeks to trust a promise of God more than an expectation. And even if the expected outcome happens, and the action leads to loss of respect, loss of money, or loss of something else, the Christian may still feel that it was the right thing to do because God may be at work in some hidden way.

Problems arise for the believer when evidence or experience suggests an outcome that is contrary to biblical promises and there is no divine hidden agenda apparent. I guess this is most apparent in the 'snake handling' churches in the USA. Mark 16v17-18 says:

"And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well."

So there are some minority churches who practice handling poisonous snakes as part of their church services. And you know what, most of the time, the snakes do not bite the people. And sometimes when a snake bites a person, they don't die. All of this confirms the promise of scripture. Of course, occasionally someone is bitten and they do die - does this disconfirm the promise of scripture? No. It shows that the person who died didn't have enough faith! And so the snake handling continues.

Here its easy for a person with even a vague understanding of snake behaviour, venom toxicity and probability to realise that when you do all the calculations, there's pretty good odds of survival from handling a poisonous snake. Faith doesn't need to come into it at all. I've commented on this before. For the believer, there is no negative feedback loop (here and here). Failed promises are explained away or reinterpreted. But if this happens again, and again, and again, then the honest believer will end up having to question the promises. When the evidence consistently goes against the faith, then faith will begin to erode. Of course, probabilistically speaking, faith will sometimes be validated and sometimes not. It really comes down to how often faith 'gets lucky'.

The thing is, faith works. I know plenty of folk who live 'by faith' and get by just fine. Along the way, some of them have experienced some very fortuitous situations, and their faith is boosted. But even to those who didn't get unexpected windfalls of cash at "just the right moment", living by faith seems to work. I'm just not sure that there needs to be a God behind it, sending 'good luck' at all the right moments. When you consider every fortuitous event as a blessing and every hardship as character building and a challenge, the net effect is a faith boost and a confirmation that living by faith is the right thing to do. 

The God of all possibility?

I've just been listening to a debate between William Lane Craig and Sean Carroll on the Unbelievable podcast. I think Carroll won. Indeed, he wiped the floor with WLC, but anyway.

What I found myself thinking (other than 'what the heck is a Boltzmann brain?') was this:

If there is a creator God who can do anything and everything, and therefore can create any universe, then any conceivable universe (and indeed any inconceivable universe), including a universe where there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever for God, is consistent with the existence of God.

So evidence becomes utterly meaningless in the search for God. It doesn't matter what you observe (or fail to observe) in the universe, anything is consistent with this definition of God. So if you believe in that sort of God, then there is no evidence to dissuade you from your belief...

So given that a great many believers of several religions actually do believe in this sort of God, then there is little point in attempting to reason them out of that belief on the basis of evidence.

William Lane Craig vs. Lawrence Krauss Debates

Recently, the "world's best apologist" Dr William Lane Craig (who some claim has never lost a debate) took part in a series of informal debates with outspoken atheist physicist Prof. Lawrence Krauss in Australia. These were hosted by a Christian organisation, the City Bible Forum, based in Australia.

The video of these events has recently been made available on YouTube, and links to the various videos can be found here. A recent episode of the UK radio show Unbelievable featured interviews with both speakers after the events to see how they thought it went.

I have been doing a lot of travelling over the past week, so I loaded up the audio of these events onto my iPod and have been listening to them in airports, on planes, on trains, etc. on my travels. I'm not going to review the events in detail, but here are a few comments and opinions on the debates, in no particular order.

The debates all followed a similar pattern. In each case there was a theme, in each event each speaker had about 15 minutes to present their case for or against the motion, then there was about half an hour of moderated discussion between the two speakers, then there was about half an hour where the speakers responded to questions that had been tweeted or texted by members of the audience. The timings weren't precise and most sections of the discussion ran over time in most of the events.

Krauss was up for a fight. Even when the moderator of the event explicitly asked the speakers to be civil to each other and attempt to find common ground, Krauss stuck to his case that religion is demonstrably false and that William Lane Craig is a liar and a fraud. The first of those two is nothing new in such debates, but there was a great amount of ad hominem attacks on WLC, particularly in the Brisbane debate on "Has science buried God?" This might have made Krauss look bad, were it not for the fact that he backed up his statements with audio (or maybe it was video, I don't know I was only listening) featuring WLC, in which he (WLC) made statements (about an upcoming film featuring Krauss), which are demonstrably false. Krauss demonstrated the falseness. We have it on record that WLC bore false witness in some of his podcasts, and furthermore, he did not apologise or admit it when presented with this evidence. So Krauss effectively demonstrated that WLC is a liar. In doing so, I think he basically won this debate.

But. On the whole, Krauss came across badly. He frequently interrupted, wouldn't let his opponent finish his statements and poured scorn on what was said. He also seemed to get irritated and angry quite often, so that he seemed to be reacting from emotional, not rational reasons. Also, while Krauss has a great deal of knowledge and understanding of science, particularly physics and cosmology, his limitations were clearly shown when the discussion moved into the subjects of philosophy, theology, history or the bible. He failed on all these topics so, on the whole, Craig came out looking like he was winning. This should really come as no surprise, as Krauss is a professional scientist, and Craig is a professional debater. Craig knew how to play the discussion, play his opponent, and play the audience. Krauss came off badly against this.

Craig's debating style gets to be quite annoying if you listen to it for any time at all. One. He lists all his arguments numerically. Two. This is really quite annoying. Three. Therefore I'll stop doing it here.

The most clever, yet probably deceptive, feature of WLC's debating style is the way he cites experts to support his case. Generally, he gives quotes from named publications, by named experts, who I suspect the majority of the audience have never heard of, and will never read the publications. It is a blatant argument to authority - he never needs to explain why his arguments are valid, all he does is cite and quote experts who hold the same opinions as himself. But he does it with such confidence that the audience assume the quoted name must be a world leading expert in whatever field, and the theory they subscribe to must be generally accepted by the wider community in which they work. Maybe some of them are, but like most of WLC's audience, I haven't actually looked them up to find out.

There really was nothing new in any of these debates. I think I've heard pretty much all of it before. And the thing is, the arguments on both sides are still not compelling enough to sway the preconceived notions of the audience. The Christians who were there (quite a lot, going by the cheers when Craig made a point) will have left just as sure of their faith as when they arrived. Likewise the atheists (similarly, quite a lot, going by the cheers). So what is the point of it, really? Well, the Christian organisers presumably expect that the Holy Spirit was at work there, so there must have been value, even if they can't see it. But what's in it for the atheists? I think they must have a similar faith in the actions of 'reason'. Reason was at work in that place and some believers must be having doubts as a consequence. Not sure.

Both sides probably saw the events as some form of success. Well, maybe the benefit of the events will be witnessed in eternity. Or not, as the case may be. Hmmm.

Do I have to study Koiné Greek?

Following my recent comments about debates on the Historical Jesus, I went away and listened to a couple more debates. One was between Dan Barker and Mike Licona on the resurrection - did it happen? You can find the audio of it here.

I'm not going to get into the details of the debate or the old 'minimal facts' argument that Licona used (expressed in a very 'appeal to consensus' manner here) in the debate. But what irked me the most about the debate was that it, once again, degenerated into an argument about the precise meaning of words in Koiné Greek (the language that the New Testament documents were written in).

2 Timothy 2:14 says "Warn them before God against quarreling about words; it is of no value, and only ruins those who listen."

Indeed. At one point in the debate Licona got Barker to say how long he'd formally studied Greek for. Barker said "two years". Licona casually dismissed two years of study as being 'basic to intermediate' level, and then trumped Barker by claiming to have formally studied Greek for five years, and so he therefore understood Greek at an advanced level, and therefore his interpretation of a given word was correct and Barkers was wrong.

They were arguing whether the nuances in this particular Greek word for 'raised' implied that Jesus was raised purely spiritually or raised physically.

Hang on, it takes 5 years of study to be able to resolve this question, and even then it all hangs on an ambiguous word, so ambiguous that someone who had studied for only 2 years would misunderstand it?

If that's the case, then the original ambiguous word couldn't be inspired by a God actually trying to communicate a message.

Sorry, I simply don't have the time or money to take 5 years out of my life to devote to the study of an ancient language. If it takes 5 years of study to be sure of the interpretation of some crucial verses in the bible, then I will never have a correct interpretation or understanding of some of the bible, and therefore will never be able to decide for myself what to believe. The only option open to me is to trust the opinion of one expert or another, so how should I choose?

If correct understanding of nuances in the original Greek is required to understand the original message of the NT writings, then the original intent of those writings will be forever lost to me and to billions of others, whose salvation apparently depends on it.

And yet, Christian apologists want me to believe that an omniscient and omnipotent God would inspire a book which is ambiguous on some pretty important things. For me, that is a truly unbelievable claim. If there is a God who intends to convey a message to his creation through a book, he would have done it in an unambiguous way.

Thus I can't help but conclude that if the finer points of an apologist's argument rely on a correct understanding of subtleties in the text, then that argument is invalidated, by default.

William Lane Craig vs The God Delusion

This post is a few comments on the event held on 25th October at the Sheldonian Theatre in Oxford and broadcast on the Unbelievable radio show and podcast from Premier Christian Radio. You can also watch the entire event on YouTube.

The event wasn't a debate like other events in Dr Craig's recent UK tour, but was a response by Dr Craig to Richard Dawkins's now infamous book 'The God Delusion'. Dawkins was invited to attend the event and defend his book, but he declined. The defence of the book, such as it was, was provided by three short presentations by three other atheist/agnostic Oxford dons.

The format of the evening was basically a 45 minute lecture by William Lane Craig, followed by the three 8 minute responses by the others, followed by another response by Dr Craig, then a Q&A session with questions from the audience.

As Dawkins's book (which I still haven't read) is an attack on the very concept of God, rather than a specific attack on the Christian God, the lecture by Dr Craig stayed firmly in the 'God of the Philosophers' territory - the only time the event strayed towards the specifically Christian God was in the Q&A session at the end.

This post is not a review of the event, and I don't intend to go into this in as much detail as I went into for the debate between Dr Craig and Dr Law. These are just some comments and thoughts on what I heard. In the mean time, I have also listened to another debate featuring Dr Craig (vs Peter Millican) and I may comment on that sometime too.

The Cosmological Argument

This was the core of Craig's lecture and is clearly his primary argument in favour of the existence of God. He presented it in much the same way as in previous debates. Basically, as the universe began to exist, it must have had a cause, and the cause must have been God.

Most of this argument is reasonably watertight, except Craig's leap of reasoning (about 14 mins into the YouTube video) that the transcendent first cause is "plausibly personal". He claims the personhood of the cause is implied by its "timelessness and immateriality". He then claims that the only entities able to have these properties are either (a) "abstract objects, like numbers", or (b) an "unembodied mind". Because the first cause obviously wasn't something like a number, it must therefore have been an unembodied person.

There is some clever sleight of hand going on here, and none of the other speakers picked up on it. Option (a), the 'abstract object, like a number' is there in the role of a straw man - it is only put there to be torn down. It is only put there to make option (b) seem like the only reasonable choice. Yet option (b) is not reasonable either. Craig offers no supporting arguments for there only being two options here, or indeed for there being any options here. He offers no justification for believing that an unembodied mind is actually anything other than science-fiction.

In other words, we know of no objects, entities or concepts that actually are immaterial and timeless. None. Not one. So to say that an immaterial and timeless thing must be one of two options is a cheat - it is nether of them, because we have no evidence that it is even possible, let alone plausible or probable.

Later on, Craig claimed that this timeless, changeless, eternal, infinite, unembodied yet personal entity must have had freewill in order to bring about the first cause. I think there's a logical flaw in that reasoning. In order to use freewill, the personal entity must make a decision and act. In order for a decision to be made there must be a 'time' or state 'before' which the decision was made (i.e. the entity's mind was not yet made up) and a 'time' or state 'after' which the decision had been made. Similarly with the action. A changeless entity cannot transition from one state to the other. I'd go as far as to say that personality requires change. If something is changeless, it cannot be a person and if something is a person, it cannot be changeless.

Basically I think the whole concept of God (or a god) existing outside of time is absolute bunk. (As I've said before, if it is even possible to have a being outside of time, then that being must be morally neutral - neither good nor evil.)

All this leads me to the point of concluding that if there was a timeless 'first cause' it remains so far outside of our understanding that we can't really know anything at all about it. The message of Jesus is 'God with us', God presented, as a person, in a way that we can understand. The philosophical first cause is so far removed from the person of Jesus, that I can see no justifiable way of connecting the two. If Jesus represents God for us, then the first cause is not God, and vice versa.

The ontological argument

This argument is the most bunk spouted by apologists. It dates back to Anselm in the 11th Century, although it was refined by Descartes and others. It goes like this: we can conceive of a God who is a "supremely perfect being" and who holds all perfections. One of the perfections we can conceive of is the perfection of existence and, thus, God must exist. There's more to it than that, but that's the gist.

The thing is, nobody who does not believe in a God will be persuaded by this reasoning. Its only function is to make theist apologists sound clever to their own supporters. Philosophers can tie themselves in knots over the logic, but no rational person will accept the claim that the existence or otherwise of God depends on whether or not we can conceive of him. It also relies on a lot of 'omnis', and I have very big issues with claiming that a God with all the omni-characteristics is actually compatible with reality as we observe it.

The responses

The responses were mostly adequate but not really up to the task of taking down Craig's assertions. Craig has being doing this style of debate for decades and the opponents were simply not in the same rhetorical league.

The only miss-step by Craig came in the Q&A session when he (incorrectly) claimed that God never commanded the Israelites in the old testament to kill women & children in the 'Canaanite Genocide' - the story says quite clearly that he did. Furthermore, Craig claimed that the Israelites were never told to hunt down and kill all of the Canaanites, only to drive them out. Well this is broadly true, but what of the Amalekites? The OT is quite clear, the Israelites were commanded not to allow an Amalekite to live. However, the format of the evening did not give Craig's opponents the opportunity to follow up on this, and I suspect none of them were well enough versed in the OT to actually know this anyway.

But enough of this 'brief' comment... I have some books to review for you sometime soon...

William Lane Craig vs Stephen Law Debate - Does God Exist?

Just listened to a debate between 'the world's foremost apologist' William Lane Craig and atheist Stephen Law, editor of the philosophical journal 'Think' and provost of the UK branch of the Centre for Inquiry. The debate was hosted by Premier Christian Radio and can be downloaded from their website.

The subject of the debate was "Does God Exist".

In his opening statement in favour of the existence of God, Dr Craig made three basic points:

1. The universe cannot be eternal and infinite, therefore it must have an origin, therefore a cause, thus a creator.
2. There are absolute morals, thus there must be an absolute morality, which must come from a transcendent being.
3. Jesus must have been raised from the dead, if the story was made up the first witnesses would not have been women.

That's it? That's the best the world's leading apologist can offer?

In my opinion, and I'm trying not to take sides here (I'll critique the atheist argument too, below), all three points are flawed.

Well, actually, I agree with most of point 1, except that exactly the same line of reasoning may be applied to demonstrate that God cannot be either infinite or eternal. So Craig is shooting himself in the foot here, or should have been if Law had picked up on this. Also, in this part of his presentation he got bogged down in a pointless discussion of the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter which relied on the assumption that both Jupiter and Saturn had been orbiting in their current orbits for eternity - as far as I know, nobody believes this, so it is a complete 'straw man' argument.

Point 2 is more slippery. What is an 'objective' absolute moral? The reasoning (and this was more or less shared by Law) is that there are certain things which are universally morally wrong. Because this wasn't really challenged in this debate, there were no examples given, so it all became a discussion (this became the main issue in the rebuttals, see below) without a well defined subject.

I've thought through this issue a few times recently and am most of the way to convincing myself that there aren't actually any universal, objective, absolute morals. The most commonly cited (at least in the debates and discussions I have heard recently) example of something that is objectively morally wrong is the act of torturing children for fun. So lets take that and think about it. Is it absolutely, objectively, universally, in all times and places, morally wrong? Well, certainly I am against it, but I don't think its universal - there are, after all, many places and times where there are and have been no people, hence no children. But ignoring that rather trivial objection, is it ever justifiable? Well, no, but does that make it objective? And fundamentally, how does that fact require us to invoke a divine source of morality?

As I see it (at the moment, this may change) this sort of morality is a product of society and doesn't actually require a higher level moral agent. That's not to say that there is no God, only that I don't think the moral argument works as a proof of God. Society is greater than the individual and I think it is entirely reasonable to see morality as an evolved product of an evolving society. And of course, all philosophers who point to an absolute moral code which transcends culture and the individual are philosophising about life from within this society. I'm not narrowing this down to 'Western' society, but rather going to a higher level and picturing all human society as being the context of morality.

Why then is torturing children for fun morally wrong? For two primary reasons, firstly it harms the child, who would otherwise grow to be a functioning part of the wider society, and secondly because it further corrupts the harmer, further enhancing an anti-societal element in society. I believe this is a highly evolved system, but falls a long way short of requiring a divine moral code.

All other 'absolute' morals I can think of also fit the context of hindering or (with regard to good morals) enhancing human society at its highest level.

By this line of reasoning, many things we consider to be absolute morals in this day and age were not, and would not have been considered absolute morals in ages past. One of the newest absolute morals to go was racism. Contemporary society is harmed and hindered by it, but that wasn't the case in ages past, when a healthy skepticism of others not like yourself actually allowed the status quo of society to be maintained. Similarly with slavery, it is morally wrong in our society, yet was an absolute requirement of the Roman Empire, the Persian Empire, the Egyptian Empire, and so on. The issue of slavery in the bible is not a moral issue, because it was not a moral issue in society back then, it is only as society has evolved, that slavery has become a moral issue.

Thus, by my reckoning, the moral argument only requires a collective society that is considerably greater than the individual, it does not require a divine being that imposes morality on humanity. (By the way, why would God impose a morality on humans and not on any other creatures? The human/animal distinction is an artificial one, which even Dr Craig skirted around in one of his rebuttals, see below).

Craig's third point concerned the resurrection, and very simply put asserted that the resurrection event must have happened, because if it hadn't nobody would have believed the story, given that it rests on the testimony of female witnesses. I've heard a few rebuttals of this over the past few years, several of which question the basic premise - that the witness of women was scorned in 1st century society. But even leaving that aspect of the argument aside, the fact is that the women being the first to discover the lack of body in the tomb is merely part of the larger narrative, and that larger narrative was preached as gospel by men - men who themselves claimed to have seen the risen Christ. So the testimony of women objection is a bit of red herring, by itself it proves nothing. Craig made no particular further defense of the reality of the resurrection.

I agree that if you could prove (beyond reasonable doubt) the historicity of the resurrection, then that is considerable evidence in favour of the existence of God, the Father of Jesus. The problem is, in this debate Craig doesn't even attempt to do this, so his 3rd argument fails.

But what of his opponent?

Dr Law's opening statement focussed on two main points:

1. There is an immense amount of suffering in the world, in particular animal suffering - the whole eco system of the world relies on animals killing and eating each other and some of those killings involve a ridiculously high degree of suffering. Beyond that, for most of human history, almost half of human children have died before the age of five. This is the way of the world, and does not point towards the existence of a benevolent creator god.
2. The evil god hypothesis. Basically, this argument turns usual apologetics on its head and uses the same reasoning, as used by apologists, to propose that there is a supremely powerful but evil god as creator of the universe. The idea is to demonstrate that nobody will accept this hypothesis, so why should they accept the equal and opposite hypothesis for a good God?

This defense of atheism was less slick and less well delivered as that of Craig, so Stephen Law was up against it from the word go. Craig seemed more compelling. Also, it would appear (from the applause and general murmuring of the audience at various points in the debate) that the majority of the audience was essentially on Craig's side (the venue was a church, after all). But were the arguments any good?

The argument from suffering is quite compelling, but fails (in my opinion) because it attacks a very narrow god concept. I agree (in general terms) that the argument does a good job of demonstrating that if there is a god then he cannot be omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent. The reasoning goes like this: If god is is omniscient, then he would know the level of suffering in the world, if he is omnibenevolent, then he'd want to alleviate the suffering, and if he's omnipotent, then he'd be able to alleviate the suffering. Because the suffering is not alleviated, then it follows god cannot be all three omnis. QED.

However, the argument stops there. It does not do anything to demonstrate that there is no conceivable god. Yes, it does provide good evidence against the God of fundamentalist Christianity, but it leaves room for the God concepts of several branches of more 'liberal' Christianity and other streams of belief like open theism (basically an admission that God is not omniscient).

The evil god hypothesis is also quite a compelling argument, but again attacks a very narrowly defined God concept. The argument should lead to the conclusion that there is no omnipotent, omniscient, omnimalevolent deity, and by analogy that there is also no omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent deity either. But that's as far as it goes again.

So, all in all, Law made two compelling arguments against a very narrow god concept, none of what he presented was really good enough to question the existence of a transcendent deity in general, and certainly did not and could not address the question of origins. Why are we here? Law had no answer for this.

1st round of rebuttals

Following this, Craig had an opportunity to respond to Law's statement. And this is where, in my opinion, Craig won the debate (the podcast version gave no indication of whether or not a vote was taken before or after the debate). His response to Law was flawed, but was done so well and with such apparent authority that Law's case never recovered.

Craig's rebuttal of the animal suffering issue was twofold: firstly he asserted (with appeal to named experts) that there are three forms of pain and that only humans experience type three pain (please excuse my simple summary of his argument, I wasn't taking notes when listening) and so the suffering of animals is a non-argument. Further to that, he explained that the 'predation' of some animals by others was essential to have a functioning eco-system. It was an excellent response, even if it was all a distraction away from the main point.

If he'd picked up on it, Law could have attacked this line of reasoning by picking at Craig's passing comment that suggested that other 'higher primates' as well as humans experience this type three pain. This was basically Craig blurring the line between humans and animals, and many of his moral arguments could be attacked by exploiting this. But Law went on the defensive, and didn't follow through. Furthermore, Law could have appealed to the pet owners in the audience, all of whom know, yes know, that their pets experience pain and even give them reproachful looks at the vet when they see you have allowed them to feel pain. That line of attack would have sunk Craig's assertion, at least for a portion of the audience.

Craig's response to the evil god hypothesis bolstered his case, without actually dealing with the main points of the argument. His attack was again twofold: firstly that, by definition, god is good, so an evil god is not a god. Of course, that's just an argument of semantics, but Craig was winning by this point, so it didn't matter to him. The second strand of his attack on the evil god concept was essentially his argument from morality again - there is an objective morality, in order to have this, there must be a good god providing that morality.

I think Craig's rebuttal was weak, but it didn't really matter as he was beating Law by this point and he knew it.

When Law had his chance to rebut Craig he made a considerable misstep by not responding to Craig's cosmological argument. He zeroed in on the issues surrounding morality and got bogged down in his evil god hypothesis again.

Both speakers had a second chance to rebut the other. Craig, who must have been patting himself on the back by this point, simply pointed out that by not responding to his cosmological argument Law had more of less conceded defeat on this issue. Furthermore he used Law's evil god hypothesis to suggest that Law believed in this god, hence was not really an atheist. Craig managed to muddy the waters on this issue so much that Law never managed to get back out of it, even through the whole question and answer session. Craig managed to keep the rest of the discussion bogged down in the same issues, going round in circles, and hence came out as the clear winner - not because his argument was any better, but because he knew all the tricks of making your opponent look like a fool.

Law's second rebuttal was slightly more considered and attempted to actually meet all Craig's arguments head on, but his assertion that Craig hadn't managed to demonstrate the existence of a God sounded fairly hollow.

So, all in all, it was a good debate, at least from Craig's point of view. Many believers will have gone away from that debate feeling that their beliefs were somehow validated, while the atheists will have gone away with their tails between their legs. I'm not sure anyone will have had their minds changed by the debate, but I'm not sure that's actually the real objective of these debates.

I've recently heard the opinion that apologetics is not about evangelism, its really about boosting (or maintaining) the faith of those who are already believers. I kind of think this is the case, whatever the sales pitch of these events actually is (e.g. "bring a non-believing friend").

Anyway, this made me think, and there'll be a spin-off blog posting from this along in a day or two.