Giford, a brother in the search for truth, unto Christopher, our beloved brother across the pond.
Greetings Christopher, and I hope that our health is holding up. Many of us out here in the real world look at your Wikipedia page frequently to see how you are getting on.
I have just finished watching your debate against a panel of Christian apologists, consisting of William Lane Craig, Douglas Wilson, Lee Strobel and Jim Dennison, and moderated by Stan Guthrie. Now there is no denying that there are some heavyweight names among Christian apologists there; nor that you were heavily outnumbered. Yet I was surprised to see you roundly trounced on many of the points raised.
Heavyweights they may have been, but the arguments they used were far from being 'heavy hitting', and your failure to convincingly deal with them - or even engage them, in some cases - undermined your entire case. When one of your opponents - Craig - summed up, he was entirely right to say that you had failed to engage on many points, failed to refute others, and seemed not to have 'done your homework'. There may have been all sorts of reasons why this was the case, not leastly a lack of time; but the weakness of your answer when you gave one heavily undermined you case.
I would therefore like to offer some unsolicited advice to you - from the lesiurely confines of my computer keyboard - about how I think you should have dealt with some of their points.
The first point on which I felt you failed to adequately engage was the Argument from First Cause. There is really no excuse for allowing this to stand in a debate, especially since it takes mere moments to dismantle.
Questions:
Lee Strobel (4.5 mins): "Scientists now agree that the Universe and time itself began in the Big Bang. That leaves the argument whatever begins to exist has a cause. We know the Universe began to exist therefore the Universe has a cause. And as Dr Craig who is an expert in this particular matter has said, we can draw logical inferences from the evidence. And that is that this cause must itself be uncaused, timeless, immaterial, powerful, and personal. A pretty good starting point for a description of God."
William Lane Craig: "I think that God is the best explanation for why anything exists rather than nothing. This is the deepest question of metaphysics. And it seems to me an argument for God along these lines is valid and cogent. Whatever begins, or rather whatever exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or else in an external cause. If the Universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. And the Universe obviously exists. From that it follows that if the Universe has an explanation of its existence, then God exists. And since that first premise requires that, I think this is a good argument for God's existence, that one could defend in more detail. Lee has also outlined another argument for God's existence based on the beginning of the Universe, that whatever begins to exist has a cause, philosophical and scientific evidence shows the Universe began to exist, from which it follows there is a transcendant cause of the Universe beyond space and time which brought the Universe into being from nothing."
Your answer: Despite this being given in the opening statements, you didn't refer back to it at all during the debate.
My answer: Now this is just a trivial rewording of the basic Argument, with the words 'that has a beginning' inserted to try to avoid the infinite recursion of God needing a cause. As such, it is vulnerable to many of the same weaknesses.
The fist and most important weakness of these arguments is that their basic premise is simply wrong. The Copenhagen Interprtation of quantum theory says that events at the quantum scale do not have a direct cause. They happen based on probability, not causality. While there are other widely accepted interpretations of quantum theory, these too deny the influence of causality. Now, I wouldn't want to overstate my case - there are possible interpretations, albeit not widely accepted, that assume that there is a cause for these events that we simply cannot observe even in principle (and those theories will be boosted if the recent observations of neutrinos exceeding the speed of light are verified). But as long as there is even a possibility that causality has exceptions, any argument based on the universality of causality is based on false premises and is therefore totally invalid.
But even if that were not the case, even if the premises were valid, the conclusion that Strobel and Lane want simply doesn't follow. If the Universe has a cause, there is no reason to think that it is anything they would recognise as God. It may be that the Big Bang is one of an infinite series of events (Craig has denied elsewhere that infinities are possible on, it seems to me, very weak grounds). Or it may be that there is an infinite 'background' against which Big Bangs periodically happen. In either case, this argument fails to show the existence of a 'transcendent' or 'uncaused, timeless, immaterial, powerful' cause, much less a 'personal' one.
Indeed, even if the premises were correct and the logic were valid, this argument doesn't even address Craig's 'deepest question': if God caused the Universe, why is there a God instead of being nothing at all forever?
So here we have an argument from false premises, using faulty logic, that doesn't address the main question, yet is one of the main reasons fr belief - and you fail even to address this gift during the entire debate!
Question from the audience (100 mins): "With the precision with which the Universe does revolve - and it is very precise, if it gets off a little bit, we're done - and I'm not a scientist - the complexity of the human body is so complex, given 5 billion years, if we were here, do you really believe that evolution, the Big Bang, and the degree with which the Universe revolves could just *happen*? Do you really believe that?"
Your answer: "I've noticed there's a big tendency lately, it's called the Fine Tuning Argument, to impress me (or to try and impress me) by saying look how nearly nothing happened at all. Look how nearly it was all a complete failure. I fail completely to see the force of this argument, either scientifically or by analogy. Here's the situation. Edwin Hubble, as you know, discovered that the effect of the Big Bang was that the Universe was exploding away from itself at a faster rate than had been thought. But it was going very quickly indeed - it's called the red light shift - most people thought that if only for Newtonian reasons that would go on, but the rate of expansion would slow, it just couldn't possibly keep going that fast. Lawrence Krauss and various other noted Jewish physicists have shown relatively recently that the rate of expansion is going up and it's burning away from itself faster than it was before. So very very soon you won't even be able to see from the red light shift what the evidence of the original Big Bang was. We were lucky to catch it while we could. It's going. In the meantime... so wherever the something came from, there's a huge amount of nothingness heading our way. And at warp speed. And in the meantime, if you want a smaller example, just look at the night sky, where you can now see the Andromeda galaxy almost without a telescope, headed directly on a collision course for us, that's coming. Who knows which will happen first? A lot of nothingness... [...] so some design, huh? And some tuning."
This is really an even weaker argument, and again a 'God of the Gaps' - we don't know why (or if) the Universe has to have the laws it does, therefore God must have made it that way. Your counter-point (that much of the universe is hostile to life) was unconvincing, and much stronger arguments are available. You could have paraphrased Dawkins, who points out that trying to account for design by appealing to a designer who himself shows all the characteristic of design is a hopelessly circular argument.
Or you could have gone for stronger arguments still, for instance, that the question presupposes that there is only one Universe. Modern science suggests (though it is by no means firmly established) that there may in fact be an infinite series of Universes, each with slightly different laws of physics. If that is the case, then rather than life being massively unlikely, it becomes basically certain. It doesn't matter whether these other universes are the result of higher dimensions, 'Big Crunch cycles', parallel quantum universes, Brane theory or bubble inflation. (Some of those theories are more respectable than others; if you want to pick one, I suggest you plump for Brane theory.) They all undermine this argument for the existence of an intelligent creator. We are then left only with the question of why our Universe happens to be one of the vanishingly small percentage that are suitable for life - but even that becomes a non-question when you ask what the chances of us evolving in a Universe unsuitable for the evolution of intelligent life might be!
Then there were the eyebrow-raisers that you must have expected from any encounter with apologists: Christianity is a relationship not a religion, Jesus' resurrection is historically well documented, only Christianity makes such bold claims, and so on. Even if you don't have time to deal with each of these in detail, I would have expected a brief word to at least prevent such claims from going unchallenged.
But the greatest omission I saw in your case was surprising indeed, since it concerned the central thrust of your argument, morality. More on this when I next write.
Yours in slight disappointment but knowing that you always love a controversy,
Gif.
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