University of Saskatchewan - Saskatoon
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
By: William Lane Craig

Debate with professor of philosophy, George Williamson

After a good night’s sleep, I flew over the prairies to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, where the temperature was 20 degrees below zero.  My debate opponent at the University of Saskatchewan was a local philosophy professor named George Williamson.  The morning after my arrival we appeared together for an hour and a half on the John Gormley Show, a popular local radio program.  This program is now posted on our website.  Williamson turned out to be an extremely nice, soft-spoken fellow.  We had a wonderful dialogue on the radio, disagreeing in a spirit of cordiality.  It was clear that we were going to have a substantive debate that evening.

The small convocation hall at the U of S quickly filled to its capacity of 290, and another 500-plus people packed the overflow room to watch the debate on the live video feed.  I presented my usual five arguments for God’s existence, and Williamson countered with three arguments for atheism based on burden of proof, the incoherence of the concept of God and of the incarnation, and the problem of evil and suffering.  I replied to these, first, by showing that non-theism is not a view as such, but comprises atheism, agnosticism, and the view that the whole question is just meaningless.  A negative answer to the question “Does God Exist?” requires a defense of atheism, not just non-theism.  Second, against Williamson’s incoherence arguments I gave careful definitions of the attributes of God challenged by Williamson and explained the doctrine of the two natures of Christ, human and divine.  Finally, with respect to the problem of evil, I challenged his two underlying assumptions, that God can create just any possible world He desires and that God will try to eliminate evil as far as is possible.  I argued that there may be no sinless world of free persons which God could actualize and that it might well be that only in a world suffused with natural and moral evils would the optimal number of people come freely to know God and find eternal life. 

The debate went very well, and the ballot at the end registered over 80% thought the Christian side had done the better job.  As I looked back on this debate, I couldn’t help but reflect that Williamson’s arguments were actually far more formidable than Shook’s, but because the audience was instructed to hold its applause until the end of each speech, the atmosphere was completely different.  The Shook debate appeared to be closely contested only because of the interruptions of the raucous atheists, whereas poor Williamson seemed easily dispatched, when in fact quite the opposite was the case.  This is part of what makes debating before an audience so unpredictable.

In addition to the debate, I engaged in a number of other outreaches in Saskatoon.  I spoke at a faculty luncheon on “Is Faith Reasonable?” and was pleased to discover not only Christian but also Muslim, Jewish, and other unbelieving faculty present.  I teamed up with the Canadian apologist Michael Horner to present a weekend apologetics seminar at a local church.  We addressed five challenges to Christian faith today:  Michael took on Post-Modernism and Historical Revisionism (the idea that Christianity has not been beneficial to humanity), and I addressed the New Atheism, Gospel Criticism, and Islamic Fundamentalism.

One of the things I enjoyed most about my visit to the U of S was time spent just talking with students.  Especially interesting was my conversation with a Christian grad student who has been infected with the post-modernist mentality, which says that we construct reality by our language and concepts so that we cannot get at reality in itself.  I pointed out to him that our conceptual-linguistic framework can actually help us to get at reality.  For example, a layman who walks into a laboratory may see simply a piece of machinery on the lab table.  But a scientist, who has the conceptual framework lacked by the layman, sees an interferometer on the lab table.  Because he has the necessary concepts, the scientist sees the machine for what it really is:  it is an interferometer.  Far from hindering him, the scientist’s conceptual framework enables him to grasp reality more fully than can the layman.  Michael and I also met with leaders of the atheist club in the student coffee bar, and to my surprise we found them remarkably open.  They seemed to be really struggling, and it was wonderful to answer their honest questions.  At the apologetics seminar, one of the faculty from the luncheon brought his young atheist son and a buddy, and I really enjoyed talking with them.  My heart just goes out to these kids—they’re truly like sheep without a shepherd—or perhaps, sheep led astray by false shepherds!