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A Lively Debate

January 13, 2009     Time: 00:19:32
A Lively Debate

Summary

Conversation with William Lane Craig

Transcript A Lively Debate

 

Kevin Harris: Really rollicking debates have been going on, Dr. Craig. We want to talk about those, beginning with one at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver with Dr. John Shook. [1]  It was on the question of “Does God exist?” Let’s talk a little bit about Dr. Shook, and then we’ll talk about this debate which has some very interesting aspects to it.

Dr. Craig: Yes, it really did. It was a fun debate. Shook is a philosopher from State University of New York. He is a very strong naturalist. In preparing for the debate, I visited his website and he has a very sophisticated account of naturalism there with I forget how many different varieties – something like eleven different sorts of naturalism. A very elaborate taxonomy or categorization of different sorts of naturalism and which one he would defend and so forth. So it seemed to me that one could construe our debate over the existence of God as a debate between naturalism versus supernaturalism. So that was what I decided to do – to try to frame the issue in such a way that it would be supernaturalism versus naturalism. I would challenge Shook to support his naturalism. Because on his website he had really bad arguments in favor of naturalism and I felt that I wanted to make him bear his share of the burden of proof to try to show why naturalism is true.

Kevin Harris: And naturalism is the view that there is nothing beyond nature. We’ve discussed it before.

Dr. Craig: That’s right. That nature is all there is. I think the definition he gives is something like “the contents of the space-time universe is all there is” or “physical reality is all there is.” That’s one of the definitions of naturalism.

Kevin Harris: It makes no room for God.

Dr. Craig: Certainly that’s clear. Whatever definition of naturalism you use, there is no room for God in a naturalistic worldview. So that would be the key issue between naturalism and supernaturalism.

Kevin Harris: By the way, I noticed that a lot of your debates are framed as a question: “Does God exist?” or “Did Jesus Rise Again From the Grave?” and so on. What are the advantages of debating a question as opposed to a resolution – “be it resolved ‘God exists.’”

Dr. Craig: When you have a resolution, then the person who takes the affirmative has to bear the burden of proof and all the negative has to do is play the role of the skeptic and say “You haven’t proved it.” But if you have a form of a question, then both sides have to give their answer to the question and therefore both sides have the burden of proof to support why their answer to the question is the correct one. So by stating it in the form of a question it makes a level playing field between the two debaters.

Kevin Harris: It seems to be more productive to debate a question.

Dr. Craig: I think it does help to bring out both sides better. Whereas if you were simply debating a resolution you would have an affirmative case but then you would never have any negative case. You would just have refutation of the affirmative case, but I think students want to hear pro and con on an issue, not just pro and why the pro doesn’t work.

Kevin Harris: This was the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and that is Richard Dawkins territory. Very low church attendance.

Dr. Craig: Yes, the whole Pacific Northwest in the United States as well as in Canada is very secularized. I think only 3% of the population in Vancouver attends church, which is astonishing. That is like Europe; that’s even worse than some European countries.

Kevin Harris: Is there a European influence, do you think? [2]

Dr. Craig: No, actually I think it would be more Oriental from the Pacific rim countries. Canada has lots of immigration from the East as well as from India and South Asia. So there is a lot of people from other ethnicities than native Canada that are in the area.

Kevin Harris: So this is what you were going up against – an audience that was really going to be stacked against you.

Dr. Craig: Right.

Kevin Harris: It usually doesn’t play out in a formal debate in that everyone is to be orderly and ask their questions, and this one played out a little differently though as I understand.

Dr. Craig: Yes, that’s right. The moderator of the debate in this case was the student president of the debating society. He encouraged students to express their agreement with a speaker by rapping loudly on their desks. Well, this created just a raucous atmosphere in the room so that every time Shook would make a point that these atheist students liked they would pound their desks and applaud.

[Start Clip]

It is logically possible that there is a flying spaghetti monster out there as well.

[applause from audience]

[End Clip]

Dr. Craig: And so the whole thing took on more of the appearance of a circus act than an academic debate.

Kevin Harris: Seems like that would be a little, you know . . .

Dr. Craig: Yes, yes it is because you see students applauding points that, to my mind, were absolutely dufus kind of points that he was making. He would say things that had no basis and really no relevance sometimes to the debate and it would bring a huge round of reaction from the atheist students. It was just surprising to me sometimes the kind of feedback they would give. On the other hand, the Christian students in the room were less numerous and were also much more timid or perhaps polite. So they were not making a similar ruckus when I would make points. They would be relatively quiet until later into the debate and then they go into it a little bit more. But as a result it did kind of give the impression of a sort of one-sided audience that he was really making all these great points and really scoring big hits.

Kevin Harris: Well, it would give the impression he was winning the debate because of audience response. Well, that depends on the makeup of the audience.

Dr. Craig: Sure.

Kevin Harris: One of the things he said is, when you gave the arguments for the impossibility of an infinite past, he got up and said, “Well, this just shows we shouldn’t consult mathematicians about what exists.” And the students broke out into applause.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, and I thought why would they applaud that line? “We shouldn’t ask mathematicians about what exists.” But what was especially ironic about this was that it was I who was claiming that the mathematical use of the infinite has no ontological implications. That is to say, in plain language, just because you can use the infinite in mathematics doesn’t mean that the infinite can exist in reality. So what he was saying was actually supportive of my side, and yet somehow nobody got the point, at least when he said this. In fact, there was a pattern that emerged in the debate that was very odd. He says that as a naturalist we depend upon reason, science, and experience to give us the truth. And yet, in the course of the debate, the only person that was appealing to arguments based on reason, science, and experience was me. He kept backing away from reason, science, and experience. For example, backing away from what mathematicians have to say by saying, “We shouldn’t ask mathematicians about what exists.” Backing away from what reason says in this case. And he did the same thing with experience and history as well.

Kevin Harris: When you studied his website and you saw that those were his three criteria of sorts, you realized that your five points that you were going to make all satisfied that. So that is the direction that you went.

Dr. Craig: Yes, exactly. I realize that I was appealing to reason, science, and experience to prove the existence of God whereas Dr. Shook either admitted – he was somewhat inconsistent here – he either admitted that you cannot prove naturalism, you can’t prove that the natural world is all there is, or else he gave an argument that was just patently invalid to anybody who understands logic. He would argue in this way:

1. We know that nature exists; look around you, we see nature. We know nature exists.

2. We cannot prove that anything beyond nature exists. That is his belief. [3]

3. Therefore nothing beyond nature exists.

Well, that’s just a non sequitur – it doesn’t follow. That’s like saying, “We know gold exists on earth. We have no evidence that gold exists anywhere else other than earth. Therefore, gold only exists on the earth.”

Kevin Harris: There is no gold on Pluto.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, there is no gold anywhere else in the universe. It is just crazy to think that you could reason in this way. And yet this was his argument for naturalism. Wholly apart from the fact that his second premise was false – that we don’t have any evidence that something exists beyond nature. My arguments, I think, showed that we do have evidence for something beyond nature. Even if you grant both of his premises, it doesn’t prove that there isn’t anything beyond nature, which is what you would have to prove to prove naturalism. And yet this is a sophisticated philosopher. I was just shocked he would give a patently invalid argument in support of his view.

Kevin Harris: I see from the newsletter here – and by the way, I want to encourage people to read the newsletters that you put out and are there on ReasonableFaith.org – from the newsletter an account of this debate. His response to you on the resurrection of Jesus was “Are there any extra-biblical corroborative writings? Anything outside of the New Testament that corroborates this?”

Dr. Craig: In other words, he would not deal with the primary source documents which have been collected into the New Testament. He just asks, “Is there anything outside the New Testament?” And the presupposition here, which is very common among laymen and students, is that the documents of the New Testament are somehow not to be trusted. But if we have documents outside the New Testament – ah! - that’s real evidence. And what they fail to understand is that originally there wasn’t anything called the New Testament. Originally, there were just these separate documents in the Greek language, like the Gospel according to Luke, Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth in Greece, the Acts of the Apostles. These documents in Greek handed down out of the first century telling this remarkable story of this man Jesus of Nazareth. It was only a couple of hundred years later that the church collected these documents together and put them under one cover that today we call the New Testament. But when the historian looks at the evidence for the historical Jesus, he doesn’t treat the New Testament as a single, inspired book. He looks at it as what it originally was – just a bunch of separate documents coming down out of the first century telling this story of Jesus of Nazareth. And the question he asks is: are these documents reliable? So you can use the historical methods to approach these documents and to find out whether or not these primary sources are reliable in what they say about Jesus of Nazareth. The question about secondary literature that is outside of what the church eventually collected in the New Testament becomes quite secondary. Most of these sources – well, really all of them – are later derivative accounts that already know the New Testament and therefore are not the primary sources. It would be mad as historical methodology to ignore the primary source documents in favor of exclusively looking at secondary, derivative, later documents.

Kevin Harris: But that is exactly what he is saying though. Dr. Shook is saying “I am going to penalize your New Testament. So you are going to have to show me something outside of that.” Why is he penalizing the primary documents? That is the question.

Dr. Craig: He is already begging the question by assuming they are unreliable, isn’t he?

Kevin Harris: They pride themselves in that. Often the skeptic, when they throw this at you, are saying, “We are trying to avoid being circular. You have to show me something outside.”

Dr. Craig: Yeah, and that is a complete mistake. When the modern historian examines the documents of the New Testament, he is not assuming that they are reliable and then proving the Bible by quoting the Bible. That would be circular. Rather, what he does is he treats these as he would treat the writings of ancient historians like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus, and asks (as he asks of those writers), “Are these writers reliable in what they say?”

Kevin Harris: Do you recall his responses then to things like the beginning of the universe and Big Bang cosmology?

Dr. Craig: As I recall, again, he simply backed away from Big Bang cosmology by just saying how uncertain all of this scientific evidence is and how provisional it is and we don’t really know and so forth. In other words, again, you see what I mean? Rather than following reason, science, and experience, he would try to undermine what reason, science, and experience tell us, which I found very paradoxical. [4]

Kevin Harris: Well, this shows that this was almost turned into kind of a sporting event rather than a debate. That’s kind of rare among the debates that you’ve had. How did you adjust your presentation or did you at all?

Dr. Craig: I don’t think I did try to adjust, Kevin. There is not much you can do when you have a hostile audience other than simply debate the issues. I think in the Q&A time I may have confronted the students at a point or two by saying something like, “I am puzzled that so many of you applauded this point because it is patently invalid” or “those of you who applauded this point apparently don’t understand the way New Testament historians work.” So I may have attempted to be a little more confrontational by pointing out that their applause on certain points was quite misconceived. But apart from that, I just stick to the issues and try to show why his arguments don’t work and why my arguments haven’t been refuted.

Kevin Harris: You are in good company because many presidents of the United States have had to make the same point – whether they are on the campaign trail or even in office. Richard Nixon very bravely, I believe when he was in South America, encouraged students to debate rather than to throw rocks and to shout down their opponents.

Dr. Craig: Yeah. In this case, I have to say on behalf of the students, they did not attempt in any way to shout me down or interrupt my speech. All of the desk banging and applauding was during Shook’s speech. It was more like the Oprah show or the old Phil Donahue show. Whenever somebody made a point you liked, boy the audience would applaud and go wild, and they would just be silent if the opponent made a point and they didn’t agree with it.

Kevin Harris: This is kind of strange because he said in response to your argument for design based on the fine-tuning of the universe, Shook said, “If the universe weren’t fine-tuned then maybe other forms of life would have evolved.” And then everybody erupted in applause at that.

Dr. Craig: Yes, they did. They thought this was really scoring a deadly blow. What they didn’t understand is that in the absence of fine-tuning, not even matter would exist. Not even chemistry much less galaxies or planets where life could form. So it is just, again Kevin, ignorance on the part of the students of what these issues are about. They don’t understand the fine-tuning of the universe. I would expect that ignorance among students but it is disheartening to see this among professors who are willing to get up in front of hundreds of students and debate these issues. That they are so ignorant of the problems that are involved.

Kevin Harris: We really have this temptation, all of us, to root for our man rather than to root for the truth. We ought to be open to our opponent if he is able to shed some light on something. We ought to be grateful. But that is just not our attitude.

Dr. Craig: No, it is not. And that is true for Christians as well – they want to root for their man as well. But I think that there is a great deal to be learned from these sorts of exchanges about very profound and interesting questions of the nature of morality, the origin of the universe, the person of Jesus. I would hope that some folks at least will come away from these having really been stimulated to think about these issues for themselves and maybe to begin to explore them. [5]