A Great Debater!

Is Christian apologist William Lane Craig a great debater?

Well - of course the answer is emphatically yes, but only in the sense that his command of the podium helps him to carry the audience to a conclusion that he has persuaded them is true.

These persuasive skills do not necessarily have anything to do with truth or rational thought.  We all know that great speakers can engage with the audience and carry them along with them towards a conclusion.  We know of powerful Roman Catholic speakers who have done this throughout history, Adolf Hitler being just such a person.  We might not agree with his philosophy, and no doubt many Germans felt nervous about it at the time, but a powerful leader can be very persuasive.

Let's examine one of William Lane Craig's debates, with famous atheist and author of "God is not Great", Christopher Hitchens.  The event took place at Biola University on 4th April 2009 and if you have the patience and stamina, you can watch all 2 hours 12 minutes of it at this link.  I choose this one because it was widely claimed that Craig 'won' it and it is interesting to analyse why.  Given the demography of the audience it would have been somewhat strange if he had not and Hitchens' performance was not one of his greatest.  He failed to nail Craig's arguments as incisively as usual.

Craig used five arguments which he repeated ad nauseum.

• The Cosmological argument
• The Teleological argument
• The origins of objective morality
• The 'evidence' of the resurrection
• Immediate experience of god

Not a single one of these is actually persuasive unless you happen to believe in the same particular god that Craig worships.

1/  The Cosmological argument or 'Kalâm argument', also sometimes known as the 'argument from first cause',  is treated well here and I feel that it is not worth adding to it except to reiterate that its assumptions are flawed and its corollary could apply to any god that you choose.  Indeed it was originally used to prove the existence of Allah, not 'God'.

2/  The Teleological argument or 'argument from design' is also totally flawed.  The universe looks superficially as though it has been designed for 'us', but when you look in more detail the hypothesis begins to fall apart.  I address a similar topic here.  Looking at the alleged difficulties in physics, Victor Stenger counters them very clearly in his books, including "God, The Failed Hypothesis."

3/  Objective morality is a strange concept.  For one thing, it is perfectly clear that there is no such thing as objective morality.  Most of us would not wish to be associated with Hitler's view of morality, but it has to be accepted that it came very much from the teaching of the Roman Catholic church - even the anti-semitic parts.  People from cultures that are not based on christianity would surely be expected to have even more alien ideas of objective morality.

The christians who claim that the only objective morality is theirs have failed twice.  First they have not looked at the world to determine whether there is any such thing - which there is not.  Secondly they claim that it is theirs and accuse atheists of not having any way to explain it otherwise.  In my view it is those christians who need to provide evidence to support their claim.  Just because their bronze and iron age writings contain something that is a little bit like present day western morality (if you ignore the correct passages), they seem to claim that these things were not already developing throughout pre-history.  But of course they do that with the whole Jesus myth too.  It is not a new tactic.

4/  The evidence for the resurrection has been covered by many people including me here (and obliquely, here, since the resurrection could not have happened without the crucification).  Since there is really no independent evidence that the resurrection happened at all, and since the story was already many thousands of years old at the time (here), this point can be dismissed as a smoke screen.

5/  Immediate experience of god falls into another category.  It might indeed be 'true' to the person who has had the experience, and they could easily consider it to be evidence to themselves.  I make a point of never denying that such experiences might have happened to them but it is not actually evidence for me.  Even if I had that kind of experience tomorrow I would probably find a different explanation for it.  At the very least I would wonder whether I had met god or just had an interesting and not-uncommon psychological experience.

 * * * * * 

And that is all there was to it.  Five easily dismissed arguments could win you a debate, even against an acknowledged rhetorical opponent.

You have to draw your own conclusions.  Yours might be different from mine and they might not, but at the very least you can understand why Richard Dawkins described Craig as  'a ponderous buffoon who brandishes impressive-sounding syllogisms'.  Craig's use of language is not designed to promote understanding but to impress the audience with his rhetorical expertise, and he achieves this very impressively.  His use of words such as 'cosmological', 'teleological' and 'transcendent' are all examples of his art.

It is sad that he has to repeat the same old topics as if they somehow prove anything.  They don't.  But of course there are no new arguments for the existence of god.  All the new arguments attempt to use the progress of science to prove that science has not progressed and they attempt to invoke god as a supernatural alternative.

Related post:  William Lane Craig to visit