Commentary on my debate with William Lane Craig
http://youtu.be/4mVVOGP0izY
Someone was kind enough to take the trouble to make this video going through some of the exchanges between myself and Bill Craig in our debate.
http://youtu.be/4mVVOGP0izY
Someone was kind enough to take the trouble to make this video going through some of the exchanges between myself and Bill Craig in our debate.
Huh. WLC is less than truthful? Who would have thought… Great vid.
That was an interesting angle! Arguing that god may well be evil. Craig seems to become very uneasy whenever a debater makes good points that drift away from his script.
I wonder if Craig is a closeted atheist… heh. He knows his own bs way too well to have maintained his faith.
The vid’s a little slow, but I agree wholeheartedly with the points made. Frankly, this is why I think it is not worth the time to debate people like Craig. He’s an evangelist, for whom the appearance of “winning” a debate and appeasing his audience by vanquishing those unsophisticated atheists takes precedence over a substantive discussion and the search for truth.
I thought your debate with him was one of the most decisive defeats he’s suffered, and his continuous dishonesty after the debate simply reinforces my view of his motives.
Why do people keep letting him pull this same move after all these years?
He keeps prefacing his debates with “if my opponent can’t refute these 3 points (or whatever) of mine, I win”. If his opponent makes their own arguments instead of wasting all their time refuting Craig’s arguments, he declares victory. He is being allowed to add his own stipulations to what his opponent must do to come out on top.
I’ve been waiting for someone to respond by explicitly laying out Craig’s typical strategy for the audience in their opening statement & explaining why it isn’t a legitimate move.
You’re exactly right and that’s why debates are not a very effective way to validate a proposition.
I like these two debates:
1. WLC vs Shelly Kagan (Kagan spanked his ass)
2. WLC vs Robert Price (Price’s intro was priceless)
This debate was a bit disappointing but I think Law makes many good points, namely every argument that is advanced can also be made for an evil god too. Clever.
John, I was at this debate and met both parties. my reviews are here:
https://skepticink.com/tippling/category/debates/
I think that it was at least a draw for the reasons given. If memory serves me right, it was actually the weakest case craig has given Sloppy and full of assertions. His arguments were castles in the air with no solid foundation. The stuff on animal pain was just shit.
price did this pretty much.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePc2tHtxC-k&feature=g-vrec
WLC has a hard time keeping up with his own arguments it seems…
Diane, to get a little technical, I think that video is wrong.
ED states:
1) either good is independent of God or
2) Good is whatever God decides – arbitrarily might is right
Craig, in interview there, says third option. God’s nature is necessarily good. He wills something because HE is good.
The supposed contradiction comes when Craig espouses divine command theory in the other clip. This might appear to then qualify as 2) above, But actually, it is a subtle variation. His commands are a necessary corollary of his good nature so that they are not arbitrary.
That’s not to say he is right (http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/divine.html) but he is consistent given the whole context of each piece methinks.
“Good” is an ambiguous word.What is good for a psychopath is not good for those who are not.I don’t think that there is an universal concept of goodness that applies to all human species and certainly not to all living species from which we are only a very small minority.
Also the concept of god being a personal creator seams to me flawed because it implies that he/she is a person priory concerned about the human species and not with the rest of all creation.
Still we can not put aside the hypothesis of a god who simply created the universe and threw the dice.
I’m sorry, but I watched the whole debate, and WLC put a beat down on Law. Law at times seemed incoherent and childish. Some of the angles Law stuck with, severely lacked common sense and were filled with a child like imagination.