Tomorrow (Friday) is the big day: the debate with William Lane Craig at the Greer-Heard Forum, as I previously mentioned. And of course the event continues Saturday, with contributions from Tim Maudlin, Alex Rosenberg, Robin Collins, and James Sinclair.
I know what you’re asking: will it be live-streamed? Yes indeed!
[Update: Here is the video.]
Fun starts at 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific. (Corrected from earlier goof.) The format is an opening 20-minute speech by WLC and me (in that order), followed by 12-minute rebuttals, and then 8-minute closing statements, and concluding with 40 minutes of audience questions. Official Twitter hashtag is #GreerHeard14, which I believe you can use to submit questions for the Q&A. I wouldn’t lie to you: I think this will be worth watching.
You can find some of WLC’s thoughts on the upcoming event at his Reasonable Faith website. One important correction I would make to what you will read there: Craig and his interlocutor Kevin Harris interpret my statement that “my goal here is not to win the debate” as a strategy to avoid dealing with WLC’s arguments, or as “a way to lower expectations.” Neither is remotely true. I want to make the case for naturalism, and to do that it’s obviously necessary to counter any objections that get raised. Moreover, I think that expectations (for me) should be set ridiculously high. The case I hope to make for naturalism will be so impressively, mind-bogglingly, breathtakingly strong that it should be nearly impossible for any reasonable person to hear it and not be immediately convinced. Honestly, I’ll be disappointed if there are any theists left in the audience once the whole thing is over.
Feel free to organize viewing parties, celebrations, discussion groups, what have you. There should definitely be a drinking game involved (it’ll be happy hour on the West Coast, you lightweights), but I’ll leave the details to you. Suggested starting points: drink every time WLC uses a syllogism, or every time I show an equation. But be sure to have something to eat, first.
If it seems worthwhile, I will follow-up with thoughts after the debate, and try to answer questions. Let’s have some fun.
Thank you, Sean, for being a respectful, clear, and challenging debater. You stuck to actual arguments and didn’t turn it into a flame-fest like some other atheists Craig has debated. Many times, Craig wins not because of his own merit, but because his opponents are morons, frankly. But you held your own and did very well!
If I imagine myself as a nonpartisan agnostic, last night’s debate would have left me very confused. Lots of webs to untangle. Lots of philosophical nuance. I imagine it went over most people’s heads. But when I look at the meat of what was said, I [i]think[/i] (and please don’t thumbs-down me for having a divergent opinion, infidels! 😉 ), I [i]think[/i] Craig squeaked ahead. His case was more cogent and came together as a single unit. I think his contention was much more modest than you might have thought (that the key premises of the Kalam and Fine-tuning argument are [i]probably[/i] true but not necessarily with scientific [i]certitude[/i]). I think he defended himself well when he pointed out that while there are cosmological models which restore an eternal past and thereby undercut the Kalam, those models have other metaphysical problems. (I wish he went into that a little more, though.)
BUT, at the end of the day I think there are a lot of loose ends. This is really the best kind of debate, because it encourages future inquiry and discussion. Thanks Dr. Carroll!
DEL, you are right. Morality is a biological adaptation. But that still doesn’t make it objectively binding. So WLC is still right. He does quote Micheal Ruse to say morality is seen as a biological adaptation in naturalism anyway.
19th century “blank slate” philosophers were the ones who decided that if morality is not Platonic then it must be cultural. It never occured to them that it could be genetic. But that doesn’t change the fact of nihilism. WLC is right. And Kagan was not honest.
nick:
Ok, point taken. Let’s say then that it is possible for the universe to exist without a beginning in time. Or that it can exist with a beginning that has no cause. If therefore the Kalam argument fails there is always the other Kalam argument, namely the argument from contingency. If the universe exists eternally yet contingently, then it still needs an explanation.
Michael,
You may be absolutely right, your comments may have been deleted and removed and your IP address blocked. It’s hard to really check this for obvious reasons, but I sure believe you now.
After reading the comment policy of this blog, I was looking for a reason why you got blocked and your comments removed. Looking through all the previous comment again, I came to all the hidden comments of a particular Michael, which nearly all had low rating so bad I did not see that before. And not only one or two, but series of 10 and more comments in a row. And I know I put negative comments on myself because frankly it was a waste of time to read any of them and it was just getting obnoxious.
I really think it is appropriate to block commentators like you, because otherwise, just one, two, or 3 of your caliber, can shut down a block completely by filling it with empty words and obnoxious statements as you did.
So I admit you were right in your last post that you got blocked, but looking at the reason for your blockage I find the ‘gods’ of this block acted absolutely correctly, within the rules, and with very good reason.
Post that said that this forum has blocked Michael’s IP from posting has been removed.
I, too, am sorry that I missed the debate.
I see that Griswold’s complaint has been downvoted, but it did get me thinking about responding, so I may as well post my thoughts here.
As I understand Carroll’s views, naturalism is the correct conclusion given that the laws of physics of common experience are completely understood. That is, we know how mass, charge, magnetism, and energy interact with each other over time and in space, at the energy levels that are common on Earth.
That does not mean that we know everything that follows from those laws of physics. For example, despite knowing that life is a chemical reaction, we do not know exactly how that chemical reaction arose, even though that reaction must follow from the laws of physics.
But it does mean that there is no way for certain things posited by supernaturalism (or anti-naturalism, or unnaturalism, or whatever you want to call it) to physically exist. There is nothing for a putative immortal immaterial soul to be made from such that it would interact in a meaningful way with our bodies and brains. The same goes for a putative eternal immaterial person; a “God”.
A theist might argue that a putative eternal immaterial person can exist and make immortal immaterial souls exist without interacting with bodies and brains, because it is in the God’s nature to exist, and in addition, this God has the power and will to make souls exist without any interaction.
But this ultimately concedes the naturalist argument: The naturalist believes based on reason and evidence, and parsimoniously rejects the ad-hoc supernaturalist presuppositionalist conjecture of the theist. The principle of parsimony should be part of everyone’s reasoning; the theist in my example above rejects parsimony for no good reason — presumably because it conflicts with their presuppositions.
Griswold’s problem with naturalist epistemology is ultimately self-defeating. Naturalism is provisional because humans are fallible and all empirical conclusions are open to being changed with new evidence. So if a putative eternal immaterial person demonstrated its own existence empirically, naturalists would have to change their minds. But this does not make supernaturalism better, because up until such a demonstration was made, the putative God would have gone to great lengths to lie by omission; to hide from the natural world and to leave the world looking natural. A God that deliberately obscures its existence cannot be a reliable source for epistemic justification.
The complaint that naturalism is a “religion” is merely fatuous. While religion is not necessarily easy to define, defining it so broadly that it can apply to any set of ideas or preferences at all means that anything can be a religion, such that “posting fatuous claims about naturalism” is itself a “religion”. Given the downvoting, I am confident that Griswold’s “religion” is not well liked, here — perhaps not even by other theists.
Do you mean Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulators?
The posts are probably obstructing the view of Venus.
I just check the hidden short statements. Where are the obnoxious statements? I can’t find any. Please an example.
@ Clark Griswold
The Youtube video you found in which Carroll says ‘How do you know,’ was created by a person who took Carroll’s statements from another lecture out of context.
@Hayden. KCA fails because it’s fundamentally circular. We never see anything begin to exist from absolute nothingness, which is what the argument requires. If the universe began from another from of natural reality, then nothing outside nature required. And Carroll showed there are cosmological models that are eternal and others that have a beginning and self-contained. Even the ones that have a beginning boundary aren’t beginning from absolute nothing. Kalam and all the other classical god arguments are all just vacuous post hoc reassurances for believers, who didn’t come to theism because they were convinced by a god arguments, but for cultural and emotional reasons. Then they blindly cling to these arguments to assuage any doubts.
I wish you had pressed the B-theory of time a bit further in the debate because it is a knock-down argument against the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
@Jayden, no the clip was not taken out of context. There’s nothing wrong with the answer. The original video is here. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcqd3Q7X_1A#t=74m25s
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That was a really good debate- as good a debate as one with WLC can be. Sean did a great job, and held his own in the face of that snake oil salesman.
What was unusual about this debate, and a crucial factor in its outcome, was the focus on cosmology related arguments. That way it didn’t descend into the usual mess that is the usual fate of WLC’s debates, and which he – a veteran expert in smoke and mirrors- is accustomed to taking advantage of.
Oh, and one more thing: Set the video free!
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So I too watched the debate and a few things. First off if you are going to talk hypothetical science that is to say, “well classical science works up to this point and then we’ll just throw all that out and start with metaphysics.” How then is it any more absurd that the universe can exist with out a cause then a God or gods can exist. Notice how criag never said in the debate the God or Jesus, he said a god or gods.
Secondly something is just never born from nothing. If the universe was then what is there to stop a building from just coming into existence or a whale to coming into being right in your living room.
Thirdly you can say, “well science isn’t there yet but we will have the answers someday” but that right there is putting a faith in science, which is no different then from putting faith in a god or gods. You don’t know when science will find said answer but you are holding out on faith that it will.
***whoops phone hit enter too soon on the last post
pastafar & Lucy Harris: Not being of the philosophers’ persuation, I probably don’t understand what Lucy means by “moral behavior is only empirical descriptively … normative values are not empirical[ly?] demonstrable.” (This reminds me of Copernicus’ introduction to his cosmology, in which, in a failed attempt to pacify the Church, he asserts that his ideas are only descriptive and not necessarily true.) and what pastafar means by “… that still doesn’t make it objectively binding” and “…that doesn’t change the fact of nihilism.”
What does all that have to to with the religious claim, and the falsification thereof, that human morality stems from obeying God’s commandments, without which we are just immoral brutes? Or, alternatively, that it takes God to instill in us those unconscious moral drives that couldn’t arise naturally and which allegedly distinguish us from those brutes?
A person’s moral binding stems, in my view, from one or more of the following: 1) naturally occuring emotions and feelings; 2) effective self-enforcement of adopted values, from whatever source; 3) fear of social implications; 4) fear of law enforcement; 5) fear of deities. Only the first of these has some objectivity and constancy—the rest are all socially and politically feeble. And, as a biological adaptation, the first doesn’t entail a god either.
My comment was addressed also to Sean, because in the debate he had exposed a weak flank in his naturalism: he doesn’t recognize objective moral values (but biologically evolved values are objective, thus he must be unaware of this option) and he does believe in free will, which is inconsistent with naturalism even as an emergent phenomenon. The belief that moral values are voluntary personal undertakings arising from free will is a humanistic position and, in my view, naturalistically worse that claiming a divine origin for them—it is just as supernatural and, in addition, also anthropo-chauvinistic. No wonder WLC beat him on that.
I don’t undertstand WLC’s fascination with cosmology, time and thermodynamics. All of it seems to be rather pointless as soon as he starts talking about a disembodied mind that exists outside of time and space. I can’t see how such an entity can be squared with any of his views.
James you ask; if things can pop into being out of nothing then why don’t we just see objects like a whale or a bicycle pop into existence in the middle of a living room?
Well obviously because the space in my living room is not nothing. When Lawrence Krauss said virtual particles pop into existence out of nothing, people in my opinion correctly pointed out that the Quantum Vacuum is not the same as nothing. Yet many of the same people seem to think it’s a valid objection to the notion that something can come from nothing that we don’t observe things coming into being out of nothing around us. Space-time even when there are no particles is not nothing; It appears to have energy (the cosmological constant) and general relativity shows its geometry is dynamic. So the reason why we don’t see things popping into nothing is because we’re already in a region of space-time, everything we observe around us in the universe is in our spacial-temporal continuum and space-time is not nothing.
Edit: You also say expecting the science of the future to solve some of the problems we have now is a form of faith. I may be willing to grant that since I don’t have an default disagreement with faith but I will point out there is huge historical precedent for science advancing and solving previously unsolved problems thus providing us with better and more powerful explanations of phenomena and I don’t think there’s a similar historical precedent for religious explanations.
Zwirko: I couldn’t agree more. Going from the observation that we have problems explaining conciousness to theorising that minds can exist independent of a body (and on Craig’s rendition independent of space and time which seems even more unbelievable) seems to me an absurd and unwarranted jump.
I’m looking forward to getting a chance to watch the debate, the glowing reviews and thus far lacklustre criticism of Sean’s performance have me hopeful he may have greatly outdone my rather pessimistic expectations.
Energy convervation. A building or a whale does not a have zero total energy. As far as we can tell, the universe does.
Several interested posters over at the Rational Skepticism forum are still waiting for the full video to make an appearance. Any chances of providing a copy yourself?
Relevant thread here.
Meanwhile, any chance of allowing line break tags to format posts? I know we can use empty blockquote tags as a workaround, but it’s tedious, not to mention bad HTML.
At least the Q & A is on youtube now.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQoYEWXPxrA&feature=share
You´re welcome.
One of the sites that was taping the event will be posting the debate on youtube tonight. You should be able to find it at http://www.youtube.com/tacticalfaith
Really enjoyed what I was able to see of this “debate.” A couple of comments:
The theist speaker who was focused on fine-tuning and writing a 2 volume (!) book on the subject appeared to have a singular talent for approaching every argument from the wrong end. Plus his entire argument undermines the idea that god is omnipotent and the creator of all things (two things I assume he believes) since apparently god was constrained by existing laws of physics that he had no control over. Why couldn’t he make the conditions that allowed for the combustion of wood whatever he wanted them to be?
Secondly, the question of where morality comes from screamed out for the inclusion of a primatologist. Or any other zoologist specializing in social animals. We are not the only species capable of empathy or the only species with social rules as WLC seemed to suggest. Maybe god gave the great apes their own moral code and we just haven’t found the monkey Moses yet. I’m skeptical.
Biological moral values are only objective descriptively. We can observe what morals humans and other animals have, but those observations don’t tell us which morals are true as values. It’s the is-ought problem. Our observations don’t tell us which morals we should follow. Science can just tell us which morals people have at a given time and place, not whether the shoulds of a morality are true objectively.
Most people including atheists like to believe their moral beliefs are objectively true in their normative or prescriptive sense (that we should do X, not just that we do X). However, nobody can or has proven that morals are objective facts in that way.