I’ll google it. According to Dillahunty, WLC said he would not debate him because he didn’t have an appropriate degree. I am not sure why that would be relevant to a debate on the existence of God?
IMO, WLC likes to debate scientists, not so much professional debaters.
Agree. Also a creator requires faith. What doesn’t require faith is admitting we don’t actually know.
All possibilities again. We just don’t know. IMO, the chances of these are as likely as any specific God.
HItchens pointed that out in his opener. I still maintain Hitchens won. I do think he should have stuck to pointing out assumptions that were unfounded. He gets off track, and I think hitting the main point over and over would have served him better, but I don’t think Hitchens liked much to repeat himself.
Anyone would win, even my pet turtle, because the onus is on the other side to prove something which cannot be proven hence, faith.
The interesting thing is when people try to use science to prove God exists. If God exists, science does not exist so you would be using something that does not exist (science) to prove something exists (God). Why does science not exist? Because God defies scientific laws as we know them which means that they are not laws but conditions which exist according to his whim and which are mutable.
At the very least, you can’t use science to prove something, which does not obey the laws of science, exists.
I agree. However, I am more coming from a convincing an audience perspective. WLC did not meet his goal, but you and I know he convinced many in the audience. This is why I think Hitchens should have stuck to the errors in the premises. Sure he states them, but then goes off on tangents.
Science is much more useful in proving things untrue than it is proving them true in general.
I’ll take your word for it. Or if I get up early enough to go to the class one day, I will just ask him. It isn’t relevant as far as I am concerned, because arguments don’t care about your rank. My impression is that WLC knows Dillahunty and is in fact friendly with him. Again, I don’t know for sure.
I don’t know what a professional debater is outside of politics. These debates do require subject matter experts. You cannot throw a professional debater, who doesn’t know the subject like the back of his hand, will get summarily destroyed. It’s a war out there and winning is the name of the game.
Well, that’s where we disagree. Why? Because the arguments say so. And contrary to the wishful thinking of many, the arguments have not been debunked. Questioning or finding an un-fully qualified premise is not a debunking. The arguments have to be proven false, not merely attacked. They can be attacked, but the attack has to work. The attack has to defeat the argument soundly and they haven’t.
Personally, I don’t see how they can be, but perhaps that’s my upper limit and I cannot see beyond. Even the Kalam argument is undefeated and it is the weakest and most problematic.
As an aside, I really hate that Kalam gets the credit, Aristotle did the first formulation of what became the Kalam Argument. Even if you prove that the universe did not begin, there is a whole list of other, similar, but better explored arguments waiting in the cue.
So in essence, there is actually more evidence of a Creator, if we want to use that term, than a multiverse. We have over 2000 years worth of philosophy backing the former.
You think they are all possible? So you think something can come from nothing? Can something exist for no reason?
The problem is, God is divine and thus “non” scientific. If God didn’t want us to prove his existence using science, assuming it were possible, he could just change science. Which brings up the question: why bother proving God exists when he clearly does not want His existence to be proven and, He has the capability to stop us if we were to come close?
Another problem is trying to prove a particular god exists and some supernatural/super-intelligent being exists. For the former, in the case of Christianity, you need to rely on scripture which is not reliable evidence. For the latter, religion is irrelevant. And we have to keep in mind that Craig is a Christian so it’s the former he is trying to prove.
On a subject like “does God exist?”. One simply needs to state they are not convinced, and then point out why the arguments have unsubstantiated premises.
I take it as someone who has a large portion of their income coming from doing debates.
To the extent that they are still possible. Something being possible is hardly proof of the conclusion though.
In this context it is.
No they don’t.
If the premises are exposed as not being supported, then a rational person will come to the conclusion that a creator is a possibility, but so are a lot of other things. Picking one option is what requires faith.
The current knowledge we have on gods says that none are yet proven. Some are proven false (or at least depictions of them) due to the depiction being something impossible. We haven’t proven all of them false, or the idea of a creator false, but we still have an infinite amount of other possibilities, and it seems silly to pick.
I tend to just keep it to there being good arguments for the existence of a creator. But at some point we have to have faith. Which isn’t a bad thing to even admit to. It’s a very widespread, nearly universal, feature of humanity.
To do that, they have to know the subject matter pretty damn well. You cannot just stand there and say, “I don’t believe it”. Or “you’re not convincing me.” That would be annoying and uninformative as well.
I don’t quite follow. Can you clarify?
Correct, that would be called a full ‘debunking’. If you can prove the premises false or do not lead to the conclusion then you have debunked the argument. This does not happen from mere hole poking attempts. The arguments are falsifiable, so one has to falsify it.
Taking burden of proof as being on the theist, the theist has a litany of tools in the chest. The thiest has to maintain the argument, the atheist merely has to prove there is something wrong with it. Prove is the pivotal part, it’s not so easy to do. A theory, being a theory for instance, does not prove a premise false if you are using the theory as a counter narrative. The theory has to be eventually proven true to debunk the argument.
These arguments have been polished and burnished in like fine Swiss clock.
Really, to dispose of the arguments in one fell swoop, you simply have to disprove causation. You have to find just one case in the records where the chain between cause and effect is broken. Do that, and you will debunk all the Cosmological Arguments. It was the angle David Hume tried. He ended up doing more damage to the philosophy of science than the cosmological arguments, but he was relentless. He did not give one damn what destruction lay in his wake, he pursued it until the end. I admired him for that. He had some brass balls on him for sure. He pissed off a lot of people and he just didn’t care.
I have a different question for you though. What is your threshold for belief? Meaning, what would it take you to believe that there is a God? Somehow I doubt its a philosophical argument. It almost never is on a personal level.
Religious belief requires faith, for sure. There are plenty of non-religious theists. They are almost all Phd. philosophers and follow a deistic method of existence.
Like I said, most people who believe in God, do not do so because of a philosophical argument.
I don’t think faith is necessarily bad. One can believe in God and be a better person for it. The issue is when those with faith make the leap to thinking a belief and the truth are the same thing. One needs to recognize the limits of faith and ask himself whether or not it’s just to force others to comply with his beliefs.
Well, it seems we have evolved to feel and display faith, so it seems perfectly rational to me that a human being would.
Even if not in a God, many people maintain humans have certain inherent rights. Or, we have certain inherent moral obligations to others. That requires faith. That certain acts are inherently evil (can you think of any?) does to.
Don’t know, faith, to me, seems to have allowed the formation of civilization and societies in some degree of orderly fashion so as to eventually even have the leisure time to formalize and progress science.
The burden of proof is on the one making the claim. If we inspect the one making the claim’s argument, we can point out where things are unsubstantiated, or where a fallacious argument has been made.
I haven’t heard a God claim yet that is solid, so the effort goes into finding the error and pointing it out.
So an example is that nobody has proven fairies to be non-existent yet. They are a possibility. Pretty sure you reject belief in the existence of fairies even though they are possible, right? Same thing applies to Gods, sure they are possible, but the time to believe is when proof is presented.
Burden of proof is still on the theist. The atheist can say prove your premise is true before I believe it. They don’t have to prove the premise false, they can just dismiss the premise if it does not have evidence.
There are many things that could prove this to me. A God could reveal himself to me as one example.
And science doesn’t give us how we ought to live. Split the atom for energy? For weapons? For both?
And we aren’t even bound to it as a force we must always follow. The forces of the universe do not care an iota that the Amish won’t just move on and catch up to the space computer age. We all die and go to the same oblivion in a cold dumb universe. There is no offense in living a life of faith. It doesn’t care about us at all.
I think this comes from how we evolved as social animals. We see similar traits in other social animals that don’t have the ability to read the Bible or have a faith in a God. They try to take care of their families, avoid violence, have empathy for each other.
We know the dog has evolved social skills to live with humans that the wolf does not possess, and that is over a pretty short timeline.
To me it is more likely that our morality comes from evolving as a social species than from a God. We see morality in godless animals through evolution.
I mean, it’s pretty limited. Chimps might eat children of their troop or of a rival troop. Why is it good or evil to do either? It’s not. Just actions by an accidental collection of molecules on a planet that will one die with our sun.