William Lane Craig vs Victor Stenger Debate "Does God Exist?"

"A debate before a packed house at the University of Hawaii with Professor of Physics Victor Stenger in which Craig and Stenger square off on such issues as the Big Bang and the beginning of time, the odds of the fine-tuning of the constants and quantities requisite for life, evil and moral values, religious experience, and many more."




The other parts can be found right here.

10 comments:

Reverend Phillip Brown said...

Who won?

Mike D said...

Craig got his clock cleaned, especially on the arguments where he tries invoke science – cosmology, probability, etc. This is one of the few debates where I feel like Craig just got mercilessly plowed.

Mike D said...

Of course, all the Craig jedi think he cleaned house. More proof that debates are usually just a waste of time.

Anonymous said...

Would you Adam and Eve it?! I have recently done blog posts with my comments on this very debate and even typed up a transcript of Stenger’s three main speeches. (There was no need to do a transcript of Craig’s speeches; he doesn’t say anything you haven’t heard him say a million times before or since.)

My two pence is that Stenger very calmly and without recourse to any debater’s tricks absolutely wiped the floor with Craig! Make sure you watch Stenger’s recent lecture partway down my post where he suspects Craig of “lying” to his scientifically ignorant audiences by continuing to use the same bogus cosmological argument as well as misquoting Stephen Hawking.

I emailed my posts to Vic and he very kindly posted them on his own website.

Happy Christmas/ Pagan Solstice/ Mid-Winter Humanist Festival, John W!

manic

Bud said...

Debates can be fun to watch, and sometimes educational. They annoy me because people always look for a "winner," which is going to be the person who employed superior rhetorical skills rather than the person who applied better reasoning skills.

William Lane Craig is an excellent orator and debater (he has to be, considering what he's peddling). I've seen him "win" on a number of occasions. That doesn't mean he's right. Craig reminds me of the guys Socrates used to get into discussions with: so-called "experts" who really didn't know as much as they thought they did.

Piratefish said...

I think Stenger sounded and looked tired, and could have done better. Craig with his usual forceful demeanor and rhetoric, could impress some people. In the end, I think it's about 50-50.

Jonathan MS Pearce said...

why does no one ever do their craig research before debating craig? you've got to fight fire with fire. rhetorical devices and assured logical argumentation. i would also approach him on the weaknesses of molinism, and his notions of free will and foreknowledge.

stenger does ok, but he doesn't really make craig sweat. craig uses his typical scattergun 'you must totally refute these 10 points which is impossible to do in this time if you want to win' approach.

he really needs to be attacked on his historicity of his 3(4) fact approach (he seems to have dropped the joseph of arimathea angle). so many hopes on carrier, but all dashed!

i'm sure some of his cosmology is also well refutable.

Joshua Jung said...

Craig's entire point about the "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is just so infantile. It's a silly question.

The basic form of the question is "What something is the cause of there being something rather than nothing?"

But, if you were ever to find the something that caused there to be something rather than nothing, the question could still be asked! Why is there the "something that caused something to exist instead of nothing" instead of nothing? Ad infinitum.

It's the golden ratio of philosophical questions.

Why is there God instead of nothing, Craig?

The question is genuinely shortsighted and myopic. It assumes the answer it is attempting to find: that nothing has never been a possibility.

So why is there something rather than nothing?

Because nothing was never a possibility in the first place.

Anyone else see this illusion in the question?

Joshua Jung said...

Oh, btw I realize I just answered one of the deepest philosophical questions ever by saying it is a stupid question that answers itself. Sue me.

Haha.

Anonymous said...

Richard Carrier lost to Craig, and he said this on his blog, but if Carrier didn't I would have said it

Craig is a master debater and amazing at selling a pitch

Most people are not that good