Free Mark Steyn linked to eight of my posts today, so I went over there to see what else he found. Canadian writer Deborah Gyapong linked to a debate play-by-play between Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett.

First off, the audio of the debate is here.

Here is an excerpt from the play-by-play, which has drawn over 100 comments so far:

The debate was between Alvin Plantinga and Daniel Dennett. Plantinga is one of the founders of the Society of Christian Philosophers and one of the fathers of the current desecularization of philosophy. He is widely regarded – even by his critics – as one of the finest epistemologists of the last fifty years and one of the finest philosophers of religion since the Medieval period. Daniel Dennett is one of the New Atheists and is a well-known proponent of atheistic Darwinism and critic of religion. He is widely regarded – even by his critics – as one of the most important early philosophers of mind that opened the field to cognitive science and evolutionary biology. He has contributed enormously to the serious study of the mind and its relationship to the brain. Both philosophers are over sixty and perhaps at the height of their philosophical powers. They have also faced off before but, as far as I know, not in person.

It looks like Plantinga presented on his argument that rationality is incompatible with naturalism and evolution. I actually heard him present this paper live, and the phrase “the probability of R on N and E” is seared into my memory. Here is another excerpt:

Plantinga was the presenter. The session asked the question of whether science and religion were compatible. Plantinga argues that they are and that in fact the scientific theory taken to be most incompatible with religion – evolutionary theory – is not only compatible with Christian theism (the religious view Plantinga defends) but is incompatible with Christian theism’s most serious opponent in the scientific world – naturalism. Naturalism is the view that physics and the sciences can give a complete description of reality. Plantinga defines it as the view that there is no God or anything like God.

Here’s the conclusion of the play-by-play:

On another note, I walked around and listened to various conversations (not eavesdropping really, just listening for loud reactions to the session). The Christian philosophers were particularly interesting. They were not upset, surprised or even moved. They were wholly unphased. They were so unphased that they weren’t even discussing the session. I was floored at Dennett’s behavior but they reacted as if Dennett’s hateful, childish behavior was to be expected. I thought they would be upset, but from what I can tell they simply expected Dennett to compare theistic belief to holocaust denial and to advocate murdering the Almighty. I guess I was wrong to expect more from him.

In my estimation, Plantinga won hands down because Dennett savagely mocked Plantinga rather than taking him seriously. Plantinga focused on the argument, and Dennett engaged in ridicule. It is safe to say that Dennett only made himself look bad along with those few nasty naturalists that were snickering at Plantinga. The Christians engaged in no analogous behavior. More engagements like this will only expand the ranks of Christian philosophers and increase the pace of academic philosophy’s desecularization.

If you guys are into debates, I highly recommend William Lane Craig debates here. Plantinga doesn’t debate much, but there is this book-debate he did recently, that I haven’t checked out yet. Dennett debated twice before that I know of, first, against that wimpy microbiologist Alister McGrath as part of the Greer-Heard series here, and against Dinesh D’Souza here.