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Videos

William Lane Craig debates Austin Dacey: Does God Exist?

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Two tough rams butt heads, and may the best ram win!
Two tough rams butt heads, and may the best ram win!

Here is the video and summary of a debate between Christian theist William Lane Craig and Austin Dacey at Purdue University in 2004 about the existence of God.

The debaters:

The video: (2 hours)

The video shows the speakers and powerpoint slides of their arguments. Austin Dacey is one of the top atheist debaters, and I would put him second to Peter Millican alone, with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong in third place. This is the debate to show people who are new to apologetics. The debate with Peter Millican is better for advanced students, and that’s no surprise since he teaches at Oxford University and is familiar with all of Dr. Craig’s work. The Craig-Dacey debate is the one that I give to my co-workers.

By the way, you can get the DVDs and CDs for the first Craig-Dacey debate and the second Craig-Dacey debate and the second Craig-Sinnott-Armstrong debate. The Peter Millican debate is not available on DVD, but the link above (Peter Millican) has the video and my summary.

Dr. Dacey’s 5 arguments below are all good arguments that you find in the academic literature. He is also an effective and engaging speaker, This is a great debate to watch!

SUMMARY of the opening speeches:

Dr. Craig’s opening statement:

Dr. Craig will present six reasons why God exists:

  1. (Contingency argument) God is the best explanation of why something exists rather than nothing
  2. (Cosmological argument)  God’s existence is implied by the origin of the universe
  3. (Fine-tuning argument) The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life points to a designer of the cosmos
  4. (Moral argument) God is the best explanation for the existence of objective moral values and objective moral duties
  5. (Miracles argument) The historical facts surrounding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus
  6. (Religious experience) God’s existence is directly knowable even apart from arguments

Dr. Dacey’s opening argument:

There are two ways to disprove God’s existence, by showing that the concept of God is self-contradictory, or by showing that certain facts about ourselves and the world are incompatible with what we would expect to be true if God did exist. Dr. Dacey will focus on the second kind of argument.

  1. The hiddenness of God
  2. The success of science in explaining nature without needing a supernatural agency
  3. The dependence of mind on physical processes in the brain
  4. Naturalistic evolution
  5. The existence of gratuitous / pointless evil and suffering

One final point:

One thing that I have to point out is that Dr. Dacey quotes Brian Greene during the debate to counter Dr. Craig’s cosmological argument. Dr. Craig could not respond because he can’t see the context of the quote. However, Dr. Craig had a rematch with Dr. Dacey where was able to read the context of the quote and defuse Dr. Dacey’s objection. This is what he wrote in his August 2005 newsletter after the re-match:

The following week, I was off an another three-day trip, this time to California State University at Fresno. As part of a week of campus outreach the Veritas Forum scheduled a debate on the existence of God between me and Austin Dacey, whom I had debated last spring at Purdue University. In preparation for the rematch I adopted two strategies: (1) Since Dacey had come to the Purdue debate with prepared speeches, I decided to throw him for a loop by offering a different set of arguments for God, so that his canned objections wouldn’t apply. I chose to focus on the cosmological argument, giving four separate arguments for the beginning of the universe, and on the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection. (2) I reviewed our previous debate carefully, preparing critiques of his five atheistic arguments. In the process I found that he had seriously misunderstood or misrepresented a statement by a scientist on the Big Bang; so I brought along the book itself in case Dacey quoted this source again. I figured he might change his arguments just as I was doing; but I wanted to be ready in case he used his old arguments again.

[…]The auditorium was packed that night for the debate, and I later learned that there were overflow rooms, too. To my surprise Dr. Dacey gave the very same case he had presented at Purdue; so he really got clobbered on those arguments. Because he wasn’t prepared for my new arguments, he didn’t even respond to two of my arguments for the beginning of the universe, though he did a credible job responding to the others. I was pleased when he attacked the Big Bang by quoting the same scientist as before, because I then held up the book, specified the page number, and proceeded to quote the context to show what the scientist really meant.

Dr. Craig is always prepared!

News

Professor calls her student’s employer to get him fired for disagreeing with her

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Rioters smash windows at a T-Mobile store during a protest against campus speaker
Rioters smash windows at a T-Mobile store during a protest against campus speaker

I know we just blogged about a stupid professor who charged a student who disagreed with her in class with “harassment”, but this is a completely different case.

Here is the story from Campus Reform.

Excerpt:

A Texas State University history professor called the employers of at least two conservatives, one a current student, in retribution over a political disagreement on Facebook.

Elizabeth Bishop, who is allegedly rumored to become the next dean of the College of Liberal Arts, made phone calls to employers and a university department in an attempt to punish the two conservatives for daring to disagree with her in a Facebook discussion.

The Facebook status in question was initially posted by Colton Duncan, the student body vice president, but was apparently later removed by Facebook for “violating community standards.”

Duncan decried Texas State’s apparent double standard in allowing radical communist Angela Davis to speak on campus, calling her an “American terrorist,” but not allowing the College Republicans to hold a Women’s Empowerment Summit.

The status soon developed into a debate over the relative merits of capitalism and communism, where Alexander Morrissette, an employee of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and Bishop began commenting at each other.

I would not recommend debating anything with a non-STEM professor who teaches at a secular college / university. It doesn’t matter where you debate or what you debate, these people have no experience at hearing points of view different from their own. They don’t debate with evidence, they just call you names and then try to silence you.

Here’s how this professor came after the student who disagreed with her:

Their debate continued in relatively the same vein, but things escalated when the Texas Public Policy Foundation received a call from Bishop the next day asking if Morrissette was one of its employees.

Bishop contended in the call that Morrissette had made a disparaging Facebook post about her, but refused to provide details on what the post said. The employee who answered the call said she would talk to Morrissette about his Facebook habits, and Bishop hung up the phone shortly thereafter.

Seemingly unsatisfied with the Foundation’s response, as Morrissette said they “laughed the ordeal off,” Bishop set her sights on an anonymous Texas State student who had “liked” several of Morrissette’s comments.

Bishop allegedly called the university department where the student works and requested they investigate her and her “associates” for “hate speech,” and further demanded that the student be removed from her leadership positions on campus.

When Morrissette heard of this development, he said it was “worse…that she levied her threats at students who are still directly subjected to her authority on campus.”

Imagine that you had an employer who did take action against you, and you were the sole provider for your wife and children! Where would you be without a job in this economy? There are also a lot of cases where the left moves on from trying to coerce you to vandalism, assault and even domestic terrorism.

It’s very important to understand that secular leftist professors – at least non-STEM professors at secular campuses – are not capable of critical thinking or tolerating different points of view. You just have to look at them as unreasoning barbarians, and avoid saying or doing anything that can provoke their anti-intellectual rage against you.

If you’re going to go to college or university, be sure and do and do a STEM degree. Not only do rigorous STEM degrees keep out the idiots, but you can also get a job on the other end of it. It doesn’t matter if you like STEM or not, it’s a matter of not throwing away your money to ignorant fascists like this professor.

Polemics

The media reported that TRAPPIST-1 planets were “Earth-like”, but were they?

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Christianity and the progress of science
Christianity and the progress of science

My assumption whenever I read these headlines from the naturalist mainstream media is that they are just scientific illiterates pushing a science fiction agenda. Naturalists believe that no intelligent designer was required in order to create a planet, a solar system and a galaxy fine-tuned for complex embodied life. The mainstream media tries to help naturalists by trumpeting that make planets that support life look common, so that no designer is needed.

Recently, there was a story about some planets that the mainstream media called “Earth-like”. But were they really Earth-like?

Evolution News reports: (links removed)

Do you recall the hubbub only one month ago about TRAPPIST-1, a dim red dwarf star some 40 light years from Earth? This star has seven planet, three of which, roughly Earth-sized, were announced as being potentially habitable. This led to excited speculation about alien evolution:

  • “Scientists find three new planets where life could have evolved” (Sky News)
  • “Nasa discovers new solar system where life may have evolved on three planets” (The Telegraph)
  • “Nasa’s ‘holy grail’: Entire new solar system that could support alien life discovered” (The Independent)
  • “Seven Alien ‘Earths’ Found Orbiting Nearby Star” (National Geographic)

Well, not so fast. Much of the breathlessness about the system stemmed from a tho

roughly imaginative artist’s rendering courtesy of NASA. The planets are designated by letters, b through h. The middle three planets are depicted as rather inviting, with what appear to be pleasing Earth-like oceans.

Today, the TRAPPIST-1 bubble looks to have popped, with 3D computer climate modeling showing major problems with the system. According to Eric T. Wolf of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the inner three planets would be barren, the outer three frozen. And the middle, planet e? In NASA’s rendering, it looks the most Earth-like. However, in a system like this centering on a dim red dwarf, planet e would need to have been stocked, to start, with seven times the volume of Earth’s oceans.

roughly imaginative artist’s rendering courtesy of NASA. The planets are designated by letters, b through h. The middle three planets are depicted as rather inviting, with what appear to be pleasing Earth-like oceans.

Today, the TRAPPIST-1 bubble looks to have popped, with 3D computer climate modeling showing major problems with the system. According to Eric T. Wolf of the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, the inner three planets would be barren, the outer three frozen. And the middle, planet e? In NASA’s rendering, it looks the most Earth-like. However, in a system like this centering on a dim red dwarf, planet e would need to have been stocked, to start, with seven times the volume of Earth’s oceans.

Let’s review what’s needed for a planet to support life, so that when these stories come out, we can recognize how many “Earth-like” qualities required for life are not mentioned.

Previously, I blogged about a few of the minimum requirements that a planet must satisfy in order to support complex life.

Here they are:

  • a solar system with a single massive Sun than can serve as a long-lived, stable source of energy
  • a terrestrial planet (non-gaseous)
  • the planet must be the right distance from the sun in order to preserve liquid water at the surface – if it’s too close, the water is burnt off in a runaway greenhouse effect, if it’s too far, the water is permanently frozen in a runaway glaciation
  • the planet has to be far enough from the star to avoid tidal locking and solar flares
  • the solar system must be placed at the right place in the galaxy – not too near dangerous radiation, but close enough to other stars to be able to absorb heavy elements after neighboring stars die
  • a moon of sufficient mass to stabilize the tilt of the planet’s rotation
  • plate tectonics
  • an oxygen-rich atmosphere
  • a sweeper planet to deflect comets, etc.
  • planetary neighbors must have non-eccentric orbits
  • planet mass must be enough to retain an atmosphere, but not so massive to cause a greenhouse effect

Now what happens if we disregard all of those characteristics, and just classify an Earth-like planet as one which is the same size and receives the same amount of radiation from its star? Well, then you end up labeling a whole bunch of planets as “Earth-like” that really don’t permit life.