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News

Audio from William Lane Craig’s debate with Stephen Law

12 Comments

UPDATE: The audio for the debate has been posted here at Apologetics 315.

Reactions from the first debate of the Reasonable Faith UK speaking tour, featuring Dr. William Lane Craig.

These are just cut and pasted by me from Facebook with names removed.

J:

I cant believe Law didnt offer any objections to Theism other than the problem of evil.. The heckling was a bit disappointing, entertaining debate though. Law made some bad admissions in the after discussion which was quite funny :)

M:

so i just got home from the debate between william lane craig and stephen law.

was a very interesting debate, and law turned out to be one of the few atheists who had clearly carefully considered his debating strategy. Not once did he even attempt to argue for atheism, all he was ever trying to do was argue against “Craig’s God” (which is what he said himself).

wlc presented just three arguments this time, the kalam, the moral and the resurrection.

law didn’t respond at all to the kalam and literally just left it with “i don’t know”.

law’s opening speech was all on the evidential problem of evil without responding to any of Craig’s arguments. Then in first rebuttals he completely ignored all the arguments again, only seeking to defend his evidential argument from evil. I have to say his strategy was interesting but I think it backfired, simply because atheism just came out to be utterly indefensible. The kalam was not challenged once, only the moral nature of the Creator of the cosmos. As WLC said numerous times, “it’s a strange form of atheism that holds to the existence of an uncaused, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, powerful, transcendent and personal being who just isn’t morally perfect”!

atheism was definitely left in a bad state in this debate!
wlc had some good responses to the evil God challenge

More M:

it was quite an interesting debate. wlc presented just 3 arguments: kalam, moral & resurrection. then law spent his whole first speech on the evidential problem of evil, with his evil God challenge mixed in. In the whole first rebuttals again law COMPLETELY ignored wlc’s 3 arguments, and didn’t respond to them until the FINAL rebuttal!

law didn’t even argue for atheism. he didn’t challenge the kalam once, and i mean not once! for me, he conceded that atheism was false (even though he doesn’t believe that himself) and instead just tried to show that whoever this Creator is, we can’t know whether he is good or evil. I thought he was really weak on the moral argument as well. I found that overall his tactics were to not specifically deny any of the premises of any of the arguments, instead he just kept repeating that craig hasn’t proved ____(insert premise) to his satisfaction.
But check it out for yourselves later in the week!

C:

I give respect to Stephen Law, he seems like a nice guy who is very intelligent and took this debate seriously.

The evidential problem of evil is tougher to fend off, but once again another Non-theist (as I think Law is an agnostic) tries his argument for personal preference.

Law basically stated ” I don’t find God to be good under my standards of what I think is good, therefore I don’t think he exists, but if he does exist he is an evil God”

And was it me or did Law mix up what is “prescriptive” morality and “descriptive” morality when he spoke about ethical naturalism? It seems as if he had it backwards.

Law gave me the impression he was either an agnostic or a closet Deist

Some selected Tweets as of Tuesday morning at 2 AM:

reNewedAtheist Tom Samuel:
i think it’s safe to say that Law didn’t do his homework. i even tweeted at him telling him to come prepared….

UnbelievableJB Justin Brierley:
Did Law defend atheism or agnosticism tonight? #RFTour one person left saying deism perfectly plausible on Law’s arguments tonight

And most importantly:

UnbelievableJB Justin Brierley:
Complete Craig vs Law debate goes online as an early podcast tomorrow. premier.org.uk/craig #RFTour

UnbelievableJB Justin Brierley:
@BenMartinBass video will go online after tour is over but I’m putting the audio out as an early poddie tomorrow @RFupdates

You should follow @UnbelievableJB on Twitter for more updates. It’s Justin Brierley’s feed, and he is posting updates continously.

The thing you need to realize about the evidential/probabilistic argument from evil is that it has to be weighed along with other countervailing evidence in favor of God’s existence. It is not a deductive argument. Craig presented three arguments in favor of the proposition, so Law has to respond to those in order to win the debate. Moreover, I am sure that he would not be able to answer the challenge of how he knows that any particular instance of evil is gratuitous. I hope Brian posts the debate audio soon.

Videos

Stephen C. Meyer explains the evidence for the Big Bang on John Ankerberg show

2 Comments

This is a short post, because I can’t embed the video – so I’m just going to post the link to the Lightsource web site which has the video.

Here’s a web page from Caltech that goes over 3 of the 6 evidences for the Big Bang.

Excerpt:

Three main observational results over the past century led astronomers to become certain that the universe began with the big bang. First, they found out that the universe is expanding—meaning that the separations between galaxies are becoming larger and larger. This led them to deduce that everything used to be extremely close together before some kind of explosion. Second, the big bang perfectly explains the abundance of helium and other nuclei like deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) in the universe. A hot, dense, and expanding environment at the beginning could produce these nuclei in the abundance we observe today. Third, astronomers could actually observe the cosmic background radiation—the afterglow of the explosion—from every direction in the universe. This last evidence so conclusively confirmed the theory of the universe’s beginning that Stephen Hawking said, “It is the discovery of the century, if not of all time.”

The article explains all three evidences in detail. It is important to show atheists how the progress of science has dashed their hopes for an eternal, uncaused universe. One discovery – that could be reversed. Two discoveries – that’s conclusive. Three – discoveries – that’s an open and shut case. (And there are three more discoveries not mentioned in the article – the second law of thermodynamics, radioactive element abundances and the stellar lifecycle itself).

And, of course, William Lane Craig uses this scientific evidence in his kalam cosmological argument, which is described in a peer-reviewed paper from this Astrophysics journal.

News

California public schools introduce gay indoctrination starting in kindergarten

13 Comments

From the liberal Los Angeles Times. (H/T Come Reason)

Excerpt:

At Wonderland Avenue Elementary School in Laurel Canyon, there are lesson plans on diverse families — including those with two mommies or daddies — books on homosexual authors in the library and a principal who is openly gay.

But even at this school, teachers and administrators are flummoxed about how to carry out a new law requiring California public schools to teach all students — from kindergartners to 12th graders — about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans in history classes.

“At this point, I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” Principal Don Wilson said.

Educators across the state don’t have much time to figure it out. In January, they’re expected to begin teaching about LGBT Americans under California’s landmark law, the first of its kind in the nation.

Notice how dissent from GLBT indoctrination is portrayed in the mainstream media:

In 2005, L.A. Unified debuted the nation’s first chapter in a high school health textbook on LGBT issues covering sexual orientation and gender identity, struggles over them and anti-LGBT bias. A section on misconceptions says sexual orientation is not a choice — a statement many religious conservatives disagree with.

Unfortunately for the leftist media, the peer-reviewed studies show that homosexuality is a choice – but that’s not what young people are going to learn in California public schools. They’ll learn what the GLBT lobby wants children to believe, instead.

And it’s OK to deprive a child of a mother or father:

On a recent morning, teacher Jane Raphael invited her two dozen kindergartners, first-graders and second-graders to sit in a circle and tell a story about their family. The students described a cross section of modern-day America: moms and dads and athletic siblings, crazy dogs, a cat named Lulu, a fish that died, divorced parents, a girl with two mommies.

You can bet that the public schools won’t be teaching the children about gay crime horror stories like Joshua Brown or Frank Lombard. These stories are a thousand times more horrifying than Matthew Shepard, but no one has ever heard about those stories. No, that’s not what the GLBT lobby wants children to learn about at all.

And that’s the problem with public schools – they only tell children what the government wants the special interest groups who get them elected want children to hear. The government wants to get re-elected, so they put public functions up for sale to the highest bidder. Special interest groups like the GLBT lobby promise them votes and campaign donations in exchange for telling children what they want the lobby wants them to believe. They only want to minimize the damage is to cut off the funding for government functions – perhaps by giving parents more control over education with voucher programs.

Even some Christian conservatives support this by voting to transfer money from private taxpayers into public schools. I once knew a Christian woman who told me that forcing her husband to pay more in taxes for public schools was a good idea, because public schools fed children free breakfasts so that all the children would be “equal”. Although she denied it, what she was really voting for was the indoctrination of children with gay proganda using her family’s money – money earned by her Christian husband. Apparently, she thought that the public schools needed her husband’s money more than her family did. When pressed by me, she admitted that she held that view because it made her feel good – she had never thought about the consequences of her voting for her husband’s ability to lead the family in a Christian direction.

Lenny has more to say about this decision by the California public schools.