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News

William Lane Craig’s after-action report on the debate with Francisco Ayala

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Here is his after-action report. I think it may be behind the registration firewall, so I’ll quote some of it for you.

Excerpt:

I had heard Ayala lecture on Intelligent Design last year in China and was dismayed by the caricatures and misrepresentations he gave to the Chinese students. So even though I had never debated intelligent design in biology before, I decided to take on this debate to try at least to set the record straight.

The last few months I prepared diligently for this debate, reading Ayala’s work, familiarizing myself with relevant new developments in biology, studying the recent works of ID proponents, conferring with colleagues who work in this field, and formulating the best strategy for the debate.

[…]Since the question we were debating was not whether intelligent design is true but merely whether it is viable, it was up to Ayala to disqualify ID as a live option. In his published work, he tries to disqualify ID both scientifically and theologically, so my opening response fell neatly into two parts. First, I argued that Ayala fails to disqualify ID scientifically because he cannot show that the Darwinian mechanisms are capable of producing the sort of biological complexity we see on earth. Then I argued that the theological arguments he presents against the designer’s being all-powerful and all-good are simply irrelevant to drawing a design inference (however interesting and important they may be for theology) because the design argument doesn’t aspire to show that the designer is all-powerful or all-good.

The debate turned out to be virtually one-sided! Ayala utterly failed to engage with my arguments. It was almost as if I wasn’t even there. It was pretty obvious to everyone that he was just presenting canned arguments which had already been refuted in my opening statement. I responded to all his points and even went beyond them to tackle the theological problem of natural evil as well. I was also able to call him to account for his misrepresentation of Michael Behe’s work. Ayala likes to indict Behe for saying that the human eye is irreducibly complex, even though it isn’t. Holding up Behe’s book and reading aloud the relevant passage, I responded that this allegation was surprising in light of the fact that Behe says on pages 37-38 that the eye is NOT irreducibly complex and therefore he does not use it as one of his examples of irreducible complexity!

Another interesting feature of this debate was the moderator, a young philosopher from the University of Colorado, Boulder, named Bradley Monton. Though a self-confessed atheist, Monton is convinced that the typical refutations of ID that pass muster today are in fact fallacious, and so he has written a book defending not only the scientific status of ID but even its being taught as an option in public schools! Having read his remarkable book in preparation for the debate, I was able to quote “our esteemed moderator” to good effect during the debate itself to counter Ayala’s assertion that ID was not science.

I note that Reasonable Faith has secured a $65000 matching grant for all donations between now and December 31st. Please contribute generously. There is no one on the planet who does more to defend Biblical Christianity than William Lane Craig. No Christian is more feared by atheists. Atheists laugh at Bible-thumping, hand-wringing fundamentalists who preach only to the choir – but they fear William Lane Craig.

You can listen to the MP3 recording of the debate here at Apologetics 315.

Video of Craig’s opening speech is here.

Related posts

News

Canadian student union leader says pro-lifers are all potential murderers

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Story from Life Site News.

Excerpt:

Lakehead University Life Support (LULS), the Canadian campus pro-life club that recently lost its hard-won club status, is facing harsh opposition from board members of the Student Union (LUSU) – one of whom has compared the group to the murderer of late-term abortionist George Tiller – as the club seeks to regain its status.

The student union voted 7-6 on October 29th in favor of denying the pro-life group club status. The club had only won its status in February after fighting for two years to gain it.

On November 6th, LUSU Vice President of Finance Josh Kolic released a statement in which he called the effort to overturn the union’s decision an attempt to ‘hijack’ the democratic process.  He went on, further, to claim that the pro-life club “represents … the same mentality of those who gunned down Dr. George Tiller.”

[…]In Kolic’s statement, he claimed that denying the pro-life group club status was a “great victory for human rights.”  In his view, “the neutral stance is simply one that allows the individual woman herself to choose,” and, as such, he says this is the position that LUSU itself should take.

He went on to ask the student body for “help [to] restore democracy and the spirit of human rights to the Lakehead University Student Union” by attending their next meeting or emailing “a deputation to the board as to why a woman’s right to choose is important to you.”

How ironic: a pro-abortion person calling pro-lifers murderers. It seems to me that it is pro-abortionists who advocate the actual murder of hundreds of millions of innocent unborn children. And remember the recent murder of a pro-life activist by a pro-abortion zealot. And here’s a recent attempted murder of a pro-lifer. Those are from the last few months alone.

Let me ask you a question. How many pro-abortion people do you suppose have read a book like “Defending-Life-Against-Abortion-Choice” by Dr. Francis J. Beckwith, published by Cambridge University Press, or a book like “Embryo: A Defense of Human Life“, published by Princeton University’s Robert P. George? Are pro-abortionists informed about the case for the pro-life position?

Well, consider how they censor the pro-life clubs on campus. Do you think they are open-minded and tolerant of opposing views? I can probably make a more persuasive case for the pro-abortion view than militant pro-abortionists like Josh Kolic can. I’ve actually heard their arguments presented in debates that I chose to listen to. Josh wants to censor opposing views. That is pure intolerance.

Further reading

Suppression of pro-lifers is quite common in Canada.

Here are some resources on the topic of abortion.

Notice how pro-lifers focus on reason and evidence, while pro-abortionists focus on the use of force, to one degree or another, in order to get their way.

Videos

How unions lobby Democrats to prevent competition and raise consumer prices

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This video from Reason.tv that ECM found at Big Government explains how unions destroy competition by using political contributions to Democrats. Competition is achieved when consumers like you and me have choices in the marketplace. Without choices, one company (or the government) has a monopoly, and can deliver low quality for a high price – and there is nothing you can do about it.

Here’s the video:

And here’s the blurb:

You may have heard the UPS is in quite the political fight with FEDEX. Though both are package-delivery companies, they’re governed by totally different federal labor rules. As a result, UPS’s workforce is much more heavily unionized than FEDEX’s-and more than twice as expensive.

So now UPS is trying to get FEDEX reclassified under federal law as a way of screwing a competitor.

Unions are major, major donors to the Democrat party, and they want to make sure that you have no choice at all about how you spend your money. And that includes government-run education!

And of course, removing competition is only one thing unions do to raise consumer prices – they also advocate for tariffs, which also makes you and I pay more for consumer goods. Unions are against consumer rights.