This video has 3 parts, as well as questions and answers in individual clips.
For those who cannot watch the video, you can grab the MP3 file of the lecture, or read this essay by Dr. Craig which covers exactly the same ground as the video.
Part 1 of 3:
Part 2 of 3:
Part 2 of 3:
If you want to show this lecture and Q&A to your apologetics group, you can find the DVD here.
You can also read a debate transcript where Dr. Craig puts his ideas to the test, against Dr. Richard Taylor.
Uncommon Descent reports on a new paper in the most prestigious peer-reviewed science journal.
Excerpt:
A new paper has just been published in Nature by Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon. The paper argues that the Ediacaran fauna are not ancestral to the animals which arose in the Cambrian explosion and that life existed on land 65 million years before previously thought. Retallack further argues that the iconic fossils of Dickinsonia and Springgina, which appear in the Precambrian Ediacaran assemblages, were not in fact animals at all. Rather they were, according to Retallack, lichens, soil structures and traces of slime moulds.
And they link to this post about the paper from Science Daily, which makes the significance of the discovery even clearer:
Ancient multicellular fossils long thought to be ancestors of early marine life are remnants of land-dwelling lichen or other microbial colonies, says University of Oregon scientist Gregory J. Retallack, who has been studying fossil soils of South Australia.
[…]”This discovery has implications for the tree of life, because it removes Ediacaran fossils from the ancestry of animals,” said Retallack, professor of geological sciences and co-director of paleontological collections at the UO’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History. His evidence, mostly gathered from a site in the Flinders Ranges, is presented in a paper placed online ahead of print by the journal Nature.
“These fossils have been a first-class scientific mystery,” he said. “They are the oldest large multicellular fossils. They lived immediately before the Cambrian evolutionary explosion that gave rise to familiar modern groups of animals.”
Retallack studied numerous Ediacaran fossils and determined that the diversity reflects a preference by the ancient organisms for “unfrozen, low salinity soils, rich in nutrients, like most terrestrial organisms.” Thus the fossils in Australia’s iconic red-rock ranges, he concludes, were landlubbers. In his closing paragraph, Retallack outlines implications for a variety of other Edicaran fossils, that could have been lichens, other microbial consortia, fungal fruiting bodies, slime molds, flanged pedestals of biological soil crusts, and even casts of needle ice.
Ediacaran fossils, he said, represent “an independent evolutionary radiation of life on land that preceded by at least 20 million years the Cambrian evolutionary explosion of animals in the sea.” Increased chemical weathering by large organisms on land may have been needed to fuel the demand of nutrient elements by Cambrian animals. Independent discoveries of Cambrian fossils comparable with Ediacaran ones is evidence, he said, that even in the Cambrian, more than 500 million years ago, life on land may have been larger and more complex than life in the sea.
Here’s a quick re-cap of the Cambrian explosion:
Part 1: (7:50)
Part 2: (3:25)
This explosion in biological complexity fits nicely with an intelligent designer . Intelligent agents make information by sequencing symbols into functional instructions. That’s what new body plans are. It’s like new software, and new software requires a software engineer.
The standard naturalist response to this problem of sudden origins of anaimal body plans used to be that the Cambrian explosion did have precursors. The precursors were thought to be the Ediacaran fossils. But that’s all been shot to Hell now, with this new paper in Nature. Ooops!
Here are the details of the debate that I got from Cloud of Witnesses:
The OSU [Oregon State University] Socratic Club will sponsor a public dialogue entitled, “Two Philosophers Debate the Existence of God,” on Monday, March 1, at 7 p.m. in the LaSells Stewart Center on the OSU campus. William Lane Craig will argue for the Christian view that a personal God exists and Victor J. Stenger the atheist position that there is no God.
In this debate, Victor Stenger does affirm his belief that the universe could be eternal in his second rebuttal (1:02:30), thus denying the standard Big Bang cosmology. He also denies the law of conservation of energy and asserts that something can come from nothing in his concluding speech (1:33:50). He also caused the audience to start laughing when he said that Jesus was not moral and supported slavery. There is almost no snark in this summary. Instead, I quoted Dr. Stenger verbatim in many places. I still think that it is very entertaining even without the snarky paraphrasing.
The debate includes 30 minutes of Q&A with the students.
Here is the MP3 file for the audio.
Here’s the video of the debate:
Dr. Craig’s opening speech:
Dr. Stenger’s opening speech:
Dr. Craig’s first rebuttal:
Stenger’s argument that there is no objective evidence for God’s existence:
Stenger’s argument that the balance of energy is zero so “nothing” exists:
Stenger’s argument that mental operations can be reduced to physical operations:
Craig’s cosmological argument:
Craig’s moral argument:
Craig’s resurrection argument:
Dr. Craig’s second rebuttal:
Craig’s cosmological argument:
Craig’s moral argument:
Craig’s resurrection argument:
Dr. Stenger’s second rebuttal:
Knowledge and the burden of proof:
Aesthetic concerns about the universe:
Dr. Craig’s conclusion:
The case for atheism:
The contingency argument:
The cosmological argument:
The moral argument:
The resurrection of Jesus:
Religious experience:
Dr. Stenger’s conclusion
The cosmological argument:
The moral argument:
The resurrection argument:
Religious experience:
God’s purpose of the world should be to make people feel happy:
WINTERY KNIGHT 