Tag Archives: Live Streaming

Presidential debate schedule kicks off this Wednesday: live streaming available

Here’s the debate schedule:

First presidential candidates’ debate between President Barack Obama, former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney

  • Topic: Domestic policy
  • Date: Wednesday, Oct. 3
  • Time: 9 – 10:30 p.m. EDT
  • Location: University of Denver, Denver, Colo.
  • Moderator: Jim Lehrer, executive editor of PBS’s “NewsHour”
  • Format: “The debate will focus on domestic policy and be divided into six time segments of approximately 15 minutes each on topics to be selected by the moderator and announced several weeks before the debate,” according to the Commission on Presidential Debates. “The moderator will open each segment with a question, after which each candidate will have two minutes to respond. The moderator will use the balance of the time in the segment for a discussion of the topic.”

Vice presidential candidates’ debate between Vice President Joe Biden, Wis. Rep. Paul Ryan

  • Topic: Foreign and domestic topics
  • Date: Thursday, Oct. 11
  • Time: 9 – 10:30 p.m. EDT
  • Location: Centre College, Danville, Ky.
  • Moderator: Martha Raddatz, senior foreign affairs correspondent, ABC News
  • Format: “The debate will cover both foreign and domestic topics and be divided into nine time segments of approximately 10 minutes each. The moderator will ask an opening question, after which each candidate will have two minutes to respond. The moderator will use the balance of the time in the segment for a discussion of the question.”

Second presidential candidates’ debate between Obama, Romney

  • Topic: Foreign and domestic issues
  • Date: Tuesday, Oct. 16
  • Time: 9 – 10:30 p.m. EDT
  • Location: Hofstra University, Hempstead, N.Y.
  • Moderator: Candy Crowley, chief political correspondent, CNN, and anchor, CNN’s “State of the Union”
  • Format: “The second presidential debate will take the form of a town meeting, in which citizens will ask questions of the candidates on foreign and domestic issues. Candidates each will have two minutes to respond, and an additional minute for the moderator to facilitate a discussion. The town meeting participants will be undecided voters selected by the Gallup Organization.”

Third presidential candidates’ debate between Obama, Romney

  • Topic: Foreign policy
  • Date: Monday, Oct. 22
  • Time: 9 – 10:30 p.m. EDT
  • Location: Lynn University, Boca Raton, Fla.
  • Moderator: Bob Schieffer, chief Washington correspondent, CBS News, and moderator, “Face the Nation”
  • Format: “The format for the debate will be identical to the first presidential debate and will focus on foreign policy.”

My take: This debate schedule really worries me. It’s only 4 debates, and they are really late in the game. Voting has already started. None of the debates are with Fox News, so they will all feature biased questions about banning contraception and prayer in schools. Academic studies have all shown that the mainstream news media is largely biased to the left, so I just don’t expect that these debates will be fair. Why do Republicans agree to debates moderated by leftists, with topics chosen by leftists? I will never understand. We need more debates, and we need them to have longer speeches and fair and balanced moderators.

I’m expecting that Fox News Live will offer streaming of the debates as they occur, otherwise I will be watching the biased coverage of ABC News via Youtube.

Video of William Lane Craig’s opening speech from his debate on ID with Ayala

Provided by ChristianJR4. If you have a youtube account, please subscribe to his channel

Here is his full opening speech in 3 parts:

You can get the full audio here at Apologetics 315. There’s a good discussion going on in the comments.

You can read more about the debate over on Bradley Monton’s blog. He is an atheist professor who served as moderator during the debate.

Here are Craig’s post-debate comments.

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

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.

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