Does God Exist?: William Lane Craig vs Antony Flew

this evenings participants then are professionally trained well published scholars they know that either God exists or else God does not exist they disagree about where the truth of that matter lies our debate format is simple there are four rounds of descending lengths - 20 minute opening statements - 12 minute comments on the opening statements - eight minute responses to the previous remarks and two five minute closing statements after a very brief break we will begin a half-hour session of questions and answers there's no need for me to make any further introductions and professor Craig & Flu will proceed through the four phases of their remarks without any interruption then I will formally close the debate and shortly thereafter open the question and answer session it is then my genuine pleasure to introduce professor William Craig and Professor Anthony flew as his traditional the affirmative side starts let the debate begin [Applause] good evening I want to begin by expressing my thanks for the privilege of participating in this event on the 50th anniversary of the famous cobblestone russell debate and it's a special honor to be sharing the platform tonight with Professor flue now in order to determine rationally whether or not God exists we need to conduct our inquiry according to the basic rules of logic and ask ourselves two fundamental questions number one are there good reasons to think that God exists and number two are there good reasons to think that he does not now with respect to that second question I'll leave it up to dr. flu to present the reasons why he thinks that God does not exist but notice that although atheist philosophers have tried for centuries to disprove the existence of God no one's ever been able to come up with a successful argument so rather than attack straw men at this point I'll just wait to hear dr. flues answer to the following question what good arguments are there to show that God does not exist let's look then at the first question are there good reasons to think that God exists tonight I'm going to present five reasons why I think theism is more plausibly true than atheism whole books have been written on each of these so I can only present here a brief sketch of each argument and then go into more detail as dr. flue responds to them these reasons are independent of one another and taken together they constitute a powerful cumulative case for the existence of God number one then the origin of the universe have you ever asked yourself where the universe came from why anything at all exists instead of just nothing typically atheists have said that the universe is just eternal and uncaused as Russell remarked to Kapil stone the universe is just there and that's all but is that really all if the universe never began to exist then that means that the number of events in the past history of the universe is infinite but mathematicians recognize that the existence of an actually infinite number of things leads to self contradictions for example what is infinity minus infinity well mathematically you get self contradictory answers this shows that infinity is just an idea in your mind not something that exists in reality David Hilbert perhaps the greatest mathematician of this century states the infinite is nowhere to be found in reality it neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought the role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea but that entails that since past events are not just ideas but are real the number of past events must be finite therefore the series of past events can't go back forever rather the universe must have begun to exist this conclusion has been confirmed by remarkable discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics the Astrophysical evidence indicates that the universe began to exist in a great explosion called the Big Bang 15 billion years ago physical space and time were created in that event as well as all the matter and energy in the universe therefore as the cambridge astronomer Fred Hoyle points out the Big Bang Theory requires the creation of the universe from nothing this is because as you go back in time you reach a point at which in oil's words the universe was shrunk down to nothing at all thus what the Big Bang model requires is that the universe began to exist and was created out of nothing now this tends to be very awkward for the atheist for his anthony kenny of oxford university urges a proponent of the big bang theory at least if he is an atheist must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing but surely that doesn't make sense out of nothing nothing comes so why does the universe exist instead of just nothing where did it come from there must have been a cause which brought the universe into being we can summarize our argument thus far as follows premise 1 whatever begins to exist has a cause - the universe began to exist 3 therefore the universe has a cause now from the very nature of the case as the cause of space and time this cause must be an uncaused timeless changeless and immaterial being of unimaginable power which created the universe moreover i would argue it must also be personal for how else could a timeless cause give rise to a temporal effect like the universe if the cause were an impersonal set of necessary and sufficient conditions then the cause could never exist without the effect if the cause were timelessly present then the effect would be timelessly present as well the only way for the cause to be timeless and for the effect to begin to exist in time is for the cause to be a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time without any prior determining conditions thus we are brought not merely to a trance Cendant cause of the universe but to its personal creator isn't it incredible that the Big Bang Theory thus confirms what the Christian theist has always believed that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth now I simply put it to you which do you think makes more sense that the theist is right or that the universe just popped into being uncaused out of nothing I at least don't have any trouble assessing these alternatives number two the complex order in the universe during the last thirty years scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a delicate and complex balance of initial conditions simply given in the Big Bang itself we now know that life prohibiting universes are vastly more probable than any life-permitting universe like ours how much more probable well the answer is that the chances that the universe should be life permitting are so infinitesimal as to be incomprehensible and incalculable for example Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe's expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million the universe would have Rika lapsed into a hot fireball pcw Davies is calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation without which planets could not exist is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeros at least Frank Tipler and John Barrow estimate that a change in the strength of gravity or of the weak force by only one part in 10 to the 100th power would have prevented a life-permitting universe there are around 50 such quantities and Khan instance present in the Big Bang which must be fine-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life and it's not just each quantity which must be finely tuned their ratios to one another must also be exquisitely fine-tuned so in probability is multiplied by in probability by in probability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers there is no physical reason why these constants and quantities possess the values they do the one-time agnostic physicist Paul Davies comments through my scientific work I have come to believe more and more strongly that the physical universe is put together with an ingenuity so astonishing that I cannot accept it merely as a brute fact similarly Fred Hoyle remarks a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkey with physics Robert Jastrow the head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies calls this the most powerful evidence for the existence of God ever to come out of science so once again the view that Christian theists have always held that there is a designer of the cosmos seems to make much more sense than the atheistic view that the universe when it popped into being uncaused out of nothing just happen to be by chance fine-tuned to an incomprehensible precision for the existence of intelligent life we can summarize our reasoning as follows premise 1 the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe is due to either law chance or design 2 it is not due to either law or chance 3 therefore it is due to design number 3 objective moral values in the world if God does not exist then objective moral values do not exist many theists and atheists alike concur on this point for example Russell observed ethics arises from the pressures of the community on the individual man does not always instinctively feel the desires which are useful to his herd the herd being anxious that the individual should act in its interests has invented various devices for causing the individual's interest to be in harmony with that of the herd one of these is morality Michael ruse a philosopher of science at the University of Guelph agrees he explains morality is a biological adaptation no less than our hands and feet and teeth considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something ethics is illusory I appreciate that when somebody says love thy neighbor as thyself they think they are referring above and beyond themselves nevertheless such reference is truly without foundation morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction and any deeper meaning is illusory Friedrich Nietzsche the great atheist of the last century who proclaimed the death of God understood that the death of God meant the destruction of all meaning and value in life I think that Friedrich Nietzsche was right but we've got to be very careful here the question here is not must we believe in God in order to live moral lives I'm not claiming that we must nor is the question can we recognize objective moral values without believing in God I think that we can rather the question is if God does not exist do objective moral values exist like Russell and ruse I don't see any reason to think that in the absence of God the herd morality evolved by Homo say is objective after all if there is no God then what's so special about human beings they're just accidental byproducts of nature which have evolved relatively recently on an infinitesimal speck of dust lost somewhere in a hostile and mindless universe and which are doomed to perish individually and collectively in a relatively short time on the atheistic view some action say rape may not be socially advantageous and so in the course of human development has become taboo but that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong on the atheistic view there's nothing really wrong with you're raping someone thus without God there is no absolute right and wrong which imposes itself on our conscience but the problem is that objective values do exist and deep down I think we all know it there's no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world actions like rape cruelty and child abuse are just socially unacceptable behavior their moral abominations some things are really wrong similarly love equality and self-sacrifice are really good thus we can summarize this third consideration as follows premise 1 if God does not exist objective moral values do not exist to objective values do exist 3 therefore God exists number 4 the historical facts concerning the life death and resurrection of Jesus the historical person Jesus of Nazareth was a remarkable individual New Testament critics have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority the authority to stand and speak in God's place he claimed that in himself the kingdom of God had come and his visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a Ministry of miracles and exorcisms but the supreme confirmation of his claim was his resurrection from the dead if Jesus did rise from the dead then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands and thus evidence for the existence of God now most people would probably think that the resurrection of Jesus is something you just either believe in by faith or not but there are actually three established facts recognized by the majority of New Testament historians today which I believe are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus fact number one on the Sunday following his crucifixion Jesus tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers according to Jakob Kramer an Austrian scholar who has specialized in the study of the resurrection quote by far most scholars hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements about the empty tomb end quote fact number two on separate occasions different individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death according to the prominent German New Testament critic gout Ludum on it may be taken as historically certain that the disciples had experiences after Jesus death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ these appearances were witnessed not only by believers but also by unbelievers skeptics and even enemies fact number three the original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus despite their having every predisposition to the contrary Jews had no belief in a dying much less a rising ayah and Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone's rising from the dead before the end of the world nevertheless the original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus so strongly that they were willing to die for the truth of that belief Luke Johnson a New Testament scholar from Emory University uses some sort of powerful transformative experience is required to generate the sort of movement earliest Christianity was NT right an eminent British scholar concludes that is why as an historian I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again leaving an empty tomb behind him attempts to explain away these three great facts like the disciples stole the body or Jesus wasn't really dead have been universally rejected by contemporary scholarship the simple fact is that there just is no plausible naturalistic explanation of these three facts and therefore it seems to me the Christian is amply justified in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be but that entails that God exists finally number five the immediate experience of God this isn't really an argument for God's existence rather it's the claim that you can know that God exists wholly apart from arguments simply by immediately experiencing him this was the way that people in the Bible knew God as Professor John hick explains God was known to them as a dynamic will interacting with their own wills a sheer given reality as inescapably to be reckoned with as destructive storm and life-giving sunshine to them God was not an idea adopted by the mind but an experiential reality which gave significance to their lives now if this is the case then there's a danger that proofs for God could actually distract your attention from God himself if you're sincerely seeking God then God will make his existence evident to you the Bible promises draw near to God and He will draw near to you we mustn't so concentrate on the external proofs that we fail to hear the voice of God speaking to our own hearts for those who listen God becomes an immediate reality in their lives in conclusion then we've yet to see any arguments to show that God does not exist and we have seen five reasons to think that God does exist together these constitute a powerful cumulative case for the existence of God and therefore I think that theism is the more plausible worldview well I thought I was going to have to begin as Socrates ended with an apology because I thought I was going to have to explain that I wasn't going to try to show that there is no God I was going to try to show that there are no sufficient reasons for believing that there is and dr. Craig apparently was wanting to maintain the exact opposite that I wouldn't be able to establish that there is no god but he thinks he's provided sufficient reasons for thinking that there is now he has offered so many arguments that it will be impossible for me in any reasonable amount of time to answer them all but what I'm going to say if it's right will provide a sufficient reason for thinking that he and others are altogether too bold in thinking that they know what caused the universe or they could know what cause the universe my fundamental point is that we are all others creatures whose entire knowledge and experience have been of the universe it is after all the only one there is and certainly the only one we have experience on so um why should anyone think that they are able to provide an answer to the question I take this business about whether God caused the Big Bang or whether you the universe just popped into existence like that well while we offered only two possibilities here why does anyone think that these are the only two possibilities of an answer and I think there are two things one needs to say about this and and one concerns and the Ultimates of explanation so let me try to make this point every of why anything is the case is given an answer in terms of something else somewhere general or more general law which at that stage is taken as a brute fact the fact that explains other things now this is surely of the nature of the case you cannot have an end to all explanation that is anything other than a brute fact of course some people find some sorts of brute facts satisfactory to then I think that's a good place to stop but um it doesn't mean that you're able to say it's absolutely wrong to stop at point so it seems to me that you can't rule out the possibility that our knowledge of the universe or our knowledge must stop with the Big Bang that this itself is the ultimate fact that if there's any first cause it's somewhere the beginning you know some microsecond away from the beginning because after all everything else in the universe is being explained now of course the whole of columns you may be different next year but we're debating in Wisconsin tonight so but one has at least to entertain the possibility that it's not ridiculous popping in half of existence out of nothing if someone was there before hand washing these gosh it started out of nothing but you know we just not in a position to answer the question and the fact that one is unable to suggest a cause for the Big Bang why should you think that anyone but a physicist is going to explain but if physics stops there isn't that the end of Humanite well now let's consider the alternative and perhaps it will be a glider to begin with make you speak sorry and I'm confronted with an affliction which I've never been confronted with before I keep getting a dry mouth of Sion and a considerable handicaps tonight and yes well let us actually produce a definition of God the supposed explanation of everything right this is the definition offered by a Richard Swinburne which is generally accepted as the standard definition within the english-speaking countries a person without a body I a spirit present everywhere the creator and sustainer of the universe able to do everything ie on lippett n't knowing all things perfectly good a source of moral obligation immutable eternal and necessary being holy and worthy of worship well well that's a lot of characteristics for this cause that some of the audience clearly think gothic that's what it must've caused the whole universe well it's a lot of things it would be perfectly possible but there should be a being that was omnipotent omniscient but wasn't particularly interested in human conduct and of course of course everyone thinking of creation and his thinking of the first two chapters of Genesis well the Creator God there created the whole universe in order to have some human beings in created in His image but why should we assume in this definition of God that he has this interest in human behavior yeah in morality and soul and um after all if he was omnipotent and omniscient and wanted people to behave in a certain way we don't know anything else about him after all I don't think we know anything about it but if we know wouldn't you expect if you were omnipotent you'd expect results and expect people to do and wouldn't have presumption being looking at human behavior and wondering what our nepeta thinks about it if we believed in on losing what as far as omnipotence is concerned he's not interested in human behavior this is okay I mean why should men see anyway these are different things people don't wreck it but you might well have an argument that might show there was an existing of being with some of these characteristics without the others the second thing I want to say is that these characteristics are at least compatible but the God that I understand dr. Craig believes in and is one who is described as good and benevolent and so on but also videos described as a being who is expecting that the majority of the creatures he has created he is going to torture forever well if you think these characteristics are compatible with benevolence if your absolute values think that torturing anyone at all apart from forever is okay well this is not my idea of I only recorded as morally compulsive not to torture anyone at all I regard this concept I'm not saying this is a reason for not believing that torture around the universe I can say that these two characteristics aren't uh are incompatible I think actually a dr. Craig at some time is a little anxious about these things I have somewhere yes um he says if we take scripture seriously we must admit that the vast majority of persons in the world are condemned and will be forever lost even if in some relatively rare cases a person might be saved through his response to the light that he has has apart from some special revelation en goes on to indicate no Orthodox Christian likes the doctrine of Hell or delights in anyone's condemnation I truly wish that universalism were true but it isn't well I regard that as a sign of grace that's he decide but I still have to say that these two things are simply incompatible it's a nightmare and the idea that such a punishment could be just don't you know what justice is would it any would it be regard of course if you like the right ones are getting the punishment but just as in the matter of simply getting the right at once punished for a crime the punishment needs to be to some extent proportionate to the seriousness of the crime and how could there be any offence committed by a human being in a short life that deserve a literally infinite punishment so what I'm basically trying to show is that there aren't good reasons for believing it and my fundamental contention is that one shouldn't expect to be able to know things outside the universe and so on and and if you like the burden of proof lies on the person who says this so no number of unanswered arguments from dr. Craig will be sufficient to leave what I've said on one side well that's never views I've produced all these arguments he hasn't answered because no one could cite in the available time all the great long list of arguments his videos but this I thought what the answer that I think couldn't be answered is the arguments if you like against Lee presumption of thinking that we're in a position to say what was going on if anything was going on outside the universe but look at what I believe is called the column argument which is a great favorite with dr. I the universe must have had a beginning because nothing could exist without beginning without end fair enough I think this is a good argument but this is supposed to be an argument for creation by a body this person the notion I find very difficult to understand anyway all the people I know are creatures of flesh and blood but still as it was created by a body this person who apparently was himself I'm created and eternal now it seems to me that I don't doubt the universe had a beginning because this is the present view of physical science it looks at it these this part of the Big Bang Theory is likely to be will as permanently but there may be some further things added but surely and if that time had to have a beginning how do we explain that beginning by saying oh well the beginning was started off the whole universe was created by a being well that being an well yes existed eternally well if this argument about a time I couldn't of couldn't of it if time couldn't have had a beginning then how is it that as it was a funny sort of time of which of course long as I've ever had an experience and which well yes of course this did never had a beginning and it will never have an end yeah simply won't do the argument that gets us to the creation is inconsistent with the desired explanation of it so I think again you come back to a decent and ignorant I'm often thought to be a rather arrogant chap stop it how wrong people can be but I've never believed that I could give you a sort of guidebook outside the universe I'd be a bit hard pressed to give you a guidebook to a fairly small area but yeah this idea that well here we go may his group of rational chaps and let's so expect such as they can all recognize an argument showing that and this is how the universe began and we know something about what must exist behind the all of us I don't think it will work at all about this thing then what about this some of my contention that um a Hanul nipa tons being could perfectly well if he wanted people to behave in a certain way this was the only thing that we can change him that they became his certain devotionally devoted and obedient children well why didn't you make him that way you're only human chaired parents would love their children to be obedient and virtuous and so on wouldn't we all have being turned we're all I suspect and you may be in son better than us but we'd be rather unsuccessful there totally good people but they're far from obedient and father that's it see I mean well now but granted the resources of omnipotence I think I could manage this um but apparently and the God whom dr. Craig is asking us to believe as the Creator and very much want people to believe in a certain way and he wants this so much that he's prepared to torture them forever for payment by not obeying me well it seems to me that anyone who knew that that was what this cosmic Saddam Husein wanted would behave like the sensible subjects of Sabbath of Hussein they'll say anything about his merits and goodness flew yet well wouldn't you if you were going to fall into the hands of his torturers but omnipotent go avoid all this by simply making them creatures such that they would choose to marry him how nice and well this is an argument which I think may give dr. kraig the for pause um yes what can we do yes about design everyone has heard of the argument to design about how if we found a watch in the bush we infer that this was a product of the design and so on but surely the reason why we infer that something was made by an intelligent being is not the complexity it's simply that it is an artifact I've obviously an artifact I'm not a natural for them the most complicated sophisticated entities in the whole universe or entities of a sort of which I see about three thousand around here and they were not at least within the universe itself designed they were at least when the universe itself we were products of unconscious physical and mechanical forces as this argument for design within us the argument from design outside the universe is another one and I won't try in remaining 30 seconds so deal with that one now another time in my first speech I argued that there are no good reasons to think that atheism is true and that there are good reasons to think that theism is true now I asked dr. flu to give us good arguments to show that God does not exist as I listened to the first speech I basically distilled three arguments that he offered number one is that if God is omnipotent then why don't things turn out as God wills it seems to me that the answer to that question is evident namely God's omnipotence does not mean that he can do things that are logically impossible but it is logically impossible to make someone freely do something libertarian freedom entails freedom from causal restraints and therefore if we are truly free and God is will to create free creatures then he cannot guarantee how free creatures will choose in other words dr. flues fallacy is thinking that because there are logically possible worlds in which everyone always does what God wants that those worlds are feasible for God to create but it may well be the case that any time God would try to create such a logically possible world the creatures would freely go wrong and would not do what God wants and even an omnipotent being cannot make someone freely do something so I think the first argument is simply fallacious secondly he argued that the doctrine of God's love and justice is incompatible with the doctrine of hell particularly because the punishment is not proportionate to the crime well let me say two things about that first of all this isn't the topic of the debate this evening the subject of the debate is the existence of God what this argument would show is that the doctrine of Hell is false not that God does not exist but in fact as a Christian theist who believes in the doctrine of hell let me do say something in defense of it anyway number one this is related to the problem that we just mentioned a moment ago namely people freely separate themselves from God forever it isn't that God sent speak to hell rather it's that people freely reject God's grace and forgiveness and so they separate themselves from God forever if eternal punishment were for finite sins in this life then I agree it would be disproportionate but the biblical view is that people of their own free will reject God and His forgiveness and so they separate themselves from God forever second point I'd like to make is if a person committed an infinite number of sins then he would deserve eternal punishment now no one obviously commits an infinite number of sins in this life but what about in the afterlife insofar as the Damned in Hell continue to hate and reject God they continue to sin and thus they incur further punishment and thus in a real sense hell is self purplish Minh are self-perpetuating rather because the sinning goes on forever the punishment goes on forever thirdly I want to suggest that there may be in fact a sin of infinite gravity and proportion which does merit eternal punishment and this would be the sin of irrevocably rejecting God and His forgiveness it seems to me that for the creature to spit in the face of God his Creator to reject God irrevocably is a sin of infinite proportion and could well merit eternal punishment so even though this isn't the topic of the debate tonight I think that no arguments have been given to show that the doctrine of hell is incompatible with God's love and justice the biblical view is that God wants every single person to know him and his love and his salvation forever and the only reason that will isn't fulfilled is because of human free now the the third argument that dr. I if we intersperse on either side applause throughout the midst of the debate we will extend the debate to excessive time please if you would reserve applause for the breaks between the sections of the debate thank the third argument offered by dr. flue was that the notion of a body less person is impossible but I have two responses to this in the first place notice that he gave no proof of this he gave no argument he just asserted it's impossible I want to see a proof of that secondly I would argue that we are acquainted with our own selves as immaterial persons you see reductive materialism which says that the mind is the same as the brain just doesn't work because mental properties are clearly distinct from physical properties for example the brain is not sad but a person is sad a mental property is different than a physical property a thought doesn't have a weight or a spatial location so reductive materialism just won't work what about another view called epiphenomenalism the idea that the physical brain has mental properties which supervene on it well this is simply incompatible with such things as self-identity over time or intentional states where one intends to do something because on this view mental states are just sort of an expressive of the brain not really a self which intends to do anything it's incompatible with free will because there's no way these mental epi phenomenal states can freely choose anything or do anything to affect the brain so that view seems to me to be implausible I think the best view is some sort of dualism interactionism that we act as agents to cause physical events in the world we ourselves are immaterial cells embodied and God would be an immaterial self or mind which is not embodied and so far from being implausible I think that this is the most plausible view of human beings and it applies to God as well so basically I don't think any of these reasons for atheism that we've seen tonight are very compelling I don't find them persuasive now what about my arguments for the existence of God are they any better well first I argued that the origin of the universe points to the existence of God and gave a deductive argument whatever begins to exist has a cause the universe began to the universe has a cause now dr. flue in response said but we must explain things in terms of other things which are simply brute facts but what my argument is is that because the universe began to exist it cannot be plausibly our stopping point as that brute fact why is that well because of that first premise that whatever begins to exist has a cause dr. flu has to refute that first premise if he thinks that the universe is going to be the brute fact and the start stopping point that first premise I think has two lines of support behind it first would be the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come out of nothing out of nothing nothing comes and that's why if the universe began to exist it cries out for a cause secondly that causal premise is constantly confirmed in our experience nobody believes that say a raging Bengal tiger or an Eskimo village could suddenly pop into existence out of nothing right here in the fieldhouse so it seems to me that that first premise is very plausible and that therefore if the universe began to exist it must have a cause now dr. flue admits the universe began to exist in his book atheistic humanism he says we now have excellent natural scientific reasons for believing that the universe did in fact have an explosive beginning and therefore it follows logically and inescapably that the universe has a cause now he asks does the universe earth the cause of the universe have the attributes of God and he suggests that it doesn't let me make two responses I am using the definition of God that was used in the original Kapil stone russell debate in that debate coppleson proposed by god i quote we mean a supreme personal being distinct from the world and the creator of the world and russell responded I accept this definition on that definition I have given evidence for the existence of God secondly remember I'm offering a cumulative case the first argument gives us an immaterial timeless changeless spaceless begin inglis uncaused personal creator of the universe the second argument gives us an intelligent designer of the universe the third argument gives us a source of moral value in all goodness the fourth argument gives us a God who is active in history in the person of Jesus and the last one gives us a God who can be immediately known and experienced and I think the cumulative force of these arguments does indeed give us many of the attributes of God my second argument was based on the complex order of the universe and here I argued that the fine-tuning of the initial conditions is due to either law chance or design it's not due to law or chance because these are initial conditions and they cannot be explained by scientific law Paul Davies in his book the mind of God says there is absolutely no evidence in favor of these conditions being necessary he says even if the laws of physics were unique it doesn't follow that the physical universe itself is unique the laws must be augmented by cosmic initial conditions there is nothing in present ideas about laws of initial conditions remotely to suggest that their consistency with the laws of physics would imply uniqueness far from it it seems then that the physical universe does not have to be the way it is it could have been otherwise and I showed that in fact the universe is balancing on a Razors Edge that cries out for some sort of explanation it can't be from law it can't be from chance because the chances of this occurring are simply incomprehensible and therefore the best explanation is designed now doctor flu says but we don't infer design because of complexity we infer design because something is an artifact but of course the question is how do we recognize something as an artifact well we do so by recognizing a specified improbability about that for example two archaeologists digging in the ground finding certain rocks shape like arrowheads or other implements don't say oh look how the processes of sedimentation and metamorphosis have created these uncanny rocks they immediately recognized the essence of design because of the improbability of that specified complexity or think of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence if we were to receive from outerspace a message of the first 100 prime numbers in sequence we would instantly recognize that is the product of intelligent design just like in the contact movie so that these specified probabilities are the way we detect design all the time in ordinary life and experience and those very present those very specified probabilities are present in the Big Bang itself and thus in the absence of an explanation by law or chance it seems to me that the best explanation is designed I also gave an argument based on objective moral values remember I showed that in the absence of God everything becomes socio-culturally relative everything is relative there is no absolute right and wrong unless you have a transcendent vantage point to transcend socio cultural relativism dr. flu made no response to this argument at all I also argued that the facts of the empty tomb the appearances of Jesus in the origin of the disciples faith are best explained by the hypothesis of the resurrection of Jesus I await any alternative naturalistic hypothesis which is more plausible than that and finally my immediate experience of God allows me to note it that he exists in the absence of good arguments for atheism I see no reason to deny my immediate experience of God and my belief that he exists the selection of these things immediate experience we did a distinction between two senses of that word experience there's the Philosopher's sense in which things like dreams visions hallucinations and the Philosopher's a sense data or experiences and there's experience of things where a person who said experience of things has actually had dealings with them now it seems to me that for people to say that they've had experience of either the Christian God or of Shiva the destroyer or any other God and well it says and Thomas Hobbes said if someone tells me that God spake to them in a dream why should I not say that they dreamed that God spake to them I have no doubt at all that Doctor Who Craig has experienced and appears to him to be that but and this is a matter in which the subjects testimony is not authoritative of course it's authoritative if we're asking whether they had the experience in the Philosopher's sense the honest testimony is the last word but when someone says they had an experience of dealing with cows and so on and that means they'd actually had dealings with real cows well so much for it we appealed to religious experience I was deeply unimpressed by my friend John Hicks it was book about experience of God in which he never confronted this obvious difficulty anyway then whatever begins to exist has a cause yes absolutely this is not a truth of logic however this like the principle that every event has a cause is an experience truth within the universe and it is wholly arbitrary and prejudicial to think oh well clearly the univille the whole universe must have had a cause so we now look for it then persons why do I have difficulty with the idea of an incorporeal person well if I was asked to explain the meaning of worker the word person to air someone who didn't it I'd point around the place here and if someone said a person has called at the house and they would think that someone had called ah the second thing I would say about this is that no one well maybe some of my Australian friends have said that the brain has experiences I think the conscious experiences are experiences of a material thing namely a personal material object I should save a material object they are experiences of a human being or in some cases of animals and then about this the tortures of the Damned being self-incurred so that's all right well would in any ordinary court that was confronted by a defendant who pleaded guilty and who knows well I wish I was shouting and well uh yes yes self-incurred well it seems to me that anyone who with his open eyes refused to do what an omnipotent being said knowing that he was going to be tortured just not for a few days like Saddam has said the earthly Saddam Hussein's victims were but forever it would be prima facie evidence and every American default divorce lawyer would be in there pitching again to say that the balance of the man's mind is deserved and it couldn't have formulated do the Americans use of the phrase mens rea so back to the point dr. Craig thought that I was saying well it's a quote from him on another occasion but so long as people are free there's simply no guarantee that everyone in that world would be freely saved sure God could force everyone to repent and be saved by overpowering their rules but that would be a sort of divine rape not their being freely saved it is logically impossible to make someone do something freedom yes of course there is but I didn't say that God should coerce people force them to do it I said that God is omnipotent God could be able to make people such that they would freely choose now you may say this is the doctrine of predestination and of course only Calvinists believe that not true this view that it made perfectly good sense to say and indeed it was the truth to say that God guided the Wills both of the saved and the Damned is found in for instance Aquinas Ike where it had got a lot of quotations here but still we'll stick with what God alone can move the will as an agent without doing violence to it some people not understanding how God can cause a movement of our willingness without prejudicing the freedom of the will have tried to explain authoritative texts wrongly that is they would say that God works in us and tuition to accomplish means that he causes in us the power of willing but not in such a way that he makes us will this all that these people are of course of course look you opposed quite plainly by authoritative texts of Holy Writ for it says in Isaiah quote Lord you have worked all our work in us hence we received from God not only the power of willing but it's employment also Calvin of course and Luther to maintain substantially the same position but to his great credit we need to take special note of Luther's insistence that this total divine control abolish 'as none of the familiar humanly crucial differences thus in his day servo our betrayal concerns concerning this enslaved will he wrote wrote I did not say of compulsion a man without the Spirit of God does not do evil against his will under pressure as though he were taken by the scruff of his neck and dragged into it like a thief or a footpad being dragged off against his will to punish me but he does it spontaneously and voluntarily item but a gain to his credit and unlike Aquinas the reformer was appalled by the soap pellucid ly perceived implications and his response was the highest degree of faces to believe he is just though his own will makes us proper subjects for damnation and seems in the words of Erasmus delight in the torments of poor wretches and to be a fitter object for hate then for love if I could by any means understand how this same God can yet be merciful and just there would be no need for faith so Luther addressed himself the question why then does he not also his evil wills in which he moves versus him so precisely the question that I was raising understandably if unsatisfactory the person Erasmus who'd raised the question simply gets the answer it is not for us to inquire into these mysteries but to adore them if flesh and blood take offense here and grumble well let them grumble they were achieve nothing grumbling will not change God and however many of the ungodly stumble and depart the elect will remain had we press Luther further he would undoubtedly have referred to a key passage from his favorite epistle the Epistle to the Romans therefore hath a mercy upon whom he will have mercy and whom he will he hardness now walk say unto me why doth he yet find fault for who has resisted his will nay but o man who art thou that replaced against God shall the thing formed sees a him rot phone why hast thou made me thus what if God willing to show his wrath and to make his power known endured with much long-suffering the vessels of Wrath fitted to destruction and that he might make known the riches of his glory on the vessels of glory which he had before / oh well I think that would be a useful thing to have on the record in this discussion lest we have any more of this suggestion that an omnipotent being could not there's a logical inconsistency it's an absurd idea that he could produce people to do exactly what he wanted to do because here you have biblical authority the authority of three of the great doctors of the church Luther Aquinas and Calvin well good enough to be going on well I think and yes and I think that's enough wealth that maybe earth will brief for a change in one of these things [Applause] let's review those three reasons that dr. flu offers for thinking that God does not exist the first argument is that if God is omnipotent then he should be able to make creatures such that they would always freely choose the way that he would like them to choose and as dr. flues last speech made very clear he's presupposing here 8'o mystic Calvinistic doctrine of divine conservation and concurrence now bear with me because this is a very subtle theological point I do not agree with Thomas Aquinas on this issue I agree with a mole inist doctrine of divine concurrence and conservation this is a doctrine laid out by Luis Molina who was a 16th century Jesuit reformer Molina's view of concurrence differed from Aquinas --is in the following way Aquinas thought that God moved the will of persons to do certain effects so that God would move my will to will to say lift my arm and I agree if that's the way you think of God's working then dr. flue is right omnipotence could bring it about that everyone would freely do what God wants them to do but on Molina's view god's concurrence acts to produce the secondary effect with my will but he does not move on my will to produce the effect because molina argued that would be incompatible with human freedom then in fact i would have no ability to do otherwise if it's God who is moving me to that effect let me quote from the introduction to Molina's treatise on divine foreknowledge by alfred freddo so he writes debates in 16th century theology over the nature of freedom came to a focus on God's general concurrence Molina's conception of freedom is strongly in deterministic in modern terms he is an unremitting libertarian Molina in tests that gods general concurrence is an action of God directly on the effect and not on the secondary agents themselves whereas his opponents that is the followers of Thomas Aquinas take it to be a divine action directly on the secondary agents pre moving them and threw them to the effect Molina thus denies that secondary causes must be moved by God to exercise their causal power in this way he stresses their autonomy this has an immediate and profound impact on the analysis of free choice and of causal in determinism in general in other words if you have a mullah Mustafa and such as I have then it is in fact impossible for God to create a world of genuinely libertarian free creatures which always do the right thing what dr. flooey is in the paradoxical position of is finding himself having to prove to us that Thomas Aquinas is doctrine of divine concurrence is true if God exists and I can't imagine how he's going to do that or even that he would want to do that but it seems to me that mullen ism provides the right analysis of freedom and concurrence and shows that even an omnipotent being cannot guarantee that free creatures will always do what he wants and that answers immediately the second objection about Hell because God cannot freely make people believe in him and go to heaven the Bible says that God is not willing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance it says his desire is that all persons should be saved and come to a knowledge of the truth those are direct quotations the only reason Universal salvation is not true is because of human free will what about the third argument concerning the possibility of a bodyless person well here I didn't really understand dr. flues argument he just simply said he takes our mental experiences to be the experiences of a material object but he didn't answer my objections to epiphenomenalism on that view you cannot explain self-identity over time you cannot explain intentionality you cannot explain free will none of that makes sense so I think that's an inadequate view in any case he's never shown that there cannot be a an unembodied personal mind and therefore I don't think he's shown that God cannot exist so none of these arguments are very powerful against God's existence do we have reasons to think that God exists number one the argument based on the origin of the universe he grants the second premise that the universe began to exist therefore the whole thing hinges on that first premise whatever begins to exist has a cause and here dr. flu says yes absolutely but he says this only operates within the universe well I'd like to know why without begging the question he refuses to apply this to the universe as a whole as I said this is based on the metaphysical intuition that something can't come out of nothing does dr. flue really believe tonight is this his alternative to theism that the universe just popped into existence uncaused out of nothing I find that incredible and we see as I say all the time in our experience that this doesn't happen why shouldn't you suddenly dismiss that experience like a cab when you get to the universe and refuse to ask for the cause of the universe so given the plausibility of that premise and look I think it's clear it's more plausible than its negation the conclusion follows that therefore a personal creator the universe exists now the rest of the arguments I have still not been refuted the argument from complex order in the universe was not addressed the argument from objective moral values is one of the most important and that hasn't been addressed JP Moreland who is a Christian philosopher underlines this point he states on an evolutionary secular scenario human beings are nothing special the universe came from a Big Bang it evolved to us through a blind process of chance and necessity there is nothing intrinsically valuable about human beings in terms of having moral non natural properties the view that being human is special is Gill of specie ISM an unjustifiable bias toward one's own species on the atheistic view human beings are just animals and animals don't have morality when a lion kills a zebra he doesn't murder it he doesn't do anything evil and that's all we are on the atheistic view but I think it's evident that this is a patently inadequate view of ethics some things are really wrong other things are really good and if you agree with me about that then you should agree that God exists as a transcendent anchor for those values finally let me just say one thing about the life death and resurrection of Jesus dr. flue how to debate a couple of years ago with someone on this and it was published as the book did Jesus rise from the dead in that my doctoral father wohlfahrt Penenberg wrote a response to this debate and this is what he said he said flu argues that there is simply not enough evidence to tell what really happened but one expects that he should at least take notice of the evidence at hand and that he should do so in detail as well as by informing himself on the scholarly discussion of it otherwise the sceptical claim that the evidence is insufficient smacks of the kind of a priori rejection that flu disdains the weakness of flus argument in terms of historical detail damages his position because he admits that no a priori decision of the issue is acceptable and again in tonight's debate he's refused to engage on the details of this historical evidence here as for the immediate experience of God I admit the question is is my experience of God veridical but what I want to know is in the absence of good arguments for atheism why deny my experience God is real to me just as the external real world is real in the absence of good reasons to deny that experience why am I not rational to go on believing in God [Applause] well some have human beings being merely animals it is a fallacious form of argument to say that anything is merely this and nothing else of course human beings are members of the animal kingdom but that doesn't mean they don't have special characteristics and characteristics of enormous importance and so on so it's ridiculous to say that anyone who doesn't believe in God believes or should believe that human beings are merely bags of bone and something on that for a start there's an enormous importance between what's in a body bag and a living human being it seeks the difference between life and death you know it's a dead body is not merely a body it's a dead human body it was something that was else before it simply does not follow that because human beings are animals they're merely animals and so they have no importance and you shouldn't think of them important you know and this just won't do at all about the resurrection yes I did say there was in insufficient evidence to come to the desired positive conclusion for heaven's sake and the evidence of this so I perhaps I should have said something else for what confronted with this sort of evidence the most recent documentation after the alleged events with 30 or so years afterwards when I was an active member of the Society for psychical research we would have had grave doubts about taking as a an absolutely faithful record documents that were say a year or so later than the actual event and what have we got by way of evidence you know again if an omnipotent being was one thing to establish that it had become incarnate in a way that he would be sure that the maximum number of people would come to believe in this and accept what he wanted them to believe wouldn't you haven't done this in a place where there were public records and so on or whatever records the Romans had left in Jerusalem were destroyed after the suppression of the Jewish rising in 70 AD and so on so my reason for saying there was insufficient evidence was simply that there was insufficient evidence and my failure to accept the conclusion that the resurrection happened on the basis of historical evidence is simply the evidence is insufficient after all my whole argument is that the evidence for a desired conclusion is insufficient in this other case do you expect me to say oh but I'm perfectly prepared to say indeed I want to say there's any evidence at all it doesn't have to be sufficient I ought to reach the conclusion you know I I didn't want to refer to the resurrection and so on because it seemed to me that this claim is without anything remotely like sufficient evidence and it's an enormous puzzle to discover what did happened at that time but when you consider the basis of what you've got and how the first first New Testament documents were Pauline epistles rather than the Gospels and what is so remarkable about the poor line compare epistles is what they don't say about the detail of it is ER and how the appearances recorded were apparently visions which is a very different thing from you know a body into the wounds of which you can poke our fingers and that sort of thing ah yes um about morality I was fiddling around and finding difficulty in controlling my papers here so I can't actually give you the human quotation I wanted to give but of course of course I don't accept the sort of relativism which most people call so yes the the sort of subjectivism which most people call relativism the idea that there's no really no right and wrong it's a matter well what's right for him is wrong for you I'm for years I've been used to having astonished students come up to me and thinking I was a you know progressive sort of chap I thought that and and being astounded to hear that I thought this was simply false well I think it's false because and the moral simply do not mean this as Hume was putting it in one of his less quoted passages which I can't now quote verbatim when people say that a man is just or unjust that what he's done is right or wrong they simply do not mean that they like this or they dislike this or anything of that sort and they are as humid appealing to some standards common to all mankind and saying no this is not a matter of my dislikes under the likes of my interests it's a matter of something else and I I think the I I'm perfectly to be prepared happy to believe constantly maintaining things that things are really wrong and so on but I don't think they're wrong and only wrong and only really wrong because God said so and I suddenly don't think that you can argue from your belief which I hope many of you share with me that there's a real difference between right and wrong between justice and injustice oh well this could only be so if God believes it and therefore this is evidence for the belief in God I think on it is that not at all you can only take it that this is well and that these things are approved by God if you know that they were approved by God again if you're working from within the universe you've got to find some other for the Amisha and evolution of Imams and of course and in the times of Hume and Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson and the other founding fathers of social science the first work was being done on trying to provide an account of the evolution of moms in my closing statement I'd like to draw together the threads in this debate and try to come to some conclusions you remember I said that the decision as to whether or not God exists will be a matter of weighing the reasons to think that God exists against the reasons to think that God does not exist now have we seen compelling reasons in tonight's debate to think that God does not exist well it seems to me not most of these arguments the doctor flew gave were based on the incompatibility of omnipotence with God's not getting his way in the world but he never refuted my explication of the molina stalked Rijn of conservation and concurrence which explained why there may be worlds that are not feasible for God because he cannot guarantee how free creatures will choose with respect to God's being incorporeal I explained that we have an acquaintance of ourselves as immaterial agents and this gives us a good explanation of things like intentionality freedom of the will and so forth and that there's no reason to think God can't be an unembodied mind and little response has been made to those arguments so I think there is negligible of any weight to the arguments for atheism tonight now what about the five reasons I gave to think that God does exist first I argued that God provides a desire that there is a deductive argument for God is the explanation of the origin of the universe first of all we saw that the universe began to exist and that whatever begins to exist has a cause and the whole debate is really hinged upon whether that causal premise is more plausibly true than not and it seems to me clearly that it is kind Nielson who is an atheist philosopher at the University of Calgary would agree with me on that score Nielsen says this suppose you suddenly hear a loud bang and you ask me what made that bang and I reply nothing it just happened Nielsen says you would not accept that in fact you would find my reply quite unintelligible well now what is true of the little bang is also true of the big bang it also must have had a cause something cannot come out of nothing and therefore there must exist a timeless spaceless immaterial and personal creator of the universe the second argument based on the fine-tuning of the universe has gone completely unrefuted in tonight's debate my third argument from objective moral values finally elicited a response in the last speech it's a dr. flue said it's fallacious to think that if God does not exist objective moral values do not exist because human beings are not merely animals there's a difference between life and death but I fail to see why that's important there's a difference between live zebras and dead zebras but a lion doesn't do anything wrong when it kills a zebra Richard Taylor an eminent ethicist a man asked us to imagine a race of people living without customs or laws and he says suppose one person kills another one and takes his goods he says such actions though injurious to their victims are no more unjust or immoral than they would be if one animal did it to another a hawk that seizes a fish from the sea kills it but does not murder it and another Hawk that seizes the fish from the talons of the first takes it but does not steal it for none of these things is forbidden and the same considerations applied to the people he is considering so dr. flue admits there are objective moral values and I say that's great but his worldview lacks any foundation for why human beings have objective worth and inherent dignity I offer you a foundation in a trance objective objective foundation in God what about the life death and resurrection of Jesus again dr. falou did exactly what professor pawan berg accused him of doing he simply says the evidence insufficient but he doesn't engage himself with the evidence remember I pointed out that critical New Testament historians agree that the empty tomb the post-mortem appearances and the origin of the disciples faith are all established historical facts so I'm asking dr. flu what is a better explanation of those then the fact that these men were telling the truth that Jesus did rise from the dead is he going to defend that there was a conspiracy is he going to say Jesus wasn't really dead I mean what is his alternative it seems to me that there is no plausible naturalistic alternative to that finally let me just say a word about immediate experience of God I myself wasn't raised in a Christian home or church-going family but when I became a teenager I began to ask the big questions in life why am I here where am I going and as I read the New Testament for the first time I was arrested by the person of Jesus his words had the ring of truth about them and there was an authenticity about his character that I couldn't deny I finally after a six-month period of intense soul-searching just came to the end of my rope and cried out to God and I experienced the sort of spiritual rebirth it was though someone turned on the light inside and God became an immediate reality to me a reality that I've walked with day by day for the last thirty years if you're searching for God in this way I want to encourage you to do the same thing I did pick up the New Testament and read it and ask yourself could this really be true it could change your life in the same way that it changed mine [Applause] well that someone could believe the evidence for an empty tomb was sufficient evidence recorded years after the event by we know not whom and so on oh no no please then Caio Nielsen having trouble with some of my old acquaintances here he wants to make out that there's no difference between the little bang and dig big bang the whole difference is that the little bang occurs within the universe the Big Bang is of the universe itself and Taylor who is saying another acquaintance going wrong and no difference between what a land or a fish does and what a human being does the difference is the difference between human beings and other animals the fact that we are animals does not justify a direct inference so so we're nothing but animals well known special sort of animals it doesn't justify any inferences to these manifestly false conclusions the one thing that I feel guilty about not doing anything about is the probabilistic arguments well applying probabilities to out again outside the universe makes it impossible I think to imply either sort of probability theory either the propensity theory because we don't know anything about the present sities of the objects considered and we certainly can't apply a frequency theory because we haven't got any other universes you know there may be other universes but we haven't got them to count them this may not be satisfactory but it's impossible I think to give completed satisfaction on every issue within these limits so I think the least useless thing I can hope finally to do is to stress once again I have not from the beginning tried to persuade you of the non-existence of God I said at the beginning but think for a moment supposing you were asked supposing you recently visited as I have done the Metropolitan Museum in New York and you'd seen a statue of the Egyptian god Horus one of the interesting things about this God was that the Egyptians in its day believed that every successive Pharaoh was an incarnation of that to God now would you like to provide a proof of the non-existence of that God the reason you don't believe in that God is no one's ever mentioned this being before that no one can produce any compelling reasons for believing there was this God and that's it so I haven't been trying what I have been trying to persuade you of is that we are finite limited human beings all our knowledge all our theories are contained within the only universe as as far as we know there is and certainly the one any move we try to make to okay what's nan going on outside is in the last degree speculative it may be right it may be wrong but um we haven't got any evidencing as opposed to believing as i as opposed to motivating reason for believing that there is such a being and again i think i will set a good example for my non-existent successes by finishing a few seconds [Applause] you

Channel: drcraigvideos

Views: 76,597

Rating: 4.7238207 out of 5

Keywords: William, Lane, Craig, Antony, Flew, Atheism, Christianity, Theism, Debate, Philosophy, Religion, Presumption, Cosmological, Argument, Miracles, David, Hume, Frank, Copleston, Bertrand, Russell, Apologetics, Scholar

Id: NixhL0CoH2s

Length: 93min 28sec (5608 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2010

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

A video posted by an apologist with comments disabled? Shocking.

[u/hanlou88]

I thought the second guy was terrible, especially considering how easy it should have been to pull apart most of the arguments of that smug silly first guy :)

[u/[deleted]]

This has to be the worst "god" debate I have ever sat through...and I watched it all. Craig made all these incredible jumps in "logic" and then attributed them to a "christian" god, with absolutely no logical or evidence-based connection at all.

Flew was completely unprepared, and was an ineffectual debater to Craig's arguments. I'm not sure that Flew was even listening.

They are both clowns on this stage. (who completely missed the point of the debate)

[u/harbingernaut]

holy shit WLC has been crapping out the same arguments for (at least) 14 years? at least he looks like less of a douche with the beard

[u/IAmAMagicLion]

It's one and a half hours, can you give me a TL;DW

[u/websnarf]

William Lane Craig is a liar apologist. But I am being redundant. He's an apologist. As a matter of definition his side of the debate will be empty, shallow, full of fallacies and painful to listen to.

[u/seuftz]

Hello Mr. Craig.

Are you still feeling sorry for all those poor raping, pillaging and slaughtering soldiers of G-O-D?

OK, just checking.