Does God Exist William Lane Craig vs Christopher Hitchens - Full Debate HD
Related
Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tYm41hb48o
Overview
"Does God Exist?", debated at Biola University in California on 4 April 2009, is probably the most-watched theism debate of the New Atheist era. William Lane Craig ran his standard five arguments in order: the contingency argument, the Kalam, the fine-tuning argument, the moral argument and the resurrection. Christopher Hitchens declined to engage them one by one and instead argued that religion is man-made, that its moral record is appalling, and that none of Craig's arguments, even if they worked, would get him anywhere near the Christian god.
Notes
- The consensus, which I share, is that Craig "won" on structure: he laid out numbered arguments, Hitchens did not answer them in the form presented, and Craig spent his rebuttals pointing that out. It is the clearest demonstration of why debate format rewards a syllogism over an essay, regardless of which is true.
- It is also the clearest demonstration of Craig's method. Each argument is valid; each has a premise that is doing all the work and that is asserted rather than shown ("the universe began to exist", "objective moral values exist"). Hitchens's instinct, that the whole package is a bridge from "something caused the universe" to "and he rose on the third day", was correct, but an instinct is not a rebuttal.
- The lesson for anyone who debates these arguments is in Steelmanning: you have to state the argument in the form the apologist uses and then say which premise fails and why. My answers to each are in the notes linked above.
- Hitchens is at his best in the closing, on why he would not want the Christian claims to be true: a celestial dictatorship, a permanent surveillance, a "compulsory love". That is not an argument against existence, as Craig said, but it is an answer to the Argument from Desire and to Pascal's Wager.