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hi everyone. i'm dr. craig hazen, directorof the master's degree program in christian apologetics at biola university in southerncalifornia. although our campus is thousands of miles away from tonight's debate on thecampus of purdue, biola university has become a center point for discussion and engagementson the big ideas that have really challenged humankind for centuries-like tonight's bigquestion: is faith in god reasonable? i want to thank biola university's partnersfor the live streaming of this event. the first partner is symposia christi whichis a coalition of campus ministry groups at
purdue, and the second is reasonable faith - the organizationthat supports the scholarship, speaking, and debates of dr. william lanecraig. we're joined this evening by 5,000 peopleon the purdue campus and tens of thousands from around the world who have signed in towatch this important exchange of ideas. one of our goals in bringing this debate toyou live is to help ignite a robust dialogue. and we want you to be part of the conversation. so fire up twitter and tweet commentary forthe world. you can also submit questions to the debatersonline to be answered during the live q&a.
now, once tonight's debate is over there'sa good chance you'll want to see it again or alert others to it so they can watch. if so, just point them to a site called openbiola. but jot down the address for yourself as wellbecause there is a treasure trove of quality academic content at that site -- and it'sall for free. so be sure to check it out. the debaters you will see tonight are bothacademic philosophers and are at the top of their game.
answering "no" to the question "is faith ingod reasonable?" will be dr. alex rosenberg who is the r. taylor cole professor of philosophyat duke university and head of the philosophy department. he's a prolific author having written overa dozen books and hundreds of articles. his latest book is titled "an atheist's guideto reality." on the other side of platform tonight andanswering "yes" to the question "is faith in god reasonable?" will be dr.william lane craig who is a research professor of philosophy at the talbot school of theologyat biola university. dr. craig is likewise an author of dozensof books and hundreds of articles.
and of course dr. william lane craig teachescourses in my own department -- the master of arts degree program in christian apologeticsat biola, which has been voted the best program of its kind in the worldon several occasions. if you have considered doing graduate workin this fascinating field of study, we'd be delighted to send you more information. just contact us or log on to biola.edu. we've developed one of the finest distancelearning programs available anywhere, so you can earn a master's degree in apologeticsor in the field of science and religion without uprooting or moving.
the degree program is convenient, it's verystimulating, and it's affordable. and you don't need a background in philosophyor theology to start it -- we'll give you everything you need to get up to speed. we also have a certificate program in apologeticsand educational resources that are available to everyone. of special interest to viewers of this debatewill be boxed sets of dr. craig's previous debates with opponents like christopherhitchens, frank zindler, bart ehrman, and more. you might also be interested in the boxedset of study materials called
"on guard" - a popular guide to christianthought and philosophy authored by dr. craig and available through biola university. one last thing. if you enjoy the ideas and want to introducethem to your church or community, consider hosting an apologetics conference in yourarea. our apologetics program at biola can supplyeverything you need to put on an amazing event with benefits for everyone whoattends. well i think you're catching on to the ideathat it's easy for the learning
to continue after tonight's debate. and i hope you take advantage of all of it. enjoy the debate and we'll see you on twitter! mr. miller: good evening and welcome! come on in and let's have a seat. thank you for coming. given the vastness of the audience that wouldbe watching this debate tonight here and across the world, you know sometimes and atsome places in america we like to say, "llllets get ready to rumblllllle."
it's going to be an exciting night. welcome to the main event - the symposium2013 where the theme is the foolishness of faith. the christian faith is often viewed as foolishnessby those who don't believe it and it is viewed as life preserving and giving by thosewho do. the purpose of the symposium annually is toexplore and debate some of the most probing questions about faith, reason,and life through lectures, panel discussions, and debates such as this. we welcome those of you attending tonight'sdebate here at elliot hall of music
at purdue university and we welcome thosewatching this live streaming, some estimated 10,000. (audience clapping). those 10,000 people represent people fromevery state in america and as of 10 a.m. this morning from over 60 countries acrossthe world. this is great. we're happy to include translators tonightso that the deaf community can participate in this for years to come when we put this onyoutube by the end of the month.
we are thankful for more than 40 sponsorsmany of which were included on the screen behind me. as you were entering, perhaps you saw that,or in the brochures, or on our website at department for sharing the cost of flyingin one of our debaters so that he could speak in their departmentyesterday. my name is mr. corey miller. i will be the moderator for tonight's debateand the mc throughout the weekend, where we've got a fantastic series of talksscheduled for you by a dozen speakers, maybe 35 talks on issues relevant to tonight'sdebate.
i'm on staff with faculty commons, the facultyministry of cru. i direct the christian faculty staff networkhere at purdue. i'm also a phd candidate in philosophicaltheology and teach adjunct courses in philosophy and comparative religions atindiana university in kokomo. our purdue audience should have a pencil andpaper that you were given on your way in to fill out some basic information includingyour vote on who won tonight's debate it should go without saying but please waituntil after the debate to decide who won. i know some of us just love our guy that'sgoing to be up here, but it's more fun this way if you wait untilafter the debate.
we'll collect these right after the debateand prior to the question and answer time, so please write legibly if you're writing. we also want to welcome some special dignitarieswho will help formally judge tonight's debate, wait until all of them are announced, andthen please welcome the judges. judges once i announce you individually pleasestand up and greet the audience. first of all john schultz, a fifth year phd student in political scienceand head of the purdue petticrew debate forum. he will head up the judge team and has helpedorganized and formed this judge team tonight. sheila klinker is on her way.
sheila, she never misses a beat; she'll behere. sheila graduated from purdue and is a memberof the indiana state senate. i'm sorry no ... house of representatives,a democratic representing … that's smooth, the enemy, representing the27th district since 1982. ron alting graduated from purdue and is amember of the indiana state senate, a republican representing the 22nd districtserving tippecanoe county. aaron trembath and an alum of purdue's entrepreneurshipand innovation program. he is the president and ceo of nanobio interfacingsystems and nano technology-based diagnosticscompany in purdue research park.
before coaching purdue's speech and debateteam, he was pretty successful in debate himself. professor fenggang yang from purdue university,a professor of sociology, and director of the center on religion andchinese society. the professor previously taught philosophyat a university in beijing, china. professor martin medhurst is a distinguishedprofessor of rhetoric and communication and professor of political science at bayloruniversity, in waco, texas. clarke rountree, another professor also flownin here just recently like dr. medhurst. he is professor and chair of the communicationsarts faculty flown in tonight from the university of alabama in huntsville.
let's welcome our distinguished guests. a colleague, paul gould, and myself will beediting a book to be published by routledge based on the proceedings of tonight's debatewhich will include the two debaters we'll announce in a moment, the two rhetoric professors we just mentionedand two other philosophers and two physics professors with an equal divideof christians and atheist along the lines. the debate tonight will continue under theforthcoming title is faith in god reasonable, debates in philosophy, science and rhetoric. we'll let you know when that comes out throughyour contact information,
so make sure you give us the basic information.turning to the corner here, the famous anti-theist samuel clemens, otherwiseknown as mark twain once said, "faith is believing something you know ain'ttrue." i don't know if that has unanimous consent. the most famous of jewish and christian philosophersperhaps of all time, at least in a particular period, moses maimonidesand thomas aquinas believed that faith is a virtue. indeed aquinas went so far as to say that"without faith, the virtue of faith, none of the other virtues are even virtuous."john calvin, the protestant reformer,
claimed that, "it would be the height of absurdityto label ignorance tempered by humility, faith; for faith consists in theknowledge of god." for maimonides, aquinas and calvin then, faithis part of a knowledge tradition. yet in contemporary times, the philosophernorman malcolm has said that "in our western academic philosophy, religiousbelief is commonly regarded as unreasonable and is viewed with condescension or even contempt." "it is said that religion is a refuge forthose who, because of weakness of intellect or character, they're unable to confront the stern realitiesof the world."
"the objective, mature, strong attitude isto hold beliefs solely on the basis of evidence." to this provocative statement much, can, andshould, and now will be said as we turn toward tonight'sdebate over the question, is faith in god reasonable? our first debater will argue the affirmativeand consequently will go first as is the tradition when taking the affirmativeposition. william lane craig is research professor ofphilosophy at talbot school of theology in la mirada, california. he earned a doctorate in philosophy at theuniversity of birmingham england
before taking a doctorate in theology fromludwig maximilian university of munich in germany. prior to his appointment at talbot, he spentseveral years at the higher institute of philosophy of the catholicuniversity louvain, belgium. he has authored and edited over 30 books includingthe kalam cosmological argument, assessing the new testament evidence for thehistoricity of the resurrection of jesus, theism, atheism, and big bang cosmology,and god, time and eternity, as well as over a hundred articles in professionaljournals of philosophy and theology such as the journal of philosophy, new testament studies,philosophical studies,
philosophy, the british journal for philosophyof science. he is considered to be one of the foremostdefenders of the christian faith. his book here, third edition, reasonable faith:christian truth and apologetics matches his website which is reasonablefaith.org. please welcome with me dr. william lane craig. (audience clapping) dr. craig: thank you. mr. miller: our next debater will argue thenegative and consequently will go second. he will have the final word in the debate.
alex rosenberg is the r. taylor cole professorof philosophy and department head at duke university with secondaryappointments in the biology and political science departments. he completed his dissertation at the johnshopkins university on a philosophical analysis of microeconomiclaws. in addition to nearly 40 articles or chapters,he is author of more than a dozen books, some of which had been translated into multiplelanguages. dr. rosenberg has been a visiting professorand fellow of the center for the philosophy of science, universityof minnesota, as well as the department ...
as well as the university of california santacruz and oxford university, and a visiting fellow of the philosophy departmentat the research school of social science of the australian national university. that's a long sentence. (audience laughing) he has held fellowships from the nationalscience foundation, the american council of learned societies,and a john simon guggenheim foundation. in 1993, dr. rosenberg received the lakatosaward in the philosophy of science. in 2006 and in 2007, he held a fellowshipat the national humanity center.
he was also the phi beta kappa-romanell lecturerfor the 2006-2007 year. on one website listing, the world's 50 mostfamous atheists in the world, dr. rosenberg ranks number 13. his recent book is the atheist's guide toreality: enjoying life without illusions. please welcome with me, dr. alex rosenberg. mr. miller: the debate rules for tonight … the structure of the debate will be as follows: each speaker will have a 20-minute openingstatement, followed by two 12-minute rebuttals and thentwo eight-minute rebuttals.
the speakers will then provide a five-minuteclosing statement. now, all the actual debate should take 90minutes, 45 minutes for each position to make theircase. there will then be a 30- to 45-minute q&aperiod according to which we will take questions from our live audience here at purdue and from our live streaming audience across theworld perhaps. if either of the debaters goes over theirallotted time, we will give them a 15-second grace period... we're very graceful ... gracious … and then promptly ask them to terminate theirtime and we will have a modest interaction
between the professors in order to get a responseto maybe answers that they give to you. professor craig will approach the lecternfirst. dr. craig ... and then when he begins, thetime begins. timer, are you ready? begin. dr. craig: good evening, i'm delighted tobe able to participate in tonight's debate and i count it a real privilege to be discussingthis important issue with dr. rosenberg. tonight, we're interested in discussing someof the arguments that make belief in god reasonable or unreasonable. so, in my opening speech, i'm going to present several arguments,
which i think make it reasonable to believethat god exists. in my second speech, i will respond to dr.rosenberg's arguments against the reasonable disbelief in god. i believe that god's existence best explainsa wide range of the data of human experience. let me just mention eight. first, god is the best explanation of whyanything at all exists. suppose you were hiking through the forestand came upon a ball lying on the ground. you would naturally wonder how it came tobe there. if your hiking buddy said to you, "just forgetabout it, it just exists," inexplicably.
you would think either that he was jokingor that he wanted you to just keep moving. no one would take seriously the idea thatthe ball just exists without any explanation. now, notice that merely increasing the sizeof the ball even until it becomes coextensive with the universe does nothing to provideor remove the need for an explanation of its existence.so, what is the explanation of the existence of the universe?whereby, the universe, i mean all of space-time reality,the explanation of the universe can lie only in a transcendent reality;beyond the universe, beyond space and time, which is metaphysically necessary in its existence.now, there's only one way i can think of to
get a contingent universe from a necessarilyexisting cause, and that is if the cause is a personal agentwho can freely choose to create a contingent reality.it therefore follows that the best explanation of the existence of the contingent universeis a transcendent personal being, which is what everybody means by "god".we can summarize this reasoning as follows: one, every contingent thing has an explanationof its existence. two, if the universe has an explanation ofits existence, that explanation is a transcendent personal being.three, the universe is a contingent thing. four, therefore the universe has an explanationof its existence.
five, therefore the explanation of the universeis a transcendent personal being; which is what everybody means by "god".second, god is the best explanation of the origin of the universe.we have pretty strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolutebeginning a finite time ago. in 2003, arvind borde, alan guth, and alexandervilenkin were able to prove that any universe which has on average been in a state of cosmicexpansion, cannot be infinite in the past, but must havea past space time boundary. what makes their proof so powerful is thatit holds regardless of the physical description of the very early universe.because we don't yet have a quantum theory
of gravity, we can't yet provide a physicaldescription of the first split second of the universe,but the borde-guth vilenkin theorem is independent of any physical description of that moment.their theorem implies that the quantum vacuum state, which may have characterized the earlyuniverse; cannot be eternal in the past but must havehad an absolute beginning. even if our universe is just a tiny part ofa so-called multiverse composed of many universes, their theorem requires that the multiverseitself must have had an absolute beginning. of course, highly speculative scenarios, suchas loop quantum gravity models, string models, and even closed time-like curveshad been proposed to try to avoid this absolute
beginning.these models are fraught with problems, but the bottom line is that none of these models,even if true,succeed in restoring an eternal past.last spring, at a conference in cambridge celebrating the 70th birthday of stephen hawking,vilenkin delivered a paper entitled; did the universe have a beginning?,which surveyed the current cosmology with respect to that question.he argued and i quote "none of these scenarios can actually be past-eternal."he concluded, "all the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning."but then the inevitable question arises, why did the universe come into being?what brought the universe into existence?
there must have been a transcendent causewhich brought the universe into being. we can summarize our argument thus far asfollows: one, the universe began to exist.two, if the universe began to exist, then the universe has a transcendent cause.three, therefore the universe has a transcendent cause.by the very nature of the case, that cause must be a transcendent immaterial being.there are only two possible things that could fit that description,either an abstract object like a number or an unembodied mind or consciousness,but abstract objects don't stand in causal relations.the number seven for example has no effect
on anything.therefore, the cause of the universe is plausibly an unembodied mind or person.thus we are brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its personalcreator. three, god is the best explanation of theapplicability of mathematics to the physical world.philosophers and scientists have puzzled over what physicists eugene wigner called "theuncanny effectiveness of mathematics." how is it that a mathematical theorist likepeter higgs, can sit down at his desk and by pouring over mathematical equations,predict the existence of a fundamental particle which experimentalists 30 years later afterinvesting millions of dollars and thousands
of man hours are finally able to detect.mathematics is the language of nature, but how is this to be explained?if mathematical objects are abstract entities causally isolated from the universe,then the applicability of mathematics is in the words of philosopher of mathematics penelopemaddy, "a happy coincidence." on the other hand,if mathematical objectsare just useful fictions, how is it that nature is written in the languageof these fictions? in his book, dr. rosenberg emphasizes thatnaturalism doesn't tolerate cosmic coincidences, but the naturalist has no explanation of theuncanny applicability of mathematics to the physical world.by contrast, the theist has a ready explanation.
when god created the physical universe, hedesigned it on the mathematical structure he had in mind.we can summarize this argument as follows: one, if god did not exist the applicabilityof mathematics would be a happy coincidence. two, the applicability of mathematics is nota happy coincidence. three, therefore god exists.fourth, god is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligentlife. in recent decades, scientists have been stunnedby the discovery that the initial conditions of the big bangwere fine tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a precision and delicacy that literallydefy human comprehension.
there are three live explanatory options forthis extraordinary fine tuning; a physical necessity, chance, or design.physical necessity is not, however, a plausible explanation because the finely-tuned constantsand quantities are independent of the laws of nature.therefore they are not physically necessary. could the fine-tuning be due to chance?the problem with this explanation is that the odds of a life-permitting universe governedby our laws of nature are just so infinitesimal that they cannot be reasonably faced.therefore the proponents of chance have been forced to postulate the existence of a worldensemble of other universes, preferably infinite in number and randomlyordered,
so that life permitting universes would appearby chance somewhere in the ensemble. not only is this hypothesis to borrow richarddawkins' phrase, "an unparsimonious extravagance", but it faces an insuperable objection.by far, most of the observable universes in a world ensemble would be worlds in whicha single brain fluctuates into existence out of the vacuumand observes its otherwise empty world. thus, if our world were just a random memberof a world ensemble, we ought to be having observations like that.since we don't, that's strongly disconfirms the world ensemble hypothesis, so chance isalso not a good explanation. it follows that design is the best explanationof the fine-tuning of the universe.
thus, the fine-tuning of the universe constitutesevidence for a cosmic designer. fifth, god is the best explanation of intentionalstates of consciousness in the world. philosophers are puzzled by states of intentionality.intentionality is the property of being about something or of something.it signifies the object directedness of our thoughts.for example, i can think about my summer vacation or i can think of my wife.no physical object has this sort of intentionality. a chair, or a stone, or a glob of tissue likethe brain is not about or of something else. only mental states or states of consciousnessare about other things. as a materialist, dr. rosenberg recognizesthis fact and so concludes that on atheism,
there really are no intentional states.dr. rosenberg boldly claims that we never really think about anything, but this seemsincredible. obviously, i am thinking about dr. rosenberg'sargument. this seems to me to be a reductio ad absurdumof atheism. by contrast on theism, because god is a mind,it's hardly surprising that there should be finite minds.thus, intentional states fit comfortably into a theistic world view.so, we may argue, one, if god did not exist, intentional statesof consciousness would not exist. two, but intentional states of consciousnessdo exist.
three, therefore god exists.number six, god is the best explanation of objective moral values and duties in the world.in moral experience, we apprehend moral values and duties which impose themselves as objectivelybinding and true. for example, we all recognize that it's wrongto walk into an elementary school with an automatic weapon and to shoot little boysand girls and their teachers. on a naturalistic view, however, there's nothingreally wrong with this. moral values are just a subjective byproductof biological evolution and social conditioning. dr. rosenberg is brutally honest about theimplications of his atheism. he writes, "there is no such thing as morallyright or wrong. individual human life is meaningless
and without ultimate moral value. we needto face the fact that nihilism is true". by contrast, the theist grounds objectivemoral values in god and our moral duties in his commands.the theist thus has the explanatory resources which the atheist lacks to ground objectivemoral values and duties. hence we may argue,one, objective moral values and duties exist. two, but if god did not exist, objective moralvalues and duties would not exist. from which it follows, three, therefore godexists. number seven, god is the best explanationof the historical facts about jesus of nazareth. historians have reached something of a consensusthat jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented
sense of divine authority, the authority tostand and speak in god's place. he claimed that in himself the kingdom ofgod had come. as visible demonstrations of this fact, hecarried out a ministry of miracle working and exorcisms, but the supreme confirmationof 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 ourhands, and thus evidence for the existence of god.i realize that most people probably think that the resurrection of jesus is somethingyou just accept by faith or not, but there are actually three facts recognizedby the majority of historians today which
i believe are best explained by the resurrectionof jesus. fact number one, on the sunday after his crucifixion,jesus' tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers.two, on separate occasions, different individuals and groups of people saw appearances of jesusalive after his death. and three, the original disciples suddenlycame to believe in the resurrection of jesus despite having every predisposition to thecontrary. the eminent british scholar, n.t. wright,near the end of his 800-page study of the historicity of jesus' resurrection concludesthat the empty tomb and post mortem appearancesof jesus have been established to such a high
degree of historical probability as to beand i quote "virtually certain" akin to the death of caesaraugustus in ad 17 or the fall of jerusalem in ad 70.naturalistic attempts to explain away these three great facts like the disciples stolethe body or jesus wasn't really dead have been universally rejected by contemporaryscholarship. the simple fact is that there just is no plausiblenaturalistic explanation of these facts. therefore, it seems to me the christian isamply justified in believing that jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be,but that entails that god exists. thus we have a good inductive argument tothe existence of god based on the facts concerning
the resurrection of jesus.finally, number eight, god can be personally known and experienced.this isn't really an argument for god's existence, rather it's the claim that you can know thatgod exists wholly apart from arguments simply by personally experiencing him.philosophers call beliefs likes this "properly basic beliefs."they are based on some other beliefs rather they're part of the foundations of a person'ssystem of beliefs. other properly basic beliefs would be beliefin the reality of the past or the existence of the external world.in the same way, belief in god is for those who seek him a properly basic belief groundedin our experience of god.
if this is so, then there's a danger thatarguments for god could actually distract our attention from god himself.the bible promises, "draw near to god and he will draw near to you."we must not so concentrate on the external proofs that we fail to hear the inner voiceof god speaking to our own hearts. for those who listen, god becomes a personalreality in their lives. in summary then, we've seen eight respectsin which god provides a better explanation of the world than naturalism.god is the best explanation of why anything at all exists.god is the best explanation of the origin of the universe.god is the best explanation of the applicability
of mathematics to the physical world.god is the best explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life.god is the best explanation of intentional states of consciousness in the world.god is the best explanation of objective moral values and duties in the world.god is the best explanation of the historical facts concerning jesus resurrection.finally, god can be personally known and experienced. for all of these reasons, i think that beliefin god is eminently reasonable. if dr. rosenberg is to persuade this otherwise,he must first tear down all eight of the reasons that i've presentedand then in their place erect a case of his own to show why belief in god is unreasonable.unless and until he does that, i think we
should agree that it is reasonable to believein god. (audience clapping).mr. miller: do we have a timer on this side or is it just ... okay, that ends dr. craig'sopening statement. dr. rosenberg will now approach his lectern.and, when i say begin then professor rosenberg may begin his 20-minute opening statement.timer, are you ready? dr. rosenberg you may begin.dr. rosenberg: thanks corey and thank you for the invitation.as yogi berra of the famous yankee catcher, once said, "i appreciate you're making thisnight necessary." i don't know whether to laugh or to cry.i hope you didn't pay money to come to tonight's
debate because everything that dr. craig said... almost everything actually, he said many times before in many different debates, almostin the same order, and all of them available on the internet.so, you know you didn't need to come out in this really cold night here in west lafayetteto hear these debates again and to hear these arguments again.in particular, what's remarkable about them is how impervious they are to the previousdiscussions and criticism that they've been exposed to.they're exactly the same as seven or eight or nine internet presentations of his argumentsin the past. what it leads me to ask is, is dr. craig infallibleor does he just not listen?
probably, the latter. he probably doesn'tlisten to what his interlocutors have suggested. i don't think that he listens because he'sreally not interested in getting at the truth. he's interested in scoring debate points.the two moves that dr. craig almost always makes, first, there's the burden of proofclaim. as though we were in a court of law, as thoughit was a question of the defending attorney and the prosecuting attorney engaged in anadversarial procedure. and the other thing that you often hear is,"all i need to show to win is ..." so for example at the very end of his remarks hesaid, "i've got eight arguments and he's got to refute all eight of them or else i win".you know, philosophy and theology don't proceed
by a "court room style" debate.we're engaged in a cooperative search for the truth, both theists and atheists, noton adversarial contest for victory. this is the wrong format for a profitablediscussion of faith, or god, or science and reason.but, let's turn to the substance of the matter. our topic is whether faith in god is reasonable,but of course by definition faith is a belief in the absence of evidence.so, i'm going to give dr. craig the benefit of the doubt and accept the change that hehas made in the terms of the debate. it now turns out that what we're arguing aboutis whether belief in god is reasonable. the god we're talking about is the god ofthe abrahamic religions; the god of islam,
of christianity, and judaism.it's not the "milk and water" deism of for example the founding fathers, jefferson, adams,monroe perhaps even george washington. the god we're talking about has the followingfeatures. if he exists, he's got the three "omni's"and benevolence. he's got omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence,and an unqualifiedly goodwill. if these four features are incompatible withsome obvious fact, then of course the atheist's ... the theist's god is non-existent.can i ask some water, corey? so, let's be clear that we're arguing abouttheism here. in thinking about theism and in thinking aboutscience ... thank you corey ... there's something
else that we had better keep in mind.dr. craig is very confident about his take on fundamental physics, on important and controversialquestions about which physicists have not attain consensus.the important thing to bear in mind in thinking about his take, the sides he chose, and theconfidence with which he presents his take, the important thing to bear in mind is this;there are 2,000 members of the national academy of sciences.the most important body of the most distinguished scientists in the united states of which fourare faculty here at purdue and two ... the two nobel prize winners in chemistry of courseare both members of the national academy of science.of these 2,000 people, 95% of them are atheists.
the percentage for the physicists is evenhigher. what do these people know about physics thatdr. craig doesn't know? is it a coincidence that this number of themembers of the national academy of science are unbelievers?i think it isn't and i think it requires us to take with a certain lack of confidence,the claims that dr. craig makes about science. i'm going to controvert some of those claimsright now. in particular, many of the arguments thatdr. craig gave tonight, and which he has given repeatedly in the past, rest on the firstcause argument; an argument that goes back certainly to st.thomas aquinas and probably to aristotle.
it rests on, of course, the principle of sufficientreason; the principle that everything that exists must have a cause.the remarkable thing about this argument and the principle of sufficient reason as it'scalled on which address is that the principle is plainly false.it's refuted trillions of times every second throughout the universe.it's refuted in this room and i'll give you a pretty full explanation of why.take two uranium 238 atoms, okay, that are absolutely indistinguishable.in a given moment, these two indistinguishable atoms, atoms of exactly the same mass andenergy state have the following difference. one produces an alpha particle spontaneouslyand the other doesn't.
there is no cause whatsoever for that difference.that's what quantum mechanics tells us. suddenly one emits an alpha particle and theother doesn't. there's no cause or whatever for that differencebetween them. now, you might think that that's not a veryimportant fact of nature but one mole, one avogadro's number of uranium 238 molecules,emits three million alpha particles a second. every helium atom on this planet is one ofthose alpha particles. the smoke detectors that operate all throughthis auditorium to protect us from fires, those operate because of the indeterminate,unexplained, completely spontaneous appearance of an alpha particle out of a uranium atomin these systems.
for dr. craig to insist on the arguments thatrest on the claim, that every event had a cause that had to have brought it into beingis just bluff. right, it's not a principle accepted in physics.you can't argue from it, forward for ... from its intuitive attractiveness.let's consider the fine-tuning argument, another of the claims about science that dr. craigmakes. this is the argument that the charge on theelectron, the gravitational constant, the mass of the electron, planck's constant, thehubble constant, the cosmic density parameter that they're all so beautifully arranged tomake human life actual that there must have been some purpose or design that brought theminto being in order to do that.
that's the best explanation.to begin with, this is terrible carbon chauvinism. if these constants had been slightly different,maybe there would be intelligent life in the universe that's germanium-based or silicon-based.look at the periodic table of the elements. look at the atoms around carbon in the periodictable. ask yourself whether, if some of these constantshad been slightly different whether there might not be intelligent creatures in theuniverse that are differently composed from us.more important, physics ruled out the kind of teleology, the kind of purpose of thinkingthat dr. craig invokes here, 400 years ago. if it's one thing that physics is not goingto go back to and turn around and accept in
its search for the fundamental nature of reality,it's the invocation of purposes. there are of course in physical theory atleast two different ways in which the particular way in which the constants of our part ofthe universe could have come in to existence, while they're being in a definitely largenumber of other combinations of constants, making up other inaccessible regions eitherof this universe or of other universes. the inflationary period soon after the bigbang produced regions of space by completely quantum mechanical indeterministic symmetrybreaking which are inaccessible to us; which are beyond our horizon, our event horizon.there are possibly indefinitely many of these. for all we know, there may be life or theremay not be life in them.
then of course string theory and end theorytell us that there are minimally 10 to the 500th different kinds of possible universesor actual universes bubbling up out of the quantum foam of the eternally existing, multi-universe.i'm not going to take sides on these varying theories, but i defy professor craig to arguefrom authority that it is impossible for something to have been created from nothing.the symmetry breaking which is characteristic of the cascade of events that occurred inour universe and which produces our universe in addition to the indefinitely many otheruniverses bubbling up out of the quantum foam of the multiverse.that symmetry breaking is another example of the violation of the principle of sufficientreason on which dr. craig's stakes so many
of his arguments.let's turn to something much more accessible, objective values.now, dr. craig's argument that only god can underwrite objective values was refuted byplato in 390 b.c., in an argument that he gives in the first and simplest of his dialoguesthe euthyphro. i'm very tempted to say to dr. craig, "whatpart of 'no euthyphro' don't you understand?" the question that plato raises in the euthyphrogoes like this, "take your favorite moral norm; gay marriage is forbidden, or fgm isrequired, or thou shall not kill. take your favorite moral norm.ask yourself this question. is it morally right because god chose it ordid god choose it because it's morally right?"
we all know the answer to this question.the answer to this question is god chose it because it's morally right.what that means of course is the moral rightness of thou shall not kill is entirely independentfact from god's choosing it, it's because he recognizes the moral rightness of "thoushall not kill" that he imposed it on us. that means that the mere fact that it's godwho imposed it on us, doesn't explain the nature of objective value.it's that further fact that he was wise enough and smart enough to detect about "thou shallnot kill" that made it the morally right value for us.okay and this is the point that socrates makes to euthyphro in the first and simplest ofthe dialogues.
and it is a problem that theological ethicshas wrestled with ever since. the only option in responding to this argumentis the divine command theory; a theory that has had its exponents all the way back towilliam of ockham. the trouble with divine command theory isthat in order to articulate that theory, in order to defend it, in order to make it soundplausible; you have to already commit yourself to there being some normative fact, some moralfact about the moral rules that make them right independent of god's saying, "you doit or you go to hell". there's a rightness about moral norms thatcannot be exhausted by the mere fact that it was handed down on a mountain by mosesfrom god.
natural selection is a theory of course abouthow we came to be moral, why we're moral about what the ecological conditions are that madeus moral. it explains our morality, but it doesn't necessarilyexplain away our morality. that requires something else.the suggestion that without god, the naturalist, the darwinian has no basis on which to underwritehis normative commitment that again is bluff. and in fact, it's the person who claims thatit's god that gave normative morality to us, that explains its normative rightness is theperson who has regrettably to use the expression that dr. craig so invokes the burden of proofof explaining. what is it about god that makes for the moralrightness of the ethical norms that he imposes
on us?there are of course any numbers of alternative ethical theories that underwrite the objectivityof ethics; among them, utilitarianism and social contract theory, and ideal observertheory, and hume's theory of the sympathies and the kantian theory of the categoricalimperative. and the real problem for dr. craig is he needsto refute each of these normative theories in order to show that there's no other basisfor ethics than god. the resources that he would use to cast doubton these theories also cast out on the divine command theory.so, let's turn to the argument from the new testament.i am sort of gob-smacked as a philosopher
that he should persist in propounding thispreposterous argument. ask yourself the following question, in 1827joseph smith got 11 people to certify that they observe the golden tablets which he,an illiterate person, was able to translate from reformed egyptian and convey the bookof mormon to the mormon ... to the latter day saints.do we believe on the basis of those 11 certificates that are only about 160 years old that thebook of mormon is the revealed word of god? the koran tells us that muhammad ascendedto heaven from the al-aqsa mosque, the dome of the rock in jerusalem on the 26th of february621. and there are millions and millions of muslimsall over the world who are committed to that
great truth.do you think we in this room should believe it? right.scientology that claims eight million adherents throughout the world, scientology tells usthat 75 million years ago somebody named xenu brought billions of people to earth on spaceshipsthat looked like dc8s. and who are we to believe that there are 55,000people in the united states or eight million people around the world who really believethis too? is there any reason why we should accept the certification of l.ron hubbard and the church of scientology that this actually happened? no, of coursenot. how many of you are familiar with the statuesof madonna taken out from their churches once
a year which shed tears? of course as scientistwe know exactly what the physical properties are of these statues and how the rapid andsudden change of temperature between the inside and the outside of the cathedral producescondensation, which the devout believed to be tears, but that's no reason for us to believeit. think about this, 53 of the first 62 dna exonerationsof people who turned out to be innocent of charges of capital crimes in the united states,53 of these people were committed, convicted on eye witness testimony.we know from cognitive social science how unreliable eye witness testimony is today.why should we suppose the eye witness testimony from 33 a.d.is any more reliable?
this as an argument for god's existence seemsto me to be bizarre. of course the killer argument for...against god's existence is the argument from evil.it's enough to show that theism is unreasonable and it of course is the principle reason forapostasy from the christian faith and the jewish faith and islam, all through the centuries.and the argument is simple and terrible and it goes like this: one, if the theist godexists, he's omnipotent and benevolent. a benevolent creature eliminates sufferingto the extent that the benevolent creature can.therefore, if there's a god and he's omnipotent and benevolent, he eliminates all suffering,but as we know it's obvious that there's plenty
of suffering in the world both man-made andnatural suffering. if there's a god then he is either not omnipotent,or not benevolent, or not either omnipotent or benevolent and theism is false.the problem of evil is theism's problem from hell.i want to say one last thing about the problem of evil and about the potential responsesthat dr. craig will make and that he has made in the past.and i need to make something about my own personal history clear here.there are a lot of responses to the problem of evil that i find morally offensive.i find them morally offensive for a certain reason.i'm the child of holocaust survivors.
all of my family, except my parents, werekilled by the nazis, including two half brothers of mine.okay? i will not take kindly, okay, to a suggestionthat dr. craig has made repeatedly in debate for or like this, that the innocent childrenwho died in the holocaust including, or died in the hands of israeli ...of the children ... of the soldiers of israel in canaan; thatthese innocent children like my half brothers were more fortunate, more luckier becausethey ascended to heaven directly than the ss soldiers who killed them and lived verynice, very comfortable, very long lives in west germany after world war ii.i'm not going to take kindly to that kind
of exculpation of theism.in particular, dr. craig has said before, and said in one sentence at least tonight;that nobody has ever shown the incompatibility of theism and suffering that it's part ofdivine plan that's beyond our cognizance. well, the argument that i sketched, the argumentfrom the evil is a logical deduction which shows the incompatibility of an omnipotentand benevolent creature with suffering on this planet.and it's not enough to "fob it off" on the mystery of god's plan or on the mere logicalcompatibility of these two views. now, i've got to stop and in the reply i'mgoing to want to take up the two new arguments that dr. craig introduced; the argument frommathematics and the argument from intentionality,
but i think i put enough on the table forhim to rejoin. thank you.(audience clapping) dr. miller: all right dr. craig will now beginhis 12-minute rebuttal. timer, go ahead and begin when he begins tospeak. dr. craig: i noticed that in dr. rosenberg'sopening speech, he didn't really present many arguments against the reasonableness of beliefin god. he gestured in the direction of the problemof evil, but he didn't really develop it. the problem is that argument is based uponcontroversial premises such as that if god is all powerful, he can just create any worldthat he wants and that if god is all good,
he would want to create a world without evil.and neither one of those is necessarily true and that is why among philosophers even atheists,the logical version of the problem of evil is widely rejected.so, what dr. rosenberg needs to show, is that it is impossible that god could have morallysufficient reasons for permitting the suffering in the world and until he does that he hasn'teven begun to offer a problem of evil that disproves theism.rather when you read dr. rosenberg's work, what you discover is that his skepticism aboutgod's existence is really rooted in his scientism or naturalism, which make it unreasonableto believe in god. but here i think it's absolutely crucial thatwe distinguish between two types of naturalism
that dr. rosenberg tends to blur together,epistemological naturalism which says that science is the only source of knowledge andmetaphysical naturalism, which says that only physical things exist.let me say a word about each one of these. first, with respect to epistemological naturalism,i want to make two points. first, it's a false theory of knowledge fortwo reasons. first, it's overly restrictive.there are truths that cannot be proven by natural science and the success of naturalscience in discovering truths about the physical world does nothing to show that it's the onlysource of knowledge and truth. secondly, it's self refuting.the statement, natural science is the only
source of knowledge, is not itself a scientificstatement. therefore it cannot be true.for these two reasons, epistemological naturalism is a false theory of knowledge that is widelyrejected by philosophers but leave that point aside.the really important point for tonight's debate is the second.that epistemological naturalism does not imply metaphysical naturalism.a case in point would be willard quine, the most famous epistemological naturalist ofthe 20th century. quine showed himself to be commendably opento the reality of non-physical entities. he wrote, "if i saw indirect explanatory benefitin positing, possibilia, spirits, a creator,
i would joyfully accord them scientific statustoo on a par with such avowedly scientific posits as quarks and black holes."and in fact, quine was as good as his word, for he did posit the existence of immaterial,non-physical objects namely mathematical objects like sets.quine's case shows that the epistemological naturalist need not be a metaphysical naturalist;but secondly my arguments for the existence of god.many of my arguments do just what quine said. they show on the basis of scientific evidencethe explanatory benefit of positing god. and so, they are acceptable to the epistemologicalnaturalist. the epistemological naturalist can and i thinkshould be a theist.
the real issue in the debate tonight is notepistemological but metaphysical naturalism. dr. rosenberg hasn't given us any reason tothink that metaphysical naturalism is true. so, what can we say about metaphysical naturalism?again i want to make two points. first, my arguments for the existence of godshowed that metaphysical naturalism is not true.there is a personal transcendent reality beyond the physical universe; but secondly i thinkthat metaphysical naturalism is so contrary to reason and experience as to be absurd.and in the following arguments, the first premise in every case is taken from dr. rosenberg'sown book, so first the argument from intentionality. according to dr. rosenberg if naturalism istrue; i cannot think about anything, that's
because there are no intentional states, buttwo, i am thinking about naturalism from which it follows three, therefore naturalism isnot true. so, if you think that you ever think aboutanything you should conclude that naturalism is false.second, the argument from meaning. according to dr. rosenberg if naturalism istrue, no sentence has any meaning. he says that all the book...sentences in his own book are in fact meaningless, but premise two, premise one has meaning.we all understood it. therefore it follows that three, naturalismis not true. third, argument from truth.according to dr. rosenberg if naturalism is
true; there are no true sentences and that'sbecause they're all meaningless, but two, premise one is true, that's what the naturalistbelieves and asserts, from which it follows three, therefore naturalism is not true.fourth the argument from moral praise and blame.according to dr. rosenberg if naturalism is true, then i am not morally praise worthyor blame worthy for any of my actions, because as i said on his view, objective moral valuesand duties do not exist, but two, i am morally praise worthy and blame worthy for at leastsome of my actions. if you think that you've ever done somethingtruly wrong or truly good, then you should conclude that three, therefore naturalismis not true.
fifth, the argument from freedom.according to dr. rosenberg if naturalism is true, i do not do anything freely, everythingis determined; but two, i can freely agree or disagree with premise one, from which itfollows three, therefore naturalism is not true.sixth, the argument from purpose. according to dr. rosenberg if naturalism istrue, i do not plan to do anything; but two, i planned to come to tonight's debate, that'swhy i'm here, from which it follows three, therefore naturalism is not true.seventh, the argument from enduring. according to dr. rosenberg if naturalism istrue, i do not endure for two moments of time but, two, i have been sitting here for morethan a minute.
if you think that you're the same person whowalked into the room tonight then you should agree that three, therefore naturalism isnot true. finally, the argument from personal existence.this is perhaps the "coup de gras" against naturalism.according to dr. rosenberg, if naturalism is true, i do not exist.he says, there are no selves, there are no persons, no first person perspectives; buttwo, i do exist. i know this, as certainly as i know anythingfrom which it follows, therefore that naturalism is not true.in a word, metaphysical naturalism is "absurd". notice that my argument is not that it is"unappealing" rather it is that metaphysical
naturalism flies in the face of reason andexperience and is therefore untenable. so, in sum, epistemological naturalism isconsistent with theism and metaphysical naturalism is absurd.let's now return to those arguments that i offered for god's existence and see how dr.rosenberg responded to some of them. he didn't respond to the first argument whyanything exists rather than nothing. as for the origin of the universe, he says,"but not everything has a cause. in quantum mechanics, virtual particles cometo be without a cause." notice that he misstates the first premise, which is that the universebegan to exist. then the second, if the universe began toexist, the universe has a transcendent cause,
that's because the universe can't come intobeing out of nothing and virtual particles don't come out of nothing.they come out of the quantum vacuum which is a sea of roiling energy.moreover in quantum mechanics, it's not clear that these entities are in fact uncaused.there are deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics according to which the behaviorof these particles is fully determined. finally number three, i would say in responseto this, that on the origin of the universe, you have to believe the entire universe couldcome into being from non-being in order for it to come to exist without a cause.i think that takes more faith than belief in the existence of god.he didn't reply to the argument about the
applicability of mathematics in the world.as for the fine-tuning argument, he simply appealed here once again to the multiversehypothesis, but i refuted that in my opening speech.if we were just a random member of a multiversal world ensemble; then we ought to be havingtotally different observations than the ones that we in fact have.therefore that's why physicist like roger penrose, have concluded that multiverse hypothesesare impotent to explain the fine-tuning of the universe.he says perhaps you could have another basis for life, like silicon.what he doesn't appreciate is that in the absence of fine-tuning there wouldn't evenbe matter, there wouldn't even be chemistry,
much less stars and planets where life mightevolve. i don't think he really understands the extentof the fine-tuning of the universe and the catastrophic consequences that would ensueif it were not finely-tuned. intentional states of consciousness, he didnot respond to. as for objective moral values, in his book,he admits that naturalism faces an even worse problem than the euthyphro dilemma.for the theist, the euthyphro dilemma is easy to solve, namely you craft a third alternativethat god himself is the good and that his commands are necessary expressions of hismoral nature. so, they are neither arbitrary nor is thegood something external to god, but on dr.
rosenberg's view there is no basis for moralvalue or moral objectivity and that's why he is a moral nihilist who doesn't think thatanything is truly right or wrong. as for the resurrection of jesus, he justdoesn't understand, i think, the credibility of the new testament documents in this regard.you can't compare them to joseph smith which were probably lies or to muhammad's ascensionwhich is probably a legend, because in this case we are dealing with early eye witnesstestimony that is not the result of conspiracy or lie.these people sincerely believed what they said and that's why most historians acceptthose three facts. therefore the naturalist has got to come upwith some alternative explanation.
you can't indict eye witness testimony ingeneral and then use that against a specific faith.you have to show in the specific case of the gospels that this testimony is unreliableand that is not the opinion of the majority of historians who investigated these documents.so, for all of these reasons, i think his metaphysical naturalism is wholly unreasonable,whereas theism by contrast, i think is eminently reasonable and plausible.(audience clapping) dr. miller: all right, as soon as dr. rosenbergbegins, he has his 12-minute rebuttal. timer, begin when he begins.dr. rosenberg: gee, what a lot to cover. so, i guess the way to begin is to say i wrotethis book, the atheist's guide to reality.
i actually didn't want to call it the atheist'sguide to reality, i wanted to call it something else, but my editor said you'll sell a lotmore books and even get yourself invited for a debate like this if you title a book likethis. of course, the important thing to rememberabout that book, the atheist's guide to reality, is the structure of its argument; which was,science has a number of important implications. in fact, first couple pages of my book i identify14 of these implications. and most of them sound really bizarro; justthe way professor craig suggested in his remarks. the real issue is that among these 14 implicationsof science that i argued ... i'll follow in my book ...one of them is atheism and the others are
that set of doctrines that dr. craig describedas absurd. none of them is supposed to follow from atheism.none of the things that he says are manifestly false and that i've argued for in my bookfollow from atheism. therefore of course the modus tollens argumentas we call it in logic, that professor craig is trying to advance, is based on a completemisrepresentation of what it says in that book.what it says in that book is that all of these alleged absurdities along with atheism followfrom the truth of science. now, you can reject all of these "allegedabsurdities", but if i'm right about the logical structure of my arguments, you got to rejectscience.
and i don't think dr. craig wants to rejectscience; because he's building god on his interpretation of what science is supposedto show. the only thing you can do of course is, asmany of my philosophical colleagues are want to do, is reject the argument that i'm out...aboutwhat science shows regarding these issues like free will, and the nature of the self,and the grounds of morality, and of the purposelessness of the universe.that's an interesting and important set of issues in philosophy and their issues in thephilosophy of science about the relationship between science and the agenda of the persistentquestions of philosophy. they are not questions about the relationshipbetween atheism and these persistent questions.
and it's simply a kalo mistake to supposethat you could refute atheism by controverting these controversial doctrines that i arguefor in philosophy. we didn't come here tonight to debate metaphysicalnaturalism or epistemological naturalism. we came here to debate whether the beliefin god, faith in god or as i've insisted we ought to substitute belief in god is reasonableor not. and that question has practically nothingto do with whether the strange theses that i argue for in this book are right or not.i would cherish the opportunity to discuss the details of these arguments with professorcraig. let's just take one example, the problem ofintentionality.
the problem of intentionality is a reallyhard problem to understand in philosophy. dr. craig mentioned a couple of times thatit's the ... intentionality is the fact that our thoughtsappear to be about stuff like i'm thinking about craig now, and i'm thinking about thetimer that says i got eight and a half minutes to finish my rebuttal.i'm thinking about stuff ... how is that possible, how is it possible forone chunk of matter, my brain, to be about intrinsically about another chunk of matter.dr. craig or the sign announces eight minutes, that is a profound mystery in philosophy withwhich philosophers have been trying to wrestle certainly since descartes and i think sinceplato made the point in the meno, one of his
other dialogues.how is it possible for one chunk of matter, the brain, to be intrinsically about, directedat, pointing at, another chunk of matter? you may think that's not a problem, that'snot very difficult; but if you start reading descartes, and you read leibniz; and you readthe philosophers in the tradition of western philosophy, you'll see that it's a huge problem.okay? it's a problem for science, for neuroscience. how is it that the wet stuff in the braincan do this? okay? there are two answers to this question.one is descartes' answer of dualism. there is a mind and it's independent of thebrain. it's a totally different spiritual substance.theists love this argument for obvious reasons.
if there's a spiritual substance in us, asoul, a person, a self, independent of our brain, well then of course if it's not physical,it's indestructible and it's well on its way to immortality, which is just what the christianreligion wants us to believe, okay, that's dualism.okay? most scientists aren't dualist, there's theodd exception, eccles and even some philosophers like descartes or popper, but most scientists;most neuroscientists think that cognition is a brain process.the problem is to explain how the brain process, one chunk of matter, can have this propertyof aboutness. that question has nothing to do ...nothing interesting to do with atheism or
theism.let's take the matter of numbers, okay. dr. craig says, it's a miracle or it's a wildcoincidence that mathematics is applicable to science, on my view.well, he hasn't reckoned with the remarkable number of alternative mathematical objectsthat mathematics have conjured up, have thought about, have theorized about, or about theremarkable range of possible mathematical functions relating these objects, okay.the fact is that we know that there are indefinitely many mathematical objects and indefinitelymany functions relating these mathematical objects.and it's a sheer argument from ignorance to suggest that the number is so small; the numberthat apply to the world of this vast range,
is so small that it demands divine authorityto make it come out that way. just the geometries alone, the non-euclideangeometries alone, there are indefinitely many of them.and it happens that in the small one of them appears to apply on this planet and in largerspaces another applies, but any one of an indefinitely large number could perfectlywell apply in the universe. the suggestion that it's some mystery thatcould only be explained by god's good graciousness to the physicists just seems to me, bizarreagain, just something that "beggars the imagination". so, i guess the last thing i want to talkabout is dr. craig's brief rejoinder that ...that i somehow need or that he can get away
with showing or with asserting that there'sno logical incompatibility between god's being omnipotent and benevolent and the existenceof suffering. now, christian philosophers have been worriedabout this problem from hell at least since the greatest of them, leibniz, okay.they have done handsprings and twisted themselves up in knots to try to find some explanation,because logically speaking if god is omniscient, and god is omnipotent, and god is truly benevolenthas a totally good will and would never will anything but for the best, then the existenceof suffering on our planet, human suffering, and natural suffering of other animals forexample, is something that needs desperately to be explained.and we've had over the course of 400 to 500
years of wrestling with this problem, thefree will defense and the mystery-mongering, it's god's will defense.and nobody has managed to provide a satisfactory explanation and i insist that the problemis logical. dr. craig needs to tell us exactly how anomnipotent god and entirely benevolent god had to have the holocaust in order to producethe good outcome whatever it might be that he intends for our ultimate providence.couldn't he have just gotten away with world war i, or the great leap forward, or the 30years war which killed untold millions, or the bubonic plague that killed 40% of thepopulation of europe? did he have to have every one of those in order to produce thekind of beneficent outcome which it is divine
providence to expect? i just don't see it.i cannot understand it. i find it offensive and i find it perplexing.and in all honesty, if dr. craig could provide me with any kind of a logical, coherent accountthat could reconcile the evident fact of the horrors of human and infrahuman life on thisplanet over the last 3.5 billion years, with the existence of a benevolent, omnipotentagent, then i will turn christian. dr. miller: okay, we now begin our eight-minuterebuttals. dr. craig anytime you're ready.timer, begin when he starts speaking. dr. craig: i am really excited about thatlast statement (audience laughing) that dr. rosenberg made (audience clapping).honestly, dr. rosenberg if you were to read
the work of people like alvin plantinga, petervan inwagen, and others on this problem with evil, you would know that hardly anyone todaydefends the logical version of the problem of evil; because the atheist simply hasn'tbeen able to shoulder the burden of proof required to put it through.listen to what paul draper who is an agnostic philosopher here in the department of purduesays. he says, "logical arguments from evil area dying (dead) breed". for all we know, even an omnipotent and omniscientbeing, might be forced to allow evil for the sake of obtaining some important good.our knowledge of goods and evils and the logical relations they have to each other is muchtoo limited to prove that this could not be
the case."in particular the atheist assumes that if god is all powerful, he can create just anyworld that he wants and that's not necessarily true.if god wills to create free creatures then he can't guarantee they'll always do whatis right. it's logically impossible to make someonefreely do something. so, god's being all-powerful doesn't meanhe can do the logically impossible. so, the atheist would have to prove there'sa world of free creatures which god could create which has as much good as this worldbut without as much evil. how could he possibly prove that, that's purespeculation? what about the other premise
that if god is all good, then he would createa world without evil. well, the problem here is that we're assumingthat god's purpose is just to make us happy in this life, but on the christian view, that'sfalse. the purpose of life is not worldly happinessas such but rather the knowledge of god. there may be many evils that occur in thislifetime that are utterly pointless with respect to producing worldly happiness but they maynot be pointless with respect to producing a knowledge of god and salvation and eternallife. it's possibly ...it's possible that only in the world that is suffused with natural and moral evil thatthe optimal number of people would come to
know god freely, find salvation and eternallife. so, the atheist would have to prove that there'sanother possible world that has this much knowledge of god and his salvation in, butwhich is produced with less evils. how could he possibly prove that? it's pureconjecture. it's impossible to prove those things; andthat's why the logical version of the problem of evil has been widely abandoned.peter van inwagen, professor of philosophy at notre dame, says, "it used to be held thatevil was incompatible with the existence of god, that no possible world contained bothgod and evil. so far as i am able to tell this thesis isno longer defended."
so, dr. rosenberg, i want to invite you tothink about becoming a theist tonight, because the main obstacle that you presented is neednot be an obstacle for you anymore. what about the positive arguments that i offeredfor god's existence? the first one is why anything at all exists? there's been no responsein tonight's debate to this first argument. you can't just say the universe exists withoutan explanation, if it's contingent. if it is contingent, as dr. rosenberg statesin his book, there could have been nothing, so why is there something rather than nothing?the theist has an explanation but the atheist by its own admission has no explanation.what about the problem of the origin of the universe?i showed that it's to no avail to appeal to
quantum mechanics, because in quantum mechanicsthings don't come into being from non-being, from nothing, they come out of the energyin the vacuum; but for the universe to come into being, it would have to come from literallynothing, because the beginning of the universe is the beginning of all matter and energyand space and time. again theism has an explanation for how theuniverse came into being, but atheism is impotent in this regard.the applicability of mathematics, all dr. rosenberg could say is there are various alternativemathematics like non-euclidean geometries. that doesn't go one-inch toward explainingwhy our physical universe is structured on this incredibly complex mathematical structureand foundation.
again the theist has an easy explanation.god constructed the universe on this mathematical structure.the naturalist is at a lost to explain it. what about the fine-tuning of the universe?i explained the disasters results that would ensue if the universe were not fine-tuned.i also explained why you can't dismiss this problem by the multiverse hypothesis; andthere has been no response to that. intentional states of consciousness, dr. rosenbergsays, "how can one chunk of matter be about another one?" i agree with him on this.it can't and that leads him to deny that we ever think about anything.it leads me rather to say but i do think about things, therefore there must be minds.and minds fit nicely into a theistic world
view, because god is the ultimate mind andso the presence of finite minds in this world is nothing mysterious.it fits into a theistic world in a way that it doesn't fit into an atheistic world.as for objective moral values, it's the same situation, dr. rosenberg rightly understandsthat if atheism is true, if metaphysical naturalism is true, there are no objective moral valuesand duties. he and i actually agree on a great deal, butwhat i would say is obviously it is wrong to do certain things.therefore it follows that there must be a foundation for moral values beyond the physicalworld in god, a transcendent personal being. the resurrection of jesus, again you can'tdiscuss this responsibly without getting your
fingers dirty and looking at those documents.you can't attack other documents like joseph smith and muhammad and use those to impugnthe credibility of the gospel sources. the fact is that the majority of new testamenthistorians, who have investigated these documents, have concluded to those three facts that imentioned. remember n.t.wright says, they're as firmly established as the fall of jerusalem in a.d.70, but the naturalist has no explanation. finally, god can be personally known and experienced.why can't god be a properly basic belief for me, grounded in my experience of god? i don'tsee why not. finally, what about metaphysical naturalism?how is this relevant in tonight's debate?
he says these bizarre consequences that heaffirms don't follow from atheism, they follow from scientism; but my argument was that scientismor epistemological naturalism doesn't imply metaphysical naturalism; remember the caseof w.v.o. quine, "...but if god does not exist theni think metaphysical naturalism is true". metaphysical naturalism doesn't follow fromepistemological naturalism, but it does follow from atheism.the most plausible form of atheism is i think metaphysical naturalism, but there are allthose absurd consequences that result from that that i described.he bites the bullet and affirms these bizarre consequences.why not stand back and say, no this is crazy
this is not the world we live in?ours must be a theistic world. if his only obstacle is the logical problemof evil; then that obstacle has now been removed. dr. rosenberg should find himself free toembrace, joyfully, the existence of god as the answer to these deep questions.(audience clapping). dr. miller: professor rosenberg may now beginhis eight-minute rebuttal. timer.dr. rosenberg: so, just as, of course, dr. craig is repeating himself.i guess i don't have much recourse but to repeat myself, because just as he suggeststhat i haven't answered one or another of his points, he similarly hasn't answered anynumber of mine.
but, that's the problem with this kind ofa debate and this kind of a format, it doesn't work.it doesn't work because what i would like to be able to do is ask william lane craiga question and listen to his answer and formulate a reply, and listen to his answer, and thengive a view, and listen to his question; which is the way in which philosophical dialogueproceeds and which enables us at least to find out where the crucial issues are betweenus and how we could mutually agree to adjudicate these matters.so now, i really need to know why he's so committed to the principle of sufficient reasonwhich underwrites a good half of the arguments from science which he advances for us.i made the point that the principles of sufficient
reason is false, it's not just that it's notknown to be true; it's that it's just plain out flat false and disconfirmed all over thegalaxy, all over the universe, all over the multiverse; indefinitely many times in aninfinitesimally small units of time. and i don't understand why he insists thatit's just intuitively obvious, it's just ... "what could be more obvious that from nothing,nothing can come, that if something exists there had to be a prior entity of some sortwhich brought it about?" we know that alpha particles come into existence for no reasonat all, every moment in this room. why should we assume that the universe isany different? why should we assume that purely quantum mechanical fluctuations symmetry breaking,which we understand is the explanation for
why there's matter in the universe and notanti-matter. why this process which produces the characteristicfeatures of our universe and does so without there being a cause for it happening one wayor the other, why the symmetry gets broken one way or the other.could it be the nature of reality as far back as we can possibly dig in cosmology?let's talk about the argument from evil. i keep hearing these quotes.he's even invoking my best friend, peter van inwagen, asserting that nobody anymore believesthat the argument from evil is a problem for theism.not ... where i come from ...where i come from that's the first thing that
we worry about, how can you reconcile theismand evil. now, you can reconcile god and evil if youreduce his power from omnipotence or you reduce his benevolence to only, "he's pretty good"or "he's good most of the time". even a philosopher like peter van inwagen,who i think is probably the best metaphysician working in our field today, even he, can'tgo any further than in his book the problem of evil, his gifford lectures in 2004.even he can't go any further than saying that he thinks that the argument from evil is notdecisive; that it doesn't absolutely and completely destroy theism.it's not as he says a successful argument. the reasons that he gives, i would be embarrassedto lay before you; because they have to do
with an argument called the sorites an argumentthat has been known since the time of the greeks.and that is the sort of argument that gives philosophy a bad name among more well-grounded,less theoretical people. professor craig invoked the free will defensethat god gave us free will. and because he gave us free will, he gaveus the power to do evil and the evil is done by us as a result of our exercise of freewill. well, i have three things to say about this.the first is he didn't need ... he could have given us freewill without givingus the holocaust or the bubonic plague. he could have done it with...given us freewill, without giving us all the
horrors of the history of our species.the second thing is he made some people, apparently, and gave them free will and they caused nosuffering at all, whether it's small children or the saints of the catholic church or whoeveryour favorite person without sin, may be. the third thing is this; let's think aboutthe following very simple thought experiment. supposed i give you all an arithmetic test.you all have free will. you can all choose.i give you an arithmetic test. it's a hundred questions and they're all ofthe form three plus five equals, or 16 divided by two equals, or the square of four equals.i offer you a thousand dollars for each right answer and excruciating pain for each wronganswer.
right? you all have freewill.how many of you are going to give me any wrong answers? none of you.you're all going to have a thousand ... $10,000 at the end of a 10 question arithmetictest. you all had free will.you all chose freely. and you always gave me the right answer.why couldn't god have arranged the universe and us, so that we all have free will andtemptation was never presented to us? or when it was presented to us, we always chose rightly.why couldn't god have arranged matters that way, given us freewill and so arranged mattersthat in our exercise of freewill we never chose evil, we never chose the outcome thatproduced suffering from anybody? that seems
to me a logical coherent possibility and it'senough to show that the problem of evil remains with us.new testament scholarship. you know, i have great respect for new testamentscholars and for the higher criticism and for the deep scholars of the christian religion,who study the new testament. some of them have told us that 75% of it wasforged and all of us tell us that it was written by people who were illiterate.and most of them recognize that the writings matthew, mark, luke, and john could not havedated from any earlier than 30 or 40 or 50 years after jesus lived.of course, the aramaic in which they were written, was completely lost and all the extantnew testaments are in greek.
and therefore the opportunity for misrepresentation,or mistranscription, or other kinds of mistakes was huge and indeed has been documented byscholarship over the last 200 years, but most of all why should we accept the credibilityof christian scholars writing about christian documents? no more than we should accept thescholarship of islamic scholars writing about islamic documents, or scientologist's writingabout scientology. (audience clapping)dr. miller: dr. craig will now begin his closing statement.he has five minutes. dr. craig: well, i want to thank dr. rosenbergfor a very stimulating debate this evening. i hope that you've enjoyed it as much as ihave.
in my closing statement, i'd like to drawtogether some of the threads of this debate and see if we can come to some conclusions.in tonight's debate, i presented eight reasons why it's reasonable to believe in god andeight reasons why metaphysical naturalism is unreasonable in fact absurd.dr. rosenberg has presented only one argument for atheism tonight and that is the problemof evil. and it was very clear in his last speech thathe hasn't understood it. he says, why couldn't god have created peoplewith free will so that they always chose to do the right thing? this has been dealt withby theist's dealing with the problem of evil. and the reason is because the wrong subjunctiveconditionals of freedom might be true for
god to actualize such a world.there are possible worlds which are not feasible for god to actualize, because if he were tocreate the creatures in certain circumstances and leave them free they would go wrong.as far as we know, for all we know in any world of free creatures in which there isthis much good in the world, there would also be this much evil.it may not be feasible for god to actualize a world having this much good without thismuch evil. that doesn't mean the holocaust is necessary,no not at all, but it would mean that in a world in which say, the holocaust didn't occur,other events would have occur that would have been comparably evil.so, what dr. rosenberg again would have to
show or that the atheist would have to showis that there's no ... he would have to show that god has the abilityto create another world, another possible world of free creatures that would involvethis much knowledge of god and eternal salvation as in the actual world, but without as muchsuffering. and there's no way that the atheist couldprove that, it's utter speculation and that's why the argument is regarded today as bankrupt.now, with respect to the arguments for metaphysical naturalism.i think what dr. rosenberg has done for us is he has described brilliantly what an atheisticworld would be like. it is a world in which there is no meaning,no truth, no thoughts about anything, no moral
values, no enduring selves and no first personperspectives. his only mistake lies in thinking that thatworld is our world, but it manifestly is not, our world is not dr. rosenberg's world.our world is a world in which we do exist. we do have thoughts about things in whichthere is therefore meaning, truth, and value. dr. rosenberg admits that theism providesa better explanation of such a world than does atheism.and since our world is evidently such a world, it follows, i think that it is reasonableto believe in god. in addition to that, i presented eight argumentsfor belief in god. he, in his last speech, said, "why are youso committed to the principle of sufficient
reason?" because a very modest version ofthat is plausibly true; namely that if a contingent thing exists, there's a reason or an explanationto why it exists rather than not. given that principle which is very plausibleand modest, you need an explanation for why the universe exists.this is especially evident if the universe came into being at some point in the finitepast. it can't just come from non-being.i won't repeat what i said about the applicability of mathematics, intentional states of consciousness,objective moral values, the resurrection of jesus, the sources we have for the resurrectionof jesus go back to within five years of the event.and they were not written in aramaic.
he is just incorrect.they were written in greek. we have the new testament in the originallanguage in which it was written and the text is 99.8% authentic and pure.so, doubts on that head are simply groundless. the one thing that we haven't talked abouttonight is my eighth point that god can be personally known and experienced.and i want to close by saying this, i myself wasn't raised in a believing home, althoughit was a good and loving home; but when i was in high school as a junior, i met a christianwho sat in front of me in german class, who shared with me her faith about god's love.i had never heard of this before. i began to read the new testament, and asi did i was captivated by the person of jesus
of nazareth.well, i went through a period of six months of soul searching, at the end of which, ijust came to the end my rope and gave my life to christ.i experienced an inner spiritual rebirth that i've walked with day-by-day, year-by-yearnow for over 40 years. a spiritual reality, that i believe you canfind as well if you will seek him with an open mind and an open heart.so as i close tonight, i would encourage you, if you're seeking for god, do what i did.pick up the new testament, begin to read, and ask yourself, "could this really be thetruth? could there be a god who loves me and cares for me? who gave himself for me?" ibelieve it could change your life; just as
it changed mine.(audience clapping) dr. miller: professor rosenberg will now givehis five-minute concluding statement. dr. rosenberg: so, here's another positiveargument for atheism. it's sort of so obvious that i hadn't thoughti should introduce it and i certainly didn't think i was going to have time, but this backand forth has gone on so long that i've got this last chance and i'm going to use it.so, why is it that god is a hypothesis that science has so little use for? you may recallwhen the king of france, louis the xiv approached laplace the great 18th century physicist andsaid what is the role of god in your system. the answer was, "i have no need of that hypothesis".of course the reason that science has no need
of the hypothesis, is that god makes no contributionto the predictive power of any part of any of the sciences.for that reason, there's no basis on which to invoke god either for explanatory or anyother purposes in science. therefore science has no more need for andindeed a considerable reason to deny the existence of god than it has to accept the easter bunny,or the tooth fairy, or santa claus. the absence of a role for god in the predictiveand explanatory content of science is quite apart from the problem of evil, the principlereason why 95% of the members of the national academy of science in the united states areatheists; and why science can provide not only no good basis for theism, but an excellentargument against it.
indeed, if we think back to the invocationof willard van orman quine, the great american philosopher by professor craig, we'll recallthat he pointed out that quine adopts abstract objects, the objects of mathematics as existingeven though they are abstract, even though they're not concrete, even though they'renot physical items in the world. why? because they were indispensible to theirpredictive power of science; and because they're indispensible, quine had no good argumentagainst them and said that science not only had no good argument against them, but infact it had a good argument for their existence because of the contribution they made to enablingus to predict detailed experiments meter readings, right, of scientific experiments, which isthe "litmus test of reasonability" among science
...scientists. and to invoke the objects of mathematics,as a part of an argument for the existence of god, fails to reflect this indispensiblefact about the reasons that scientists are committed to do.if god could do as much for science as the number two, physicists would be much morereceptive to his existence. so, let me end this debate with a little advicefrom an atheist. dr. craig has ended by making a personal statementabout the importance of jesus christ to his own character and well being, his own spiritualstate. believe if you want to, have faith in jesuschrist if you need to, but do not make yourself
vulnerable to reason and evidence, do notdemand that your belief be reasonable. you will be threatened with the loss of yourfaith. you may well lose your faith.those who have lost their faith in god are generally those who have felt the need forgood reasons, for evidence, for argument, better that you should take as your slogancredo quia absurdum "i believe because it is absurd." that's a far sure basis.it's not an epistemologically respectable one, but it's a psychologically far firmerbasis to believe in the existence of god. you cannot accept that faith is reasonable,but that doesn't stop you from believing. of course, those friends of mine who are devoutchristians, of whom i count a number of people
that professor craig mentioned tonight, andeven professor craig with whom i'm sure i will have a friendly exchange after this debateis over, (audience laughing) even professor craig i'm sure will tell you that that is,in many ways, the firmest basis for commitment to jesus, faith and not reason.thank you. dr. miller: well, this concludes the debateportion of tonight's event. please give our debaters a hand for very spiriteddebate. (audience clapping)now they're hugging; now we're friends. dr. rosenberg: so, i said to bill, "now youknow how the presidential candidates feel right after their debate".(laughing).
dr. miller: it will go on in the form of abook is faith in god reasonable. for our next aspect of tonight's event webegin the question and answer period for our live ...we have three different elements of this. let me explain this.for our live purdue audience, if you've got a probing question, please approach the microphonesat the front. if i can have our microphone bouncers, theyare evil microphone bouncers stand. if you've got a question for professor craig,line up here. if you've got a question for professor rosenberg,please line up over here. ensure that the questions are well thoughtout, are concise, and you will not be giving
a lecture yourself.then as soon as you asked your question, unless there is a followup from the debater askingyou to clarify, then please have a sit. i will ask the debaters to limit their responsesto two minutes and then they may exchange words over those responses briefly.after the ... while the q&a is going on, let me ask thejudges to write up their conclusions and you as the audience, please fill out those commentcards we gave to you, those response cards, now is the time to decide who you think wonthe debate. after the q&a terminates, we will announceall voting results, our judges, our purdue audience, and all who respond online so pleasepass your cards as soon as you get that filled
out like within the next 15 seconds, pastit to the inside isles. and volunteers, now is the time for you tocome forward with buckets and begin collecting in a couple of seconds those cards.for our 10,000 plus listening to this online and around the world, you can vote, you cansubmit a question. if you're in front of a computer you'll seethe vote link above the player and the submit question to the right of your screen.voting online will close in 20 minutes, so do it now.and a runner will bring me questions submitted from the website for our debaters.now, let's begin the debate. we will take a question beginning over onthis side from someone for dr. craig, do it
again over here for dr. rosenberg, once morefor dr. craig, once more for dr. rosenberg and then we will take one online from somewhereacross our web. so, if i can have it a little bit quiet pleasein the audience, please fill out those forms but maintain relative quiet so that we cancontinue with this next session. all right, first question for dr. craig, goahead. speaker 1: in your published works, you'vetalked about something that's conspicuously missing from this debate; the relation betweenreason and faith. for example, in reasonable faith you pointout that when faith is in conflict with the evidence and argument, it's the latter ratherthan the former that should be disregarded.
on the face of it, that seems like to mountnothing less than an endorsement of confirmation bias.it should go without saying, that an open-armed embrace of conservation...confirmation biasis nothing reasonable at all. however, you, in other areas have expoundedupon this and taking what might be considered a personal epistemological code and to somethingof a normative claim. the example i have in mind is when you'reasked about, "how christians should respond to their doubts?" you gave the same answerbut with an explanation and that's a kicker. you posited that...dr. miller: can you be concise and just ask your question?speaker 1: i'm trying to get to it.
what you effectively did...skipping ahead because the moderator ... was posit instead of the possibility of thecartesian demon... the actuality of the cartesian demon...so as you pointed out hume... that descartes didn't take the radical skepticismfar enough and introspection, you don't get a unified entity having these perceptions,you only get the perceptions. on your framework, how do you and, since itwas a normative claim, all other christians escape this downward spiral of radical skepticism?dr. miller: go ahead and have a seat thanks for the question.dr. craig: in tonight's debate i took the word faith to mean the same thing as believe.faith in god, believe in god.
let us say believe that god exists, but you'requite right in saying there's another understanding of faith that is more than just propositionalbelief. it would be the idea of trusting in someone,committing one's life to someone. and i would say that, that kind of faith wouldbe subsequent to propositional belief. you first believe that god exists, and thenyou can believe in god, and put your faith in him.now in the chapter that you were speaking of in reasonable faith, when i'm speakingof faith there, i am talking about... how do we know the propositional truths ofthe christian faith like that god exists or that god loves me and so forth.what i was suggesting there is that in addition
to external arguments and evidence, thereis also this immediate testimony of god himself to one that gives you in a properly basicway, a knowledge of god's existence and the great truths of the gospel.that was my eighth point in tonight's debate that god can be personally known and experienced.and i said this isn't an argument rather it's suggesting that just as we have properly basicbeliefs like the belief in the reality of the external world, or the reality, the past,so belief in god could be a properly basic belief grounded in the inner witness of theholy spirit. so, this isn't some kind of fideism or leapin the dark sort of thing it's saying that, god himself can give a person a knowledgeof his existence that is independent of argument
and evidence.and this is a view that's widely defended today especially by alvin plantinga and hisbook warranted christian belief. and i think he shown that there aren't anyphilosophical objections to this point of view.it's a perfectly coherent religious epistemology. dr. miller: all right, question for dr. rosenberg.go ahead. speaker 2: dr. rosenberg, having taught chemistryfor 40 years and having a degree from a major big ten university in chemistry.i'm very interested if you could go a little bit into more detail why the decay of uranium238 violates any of the principles that dr. craig gave for the existence of god? (audienceclapping)
dr. rosenberg: thanks, it's a nice questionbecause it gives me a chance to put this case before everybody a little more clearly.so, you've got two uranium atoms, same number of neutrons, same number of protons, samenumber of electrons; all of them at the same quantum states and quantum energy levels.and they're not merely as identical as two peas in a pod.they're much more identical than that in all of their physical properties.at a certain moment, one of them emits and the other does not emit an alpha particle,that is to say, the nucleus of a helium atom. the difference between these two atoms isthat one of them emitted and the other didn't. now if every event has to have a cause, ifeverything that comes into existence has to
have a cause of it's coming into existence;then there's got to be some difference between the two atoms in virtue of which one of thememitted an alpha particle and the other didn't; but quantum mechanics tells us and all theexperimental evidence which confirms it to 12 decimal places tells us there is no difference,end of story. there is an event without a cause.there is no causally relevant difference between the two molecules in virtue of which one emittedan alpha particle and the other didn't. dr. craig: well, that's not the end of thestory. there are at least 10 different physical interpretationsof quantum mechanics. some of these are fully deterministic andnobody knows which one of this is true.
victor stenger who is atheistic physicistsays this in his book. he says, "other viable interpretations ofquantum mechanics remain with no consensus on which, if any of them is the correct one."so, he says, "we have to remain open to the possibility that causes may someday be foundfor such phenomena." there are deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics thatmay well be correct. in any event, my argument never appealed tothe premise that every event has a cause. it was deliberately formulated in such a wayas to allow for quantum indeterminacy. without prejudicing the issue, my argumentis that if the universe began to exist, had an absolute beginning then the universe hasa transcendent cause.
and quantum mechanics is simply irrelevantto that, because we're talking about an absolute beginning of space and time, matter and energy.there's nothing in physics that would explain how being comes from non-being.dr. rosenberg: i need to make a short response to that with your permission.this is not an issue about the interpretation of quantum mechanics.i happen to think that among the interpretations of quantum mechanics, the deterministic ...some of the deterministic ones are more plausible than others.this is a matter of experimental physics. this is a matter of a fact about the natureof reality. and it also seems to me clear that, in sofar as we have here, good evidence that things
can happen with no cause at all, it followsthat therefore the universe can come into existence with no cause at all.and indeed, that's what the best guesses of contemporary physical theorists is.dr. miller: alright, for dr. craig. speaker 3: i would like to ask you about youruse of the existence of "objective morality" as an argument.because, there are differences due to society or religious beliefs that lead to people havingdifferent moralities such as like the practice of sharia law or the death penalty.so, how can ... if god gave us, like as humanity objectivemorality, then why do we have such conflicting views of morality and what is right and wrong?dr. craig: the question you're raising is
not a question about moral ontology, thatis to say, the reality or the foundation of moral values.your question is about moral epistemology and that is how do we come to know moral valuesand duties? it's no part of my case to say that moral questions are always easy.certainly there are areas of gray where good people will disagree and will differ.it's not always easy to discern what is right or what is wrong in certain situations.but, what i am saying is that we do have in moral experience, a very clear grasp of caseswhere there are clearly objective moral values and objective duties or obligations and prohibitions.and so, by no means, am i suggesting that all of these cases are clear, all you needis a few really, any and you've got to then
explain what is the ontological foundationin reality for these moral values. dr. miller: no sorry, no follow-up questions.thank you. all right, for dr. rosenberg.speaker 4: yes doctor, so with a lot of debates such as this, the question becomes an argumentof looking at the same evidence and coming up with different conclusions.as a result of this, people become i supposed heated in this debates, and so there is certainlevel of arrogance on both sides. this is more of a question to both of you.how is it that you deal with this sort of issue where you a lot of the arguments madeby you ... and i'm an atheist so i'm with you on a lotof them ...
a lot of them posit a sort of attack on theother viewpoint. as a result, the other person becomes verydefensive and attacks your view point. how is it that both of you help address andcalm that issue? dr. rosenberg: i have no idea.(audience laughing). i suppose, as i said at the beginning, thati don't think that debate format the eristic context of prosecutorial and defense attorneysin a adversarial relationship is the right venue under which to purse philosophical andtheological inquiry. in fact, i'm very confident that it isn't.i have spent a lot of time in my life with peter van inwagen.and we have often argued about issues like
this ...discussed issues like this, tried to find out ...to identify where are differences are and how we might adjudicate them.it's a difficult process; it's a process that's been going on in philosophy and rational theologyfor at least 2,400 years in the west. it certainly hasn't attained consensus, butat its best it's not controversialist. it's unfortunate that some fora because theymake for entertainment or sell books and cds and stuff like that, emerge in which suchdebates sharpen controversies, but they are not the ideal indeed, they're not even satisfactoryvenues for pursuing these questions. dr. craig: i'm glad for the question, becausei think while we may be passionate about our
arguments and point of view, i think it'sextremely important that these kinds of debates be conducted with civility, and charity, andhonesty. i think you try to represent your opponent'spoint of view fairly, you prepare by reading his work carefully, and pointing out the areasof disagreement, but you do so in a way that is gentlemanly and civil without personalattacks upon character. i think that these kinds of forums are veryvaluable that doesn't mean they're the only kind of forum.obviously he and i both publish in professional journals, we read papers at professional conferences,publish books, but most of you students will never read a professional philosophy journalor attend a professional conference.
these debates are important as a way of gettingthis information disseminated to a wider public in a way that is passionate and firm, butit's civil and it's an academic exchange; these are as old as the middle ages.back in the middle ages they used to have what they call quaestionis disputatis, "disputedquestions" of theology. we're continuing a long tradition,i think of having a good solid academic debate over these issues and i hope that people wouldbe stimulated by what said tonight to go out and look further and read, and investigate,and think harder about these, maybe take some classes in philosophy, or theology, or newtestament studies about these matters. i'm firmly committed to the value of thesekinds of forum on university campuses.
i'm glad dr. rosenberg despite his scruplesagreed to participate tonight. (audience clapping)dr. miller: given that we have a ton of questions here and we've got probably twice as manypeople watching live stream. in fairness, i'm going to ask one of eachof our debaters from within the united states and then one with outside of the united states.so, first of all, dr. craig from anthony in newburyport, massachusetts: with respect tothe fine-tuning of the theological argument, aren't you presupposing atheism since godcould have made the universal without needing to have it fine-tuned?dr. craig: the fine-tuning argument doesn't presuppose anything about how god could havedone it in the sense that he could have created
a world say of just spirit beings withoutany physical beings at all; but fine-tuning simply means that the fundamental constantsand quantities in the universe that are necessary for life, fall into an extraordinarily narrowrange of values; an infinitesimal range almost. such that if these values were to be alteredby even a hair's breadth or less rather, the balance would be upset and life could notexist in a universe governed by these laws. and so, that's all the debate is about.it's not about whether god could have created other universes with other laws of naturethat weren't fine-tuned. it's about whether or not ...or what is the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe that characterizes this univ...the universe we live in.
and, i think that the best explanation isintelligent design. physical necessity, and chance just won'toffer plausible accounts of this fact. dr. miller: okay, one for dr. rosenberg andthis one i had to take this. this is kind of funny because of this purdueaudience this is from iu. they are actually watching with a christianministry and a non-theist campus group together. so, dr. rosenberg, and there's no name onthis, it's the whole group they all decided unanimously apparently ...how can the most basic moral values be universal if they are determined by natural selection?dr. rosenberg: that's a question for evolutionary anthropology.that is, it's the question ...
assume that there are set of moral norms,behaviors and values, that are universal that are...that obtain in every culture, how could that happen? well, first of all, the explanandum,the proposition describing what is to be explained of course is false.and therefore it's difficult to satisfy the request for an explanation.it's not the case that there are universal moral values.the moral values differ in... on our earth and have overtime owing to importantecological differences between the communities that have emerged at various times and variousplaces on our planet but now let's just slightly change the question to ...in so far as there is a commonality among
all human groups in regard to the moral normsthat they adopt, how could this have emerged as a result of a process of blind variationand natural selection? so for example, human cooperation, the commitmentto fairness and to equality, to reciprocity, these are almost all universal.there's only a very small number of societies which spurn such moral norms.and why should they have emerged? it's a remarkable fact of recent work by evolutionary game theoristsand evolutionary anthropologists and others that it turns out that cooperation, a commitmentto fairness and to equality and to reciprocity, turn out for creatures like us who found ourselvesat the bottom of the food chain on the african savanna 200,000 years ago; to be absolutelyrequired for our survival.
in fact, it's because we glommed on by pureblind variation, a natural selection to this set of norms of cooperation that we manageto climb up the food chain so that within a 100,000 years; we were at the top of thefood chain everywhere on the planet. our own persistence over that subsequent hundredthousand year period; and our expansion out of africa is largely due to the natural selectionfor those almost universal norms of cooperation. and it's a wonderful thing about us.dr. craig: i would just say i think the question isn't the universality of these norms buttheir objectivity. dr. miller: okay.(audience laughing) dr. miller: dr. craig, this is from tiborin town zilina slovakia ...
slovakia.if the christian faith is from a realm beyond or above reason, like pauline, peace surpassingunderstanding...? dr. craig: it's from slovakia?could you say that again? i didn't catch it. dr. miller: if the christian ...if the christian faith is from a realm "beyond or above reason," like pauline "peace surpassingunderstanding," then how can we even anchor such a topic as the reasonableness of believingin god? dr. craig: god, i would say is beyond humancomprehension in the sense that we cannot grasp fully god's greatness and majesty.he is not able to be comprehended in that universal sense, but that doesn't in anywayimply that we get no elements of truth about
god.i would say that in fact, god is the ultimate rational being.he is the ultimate rational mind and we as finite minds, made in his image, are ableto know a great deal of truth and a great deal about him even if such knowledge is notexhaustive. dr. miller: tibori you can go to sleep nowbecause it's late there. (audience laughing)okay, dr. rosenberg, from sarah in seoul, south korea: "you said god chose it, whatever"it" may be, because it was "morally right." where does the standard for morally rightand wrong comes from and what is the logical basis for this order?dr. rosenberg: well, i don't have the slightest
idea, but what i do know is that god's commandcannot be such a basis. assume god exists, assume he commanded usto obey certain moral norms. the question becomes are those the right moralnorms simply because he commanded them, holding the threat of hell to our heads or did hecommand them in his wisdom and goodness because they are the moral right ones?the answer that we all agreed to is the latter that he chose them for us because there arethe morally right ones and it can't be rocket science what makes them morally right; it'snot like interpretation of quantum mechanics. we all know what makes the morally right valuesmorally right. it's not merely the fact that god chose them.he chose them because they were the moral
right ones.and therefore you cannot argue for god's existence from the existence of morally right norms,but what the origin, what the basis of moral objectivity is, is not a question to whichi have at this time a satisfactory answer. of course as i ...and it pains to point out, that's not a material question in this discussion.dr. craig: i think this is one of the most powerful arguments for the existence of godand rooting moral values and duties in god can take either two forms.dr. rosenberg alluded to one form which is called volunteerism, which is what ockhamheld and that is that god just makes up moral duties and responsibilities for.they're based in his will, but that's not
the majority mainstream christian position.volunteerism is not the usual way divine command morality works.the majority position would be that god himself is what plato called the good.god himself is the paradigm of goodness. his commands are reflections of his own character,so it's not that god commands things because they're right independently of him, that there'ssome good outside of god to which he is subservient, rather god is the good and his commandmentsare reflections of that good character toward us.and so, they're not arbitrary but neither are they based on something independent ofgod. i think this gives a very credible foundationfor moral obligation and prohibition as well
as moral value which the atheist cannot provide.dr. rosenberg: and i think it's just the ... "the assertion that god is good because godis good" without adding any content to found, to ground, to substantiate the claim.so, god... god's goodness cannot consist in his obeyinghis own moral norms because god could not disobey them.it makes no sense to say that his goodness consist in his obeying his own moral norms,not to mention that in the old and new testament, he doesn't do it very often, but that's anothermatter. the real problem is if you assert that it'sgod's goodness in which the foundation of the moral norms consists, then you have togo on and say unless you think it's like quantum
mechanics, what is that goodness consistsin. if you simply say, "it's god's goodness becausehe is good", that's not an answer to the question. we need some content to the claim that hisgoodness grounds the objectivity, the rightness; the correctness of the moral norms, and merelysaying, "he's good" over and over again doesn't do it.this is the open question argument in meta-ethics and it dogs divine command theory just asfully as it dogs as it daunts utilitarianism, or kant, or social contract theory, or idealobserver ethics. dr. craig: yes, i don't think that that'san insuperable problem. god by his very nature is the greatest conceivablebeing.
he is a being that is worthy of worship andonly a being which is perfect goodness can be worthy of worship, and the greatest conceivablebeing would not simply be good by conforming to some other standard.he would be the paradigm of goodness. he would be like the old meter bar in paris,which defined what a meter was not by conforming to some abstract length, but by being theparadigm of what a meter is. it makes no sense to ask, "why is the meterbar a meter long?" it is the paradigm for what that is.similarly god, i would say, as the greatest conceivable being, a being worthy of worshipis the good and this is defined in terms that of the character quality city has like compassion,fairness, love, justice, and so forth.
it's not a contentless claim.(audience clapping) dr. miller: okay, i f i could have someonebring up to me the results from the three voting aspects.we will continue to take questions for another 10 minutes here while they bring that up andi will share with the audience the conclusions of the people.over here for dr. craig. speaker 5: yes dr. craig, i just want to knowhow would you respond to dr. rosenberg's argument in his concluding statement that science canoperate without having to account for god? dr. craig: that science what?speaker 5: that science can operate without having to account for god or taking accountfor god?
dr. rosenberg: yes, that god makes no predictivecontribution. that god makes no predictive contribution.speaker 5: yes, that's my question. dr. craig: yeah, i read his interview in thecampus newspaper this morning trying to get some clues to what he might say this evening.and i saw this argument about predictability and here's what my thoughts on this are.predictability is just one way to test for the truth of a scientific theory.and it's not always useful. some theories for example are empiricallyequivalent in their predictions. for example i mentioned 10 different physicalinterpretations of quantum mechanics which are all empirically equivalent.there are three different interpretations
of special relativity which are all empiricallyequivalent and yet they're different, there in in each one is a legitimate scientifictheory even though they can't be assessed based on predictability.other factors then can come into play, things like simplicity, plausibility, degree of 'adhocness', explanatory power. these are other theoretical virtues besidespredictability that we can use in testing a hypothesis.predictability is especially difficult to apply when you're dealing with a free agentrather than with impersonal mechanistic causes, and particularly in god's case, how couldyou predict what god would do? you could predict perhaps if a universe exists then it wouldbe fine-tuned for our existence or that if
god created a universe, it would likely haveobjective moral values and duties. i think you could make that kind of prediction,but how could you predict as a free agent whether or not god would create a universeat all? so, instead, i don't think what you do is look for predictability.you follow quine's prescription. remember quine said, if you could show theindirect explanatory benefit of positing things like a creator, then i would joyfully accordthem scientific status along with these other entities like quarks and black holes.and so, i would say that the... theism has explanatory power to offer us.for example fine-tuning is more probable on theism than on naturalism.states of intentionality are more probable
on theism than on naturalism or atheism.objective moral values and duties are more probable on theism than on naturalism.the resurrection of jesus is more probable on theism than on naturalism.so, in all of these ways, i think theism is an explanatorily beneficial hypothesis thatexplains a wide range of the data of the human experience which atheism cannot explain.speaker 5: sounds pretty ad hoc to me. (laughs).dr. miller: for dr. rosenberg. speaker 6: in your closing argument, you'resaying that science is the only way to be reasonable.wouldn't that make history and personal experiences unreasonable because they're not repeatableand also everyone in this room because we're
not repeatable scientifically?dr. rosenberg: i don't know what it means to say."we are not repeatable scientifically". everybody in this room has a large numberof properties in common but they're all shared and that have scientific explanations.everybody in this room differs from everyone else in a variety of different respects andthose differences are also open to increasingly the subject of scientific explanations withsubstantial, additional, predictive content that certify their improvement over previousscientific explanations. as for personal experience in history, aswe all know and this happens to be my principal career interest as a philosopher, the philosophyof social sciences.
as we all know, there are grave difficultiesinvolved in applying the methods of the natural sciences, of the empirical sciences to humanquestions. in many respects, these are submitting ofimaginative, interesting and powerful solutions as we speak.if i'm right, and no one will know if i'm right about this well after all of us in thisroom are dead. if i'm right, eventually the sciences broadlyunderstood. will provide as predictably powerful and thereforeas explanatorily credible accounts of the nature and character and trajectory of individualhuman lives as they now provide for the planets, but of course i could be wrong.it's an empirical question.
speaker 6: thank you.dr. craig: this is the question of epistemological naturalism that i raised in my second speech.remember i said, "the one reason that's regard of this a false theory of knowledge is becauseit's overly restrictive". in particular, dr. rosenberg is very harshin his book on the humanities in terms of the humanities not really being a source ofknowledge at all, including history. and this has led many of the reviewers ofdr. rosenberg's book to be very critical with regard to this narrow scientism that he propounds.for example, michael ruse who is an agnostic philosopher of science says this, "i thinkrosenberg's insensitivity to history blinds him to the fact that science does not askcertain questions and so it is no surprise
that it does not give answers.""i'm not at all sure that the theists' answers are correct, but they are not shown to beincorrect by modern science. science is limited in scope and by its verynature is destined forever to be limited." so, science may be the best way of gettingat knowledge of the physical world the way it operates, but there are many other fieldsof knowledge that also are sources of truth and knowledge about the world including mathematics,metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, history and so forth.dr. rosenberg: all i can say is we weren't debating this book; which is not widely available.(laughs). we were debating the reasonableness of thebelief in god's existence.
dr. craig: could i ask you a question, dr.rosenberg? given the debate question tonight, is faith in god reasonable? i thought andanticipated that you would say much more about your defensive scientism because it seemsto me that that's the principle reason that you are skeptical about the existence of god.and so, i'm curious why didn't you make this more of an issue in tonight's debate? thatwould show god and faith in god to be unreasonable if scientism or epistemological naturalismwere true or metaphysical naturalism, i'm sorry, i meant to say.dr. rosenberg: i wrote this book because i was relatively disenchanted with the tideof works by hitchens, and dawkins, and harris. here i exclude dan dennett, who's book thebreaking the spell is quite in order ...
a different order of magnitude.i was rather tired of books hammering another nail into the coffin of theism.i'm much more eager to put before a public that might be interested in the real implicationsof science for the perennial questions of philosophy for what a radio humorist namedgarrison keillor calls the persistent questions that bother that guy in the 14th floor ofthe acme building in st. paul, minnesota, the guy that was excludedfrom referring to by my editor because he said nobody ever heard of garrison keillor.(audience laughing). i was interested in exploring what the consequencesof science were for these fundamental questions of philosophy that keep us up at night.right? what i said at the beginning of this
book is science gives us the best argumentfor atheism and it's so good that i don't have to rehearse it in this book.i want to go on and talk about all the other things that those of us who are atheists becausewe believe that science describes the nature of reality, ought to believe.now, i don't think that in a discussion about atheism, the further consequences of sciencewhich i claim to obtain are relevant or material. and i certainly know, and i'm sure you willagree with me, that those who reject these conclusions can do so by saying they don'tfollow from science. of course i take it that on your own vieweither these conclusions do follow from science and therefore my book is vindicated as anaccount of how science deals with the perennial
questions that keep us all up at night, orelse you've committed a flagrant logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.dr. craig: no, what i said was it doesn't follow from epistemological naturalism, buti do agree with you that your conclusions follow from metaphysical naturalism and that... dr. rosenberg: no, my argument is not theyfollow from metaphysical naturalism. my argument is they follow from the substantiveclaims of the sciences, physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience ...dr. craig: yes, i disagree ... dr. rosenberg: it's not philosophy that iam deducing these consequences from. it's science and of course we can argue aboutthat.
dr. craig: yes, i disagree with that part,but where i agreed with you in contrast to the dawkins and the hitchens and dennett andothers, where i agreed with you was that if only physical things exist, if physics fixesall the facts as you put it, then it seems to me you're right, there isn't any intentionalstates and there aren't any meaning to sentences, there is no truth.dr. rosenberg: yes, could i get you to write a blurb for the back of my book?dr. craig: somebody ... somebody on facebook said, why have a debatebetween craig and rosenberg, they both agree on the consequences of denying god and sohe thought it would be pointless, but i mean it drives you back to the question, well isthere a god? it's metaphysical naturalism.
dr. rosenberg: maybe there's a chance formy book to be in the christian bookstores after all?dr. craig: yes. (laughing).(audience clapping). dr. miller: on that note, let's (laughing)two more questions here. i'm going to go right back to you dr. rosenbergand then will take one from this side because this is an interesting ...dr. rosenberg: you know corey i've been asking you to call me alex all day (laughs).dr. miller: but you also wanted me to call you dr. rosenberg and that rosenberg likein a football game. (laughing).okay, alex (laughing).
gabriel sotto from costa rica: let's assumethat god does not exist and you were right, then what is your explanation for the existenceof evil if there is no evil and good? dr. rosenberg: of course my explanation ...the explanation that i offer in this book not to put too fine a point on it, isn't anexplanation of evil because that would commit me to a normative theory which i am unpreparedto endorse, but i have an explanation for suffering, for the pain and misery of humanexistence and of other biological systems. and regrettably, it has to do with the natureof matter and the nature of the struggle for survival and the competition among physicalsystems including biological systems and animals and us for survival; and the fact that naturehas so organized living matter as to provide
it with signals when it's doing somethingthat's dangerous for its persistence and its well-being by giving it pain.right? now, i don't think it's a great mystery whyphysical systems... why biological system should feel ...have sensations in particular sensations of pain and discomfort.those are signals that nature is providing or they are the byproducts of signals thatnature is providing about the threats to one's well-being.that's about the best i think we can do by way of explaining, "why there is suffering?"okay? giving a scientific and empirical, a factual explanation for why there is sufferingas opposed to theological explanation for
why there is suffering.dr. miller: dr. craig do you care to respond to that or just ...dr. craig: no comment. dr. miller: let's take one last question onthis side to dr. craig. speaker 7: yes my question is for dr. craig.the bible says that jesus loves us, wants a relationship with us and wants us to believein him. he even showed himself to disbelievers likeyou mentioned to people such as thomas after he was crucified to help them believe.my question is why does jesus not continue to physically reveal himself to people particularlyunbelievers to show them that he is real? dr. craig: yes.obviously god could make his existence or
christ's existence more evident than he has.he could have the stars spell out "god exists" in the sky or he could have every atom inscribedwith the label "made by god". clearly, god could make his existence a lotmore obvious, but i think what the point you were making is the salient one.god isn't interested in just getting people to believe that he exists to add one morepiece of furniture to their ontology of the universe.he wants to bring people into a loving, saving relationship with himself.i think that god in his providence knows how to so order the world so as to bring the maximalor optimal number of people freely into relationship with himself.he knows that it isn't necessary or profitable
to have jesus of nazareth appear miraculouslyto every single person in his lifetime in order to provide sufficient grace for salvationto everybody. in fact, it's possible that in a world inwhich god's existence was as plain as the nose on your face in which jesus was constantlyappearing in people's bedrooms, that they would get rather annoyed at the effronteryof this intruder, popping into their houses all the time uninvited, and wouldn't leadat all to a deeper faith or love in him. so, i think that we can trust god's wisdomin providentially ordering the world in such a way that people are given adequate but notcoercive evidence for his existence and the question then for us is how will we respondto that.
it's not an adequate response to complainthat you want more evidence. you need to look at the evidence that youdo have and to make a decision on that basis, but i don't think that...there's any reason here to think that god would do what you suggest, it may be thatthat would do nothing in terms of bringing a greater number of people into a saving relationshipwith himself. (audience clapping).dr. miller: give one last question for dr. rosenberg and then we will give you the resultsof the vote and close out. speaker 8: dr. rosenberg, i wonder if youmight help me to understand how your view is not incoherent.do you really claim in your book that sentences
have no meaning or truth value; even the sentencesin your own book? how is that not incoherent and self-refuting? at least the sentencesyou've made tonight surely you think are true, but if even you don't think that your positionis true, why should we? dr. rosenberg: two paragraphs from the lastpage of the chapter of my book entitled the brain does everything without thinking aboutanything at all. of course this is at the end of a long chapterin which i've talked about neuroscience, nobel prize winning research by erick kandel, thewonderful ibm computer watson that beats us at jeopardy and about the best semantic andphilosophical theories of intentionality. pardon me for reading."introspection is screaming that thought has
to be about stuff and philosophers and youare muttering, denying it is crazy worse than self-contradictory, it's incoherent.according to you rosenberg neither spoken sentences nor silent ones in thought expressstatements, they aren't about anything that goes for every sentence in this book, it'snot about anything. why are we bothering to read it?" it's notas if i haven't figured it out that this is an issue that is raised by science and inthis chapter. now, i'll read you the last paragraph, "look,if i am going to get scientism into your skull i have to use the only tools we've got formoving information from one head to another: noises, ink-marks, pixels.treat the illusions that go with them like
the optical illusions of the previous chaptr."a chapter in which i said don't trust consciousness, because it's mainly mistaken."this book isn't conveying statements. it's rearranging neural circuits, removinginaccurate disinformation and replacing it with accurate information.treat it as correcting maps instead of erasing sentences." now, there is a big business inphilosophy about the nature of semantics and about the how intentionality's realized.i ain't so stupid as to contradict myself in the puerile way that you're suggesting,okay? what you got to do is read the book to figure out the answer and send me an emailand i'll send you a really long and hard paper called the eliminativism without tears, whichi have written to try to give a detailed account
of why it is that we can still make senseto one another in spite of the fact that neuroscience shows that intentionality is just an overlaylike so much of the rest of our common sense views about reality; including the beliefthat europe is still standing because things just fall directly to the ground.(audience clapping) dr. miller: very good.well, let me go ahead and read these tallies and close us out.it's not a scientific result here, but we've got three interesting results nonethelessfrom across section of audiences, our formal judge team, our purdue audience, and acrossthe web nationally and internationally. so, for the formal judging, in a four to twodecision our judging panel has identified
dr. craig is the winner of this evening'sdebate. (audience clapping).for the local result from purdue, we have no vote at all 112 and on by far most peopledid not vote, half didn't vote, it appears they didn't even write cards.sheesh! dr. rosenberg has 303 and dr. craig 1,390.(audience clapping). online vote, it appears that dr. craig has734 and dr. rosenberg 59. (audience clapping).so, for whatever its worth, so let's go ahead and close this out.these gentlemen are very enlightening people, fun to hang out with, and they're going tostick around for another half an hour to answer
questions that people perhaps come up andtalk with them. as someone who loves ...this may sound morbid ... but loves to visit cemeteries; i do it everytime i go to a new town for historical imagination, i've mentioned this many times before andi'm still eager to find this, if someone knows of this cemetery with a tomb stone with aparticular epitaph on it, i will pay money. it reads this way, "pause, stranger, whenyou pass me by: as you are now, so once was i. as i am now, so you will be, so prepare fordeath and follow me." and somebody came by philosophic, probablya skeptic or something like that and wrote,
"to follow you, i'm not content until i knowwhich way you went." (laughing). we do thank you for coming and watching thelive stream tonight. we hope it was beneficial, generating morelight than heat, look next to the book, and to youtube no doubt it provides somethingto reflect upon and think about which of the drop your pencils on the way out andsomeone will give you a detailed list of tomorrow's events. good night.
thank you.