In the past couple days, I’ve gotten a request for advice on debating Christians, and seen a pair of somewhat misguided articles on how to debate William Lane Craig by Andrew of Evaluating Christianity. Here, I’m going to explain what’s wrong with Andrew’s stuff, what’s right, and expand on the advice I gave to the fan asking for advice. Also, I’ll provide some sample things that I’d say in a debate with Craig, and explain why most college professors suck.

Do you need to be an expert on high school debate?: Andrew’s basic position is that you cannot debate Craig without a throughout knowledge of “Lincoln-Douglas” high school debate competitions. The first article insisted you absolutely must know the jargon and not be intimidated by high school debaters:

First, you should know that Craig employs a distinctive, persuasive style that is almost entirely identical to high school Lincoln-Douglas (LD) debate. This means that Craig maintains a flow, calls out drops, and extends arguments. If you don’t know what these terms mean, you are not qualified to debate William Lane Craig. Period.

So the first thing you need to do is to watch a high school LD round and talk to a high school LD coach.

If those two 17-year-olds kids have intimidated you, you are not qualified to debate William Lane Craig. Get yourself some coaching in the basics, watch the video again and again until you can flow it, judge high-level circuit LD, and immerse yourself in the activity until you’re not intimidated. This will take some time. It’s okay; Craig isn’t going anywhere.

In the second post, he takes it up a notch by insisting you must take a year to do this: “a) spend one year judging high-level (”circuit”) Lincoln-Douglas debate, and (b) get specific debating advice from current Lincoln-Douglas debate coaches.”

When I read this advice, one name jumps to mind: Eddie Tabash. Tabash is a lawyer who’s debated Craig and promoted himself as qualified to coach people who want to. He clearly understands LD-debate. But a lot of people found his presentations in debate extremely off-putting. Why? Because he approached it as LD debate, not real debate, and there’s lots of stupid stuff that flies before LD debaters but does not fly out in the real world, which was reflected in Tabash’s too-fast speaking style and table-pounding way of making his points. Craig doesn’t slavishly follow LD debate style, rather, he follows a style which is based on it but also based on an understanding of the difference between LD debate and real-world debate. And getting the jargon is pointless: I’m a little fuzzy on it, but I could figure out what Andrew is talking about because I know Craig’s debating style.

Positive advice: rather than spending a whole year getting involved with competitive high school debate, just spend several hours listening to audio of Craig’s debates, and studying transcripts. You need to understand his style of debating on its own terms. Even if you aren’t debating him, a lot of Christians will imitate him, and there’s much you can learn from in forming your own approach to debating. Understanding high school debate may help, but is strictly optional.

“Offensive responses”: This that when you rebut an argument for your opponent’s position, you throw in an argument for your own position. Andrew recommends making this a key part of your strategy, but do this obsessively, and you’ll end up with too many balls in the air. That’s OK in high school, but not in the real world. Craig does it occasionally, but only when he’s got an argument ready that he uses a lot anyway. For example, he frequently will respond to the problem of evil by invoking the moral argument for God, but it’s hard to find other examples of this tactic used by Craig.

Being concise and writing out your speech: Here’s where Andrew gets something right. I’m sick of hearing people like Richard Carrier and PZ Myers complain that they must not be concise on principle. Truth is, most Ph.D. types are in the business of being pointlessly verbose.

A semester at Madison consists of 45 lectures, 50 minutes each. Suppose the prof speaks at a relatively leisurely rate of 125 words per minute. That’s about 280,000 words to deliver over the course of the semester. A robust dissertation is maybe a little over 100,000 words. The only way I’ve seen a professor produce 280,000 words of useful information is if it’s a chemistry, molecular biology, or anatomy class where the professor can bombard students with reaction after reaction, biological pathway after pathway, or piece after piece of anatomy. Many intro physics profs will spend the time slowing down because a lot of students have trouble with physics. The very best professors I have are the ones who can deliver 140,000 words of useful information and then lead good class discussions. The rest of my professors have been expert time-wasters.

This has got to be the number one reason Craig is such a good debater: most of his opponents are college profs who’ve tried to rationalize their self-worth by convincing themselves that wasting time is a matter of principle. The debate goes like this: Craig says what he has to say in a concise manner. The prof throws away most of the time alloted to him. Craig points out the prof didn’t address most of his points. Craig wins. The prof goes home and tells his buddies he lost only because he has principles. Andrew’s article has a very clear example of how this happens and how it can be avoided.

Most people aren’t as long-winded as college professors, but could use some work. They just have no idea how much time 20 minutes is. To learn to manage your time, first study Craig’s debate transcripts. Notice that he speaks at about 140 words per minute. Figure out how fast you can go while still sounding natural. 150 is reasonable, 200 possible. Then practice typing out statements designed to fill various amounts of time. Some things to think about:

• A long letter to the editor can easily be delivered aloud in 2 minutes
• A typical op-ed column can be delivered aloud in 5 minute
• A longish feature article can be delivered aloud in 20 minutes

Once you’ve understood all this, you’ll understand why not only do most university lecturers suck, but also why most one-hour guest lectures suck. It’s hard to fill as much as a 1 hour lecture with useful information: it takes at least 8,500 words.

Minor disagreement with Andrew: when I speak in public, I speak from an outline that’s been cut down from a typed speech, rather than trying to read or memorize the speech word-for word. That means I go in knowing what I want to say and how long it will take me to say it, but I’m not burdened by worrying about saying exactly such-and-such words. Memorization might not be a bad idea, though, if you have the time. A nice trick for memorization is to record yourself reading from a manuscript, and then listening to a loop of yourself on an MP3 player as you walk around town.

Your arguments: Pick your three or four favorite arguments for your position and figure out the best way to present them. Consider checking out the Infidels.org library and using Bruce Russell on evil and Theodore Drange on nonbelief for inspiration. Also see the end of this post for sample things I’d say in debate. The amount of time, actually, doesn’t seem to matter much, because it’s more about keeping your presentation varied but manageable than spending exactly, say, 4 minutes per argument. Rather than greatly varying the number of arguments you use, vary the amount of detail you go into. You’ll learn how to do this as you practice typing out statements.

Note: it’s true that Craig typically presents five or even six arguments for the existence of God. Why don’t I recommend doing this? He never has the time to develop more than four of them in detail. He often downplays religious experience as “not really an argument.”

Rebuttals: For some reason, novice atheist debaters often feel the need to spend time refuting what they consider to be the “main” or “best” arguments for the existence of God, even if their opponents are not presenting them. DO NOT DO THIS. You SHOULD write out responses in advance to things you can reasonably expect your opponent to say. For example, if he’s Craig or a hard-core Craig fan, write out responses to Craig’s arguments. However, be ready to adapt to any differences between what you expect them to say and what they actually say.

There’s a cliché that it always takes longer to rebut an argument than make it. Exactly the opposite is true. While more detailed rebuttals are always better when time allows, clearly pointing out one key flaw in an argument is all it takes to get rid of it. A good argument will have several key assumptions that go into supporting the conclusion, consider focusing on one and spending no more time refuting it than your opponent spent presenting it.

While you should address everything your opponent says in some way, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you have to refute every little point they make in detail. If you’re ever at risk of not having enough time to address everything they say (Craig often tries to force his opponents into this situation) consider either:

1. Pointing out common flaws that multiple arguments have, and refuse to bother with the details, or
2. Pointing out that they’re making a lot of assumptions that they’re not justifying, and refuse to take on the burden of disproving unsupported assumptions.

Are you speaking first or second?: If you’re speaking first, you completely control the time alloted for your first statement. Prepare to make the best use if it you possibly can. If you’re speaking second, prepare to fit your arguments into 1/3 of the time given for your first statement, and spend the rest of the time refuting what your opponent has to say.

FINALLY: WHAT I WOULD SAY IN A DEBATE WITH CRAIG: First section is an introduction and initial argument with several sub-points, written on the assumption that I am speaking second. Second section is how to refute his standard presentation of the moral argument:

“Richard Dawkins is famous for saying, ‘We are all atheists with respect to most of the gods humans have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.’ “This isn’t just a slogan: it’s good advice for how to think about this issue. John W. Loftus–a former student of Dr. Craig’s–calls this the Outsider Test: ‘Test your religious beliefs as if you were an outsider to the faith you are evaluating.’ Since probably no one here believes in the gods of ancient Greece, this means that if the evidence for the Christian god is no better than that for the gods of ancient Greece, you shouldn’t believe in the Christian god either.

“Furthermore, we shouldn’t be agnostic about the Greek gods. We can deny they exist. Why? The Greek gods were supposedly involved in the world in all kinds of ways: causing weather and seasons, love and death, and countless other things. But scientists have been unable to find any evidence of this alleged involvement in the world. Therefore, we should deny the existence of the Greek gods.

Similarly, if the Christian god existed, we would find lots of evidence for him that we do not find:

1. Genesis says God created the heavens and the earth from a chaotic void a mere several thousand years ago. But our best evidence from geology, paleontology, and astronomy contradicts this. If the heavens were a mere few thousand years old, we wouldn’t be able to see most of the galaxy’s stars because their light wouldn’t have had time to reach Earth.
2. Genesis said rainbows are a sign from God given to Noah. But we know they’re a natural phenomenon.
3. Genesis says the world’s many languages are punishment for building the tower of Babel. But we know new languages develop naturally, without divine intervention.
4. The Bible, along with post-Biblical Christian tradition, says God has sent a variety of prophets, apostles, and saints to work miracles on his behalf. But today, whenever we investigate urban legends of miracles or supposed miracle workers like Peter Popoff and Benny Hinn–and real investigations have only become possible recently–the claims turn out to be bogus. The reasonable inference is that all such claims are bogus.
5. The Bible attributes the rise and fall of nations to God’s will. But historians and political scientists have been unable to find much use for that way of explaining historical events.
6. The Bible affirms that God answers prayer. But attempts to verify this scientifically have failed, and what’s more, most Christians realize deep down this doesn’t work. That’s why they recognize it as a tragedy when religious parents try to use prayer as a replacement for medicine when caring for their children.”

[450 words. Max delivery time: 3 minutes]

“What about Dr. Craig’s moral argument? The problem here is that Dr. Craig never argued for his key claim, that morality requires God! He just said, well, here are some people who agree with me. This isn’t a legitimate way of arguing:

1. First, we’re not dealing with a lot of scientific or historical data that only experts have the time to study. This is a philosophical issue, with arguments anyone can examine.
2. Second, Dr. Craig’s description of where the philosophical community as a whole stands on this issue is misleading. Not only do many atheists believe in objective morality, prominent theistic philosophers like Keith Yandell and Richard Swinburne have argued that this is a consistent position.
3. Finally, Dr. Craig’s description of atheists who reject objective morality is misleading. Bertrand Russell rejected objective morality, but gave arguments against it that were independent of whether or not God exists. If Dr. Craig is taking Russell as an authority, he should actually reject objective morality and give up the moral argument.

“Furthermore, not only is Dr. Craig’s premise unsupported, it’s false. Consider this argument:

• Step 1: if morality is dependent upon God, then slaughtering children would be moral if God commanded it. Dr. Craig accepts this premise; he says so in an article on the Old Testament slaughter of the Canaanites on his website.
• Step 2: No one could make slaughtering children moral just by commanding it. This is just as obvious as the things Craig has said about rape and torture being wrong.
• Therefore, morality is not dependent upon God.”

[258 words. Max delivery time: 1 minute 45 seconds.]