When Richard Carrier put up a blog post reporting on his debate with William Lane Craig, I decided I wasn’t going to bother listening to the debate. I was disgusted with Carrier’s complaints that he couldn’t have helped losing because Craig had an unfair advantage, so I simply wrote a blog post on debating tactics explaining what’s wrong with this idea. Recently, though, my curiosity got the better of me and I listened to the debate.

Basically it was what I expected—better at first, but way worse by the end. Carrier had said a couple of times that he thought the historical reliability of the New Testament was what they should have been debating, because that’s the only evidence for the resurrection. Here’s the part that was better: After Craig delivered his standard opening speech, Carrier delivered a very strong opening speech based around the fact that the New Testament is the only evidence Craig had for the resurrection. Though I’m not sure I’d recommend listening to the whole debate, you definitely should listen to this part. If I ever do a public debate on the resurrection, I’ll definitely incorporate some of Carrier’s points into my case.

Then, for the rest of the debate, Craig decided that his strategy would be to pay as little attention as possible to what Carrier had said in the debate an instead spend his time making fun of things Carrier had said in other places. At that point Carrier basically collapsed, even though it should have been easy for him to win the debate after that. He should have loudly said Craig was misrepresenting what he had said in other places (instead of meekly, the way he did on the debate), and then said Craig was refusing to address the most serious weakness of the case for the resurrection. As Carrier said in his debate wrap:

If anyone agreed with my first fact (the Gospels can’t be trusted on historical details), many of Craig’s arguments automatically became irrelevant (since they depended, overtly or covertly, on the Gospels as sources of information). And my second argument [on the epistles] he pretty much left intact.

If Carrier had returned to this point in every round of the debate, it would have been a straightforward win for Carrier since this strategy accounts for every scrap of available evidence against for the resurrection.

To a large degree, Craig wins debates based on things like organization, structure, and time management. But his debate with Carrier showcases one of his other strengths: massive cojones. Craig has the ability to commit absurd fallacies with a straight face and pretend he doesn’t know what his opponents are talking about when called on it. He knows that if his opponent says something in round 1 and he pretends it was never said in round 2, then unless his opponent returns to the point in round 3 it may as well have never been said.

In contrast, Carrier had so little confidence in his own strategy that he gave up on it after his first speech, and even when he did manage to respond to Craig on certain points, his tone of voice suggested he wasn’t really sure about his counterpoints, even when it would be obvious to any informed person that Carrier was right. He also ignored Craig’s personal attacks on him, according to the comments on the wrap-up post because he didn’t want to set the wrong “tone” for the debate. But the tone of the debate that ended up being set was one where Craig could insult and mock Carrier with impunity. Carrier needed to calmly point out what Craig was doing in his first speech to put an end to it immediately.

If I wanted to be PR-speaky about this, I’d say it was a matter of staying on-message. But really it’s about having enough confidence in your message that you’ll automatically stay on it, and about generally having the confidence to stand up to someone like Craig.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this, I got an e-mail saying “Chris, you’re an asshole” with no further explanation. Was it in response to this post? Just in case it was: yeah, I made this post knowing full well that using one anatomical metaphor would make me sound like a couple of other anatomical metaphors. But I stand by my decision: just talking about “confidence” doesn’t quite capture the quality needed to debate someone like Craig.

Also, let me be clear here that I wasn’t trying to completely trash Carrier. Unlike some people, I don’t think he was unqualified to debate Craig. I think he just let himself get intimidated by Craig’s reputation and “I can say anything with a straight face” attitude.