Basically the book starts off with three chapters of preliminaries talking about the sort of silly knee-jerk reactions that people have to criticism of religion, talking about why it’s okay to criticize religion, talking about the differences between what most religious people believe and what left-wing theologians believe, stuff like that. And then I have five chapters talking about the truth of religion, arguments for the existence of God, arguments against the existence of God, stuff like that.

Essentially that’s what I that written so far and the plan was to make the last chapter to chapter about the moral side of religion and the harm that religion does. But I’ve sort of got writer’s block on this chapter because I’m not sure how to make it interesting. Because I’m not sure there’s anything interesting that can be said in defense of the moral side of religion.

So, for example, I think Plantinga’s ontological argument isn’t it all a good argument in the sense that I don’t think it does anything for the credibility of theism. But it’s an interesting argument insofar as there’s an interesting explanation of why it’s a bad argument, and I can write 2500 words about it and not feel like I’m wasting my reader’s time. But I’m not sure there are any comparably interesting defenses of moral side of religion.

Perhaps a better way to explain it is that William Lane Craig’s arguments for the existence of God are terrible arguments, but when you put him up on stage against an opponent he can use all his rhetorical prowess and high school debate team skills to impress the audience. But Craig rarely does debates on things like the morality of hell, and he probably would never agree to a debate on a topic like, say, “resolved, that the Bible is full of immoral teachings” because any halfway competent opponent would win in spite of Craig’s debating skills. That’s an indicator that the question of the morality of many religious teachings is one-sided, in a way that the argument over the existence of God is not one-sided.

So when Dawkins says that the God of the Old Testament is a homophobic, misogynistic, genocidal, bully and so on and so forth, that’s something that’s just obvious anyone who’s actually read the Old Testament. That’s a paragraph that all of Dawkins’ critics cite as evidence of what a terrible person Dawkins is, but their attempts to explain what is wrong with that statement are just absolutely pathetic. For example, Alastair McGrath says well, that’s not the God I believe in or anyone I know believes in, which may be true but it’s still the God described in the Old Testament.

Or you have Alvin Plantinga who makes the really insulting claim that the fact that Dawkins would dare say such a thing about God (or the God of the Old Testament, rather) indicates that Dawkins’ book contains no “evenhanded than thoughtful commentary,” even though Plantinga ought to know the basis for Dawkins statement. And instead of actually trying to rebut it he just dismisses it, which I think is a much more serious indicator of a lack of thoughtful commentary.

When Christians aren’t talking about what a big meanie Richard Dawkins is, the usual approach to talking about the Old Testament seems to be to go on and on about context. (I won’t get into what Jews say, they have somewhat different strategies.) Both conservative Christians and liberal Christians do this, and it’s just an evasion. The Old Testament, remember, contain commandments to kill men for having gay sex, commandments to kill people for blasphemy or for trying to get you to worship other gods. It even contains a part where Moses has a man killed for picking up sticks on the Sabbath of all things. It contains commandments to exterminate entire tribes.

Lots of awful stuff. Stuff that is on the face of it horrendously immoral. And when Christians talk about the context of the Old Testament, they never actually get around to explaining why that should stop us from thinking that these things in the Old Testament are horrendously immoral.

Similarly, there are verses in the New Testament, which taken together seem to suggest that anyone who does not believe in Christianity will be punished forever in hell. I called the Old Testament horrendously immoral; this goes beyond horrendously immoral. In fact I don’t even think there are words in the English language to express how evil this doctrine is, except perhaps, for “hellish.”

Some Evangelical Christians address this problem by saying, no, this misinterpretation of the Bible and try to interpret the Bible in a way that allows some non-Christians to go to heaven or even allows everybody to go to heaven. There are a serious Evangelical Christians who seriously argue that the Bible teaches that, and part of me says fair enough, because I think the Bible contradicts itself on what you have to do to get salvation.

However, a lot of Evangelical leaders think the all non-Christians go to hell thing is nonnegotiable. How they deal with the problem of hell is first of all, the avoid talking about it. Second of all if they do have to talk about it, they downplay it. One thing they’ll say is that hell isn’t literal flames hell is just separation from God.

Of course this doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, it might even be a blessing in disguise since a lot of times the God of Evangelical Christianity he sounds like a bit of a weirdo, who I might want to stay far, far away from, if, for example, he’s really that obsessed with getting people to believe things for which there is very little evidence.

On the other hand, if you ask the “hell is separation from God” folks, “how bad is hell?” they’ll tell you that hell is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you. So if the belief is also that all non-Christians go to hell, that’s still saying that all non-Christians (if they die without coming to the truth and accepting Jesus as their Savior) will meet the worst fate imaginable. It’s saying that all of Hitler’s victims, with the exception of minority of converts to Christianity, all of them once they were killed in the Holocaust then went on to a fate even worse than Holocaust, ordained for them by the Evangelical Christian God. Good news indeed.

So there’s just no good defense of these doctrines. The other defensive strategy is that oh well we should ignore these doctrines because of the overriding message of love that is the true core of Christianity. This is very popular among liberal Christians, but surprisingly you also hear it sometimes from Christians who claim to be Evangelicals, claim to believe everything in the Bible.

My response to that is that, well, it’s true the Bible talks about love, but in so far as a particular biblical author combines talk about love with these horrible teachings and that’s evidence that that particular author did not really understand love. If a modern cult leader who advocated both stoning gays to death and also said some nice things about love, we wouldn’t think that the nice things about love overrode the horrible things about stoning gays to death.

Maybe the reason some Christians are so impressed the idea of a message of love and the Bible is they are under the impression that without the Bible, people wouldn’t know to love each other, which is maybe understandable if your moral education has been totally limited to the Bible. But once you know even a tiny little bit about ethical traditions outside of religion it becomes totally obvious that that’s false. For example, just look at Stoic teachings about the brotherhood of all men which, predate Jesus.

So that’s my stream of consciousness thoughts about the moral side of religion. I could go on, I’ve got more to say, but I’m not sure I have a book chapter worth of things to say. I think it’s a very important point and I don’t want to sell it short in the book, so give me advice on this one. When I talk about the moral side of religion, what should I be talking about? Yes, I can talk about the lie that Hitler was an atheist, and I can talk about communism, and I can talk about the Inquisition, and I can talk about the horrible treatment of women in Muslim countries today, but I think those issues are as straightforward and can probably be dealt with just as briefly as the things I’ve been talking about this post.

So what do I do to fill this chapter I’m trying to write?

(1) Is morality reducible to what somebody (or bodies) says or thinks is moral?
(2) Is morality reducible to something contingent and local to planet Earth?

There’s an obvious way to say “no” to both questions: if moral truths are written in some Platonic realm. There’s also an obvious way to say “yes” to both questions: if morality is reducible to what humans say or think is moral. But there’s a famous moral view that says “yes” to (1) and “no” to (2), namely the sort of divine command theory endorsed by William Lane Craig, which makes morality reducible to what God says.

Now here’s Ruse:

How does a non-realist like me proceed? One could be some kind of social contract theorist and think that a group of wise old people sat down one day and made up the rules of morality. This seems to me to be unsatisfactory both as history and philosophy. I go rather with the late John Rawls in his Theory of Justice, thinking that natural selection put morality into place. Those proto-humans who thought and behaved morally survived and reproduced at a better rate than those that did not. (There are all sorts of good biological reasons why cooperation can be a much better strategy than just fighting all of the time.)

So what does this make of morality? Sure, it is something that is part of our psychology. Frankly, who would ever doubt that? If you like, the controversial part is that it is only part of our psychology. I think that is the world into which David Hume pushed us. But because it may be the case that we can do what we like, it doesn’t follow that we should do what we like. As evolved human beings, the rules of morality are as binding on us as if we were the children of God and He had made up the rules.

So that is why what Jerry Sandusky allegedly did was wrong – really and truly wrong. That is not a matter of opinion.

This sounds puzzling, but maybe Ruse wants to say “no” to (1) and “yes” to (2), by making morality rooted in human psychology (though not, apparently, in a way that’s open to straightforward scientific study). And it’s not really obvious saying “yes” to (2) in this way requires you to say “yes” to (1). Just because a fact is psychological doesn’t mean it can be changed by getting people to agree to say something different about it. If that’s right, it’s wrong for Craig to insinuate that on Ruse’s view, morality would be changed “if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in exterminating or brainwashing everybody who disagreed with them.”

My gut inclination is to want to say “no” to both (1) and (2), to follow G. E. Moore and Russ Shafer-Landau if not Plato. But maybe Ruse (if I understand him correctly) has the right approach, “no” to (1) and “yes” to (2). That could be right even if Ruse doesn’t have the most plausible view of this sort. Russell Blackford has complained that “too many people assume that the only alternatives are a very crude moral relativism or a naive moral realism.” And I’ve been thinking of picking up Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project, which I’m told treats morality as a kind of technology (and facts about technology aren’t automatically changed by what people say or think).

There are two billion Christians on planet earth. Most of them accept the Canaanite genocide narratives at face value and thus believe that in that particular instance God sanctioned genocide. A minority of Christians like me don’t read them in that way, but that’s irrelevant to the fact that millions do.

The problem with this is that Rauser ignores a very large and important group of Christians: the group that’s totally oblivious to the existence of the Canaanite genocide narrative. My money’s on them being the real majority position, or at least the plurality position. And in the US at least, my experience has been that most Christians, any time you bring up anything nasty from the Old Testament, are just going to say, “Oh, but that was the Old Testament, and I’m really more about Jesus,” without staking out a coherent view. Moving on:

And that’s the problem for Dawkins. Craig’s view on genocide (and that of a majority of Christians) may indeed be reprehensible and ridiculous. But the reality is that this view is not like Holocaust denial which is a fringe position that can best be dealt with through neglect. This is indeed the view of millions of Christians and thus is one well worthy of Dawkins’ expert refutation.

Rauser is treating the issue as one of agree to debate Craig vs. ignore the issue entirely (“neglect”). But Dawkins is hardly ignoring the issue. He also discusses the Canaanite genocide in The God Delusion, mainly for the sake of making the point that people don’t really get their morality from holy texts.

Dawkins is taking basically the right approach there, and Rauser makes a third mistake which shows why:

I spoke with a friend of Craig’s just today who informed me that in one single debate he conducted forty-seven people became Christians. In other words, forty-seven more people became converts to the position that Dawkins views as the moral cousin of holocaust denial.

This is where we get some real nonsense. The position Dawkins is saying is the moral consequence of Holocaust denial is that its A-OK for God to order the extermination of an entire tribe of people, and that he has in fact done so in the past. But that’s not the view Craig would have been trying to win people over to.

Put another way: without even knowing what debate we’re talking about, I can tell you that Craig did not say “I think God once ordered the extermination of entire tribes, and ordered the execution of homosexuals and blasphemers, and sends everyone who doesn’t accept Jesus to Hell, and I think all that’s just fine.”

No, if any of those topics came up in the debate, you can count on Craig to have insisted they were irrelevant (though I think they usually are), and probably not even own up to his views on them. This is one reason why I think, if the goal is to combat Craig’s odious moral views, doing a debate a debate on the existence of God, doing the debate Craig wants, would be pointless. Craig would just evade, evade, evade throughout the debate.

Of course, Dawkins could say “Okay, let’s do a debate on the topic ‘Resolved that the Bible is full of immoral teachings.’” Craig would probably refuse, though, because Craig doesn’t really want to be stuck defending the whole Bible. Few Christians do. With issues like these, Christians basically fall into three groups: those who aren’t aware of them, those who avoid thinking about them, and those avoid talking about them. (There’s also “those who admit the Bible is wrong about some things,” but they tend to not like to think or talk about the bad stuff either.)

This is why what Dawkins is actually doing, writing about the issue in small doses, just trying to make people aware of certain things, makes sense. It completely messes up Craig’s strategy of “declare the issue irrelevant and hope it goes away.” That’s the key thing, much more important than rebutting Craig point-by-point.

I know the reason I’m so opposed to Christian fundamentalism comes more from reading what the fundamentalists have to say than what atheists have to say. Similarly, this Freethought Blogger said that he thought Dawkins’ take on Craig was over the top–until he read Craig’s response. Every time Craig is forced to talk about this stuff, he turns more people off.

Those who ignore the following notice will be disemvoweled

This is going to be a largely meta post about debating tactics, “winning” debates, and so on, with only occasional comments on arguments for and against the existence of God. Before you comment saying that I need to “deal more with the arguments,” go read the criticisms of Craig’s kalam argument, design argument, moral argument, argument for the resurrection, and even what he’s said about the ontological argument and Leibnizian cosmological argument. (You can respond to those articles here, if you like.)

Does Craig win all his debates?

Luke has said that he thinks Craig wins all (or almost all) of his debates. Here, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that atheists need to declare a moratorium on ever saying Craig won a debate. The reason is that every time we say this, it’s almost guaranteed that we’ll be misunderstood, and all too often, “Craig wins all his debates” is used by his fans to deflect any and all criticism of him.

Misunderstandings are going to happen, because it’s not really clear what it means to say someone “won” a debate. In fact, I’m not sure I know what Luke means when he says Craig won a debate. I’m not sure Luke himself knows. Consider his mini-review of Craig’s debate with Robert M. Price:

A great debate between two people who really know their stuff. Price does a good job of pointing out the dishonesty of Craig’s approach, but as expected he does not organize his arguments as well as Craig and thereby loses.

I haven’t listened to this debate, so it’s possible Luke’s description doesn’t do the debate justice. But if all Luke had said was, “Craig was better organized, but dishonest, and Price did a good job of pointing out his dishonesty,” I would have assumed without a second thought that the debate was an embarrassing defeat for Craig. In what sense, then, does Luke think Craig “won”? No idea.

In general, I can think of a few things people might mean when they say who “won” a debate:

(1) Who won by debate team judging standards?
(2) Who was more rhetorically effective?
(3) Who presented better arguments?

If I declared a winner in a debate, (2) is what I’d probably have in mind. Some people (Luke?), however, seem to have more (1) in mind. This is understandable, since Craig relies heavily on debate team style tactics, and often gets a lot of mileage out of them. But I don’t see any reason to view (1) as interesting in and of itself. It’s a mistake to jump from “Craig’s style is often effective” to “all debaters should be judged by how much they sound like William Lane Craig.”

However, if you say Craig won a debate and you mean anything like (1) or (2), realize that Craig’s fans may hear you as saying (3). And I think this explains why Craig’s fans get so excited about him “winning” debates, to the point that some will deflect any and all criticism of Craig by saying “but he wins all his debates!” The thought seems to be, “All reasonable people agree Craig wins all of his debates, which means that Craig always has the better arguments, so I don’t need to think for myself about whether his arguments are really any good.”

I wish I were exaggerating here, but I’ve found this comment recently left on my review of the Craig/Harris debate to be fairly typical:

Wow. Such an emotional/irrational response. I guess this is what you get when Craig continues to embarrass atheist debate after debate. I’d encourage you to actually focus on the arguments, and better still, just read a transcript next time.

This is the entire comment. No support for the accusation of irrationality, just an appeal to Craig winning his debates. Craig himself encourages this kind of thinking:

While debate training (especially knowing how to manage the clock) is undoubtedly a great help in winning a debate, that’s just not a sufficient explanation for the impotence of atheists to offer refutations of these arguments—or to present a case of their own for atheism.

Charming how Craig jumps from “I win all my debates” to “atheists suffer from impotence to refute me or present a case for atheism,” as if it’s just obvious that no atheist anywhere has refuted him. Atheists really need to not encourage such nonsense.

Is Craig better about staying on-topic?

Back to Luke:

Personally, I’d like to thank Dr. Craig for raising the level of debate on this issue. Though he makes many patently absurd arguments, they are no less absurd than some of the bad arguments made by his opponents, and they are usually more relevant to the central point. Atheists tend to ramble on about irrelevant topics when they debate Dr. Craig.

I’ve said previously that I think Craig’s allegations that Sam Harris went off-topic in their debate were bogus. Furthermore, the debate with Harris was part of a pattern. Craig regularly accuses his opponents of going off-topic, but these accusations are often quite absurd, and I think it’s actually Craig who frequently strays from the agreed-upon topics of his debates.

Thing is, almost all of Craig’s opening statements are variations on one of three speeches: there’s the “God exists” speech (usually, but not always, involving the same five exact arguments), the “the existence of objective morality depends on God” speech, and the “Jesus rose from the dead” speech. I know of two cases where Craig did something else because all of these speeches were obviously inappropriate: his debate with Bradley on Hell, and his debate with Ayala on Intelligent Design. But on other occasions, Craig has tried to shoehorn one of these three speeches into a debate where they didn’t belong.

This is what Craig did in his debate with Harris (see link above), and as a rule he’ll take the the same approach with any debate topic that mentions “good” or “morality” in any way. Similarly, in his debates with Eddie Tabash and Keith Parsons on Christianity, Craig focused on delivering his standard arguments for the existence of God, and did his damnedest to steer the debates away from any points of Christian doctrine. Interestingly, these two debates have been cited as debates Craig lost, suggesting that on those occasions the audience didn’t buy his strategy.

One particularly ridiculous example: In his debate with Craig, Massimo Pigliucci said early on that he didn’t claim to be able to disprove a highly abstract God, and ended up spending some time talking about the Christian God specifically. I think this was a sensible approach, but Craig accused Pigliucci of being irrelevant. Then, Craig agreed to a rematch on the topic of the Christian God specifically… and presented his same old set of arguments, and just called them “arguments for the Christian God,” even though I’m sure Craig knows most of them don’t prove Christianity over, say, Islam or deism.

My impression is that trying to control the framing of a debate, and finding any excuse you can to dismiss your opponent’s arguments as irrelevant, is a standard trick Craig picked up in his debate team days. But please, when Craig accuses his opponents of irrelevance, don’t assume he’s right just because they don’t challenge him loudly enough.

Do Craig’s opponents misunderstand his arguments?

Just as Craig frequently accuses his opponents of going off-topic, he also frequently accuses them of misunderstanding his arguments. Luke agrees:

Only about 10% of Craig’s opponents have even understood his moral argument God’s existence, so 90% of them have given responses to the argument that are totally irrelevant, and easily dismissed by Dr. Craig.

And again, I think Craig’s accusations are largely bogus. For example, here’s an exchange I’ve seen more than once:

Craig: If God doesn’t exist, why think human beings have objective moral value?
Atheist: I think it’s just obvious that they do.
Craig: That’s a point about moral epistemology, but my point is about the existence of objective moral values.

Yes, Craig makes claims about the existence of objective morality, but he talks about other things too, and the atheist’s response in the above exchange is a perfectly sensible response to one of those other things. I think the deep problem is that Craig’s moral “argument” is less an argument than a hodgepodge of good-sounding lines. This means that no matter how good an atheists’ response to one of these lines, Craig can always toss out another line and say that’s the one the atheist must respond to. Honestly, I’m not sure what it would be to understand Craig’s moral argument.

And yes, I think it can be valuable to take a string of good-sounding lines, try to figure out what they’re really trying to say, and show that they aren’t good arguments even on the strongest interpretation. But it’s unreasonable to expect Craig’s opponents to do that in a debate with tight time limits. It would be nice if his opponents pointed out more often that Craig can’t keep straight what he’s trying to say (as Shelley Kagan did), but just because someone fails to do that doesn’t mean they’re misunderstanding Craig.

Similarly, when Craig’s opponents point out that the Bible isn’t regarded as an especially reliable source by mainstream scholars, Craig will inevitably complain that his case doesn’t depend on the general reliability of the Bible. But in most of his “God” debates, Craig’s discussion of the resurrection consists of just asserting all the major points of the Biblical story are historical, with nothing more than a few quotes backing him up. If the Bible’s reliability isn’t challenged, many Christians will think that means it’s totally reliable, and since Craig has no actual argument, why not make that point?

How much does knowing the philosophical literature matter?

Now for the last big point Luke makes in defense of Craig (I think). Luke:

It might be the case that, for example, none of Craig’s arguments are as ‘good’ as an argument from evil or an argument from reasonable nonbelief, two popular atheistic arguments. However, Dr. Craig’s arguments are almost always stronger than the atheist’s arguments as presented in these debates.

What I mean to say is that because nearly all of Craig’s opponents are apparently oblivious to the philosophical literature on all these arguments, Dr. Craig knows what the best responses to all the atheistic arguments are, and he gives them. In contrast, his opponents do not know the best atheistic responses to Craig’s arguments, nor do they know the strongest formulations for their own arguments.

Luke doesn’t quite say this, but I think what he means to say here is that the best arguments, and the best responses to arguments, are generally the ones found in the philosophical literature. I think this is false, but explaining why would be a whole ‘nother post. So instead, I just want to look one at one particular example Luke gives, and point out what’s wrong with it:

Let’s say the atheist argues that the existence of evil shows there is no God. Dr. Craig replies that “I understand this is an emotional problem, but it need not be an intellectual one, because the existence of evil and of God are not plainly incompatible, and no atheist has been able to supply the additional premises that would be needed to show that they are, indeed, incompatible.”

To anyone familiar with the philosophical literature, it is obvious that Dr. Craig is calling up the work of Alvin Plantinga on the logical problem of evil. If the atheist supplies additional premises, Dr. Craig can show that evil and God are not incompatible merely by proposing a premise of his own:

(P) God has a morally sufficient reason to allow evil.

We need not assume that we would know what God’s morally sufficient reasons are for allowing evil, and if P is even logically possible, then God and evil are not logically incompatible.

This is Problem of Evil 101 stuff, but atheists are oblivious to it.

I wish Luke had given a source for the quote from Craig. It sounds very much like Craig’s style, but it’s just rhetorical bravado. I think it’s pretty plain that a loving God would prevent, if not all evil, at least some of the most horrendous evils that we see in the actual world. And for Craig to simply announce that atheists have no good arguments, without making the slightest attempt to show this, is just ridiculous (but completely typical of Craig).

Luke says this is a good response because it’s “calling up” Plantinga’s work. Seriously? We’re giving Craig credit for vague allusions to the philosophical literature? If so, we may as well give up on ever trying to best him, because he can make more vague allusions in 45 min. (the amount of time he usually gets in a debate) than any of his opponents can ever hope to refute.

But even if we imagine Craig actually giving Plantinga’s argument, rather than just alluding to it, I’m still not impressed. I don’t know of a single time when one of Craig’s opponents has made the logical incompatibility claim that Plantinga was rebutting. Responding to the argument “a loving God would have prevented the Holocaust” by making a big show of saying God and evil haven’t been shown to be logically incompatible is just a smokescreen: the original argument didn’t say anything about logical incompatibility.

Two general lessons here: first, even if we grant the assumption that the philosophical literature is full of good arguments, this only matters if Craig actually gives those arguments, rather than just alluding to them. Second, again granting the assumption, it only matters if the argument is actually relevant. We shouldn’t cheer on an irrelevant rebuttal just because it’s a wonderfully sophisticated rebuttal to something else.

Final thoughts

I didn’t intend this to be a theme, but in every major section of this post, I’ve run into a fact about Craig: he will say anything he thinks he can get away with saying. He knows that if he says something and nobody challenges him, many people will assume he’s right just because he wasn’t challenged, even what if he said is completely absurd. I know I’ve fallen victim to this. This is reason to be cautious about agreeing with Craig on anything. At minimum, you should ask yourself, “do I have a good reason to think that, aside from the fact that Craig said it and no one contradicted him?”

Also, I would ask Luke: aren’t you offended by Craig’s dishonesty? I’m generally not bothered by the kinds of things people label “offensive,” but I do care a lot about getting at the truth, so to see someone posing as an honest scholar while being so dishonest pisses me off. Luke acts as if he doesn’t care so much. For me, though, that Craig’s dishonesty vastly outweighs his occasionally getting small things right, so I focus on the former and refrain from gushing over the latter.

Mad props to Advocatus Atheist for the picture, which I’m stealing without permission.

Harris’ critique of divine command theory

I had to roll my eyes at part 2 of Luke’s review of the debate, where Luke claims Harris’ entire first rebuttal was “fail” because it was all irrelevant. But Luke simply ignores one of the most important points of the entire speech: that Craig’s moral theory entails that if God were to command the slaughter of an entire tribe, it would be moral, and that if the Taliban really were following God’s commands, they would be moral.

This is, as Harris says, a psychotic view. If he wanted to be pedantic, he could have added “any view which entails that is not only psychotic but also false,” but I don’t think failure to be pedantic invalidates the argument. Pace Craig, it isn’t enough for the divine command theorist to say “well maybe God didn’t command those things,” because they’re still committed to the if-then claim. And Craig’s only response to the illustration of the Taliban was to misrepresent Harris’ position and pretend that he and Harris actually agreed on that issue!

It’s sort of weird to see Luke saying the things he said. The first part of Luke’s review had some good criticisms of Craig’s views, but when he gets to Harris making very similar criticisms, he declares all of Harris’ points irrelevant.

Craig’s “modal argument” against Harris

One of Craig’s arguments in his rebuttal was that, in The Moral Landscape, Harris says that well-being and morality might come apart if “sinners” could flourish just as much as “saints.” Luke comments that that argument is “sound if it represents Harris’ position correctly,” and I do think it was the best point Craig made all night.

From Harris’ book, I get the impression that he really, really wants it to be true that doing the right thing will maximize your own well-being. I think Harris is wrong to think this important, since it seems pretty easy to see how doing the right thing might require some real sacrifices, ones that won’t be balanced out in the long run. And in general, think that Harris doesn’t adequately address questions about how to balance different people’s needs. So in that sense Craig has a point.

Trouble is, the idea that “doing the right thing will maximize your well-being,” and the things Craig quoted, are things that Harris never said during the debate. As far as I can tell, they also aren’t entailed by anything Harris said that night, nor do they strike me as central to Harris’ book. Harris actually makes quite a few gestures in the direction of utilitarianism, which certainly clearly says you sometimes have to sacrifice for the sake of others.

Craig makes a big show of claiming to have refuted everything his opponent said in a given debate, but often his actual strategy is to ignore everything his opponent said there and attack them for things they’ve said elsewhere. This is something I first picked up on when I read the transcript of his debate with Bart Ehrman–I wasn’t impressed with the strategy then, and I wasn’t impressed when he used it with Harris.

Notice the contrast with Harris’ criticisms of Craig: Craig explicitly made divine command theory a central part of his case throughout the debate. He didn’t get up in his opening statement and say, “yup, slaughtering children, establishing a theocracy, I think it’s all OK if you get God’s approval”–but it’s nevertheless clear what divine command theory entails.

On a related note, while I do think Harris’ views are flawed, I also think he often has good responses to his opponents. I do not think he can be refuted simply by saying “is-out problem!” or “Moore’s naturalistic fallacy!” Nor is it accurate to accuse Harris of never having studied philosophy. Please keep those things in mind when you criticize him.

Harris is a really good speaker

How good? Good enough that, if I ever wanted to brush up on my public speaking skills, watching videos of Harris would be at the top of my to do list. Good enough to make me question whether Craig is even all that great of a debater.

With that last comment, I emphasize that I’m talking about rhetoric here, not quality of arguments. I went into the debate expecting Craig’s arguments to suck: I’ve said before that Craig doesn’t deserve to be praised as logical and rational. I’ve dissected his moral argument in detail here, and I’ve had some fun with it here. (But cf. my criticisms of Harris.) In the past, however, I’ve always thought Craig is very rhetorically effective, and often gets the rhetorical win even when his arguments suck.

[Addendum: looks like Luke is going to be more thoroughly picking apart the arguments. He also has a nice round-up of reviews.]

Seeing him against Harris made me re-think that. I still think Craig is good at beating up on weak opponents–ones who ramble and run out of time, who let him control the framing of the debate, or who just aren’t good public speakers. However, against Harris, he seemed less impressive… and realize that some people *do* find him off-putting. After, I heard an audience member (Christian, I think) complain about him being repetitious; another described him as “smarmy.”

When Craig was speaking, Harris spent a lot of time smiling and typing furiously on his Macbook, as if he were thinking of brilliant things to say in response to Craig. But when he actually got up to speak, it sounded a lot more like a carefully prepared talk than a statement in debate: lots of carefully crafted lines (many of which got a good laugh out of the audience), only a few quips quips explicitly responding to things Craig had said in his speeches.

This isn’t to say he didn’t respond to Craig: he spent a lot of time explaining and defending his moral views and critiquing Craig’s divine command theory. He just didn’t make a big deal of saying “hey, I’m responding to Craig now.” He just didn’t go for a tedious point-by-point, which was probably the right move.

Harris did stray off topic quite a bit at times, with things like the problem of evil, Hell, and a couple jabs at the Catholic church. I have mixed feelings about this. He had worthwhile things to say that some audience members might not have heard otherwise. He said them without rambling or running out of time. On the other hand, some people were annoyed that Harris went off topic so much, so probably there are better ways Harris could have used his time–but also much worse ways.

[I now believe most of what I said in this paragraph to be false, see here.]

Not taking Craig too seriously

In particular, Craig spent a lot of time attacking Harris for not believing in free will, and at one point accused Harris of hiding an admission that he doesn’t believe in moral responsibility in his endnotes. Craig quoted Harris as saying that moral responsibility is a “social construct,” and that “In neuroscientific terms, no person is more or less responsible for any other for the actions they perform” (actually a quote from Michael Gazzaniga, though one Harris says he agreed with).

This was misleading, since Harris was saying that moral responsibility applies to “people and not to brains,” and that “it is a social construct that can make more or less sense given facts about a person’s brain.” Worse, it was obviously irrelevant to the God and morality question, but Craig pretended he was saying something about atheism, at one point calling it his most important objection to Harris. Then he complained lots when Harris went off-topic.

The difference between what Harris did and what Craig did was made clear to me in the post-debate discussion when someone, defending Craig, said that at least Craig faked being on topic. But it’s that very fakery that offends me so much. It tends to confirms my suspicions that he really doesn’t care if his arguments are any good. It’s just what he can get away with saying.

I did want to raise the hypocrisy issue in the Q&A, but made the mistake of letting a bunch of people cut me in line, so I didn’t get to. And maybe Harris should have pointed out the hypocrisy briefly. But I don’t think going over the above in tedious detail would have done him any good. It would have been taking Craig way more seriously than Craig deserves.

The debate underlined a lot of things about Craig

In addition to the issue of Craig’s hypocrisy over relevance, there was a revealing exchange at the end of the Q&A:

Harris: This is the kind of morality that you get out of divine command theory that, again, offers no retort to the Jihadist other than, “Sorry buster, you happen to have the wrong god.”
Craig: But that’s exactly your retort, Sam, that God has not issued such a command, and therefore, you’re not morally obligated to do it.
Harris: No, if God did, he would be evil. So I can get behind that God, if God is issuing that command, he’s an evil bastard.
Craig: The problem is that you see, on atheism, you don’t have any basis for making that kind of moral judgment.
Harris: I’ve tried to give you a basis, sorry.
Cue laughter and MASSIVE applause from the audience.

This is a great example of why I find Craig obnoxious: he tries to interpret his opponents views in whatever way he thinks is convenient for him, and when cornered, changes the subject and repeats old talking points as if his opponents’ rebuttals never happened. It also makes clear why Craig’s moral views are so indefensible: all he can say about Al Qaeda and the Taliban is that they’re mistaken about what God commands.

After the debate, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the audience reaction. Did they laugh because they thought Harris got Craig, or were they just laughing at the “no you don’t, yes I did” character of the exchange? But re-listening to the debate and hearing how much applause Harris got, I think a good chunk of the audience got what happened. And if I ever had to debate Craig on the existence of God or morality, I’d certainly bring up his admission about what his views entail re: Jihadists.

I tend to think Harris should have said these things sooner. When something happens this late, Craig (or whoever’s) supporters can tell themselves, “nah, that’s not what he really meant.” Better to have hammered it over several rounds. Still, great work on Harris’ part.

Craig’s internet fanboys need to be taken with a grain of salt

If you take a look at Craig’s Facebook pages, you’ll see a bunch of people congratulating him on his performance, saying “Sam Harris got creamed!” stuff like that. I confess that if I hadn’t been there, I might have concluded from that that Craig had won on rhetoric, if not substance. But when I went around talking to people after the debate, no one was saying anyone creamed anyone. (And to be clear: I wouldn’t say Harris creamed Craig, just that he got across some strong points.)

The lesson here is that the reactions of Craig’s fanboys aren’t any indicator of general audience reactions. In the future, atheists need to not assume Craig was even *rhetorically* effective based on what a few people say online. If you look at the comment thread on the “Sam Harris got creamed” comment, you see one guy (“Alex”) chiming in to say he thought it was a draw–and here’s here’s one of the responses:

Well the fact that Alex is still an atheist (rather than a more reasonable agnostic at the very least) after allegedly watching every Dr. Craig debate with diligence, says something in itself. If such an extensive bombardment of sound logic… and clearly argued syllogisms are not enough to sway one’s stance in favour of the truth which they all point towards, then clearly either a presuppositional antipathy towards theism is at play, or otherwise an intellectual deficiency in cumulative reasoning – being unable to, or refusing to draw an OBVIOUS conclusion about reality even when you’ve got all the resources and compelling reasons in front of you to do so.

[I'm taking the liberty of inserting a paragraph break here--Hallq.]

I mean we saw last night how objective morality doesn’t exist without God – so why choose to believe that God DOES NOT exist? It’s self-defeating on every front. It would be a great prospect in humanitarian terms/ends to see people begin to use their minds and actually reason with common sense. Choosing atheism in these modern times should be considered intellectually detestable by any person who values reason and moral living – why it seems the other way around is beyond me!! Clearly a vast number of people are just plain stupid! :O

These are not rational people.

Craig is petty

I don’t have a lot to say about this, but it strikes me as incredibly petty for Craig to need to attack not only his opponents, but his opponents’ supporters. And two relevant observations:

(1) I’ve managed to verify that tickets were given out to students for free before being sold to the general public. This guarantees most of the audience was in fact Notre Dame students, and makes the idea of an outside group trying to “pack” the debate ludicrous.

(2) The idea that Notre Dame students wouldn’t have asked such bad questions is silly. I’ve TA’d for Notre Dame undergrads, and while many of them are fairly bright, they’re still undergrads. Of course they’ll ask things that won’t seem “high quality” from the point of view of someone with years of philosophical training.

A final thought

These debates are a lot of fun for debate nerds, but I think we debate nerds have blown the importance of “winning” them all out of proportion. In the long run, Craig does not matter–among other things, much of his shtick is playing to the prejudices people walk into the auditorium with. He’s half-admitted this, saying that he thinks his moral argument works because people have been “indoctrinated” to believe its premises.

One of the great things Harris did in his opening speech was to start off talking, not about Craig’s arguments, but about all the e-mails he gets from believers around the world, and to say that he sympathizes with some of their concerns and is going to address them. Harris has been going around doing that all over the place, and not just in debates with the likes of Craig. And I think doing *that* is what matters in the long run.

I’m stoked about this debate because in some ways, Harris is my favorite out of the so-called “Four Horsemen.” Don’t get me wrong–Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens have all done great stuff (especially Dawkins’ popular science writing!)–but when it comes to their critiques of religion, I think Harris made the greatest contribution. He strikes me as a lot smarter than most people give him credit for, and he’s got some strengths that make me think he’ll do well in a public debate: he’s good with concise jabs, and never seems rattled by criticism in the videos I’ve seen.

The topic of the debate is the relationship between God and morality, which is good, because it means Craig won’t be spamming arguments to quite the extent he does in “Does God exist?” debates. In spite of that, I have a hard time envisioning how the debate will turn out. Craig is sometimes pretty nasty to his opponents (i.e. ignoring Richard Carrier’s arguments and focusing on calling him a “crackpot”), and I probably shouldn’t be surprised if Craig treats Harris the same way… but another part of me is asking, “would he really stoop that low again?” And I’ve never seen Harris in a situation quite like this before, so I don’t really know what he’ll do.

But tomorrow, I won’t have to wonder. I’ll get to see it all first-hand.

P.S. If you can’t get enough of me talking about Craig, I recently posted a longish blog comment on debating him. The stuff on how to do a debate on the resurrection, I’ve said before, but I also kick around some new ideas about how to debate the existence of God.

Science can determine moral values if we accept three assumptions.

1) Ethics is about the conscious states of organisms. (okay)
2) Conscious states of organisms are within the realm of science. (okay)
3) Ethics is about maximizing the well being of conscious organisms. (hmmmm)

I think you’ll see why I dislike even having to question this last assumption, since generally I agree with it. But is this statement itself something that can be determined by science or not? And if it is, can science determine the specific nuances that go into it?

More specifically, Harris says that ethics is about the well-being of conscious creatures, and that science can study well-being. I don’t think either of these claims are crazy or obviously confused or require some special source of philosophical insight not normally needed in the sciences.

One criticism here is that disagreement over these claims, or over what “well-being” is, undermines the possibility of a science of ethics. This was one of Simon Blackburn’s criticisms, which Brian Leiter touted as showing “why Sam Harris is so confused,” but in The Moral Landscape, Harris does a very good job of addressing criticisms like this. Here, Harris is rebutting moral relativism, but his point applies just as much to the claim that ethics lies outside science:

What if certain people insist that their “values” or “morality” have nothing to do with well-being? Or, more realistically, what if their conception of well-being is so idiosyncratic and circumscribed as to be hostile, in principle, to the well-being of all others?…

We should observe the double standard in place regarding the significance of consensus: those who do not share our scientific goals have no influence on scientific discourse whatsoever; but, for some reason, people who do not share our moral goals render us incapable of ever speaking about moral truth…

It seems clear that the Catholic Church is as misguided in speaking about the “moral” peril of contraception, for instance, as it would be speaking about the “physics” of Transubstantiation. In both domains, it is true to say that the Church is grotesquely confused about which things in this world are worth paying attention to. (pp. 34-35)

Harris could, if he wanted to, borrow from what Kripke and Putnam have said about “natural kind terms”: it may not be obvious what does and does not count as water, but we settle such questions by pointing to our paradigm cases of water and studying them. When we find out that what water is is H2O, we conclude that a superficially similar substance with a different chemical formula isn’t water.

I’m not saying Harris had to take this approach, and I hope for his sake he doesn’t, since I’m personally skeptical of Kripke and Putnam’s philosophy of language. What I do think is that thinking about the Kripke-Putnam view of terms like “water” shows that it isn’t crazy or obviously confused to think that well-being is as much a subject matter for science as chemistry, or that it doesn’t require any mysterious philosophical insight to see that ethics is about well-being.

I think where Harris gets in trouble, though, is situations where we must choose whose well-being we try to improve (or, have the opportunity to help some people at the expense of others.) Harris makes perfectly clear that he is aware of such moral dilemmas, and understands their importance to an extent, but he doesn’t seem to see how they threaten his claim that science can determine values. He says:

Such puzzles merely suggest that certain moral questions could be difficult or impossible to answer in practice; they do not suggest that morality depends upon something other than the consequences of our actions and intentions. (p. 72)

The trouble is that the category “moral questions” includes not just questions about what consequences our actions will have, but questions about how to weigh the consequences of our actions. Questions like “Are we, as Peter Singer claims, under an obligation to make considerable personal sacrifices to save the lives of people in the Third World?” or “Would it be right to create a world of universal happiness at the cost of torturing to death one baby?”

If Harris claims science can answer all our moral questions, it had better be able to answer questions like those. I cannot see how it could, and while that is not a conclusive argument that it can’t, Harris doesn’t even give a general sense of how it could, and until someone does, I’m skeptical.

Harris seems to have made a subtle mistake here, thinking, in effect, that it was enough to have the first two points listed in Greg’s review to make ethical questions scientific questions. The thought is, “Ethical questions are questions about well-being, and questions about well-being are scientific questions, so ethical questions are just scientific questions.” But even if many questions about well-being (what is it, how do we attain it) are scientific questions, that does not mean questions like “what should we do when the needs of two or more people conflict?” are scientific questions.

If Harris is making this mistake, I don’t claim to know why he makes it. The snark that Harris just doesn’t know any philosophy (“I suggest that Harris would benefit from reading about it” – Massimo Pigliucci) is simply false. Harris did his bachelors in philosophy, and emphasizes in a footnote that he’s read quite a bit of the philosophical literature but just doesn’t think discussing it all would’ve made for a good book. When professional philosophers suggest that Harris is an ignoramus, it’s another embarrassing example of how they’re often too ready to dismiss outsiders.

Still, I do think Harris’ thesis in The Moral Landscape, that science can determines values, rests on a mistake: failing to see the significance of some of the most difficult moral questions we face.

While I’m at it, I want to say something that I hopes gets broadcast loud and clear through religion-debating circles: If I debate William Lane Craig on the resurrection, I will win.

It would be nice to actually be able to debate Craig some day and prove this directly, but I don’t know if if this will ever happen, and I actually think it’s more important to get people to understand why this is true.

The reason is, as I put it to a fan on Facebook the other day, that there’s no credible evidence for the resurrection outside the Bible, and the Bible isn’t credible evidence either. If I debated Craig, I would say this in every round of the debate, and point out Craig’s efforts to keep the focus off this issue.

Once you understand the basics of Biblical scholarship, and you can avoid getting too worked up over Craig’s bloviations and dishonesty, Craig’s arguments about the resurrection become pretty funny. If you read the transcript of Craig’s debate with Bart Ehrman, you see Craig constantly repeating statements like, “We have got good, early, independent sources that in fact Jesus…” when what he means is “several different parts of the Bible say that Jesus…”

The reason Craig doesn’t say what he really means is he can’t, not without sounding silly. And if I debated Craig, I’d be sure to point out these silly rhetorical gambits as often as possible.

I know that debating Craig would mean being the subject of a lot of irrelevant personal attacks. This is what happened to Richard Carrier when he debated Craig, and sadly, Carrier took the bait and tried to refute as many of these attacks as possible, rather than pointing out Craig had mostly ignored the points Carrier made in his opening speech.

If I debated Craig, I’d do the opposite, and at the end of the debate, Craig would be exposed as the charlatan he is (at least on that issue).

I know in advance of posting this that some Craig fan will see it and blindly insist that Craig being right is the only possible explanation for why he sounds so good in debate. To which I reply: don’t be an idiot. Try to at least consider the possibility that someone could sound good in a debate by using silly and sometimes sleazy rhetorical tricks–against opponents who aren’t prepared to call out those tricks.

While I’m on the subject, though the issue isn’t quite as simple as the resurrection, I could probably win a debate against Craig on God and morality. When Craig brings up morality in a debate on the existence of God, it usually goes like this:

Craig: Morality couldn’t exist without God. Michael Ruse said so.

Atheist: …

Craig: My opponent didn’t respond to my argument. I win!

Atheist: Wait, what the hell are you talking about? I’m an atheist, and I believe in morality.

Craig: My opponent hasn’t proven morality could exist without God. I win!

Atheist: …

Craig: Once again, my opponent failed to respond to my argument. I win!

Third party, commenting on debate after the fact: Craig was just basing his argument on appeals to authority.

Craig: I did too have other arguments for my view! So I still win!

Not letting that happen is pretty straightforward.

Note that, while I’m happy to debate specific topics like these, I’d have to think carefully before doing a “Does God Exist?” debate. Against Craig or a Craig-wannabe who tries to cram as many arguments as possible into his presentation, it’s hard to see a debate on that topic being of any benefit to the audience.

It’s fun to think about working hard to master the stupid debating tricks necessary for a rhetorical win in such a debate, but I wouldn’t agree to a debate on the existence of God unless I thought there was a good chance of the debate being enlightening to the audience.

But enough quibbling. Just so no one–especially no one involved in running a campus atheist group forgets–I’m available for debates.

There’s something about Xtranormal videos that makes almost any situation funnier. It occurred to me that this makes them a great vehicle for mocking the rhetoric of religious apologists.

I want to emphasize that everything the Craig teddy bear says is based on things Craig actually has said. I relied especially on three books, each presenting a debate between Craig and one opponent: Antony Flew, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and Paul Kurtz.

Note that while the Sinnott-Armstrong book is just Craig and Sinnott-Armstrong, the other two books have transcripts of a live debate with comments from many different professional philosophers, with Craig’s final comments at the end. In both of those books, some of the comments on the transcripts are very good, and I stole liberally from them in making this video (always making sure to include the lame responses from Craig’s final comments.)

Oh, and “Craig”‘s final line comes from this article on his website.