Oct
24
2009
What Science Can’t Account For
A good riff here by William Lane Craig from a 1998 debate:
HT: Triablogue
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23 Comments
I don’t disagree with Craig, but the video cuts out before Atkins can respond, which is a shame.
See here and also here for the above clip in context. In my opinion, unfortunately, I don’t think Atkins fares any better even in context.
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Great video…..did Atkins respond that because science can’t prove moral claims there are, therefore, no moral facts? That would seem to be an obvious response. Great video! May have to show it in my class this morning.
That was a good riff.
Did you hear Richard Dawkins on the Michael Medved show a couple of weeks ago? I would like to hear a debate between Dawkins and a good apologist.
I was lost at the first word of his five points. But wen William Buckley said, “Put that in your pipe and smoke it”, I knew it had to be good.
Sounds like Dr. Craig’s at his best when he sounds like a presuppositionalist.
That’s exactly what I was thinking.
Good video. I miss William F. Buckley.
[...] (via JT) [...]
@John -
Yes, and apparently, Dawkins knows he wouldn’t stand a chance, which is why he has refused to debate apologists.
I wish Craig sounded like this all the time and wouldn’t rely so heavily on analytic philosophy. Its like he just got done reading Van TIl before this video!
Or he may have just finished the Bahnsen vs. Stein debate and took some cues?
@John & @Jay – I was thinking precisely the same thing as I (re)watched this. I actually own this debate on VHS, but of course, because it’s VHS, I haven’t watched it _since_ about 1998. Of course, at that time, I’d heard of presuppositional apologetics (from peripheral mentions in my reading of and about Francis Schaeffer) but didn’t have as clear an idea of their import. Thanks for the post, JT.
pwned
While I generally agree with Craig, I would add that his example about the speed of light was a rather poor choice. Yes, it’s strictly a postulate, but it’s been confirmed by reams of scientific evidence, and there are much stronger examples in my view (e.g. requiring scientific hypotheses to be falsifiable).
I don’t know, I have read about the speed of light being slowed down in certain atmospheres. That it is constant in a vacuum is pretty scientifically standard, but pretty recently scientists have slowed down light (to 38 mph) in certain experiments. It really was assumed more than proven.
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99111&page=1&page=1
But yes, there were better examples.
The point, however, was that it’s an unprovable assumption because we don’t know that c is constant everywhere and everywhen. It’s entirely possible that c has varied over time, and we’d have no way to know that. While the assumption of constancy has worked in every case we’ve needed it to, that doesn’t mean it always would have or always will.
I’m kinda surprised that no one commented on the horrid title for this video. (And yes, I know that’s not JT’s doing nor Dr Craig’s.)
Had he known about it, Dr Atkins probably could have used the video poster’s smug “sore winner” attitude as the ultimate argument against the existence of God. It is only testimony to His overwhelming grace that God would want to have anything to do with such an arrogant person as the video poster.
[...] HT: Justin Taylor [...]
Unfortunately, this is somewhat of a logical highlight near the end of nearly 1.5 hours of talking past each other and ignoring each other’s arguments and nuance. I found the debate as a whole not edifying. So if you were considering going over to YouTube and watching the whole thing (which you can in a series of 12 videos), allow me to suggest last year’s debate between Craig and Hitchens instead.
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