March 18, 2009
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(live blogging) Richard Carrier vs William Lane Craig
Intro:
Atheist Richard Carrier and Christian theist William Lane Craig debate the historical case for the resurrection of Jesus in Missouri. I'm here now in the balcony and will be live blogging my thoughts. Andrea_thenerd and Da__Vinci are here with me as well.
7:02: Just the intro...7:06: WLC starts. "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?" Existential and Historical considerations are brought up.
7:08: WLC says he presupposes existence of God a la natural theology. Existence of God has been set aside for "another debate".
7:10: WLC is pointing out that RC is a mythicist.
7:11: WLC lays out four standard apologetic historical facts and points out that majority of scholars agree on these and that the best explanation is that Jesus rose from the dead.
7:12: WLC claims there are 5 independent early sources for Jesus burial.
7:13: WLC's Fact 2: Jesus' tomb found empty by women.
7:15: WLC takes note of the ancient anti-women testimony. Claims Mark is unembellished.
7:19: WLC is doing a decent job of appropriating his polemics against RC's known positions. Should be an intimate debate. yay!
7:21: Now WLC is addressing the "spiritual body" hypothesis since that may be the direction RC takes. Not sure what Rick will be arguing tonight.
7:22: WLC's fact 3: Experiences of Jesus after the fact. Uses the variety in the gospels apart from defending the gospels as independent of each other.
7:24: Claims the Christian conception of the messiah and other Christian beliefs were "too novel" and that something else must explain it. WLC has set up his four historical facts and is going into the abductive argument. Says "God" is the only ad hoc hypothesis...as though that is any small ad hoc addition to the equation.
7:27: RC is up. Cuts to chase as usual.7:28: Goes into the gospels as myth making and not history. Uses Barabas example. Reversal of expectation and implausible ironies in Mark. There's way to much info he's going into to summarize properly.
7:33: Reification of fictional characters. Lazarus starts in Luke as parable. John decides Lazarus actually exists.
7:36: Another indication of myth, the acceptance of wildly different earlier accounts. Matthew's horrible elaboration on Mark.
7:37: RC adds the point to the Matthew account of all the dead being raised, that tons of tombs would be empty as well. Therefore the mystery people couldn't totally slip through the cracks of validation. Didn't think of that.
7:38: RC is going into Paul's revelation epistemology.
7:39: RC claims the burden of proof is on the religious person who says their visions were real but all the other contradictory revelations are just hallucinations.
7:41: Goes into evidence that the early Christians were habitual hallucinators.
7:42: Talks about the happy-schitzos (functionally delusional people) and how they would naturally gravitate to particular comfortable religious niches.
7:44: "Most missing bodies don't go missing because they rose from the dead."
7:45: Notes that Craig says that naturalistic should be preferred when available.
7:47: RC concludes with saying for the sake of this debate he accepts the mainstream concensus and that mythisism has to go through the peer review process before brought to the debate.
7:49: WLC says RC has chosen to argue the original debate topic instead of the resurrection of Jesus. He's a little grumpy about that.7:50: Says the majority of scholars reject the gospels as myth making. Says the commision of the gospels was not to say...um...some kind of hair splitting. RC made the point that Jesus probably should have brought his message to everyone and WLC had to counter it. Didn't make sense. He's now pointing out the exceptions to the idea that most of the gospels can be pulled from the OT. Standard re-emphasis.
7:53: Notes that RC didn't respond to many of his points, but RC said that what he said by-passed. WLC claims there is no reversal of expectation motif and says its all about the fulfillment of Jesus' claims. Says all of the connections are in RC's head.
7:56: Says RC is just trying to explain everything away and reasserts the abduction (argument to the best explanation). WLC ignores the broader scope RC laid out in favor of the myopic Christian conclusion.
7:58: Says that basically all ancient visions were evidence that the ghosts were dead, not that they were alive. Oh noes!
7:59: Says you can't psycho-analyze historical figures as RC apparently does.
8:00: Says the skeptics' real problem is miracle aversion and that he "solves" this problem by presupposing God. Yay!
8:01: RC says he's argument isn't anti-miracles, but instead that miraculous claims typically are natural and that supernatural explanations are at the very least "uncommon." And he says that we can't rule out natural explanations here.8:02: Giving background info on examples of similar beliefs contra-WLC.
8:03: Notes publication bias on scholarly consensus in regards to the "fact" of the empty tomb.
8:06: Women could be witnesses! Yay!
8:09: RC's trying to do too much. Hard to follow along. He said he couldn't possibly cover all the "shotgun" arguments.
8:10: Says we don't know what happened to the body of Jesus and don't have enough evidence to say either way. Isn't defending the "spiritual body" hypothesis this debate.
8:13: WLC falls back on his four facts. Notes RC didn't disagree with three of them. Says Luke couldn't have made up the speeches that was common in ancient history. Says there are tidbits of non-Luke language in the speeches. I guess Luke couldn't use other people's slang? Okay...8:15: Says women can only testify to their virginity or that her husband is dead.
8:16: WLC is making fun of the Mary's as symbolism. "speculation going off the railing" "have to learn to read the lines before you read between the lines" "RC hasn't learned to do that yet..." Crowd groans. Guy beside me says, "too far sir."
8:19: WLC says all the connections are all in RC's head again. Says RC was wrong about WLC's basis for asserting empty tomb is consensus position.
8:20: "Carrier's Three Absurd Theses" Rips on RC's exegesis. Calls RC's views crank views.
8:23: WLC had tried to portray a connection as more elaborate a game of free association when in fact Myriam of Magdola's name is verbatim the Egyptian name. (sorry bout missing context).8:26: Discusses the symbolism and improbabilites of various literary motifs in the gospels as history.
8:27: Discusses the "naked boy" in Mark and the bizarre occurrence and probable symbolism. RC's cases are too thorough in the books to easily pitch in debates like these. That's unfortunate.
8:29: RC runs out of time.
8:30: WLC's closing. Says RC's claim about what God would do to inform everyone is a philosophical claim and has no place in this historical debate. Removes the resurrection from having anything to do with salvation necessarily and is compatible with things like universalism or "whatever." Says God will judge people based on the info they have.8:32: WLC is trying to get into the details that RC had gotten over. This kind of back and forth is too difficult for a lay audience to track.
8:35: WLC tries to reframe the probabilities to focus on the gospel details rather than the general scape of religious claims.
8:36: RC doesn't think WLC has presented especially convincing evidence to overturn normal probabilities for bodies going missing.8:40: They're both doing a lot of "nuh uh" "ya huh"ings.
8:41: Early Christians were a bunch of hallucinating cultists! Yay!
8:42 Q and A: Cognitive science vs Natural Theology. Duel of the background knowledge. Great question, actually.8:44: WLC says the hallucination theory isn't a great explanation even though he accepts RC's background knowledge.
8:45: Q to RC: About Simon of Syrene and how he has kids vs. gospels as myth. RC explains how you have to have enough cases of myth busts in order to determine the prior probability of other unknown allusions to other previous themes the gospel writers may have wanted to comment on.
8:50: Q to WLC for some reason on the idea that everyone was hallucinating the same thing. Wow, WLC concedes something never thought I'd hear, that he admits the documented cases of group hallucination of "similar" things plus group think. Says there's too much a variety of accounts to account for the gospel appearances...
8:51: Q to RC on "hallucination theory." Apparently wants to know more about the scientiffic studies on religious hallucinary experiences. Looking for a good definition of hallucination.
8:53: Q to both to define "ad hoc" since they don't have dictionary on hand. "Made up!" Yay!
8:55: Q to WLC "How necessary is inerrancy to this debate?" Says that inerrancy plays no role at all in his case. Significant nuggets can be mined from otherwise bullshit sources.
8:58: Q to RC: first argument, on Barabas, uncommon name, his mother has uncommon name, but she still exists! Oh noes! Audience claps. Not RC's argument. RC points to the conjunction of many factors and not any single factor, like the legal absurdity and others.
9:00: Q to WLC: Was audience of Mathew Jewish and Matthew was Jewish? "Yes, probably." Question about the reference to guards spreading false rumors about the Christians, being spread to Jews as though that's a different group and "to this day" as though it is far removed from time period. WLC goes into his speculation that there's a long entrenched controversy of Jewish vs. Christian polemics.
9:03: Q to RC: "What would be sufficent evidence to convince you?" RC notes the 3 hour darkness should have been worldwide and isn't.
9:05: Q to WLC: "Has Jesus appeared to you?" "No." WLC says he doesn't believe any of the accidents of history will prevent anyone from being saved and reasserts that it is irrelevant to debate.
9:07: Q to RC: Is citing multiple sources important to authenticity? How come you cite yourself so much and not others? Doesn't that mean you suck? RC elaborates on the faulty survey of scholars and those who support his position on the non-historocity of the empty tomb.
9:12: Q to WLC: On the women as unreliable witnesses. WLC says that the women are only a piece of the improbable testimony.
9:14: Q to RC: On hallucination, and single out Paul's hallucination as unlikely. Complains that RC didn't elaborate on Paul as the exception. Christians clapped. RC notes that Paul is the only enemy that converted and that perhaps Paul felt guilt over believing in the moral message of the Christians he was persecuting. He says we don't really know. RC finally brings the WLC point about an irrelevant philosophical issue, that its a question of predictions of naturalistic theories vs. supernatural and that there has to be a way to distinguish theories or else we can't say WLC's view is correct.
9:20: Q to WLC: Why wouldn't Jesus appear to everyone on earth? WLC: Tries to cast doubt on the probability of salvation view having good information for what salvation is all about. Ironically I guess the woman that just announced the missing wallet perhaps should have kept quiet.
9:24: My battery is about to die. Last question, yay! Q to both: Who has a TV? Blah...blah...blah...social construct theory...blah, blah, blah...no question? Weird. Prank non-question. Q to RC: Something about Jude, and the end of the world. Stupid question.
9:27: Q to WLC: Multiple independent attestation?
9:32: Q to RC: How could the gospel writers have been so sophisticated as would be required of all this myth construction? RC: Its standard education if you could be educated in Greek. Andrea: That would have been a great point to bring up earlier! Me: Shyeah. WTF?
Outro:
This debate kinda sucked. Too much material. Requires too much background knowledge. I wonder how much nonsense was created as a result of it being all over the place. Are people more informed after this or confused? How much will snowball with bias of each? *shrug*Ben
Comments (7)
My wife is due any day now, maybe I should do some live blogging during the birth.
So what is the consensus in the audience, is it close or is someone getting blown away? I suspect, in general, the Christians and atheists both will declare their side as the winner.
This is fascinating - live blogging - and on a topic near to my heart. I'd enjoy hearing Carrier, as I have respected his writings ever since I studied my way into an excommunication.
Thanks for providing this! I'm heading out now to "sin".
must read later, have to finish editing my movie.
"Too much material. Requires too much background knowledge. "
Well, this was the exact comment I was about to leave, but obviously you already understood this.
@godgone - Hey! You see the same people everywhere you go on xanga!
Where were you sitting?? I was looking for you and Andrea. (More so Andrea, since I have a better idea of what she looks like.) Didn't you get seating reserved for out-of-towners? We did, and it was all up front, so I thought it might be easy to spy you, but I got nothing. Oh well.
@Fletch_F_Fletch - That would be really weird, dude. Are you joking? If not, will you post pics? hehehe j/k
There seemed to be a large Christian audience and it seems they think he was a clear victor. As far as the subjective elements of a debate go, I'd say it's plausible that Craig did better than Carrier in that regard. I hope to write a summary here soon and have the videos uploaded, so I'll have a better idea when I lay out all the pros and cons of the different levels of debate.
@godgone - Welcome!
@blonde_apocalypse - It became quite evident that most of what Carrier was saying wasn't sinking in. I've read his books and online articles and so I understand a lot of of what he says beyond what's presented, but in terms of what a lay audience can grasp upon a first hearing and in a debate context, it seems Carrier failed to communicate. He needed some slides, hardcore.
@StrokeofThought - Wow. I feel like an idiot. We were up in the balcony because I didn't realize the reserved seating up front was for us! I was like, "I'm not that important, let's find some seats." Oh well. Had no idea you'd be there. Oopsie.
Ben
@WAR_ON_ERROR - I imagine he had to make the classic choice: you can speak to the seasoned, experienced audience or speak to the newcomer but you can't do both.