March 22, 2009

• (debate review) William Lane Craig vs Richard Carrier on the Resurrection of Jesus

  Intro:

  In my previous post (link), I live blogged the William Lane Craig and Richard Carrier debate on whether Jesus rose from the dead.  Here, I'd like to give some closing thoughts on how I think it went.  Since I'm coming at this rather late in the week (I've been busy being on vacation!), I'll take advantage of many of the things people have already said that I think were on the mark, and put together my own composite picture.  I have yet to see Craig's closing thoughts, but Carrier's have been posted on his blog (link).  The best review of Carrier's case from a Christian perspective that I've found so far was done by Jason Engwer on Triablogue (link).  A nice summary of the exchange can be found at the eternal hope blog (link).  In case you are wondering, I'll go ahead and say up front that as far as subjective debates go, it seems plausible that Craig won.  I think Carrier made some poor choices and the debate suffered as a result even if the points he made were technically better.  I'll be pointing this out, but really, Carrier should have been pointing it out instead. 

  (part 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10)

  ---

  Carrier claims (link):  

  As I had predicted, I didn't win the debate. As I said before the debate in comments to the previous post on this, "it always takes twice as much time to rebut an assertion as to make one, so the fact that both parties have equal time all but entails the affirmative position will always win on any technical measure," by thus having twice as many unanswered arguments by the end.

  However I have to agree with various commenters who said things like this:

  Philip M:
  

  In this format both have equal time in all debates, the topic is known, and both people are experts. The quantity of assertion is really irrelevant to how people decide who won the debate. If you pick the few most important ideas in the debate and win those, you'll win the debate. Interestingly enough, I think one of the only times a negative could win a debate is against Craig specifically, since he uses the same structure, arguments, and quotes for his debates about the resurrection every time. If you think the negative can't win the debate, you must think that the negative has an obligation to construct their own case, *and* respond to everything the affirmative said. That's clearly false. (link)

  Eric: 

  I'm sure that anyone who is both familiar with the subject matter and who has studied Craig's standard, completely unsurprising opening could come up with a brief point-by-point rebuttal, focusing only on the strongest arguments against his case. Hence, the 'shotgun' riposte is farcical. It's a debate; you're not expected to reply with a dissertation to every assertion he makes. (link)

  I don't think it was an intentional farce, I just think it's an easy out.  Carrier continues: "But even with that in mind, I wasn't happy with my performance. My rebuttals were disorganized, I stumbled over sentences too often, and my time management was poor (I didn't hit all the points I wanted to)." 

  ---

  Some things Craig did right:

  Philip M: 

  In reality, Craig I think tried to make the debate quite focused, which you can notice in his opening as he tries to anticipate what Carrier will argue. He presupposes Jesus personal claims and the existence of God explicitly. He then puts a lot of arguments on the burial story, the empty tomb, and on the nature of the body in 1 Corinthians 15. The other facts he barely touches, because Carrier accepts them already, and then he talked about the best explanation of them. So given that he knew what Carrier stressed in his written work, it seems like the shotgun could have been avoided if Carrier just argued where he and Craig disagreed the most about the case (empty tomb, nature of 1 Corinthians 15, best explanation). (link)

  When Craig pointed out that Carrier switched topics, even though Carrier's position still technically works, it was close enough to the truth that I had to empathize.  And when Carrier comes back with the "shotgun" complaint, it seems Carrier has doomed himself to a self fulfilling prophecy of causing the problem he expected from the beginning.  Honestly, Carrier introduced a large mat of heavily intertwined points in his opening statement (that sounded like he lifted them right out of his books) which would take a few hours to pick apart properly (if at all).  Blaming Craig for doing the same is convoluted and confused at best and hypocritical and fatalistic at worst. 

  Some things Craig did wrong:

  -The presupposition of arguments from natural theology that God exists is no small ad hoc assumption to throw into a historical case.  Theologians can and have gone a million different ways trying to judge an absent god's motives.  Some kind of disinterested deistic god could satisfy whatever philosophical domain of claims, but never interfere in human history.  Since no further elaboration happened (that I can recall), one might as well not even bother to bring up the presupposition at all since it doesn't appear to have any effect on the case.  And once any such considerations *are* in the door (see the notes on molinism below), all of the sudden we are buried deeper and deeper in more and more implausible ad hoc conjectures to prop up the idea of a god who would be interested in raising Jesus from the dead.  It's not really feasible to compartmentalize the debates as Craig attempted to do.

  -I was amazed (and impressed) that Craig actually admitted that mass hallucination was possible and that different people could be mutually induced to see something similar each in their own little subjective world.  I was almost certain defenders of the resurrection of Jesus would be in denial of this forever and yet here Craig is admitting this is part of his scientific background knowledge (contrary to Frank Turek and Mike Licona, for instance).   Then Craig rather badly transitions into some kind of vague argument from variety of experiences recorded in the gospels.  Props for being straight with the common ground data, but a fresh defense of where apologetics should go from there with it is definitely called for.  Carrier made a big point about the proficiency of what would be indistinguishable from habitual hallucination in any other context and so dropping the ball here is a rather significant point to lose. 

  -For a while it seemed that Craig might get away with claiming Carrier's point about a compassionate god prioritizing communication in the salvation scheme was only philosophical and not historically relevant.  However, at some point Craig had to face the issue (it kept coming up and got clarified a little) and he ended up saying as the xangan carriervcraig noted:

  Craig responded by saying that Jesus did not even rise from the dead to convince people that he was alive, but just to commission people (something I have told him in person I think is false).  He also argued based on a Molinist account of divine foreknowledge that God has so ordered the world so that everyone who would accept God based on their willingness to do so will have a sufficient basis, whether that be in evidence or not, to do so. (link) 

  I've covered Craig's ad hoc molinism in the past (link) and as I said in the live blogging, this is hairsplitting.  It doesn't really matter what explicit emphasis or detail might be official (and likely many Christians probably think Craig is just plain wrong even from their point of view), but the underlying obvious theme is that you can't build a religion on thin air.  If you don't even know the basics are true (link), how in the world can you hope to build a meaningful relationship on top of that?  Clearly something in the ballpark of what Carrier suggested would be more likely from a loving god who cares about our salvations rather than the underwhelming exploits of what we might expect from just a successful religious movement.  That was obviously Carrier's point, and Craig came back with hairsplitting that required ad hoc molinism that just didn't compete.

  -Both parties were trying to make an argument to the better explanation given a certain sample range.  Craig wanted us to sample his 4 facts, draw a straight line through them, forget we just presumed God into the equation from the get-go to make this feasible, and then pay no attention to the vast religious landscape of competing claims.  Carrier wanted us to take a look at the more established facts of human culture and psychology and blow off an oversimplified circumstantial case for a miracle buried in the insecure mire of a religious tradition.  I was glad to see Craig actually try to hit this difference head on, but his reasoning amounted to the raw insistence we should just do it his way.  We can take the case of Christianity on its own terms and still easily come to the conclusion that a circumstantial case just isn't enough to establish a miracle claim.   

  -I suppose I could cut Craig some slack for at least attempting to address Carrier's slew of myth-making examples.  However his method of doing so was so transparent and superficial a reversal of polemical polarity that he might as well have not bothered.  Let's emphasize the differences and note some examples that might not fit the mold!  Yay!  That didn't quite get on top of things and give us reason to favor his position and it certainly wasn't enough to justify the many times Craig claimed all the connections were just in Carrier's head.   

  -Apparently he made lots of funny faces at Carrier during his presentation and had other various class-less stumbles.  I was too busy live blogging to notice.  Craig called Carrier's views crank views, implied numerous times it's all in Carrier's head, and accused Carrier of lacking reading comprehension in favor of seeing things not there in the text (even though Carrier's case was sufficiently demonstrated).  Craig's overall professionalism while superb otherwise, seriously stumbled at those points.

  -I'm not sure what I think about the use of Carrier's position as a mythicist to "poison the well" of the debate from the get-go.  On the one hand, it's fair to point out what's true and relevant.  On the other hand, it is common knowledge most Christian ears close the instant the label "mythicist" is applied to a critic of Christianity (Nick: "And if I recall correctly I think he even has some doubts that Jesus existed which almost makes him not worth listening to on any point, but we’ll see what happens," link, Metacrock: "I don't think Carrier is anything but disingenuous about what historians say. His myther ideas totally blind him tot he nature of history," link).  Christians barely tend to tolerate "normal skeptics" but the mythicist brand is one kick in the coconuts too many.  Supposing possibly that one man of history may have been fictional is less an extraordinary claim than one man of history probably having magic powers and rising from the dead, but that doesn't seem to phase anyone.  So, I'm pretty much torn right down the middle on this one.  Perhaps if Craig had been a little more professional in general, I could see this more as dispassionate information, but in context, it seems he was not-so-subtly milking Christian prejudices.  [Edit:  It seems that DrCraigVideos singled that one section out for general promotion (link)...so it looks like his fan base got the message.] 

  -Craig was a bit overdressed.  He looked like a politician or a business man. 

  Some things Carrier did right:

  Even though Carrier focused on all the wrong things in the debate for the most part, his almost off-handed statements in terms of what did directly clash with Craig's case were just plain better (as I said in my intro). 

  ~"Most missing bodies don't go missing because they rose from the dead." 

  ~"Miracles are at the very least rare and have never been confirmed." 

  Those two statements basically win even a convoluted and messy debate on this topic.  Craig's four facts may have a majority of scholars behind them, but they are circumstantial, the consensus likely degrades from there on various supporting tidbits and even if totally accepted and Craig's hypothesis requires the huge ad hoc assumption of God and his involvement which is still up in the air and improbable even if he exists.   

  Had Carrier stuck with the above backbone and brought everything back to this with ease (as could plausibly be done), things would have gone much better.

  Some things Carrier did wrong:

  -Right off the bat, Carrier should have jumped on putting mythicism into perspective as I pointed out.  A less insulting route could have been a simple and obvious comparison in a rhetorical form I've seen him use in other contexts.  After clarifying that he would not be advocating the mythicist position and that it needed to go through peer review first, he should have said something like this:  "Just as Christians would not expect to have their case rejected just because they advocate a number of fringe views they hope to one day gain notoriety on through proper channels, so too, I would ask that you hear me out despite some of my own views that are currently fringe and works in progress."  Something like that could plausibly force an honest Christian to respect Carrier's underdog position (and set it aside for the current debate) at least as much as they would have their own position respected.  It would also subtly tip the scales in his favor given that Carrier would immediately win any grand consensus-a-athon on balance if brought to full fruition.  Carrier, however, did no such thing.

  -Carrier should have dropped all pretensions to defending any non-consensus view and stuck strictly with a general case for insufficiency.  Craig came back against the "gospels as myth-making" theme with a consensus reversal that went unaddressed.  Christians will always lose appeals to authority and if you don't venture out beyond the confines with your own theories, once that route is taken, all you have to do is be more consistent than they are.  If Carrier didn't want to get into the spiritual body hypothesis or mythicism they could have been mentioned in passing along with several other plausible naturalistic alternatives that are oodles more probable than the orthodox Christian supernatural version.  That would have put more intimate content that mingled with Craig's case on the table than what otherwise transpired.

  -Carrier had no slides.  He had several pieces of evidence in support of his gospels as myth-making case and each of these was defended by a number of points.  It was clear that much of the Christian audience (and probably non-Christians as well) pretty much only heard the first example and only one small item of that one example and then got way lost in the rest they weren't familar with.  "A student said during the question-and-answer period following the debate that 'my mom has an uncommon name, but she exists.'” (link)  This drew enormous applause and reflected a major theme of Craig's criticism that Carrier's exegesis (critical examination of the bible) is a case of skeptical pareidolia (seeing patterns that aren't significant).  I was laughing at how cliche' and shallow this person's question was and how it reflected the comprehension of the Christian audience...but oh well.  Anyone that is at all familiar with Carrier's work will know there's no way in hell he'd defend any position like this with only one weak link and will more often than not ridicule skeptics who tend that way and go too far with insufficient evidence.  And it could have/should have been evident in the debate itself if people paid attention.  Unfortunately the conceptual saturation rate of the audience was not all that and more background knowledge would have been required to register the weight of the points being made.  Slides with bullet points would have helped tremendously to keep all the reasons fresh in people's minds.

  -Even though I understand where Carrier is coming from in claiming Craig only has two sources and not dozens of independently attested sources, it was really difficult to tell that from what was presented.  There were little tidbits here and there that you could put together, but it should have been Carrier's job to do that for us. 

  -Even going into the "gospels as myth-making" wasn't necessary in and of itself.  To establish the case for an ideologically hostile audience, you'd really have to go through the majority of examples so that the few exceptions that Craig could bring up (and he did) wouldn't matter and no one would have to take Carrier's word for it.  As Philip M said (link), "Clearly, premise 1 takes far too much substantiation to be workable in a debate."  Carrier tried to excuse himself up front, but he should have just changed tactics altogether.  He did manage to frame this much better in the Q and A but it was a little too late.  He should have been framing the debate better all along.  As John Loftus noted (link), "I didn't think Carrier did badly although I do question why he focused on that which he did." 

  -I'm certain the "it's all in your head" claim will come up over and over and over again if Carrier chooses to pursue the myth-making chunk of his presentation in future debates.  If Carrier does this, he needs some kind of rhetorically forceful way to get things immediately back on track rather than just appealing to the subjective memories of an ideologically hostile audience who has just been stroked up and down in favor of just figuring you are in fact nutzo. 

  -Carrier alluded to his defense of various points in his books too many times.  The subject of female testimony in the ancient world came up a number of times and Carrier ended up just saying that Craig is wrong and that it's all in his book.  Craig appeared to end that back and forth with a stronger point.  Even doing that once in an otherwise strong debate could be too much, and as I recall, Craig did no such analogous thing.  Granted, what Carrier said was entirely true and his books are filled with endless rigorously defensible points (contrary to those who predictably said things like, "I doubt I’ll read Carrier’s book but I’m absolutely positive that whatever his reasons, they’re ridiculous." link), but as I said a second ago, an ideologically hostile audience should not have to take his word for it (not to mention I've seen like half a dozen comments conspiracy theorizing that Carrier is just out to sell books).  As Eric said (link), "But might Craig not have a rebuttal of Carrier's rebuttal, and so on, ad infinitum? We have to make judgments based on the data we have, not on future credits."

  -I was surprised that Carrier did not mention the embarrassing ending of Mark and note that Craig agrees with Markan priority.  Whatever bias there was against female testimony, the original ending of Mark trails off with the women running off not telling anyone that Jesus was even raised from the dead.  It's almost as though Mark was pitched to an audience that was only hearing about this version of the good news many years after the fact (urban legend style) and that you might not have heard about it because of those darned women.  To add to this embarassment, you have the Christians later who apparently recognized this and tried out some of their own endings that are more in line with the other gospels and you have Matthew that adds Jesus in on the way to make sure that those unreliable women do tell someone sooner rather than never.  Carrier got into this last point, but it really could have been better supported with some of these other obvious details. 

  -Carrier used the phrase "cut to the chase" at least two times too many.  It's one thing to need to use all your time to cram in a complicated and delicate case, but it's another to bottom out with catch phrases that fall flat.  There were a few other rhetorical bottoming out moments (like, "there's a naked boy in Mark, how about that?" and "Christianity was basically a hallucination cult...[awkward silence]" etc.) that broke the flow of the argument and gave the ideologically hostile audience way too much time to assume the worst. 

  -Carrier overplayed the "Jesus should have appeared to everyone" point.  Carrier at first seemed way too absolute about it and it could have been pitched more "softly" as an argument to the better explanation.  Inevitably that is how Carrier framed it late in the Q and A, but again, the damage was already done and you shouldn't make an ideologically hostile audience work for it. 

  -If Craig was over-dressed, it seems that Carrier was a bit under-dressed.  Perhaps a suit jacket would have been too much, but his tie could have been a different color than his shirt.  Small thing, but presentation does matter.

  ---

  My response (link) to Carrier's defense of his choices:

  Rick,

  I guess we have a difference of opinion on proper strategies here. Educating an audience is one thing when you have more than an hour to work with and when certain expectations don't apply. Your version works much better in lecture format or for like a week long seminar. The kind of case you pitched easily lent to little tidbits being blown way out of proportion and Craig easily milked the audiences' prejudices to where people don't even remember what you did argue. I would not have tried to make this a technically sound academic debate as you clearly were trying to do. In a debate with Craig I would have been in it to win it, and would have been careful to play the game he does, but better, since that's not really that hard to do. The education part for Christians then is that even on their own terms their case doesn't work, and "oh btw, I have a serious academic case in my books." That's my opinion anyway. I do think, even given your choices here, that you could have picked up a lot of force from a Q and A where both of you can respond to the same question. Oh well. I would demand that next time, if I were you.

  Ben

  ---

  Outro:

  Pretty much all of Rick's errors are superficial and pretty much all of Bill's errors were in terms of actual content.  It depends on what your definition of winning a debate is.  I think Rick will appreciate the constructive criticism and I'm fairly certain he already knows most of this anyway.  I hope that what I have here is something in the ballpark of what he says he learned from the experience. 

  I imagine a number of factors have contributed to Rick's admitted poor performance.  The moral of the story seems to be don't take on more than you can handle.  Being the first to seriously advance the mythicist case (link) up the scholarly "Mt. Improbable" is an epic challenge which must be especially emotionally taxing.  Mythicism is a fringe position and his reputation is totally on the line there.  Rick had also been committed to a debate with Jake O'Connell (link) on the true nature of Paul's resurrection beliefs.  Also, the Jesus Project (link) is an epic project in and of itself that if it makes any progress will be positively amazing (getting a whole bunch of eclectic Jesus scholars to agree on anything...). Maybe it'd be nice to have a life in there somewhere as well, but I probably shouldn't have to make excuses.  His interest in "mixing things up" backfired in the Licona/Habermas fiasco (link) and it seems he has his head too far in this mythicist book, that he wanted to work something like that in.  Debating Craig was not the time to try something new.  I can't completely hold it against Rick since it seems much of this in terms of a clustered up mess was out of his control, but it is rather important that when lots of people will be watching to put your best foot forward.  Pretty much everything that Rick did wrong here he got 100% right in the Licona debate (link) and it showed.  I can't expect every Christian out there to really give a damn about the excuses even if valid, so this is just here at the end because I think it's probably true and worth pointing out to those who may honestly want to know.  Granted, this is just my speculation, but I've been worried for many months that Rick has been over-extended on various projects and was wondering what might suffer as a result.  I'm hoping at least that the perfection of his new book, "On the Historicity of Jesus" is where the majority of his mental resources are devoted, since that will probably matter more in the long run than a scuffle with Craig. 

  To apologize for Bill's reactions (while we're in the icky business of apologies), I'd have to say he probably honestly thinks Rick's views are in fact fanatical, fringe, and crank, and that just comes out sometimes beyond his control.  And he probably honestly believes the Holy Spirit is talking to him, and that's beyond his control as well.  I doubt most Christians who believe they commune with the Holy Spirit actually "ask for it" in any discernible way.  It probably wouldn't work for them if they did.  And from that vantage point, I'd have to say that Craig did the best that could be done even if the points he had to make ended up kind of sucking.  But then again, I would say that, wouldn't I?  *teeheehee*

  I should thank Russ and Andrea for taking the pics!  Yay!

  Ben

  • 1:11 pm
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