Watching. Now into Craig's presentation.

Arguing for 'objective morality' - he is right, that without God there is no such thing. I would argue that even with God, we still do not have it, all we have is a set of commandments, laws.

What the fuck is your problem? It's like you don't mind obeying laws, but as long as they are subject to oversight and review, unlike a dictator. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ARBITRARY DICTATORS?

I should have expected as much from someone defying gravity. HOW THE HELL do you sit at your desk typing at your keyboard when you are upside down?

I don't quite agree with some of the arguments and positions of Shelly, but that is to be expected since he is only a philosopher.

I was very disappointed in him not pointing the obvious inappropriateness of the lion and antelope example. The lion has no choice but to kill to survive, vegetarianism is not an option. Any blame for that situation would fall on the hypothetical creator, ie God.

If they wanted to use examples from the animal kingdom, then things like a new dominant male killing or chasing away the cubs fathered by his rival would have been more relevant. Still defensible from an evolutionary point of view, but with clearer moral issues.

Yes, Shelley did pretty good job of pointing out the fallacies in Craig's argument.

Lane didn't bring any good arguments at all, but that is hardly surprising.

I would have asked Craig if he ever did anything like reading a good book, going to a good movie, attending a party with friends, IOW any of the sorts of things he actually found pleasant. Since the positive feelings from such events don't even last our lifetime, let alone for eternity, I must assume he is never motivated to do any such things....

Shelly let slip that he was "playing a game", at one point, though he retreated from that as "not fair". I think the points he was making were not, strictly speaking, designed to be true. If you see his lecture series ( http://academicearth.org/courses/death ), when he has a chance to cover his position over the span of a course, he's very thorough and specific. But when given 20 minutes ... truth isn't what it's about. That's often the frustration that rationalists feel in debates like these, and Kagan was able to share that with Craig.

But how many ridiculous things did Craig say? I mean, given the vast set of things that Craig said, and the subset of those things that were ridiculous, I think the only strategy Kagan could have followed is to address just the one glaring problem.

I wasn't aware that there was a distinction between canon and fan fiction, where derivative works were concerned. Is the difference getting paid to write them?

That's actually what I mean when I say "destroyed". Ordinarily, WLC's opponents are so flummoxed by him (because he's supposed to be a philosopher, and he seems to grant himself the luxury of not addressing questions posed to him) that they get caught up in the weight of the overwhelming insanity of his position. That can flat rattle a thoughtful person!

But because Kagan is so talented and practiced at lecturing (as evidenced by his online course on death) he's well suited to show Craig for the phony that he is. Kagan is the real deal, in that he can both rattle off an argument and also think about it on the spot. Craig merely appears to be a philosopher in that sense, especially in other debates where no-one is clever enough to take him to task for just one argument at a time.

In future debates about morality, I'm going to follow Kagan's lead. It's a great way to deal with the informal debate format.

The difference is being published. If it has been published, and says Star Wars on it (and the author hasn't been and isn't about to be sued), then it is cannon.

LOL!

Canon!?

Are we really going to go there?  When's the reformation?  Where's Darth Luther?  Should I prepare the shrine to he who has the line to the force?  I hear The Lucas will be visiting Mexico to shore up the numbers.

Is it still funny?

Canon!

I've seen this use of the [word] already, but I had the exact same reaction. Exactly. Science fiction is particularly fond of using "canonical" as a description of accepted story lines, etc. The connection between science fiction and religious ... uh ... "literature" has always been pretty strong, though.

...

But Vastet said it was "cannon", which means the thing that Star Wars stories should probably be shot out of.

(I was born a shit disturber -- I can't help it.)

Edit: where the square brackets are now found was the word "world", proving that I am the king of self-sabotage, engaging in the exact same error I was accusing Vastet of making. That's right, I'm the king. The King of Cannon.

You're right! I had an explanation about the Star Wars *world* in there, but it was such a bad joke that only a typo remnant remained.

Not a joke like WLC's education is apparently a joke, another kind.

That's the group solidarity talking. Kagan was tasked with addressing an audience who would at least accept Craig's arguments as something other than fantasy. It's a tough sell, when people already believe in angels, for no other reason than they saw them on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

We're dealing with complexicating primates, here, not rationality machines. Who knows what they'll believe next?

I think the debate revealed just how clearly Craig was basing his argument on his inability to conceive of certain things, and his presuppositions, rather than an explicit positive reasoning. 

'Without God, there can be no ultimate objective standard of morality'. So? Is your discomfort with the absence of any ultimate moral standard somehow 'proof' that there must be one??

 It's a tough call to make: how much denial would someone have to be in to ignore the more glaringly obvious points that Kagan illuminated? As Bob said, there were points where Craig's argument boiled down to him feeling icky about something, therefore it was false. One would think that truth had nothing to do with how comfortable one was, but Craig begs to differ.

That was fun. He certainly was outclassed, and I felt a bit sorry for him (using empathy bestowed upon me by the Great Empathy Giver, of course). I didn't find it helpful that Kagan kept referring to the morality he was presenting as "objective," as they were both using the phrase "objective morality" and clearly talking about two completely different things. And Craig needs to read the Bible a bit more before he goes touting the idea of objective, absolute morality anymore. The Bible clearly doesn't support that argument. Either that or genocide, slavery, and the wholesale slaughter of non-combatants including women and children is moral.

I look forward to Kagan's course on death. Thanks for both those links.

I'm just curious if anyone has noted what Craig has said on his site about the debate. In one of his Question of The Weeks (Question 116), he says he didn't "press the point" during the debate because, "our hosts with the Veritas Forum had made it very clear to me that they were not interested in having a knock-down debate but a friendly dialogue that would foster a warm and inviting atmosphere for non-believing students at Columbia. The goal was simply to get the issues out on the table in a congenial, welcoming environment, which I think we did." Both Kagan and Craig weren't going into the debate with the intention to clobber each other with philosophical defeaters but rather to present opposing cases to a maturing college audience that was likely unfamiliar with the topic.

I personally didn't get the impression you all say you got after watching the debate. Dr. Kagan, while, granted, a very educated man, never seems to cede to Craig's point that, on atheism, the feelings of homo sapiens does not matter because ultimately homo sapiens do not matter- and he never really gets into how they even could matter (bear in mind, on atheism, the feelings of homo sapiens become ultimately reduced to merely firings of complex electrical nervous systems in mammals). Yes, Dr. Kagan, we get that relatively, the feelings of pain and suffering matter (particularly to those which are at the mercy of them), but why, if the universe begins with no intention of bringing about mankind, and if mankind will ultimately cease to exist due to the inevitable heat death of the universe, why, on atheism, should we think that anything that happens between these two events even matters? At first, it almost strikes of his not even considering this hypothetical reality. He just outright assumes that if we can feel pain, then it somehow just must necessarily matter. But this is his burden of proof to bear and throughout the course of debate he evinces his inability to carry such a burden.

 Open to replies and a continuance of this discussion, if anyone's interested.

-adamryan

My understanding from Kagan's response address of this is that our feelings matter to us, in the here and now, even if they do not matter ultimately with respect to the cosmos.  He further points out (around 49:00) that introducing god simply begs the question of ultimate worth.  How do we suddenly become more special if we acknowledge a god, and that he gave us souls?

What we do during our brief and unlikely existence, does not matter ultimately:  our species will still go extinct, the sun will still destroy our planet, the universe will still wind down to heat death.  But it matters during (and only during) our brief and unlikely existence.  Just as we still appreciate visual beauty, although we know it is simply our poorly-formed eyes filtering a tiny portion of the light spectrum.     Just as we still feel lust although we know it is simply our genes exhorting us to reproduce (and can consciously hinder that biological goal through contraception).  

Kagan says around 55:00 that he doesn't believe in "deeper meaning", and then provides the example of a torture victim.  One's ability to feel pain doesn't lead one to object to being tortured on account of the cosmic significance of the act (and there is no cosmic significance), but rather on its immediate, personal significance.  

It always amuses me when these guys insist that something that is only temporary, or cannot be shown to have cosmic significance, cannot possible matter to us, or give us any 'real' happiness.

Do these people never watch a TV show, read a novel, go to the movies, enjoy a tasty meal, listen to a great piece of music, etc. None of those things have any of the above eternal or cosmic attributes, yet people are obviously drawn to them in vast numbers.

It is the drama, the story which is a sequence of changing scenes, of the unexpected outcome, which is what makes a great drama appeal to us.

The real situation is that the truth is the very opposite of Craig's position. It is inherent in the way our minds work, as much to allow us to adjust to reality, that anything which persists indefinitely will eventually start to bore us, it is only novelty, experiences which have a temporary peak intensity really have a lasting effect, a memory, which drives us to seek to repeat them.

So heaven, or even an eternal Hell, would only really work, for this and many other reasons, if our core personhood was drastically changed from what it is in our 'mortal' experience, which begs the question of whether it is meaningful to claim that it is the same 'soul', the same 'I', who would be enjoying or suffering such a truly eternal existence.

Imagine watching your favourite TV show for the billionth time...

Would that be Heaven or Hell??

Agreed. Of course they matter to us here and now. That isn't disputed. What is disputed is whether a rationally justified, coherent system of ethics can be built on how we feel, here and now. If all that ethics is is just a system of behavioral governance which is, at bottom, based on how we feel, then that seems to flip on its face our ideas of justice, right and wrong, etc. The prisoner's term now becomes, not a stretch of time of punishment because he has done something wrong, but an incarceration due to having been caught doing something which made someone feel a certain way- and since that person's feelings happen to be one which the populace seem to all agree to disdain, the majority has decided to lock this man up. Notice, however, they have shifted ground. They are no longer locking him up because he has done something wrong, but rather because he has done something unpleasant. When we justify behavior like this, the least we can do is be honest with ourselves and concede to the mistake.

 The honesty is appreciated. When I have had this conversation in the past, it rarely has ever had the opposite side admitting that the fate of man, on atheism, trivializes his existence. So I do appreciate that you at least are acknowledging this. But the point still needs to be pressed: Why does this matter? How can we seriously justify a system of ethics if they truly are this relative and subjective? When we say something is good, or something is bad, we are not referring to anything more than our feelings, if atheism is true, because if atheism is true, the "good" we feel is nothing more than some sort of evolutionary trait we've developed throughout our history. Saying that something is "good" becomes equal to saying "I" (and maybe society as a whole, also) "do like when" such and such "occurs.", and saying something is "not good" (evil, bad, immoral, etc) becomes the same as saying, "I do not like when" such and such "occurs." Well if right and wrong are truly this relative, then any and all chance of having a coherent system of ethics, really, just falls apart. This is precisely where the theist has it easy. When the theist grounds morality in God's nature, then if God exists, there becomes readily evident an objective, ontological reality to morality. When, on theism, someone says such and such is evil, the statement becomes meaningful because it at least has a standard by which it can be compared to.

Dawkins himself realizes this (I'd like to think the concept of objective morality necessitating something like God is as popularly well understood as I'd hope for it to be) when he says,

"There is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference. We are machines for propagating DNA. It is every living object's sole reason for being." - River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

Again, of course torture provides an immediate example of why we ought to think things matter relatively, but Kagan's point to defend (or at least explain) was why, after realizing what atheism necessarily entails, we ought to regard as important those feelings of the torture victim. Please don't misunderstand my point here. I am not saying that unless you believe in God, nothing matters, including torture. What I'm getting at is that if there is no God, then anyone that says we ought to do things in a particular way immediately must bear the burden of explaining why (ontologically) their new ethic is somehow an expression of how things ought to be. What is important here is not morality epistemologically, but ontologically. And this just does not seem to have an adequate explanation, on atheism at least. The most we've come up with is a sort of social contract theory, but it's clear that it isn't objective at all.

I think Craig paints the position well in the debate when he says something to the effect of, "Remove God from the picture and what you're left with is a sort of ape-like creature on a speck of dust in the universe, deceived by delusions of moral grandeur."

When we really think about it, unless we have some sort of real, objective standard that exists in some way, any truly meaningful system of ethics is, and will always be, out of man's reach. 

-adamryan

p.s. I have been studying this for a while and have come across Hilary Putnam's, Morality Without Ontology. Eagerly looking forward to reading it, as it may clear up some misconceptions I might have regarding this very issue. Just thought I'd throw that out there and make it known that I'm not set in my ways, per se, but just actively voicing what, to me, seems to make the most sense. For now, at least.

Wait a minute a well spoken well mannered theist, where have you been?  Mmmm, smells like fresh air.

-adamryan

I think the Christian position (at least in my philosophy studies) has been that the happiness we feel now is a glimpse of what is yet to come. This happiness (or "joy", as it is in the Bible) as we experience it now is really only the minimal level of what it can be. 

I'm not sure if it would be off topic for you, but I was wondering if you've heard of WLC's website, ReasonableFaith.org. On it, when you log on (free to register), the site has some great audio-visual content available (debates, lectures, etc), and I have a feeling that if you were to give it a quick browse, you might come across something that'd pique curiosity. Maybe in the podcasts? In any case, if you'd like me to give it a go and check them out for you, I'd be glad to do so (if you are interested, but not enough to register). Just give me the word. He's covered a lot on his site so far, and it's only been up for two years (I think).

-adamryan

Adam,

  I hope we can meet outside of this thread to discuss some of your beliefs and reasons for being a Christian, it would be however out of place here but I am always looking for reasonble theists brains to pick as the never-ending lineup of non-reasonable theists bore me to death.  It would be great if you could start a thread highlighting your beliefs and reasons for belief, but only if it's something your up to.   

@Adamryan:

Why are our goals hopes dreams and desires, 'illusions'?  Why wouldn't they matter to us?  Why is my desire to give my daughter and wife a happy life, 'trivial'?  Why is my desire to live in a society that holds the same values I do and is mutually supportive of a happy life, 'trivial'?  I always feel like theists are demeaning the human condition when they talk like this, like our life doesn't really matter because it is just a warm up act for the 'real' show.  But the thing is, Heaven is a speculation, an idea, a hypothesis.  Our current reality is, well, real.

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I'm not terribly interested in delving deeply into WLC, outside of watching his debates.  If I see a debate where he has an interesting idea I might reconsider.  His main draw, to me, is that his debate style isn't inflammatory...but honestly I'm not impressed with his reasoning.

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My secular morality comes down to wanting a world that matches and supports my value system.  I don't want a violent, chaotic dog-eat-dog world where only the powerful prosper because I would be likely to have a violent, chaotic life filled with suffering and end up eaten by a dog.  I want a peaceful, relatively stable world where the weak are given some protection and a chance to prosper on their own merit, that way myself and those I care about have a chance to live a good and happy life.  I also have a biological drive towards empathy that makes me feel bad when other humans suffer and that shapes my morality.

This is all about enlightened self interest.  It would not be in my interest to live a narcissistic life and it would certainly not be in my interest if everyone lived a narcissistic life.  Such a society could not survive past a state of tribal anarchy.

                       I'll call him.

                     edit]   I called;  he is alive and breathing;   --   stay tooned.

That's a relief. Not that I was worried; I myself don't have much time these days, so I figured he just got caught up with life.

Thanks for the updated, Jeffrick.