Craig Debate Wrap

The Carrier-Craig resurrection debate went down the night before last. I'm finally home and rested. Here's just a quick report on what went down.

W.L. Craig Debate

All the details have been settled at last: I will debate William Lane Craig on the Resurrection of Jesus at the Mary Linn Performing Arts Center on the campus of Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri the night of Wednesday March 18 (2009) at 7pm (on the corner of College Ave. and College Park Dr).

The event is being sponsored by the campus Philosophy Club. Admission will be free, but it's first-come-first-serve, and I'm told the venue might fill, so there's no guarantee everyone will get in--but if you're planning to come from out of town, you might be able to get a reservation (see below). It will be recorded, and there may be a video and transcript released eventually (certainly one or the other, if not both), but possibly not for a long while.

I will give a brief talk on a variety of subjects followed by an open Q & A at 10:30am the day of the debate in (I believe) Fine Arts 200 on campus. Craig will also be lecturing somewhere on campus that day, too, for an ethics class, but that might only be for students of that class (I don't know the details).

Proposed Format: It will be a faculty-moderated formal debate. The format will likely be as follows (running about two to three hours altogether):

Opening Statements: Craig 20 minutes,
then Carrier 20 minutes.

Rebuttals: Craig 12 minutes,
then Carrier 12 minutes.

Counter-Rebuttals: Craig 8 minutes,
then Carrier 8 minutes.

Closing Statements: Craig 5 minutes,
then Carrier 5 minutes.

Audience Q&A: moderated, 45 minutes or so.

We'll both be selling and signing our books after the event. I will likely have copies of The Empty Tomb to sell as well as Sense and Goodness without God, and if all works out, I might also have copies to sell of my new book, Not the Impossible Faith (which I briefly mentioned before, but I'll blog all about that book in a few weeks, once I've finalized everything for it). All three books pertain to the debate in one way or another.

The topic of the debate will be "Did Jesus Rise From The Dead?" even though I originally insisted we first debate "Are the Gospels Historically Reliable?" for the simple reason that you can't honestly debate the former until you've debated (and in fact settled) the latter. Craig simply refused to debate that topic, claiming it was too big to cover in an oral debate, which I found odd since it's a necessary component of the resurrection debate, and if a necessary component of a resurrection debate is too big to debate, the resurrection itself must be too big to debate. So for a while we considered instead debating the Moral Argument for God, since we were at an impasse otherwise. But we eventually negotiated a compromise: I would concede to debate the resurrection if I can go on record with (and criticize) his reasons for refusing to debate the reliability of the Gospels.

I'll quote his exact last words on the matter:

I propose the straightforward "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?" The reason I prefer this topic to the historical reliability of the Gospels is because (i) a case for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection does not depend on the Gospels' being generally reliable, and (ii) being narrower in scope, the topic is more manageable in an hour and a half's debate.

I find both (i) and (ii) to be patently false, in fact outright illogical. But if he wants to be illogical, that works for me. I also find curious his use of the word "prefer" for what was in fact a refusal. Make of that what you will.

As to (ii), defending the resurrection requires establishing a number of premises, including the reliability of the Gospel accounts, and the viability of miraculous explanations of ordinary evidence, and the authenticity, meaning, and reliability of passages in the epistles, and so on, and is therefore larger in scope, not narrower. The historical reliability of the Gospels focuses solely on the Gospels and the evidence within them (and from the field of history) as to whether we can trust what they say, which is necessarily narrower in scope than any argument that requires first establishing that we can trust what they say. As to (i), if the Gospels are not generally reliable, then everything they say is under a pall of suspicion, which entails we can't trust what they say about their most contentious claims, and the resurrection is exactly such, therefore it is not logically possible to make "a case for the historicity of Jesus' resurrection" without "the Gospels' being generally reliable" (unless he intends to make that case without ever appealing to the Gospels, which is unlikely).

I say this here as I might not bother making these points in the debate itself, except by simply pointing out why we can't trust what the Gospels say. I've also been asked about this quite a lot already, as apparently Craig was leaking details of our negotiations, so I might as well say here what I've already said to many people in email.

Out-of-Towners: The organizer Landon Hedrick wants to know who is coming from out of town or even out of state to see the debate, and is willing to reserve a limited number of seats for those of you who do. To get those reserved seats, you need to email him and ask, telling him how many and who you are and where you are coming from. I'm impressed to hear he already has people coming from as far away as Nebraska and Florida. He can be reached at landonhedrick67@yahoo.com.

Craig the Annoyed

Many fans have been telling me for weeks about William Lane Craig's childish rant against me on his radio show Dr. Craig's Current Events Audio Blog. Now that my dissertation has been accepted for defense (I'll blog on that in a week or two), I finally found time to listen to it. It is kind of sad. But it's the sort of petty and bigoted belittling I hear many Christians launch against whoever or whatever annoys them. So I'm not surprised.

Debate Videos

Not only is my TV appearance on PAX now available on DVD (or so I'm told), but so are the two grandest debates I've participated in. Of the latter, the first, "Licona vs. Carrier: On the Resurrection of Jesus Christ," which took place before an audience of half a thousand at UCLA, has long been available but went out of stock for quite a while. It is now back in stock and will probably remain so. It can now be purchased via CreateSpace (but profits still go to the Secular Web and, indirectly, to me). It's probably the best debate on the resurrection you will ever see. Licona holds up his end as well as anyone in the Christian apologetics community, and I present more material than you're likely to hear in any other debate. But like all serious debates it is long and dry.

Even longer and duller is "Does God Not Exist?" which was a team debate, three-to-four hours long, before an audience of a thousand (mostly Muslims) in Dearborn, Michigan, with Dan Barker and myself on the affirmative, and Muslim scholar Hassanain Rajabali and ambiguous cosmological creationist Michael Corey on the (double) negative. I say this is "dull" only because for most people it is. There isn't really any way to make this debate stuff exciting and serious at the same time. But if you can endure it, it is a pretty good debate, though there were aspects of it that pissed me off, as you will learn from my post-debate commentary: "The Big Debate: Comments on the Barker-Carrier vs. Corey-Rajabali Team Debate" (2004). Well, now you can see the entire debate yourself. A fairly decent DVD version is available for purchase through informal channels, while a very poor quality version is available for free on YouTube: broken up as Part I and Part II.

Most of you already know I appear in the movie The God Who Wasn't There, the DVD of which has an extended portion of my original interview in the special features. But not many of you know I debated William Lane Craig on national television. This was on Lee Strobel's now-defunct show Faith Under Fire, which used to air on the PAX network. I debated Craig by satellite feed for ten minutes or so. I taped two or three other episodes for this show, debating other guests on other topics, but those never aired.

Many have asked me where they can get a copy of my TV debate with Craig. Well, I now have an answer: you can't. It's (sort of) available on DVD as part of a Christian "teach-by-tape" curriculum (so to speak). Bits of my episode appear on Faith Under Fire 1: Faith & Jesus. It's hardly worth watching, since almost nothing of any real significance can be said in ten minutes even in the original broadcast, but worse than that, this DVD version cuts more than half the aired debate away, shows segments out of order, and concludes with a newly added segment in which Strobel lists a bunch of unrebutted arguments in favor of the resurrection not raised by Craig. This is the only occasion Craig has ever interacted with me in public (we've briefly corresponded in private on several occasions), so it's a shame the original video has essentially been destroyed.