Debate Highlights from Liverpool

KEVIN HARRIS: Hey, it’s Kevin Harris! Welcome to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. Dr. Craig and I are about to go back in the studio and record some new podcast material. I keep an eye on social media, look on YouTube, and see what kind of material I can find in preparation for these podcasts. I ran into a video of “Dr. Craig's Highlights: A debate in Liverpool with Dr. Mike Begon.” This particular YouTuber said these are the most interesting parts of this debate. These highlights, by the way, mostly come from the Q&A portion of the debate that evening. Today we're going to look at one particular YouTuber’s take on what were the most interesting parts of the debate in Liverpool with Dr. Mike Begon. We'll see if you agree.

QUESTION: You say that beliefs held without evidence are irrational. Would that not make your own belief that God does not exist irrational, given that you have no evidence for it?

DR. BEGON: Well, I do not believe . . . I do not hold the belief that God does not exist.  That is an accusation that is often made against atheists. I believe that God is a delusion. I am here to defend the proposition, or to propose the proposition, that God is a delusion. A delusion, to me, is a belief held when there is no evidence to support that. I am not making the positive statement that God does not exist, and you should really not accuse me of saying that. To say that God is a delusion is very different from saying that God does not exist. As a scientist, I wouldn’t make such a statement.

DR. CRAIG: Those statements are only different if you adopt this non-standard definition of a delusion that he’s offered us tonight. But according to the dictionary a delusion is a false belief or opinion. So if the statement “God exists” is a delusion, that means that that is false. And if one asserts that that is false then the questioner is quite right, this is an assertion to know something, it’s a claim to knowledge. As opposed to agnosticism which says, “God may or may not exist.” But if you claim that God does not exist you’re making a knowledge claim and that therefore requires warrant, particularly on evidentialism as she rightly saw. The evidentialist would need to provide some sort of argument. And traditionally atheists have tried to do this – the evil and suffering in the world, can God make a stone heavier than he can lift? You know all the arguments. But none of these, I think, are successful in supporting atheism. So I don’t think there are good grounds for thinking that the evidentialist atheist can bear his share of the burden of proof.

MODERATOR: Okay, thank you very much. Next question for Professor Craig please.

QUESTION: Okay, I’m not very interested in whether God created the universe or not. I think that’s a kind of boring claim about God. I’m much more interested in the kind of socially involved manipulator kind of God, and you made some extraordinary claims which seems to me require extraordinary evidence particularly about whether Jesus died and was then resurrected again. You’ve provided very ordinary evidence that that may be true on a historical basis, that morality is God-given in some way, whereas in fact there are very plausible arguments about the biological basis of morality. And I just think that you didn’t really provide enough serious evidence in those kind of more interesting areas about what God may or may not be up to.

DR. CRAIG: Interests are person-relative. I, myself, am terribly interested in contemporary cosmology both with respect to the origin of the universe and the fine-tuning of the universe for life. I am captivated by the universe and its beauty, its wonder, its origin, its end. So I find those very interesting whether you do or not. But with respect to the God involved in human history, this claim, this slogan, “extraordinary events require extraordinary evidence” – that sounds so right, doesn’t it? It sounds so common-sensical. But, in fact, it’s demonstrably false. Probability theorists from the time of Condorcet to John Stuart Mill worked on the problem of what kind of evidence would it take to establish a highly improbable event. And what they found was that you can’t just consider the probability of that event relative to our sort of general background knowledge of the world so as to say an extraordinary event requires extraordinary evidence. You also have to consider what is the probability that the hypothesis in question is false, given the evidence that we have? And if that probability is sufficiently low, if given the evidence that we have the probability is low that the hypothesis is false, that can balance out any intrinsic improbability in the event being very extraordinary or highly unusual with respect to our general background evidence. So this claim “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” is actually a false assertion. I would say that in the case of the empty tomb, the origin of the Christian faith, the appearances of Jesus – these are not, in any case, extraordinary events. Those are non-miraculous events that can be established by ordinary secular historians. What would be miraculous would be when you come to the step: What’s the best explanation of those? That’s where the extraordinary part would come in and, as I say, I don’t think you need extraordinary evidence for that.

MODERATOR: Professor Begon?

DR. BEGON: Well, it seems to me I’d be surprised if the events at the heart of the Christian religion are not considered by many Christians to be extraordinary – that Jesus was resurrected. So it seems to me that the burden of proof is to provide evidence.  Whether it’s extraordinary evidence is, again, a matter of opinion, I guess. But these are certainly, I can’t understand why anybody would suggest that these are not extraordinary events and that they are extraordinary claims that these events were true. And to suggest that there is evidence for them, it seems to me, is extraordinarily arrogant really.

MODERATOR: Next question please, to Professor Begon.

QUESTION: I used to work as a psychiatric nurse and the definition we worked with, from my memory, for people who suffered with delusions was ‘a firm, false fixed belief that is neither open to reason nor experience’ and that was the kind of all-encompassing thing. When we tried to therapeutically engage with people you worked on the assumption that it was a delusion and that therefore was a false belief and the background of it was false. So in my question I’m assuming that you are believing that there isn’t a God, just as the base of the question. And it would seem that when people deny the existence of God they place at the beginning of time, or wherever else in the universe, the notion of chance as a totalising explanationary concept to try and explain the universe and meaning and existence. That being so, it would seem that everything then, logically and rationally, is based upon chance – from the firing of the neurons in my brain to my emotional responses to my children to the scientific inquiry all the way down the line, right down the blocks. If that’s true, if the notion of chance is true and taken as axiomatic, then it doesn’t explain the world as we experience it.

DR. BEGON: Well, you’re accusing me of something I haven’t said. What you seem to have said is that if you didn’t believe in God then you would have to believe in chance. And you’re extending that to say since I do not believe in God in the sense that I see no evidence for God, I must therefore believe that chance is at the center of everything that we see. I don’t have any such firm belief. It would be equally deluded to believe in chance, a name given to something I don’t understand, as to believe in God, a name given to something I don’t understand. I take a much more practical view. I deal in the here and now. I deal with what’s going to happen tomorrow. I deal with trying to do good today, as good as I can, and so on. And so you’re accusing me of, if you were in my position, you would feel that we’re ruled by chance. I don’t particularly feel like that. It’s an accusation. I never said it. I don’t believe it.

MODERATOR: Professor Craig?

DR. CRAIG: I really appreciated what you said about the definition of a delusion in psychiatry: a firm, fixed, false belief that is not open to reason or evidence. And what’s striking to me is that that sounds like a description of atheism many times – a firm, fixed, false belief that is not open to evidence or reason. Instead, what we get are slogans, easy dismissals of theistic arguments. I think we need to recognise that not just theists, but atheists can be victims of delusions as well. So thank you for that interesting contribution.

MODERATOR: Next question for Professor Craig, please.

QUESTION: I’d like to address it to the last point that you made about discovering God through reading the New Testament. And I was wondering whether you would have considered me delusional if I’d spent fifteen years studying the Lord of the Rings and arrived at the conclusion that Aragorn was a real person and that he was here and he helped me find my car keys when I was confused, that Sauron was the creator of the universe and that me and Aragorn had to go and get swords and go and take him down. Would you try and have me sectioned?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Yes, I would regard that as delusional and I, of course, don’t think that that’s at all analogous to belief in God or Jesus of Nazareth.

QUESTION: You’ve repeatedly asked tonight for evidence of God. That’s a common trait amongst people, skeptics like yourself. In all I’ve heard over the years I’ve still not heard a skeptic put forward what they would accept as valid criteria for the evidence of God. So what are the criteria you set forth for people like me [and] Professor Craig to give to you as valid evidence of God?

DR. BEGON: Well it’s . . . I could respond flippantly to say it’s not for me to design your experiments for you really. You write your own grant applications. I tried as best I can not to rely on anybody else, as you’ve probably gathered, in framing what I say here, but it seems to me that Dawkins has something to say about this. If I and others like me have been asking for evidence all this time, if there were evidence do you not think that it would have been presented before us? If it were possible, for example, to prove that prayer improved one’s chances of surviving an illness do you not think that those who believe in the power of prayer would have brought forward evidence in favor of that? They have tried and they have failed. Now I can’t say that I can write a research agenda for you and tell you . . . I can’t pretend that I know exactly what I want to see before I accept evidence of God. In fact, I’m open-minded. I’ll accept anything. I’m not restricting you. Bring forward anything you like that satisfies the normal rules of evidence and I’ll believe you.

DR. CRAIG: [addressing the questioner] You still haven’t heard the answer, have you? It’s astonishing; it’s just astonishing. You ask what are the standards of evidence would it take to prove to you that God exists, and no answer is forthcoming. Why? Because atheism is a firm, fixed belief that is not open to reason or evidence, just like this fellow who says it’s like believing in Lord of the Rings. You wonder what would it take to convince somebody who’s that closed-minded? I submit to you that believers in God are far more open-minded to follow the evidence where it leads, and I think your question just illustrates it so beautifully.

QUESTION: So, four out of five of your reasons for the existence of God could equally apply to any god, or indeed the flying spaghetti monster. I’d like to ask what gives you the right to define God?

DR. CRAIG: What would I provide to define God? Was that the question?

QUESTION: Why do you define God according to some Judeo-Christian mythology?

DR. CRAIG: Well, you’re quite right that my opening three reasons based on the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning, and the existence of objective moral values would be common to any of the great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Islam, Christianity. So, yes, that’s right, these are common to all monotheisms. They would be inconsistent, however, with religions like Taoism, Advaita Vedanta Hinduism, Buddhism, which lack a personal creator and designer of the universe, an objective lawgiver for moral values, so it would narrow down the field not only eliminating secularism but also non-theistic religions to the world’s great monotheisms. And then my fourth reason, based on the evidence for Jesus, his personal claims and his resurrection from the dead, would narrow the field of monotheisms down to Christian monotheism. So mine is a cumulative case that will issue in the conclusion that the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.

MODERATOR: Professor Begon?

DR. BEGON: I have nothing to say on that really.[1]