Victor Stenger Debate at Oregon State University

Transcript Victor Stenger Debate at Oregon State University

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, significant and well attended debates have been continuing in your work. We are going to talk a little bit about some debates you had recently. By the way, if you go to ReasonableFaith.org, some of these debates are available on audio and video. In the case that those are not there, there is also some descriptions of them and our newsletter. So just go to the newsletter and you can read some quick accounts of what took place at some of these debates.

Let’s start with Victor Stenger. This is not the first time that you’ve debated him. Contrast the two debates that you had.

Dr. Craig: Sure. Vic Stenger and I debated a number of years ago at the University of Hawaii where he was an Emeritus Professor of Physics. That was a debate on the existence of God and it went very well. I think the Christian side emerged clearly victorious, although Stenger, I understand, has in recent years done a little bit of revisionist history on the debate. But fortunately the tape is available and anyone can watch the DVD to form his own opinion. [1] But I was happy to have a rematch with him at Oregon State University for the Socratic Club at the university. [2] Our topic again was the existence of God. Stenger had published some more recent books since our previous debate so I took the time to read those, or the relevant portions of them.

Kevin Harris: God the Failed Hypothesis is one of them.

Dr. Craig: Yes, that’s right. He gives his reasons for thinking that God does not exist. So I was prepared to respond to those arguments as well as to offer some arguments myself for God’s existence.

Kevin Harris: He’s a physicist.

Dr. Craig: That’s right.

Kevin Harris: So I think the debates probably centered on some of those points on the Big Bang and creation of the universe and so on?

Dr. Craig: Well, I did bring up the cosmological argument based on the origin of the universe but it was surprising, frankly, how weak Stenger was in his own area of expertise in the physics. I think that since his retirement he perhaps hasn’t been kept abreast of developments so as a result he really had very little to say about the origin of the universe other than to appeal to the Hartle-Hawking model back from 1983 and didn’t seem to be apprised of more recent developments.

Kevin Harris: In this second debate you changed it up a little bit just to keep things fresh.

Dr. Craig: Right. Having been to India in February and had the experience of speaking on the existence of God there and noticing the very positive response I got to the ontological argument, I thought, well, let’s try the ontological argument out in a debate. I had never done this before because the argument is so abstract that students are apt either to not understand it or to think it is some kind of a trick. But I thought, well, why not. If it’s part of a cumulative case, let’s throw in the ontological argument. Then, because of time constraints, I had to cut somewhere else so I cut the fine-tuning argument and put in a short version of Leibniz’s argument from contingency – that God is the best explanation for why there is something rather than nothing. Then I went with my usual moral argument and the argument from the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. So it did have some new elements in it. Those new elements, I think, made it a great deal of fun. After the debate I ran into Stenger back at the hotel. He was in the bar having a drink. He said, to me, “You didn’t use the same arguments this time!” [laughter] He said, “You didn’t use the fine-tuning argument.” And I said, “No, I thought I’d mix it up a little bit and make it fresh.”

Kevin Harris: No wonder he was having a drink.

Dr. Craig: He was definitely off balance in the debate, I think. [laughter]

Kevin Harris: He basically argued one thing – if God existed, he would provide good objective evidence for his existence, which he hasn’t according to Stenger.

Dr. Craig: Right. Yes, it was an argument from the absence of evidence, but it was an attempt to push that argument a little bit farther. Not simply saying that there is no evidence that God exists but attempting to say if there were a God then there would be such evidence. In fact, in his book Stenger gives a list of eleven different observations which would make it probable that God exists if we were to have these sort of observations. So he thinks that if there were a God this is what we ought to expect to see, we don’t see that, therefore it is highly probable that God does not exist.

Kevin Harris: In other words, God needs to reveal himself in the way that I think he should. [3]

Dr. Craig: Yes, that’s the presumptuousness of the argument, Kevin. That’s one of the problems with it. It is very presumptuous in saying that “I know that if there were a God then this is what he ought to have done. He ought to have met my standards for his evidential presence.” That is a very presumptuous way of arguing. It might be that God has quite different motives or purposes in mind than you would. In fact, I did attack that first premise that if God existed then he would provide good objective evidence to everyone of his existence. I gave two reasons for thinking that may not be true. But in a sense that was just an aside. I just said that in passing. My main attack came upon the premise that he hasn’t provided good objective evidence because I think that he has. But I think, in fact, both premises in Stenger’s argument are dubious.

Kevin Harris: Any one of those eleven compelling?

Dr. Craig: As I looked at them, I thought at least seven out of the eleven are fulfilled and therefore God has done a very good job of meeting Stenger’s criteria. One was, for example, the universe would have come into existence without any sort of discernible natural cause of its origin. Well, that is certainly suggested by modern cosmology. Another was that the universe would exhibit a sort of order and complexity that natural science could not explain. And that is certainly true of the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe. So, with several other of the eleven conditions that he laid down, in one sense Stenger played right into my hands in that I was offering arguments and evidence for God’s existence that made that second premise just evidently false. That premise again being that there is no objective good evidence for God’s existence. So it served to focus the debate on the arguments for God’s existence that I was giving. Because if Stenger can’t answer those, then his second premise is automatically falsified.

Kevin Harris: I applaud Dr. Stenger. At least he tried to name some things. We often challenge our atheist friends, “OK, well, name me one thing that you think God should have done that he hasn’t to reveal himself.” Many are trying to list some things. One atheist friend of mine said, “You know, now that we have electron microscopes, if we were to look at each individual cell and it said on there, ‘Made by Yahweh.’ God could have easily just done that and we’d see that.” Kind of like Made in China?

Dr. Craig: I wonder if God would do that in English?

Kevin Harris: Or if he’d write it in Hebrew.

Dr. Craig: Yeah. [laughter]

Kevin Harris: That’s another thing. Well, when you see it then it would translate immediately. God could do that. But my question back to him was, if you were to see that, would that necessarily make you want to have a relationship with God or would it just force you to believe in his existence? Or how do you know that aliens from another planet didn’t put that on there to fool us? God has done so much better than stamping each atom with “Made in China.”

Dr. Craig: Stenger’s argument is not that God could have made his existence more evident. That is not his argument. I think his argument is better than that. His argument is that if there were a God then we ought to expect to see some sort of good objective evidence of his being. That doesn’t require that there couldn’t be greater evidence. That would allow you to have, in a sense, an ascending scale that maybe is endless. God could have always made his existence more obvious. But Stenger isn’t requiring that. He is simply saying there ought to be some good objective evidence that he exists if God did exist. Now, I don’t think that premise is clearly true. I think there are reasons to think that if God exists he might well have reasons for not doing that. But in any case, that aside, I think that God certainly has met Stenger’s criteria for his existence being reasonable; namely, that there is good objective evidence that God exists. Similarly, the argument that God could have provided greater evidence of his existence and therefore that somehow provides a reason to think he doesn’t exist – that again is not Stenger’s argument. But you will hear that said by certain atheists. So there is a whole mix of these kinds of arguments based on absence of evidence or degree of evidence. [4] It is important to see exactly which one our opponent is offering. Fortunately, Stenger makes his premises explicit. He states them very clearly in his book, and that makes it easier to respond.

Kevin Harris: After these debates, it would seem that some dialogue would be opened up between you and some of your opponents. Because, after all Bill, they are colleagues. Are there further exchanges to maybe get at truth? Because it can become a contest and if they continue to view you as a contestant, well then they may be resistant to any insights that you have. Instead, they might ought to try to incorporate your work with theirs.

Dr. Craig: Yes. I don’t see any movement in that direction, Kevin. I am not engaged in any sort of personal dialogue with these folks, other than just published responses and counter-responses. I don’t see any interest from the folks that I’ve debated in further dialogue on these subjects.

Kevin Harris: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

Dr. Craig: I suppose it is a bad thing for them spiritually, I think. Unfortunately. It is not a good sign.

Kevin Harris: Because you could offer them some spiritually things. You could offer them some insight.

Dr. Craig: Well, it would show that they are open at least to the existence of God.

Kevin Harris: Maybe get it on a personal level.

Dr. Craig: If these people’s arguments are really as bad as I think they are and as they seem to be in these debates, then their lack of openness is troubling because the arguments have been devastated for unbelief but doesn’t seem to make any difference.

Kevin Harris: I will suggest that in many ways it is not necessarily a bad thing because these issues are often best hashed out in public forums and public discourse where you really try to get at the crux. And the heat of it all tends to bring the main issues to the surface. So I would suggest that I would see there is a lot of value in what you do. Responding to journals, responding to articles, responding to one another in written form and in public forums.

Dr. Craig: Right, that is where the debate is carried on. Students who view the debates can see what are some of the arguments for theism, what are some of the arguments for atheism, and then how would proponents of these differing views respond to these arguments. They then can weigh the cogency of these responses.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, as we wrap up today, I do want you to mention your opportunity to speak to the professors at the Harvard Faculty Club. When I heard you were going to do that, I did think of Daniel in the Lion’s Den in one sense because it is Harvard. And in another sense I was totally confident that they definitely needed to hear from you.

Dr. Craig: These were two extraordinary evenings that we had in Boston. The first one was at the Harvard Faculty Club where I talked about God as a foundation for morality. There I did have a respondent. Her name is Rae Langton . She is an atheist or agnostic philosopher who was raised by Christian missionary parents in India, rather in a boarding school in India. She was sent away from home at five. She told us about how she was raised in this very authoritarian boarding school. Unfortunately, it seemed to just turn her against religious belief. So she thinks religion now is positively detrimental to the moral life because it just tells you to do things or God is going to get you. That is what religion does. It was sad to see the kind of emotional baggage that she still carries from her childhood about this. But we had a good exchange about whether or not God can be the ground of morality. She raised the Euthyphro argument as you might expect. But it was a good evening. Then the next evening was at MIT at the Faculty Club. There I was paired with Avi Loeb and Howard Smith – two cosmologists talking about the kalam cosmological argument and the origin of the universe. Smith is a Jewish believer – he is a theist. Loeb is an agnostic but open. So we had a wonderful dialogue. They were fully in agreement with the science that was presented. So it was a very charitable evening. The physicists in the audience, I think, were especially appreciative of the approach that I took.

Kevin Harris: On our next podcast, I want to explore some more debates that you had recently. I promise they are going to be interesting.

Dr. Craig: Sure. [5]