Why Atheists Lose Debates (3 examples provided)

Earlier, I wrote about Why Atheists Lose Debates.

I said atheists lose for lack of time. The theist’s explanation for fine-tuning (“God did it”) requires 3 seconds to say, while the atheist’s scientific explanation could take over an hour. In a debate, the clock is everything.

But that’s not all. I also said that atheists lose debates because they often present an inferior case. I clarified:

Maybe all the theist’s arguments are terrible, but to win the debate, the atheist has to show why his arguments are terrible, and (in some way) must give some good arguments for his own position. The atheist often does poorly in boththese respects. Atheists often prove themselves to be woefully incompetent in philosophy of religion, epistemology, naturalistic philosophy, and all topics of philosophy relevant to the debate… The atheist loses the chess match because he prepared for the debate by reading Wikipedia rather than Plantinga, Rowe, Alston, Oppy, and so on. A theist like Craig, on the other hand, has read all these thinkers many times over.

In my original post, I gave two generalized examples. Commenters asked for specific examples.

Okay, here are three specific examples of how atheists present an inferior case in debates with theists.

Example #1: Bart Ehrman on Miracles

In his debate with William Lane Craig, scholar Bart Ehrman presented something like Hume’s argument against miracles. Ehrman argued that an historian can’t show that a miracle (like the resurrection of Jesus) occurred in the past: Historians try to show what probably happened in the past, but by definition a miracle is the least likely kind of thing that could happen. If someone in history reported a miracle, it’s always more likely they were confused or lying than that the miracle occurred. Confusion and lying happens all the time, whereas miracles by definition are extremely unlikely.

Craig responded by explaining how, contra Hume and Ehrman, Bayes’ Theorem could be used to show that a miracle occurred in the past. (See page 14 and onwards in the transcript.)

Ehrman replied by saying:

…if you think I’m going tochange my mind because you have mathematical proof for the existence of God, I’m sorry, but it ain’t gonna happen!

Craig never offered a mathematical proof of God. Either Ehrman’s remark was a rhetorical diversion, or he really had no idea what Craig was talking about. That would also explain why Ehrman never tried to reply to Craig’s point about Bayes Theorem, or Craig’s explanation of “Bart’s Blunder” when it came to probability theory.

So what is going on here?

On this point, it looks like Ehrman just wasn’t prepared. He defended an argument from Hume but was completely shut down by Craig’s Bayesian analysis. But here’s the thing. Most of the papers published on Hume’s “Of Miracles” in the past decade have considered Hume’s argument in the context of Bayes’ Theorem! Craig knows this, and has read the relevant literature. Ehrman, apparently, has not.

What could Ehrman have done to better prepare? He could have contacted a philosopher of religion for help, or even an amateur like myself. The Bayesian reply to John Earman (on whom Craig was drawing), along with a proof of Hume’s argument concerning miracles in symbolic logic, can be found in pages 298-341 in J.H. Sobel’s Logic and Theism. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Ehrman has never heard of Jordan Howard Sobel.

Those who want to see what a short reply to (but not a refutation of) Craig’s Bayesian analysis could look like, see here.

So what have I shown? I haven’t shown that Ehrman lost the debate. I’m not doing full-length debate reviews in this post. Instead, I have provided an example of how atheists lose certain arguments – and with enough bad arguments, whole debates – because of their own ignorance of the subject material. Remember, it might be that Craig’s Bayesian analysis is wrong. But Ehrman didn’t show it to be wrong. He just stood by and looked ignorant. That’s why I say he presented the weaker case on this point.

Example #2: Christopher Hitchens

Ehrman was, at least, a scholar of New Testament history entering a debate on the resurrection of Jesus. Christopher Hitchens, however, has no expertise in New Testament studies or philosophy, and decided to debate someone who has a Ph.D. in each field and decades of debating experience: William Lane Craig.

Hitchens made lots of good points, even quoting Craig’s book Reasonable Faith, but let’s zoom in on one of his responses to Craig’s arguments from cosmology.

Hitchens admitted he is no physicist and that he offers only “lay objections.” But why? Why not call up some physicists and philosophers to find out what is really wrong with Craig’s arguments? Why not familiarize yourself a bit before throwing ignorant objections into the air in a major debate?

One of his objections was:

Who designed the Designer? Don’t you run the risk… of asking “Well, where does that come from? And where does that come from?” and running into an infinite regress?

But this is an elementary misunderstanding in philosophy of science. Why? Because science faces the exact same problem. It’s called the “why regress” because no matter what explanation is given of something, you can always still ask “Why?” (like Mindy from Animaniacs). The example I gave in my talk at UCSD went like this:

CHILD: Daddy, why do birds fly? DAD: To get food for the baby birds. CHILD: Why? DAD: So the baby birds don’t starve. CHILD: Why? DAD: Because they need energy to keep living. CHILD: Why? DAD: …I dunno, Daddy’s tired. Go play with your toys.

The truth is, even if a whole panel of biologists and chemists and physicists were assembled to answer this child’s questioning, there would still come a time when none of them could answer the “Why” question.

Scientists know this. In the 19th century they proposed “atoms” to explain certain observations, and they were right, even though they had no idea what could explain atoms themselves. Later, scientists posited quarks and electrons to explain certain observations, and they were right, even though they had no idea what could explain quarks and electrons themselves. This is how science works.

So if, like Hitchens, we were to require that a good explanation for something must itself be explained, this requirement would literally destroy science. And I don’t think that’s what Hitchens is trying to do.

I have found that it’s hard for atheists to give up this why-regress objection to theism, which is “sacred cow” argument atheists don’t want to stop using. Because giving the argument against the why-regress objection often doesn’t do the job, I’ve found that I need to beat atheists over the head by quoting authorities, which they often find more persuasive than argument. So here we go, four atheist philosophers on the why-regress:

First, atheist philosopher of science Peter Lipton:

The why-regress is a feature of the logic of explanation that many of us discovered as children, to our parents’ cost. I vividly recall the moment it dawned on me that, whatever my mother’s answer to my latest why-question, I could simply retort by asking ‘Why?’ of the answer itself, until my mother ran out of answers or patience… [But] explanations need not themselves be understood. A drought may explain a poor crop, even if we don’t understand why there was a drought; I understand why you didn’t come to the party if you explain you had a bad headache, even if I have no idea why you had a headache; the big bang explains the background radiation, even if the big bang is itself inexplicable, and so on… …the [why-regress] argument brings out the important facts that explanations can be chained, and that what explains need not itself be understood…

Or consider atheist philosopher of science Michael Friedman. Notice that he assumes our explanations may not themselves be explained, but that explanations succeed in increasing our understanding of the world:

[Consider] the old argument that science is incapable of explaining anything because the basic phenomena to which others are reduced are themselves neither explained nor understood. According to this argument, science merely transfers our puzzlement from one phenomenon to another… The answer, as I see it, is that.. we don’t simply replace one phenomenon with another. We replace one phenomenon with amore comprehensive phenomenon, and thereby… genuinely increase our understanding of the world.

And here’s atheist philosopher of religion Gregory Dawes:

Richard Dawkins, for instance, writes that to explain the machinery of life “by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing.” Why? Because it “leaves unexplained the origin of the designer.” …[Dawkins' idea is] that religious explanations are unacceptable because they leave unexplained the existence of their explanans (God). Dawkins apparently assumes that every successful explanation should also explain its own explanans. But this is an unreasonable demand. Many of our most successful explanations raise new puzzles and present us with new questions to be answered.

Finally, atheist philosopher of metaphysics John Post:

…there cannot be an infinite regress of explanations… Again the reasons are not practical, such as the finiteness of our faculties, but logic or conceptual, entailed by the very notions of explanations involved. Even for an infinite intellect, regresses of such explanations must end.

Again, it would be nice if Hitchens had decided to do a bit of research before debating William Lane Craig. Craig trounced Hitchens in response to bad arguments like the example I gave.

Example #3: Jim Corbett on the Moral Argument

In his debate with atheist Jim Corbett, apologist Sean McDowell offered the moral argument for God’s existence:

If God does not exist then objective moral values do not exist. Objective moral values do exist. Therefore, God exists.

Sean even took the time to explain that atheists can be moral, and they can know moral truths. What’s he said is that if God doesn’t exist, there is no objective foundation for moral truths.

Corbett replied with wholly irrelevant points:

Does Sean McDowell pretend to know God’s will better than the celebrated theologians of ages past who tortured unbelievers or held slaves? Some research shows that organic atheism is correlated with societal health.

…along with other points irrelevant to Sean’s actual argument. Jim then concluded:

Is there another explanation for morality? I’m sure there are many. And the truth is, I’m not an expert in religion or morality.

So at least Corbett admits he’s ignorant of the subject he agreed to debate. But I have a suggestion. Either (1) don’t debate a subject you know nothing about, or (2) prepare for that debate so you do know something about it.

For example, I would have advised Jim Corbett to read Erik Wielenberg’s work on why even non-natural moral realism is more plausible than theistic moral realism.

Conclusions

If you want more examples, see here, here, here, and here.

I do not expect every atheist debater to be fluent in Bayesian epistemology or to be an expert in meta-ethics. But I would like to see atheist debaters stop embarrassing themselves by being so argumentatively outgunned by their theistic opponents. Atheists: Do a bit of research and preparation before entering a debate. Study the relevant arguments. Ask for advice from people who know more about the subjects of debate than you do.

That’s all I ask.