That’s not what he said at all. This is what he said @Drich. Look at the quote below.
As far as you making a CLAIM that Elon Musk believes in God, that is false. Musk believes that humankind should exist on more than one planet, and that we should start soon.
Elon Musk isn’t a Christian. He just really wants to go into space.
Blockquote Musk replied, “I don’t really worship anything , but I do devote myself to the advancement of humanity by using technology.”
Imagine that. Something we agree on.
But the rest of us here do not believe in God and again that’s you making a claim. Provide evidence. We don’t want to hear your words. We want you to show us evidence. Not paragraph upon paragraph on what and why you’re a Christian and your personal experience with a figure we think is fictional until PROVEN otherwise.
I’ve watched several debates on YouTube between Craig and various atheists, and Craig sometimes chews them up, which is quite surprising since he never changes his debate style or content. That makes me wonder why some of his opponents don’t seem to have watched his earlier debates to learn how to counter his tactics.
Being atheist endows the non believer with no cachet. We’re just ordinary people. Some of us are very ordinary. That means we may be smart or not, educated or not. Experienced in debating or not. That say a Jesuit sophist or any anyone who has been taught Biblical hermeneutics and exegesis will tear us up
Winning a debate need not necessarily have anything to do with truth. Winning a debate shows how good you are at debating.
As far as I can gather, Craig is a presuppositional apologist. That means he stacks the deck by simply beginning from the position which assumes the existence of god as a given. I do not, and tend to begin such a discussion by demanding the believer provide empirical evidence for the existence of his god. I am obliged to do this because I am neither as smart nor intellectually nimble as say Chris Hitchens or Stephen Fry.
Below is a link to one of the most famous debates ( on radio, 1948) between a believer and an atheist. The atheist is Bertrand Russell, the believer is Frederik Copleston SJ (Jesuit)
The clip below is abridged (18 minutes) but will give you an idea
The clip below is an analysis of the debate. It goes for over 2 hours, and I haven’t seen it yet.
Of course the Great Radio Debate of 1948 only proves why the later Goon Show programs (Milligan, Sellers and Secombe) were so popular with British radio audiences.
WLC is famous for insisting on pre-conditions and rules for any debate before he agreed to engage in them. There’s one recorded debate where in his final segment Lane expresses disappointment for an unrepentant Hitchens for not sticking to the formal rules he had prescribed.He went on impling he had already won the debate and therefore had no real need to answer the points Hitchens raised (for which he had not had time to research for a devastating reply).
I reject that philosophy can be used to support theism simply because the default theist position starts with the premise that a god exists, a cirucmstance which they are never able to establish without resorting to complex conditional definitions and specious allowances. Its no co-incidence that the Jesuits excel in this sort of debate as they have had over 500 years honing the semantics and apologetic logic .
The hardest thing to bear with WLC is his studied supercilious, condescending, manner and pompous voice. He never talks with people he always talks down.
Secombe was always funnier.
What I said was that as far as I can tell, Craig is a presuppositional apologist. Although not the only apologist stance, it’s certainly a common one. Especially among the ignorant, the intellectually lazy and the stupid. (imo)
Yeah.
Secombe had great wit. When he was knighted he said “I’ve been made a pillock of the establishment” and referred to himself as “Sir Cumference”
Sorry Boomer, I had not meant to refer to anything you said or implied, it was just my general ranting statement about theists employing philosophy to prove their god.
As is well known, WLC has publicly declared he always will run with the claims he interprets from the Bible despite any verifiable evidence to the contrary at all. His passion is the art of debate and not truth in itself.
WLC is a professional debater. In competition a debate is scored on points made, arguments made, that are not responded to by the opposing team, in addition to the better arguments, citations, etc. of the arguments that are being addressed. If you listen to WLC debates, he is consistantly asserting all the points he has made that have not been addressed by the other side.
In an officially scored debate, he does win these points when they are not addressed or rebutted. Unfortunately for the people he opts to go up against, they do not know how to “flow.” They tend to address WLCs main idea and leave all the little bullshit points for the birds. This is not how a debate is won.
Listen to WLC and you will hear a hundred little side points that he sneaks in during the contention of his main point. WLC does not win debates on any sort of logic, reasoning, or rationality. He wins on a shotgun approach to splattering information all over the fucking place and then when the other side does not address his nuanced version of essoteric bullshit, he claims the points have gone un addressed and he wins the debate.
He is not winning a debate by actually producing quality reasoning. Instead he is relying on basic debate tactics that anyone who has ever had a class in debate can see straight through. Stanford Debate
Very true, I once saw him in a debate with the Hitch trying to insist atheism was a belief that required faith. The man’s an unscrupulous snake oil salesman.
OP: “Who the fuck says we need a god/gods in our lives to have any meaning or purpose in the only life we’re going to get?”
Wow, that leaves all animals and most people having entirely no meaning to their lives.
Although I don’t like when people reduce other people to their job titles, we get purpose from how we choose to live our lives and who we choose to live it with. We define our own purpose and meaning. Parents mean a lot to their children even if they don’t mean anything to anyone else. It’s not different from the way an artist gives meaning to a painting or a writer to a book. By expressing yourself and creating your own identity you get to define who you are and what you want to do with your life.
Please excuse the slave-minded people who aren’t taking responsibility for the lives they create. They live for a fictional character. They find purpose in what that fictional character allegedly told them to do. And this fictional character promised to give them eternal life among the stars and has yet to fulfill this promise and the longer he waits the more people there are to be disappointed. So isn’t THAT meaningless?
I understand what you’re saying here, but if I was going to debate Craig (not that I ever will…) I would certainly listen to all of his published debates (there’s lots of them on YouTube) and learn his tactics and main points in advance of the debate. He never seems to vary his points, so I could come up with counters to them before debating him. It seems to me that many of the people I’ve seen debate him haven’t done adequate preparation and Craig consequently catches them off guard.
Yes, debating takes skills that most of us don’t have, but we shouldn’t handicap ourselves either by not listening to Craig’s published debates.
BTW @Sheldon, “Lane” is his middle name, so it’s correct to refer to him as “Craig” rather than “Lane Craig”.
Yep, and there’s even a term for this tactic: the Gish Gallop. My original point was not whether Craig’s points or arguments are correct (they’re not), but that people debating him should do their homework by listening to all of his published debates so they can get some idea of his tactics and main points and develop a strategy for countering them since all of his debates follow exactly the same pattern.
Cool! Gish Gallop! I got a new word. I always referenced it as “The Shotgun approach to debate.” I was on a speech team but did not do debate. I had a lot of the same training but used little of it in persuasion, speech to entertain, and extemporaneous. Love the new word. I will use it often.
Eugenie (*sigh) used the term to describe the debating method of Young-Earth creationist and one-time vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research (a huge tautological title) Duane Gish, a legitimate biochemist and master of delivering an avalanche of weak or unsubstantiated arguments, like WLC to confound his debating opponents. “Spreading” is the formal expression for that tactic.
Apparently he is in heaven right now most likely abusing me from above because finally he has no means or right to reply.
The saddest part is that you have to sacrifice the first to obtain the second; the one for sure reality for the promise. Your one shot (lucky life lottery winner)…
for sure reality for the promise. Your one shot (lucky life lottery winner)…