Originally Posted by gwarlroge
I was there and agree with brady. I wish Hitchens had prepared some arguments--the problem of evil would have been especially good. (One Biola student asked about it in the Q & A session, and I fear that Dr. Craig's response lost some of the audience with its length.) I also wish Hitchens had pressed the "who designed the designer?" question more--he brought it up once, but that was enough to get some people's heads nodding. It's a fairly popular argument, so I think it needs to be discussed more. (Not that I think it can't be answered--it's just that no one knows the theist rebuttal.)

Overall, though, the debate was very fun. Craig won, but Hitchens was polite and interesting. Both of them seemed to be friendly toward each other, which was nice to see.

Originally Posted by setemstraight
Is this all you people do in here? Give props to your own guy, no matter how they do?

The fact of the matter is, all Hitch needed to do was mention the 'argument from incredulity' to Craig and the debate is over. Without even watching it, I can assure you that this in fact occurred.

This blogger has Hitch winning the debate:

http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/dtennapel/2009/04/08/does-god-exist-hitchens-vs-craig/#more-97678

Why does this single point win the debate? Because a debate win is not about crowd pleasing. If it were, it would be impossible to win a debate against a theist, because they always have the numbers. It wins because Craig's entire platform is built on incredulity. Craig is incredulous to the fact that Cosmological, Teleological, Transcendental, Ontological, Non-universally-communicable personal knowledge of the 'divine' et al arguments have been thoroughly debunked. Surely, as the 'world's top debater/apologist' for christianity, he must be aware of this. So we are left with 2 choices. Either he is 1) incredulous to the debunking or 2) his entire presentation is rhetorized for the herd animal masses of the audience. I say he is aware of the debunking and so I go with option 2 ( that is giving Craig's intelligence maximum credit).

Craig is undoubtedly aware of these debunkings as he seems to attempt to come up with new arguments all the time. These are again not NOVEL as they are just permutations of the aforementioned. Take the Kalam argument for example (permuted cosmological). I had not heard of this until I came to this website, but it is also easily debunked. Craig seems to be in favor of a complex god hypothesis, perhaps even 'infintitely' complex. Where does this complexity come from? Is the interaction between the simple and the complex a one way street where complexity is non-conservative? If you personify in a god an infinity, you have paradoxically constrained the infinite and this same premise at the heart of the Kalam argument (you cannot have a backward in time growing infinity; likewise you cannot have an ever growing infinitely complex god). The Kalam argument is self-refuting for this reason. And yes, I do recognize my own argument as a permutation of the "who made god" refutation. A permutated original argument tends to give rise to permutated refutations. It just proves the refutation as valid for it can change along with the original argument change to continue refuting it.

So theists really have to answer the question of why god could have created 'himself' and the universe, but the universe could not have created itself (the universe does contain 'sentience' in humans if nothing else). I think you will find the god hypothesis as horribly out of place. If your solution is to expand or change the definition of god to make it work, you end up treading dangerously close to pantheism (gasp!).

Good luck theists. You are going to need it.

Originally Posted by icepick


Have you actually seen the debate? I don't get what's wrong with theists saying they feel in their best estimation that Craig won. It's even easier to say that when the opponent is Hitchens. I'm sorry, maybe he's an idol to you, but intellectually he's a bum. I haven't heard one good argument from him. Ever. If you disagree give me one. Give me one good argument Christopher Hitchens has made at any point in the past. I've seen him debate theists like Frank Turek and Dinesh D'Souza and I can say with confidence that the guy is intellectually vacuous with respect to these issues.

Also, I don't understand the argument you're making against the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Are you basically asking how can God be so complex, timeless, etc? That's irrelevant to the argument. To conclude that there was a timeless, spaceless, immaterial, personal agent that freely chose to create the universe in no way attaches a burden of proof for me to explain further this entity. I don't have to have a deeper explanation of that entity in order to say that this entity is the best explanation for the cause of the universe.