Hitch vs Craig

[rayne]

Originally Posted by Goldenmane

What goes hand-in-glove with that shite, and makes it (and Craig, by extension) even worse, is Craig's is Craig's stated position on the genocide of the Canaanites, which simply put goes like this:

1) Absolutely, it was moral, because God ordered it, and God's will is by definition what dictates right and wrong;

2) The only really difficult thing to stomach is the really hard time the Israelite soldiers would have had in carrying out the order to slaughter babies. That must have been difficult for them. But it was still absolutely the right thing to do. Because God.

3) I'm a raging fucking sociopath who makes all other Christians look bad by association

So Divine Command Theory, god says it was cool therefore it's moral so why is he attempting to say rape is immoral by christian standards (and by extension atheist have no reason to think of rape as immoral?)

Wait wait..gish gallop?

[Goldenmane]

Originally Posted by rayne

So Divine Command Theory, god says it was cool therefore it's moral so why is he attempting to say rape is immoral by christian standards (and by extension atheist have no reason to think of rape as immoral?)

Wait wait..gish gallop?

Yep.

One of the keys to the Gish Gallop is to throw in things that sound like something the audience might agree with. Most people, for example, at least in a Western society and with a little liberal education, would agree that rape is wrong. There are bloody good reasons for holding this position, but there are also (unfortunately) ill-considered reasons for holding it, not least of all being the question of what 'wrong' means and how they reach this conclusion.

Anyway, you chuck in 'rape', knowing that most of your audience will instantly think 'wrong', because they're not arseholes, and then you say that Christianity says it's wrong (although I'm not sure I remember that ever being addressed in the Biblical stuff) and say that non-Christians - or rather, atheists - are all fucking fine with rape. And then you spout some other bullshit before your opponent has the chance to respond to such a fucking despicable accusation*.

Used to be eating of babies. Seriously. many people seem to think that's just a joke, or an exaggeration, but it really isn't. We used to actually and seriously be accused of rampant baby-consumption, on a not-uncommon basis.

But then, we also used to almost always be accused of actually worshiping Satan, too. That's still around, occasionally, but it's comparitively rare.

*To add: you phrase it in such a way as to invoke plausible deniability. Oh no, you weren't saying that your opponent thinks rape is ok. That's obviously wrong, and your opponent is obviously upset. What you were saying is that your opponent isn't really an atheist, because they aren't raping a fucking baby right here on stage. They're just being a little rebellious.

That, for those interested, is the politics of power and privilege. And it's fucking vile.

[Sieveboy]

Originally Posted by Goldenmane

Yep.

One of the keys to the Gish Gallop is to throw in things that sound like something the audience might agree with. Most people, for example, at least in a Western society and with a little liberal education, would agree that rape is wrong. There are bloody good reasons for holding this position, but there are also (unfortunately) ill-considered reasons for holding it, not least of all being the question of what 'wrong' means and how they reach this conclusion.

Anyway, you chuck in 'rape', knowing that most of your audience will instantly think 'wrong', because they're not arseholes, and then you say that Christianity says it's wrong (although I'm not sure I remember that ever being addressed in the Biblical stuff) and say that non-Christians - or rather, atheists - are all fucking fine with rape. And then you spout some other bullshit before your opponent has the chance to respond to such a fucking despicable accusation*.

Used to be eating of babies. Seriously. many people seem to think that's just a joke, or an exaggeration, but it really isn't. We used to actually and seriously be accused of rampant baby-consumption, on a not-uncommon basis.

But then, we also used to almost always be accused of actually worshiping Satan, too. That's still around, occasionally, but it's comparitively rare.

*To add: you phrase it in such a way as to invoke plausible deniability. Oh no, you weren't saying that your opponent thinks rape is ok. That's obviously wrong, and your opponent is obviously upset. What you were saying is that your opponent isn't really an atheist, because they aren't raping a fucking baby right here on stage. They're just being a little rebellious.

That, for those interested, is the politics of power and privilege. And it's fucking vile.

The bible covers rape in Leviticus, with the same degree of empathy and effective justice as it deals with working on the Sabbath.

I am not trying to be facetious, WLC is the one of worst kinds of intellect I can conceive of, he bends and twists language and meaning to justify his beliefs and belittle us, yet doesn't have the intellectual honesty to engage us in the written form. What's more is this intellectual leadership of his (and I mean that in a very loose sense) is used by such leaders to justify atrocities and followers to act on these thoughts.

As xeno noted a fair number of the minds here can destroy him in writing. What a Dick he is.

[Goldenmane]

Originally Posted by Sieveboy

The bible covers rape in Leviticus, with the same degree of empathy and effective justice as it deals with working on the Sabbath.

I am not trying to be facetious, WLC is the one of worst kinds of intellect I can conceive of, he bends and twists language and meaning to justify his beliefs and belittle us, yet doesn't have the intellectual honesty to engage us in the written form. What's more is this intellectual leadership of his (and I mean that in a very loose sense) is used by such leaders to justify atrocities and followers to act on these thoughts.

As xeno noted a fair number of the minds here can destroy him in writing. What a Dick he is.

Oh, yeah, I remember what the Bible says about rape now. It's wrong, because it's damaging goods you haven't paid for yet. But that can be rectified. You break it, you bought it.

Aside from that, yeah. Craig is someone possessed of a fairly decent intellect, but no intellectual honesty. He's no genius, but he's not actually stupid, as I've seen some people describe him.

He is cunning, though.

[andrew84]

I find Craig to be a kind of mini celebrity. He's got his website with Q&A, podcasts, and his regularly debates. He's a lot more evangelical than his fellow theists.

As for the debate? Well, Hitchens wasn't really prepared. Also, he was a journalist (and a very good one!) not a philosopher.

Originally Posted by Sieveboy

Just an FYI, WLC arguements may be great when vocalised (and that is a subject i can discuss later), but they are for him a form of rationalisation for his beliefs, not the source of his beliefs. He is on record as saying the source of his faith is revelation, not philosophy or reason. That, is an important distinction, it is why his arguements don't work on us.

I can take it one step furher, WLC refuses to engage in written debates with anyone and refuses to debate with his former students.

His refusal to engage in written debates is that his debating style is a highly evolved () form of the gish gallop. In which he is rhetorically skilled enough to box his opponents in with too many points to counter in a 10 minute speech or equivalent. In the written debate in which time is not an issue, his gish gallop type arguements get melted.

Final point Hitchens, Grayling, Dawkins and so on all make and made mistakes, errors and are not omnipotent. Losing a debate doesn't mean that reality has somehow changed. WLC is an expert debater (IMHO he is a mass debater ), but as a philosopher he is a lightweight in that his publishing record is limited (Plantagina is a far more accompolished philosopher than WLC). He is very much a seagull (cowgull maybe), he flaps around makes a lot of noise and dumps crap everywhere, which takes an age to clean up.

Many good points but I don't think you can call him a lightweight. I can't remember the source but he's something like the 15th most cited philosopher of religion in the world, and he has written a shitload of articles/books on the kalam argument, the resurrection, and the "A" theory of time. He does engage in written debates, if someone criticises his precious kalam argument, he will write a reply to that journal. He is quite relentless in this manner.

[andrew84]

Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction and any deeper meaning is illusory." Like Professor Ruse I just don't see any reason to think that in the absence of God, the morality which has emerged among these imperfectly evolved primates we call Homo sapiens is objective, and here Mr. Hitchens seems to agree with me. He says moral values are just innate predispositions, ingrained into us by evolution. Such predispositions, he says, are inevitable for any animal endowed with social instincts. On the atheistic view then an action like rape is not socially advantageous and so in the course of human development has become taboo, but that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really morally wrong. On the atheistic view there's nothing really wrong with raping someone.

The first sentence is wrong. When someone says that rape is wrong, I think most people saying this mean that the act of rape has this property of 'wrongness'. Ethical naturalist try to defend this view.

[Sieveboy]

Originally Posted by andrew84

I find Craig to be a kind of mini celebrity. He's got his website with Q&A, podcasts, and his regularly debates. He's a lot more evangelical than his fellow theists.

As for the debate? Well, Hitchens wasn't really prepared. Also, he was a journalist (and a very good one!) not a philosopher.

Many good points but I don't think you can call him a lightweight. I can't remember the source but he's something like the 15th most cited philosopher of religion in the world, and he has written a shitload of articles/books on the kalam argument, the resurrection, and the "A" theory of time. He does engage in written debates, if someone criticises his precious kalam argument, he will write a reply to that journal. He is quite relentless in this manner.

Might wan't to check the google scholar rank for him. Thunderf00t has been referenced more than WLC. I might try that myself now.

[Sieveboy]

Hard to link on my phone but google scholar scored ~36,000 hits for WLC and ~318,000 for Peter Singer.

[Goldenmane]

Originally Posted by andrew84

I find Craig to be a kind of mini celebrity. He's got his website with Q&A, podcasts, and his regularly debates. He's a lot more evangelical than his fellow theists.

As for the debate? Well, Hitchens wasn't really prepared. Also, he was a journalist (and a very good one!) not a philosopher.



Many good points but I don't think you can call him a lightweight. I can't remember the source but he's something like the 15th most cited philosopher of religion in the world, and he has written a shitload of articles/books on the kalam argument, the resurrection, and the "A" theory of time. He does engage in written debates, if someone criticises his precious kalam argument, he will write a reply to that journal. He is quite relentless in this manner.

Yeah, he's produced a lot of bullshit.

But it's still bullshit. And he's still a fucking lightweight. Kalam has been rendered a Debunking Theist Bullshit 101 practice exercise. Fuck, I'm slow on the thinking and it only took me about 5 minutes to work out the most obvious glaring flaw with it. Anyone with a modicum of familiarity with modern cosmology and a slight awareness of precision in language is going to realise that
a) We don't have any conclusive evidence to support the assertion that the universe (or anything else, for that matter) began to exist, and;
b) that motherfucker likes to use chameleon homonyms, which is to say that he uses the same word more than once, but means a different fucking thing each time whilst pretending to precision.

I don't give a fuck how often Craig might be cited. Freud founded an entire field, and he was still a flat out cocaine-fueled babbling bundle of utter fucking incorrect.

[Worldslaziestbusker]

Originally Posted by andrew84

The first sentence is wrong. When someone says that rape is wrong, I think most people saying this mean that the act of rape has this property of 'wrongness'. Ethical naturalist try to defend this view.

To test whether or not rape is wrong, I pass the concept through the Kantometer.

Rape is sex without informed consent.
If rape were to be permissible, sex without informed consent would have consent.
The proposition is incoherent.


If rape is not wrong, rape does not exist.
The concept of rape exists.
Therefore rape is wrong.


This is as close to an empirical examination of the concept as I can get. It's not strictly first principles, because it rests on an assumption that personal sovereignty is valuable to an individual, but as that seems to be the case for most people, I think it's a sound stab at showing that rape is wrong independent of cultural mores and religious edicts.