Two debates about the existence of God
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Announcement: if all goes to plan with my visa, I will be an instructor at Reason and Rationality’s philosophy summer program based in Princeton, NJ. Other confirmed instructors include Joe Schmid, Flo Bacus, and Noah McKay! From the website:
Reason & Rationality equips high school students with the tools to think rigorously about complex questions, separate fact from ideology, and participate in lively intellectual discussion. The 2-week Foundation Program focuses on 20 Big Ideas in Philosophy, Economics and Ethics. Classes are rigorous, fast-paced and full of humor. Students sharpen their critical thinking and communication skills and leave with a grasp of the intellectual frameworks that empower them to simplify complex problems, connect the dots, and craft compelling arguments.
If you are a teenager interested in philosophy (or a parent of one) have a check and see if there are still some spaces left in June! (Also, if it is too expensive, consider applying for an emergent ventures grant to help with the costs—I know at least one student did that last year with success.)
If you can’t do it this year, keep an eye open for next year! It’s an incredible program, and for many students life-changing.
People always ask me, “Amos, what debates have you moderated recently?”, so I thought, rather than answering the same tired question again and again, I would just upload a short blog post linking to them.
I. Which is more probable: theism or naturalism?
This debate was an absolute zinger. On team theism were Noah McKay and Miles K. Donahue, and on naturalism were Alex Malpass and Nathan Bray.
Noah—a PhD student at Princeton—made a version of the argument from miracles (zooming in on the Barbara Snyder case, along with some interesting meta-points about the distribution of miracles), and Miles—a DPhil student at Oxford—made the fine-tuning argument, which he is doing his dissertation on.
Alex—an accomplished philosopher with multiple papers in Mind—put forward his increasingly well-known ‘stalking horse’ objection, the gist of which is that for any sufficiently specified theistic hypothesis that predicts the data theists want to explain (in this case, miracles and fine-tuning), there are a host of no-less-bad naturalistic hypotheses that do the same, and are no worse off in the final competition.
The main line of argument from Nathan—a PhD student at St Andrews—centred on divine psychology: in particular, perfect being theism doesn’t actually predict the stuff that theists like Noah and Miles think it does, because we have too little reason to think that the perceived value of stuff like fine-tuning and miracles represents how God much actually values them.
This was a great debate on multiple levels: all of the participants are highly philosophically literate, making it a better product than 99.9% of theism vs. atheism debates online. Also, they were a good combination of participants, with arguments that clashed well with one another: Noah and Miles were both making evidential arguments for theism, and Alex and Nathan were both making in-principle objections to evidential arguments for theism. It was respectful, content-filled, and—if I may—exceptionally brilliantly moderated.
My verdict is that the theists won this debate, both on points and energy.
II.
No idea why I moderated this second one, I had literally no reason to be there; I did nothing except pretend to be named Miles Donahue, since the debate was airing on his channel. Still, it was fun to be in the virtual room while it played out live.
Following on from the previous debate, Miles and Alex agreed to a friendly follow-up; with only two debaters present, the two made a lot more progress, and the result was far more even. By the end, the two were at the edge-of their thinking, and significant progress had been made.
My verdict is that Miles pulled ahead in the first half and Alex pulled ahead in the second.
Coda: see also this review of the first debate, featuring Friction, Nathan Bray, and Daniel Linford.
Based post full of Correct opinions, especially that everyone should join us for Reason and Rationality!
Both good debates.
Agree with your assessment of the first one, but I do think Noah using a miracle as the cornerstone of his case was odd, since so much depends on the precise details of what happened, which is tough to discern in this format (witness Ethan's gargantuan back and forths).
But I thought the theists shone when they were cross examining the atheists, any time you can pin your opponent into radical theories of modality to support their argument, you've got the advantage. Also think it's interesting that the divine psychology objection basically reinvents the classical theist principle of remotion (https://branemrys.blogspot.com/search?q=remotion&m=1), so it makes for strange bedfellows.
Had the opposite reaction to the second debate, I thought Alex was ahead early when stymieing the Awesome Theistic Arguments, but Miles was able to counter well about the prior probabilities of theism vs. augmented naturalism. And Kierkegaard getting attention in Bayesian debates is always nice.
As it happens, many of the ATA's seemed more analogous to arguments from miracles than fine-tuning, so it would be interesting to hear their proponents respond to Alex's super-advanced aliens/time-travelevers scenarios, or to hear his take on arguments that are less amenable to them as explanations, like those having to do with the initial conditions of the universe or mathematical constants. And, as they touched on, it's difficult to draw a precise line between simulators or ultra-powerful beings within the universe and small-g gods (I'm told some philosophically and technologically inclined Mormons go all the way with this, make of that what you will).
Last but not least, they acknowledged the depth vs. breadth trade-off, but it's a shame that they couldn't get into the other arguments they alluded to at the end, or even address Miles' stipulation that he wasn't going to consider multiverse theories. Then again, they always say to leave the audience wanting more.