The State of the God Debates: Some lessons from Shook vs. Craig

Back in December, I was given two opportunities on the same day--and they conflicted.

That morning I got a phone call from John Shook, a friend of mine from graduate school and a former OSU colleague who now works for the Center for Inquiry (a kind of atheist think tank). He invited me to debate him at an event in California in February--perhaps on the topic of God and morality. Later that day, I was handed the violin part for "I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change." It was to run during February--encompassing the weekend of the event John had invited me to participate in.

My father having passed away just over a month earlier, I was thinking a lot about life priorities, about what goals matter the most for living a full, rich life. Participation in a debate about God and morality could certainly fit into a rich life, especially given my interests and profession. But so, too, could participation in the musical. The question was which would do more for me, at this point in my life, to help me build the best kind of life I am capable of.

I've been a violinist since the second grade--far longer than I've been a philosopher. In high school, playing the violin was central to my identity, and I very seriously considered a career in music. I've been involved with the local community theatre for far less time, but it has been a rich source of creative opportunity and community. And here was a rare chance to bring my long training as a violinist into the communal creativity of community theatre.

That's what I chose, and I haven't regretted it. In fact, the experience of connecting with this particular cast has been a great gift. I've made new friendships, deepened old ones, and laughed more these last few weeks than I have in years. The experience has also opened further doors for musical creativity. I've come to know the keyboardist, a very talented musician who does music (among other things) for a living and is eager to have me play with her band on numbers which call for a violin or fiddle part.

The debate with John would've looked better on my professional CV. It might have sold some of my books and helped get some of my ideas out to audiences who otherwise would've have heard them. These aren't trivial things, and I hope to have other opportunities to pursue these things.

But I doubt that flying out to California for a debate would've fed my soul the way that the last few weeks of communal, playful, joyful creativity have done. Part of the reason for that has to do with the current state of the God debates.

This morning, with the date for the debate-that-might-have-been drawing near, I found myself thinking about the option I turned down and I took another look at parts of John's debate with William Lane Craig from a couple of years ago. It reminded me of why debates of the sort exemplified there don't feed my soul (and why I wouldn't want to debate Craig).

Let me say, first, that intellectual exchange with those who disagree with me can feed my soul quite richly. I really enjoy going to professional philosophy conferences to present papers. And at such conferences, there is always a designated commenter on the paper you present. The commenter typically raises objections and critical questions. Sometimes the exchange that follows has some of the character of a debate. But it's also constructive. Each is afforded the space to develop his or her thoughts. If someone makes a good point, it is (usually) quickly acknowledged. And if someone is trying to make a potentially good point but is having some trouble finding the best way to articulate it, others will sometimes jump in (perhaps even a philosophical opponent) with a clarifying question: "Is this what you're trying to say?"

At its best, the aim at a philosophy conference is to increase clarity and deepen the collective understanding of the philosophical problem and the best arguments for alternative solutions.

That isn't the aim in most of the current God debates--where the objective is to win. When John first proposed a debate, my counter-offer (this was before I was invited to be part of the musical) was to have a philosophical conversation--that is, something more like what happens at a philosophy conference than like what happens in typical God debates. John thought that sounded great. But I know that even if we went into the event in that spirit, we would be doing so in a context defined by a different spirit--one in which the zero-sum model of a sporting event seems to prevail. And it's easy to get sucked in by that broader spirit--especially if you have an ego (as both John and I do).

One clip I looked at this morning from the Shook-Craig debate strikes me as instructive here. It appear on youTube under the belligerent title "Dr. William Lane Craig humiliates Dr. John Shook." Here's the clip:



There are a few lessons I want to extract from this clip. First off, the title of the clip is misleading. What appears here is a brief moment in a considerably longer exchange in which neither debater humiliated themselves, even if Craig did manage to trip John up a couple of times here. I'm not saying that Craig didn't make some legitimate points that should have been made--but the title of the clip treats this as equivalent to scoring points against an opponent in a win/lose sporting match. It's as if the video's poster is delighting in a good blow landed by a favored boxer in a title fight.

And then there's the applause. That doesn't happen at philosophy conferences. And when, in this clip, does the applause happen? When one debater "scores a point" against the other.

But the most important point I want to make is this: Presumably because Craig was interested in winning the debate, he didn't display any interest in unpacking the analogy that John was trying to invoke, to understand that analogy within the larger context of John philosophical convictions. Adept at debate, Craig piped in with telling questions or comments (verbal jabs) before John could fully develop his line of thought. This put John into a defensive posture which made it hard for him to collect his thoughts so as to be able to connect the example to its larger philosophical context.

Since I know John, I know that larger context. I pretty sure I know what he was trying to do. John is a specialist in John Dewey, an American pragmatist. Put in somewhat oversimplified terms, what matters most for pragmatism is how our ideas and beliefs are related to behavior. If two seemingly different philosophies have the same pragmatic impact--if they affect how we behave in identical ways--then they have the same pragmatic meaning. The test of truth, for pragmatism, is how an idea works in practice.

So how does that connect with the analogy John was trying to use, about investing money in the stock market? Here's the thing: If I have my money in the bank and I have no good reason to suppose that moving it to the stock market will be to my advantage--and I am risk-averse--then I will behave in the same way that I would if I have my money in the bank and believe that putting it in the stock market would be a bad idea, ultimately losing me money.

Craig is clearly correct to say that the lack of evidence for the view that the stock market will rise in the coming months is not evidence that it won't. But for the hypothetical potential investor with a conservative disposition, the absence of such evidence will have the same pragmatic significance as evidence that the stock market won't rise in the coming months. The belief clusters here are pragmatically the same. For someone who is a pragmatist, these two belief clusters have the same pragmatic meaning.

So, from this perspective, consider someone who (a) operates as if the natural world is all that exists until convinced otherwise by evidence of a supernatural reality, and (b) hasn't yet been convinced otherwise. Even if this person acknowledged that one cannot know that the natural world is all there is, this person would qualify as a naturalist from a pragmatic perspective. Why? Because the person operates practically in the same way that someone who is convinced that there is no supernatural reality would operate. Such a person is a pragmatic atheist. John has said to me before (not in these precise words) that he isn't big on the category of agnosticism precisely because self-professing agnostics typically operate as if there is no God--and so, from the standpoint of pragmatic philosophy, they are atheists.

John may very well have defined naturalism as the belief that the natural world we know through empirical inquiry exhausts what's real. But if he was operating with a pragmatic understanding of "belief," being a naturalist in this sense is consistent with being agnostic (in a more conventional sense) about the existence of a supernatural reality.

John is perfectly capable of making these points. But Craig's debating style, evidenced in this clip, interfered with rather than facilitated John's ability to lay out what he was really wanting to say. This made it possible for Craig to invoke more traditional terminology--which does recognize a distinction between agnosticism and atheism even when a person who professes not to know behaves as if there is no God. The result is that John's position could be neatly knocked down--but it was a mischaracterization that was being knocked down.

What John is committed to is the idea that, in the absence of compelling reasons to believe in a supernatural reality, we should operate as if there is none. We should be naturalists or atheists in the pragmatic sense. He is also committed to the view that there are no good reasons in favor of the idea that there are supernatural realities. Now, I disagree with John on both points. My first book, Is God a Delusion?, can in some ways be seen as an extended critique of both of John's commitments here, with special emphasis on the first.

But my point is this: We don't do the pursuit of wisdom a service by using the sort of debate techniques that interfere with the ability of others to lay out their position with the clarity needed to assess it on its own terms. Were Craig operating in professional philosopher mode rather than debate mode, he might have said, "If we take your investing analogy in such-and-such a way, it just seems silly. So I suspect you might mean something else by it. What would that be?"

But the current state of the God debates discourages that more philosophical approach. And it's not just theists who are guilty of favoring the pursuit of victory over the pursuit of philosophical clarity, even if in this clip it is the theist who's doing it. The new atheists offer plenty of examples of the same sort of thing.

Now none of this is to say that there isn't a place for debate. I think debate can be helpful in sparking more meaningful critical dialogue. Debates are exciting, and can attract interest in  toipc. The seductive power of the competition, the zero-sum face-off, can draw people into an issue in a way that exposes them to opposing arguments they wouldn't otherwise have heard, perhaps stimulating deeper reflection and more substantive dialogue. Unfortunately, this very same seductive power of zero-sum confrontation makes it always in danger of eclipsing and replacing more productive dialogue.

This is not just a danger in the contemporary God debates. Too much of what goes on in the exchanges between theists and atheists has just this zero-sum character. And that is why community theatre does more to feed my soul.

But real dialogue between people of opposing views can be deeply rewarding. It can be a creative and communal activity every bit as rich as working to create a theatrical production. I like to think that this blog is one place where such deeper dialogue can happen on issues about religion and God and ethics. The question is how we work to make that kind of dialogue happen more. How do we make meaningful critical discourse the natural outflow of those more sexy "debates" that bring attention to the issues--as opposed to allowing such discourse to be eclipsed by the debates?

Thoughts?