Saturday, June 8, 2013

Dillahunty v Lucas Does God Exist?

This debate (audio | video) was supposed to be about the existence of god but Lucas, right off the bat pretty much said that god exists and turned the debate into a debate about morality. Dillahunty calls Lucas out on this and apparently had to scrap all the counters (I would hope) he had prepared for all the regular god arguments.

3 stars. 

And so we have a debate on justifying objective morality. I like these debates but a) this wasn’t a debate only on that topic b) Dillahunty wasn’t prepared to only tackle that topic anyways c) Lucas wasn’t that interesting of an apologist and d) I agree with Dillahunty about debate formatting, the opening speeches should be the shortest, 20 minutes is just too long imo.

Dillahunty also had the same issues in this debate that I felt he had in the previous debate I reviewed. He’s super into TAG and you can get more than you can handle in this debate he had with Matt Slick and he’s super into, well, I’ll use the word he used several times to describe it: being pedantic. This time he was a little better about presenting a positive case but because the debate changed it seemed like that couldn’t be fleshed out.

The cross-exam was good, and by good, I mean terrible for Lucas. Lucas really fell apart when it came to the slavery issue but can you blame him? Slavery blows and his god was fine with it. This is a morally corrupt position and Xians gotta stick to it, unfortunately. But again another issue with Dillahunty came up, he was just too glib with his answers and too tedious about definitions it seems. The debate ended up being about morality but there are several different, convincing and certainly better moral frameworks out there that Dillahunty could have suggested or he could have even fleshed out the one Lucas attributed to him (utilitarianism) or at least clarified the misconceptions Lucas made about it.

Check this debate out if you enjoy hearing an apologist get devastated but skip it if you want to see good debate performances.

Also, this is the second formal Dillahunty debate I’ve heard and I’m pretty downtrodden, tbh. I honestly think he could take down WLC but unless Dillahunty becomes Hitch or Harris status in popularity than we won’t see that debate anytime soon. I got two more Dillahunty debates to listen to, I hope they work out.

Technical: Good AQ. The audio I made has a section of Dillahunty’s repeated but I don’t know if that occurs in the video or not.

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