Friday, July 5, 2013

Carrier v Marshall 2013 Is the Christian Faith Reasonable?

This debate ( video | 1h52m02s ) took place in 2013 between Richard Carrier and Apologist(?) David Marshall. They debated the reasonableness of the Xian belief.

3.25 stars.

This debate is an example of what I mentioned in my reasons for this site page. In order to attempt to have a lot of content out in a short time I decided to just review all the debates I like/are already popular and I predicted that as I started debating newer debates, my ratings (which were all pretty high) would start to diminish because I was just listening to the debates to listen to them...well here we are.

Nothing really new or interesting with this debate. Richard did fine though I think that his debates with Jacoby and Licona were the best of his that I have heard so far. What is definitely the case is that he devastated Marshall. I don't know much about Marshall but he just doesn't seem to have the flare for debate - which isn't always bad, I don't think Vic Stenger is the most charismatic but I think he can present and call out arguments pretty well - but it certainly becomes evident even with his opening speech.

In fact, both kind of muddled up the debate topic, imo. Both didn't really state things too explicitly and this probably should have been emphasized due to the fact that the debate wasn't a) an argument about the existence of a god nor was it b) only about the historicity of the bible. Yet the debate seemed to only focus on one or the other.

For example, Marshall notes that Richard is not addressing the arguments for the existence of god and this is the only time that Richard comes back and notes that this is irrelevant to the debate - this kind of thing happened in the Parsons v Craig debate only Parsons was a lot more no-BS about pointing out the same thing that Richard does and does it so well that Craig never brings it back up.

Marshall was just too all over the place, his opening speech talked a lot about miracles and it seems like a good apologist would at least know not to bring up modern day miracles because of how sketchy they are but he brought up a lot of coincidence stories and stuff and I felt bored and had no idea where he was going. He also decided to bring up the fact that Richard lost to Craig and named dropped Luke M. when he talked about how tough of an opponent Craig is. To this internet nerdy atheist, it was obvious that Marshall is an internet apologist - not too bad of a thing, but it should be noted that this debate is an example of how being able to argue a lot on the interbuttz doesn't really translate over to real lifebuttz.

After watching the debate I've lurked around all the atheist/apologists blogs out there and I guess Hector Avalos has been in a little internet tiff with Marshall. I wish Reggie still did the Infidel Guy because I bet BET they both would love to go on IG to square off and I wouldn't mind hearing that. The closest thing we got going that I know of is Unbelievable but that's too short and has little audience interaction.

Technical: Great VQ...I might upload an Mp3 of it but the program I use to make Mp3s from yt vids makes them like 300 MB!

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