Sean Carroll debates William Lane Craig

[Vodmeister]

My view of William Lane Craig as being an "unbeatable debater" has plundered severely after watching this debate. This is by far one of the most entertaining debate I've ever seen WLC compete in, simply because Sean Carroll thoroughly demolished him.

Sean Carroll also does a great job in disproving the Kalam Cosmology Theory and the Fine Tuning Argument, both of which we have discussed on this forum in the past.

theworldofanimals.proboards.com/thread/311/kalam-cosmology-theory
theworldofanimals.proboards.com/thread/674/fine-tuning-argument

Nonetheless, here is the full debate;


www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0qKZqPy9T8

For those who don't have 2 hours and 16 minutes of free time, here is an amusing highlight package of the debate;


www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1c_GlAjvy4

I can't decide who did a better job against WLC - Sean Carroll or Shelly Kagan.

[coherentsheaf]

Just watched the opening statements. Carroll was simply amazing.

[coherentsheaf]

Ok watched the whole debate now. Carroll was simply the best challenger of Craig on cosmological issues I have seen so far by a huge margin and his debating performance was stellar. To my mind he successfully beat Craig on the Borde Guth Vilenkin theorem, which cant recollect from anyone else. Unfortunately a few points slipped through nonetheless: E.g. Craig claimed that in any multiverse the pocket universes would eventually produce Boltzmann brains, when they become stable. I think while the general answer of Carrol was alright (That there could simply be models where more non Boltzmann observers exists) a more precise answer like proposing a model where more and more pocket universes exist with time hence total total number of young universes would exceed that of old ones at any point in time is preferable. I think however that the Boltzmann brain criticism needs to be addressed a t a more fundamental level. The general problem I percieve in its use as criticism is that any finite universe with an enthropical increase will produce ore Boltzmann brains than normal ones, so any use of this as criticism of a specific model of reality does not help to distinguish this theory from others. On another note the Boltzmann brains are empirically indistinguishably from normal ones, so if there are a lot more of them then we could neither ell a posteriori nor a priori.

[coherentsheaf]

In any case here are Carroll's reflections on the debate which I believe to be a pretty fair assessment: www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/02/24/post-debate-reflections/

[Vodmeister]

There are only few things on this planet more annoying than Craig's sarcastic responses to counterarguments against the Kalam Cosmology Theory to downplay/discredit his opponents.

Some arguments made against the KCA are very good, such as;

1. The "no cause before time" question
or 2. The "all matter is preceded by previously existing matter" claim.

Yet I have to give WLC some form of credit. He's the master of kicking up a cloud/smokescreen when he desperately needs one.