Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Me and Matt Slick

I finally made time to give Matt Slick a call over at CARM. I listened to a discussion he had on a show called The Atheist Experience. He did an initial call in, then called in for a later show for a more extensive discussion with Matt Diluhanty. You can listen to that call here. I thought for the first call he was cut off a little too much by the hosts, so he seemed frustrated, and then for the second call I thought Matt Diluhanty didn't answer his challenges the way I would have, so I thought I ought to call in to CARM and see how I fared. Then I got sick with a sore throat and forgot about it until now. So it had been a while since I had thought about TAG, but I thought I'd call anyway.

You can go to the CARM podcast and listen to my call from 7/6 or you download the section that involves just me here. It was a lot of fun. Matt seems like a really good guy and he's absolutely right that he and I would have so much fun with these topics over a barbeque in his back yard.

I'm not as philosophically oriented, so things like TAG are not so much my area of expertise, but it's fun anyway. I thought the call went great and generally I'm satisfied with the way I presented my fundamental objection, but I have to admit that some of the things he said didn't really register with me while I was on the phone so I didn't respond to them exactly as I would have liked to. I might have more to say about this later, or I may just call him back.

He wanted to ask me about the Kalam Cosmological argument, but wanted to give another caller a chance to get through, so he suggested I call back and I did. So after one caller I was back on the air. Once again it's at his podcast, or you can just listen here. A more brief call, but interesting nontheless. Once again I was able to express my fundamental objection to the Kalam Cosmological argument and I was happy with that.

He suggested I call in the next day (Tuesday) to talk about the resurrection. So I did. The podcast isn't posted yet, but I recorded it myself, so you can get that here. It's a .wma file. I might replace it with an .mp3 after the podcast is posted. This call also was great as far as I was concerned. I expressed my fundamental objection to belief in the resurrection, ripping off Arif Ahmed's brilliant argument against Gary Habermas and Matt tried to respond. In my view it's absolutely devastating. Matt in response was getting away from my central argument, talking about the early dating of Acts, which is really rendered irrelevant by Ahmed's argument. If I was trying as hard as I could to win I'd have probably dismissed these points as irrelevant, but really I was more just having fun and I find the rabbit trails interesting, so I went with it a little. The reality though is that even if we posited that Acts was dated to the 40's, Ahmed's argument still shows that belief in the resurrection is unreasonable.

In the end I asked Matt to chew on it and I'd call back to see what his thoughts are. I'll post that when it happens.

3 comments:

Brian said...

Good to hear you on both, Jon.

Matt's Transcendental Argument (TAG) is presented here for those unfamiliar with it.

Take care.

Anonymous said...

thought the discussion was good until it got to the personal experience of Jesus part. That may be a convincing argument for anyone predisposed or with a desire to believe but it is the least convincing argument out there.

Jon said...

Yeah, I definitely agree, Anon. Thing is though it's probably a lot more effective than apologetics is.