Debating 101

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:31

Greetings and welcome to The Dividing Line. Today is a much anticipated program. I'm a little surprised by that.

00:37

I only mentioned last week. I just sort of had the thought cross my mind. We ought to do a program where I talk about sort of an introduction to debate, the process, how

00:50

I've learned and grown in debate preparation, things like that, over coming up on, oh my goodness, 35 years.

01:03

Yeah, this August will be a 35 -year debating career.

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Currently sitting at 193, working on as many as we can, given that I really wasn't doing anything for 2025 for a while.

01:19

I was going to sit around and do nothing, but didn't know what the results election was going to be, so didn't really know.

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So I mentioned that on Twitter and boom, everybody's like, oh, I want to hear that. Okay, well, cool.

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We definitely need the next generation to start stepping up. I'm talking, well,

01:41

I'll go ahead and tell you. I'm talking with the apologetic dog, Jeremiah, over in Jonesboro.

01:46

We're trying to pray that we can put at least one, maybe two debates together in like a month and a half.

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And I will do a straight shot. I've already looked at the distances to drive to Jonesboro.

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And Jonesboro is not far from Conway, so I can maybe pop in and do a little something for the seminary while I'm back there.

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But do some tag team stuff, because most of my debates have been just myself.

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And I think that's a lot easier, personally. But I have done some tag team debates.

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I did one in 93, I think. I think it was 1993 at Boston College.

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And of course, Jeff Durbin and I have done two, both of which have turned out to be somewhat infamous, including the antifreeze debate, which a lot of people remember very, very well.

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So anyway, I thought, well, okay, let's do it. Let's put it together.

03:00

Let's talk about some of the tools you can use. I'm not saying that this is the only way to do it.

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This is just simply how I've done it. I think there are certain rules that need to be utilized to get things done right.

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I think there are certain aspects to debate that need to be there, or you don't have debate.

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I do not believe that the political debates, when

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Joe Biden and Donald Trump were sitting there insulting each other, I don't consider that debate.

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You do not have equal time. The moderators are not even close to unbiased.

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You don't have a single thesis. And in that process, the audience suffers.

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I do debates primarily for the audience that is there and the audience that will view 10, 20 years down the road.

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That's not what my intention was the first few years

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I did this, mainly because I had no earthly idea at that time that I would be doing nearly 200 moderated debates over the next three and a half decades.

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There's no way of knowing that. In fact, those first debates came about because I had been listening to Jerry Matotix and Scott Hahn debating primarily

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Calvary Chapel type guys, primarily Jerry Matotix too, and recognized the nature of the challenge that was there and recognized

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I could do better than these guys were doing. And I do want to, as I have said in the past, we did not begin my career by challenging someone else.

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We sent copies of the Fatal Flaw and Answers to Catholic Claims when they first came out in late 1989 to Catholic Answers in San Diego.

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And very short period of time later, the phone rang and I believe it was

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Jerry Matotix directly called us and wanted to know if we would do a debate.

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And that may have been, that was probably mid -89.

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Yeah, because the debate was in August, as I recall, August of 90.

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So it was May or something of 90, somewhere around there.

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Anyway, what? Well, don't forget to add in the fact that prior to this, you were a frequent guest on Local Talk Radio.

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And in some of those circumstances, they love to pit you up against some pretty wild and crazy people.

06:08

Oh, very wild and crazy people. Very wild and crazy people. You went up against Tom Likas. You were a guest of Barry Young.

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Tom Likas. Bob Mohan. Bob Mohan. Man, I wonder if he's even still alive.

06:19

No, he's not. He passed away. He moved up to Montana. He passed away like five years ago. Really? Yeah.

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That's sad to hear. And we have some of those recordings actually on our

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Sermon Audio channel. Yes, I know. Very early recordings. But those will be used against me later.

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I'm sure they will. But all of that built up to this. Yeah, yeah, we did.

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Yeah, I had done all sorts of stuff with atheists, nasty atheists, demonic atheists, just all sorts of wild and crazy stuff prior to that.

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So yeah, but of course those weren't debates. But starting my sophomore year in high school,

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I had one of these things stuck in my face. I was a radio announcer. My dad managed a radio station in Sun City, Arizona.

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I started working on Saturdays and I had learned all the equipment.

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And then one day, the Saturday afternoon guy had a kidney stone attack or gallbladder or something.

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I forget what it was. And my dad said, well, you're up. So he just threw me on the air and I already knew the music.

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And it's just a matter of... And the advantage to that, because this is one of the things I'm going to be talking about.

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The advantage to that is you have to be wired to be able to do this well. What I mean by that is there are a lot of people,

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I might as well start here, there are a lot of people, and I've said this over and over again, there are scholars so far beyond me, it's not even funny, know so much more in other areas who should never debate, should never, ever, ever debate.

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And the reason is they cannot multitask. They cannot listen to someone else, take notes, and then immediately stand up, walk to the podium and respond to what the other person has said in a meaningful fashion and in a cogent fashion, in a way that communicates to the audience.

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And I've used as my example of this, a dinner I had in Berlin, yeah, the real

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Berlin, a number of years ago with probably the greatest living scholar, then anyways, on Desiderius Erasmus, and I'm just thinking about the interesting place we had dinner and stuff like that.

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But this fellow, you would ask him a question and he would literally sit there and look at you for 30 seconds in utter silence, wouldn't say a word.

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Now, 30 seconds doesn't sound like a long period of time. On radio, it's an eternity.

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That's called dead air. And like I said, I grew up doing radio and you don't want dead air. People turn the radio off, they switch to another station very, very quickly.

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Dead air is a bad, bad, bad, bad thing. And so in a debate, dead air means

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I've lost. Dead air means I don't have an answer. Dead air means he got me.

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So you can't have dead air. Now, when he would then answer your question after 30 seconds of complete silence, which is awkward, very awkward in a conversation, it was like you were getting a brand new scholarly paper on the topic.

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It was brilliant. But it took him 30 seconds to put it all together. Okay, tremendous scholar, probably tremendous teacher, but not somebody that's going to be doing debates.

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So debating isn't for everyone. I have debated many people who

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I don't think ever debated again. I can think of a number of people that have debated who never debated again.

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And as I'm getting older, the list of people I've debated who aren't even on earth any longer is getting longer and longer as well, which is sad and interesting at the same time.

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So you have to have certain capacities in and of yourself.

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So people ask me all the time, all the time, how do you stay so patient when someone's just throwing bombs at you, throwing haymakers at you, treating you like,

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I mean, they're going off topic and they're going crazy over here and going crazy. Now, those aren't my favorite debates by a long shot.

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But I will tell you, in that very first debate, the first debate took place at St. Cyprian's Catholic Church in August of 1990 in Long Beach, California against Jerry Matitox.

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Jerry Matitox, the first ordained PCA minister to become a

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Roman Catholic. At the time, he was the darling of Catholic answers. Now they sort of wish they'd never crossed paths.

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But Jerry Matitox always out talked to me. He could always talk faster than me. I've jokingly said that Jerry has gills.

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He doesn't have to breathe because he just can rat -a -tat, rat -a -tat, rat -a -tat, rat -a -tat. And I can say that having debated him,

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I think 13 times. So we've gone around the mulberry bush a few times.

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Anyway, during that debate, and I had no debate experience.

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I had been on the talk shows that Rich mentioned, but I had never been in front of an audience in a

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Catholic church doing a formal debate where you have a moderator, you have a thesis statement, and you have equal time allotted to each side.

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You have questions, cross -examination, or at least questioning one another.

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There's a difference and we'll talk about that later. I had taken no classes because they weren't offered.

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The high school I went to was very small. I was in the first four -year graduating class.

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So relatively small high school. They didn't have anything on debating.

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The closest thing that I did, as I've told many people before, closest thing I did my senior year, we did the trial of Lee Harvey Oswald.

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I was the prosecuting attorney. 11 -1 for conviction. The one was the girlfriend of somebody on the defense.

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You didn't really get to vet the jury for extra.

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Yeah, it didn't work too well. Anyway, that was about the closest

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I had ever come and had done really well with it, actually. I didn't have, in college,

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I don't think there were any debating clubs, debating team classes, anything like that.

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I had no training at all. The most of the training I had at that point in time was years and years of years of standing outside the

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General Conference of the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City and the Easter pageant of the

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LDS Church in Mesa and having entire groups of Mormon missionaries and LDS people and stuff like that throwing stuff at you.

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I would normally control those conversations. You have to know how to do that.

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You have to be able to express yourself clearly. You have to be able to focus on certain individuals. You got to be able to go back and forth.

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When Jerry started becoming aggravated and agitated, something happened.

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I'll never forget this. He's starting to get more and more into this because I'm not responding the way that the people he's debated before have responded.

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They start falling apart and they start getting angry and throwing stuff at him and stuff like that. I'm not doing that.

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I'm staying focused. I'm giving answers that he's not accustomed to hearing.

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He starts sort of losing it. I remember after the debate talking with our people about it.

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What I likened it to was if someone's losing their cool, then what

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I want to do is I just want to keep giving them more rope. You want to lose your cool?

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You're losing the debate. If you're doing that, I'll give you more rope. I don't need to get in the way here.

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If I escalate with their escalation, I'm defeating myself in so doing.

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Over the years, there have been some, especially some of my Muslim opponents have gotten a little bit on the crazy side.

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You just give them more rope and let them hang themselves. My dad was a very patient man.

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I got some of that from him, not as much as he had, but my dad was a very patient individual.

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You have to be wired to be able to do that kind of thing in a public setting.

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Some of my background helped. Like I said, radio announcer, microphone in front of me, that freaks a lot of people out.

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Having a microphone in front of someone's mouth, having a camera out there, or even more than a camera, having an audience.

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I think the largest audience I've debated in front of was at Biola with Shabir Ali. That was 2 ,500, 3 ,000 people.

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None of that bothers me. It doesn't get in the way of my being able to focus upon what

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I'm supposed to be doing, and it doesn't cause me to forget about why

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I'm there in the first place. That's something else. Next thing, why do you wish to debate?

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Why do you want to do this? Very often, I will have young men come up to me after debate.

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I think, again, the Biola debate comes to mind, and just a huge number of young people that came up after that debate, and they're asking how they can get into Christian apologetics and stuff like that.

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I tend to throw cold water on them because they've not seen everything that went into being able to do that kind of thing.

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My standard response is, if there's anything else that you can do and be in obedience to Christ, do it because you didn't see the years of poverty that you had to go through,

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I think, to be able to get to this point. So why do you wish to debate? What do you want to do? My intentions have certainly clarified over the years.

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Those first few years, it was just, well, we're addressing these issues.

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I don't even know how many debates we did before we did a debate on a topic other than Roman Catholicism.

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I think it would have been up in Salt Lake with Jason Wallace. We finally started debating

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Mormonism. Believe me, Mormon debates are highly unusual. That's why they've pretty much stopped, but they were very, very unusual.

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Then it wasn't until 2006. So yeah, it was 16 years in before we had the debate with Shabir Ali on Islam.

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I don't remember the first debate with an atheist, a formal debate with an atheist, other than the radio programs and stuff.

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So Roman Catholicism was the main subject for quite some time that we were focused upon doing debates on.

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So initially, it was simply a defense of the faith.

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At my age, I think, in 90, I was 29 years old.

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So I wasn't yet 30. Yes, I had both of my kids at that point in time.

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So married for, well, wow, I had been married for seven and a half years,

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I think, with that first debate. So I just didn't have the long -term view of things.

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I had not just sat down and thought, why are we doing this?

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How do I want this to be valuable 30 years from now? I really wasn't thinking along those lines as yet.

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But certainly over the years, as the range of topics that we have addressed has expanded, and if there is anything where we are by ourselves standing out in the field, it's the breadth of material that we address.

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There are people who can go much more in depth in a particular area, but there aren't that many people that can do as broad an area of debates as we can and have done.

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Everything from text criticism to Islamic history to early church and and all sorts of stuff in between,

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Mormonism and everything else. So obviously, down the road, the attitude really became,

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I really had to clarify things, and I have developed longer -term goals.

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So I want to finish well, and I want what we do to produce a body of work that will be valuable decades after I'm dead, and that will also encourage others to get involved in doing this kind of work and in giving a defense of the faith.

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I wasn't thinking about that in August of 1990 at all.

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And I did not have anyone to learn from. I didn't have anyone to go to to say, hey, it looks like I'm going to be doing debates.

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You got any pointers? I didn't really have anybody like that. So that, for me anyways, thankfully,

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I always have been a churchman, and so I wasn't just trying to go off by myself and and do something that is actually spiritually dangerous.

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I would not suggest that anyone who does not have a good, firm foundation in the church and in their faith to be doing something like this.

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A lot of the stuff that I see on YouTube these days, where you got the young guys in their basement and the ceiling fan going in the background in their t -shirts doing debates, it's dangerous.

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It really is. Alpha and Omega, we established a rule a long time ago when we went out to Easter pageant and stuff like that.

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You need to be a part of a sound local church to be involved with this because it can be spiritually dangerous.

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You have to ask yourself, why do you want to debate? Next, you have to ask yourself, who's your audience?

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Who are you debating for? A lot of people don't even think about that, but it determines a lot, especially in your opening statement.

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It determines when you've listened to your opponent's opening statement, how you're going to categorize the statements that he's made.

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You have to have a lens as you're looking at these things. I wonder.

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This is my older Remarkable tablet. Let me pull up...

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I guess I could have used this on the new Remarkable, but this is the one that I wrote on.

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Come on. Yeah. Let's see.

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Okay. All right. Good. Which one do we want to use here?

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I want to use one. Here's the first page.

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This was April 1st, 2023, so not quite two years ago. This is the debate that Jeff and I did at the

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University of Utah on ethics against Chatterjee and the other fellow. Okay.

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I'm waiting here. That's got to focus there. Went the wrong way.

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There you go. Hit that focus button there. Try it again. That's getting close.

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There we go. That's the first page of my handwritten notes taken during the course of the debate.

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Notice up in the corner it says 2010 -10 -5. That was the outline that I had written down real quick.

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You'll notice I have certain things outlined. I'll talk about that later, but you notice what you're doing in a situation like that is

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I'm writing this stuff down as they are saying it. When you get into the rebuttal and into the cross -examination, you obviously, and the more aware you are of this, the more consistent you can be, you have a lens through which you're looking at what has been said.

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What you have said, you're mentally making a note of what they haven't talked about.

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They haven't responded to this. They haven't responded to that. And what they have said, you have to create a list.

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What's the most important? What's the second? What's the third? What's the fourth? Well, what determines that? The lens through which you're looking at it and that lens is who's your audience?

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Who are you debating for? And it was, you know, five or six years in that I started to think about, all right, when

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I'm looking at the audience that is there, you have your opponent. And sometimes that's an opponent who is a professional.

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They are very committed to their position. And it's highly unlikely you're going to be changing their mind.

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Sometimes you debate people where it's not quite that position, not quite that way. So you might change their mind.

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But most of the time, it's someone who's doggedly committed to a particular theological position or anti -theological position.

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On your side, you're going to have a certain group of, slice of the pie, of people who are going to agree with everything you say.

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And they're not going to hear a word the other guy has to say. They just want to see you rip and snort and they're going to agree with everything you say.

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And there's no danger they're even going to hear what the other person's saying. Then, aside from that, the next slice of the pie are people on your side that are going to be very friendly to your side, but they're going to hear what the other side has to say.

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And you can encourage them to stand fast in the faith.

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You can maybe answer questions they've always had. You're hopefully encouraging them to continue this conversation.

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So if you're debating Mormonism, these are the people that are going to go out and they're going to witness to Mormons, that are going to do so well, that kind of thing.

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On their side, you just have to understand that there are certain people are going to walk through that door and they're going to sit in front of you and they're not going to hear a word you say.

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They're not. They're going to hear you say and stuff. Michael Fallon told me about, after I debated

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Peter Stravinskis in 2001 on Long Island, he was behind some

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Catholics as they were talking after the debate. The one says, the other one, you know, when

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Father Stravinskis was speaking, you could just feel the spirit moving and then white would get up and you could see the demons dancing on his shoulders.

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There's nothing you can do. People wish that there was something you could do. People wish there was some way to break through.

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But there isn't any way to do it. It's not possible. And if you allow yourself to be distracted by that, you're going to really slow me down today, aren't you?

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Don't forget the guy that literally, this was in New York, literally left the room when you were speaking.

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Well, yeah, it happens all the time. Stravinskis would get up and he'd come in and he'd leave.

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Oh yeah. And I'm sure afterwards proclaimed the other guy the winner, having not heard a word

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I said. There's nothing you can do about that. It's impossible to get through to people like that.

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So you can't concern yourself about it. The slice of the pie on that side of the fence are the people who are willing to listen to a criticism of their position.

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And if they hear you accurately representing their beliefs, then those are the people you may have long -term impact upon.

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Those are the ones you want to be shooting at. So you have your opponent, you have the audience that night.

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And then, especially today, this wasn't necessarily the case.

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I wish I had a videotape of that first debate from August of 90, but I don't. All we had was a cassette tape that we managed to take that night.

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You have the audience down the road. Now, August of 90, there was no such thing as YouTube.

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There was no such thing really as the internet. So we'd bring these tapes back and we still have them.

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I know where they are in the other room. Right there, basically. There's an old cassette tape wooden thing.

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And they're the master tapes that we would have. And I mean, literally back then, we put them into a ghetto blaster that could copy one tape at a time and put it on high speed.

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That's how we made. And we used file folder labels. We didn't even have cassette tape labels at that time.

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We eventually got them, but we didn't have them at first. But over time, then you would be creating videotapes.

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I don't think we ever did. We never really did VHS stuff or anything like that. We did?

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No. We had go video machines? Really? I had forgotten that.

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Then we went from video to DVD and doing DVD reproduction and stuff like that.

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So it started getting out there. And now, of course, most of the time, the debates are live streamed.

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Not always, but most of the time, the debates are live streamed. And everything you do is going to end up on YouTube and other places, sermon audio, stuff like that.

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So you've got literally a global audience. If people know who you are, and you've proven that you're capable of doing this over time.

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So that's a question you have to have yourself. Who's my audience? Who am I debating for? Because that's going to determine how you're going to communicate with them.

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And so obviously, right along that same path, what if society continues to degrade?

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Because let's be honest, debate is not the big thing today. Formal debate, logic, reason, rationality.

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Who knows modus ponens and modus tollens and laws of non -contradiction?

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In New Jersey, they just passed a law to allow people to teach in New Jersey public schools that can't pass a basic reading, writing, and arithmetic competency test.

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So they ain't covering this stuff at school anymore, I assure you. It's not like the late 1600s in England, where by your third year of schooling to be a minister, you had to be able to debate in Greek.

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That ain't happening no more. So some might say, well, hey, if you want to reach the young audience, then debate has to change form.

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You got to Joe Rogan it. Lots of salty language.

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I've told the story many times when I did the Dr. Drew show in 2016. The producer came in into the green room before he went out and said, please keep all of your answers as brief as possible.

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Our studies have shown that if any one person speaks for more than 15 seconds in a row, our audience tunes out.

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Okay, so debates change. I've told the story before, debates at the time of Reformation were not two and a half hours long.

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They might be two and a half days long, where you would debate in the morning, break for lunch, debate in the afternoon, break for dinner, and then start the next day.

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Nobody has the willpower. Now, there is a reason for that.

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If you went to one of those debates, like the Leipzig Disputation, stuff like that, you either walked or rode in a cart for days to get there.

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So you don't want to walk for three days to Leipzig, be there two and a half hours so you don't have to walk back.

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You want to get your money's worth for being there. That changes everything because when

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Luther and Eck went at it at Leipzig, Luther had time during the lunch break to go look up the accusations

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Eck was making against him, that he was a follower of Jan Hus.

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All he had ever heard of Jan Hus was he was a heretic that was burned. And he had the time to go to the library during the debate, during the lunch break.

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And that's when he discovered, yeah, he was saying the same things Jan Hus had said.

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You don't have that opportunity in the format that is being used today. And so someone could argue, hey, 20 years from now, debates will be 20 minutes long and be primarily done by memes or something like that.

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Well, I think there is a minimum requirement in light of how

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God has made us to be able to address important issues.

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There's a minimum requirement to be able to do that. So a couple weeks ago, the Pope said that all homilies should be less than eight minutes long.

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Okay, we aren't even through the introduction and apology in eight minutes, I can assure you of that.

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And I just don't think that important issues can be addressed at too much shorter of a period of time.

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It just gets more and more surface level, more and more surface level until it doesn't really have any value any longer.

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Next, one of the real challenges that we've had over the years is coming up with a proper thesis.

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Now, initially, it wasn't overly difficult because we hadn't done a whole lot of debates yet.

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So if you're debating Roman Catholics, we're going to debate sola scriptura, we're going to debate the mass, we're going to debate the papacy.

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Is the papacy biblical and ancient? Catholic says yes, the proselytist says no.

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Is sola scriptura biblical? The proselytist says yes, so and so. So it wasn't a big, big deal initially.

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But once you've... I've done so many sola scriptura debates, it's ridiculous.

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So people want to try to come up with a new spin on it, um, things like that.

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And so sometimes we have really struggled with someone, frequently with someone who hasn't done a lot of debates.

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And they were sort of assuming that however it was phrased was meant to like be a trap or something along those lines.

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And so there have been times when we've really had to go back and forth. Well, how about this?

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How about that? And honestly, generally, I'm the one that ends up giving in because I just want to get the debate to take place there.

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A lot of times when I debated the homosexual fellow up in Montana, I had an entire presentation ready to go.

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And I recognized um, as soon as I talked to this young man, that if I made that opening presentation, he was going to walk out before he ever stood up to speak.

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I could just tell the debate would not happen. And so I threw it out and went completely off the top of my head for the opening statement in a way that I knew would keep him in the debate and hopefully produce something that would be worthwhile over time.

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So yeah, there are some people that, you know, you struggle with the thesis mainly because they're afraid to be doing this the first place.

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They don't really want to do it. But it needs to be a meaningful thesis.

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That doesn't mean that you're necessarily going to be on the same topic by the end of the evening.

39:37

Any debate with Catholic answers, you're gonna end up debating the canon. That was just my experience the first number of years that we engaged in that was they'd always end up on the canon of scripture no matter what the topic of the debate was.

39:50

And of course, once you get into the Q &A, you don't have time to make a meaningful presentation on the canon.

39:58

That's exactly what they knew. They knew that and that's how they were running with it. There are some debates where both sides are affirming and both sides are denying sort of at the same time.

40:20

But if you don't have some clarity, if the more nebulous and fuzzy the topic is at the beginning, the more nebulous and fuzzy it's going to be at the end.

40:34

In fact, it may end up being so fuzzy nobody really knows what in the world happened. What you really want is at the end of a debate, everybody knows exactly what the topic was and who made the stronger presentation on the subject.

40:47

One of the debate tricks that people use is to shift that debate during the course of the debate to a different topic that's more amenable to their position.

41:00

We've gone through that many times over the years. But it's most helpful to have a clear positive side and a clear negative side.

41:15

There have been a few debates. If both people involved in the debate really want to make it work and are actually friendly toward one another, then the clarity of the thesis isn't quite as important.

41:35

But if you're dealing with someone who literally just wants to hand you your head on a and that is the proper rules for the debate.

41:52

Now, I bought various textbooks eventually on debate, especially during the

42:05

Cantor brothers' debacle in 2006 when Tom Askell and I were supposed to debate the

42:15

Cantor brothers at Liberty. They just engaged in every kind of absurd type of thing possible.

42:31

We learned later. We figured it out later. Because remember, in 2006, I had no idea that the

42:38

Cantor brothers were frauds. All I knew is they were former

42:43

Muslims. I hadn't heard all the stuff that Cantor was claiming about being born in Istanbul or whatever it was and trained in jihad and all this other stuff that he just made up.

43:01

At the time, all I knew was he was just rabidly and in a very shallow fashion anti -reform.

43:09

His arguments were childish. Yet here, he was being elevated the position of the head of the theological school at Liberty University.

43:22

The way they eventually managed to kill the debate was,

43:28

I think, two weeks before the debate, they decided to change all the rules. And we're like, no, we already had this.

43:37

No, we're going to do it this way. No, we had an agreement. No. Okay. It ain't going to happen. It didn't happen.

43:43

Now we learned years later that the then president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary had not wanted that to take place.

43:53

Why? I think it's because he knew what Eric and Cantor's real background was, and he didn't want that to be exposed.

44:04

It was another four years. It was January of 2010 before we exposed.

44:13

We were the ones that did it. We exposed Cantor's hypocrisy and his lying in January of 2010.

44:22

Let me clarify really, really quickly. Amongst Christians, we were the ones that did that.

44:28

It was a Muslim who had contacted me. I was flying to London, and right before I left, he contacted me and said, did you know that Eric and Cantor claimed to have debated

44:38

Shabir Ali? And I said, I never heard that. You'd have to provide me with the links.

44:45

So I'll send them. And I literally saw them at my gate in Philadelphia.

44:52

I was making my connecting flight to Heathrow. And then I got to listen to the links once I got to my hotel in the

45:00

UK. And so he was the one who gave us the information. So the Muslims were on him before we were.

45:06

I don't want anybody to think I was claiming that for myself. But I was the one who then contacted

45:12

Cantor and said, here's these links. You claim here to have debated

45:19

Shabir Ali. I know Shabir Ali. I've debated Shabir Ali. I contacted

45:24

Shabir Ali, and Shabir Ali has never even met you. Would you care to explain this? And that was the day.

45:31

That was the day that Eric and Cantor decided to destroy his own life. He really did. He decided to double down.

45:38

He got Norman Geisler to defend him. He got all these friends to defend him. But it didn't work because it wasn't true.

45:44

And it all fell apart. So I didn't want to mislead anybody there.

45:51

But they did it by changing the rules of the debate. So you need to have a moderator. Now, if both people in the debate actually want to make it work, the moderator will be bored.

46:06

I mean, I've moderated a number of debates myself. And it's just keeping time and keeping track of whose turn it is and where we are in the cross -examination and announcing stuff for the audience.

46:21

It's not that difficult to do. You do have to keep track of where you are, but it's not hard.

46:28

Now, if people decide to misbehave, then things can get interesting.

46:39

And poor Ken. Old Ken Cook moderated the second debate that I did with a well -known atheist.

46:52

And I had done in my opening statement...

47:01

No, he had made his opening statement. And I started making my opening statement. And he objected to the fact that I was quoting from his own book, which was for sale in the back of the church we were at.

47:14

He was selling it, but he was objecting that I was quoting his own book. And so he's appealing to the moderator.

47:22

And poor Ken. All Ken wanted to do is sit there and take time. He had no idea this was going to happen.

47:30

There have been a couple of times over the years where an opponent has appealed the moderator and you could just tell the moderator just wanted to say, would you all just get back to what you're supposed to be doing?

47:44

But yeah, sometimes they have to moderate. And if both sides are doing what they should do...

47:53

But look, hey, if one side wants to derail the debate, they're going to do it. It doesn't matter how much you may want to make this thing work.

48:02

If the other side wants to make sure it doesn't work, they can do that. You can't stop them. The best debates have always been debates where both sides behaved and were focused upon doing a good job.

48:16

So anyway, you need a moderator and you need to have proper timeframes. Now, look, there isn't any one setup that is ideal.

48:29

You have to be able to adjust to longer and shorter opening statements.

48:39

You'll be in situations where... Let's say if you're on a university campus, shouldn't be this way, but on a university campus, generally, they're going to want shorter debates.

48:55

And more audience participation. The first debates we did had much longer opening statements than what we've been doing generally since then.

49:10

So 30 to 40 minutes, that's a long time. 30 to 40 minutes is a long time.

49:16

Now we generally do 20 to 25, normally 20 for opening statements. Sometimes as short as 15.

49:25

And then how many rebuttals do you have? When do you take a break? How long should the break be?

49:32

It'll always be two times longer than it's announced to be. That's just my experience. Always is.

49:38

Always is. Doesn't matter how... And that moderator can crack the whip. It won't make any difference.

49:44

People can only go to the bathroom so fast. So that's all there is to it. But where do you take the breaks?

49:51

How do you handle cross -examination? Now, by the way, it was years into my career before I really came to understand that cross -examination is where the debate takes place.

50:12

It's where it takes place. When I first started, the questions for each other almost panicked me.

50:21

I'd be looking at my notes and just trying to come up with something. I didn't feel comfortable having pre -written questions because I didn't know whether they would have actually come up in the conversation at that point.

50:36

And so I knew enough about debate that you're supposed to have your opening statements.

50:42

And technically, technically, that should be the end of your presentation of factual data.

50:52

The rebuttals should only be in response to what the other person has already said.

50:58

The cross -examination should be based upon the presentation. And the closing wraps all that up.

51:04

Unfortunately, in most debates, what happens is, and this is criticism

51:11

I've had of many of my opponents, and I probably did it in the first couple of my debates because I didn't know any better, but people would get to the end of their allotted time.

51:21

Let's say we had 25 -minute opening statements. They're not done. They've got more they want to say. They say, well, when

51:27

I come back up, we'll talk about this, this, and this. Well, you're not supposed to do that. It's not,

51:33

I've got 25 minutes, and then when I come up, I've got another 10 minutes to continue my presentation. That's not how it's supposed to be done.

51:42

That should get you disqualified, but we don't generally have debate judges sitting there going, well, okay, you're not as qualified.

51:53

So you want to try to have those overarching rules in mind and stay focused upon what was presented primarily in the affirmative side's opening statement because that's where they're the ones that have the burden of proof.

52:22

What happens is people will bring up new topics during cross -examination in their closing statement, and that's always really bugged me because there's no opportunity to respond to it.

52:38

So if I had the affirmative, for example, and in some debates, we've changed the order.

52:48

So if you have the affirmative, I'd also have the final word. That's happened a number of times, doesn't always happen.

52:57

I'd say about 25 % of the time that will happen. You have the opening, you get the final word because the other side hasn't had to prove anything.

53:06

They've just been shooting at you. So why not do it that way? I don't care, personally, one way or the other.

53:14

But when someone brings brand new stuff up at the end of the debate, you have no opportunity to respond to it.

53:24

That's just cheesy. That's not the way it should be done. Again, the real question is, who in the audience are you really debating for?

53:35

I'm debating for the person who's taking serious notes and is seriously listening to what's being said, and they're following the arguments.

53:42

Bill Shishko, pastor of the, back then, Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Franklin Square.

53:49

I forget where he is now. I think it's called the refuge or something like that. I'm not sure what the name is. But Bill moderated a number of the debates we did on Roman Catholicism on Long Island.

54:02

He taught debate. In fact, one of the funniest things

54:10

I remember in debates was, I think it was the first time he moderated the debate that Pat Madrid and I did on Long Island.

54:23

I wonder if Pat remembers this. I bet he does. He brought his gavel with him because he would,

54:31

I think with homeschool stuff and stuff like that, he was a debate judge type thing.

54:37

He was sitting behind us between Pat and I, we were doing cross -ex. We're sort of sitting here.

54:43

We're not that far away from each other, the way that the the stage had been set up.

54:51

We get to the, and we were going at it. So we had sort of lost track of time a little bit, which can happen during cross -ex.

55:01

All of a sudden, it's like a gun goes, and Pat jumps and I jump.

55:09

Today I'd go into, I'd have an irregular heart rhythm as a result. But he had taken his gavel and banged it on the table, and both of us about fell over.

55:21

It was one of those memorable experiences that I have. But here's someone who had some, and he and I ended up debating each other.

55:33

We debated paedo -baptism once as well. But he would keep control.

55:43

There was somebody that, if someone did make an appeal to the moderator, Bill's going to be like, nope, here's the rules.

55:52

That's the way it goes. And that's the way it should be. It's good.

55:59

But anyway, the time frames go back to I have so many stories

56:06

I could tell. That's the danger of doing this program. And I realized we've already been going for nearly an hour, and I can't believe it.

56:14

Because I could fill the entire time. I've done 193 of them. And the sad thing is,

56:21

I'm forgetting some of them. I don't go back and listen. I should just gather all my debates up and just do an entire trip where I'm doing nothing but listening to my old debates at high speed.

56:33

It would probably do wonders for my memory. But anyway, having the proper time frames, vitally, vitally important.

56:43

And it will change depending upon where you are and upon the topic.

56:50

I mean, like some type of deep historical topic. You can't do 15 -minute opening statements.

56:56

You're out of time. And you want your audience, when they hear the last of the closing statements, to feel like they understand what both sides had to say.

57:08

That's really important. Okay, cross -examination. In the first years, we didn't really have meaningful cross -examination.

57:20

We had timed questions. So you'd have 30 seconds to ask the other guy a question, you'd have two minutes to answer, you'd have one minute to rebut, and then you'd reverse.

57:31

We did that. I did that with Mitch Pacwa. I did that with Jerry Matatix. I think that's pretty much the format we used.

57:40

The City of the Lord on the papacy, on Perseverance of the

57:46

Saints up at Northwest Community Church. And so it wasn't really cross -ex. It wasn't a free -flowing thing.

57:55

And the only way, a free -flowing cross -examination is beautiful.

58:02

It's the best way to do a debate. So when I think back on, people always ask me, what's your favorite debate?

58:09

And I'm like, well, it depends on what topic you're talking about. The debates that I think will have the longest lasting value is where both people were able to engage in cross -examination without playing games, so that the real issues in the debate could be just laid out in front of everybody.

58:32

So my cross -examination with Abdullah Kunda at the University of New South Wales, still my favorite

58:38

Muslim debate, uh, mainly because Abdullah had read my book on the Trinity and attempted to craft his presentation in a way that Christians would be able to understand it.

58:48

Only Muslim I've ever debated that would do that. But the cross -ex, um, the last three debates with Mitch Pacwa, the first two were some of my earliest debates.

59:01

We only have them on tape, on audio tape. They were video recorded, but they wouldn't give them to us unless we paid them 5 ,000 bucks.

59:12

And the last ones though, Mitch and I were both older, knew each other now.

59:18

And so the cross -examination could go very smoothly. There's going to be respect.

59:24

You're not going to, um, the, the person answering isn't going to, uh, filibuster.

59:34

And the person asking the question isn't going to so rush the other person that they can't give an answer.

59:41

You'll see many debates where that doesn't work and I'm getting cut off, uh, you know, they're filibustering.

59:51

And so I'm trying to get them back on track. Uh, and so they're complaining about that. And you can just sort of tell, uh, some guys have debated a number of times.

01:00:02

Sometimes the debate was good and sometimes it wasn't. You couldn't tell who was going to show up. Um, I could name names on that one, but I won't for the moment.

01:00:10

Anyway. Um, but cross -examination, um, is where the debate takes place.

01:00:18

It really, really is. And I don't know when I first really came to understand that, but once I did,

01:00:25

I found that I, I excel at cross -examination and I do. My modern, the biggest thing that I notice, you know,

01:00:34

I'm just last year in setting up debates, my opponents wanted to minimize cross -examination as much as possible or just get rid of it altogether.

01:00:44

Yeah. And I won't, I'm like, nope, nope, it's gotta be cross -examination. Um, that's where the debate takes place because they know, uh, that's where I excel.

01:00:54

And I excel because when I hear someone's argument, it's almost like I can see it. I can see where the inconsistencies are.

01:01:03

And so I can go for that. If it's a biblical argument, um, a lot of my opponents don't know the original languages.

01:01:10

And so they know if I start going there, they're in a whole lot of trouble because they've maybe made claims they shouldn't have made.

01:01:17

They can't necessarily respond, whatever it might be. Um, but cross -examination is where the debate really, really does take place.

01:01:27

And, you know, I, I wanted to tell the story, uh, in 93, when we went up to the, um,

01:01:36

World Youth Day in Denver, two debates, one at, um, Denver Seminary, the other at a

01:01:41

Presbyterian church in the Denver area. At Denver Seminary, after the debate was over, and I was debating geriatrics, um, there were three and a half hours each.

01:01:53

There were long debates. And the first night was New Testament evidence. Second night was patristic evidence.

01:02:00

And I had a fellow come up to me. He seemed like an older gentleman to me then.

01:02:06

He was probably my age now. Um, I had a fellow come up to me, don't know who it was. And by the way, sir, if you're watching,

01:02:13

I would love to hear from you. Um, to be honest with you, probably not still alive.

01:02:19

Uh, this was 93. That was a long time ago. Um, but it's possible.

01:02:27

And this fellow came up to me, Denver Seminary. He says, appreciate the debate. That was very, very useful.

01:02:33

I just want to suggest to you that you probably, you probably want to slow your presentation down because, you know,

01:02:43

I had been listening to Jerry Mattox and Jerry, you know, machine gun type stuff.

01:02:50

And I didn't have anything else really to go by. And of course, if you've ever watched collegiate debate, you can't even understand what they're saying.

01:02:59

And as if that's debate, it's, it's meaningless. Um, so he said, you probably want to slow it down and bring your audience with you.

01:03:12

Make sure they, they understand where you're going, how you get there and what, what the conclusion you want them to hear is now young, young men can either take suggestions and correction like that and take it to heart and think about it.

01:03:33

Or they can do what young men frequently do, uh, like Rahul did, um, and reject it.

01:03:41

Like, who are you? I'm the one that just got done doing it. You couldn't do what I just did. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, the

01:03:47

Lord was gracious to me. And I said, thank you very much. I will really consider it. And I did,

01:03:53

I did, I did it the next night. I slowed things down.

01:03:58

I included less material in my opening, but made sure that people understood exactly where I was going.

01:04:09

And I so appreciate that man. And that's something that a lot of my opponents do not understand.

01:04:16

And that helped me tremendously. And that then coalesced with and joined with my biggest stinking advantage over my opponents.

01:04:30

And that is, I can use a clock. I cannot tell you for years, this is what

01:04:41

I would use. Not necessarily this one, but it's a, it's a RadioShack timer and you can just punch the time in, hit start, and it counts down.

01:04:51

It's an egg timer type thing. And I used this for years. Do you know how many times

01:04:57

I had to let my opponent borrow my clock? Shabir Ali looking at his watch.

01:05:08

And it was an analog watch for crying out loud. How could you even know? I mean,

01:05:13

I, I could understand if it was digital. I've got a, I've got a beautiful Apple. I love my Apple watch. Oh my goodness. I really wish

01:05:19

I had had these for years and years before. Yeah. Rich going, we know, we know. And he's jealous. But you know,

01:05:26

I could have it a really nice, this has a really nice timer on it that would work in a debate just fine because it does the thing where you could, you know, it's got the thing going around so you can just visually see how much time you have just by glancing.

01:05:40

You don't even have to think about the numbers just by glance at it. So this, this would work fine. But this is what I used initially.

01:05:45

The only disadvantage to this was it beeps at the end. And I didn't necessarily want, you know, beeping on the recording and stuff like that unless it was when the other guy was speaking.

01:06:00

And so I would set my timer for the, you know, the other guy has 10 minutes for his rebuttal, 10 minutes start.

01:06:08

And if it was obvious he was struggling to keep time, then my timer's going off and I'm just sitting there.

01:06:15

Oh, is my timer going off? I guess your time's up, isn't it? Yeah, it is.

01:06:21

Stop talking. There have been people that I've debated. It just did not matter.

01:06:26

They, they could not stop in time. They couldn't do it.

01:06:33

So now what I use is my iPhone and the, the timer function, you can easily set it for, you know, 20 minutes, you hit start.

01:06:47

And if you tap it again, this is what you get. And so you get this circle and you can't tell right now because it's just now started counting down, but that circle is going to start disappearing as time goes by.

01:07:00

And so just by glancing, you see a little teeny tiny break there up at the top already, just by glancing at it, you get an idea of basically where you are in your, in your time frame.

01:07:12

And so what you want to do is, especially in your opening statement, if you can do a 20 minute opening statement, wrap it all up, present all of your information and have a summary right at the end, as you're finishing with two seconds left, probably the moderator, whoever they are, is going to mention that you did that.

01:07:41

Okay. I've had it happen many times. And the audience goes, there's someone that just made a cogent argument and I understand what they're saying.

01:07:51

And they were able to summarize it and it was memorable. And if the next guy gets up and gets to the end of his time and the moderator has to stop him and he has to go, and okay,

01:08:08

I'll get to my last points during the rebuttal. You've already won the debate.

01:08:14

I mean, you really have. The vast majority of people, there's one person prepared here and there's one person who isn't.

01:08:21

And there's one person whose argument I understand is another one who I don't understand because they haven't wrapped up their argument yet.

01:08:27

And I get to start rebutting them before they even finish their presentation.

01:08:34

So I just have always, especially with Shabir, I mean, he's done lots of debates, probably not as many as I have, but he's done lots and lots of debates.

01:08:46

And he's always looking at his watch or something like that.

01:08:53

I've offered to buy him a timer, something to be able to do that.

01:08:58

I don't know. Now, some debates, the debate I just did in Jackson had a nice big debate timer down front.

01:09:11

And I will stop using my iPhone if they're doing a good job with that.

01:09:20

And it is nice and easy. You're doing your presentation. You just glance down there. You've got four minutes and 43 seconds left.

01:09:29

But for some people, if you look down there and you've got four minutes and 43 seconds left, that actually throws them off because they don't really know what can

01:09:42

I get into that. And if I'm not as far through my presentation as I thought I would be, how can

01:09:49

I speed it up? And you can sort of tell the wheels fall off. I had that happen once in London when

01:09:57

I set my timer for the wrong amount of time. I had set my timer for 25 minutes. There were only 20 minute opening statements.

01:10:04

So I did have to all of a sudden make a quick adjustment.

01:10:13

So watching the timer, not getting flustered by the timer, and getting everything in the way that needs to be really, really, really, really important to do.

01:10:29

Real quickly, audience questions, I'll be honest with you.

01:10:37

Out of 193 debates, audience questions have been beneficial to about 15.

01:10:46

In the vast majority of others, it's been a waste of time.

01:10:54

Bill Shishko was the one who kept saying, now, if we have a question, it has the squiggly thing at the end.

01:11:04

Now, audience questions can be done two different ways, obvious. Well, now, three different ways. Audience questions can be written down.

01:11:12

That's very, very common. Write them out down on a card. They're collected halfway through the debate.

01:11:19

Then you have people from both sides go through them. And then the moderator asks the questions of the participants.

01:11:27

The scary way of doing it is having an open mic where you have to threaten people and have a big 280 -pound guy controlling the mic and say, this guy is going to rip your head off if you start preaching and stuff like that.

01:11:41

Now, that's also led to some of the most interesting experiences in debate, such as one that I've used for years, years and years and years.

01:11:53

I debate, when I first debated Hamza Abdul -Malik. So I do not consider it my first Muslim debate because we weren't debating a

01:12:00

Muslim topic. I was simply defending the Trinity. My first Muslim debate was with Shabir Ali.

01:12:05

But I debated Hamza Abdul -Malik before that on Long Island. And the audience, the people recording the debate were

01:12:15

Muslims. And so they put a wireless, now

01:12:23

I think about it, wireless microphone in the middle of the center aisle of the church. And this big

01:12:34

Muslim guy from another country gets up there and he starts asking this question.

01:12:43

And it goes on and on and on.

01:12:49

And the pastor of the church was trying to be the moderator. So he's, do you have a question, sir? It goes on.

01:12:56

And finally he says, sir, I'm going to have him turn the microphone off. You need to answer your question. At one point he gestured and hit the microphone and it goes, knocks it off the stand down the aisle.

01:13:12

They have to go find it and stick it back on. And while he's still asking, they're taping the microphone to the stand so it doesn't get knocked off again.

01:13:22

And finally, after all this time, he goes, so was

01:13:28

Jesus a white man or a black man? And it literally took three minutes or more to get around to this.

01:13:40

And I've played that clip. I have that clip in my, in one of my Muslim presentations, just to give you an idea of the thought process that's going on as people are listening to you talking.

01:13:53

But yeah, if you don't have the microphone out there, you don't get those fascinating type things.

01:14:00

So now the new thing is a

01:14:06

QR code that you can scan and write your question on your phone and send it to this website.

01:14:15

And I guess the new thing, I've never seen it because I'm always the one doing the debate, so I've never used it. But probably about five or six times now

01:14:24

I've been in debates where you send your question in and the other people can go to that website and see the questions and vote for the questions they like.

01:14:37

And that moves them up in the priority list. Who knew? I guess that's not a bad way of doing it.

01:14:48

Yeah, yeah. You get all your friends to go on and get your question at the top. I'm sure it does happen. But now that's another way of doing it, is using the internet as the mechanism of bringing the questions in for the audience questions.

01:15:02

But there's only been a few debates where the audience questions were focused, they were in depth.

01:15:09

Now, look, I like when I'm doing my Muslim debates, I like the audience questions because they generally tend to flow along the same themes and I get to address some really cool stuff.

01:15:21

So people bring up, why did Jesus say, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

01:15:27

And here's really where you have to be built to be able to do this.

01:15:35

It's one thing if you have 20 minutes to make a presentation. It's another thing when you're answering questions in 45 seconds, 60 seconds, do you have any idea how difficult it is to do that and to do it in such a way that you're still making a point?

01:15:56

And then rebuttals. If the other guy got 60 seconds, normally this is what

01:16:03

I suggest, is one side has 60 seconds, if it's addressed to one side, you have 60 seconds, the other side has 30 seconds to rebut.

01:16:13

Try to come up with cogent, interactive statements in 30 seconds.

01:16:21

It is not easy to do in any way, shape, or form. So that's why

01:16:29

I say you have to sort of be wired to do this kind of thing. You can learn to get better at it, but still the ability to speak at that, understandably with clarity, bring stuff together and make cogent points in 30 seconds when you've already been doing this for two and a half hours.

01:16:53

You're getting tired. Your mind, you've been burning calories, believe you me.

01:17:01

It's a bit of a challenge. A couple other things.

01:17:08

I always tell this to anybody that's doing one of their first debates.

01:17:14

Now, again, some debates, I have read my opening statement.

01:17:20

If there are particularly technical topics that are being addressed, there's a vast difference between using

01:17:33

PowerPoint keynote in your opening and not. I know when we do the debates in Houston, the pastor there much prefers not using digital presentations.

01:17:51

He feels that he wants people to see old style scholarly debates where you are seeking to move people by the power of your argument and your spoken word, not by how fancy your slides are.

01:18:05

In my experience, a lot of people who use PowerPoint and keynote abuse them. Remember the debate on the

01:18:13

King James and the Legacy Standard Bible back in Tullahoma a year and a half, two years ago?

01:18:18

My opponent had 254 slides for a 25 minute opening statement.

01:18:25

That's 10 slides per minute. That's one slide over 10 seconds. And every slide was filled with text.

01:18:32

Nobody could even read what he was putting up there, let alone keep up with it.

01:18:39

It was just abusive. It was ridiculous. I just have no interest in debating that guy again.

01:18:48

Now, look, if the other guy uses a nice presentation and you don't, well, advantage goes to him, really.

01:18:59

And some topics, if we're dealing with textual stuff like that, you've got to be able to put it up there for people to be able to see it.

01:19:06

I do prefer non -supplemented debate presentation, but I've done both.

01:19:14

I can put together nice keynote slides and utilize them. But here's something to remember.

01:19:20

Here's something to remember. I don't know why, I can't explain exactly why this is, but I can tell you that it's true.

01:19:29

If you write out your opening statement, now, a lot of people preach from a manuscript, do their opening statement from a manuscript.

01:19:38

I've done opening statements from manuscript before. Let's say you write it out, you sit there, you start your timer, you read it, and you try to read it as if you had an audience.

01:19:55

You time it out and go, man, that's spot on. You won't get it done.

01:20:02

When you get in the debate, it will take you minimally 5 % longer to get through it.

01:20:09

Why? I think it's because you're in front of a live audience and you realize you have to enunciate more clearly, or maybe it's because you're standing and your breathing's different.

01:20:23

I don't know. All I know is this, it will take you longer in the debate to get through your opening statement than it does sitting in your office.

01:20:33

So aim for at least a minute shorter and it'll probably end up working outright for you.

01:20:41

Just do it. Trust me. I've told that to a lot of people and they said, you were exactly right.

01:20:48

I barely made it through and I had shortened it from what I thought I'd be able to make it at your suggestion.

01:20:55

So it is going to take you longer in the live debate. A couple other things.

01:21:03

I know I'm going a whole lot longer than I thought I would. It is so useful.

01:21:08

This is something that's been one of the biggest advantages I've had in all my debates.

01:21:14

When I debated Bart Ehrman, I had read every Bart Ehrman book in print.

01:21:21

I had listened to all the classes of his that were available. I spent six months. He didn't know who

01:21:28

I was. He hadn't read a word I'd ever said, had no idea, and didn't care.

01:21:35

John Shelby Spong, I had read all his books on the relevant subject. I had listened to everything he had said on the relevant subject.

01:21:45

One of the classic debates that I've done was against Peter Stravinskis on Purgatory.

01:21:53

If you want a master class on cross -examination from the Bible, the cross -examination of Peter Stravinskis, I can't think of a better one.

01:22:04

I walked him through 1 Corinthians chapter 3. The debate was done.

01:22:09

It was over with at that point. His debating career was over with. I don't think he's ever debated again.

01:22:18

The point is, in his opening statement, he talks about his conversations with Jimmy Swaggart.

01:22:28

Jimmy Swaggart, he has no idea. I'm as different from Jimmy Swaggart as anyone he could possibly debate.

01:22:34

But he didn't take the time. He didn't care. Spong didn't care. Ehrman didn't care.

01:22:41

And I can name just a few people. The Roman Catholic fellow that I debated on Unbelievable, then we debated in London, then we debated in Belfast.

01:22:52

I'm sorry, what? That might be it. Super sharp and knew my stuff backwards and forwards.

01:23:02

That makes for the great debate. You respect someone like that. Very few of the people

01:23:08

I debate actually know where I'm coming from. They don't care.

01:23:13

They just don't think we have anything worthwhile to say. So I always want to know where my opponents could be coming from.

01:23:21

And I'm honestly nervous going into debates where my opponent has not written anything, hasn't recorded anything, published anything.

01:23:32

I can't find YouTube videos. When I debated this Tom Riello fellow in Jackson just a matter of months ago, had nothing.

01:23:43

Really had nothing. And the debate really resulted in almost nothing. I mean,

01:23:48

I got to speak the truth and he collapsed at Hebrews 725, which is where everybody collapses.

01:23:55

But it wasn't nearly as useful as it could have been, mainly because he didn't want to be all that useful.

01:24:02

But I didn't know where he'd be coming from. And there's all sorts of people that I've ended up debating.

01:24:09

I'm far more comfortable when I've had the opportunity and the time to know where my opponent's coming from, know what their arguments are going to be.

01:24:19

That's always been an advantage of mine. And so we're talking about debate in February.

01:24:28

And one of the names that has been given to me, I pulled up a debate that he was doing.

01:24:34

I was listening to it while writing a couple of days ago. I want to know. I think that's just necessary.

01:24:40

I think you're just taking a huge risk and being rather arrogant if you don't take the time to do that type of thing to find out.

01:24:50

Okay. All right. Last few things that have to do with being organized.

01:25:02

Rich remembers this, I'm sure. After the second night of debating geromatics in Denver, I had put all my stuff away.

01:25:16

I had this big, still have it, silver book bag that opened like this.

01:25:21

You can put a fair amount. I mean, it could get pretty heavy. You could put a lot of stuff in there. And I had two of them.

01:25:28

I think I still have both of them in my office all these years later. And all my stuff was put away.

01:25:36

I had two book bags sitting there on my six foot long table. And Rich and I were talking.

01:25:41

Most of the people had left by then. And we're staying there and I look over at Jerry's table.

01:25:51

Do you remember this? And the entire six foot table is covered in yellow pads of paper, pieces of paper, books stacked on top of each other, books opened and laying on top of each other.

01:26:10

There is not a square inch. There's not a square inch at the top of that table that is open.

01:26:18

Underneath the table looks the same except for where his feet were.

01:26:26

It is a disaster area. And so here's my table, all my stuff's put away.

01:26:33

And there's Jerry's table. And it is a disaster. He comes walking in from the foyer from talking to folks.

01:26:39

And Rich and I are just sort of standing there and we're talking and he sees us looking at his table.

01:26:45

And he walks up the steps and he looks at his table and he looks over at my table and looks at us.

01:26:51

He says, well, you win the organization contest or something along those lines.

01:26:57

That's what he said. But yeah, I mean, some debates, you need to have books, you need some resources there.

01:27:09

But to be honest with you, the way we do debates now where time is an absolute premium,

01:27:16

I've even mentioned, I've thought about in future debates, building in at least 60 seconds between each segment.

01:27:28

That's long enough to maybe look up one reference. For example, when

01:27:34

I debated Tom Riello, I wanted to, he kept making the assertion that Ignatius had talked about bishops, priests and elders or something like that.

01:27:46

And I was like, no, he didn't. But I didn't want to say that without having the chance to do a quick search.

01:27:56

I mean, I have Ignatius in Greek in accordance on my laptop, but I didn't have time to do that.

01:28:03

I did it afterwards and I was right. He was wrong. He was converting presbyters into priests, which are different words.

01:28:12

So Ignatius had not said what he said, but he said it a number of times. If there had been a couple of minutes between breaks,

01:28:19

I would have done the search, gone, am I right? Then bring that up. Might do that for some future debates.

01:28:27

It's not a bad idea. But the key to everybody, let me show you real quickly.

01:28:37

I mentioned, I was doing another program. What do

01:28:42

I take my notes on? Well, for, I still have most of the paper, pads of paper that I've used in the past.

01:28:55

For example, I ran across the notes I took during the Bible Answer Man broadcast with George Bryson in 2003.

01:29:04

And you can see right on it where I had written because Eddie D 'Alcor was sitting next to me.

01:29:10

And I wrote to him during one of the breaks, this is the last time I will ever be on BAM.

01:29:16

And that was during the first hour. And I knew it because it was so obvious to me, it was an ambush, a purposeful ambush where Hank was working with George Bryson.

01:29:27

They had gotten together and said, this is how we will handle this. So I was, it was one against two.

01:29:33

The problem was one of the two didn't want to work with the other one of the two. And you could just see the frustration on Hank's face because George just would not,

01:29:44

Hank would try to set him up and George just go off into some place. And yeah, so I have a lot of that stuff there.

01:29:52

So initially that's what I did. Then I found this thing and I can't remember what it was called, but I found a pen.

01:30:00

I'm sure they still make them. And it's still a really valid way of doing things that you write on a certain kind of paper and it records the audio of what's going on.

01:30:12

So if I had a kid going to school, going to college lectures, man, this is what

01:30:17

I'd get them because they can, while they're taking notes, it's recording.

01:30:23

And then afterwards you can go back and you can take the pen and you can tap anywhere in your notes or on your computer because it'll transfer what you wrote on your computer.

01:30:33

When you tap on it, it will play what was being said at that time. I mean, that's brilliant.

01:30:39

It really is. And I started using it, A, to have a backup of the debate because I did a debate,

01:30:46

I forget what year it was, and the guys never recorded it. And I was like, what?

01:30:52

And it was an attorney on Reformed theology and he was one of the best people I debated on.

01:30:57

Nobody recorded it. There's no record of it. So that was one of the reasons

01:31:03

I did it. But then the other reason I thought maybe someday someone will say,

01:31:08

I never said that. And I could just tap on it and it would play it. Never had to do that. Eventually I moved away from that.

01:31:16

And this is an iPad, by the way. This past year, when

01:31:24

I did those four debates in one trip, we got sick and all the rest of that stuff, I had to end up using the iPad because I forgot my remarkable tablet, which

01:31:33

I'll talk about in a second. I made it through and I do the thing with the iPad where I have the keyboard -type thing.

01:31:44

And so you can do it this way.

01:31:50

I wasn't as comfortable with it, but it certainly does work. And I will always have this there because this will be my

01:31:58

Bible normally. If I want to do a search in accordance, olive tree, have the original language text, you'll see this very iPad.

01:32:07

When I was cross -examining Layton Flowers, I would just open up John Six.

01:32:15

And what's nice about that is the fonts are so huge that I don't have to be putting glasses on, doing this type of thing.

01:32:23

It's big enough, I don't need that. And it's right there in front of me and say, okay, so what about this term? And I can be looking right over the other person, really much, much easier to do it that way.

01:32:33

The iPad is extremely useful. And of course, now, initially this wasn't the case, but now the

01:32:42

Accordance, Logos, Olive Tree, those are the three Bible programs I use. I use Logos primarily for other resources, not for Bible.

01:32:50

They're all just as powerful on iPad as they are on my MacBook Pro. So that's extremely useful along those lines too.

01:33:01

But a few years ago, and I'm sure Jeff's going to listen to this.

01:33:08

Jeff Durbin walks into church at Apologia, and he has this. It's the Remarkable 2.

01:33:14

Now, I'm probably not going to be using this anymore. I've got the new Markable Pro. And I guess

01:33:20

I mentioned that, and I've already had one person on Twitter contact me. Now, this is someone I know super sharp, and I've actually talked to him.

01:33:28

You know, you and I, we should team up to do some debates because he's super sharp in church history. And this is the next generation, pass these things along.

01:33:38

He's already contacted me and said, hey, if you're not going to be using your Remarkable 2 anymore, can I buy it from you?

01:33:44

And I'm like, yeah, I think we can probably work that out. He's involved in ministry. It'll work. So Jeff walks in one day, and I had tried using pens on the iPad.

01:33:57

It just never worked for me. Sometimes you have to write real fast.

01:34:02

It just never had that same pen on paper feel. And then

01:34:07

I checked out the Remarkable, and it's like writing on a piece of paper. And so I showed you what it looked like.

01:34:18

And here is the functional thing. Now, so this past year, 2024, they came out.

01:34:26

Now, you can tell this is a little thicker. It is a little bigger. It is a little heavier, but I don't have to go through TSA anymore.

01:34:36

So I don't care because I have to get it out. And believe you me, my 6 .6 turbo diesel doesn't care that I have this much more weight than I had before.

01:34:46

Now they have the Remarkable Pro, and I went ahead and we upgraded.

01:34:56

Why? You can't see it in here, but there's a backlight on this.

01:35:03

There is some, it's very dim, but there is a backlight on it. And it's color.

01:35:09

Now, it's not really bright color, but it is color. And so why would

01:35:16

I think that that would be worth the upgrade price? Because they're not cheap.

01:35:23

I'll tell you. And here's the real functional thing as we start wrapping up here. This is where debate happens in my mind.

01:35:33

I'm sitting there, and I can use it if I want to have notes for my opening statement.

01:35:40

There are times I've done opening statements with no notes. There are times I've done entire debates without any notes.

01:35:47

If it's a subject that I know well, I don't need the notes. They're going to be in my way. If it's not a super technical subject or something like that, why do it?

01:35:59

And I am offended when someone has, it's one thing for you to read your opening statement.

01:36:06

That's fine. No problem. When you read your rebuttal, when you read your questions and you read your closing, you didn't debate me.

01:36:16

You weren't interacting with me. You were interacting with what you expected me to say. It may or may not be accurate.

01:36:22

I have no respect for that. I'll just be honest with you. I just don't have any respect for that. And that has happened a couple of times with different people.

01:36:32

But you're sitting there. And so it has this little pen type thing you have to use on it.

01:36:41

I was always worried that I'd lose this, especially when I was still traveling. It's here on the side.

01:36:49

Three or four times I've found it in my bag because it's just held there. It holds on pretty good, but in fact, the new one holds on even harder.

01:37:02

So I do like that. But you're listening to the other person. You're writing as quickly as you can.

01:37:10

You've still got to write legibly enough that you can read your own notes. I've seen people get up there and they're like, oh boy,

01:37:19

I had another point there, but I can't read what I wrote. You're writing these things down as he's presenting them.

01:37:26

In your mind, you're using that lens that you've already come up with.

01:37:34

And you're prioritizing what's in light of what I have said.

01:37:42

What has he said that I need to get to devote the most time to? Because think about it, if you have 20 minute opening statements and 10 minute rebuttals, you've got half the time.

01:37:52

You can't get to everything the other person said. It's not possible. So you have to go, all right, what's the most important thing?

01:38:00

What are the things that most impact my case in what this person has said?

01:38:06

And it may not be the first things he says. So you're writing all this stuff down. You're listening.

01:38:13

You're writing. At the same time, the process, and this is where people will struggle, the process going on in your mind is this is my first, as soon as I get up,

01:38:26

I'm tackling this, then this, then this, then this. And what

01:38:32

I would do is I would use numbers. So star, start with that. One, two, three.

01:38:40

These are the things that I'm going to, and if I can't get to four, five, and six, I can't get to four, five, and six.

01:38:46

That's just, that's the nature of debate. But hopefully you are processing what the other person has said, and you're putting them in a good order.

01:38:58

So you're taking out the most major points. You can't get to all the minor points. Just, it's just not possible.

01:39:04

Why then go with this? It's color. So I can just tap, go to red, and go and circle that, circle that, circle that.

01:39:15

There's the stuff that I need to get to. I'm not looking, I'm not having to look through my messy writing for numbers.

01:39:22

I've got color to grab my eye and go here, here, here, here. Do it this way.

01:39:28

Or maybe I'll just, haven't done it, use it for this. It'll be these, February will be the first time I've used it.

01:39:33

But maybe I'll just switch to that to put the numbers in. So I'll be able to find them that much easier. That's really functionally why

01:39:39

I wanted to be able to do that, was it's just a of that a little bit less energy of the mind looking at what your notes are to be able to find what you need, to be able to get done what you need to get done in the time period that you have to do it in.

01:40:01

So let me see here. We've got the timers. We've got your note -taking devices.

01:40:10

Um, yeah, I'd say that's probably pretty much everything.

01:40:17

I'm sorry. I've got, yes, yeah, as, as Stravinska said, looking up on your gizmo there, he was, he wanted to get out of that place so bad by the time he got done.

01:40:29

It was not even, and you know, the funny thing is people started coming up to him and they started going after him.

01:40:34

I tried to go over there and, and help honestly, to try to calm people down.

01:40:40

I, I wasn't trying to have the man utterly embarrassed. He embarrassed himself by the way he prepared for the debate, to be honest with you.

01:40:47

Um, but yeah, there you go. So that wasn't a story time with uncle Jimmy, because there are so many stories

01:40:54

I could tell you. Um, maybe once I retire,

01:40:59

I will listen to all those debates and start taking notes. Oh yeah.

01:41:05

And put together a book, um, you know, a lifetime of debates or something like that.

01:41:11

I don't, I don't know. Maybe that would be something that would be worthwhile doing down the road. Um, but hopefully this has been useful to somebody as you may prepare.

01:41:23

By the way, I should note that, um, right before the program started, um,

01:41:32

Dale Tuggy, he and I debated in Houston recently, relatively recently.

01:41:39

Uh, Dale Tuggy said on Twitter about this program.

01:41:47

He says, while you're at it, you can touch on the differences between preaching and debating. Uh, and you know what?

01:41:55

I will. Um, especially my Muslim opponents recognize that in my closing statement,

01:42:05

I will become a preacher. And if you're debating topics like the gospel, obedience to Christ, worship of God, um, those should not be approached as sterile scholarly subjects.

01:42:23

Um, I am a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ and yes, I will preach the gospel in a debate.

01:42:31

Now I will try not to just completely ignore the topic of the debate or something, but if I have done what

01:42:38

I need to do and I have substantiated either my objection to the thesis or my presentation of the thesis, in my closing statement,

01:42:50

I will bring the claims of Christ to bear on my opponent, my opponent's position, and to the people in the audience.

01:42:59

And I do not, uh, apologize for that at all because I don't think doing debate well does not mean that you do it without passion.

01:43:11

Um, some people confuse their passion with argument. I'm not confusing that.

01:43:18

But if I've made my argument and I've established a foundation, then I'll make application. Um, I'll do that.

01:43:25

And I do. Um, and Dale, you're just not a preacher.

01:43:31

Um, and with all due respect, sir, you sound like you're selling life insurance and people don't understand that.

01:43:43

If you're talking about the true God and you sound like you're lecturing on actuary tables for insurance, people see, find a disconnect there.

01:43:58

They don't, they don't, they don't understand that. If, if I'm talking about the worship of Christ, if I'm talking about the lamb standing before the throne in Revelation chapter five, standing as if slain and all the world, everybody in heaven and earth and under the earth are worshiping he who sits on the throne and the lamb.

01:44:18

Um, I can't do that in some cold, dead, bored voice.

01:44:27

I can't do it. And I think, I think you need to think about the fact that you do.

01:44:35

Why is that? I don't know. I don't know. Just something that's interesting in case he's listening.

01:44:41

I don't know what he is, but he did tweet to me. And, and by the way, I should mention after we had our debate, send a very nice thank you note in the mail.

01:44:49

I don't know that I ever got a chance to reply to it because when I got back from that trip, I think I ended up in the hospital. Um, it was just hasn't been that, that wasn't an easy year.

01:44:59

Um, so I apologize if I didn't, but I did appreciate that Dale did contact me in that way.

01:45:04

And we've talked about doing future debates. I'd like to, I'd like to debate John one, uh, with him.

01:45:11

Uh, but again, we have very different approaches and that's perfectly fine, but also says something about which audiences we are seeking to, uh, to, uh, communicate with.

01:45:22

All right. An hour and 45 minutes. Let's wrap it up. Uh, thanks for watching the program today. Hope it was useful to you.