Debate Teacher Reacts: Greg Koukl vs. John Baker

Is that what he's trying to communicate? I mean, like, it's very frustrating because he's not speaking clearly. I think we need to get a translator for this guy.

That's my anger translator, Luther. Welcome back to another

Debate Teacher Reacts video. My name is Nate Sala. Thanks so much for watching. I'm the president of a Christian nonprofit organization called

Wise Disciple. And here at Wise Disciple, we're all about living effectively as Christians in today's culture.

Now, if you are brand spanking new to this series, welcome, welcome. Come on in. Come on. Have a seat. Crisscross applesauce.

Okay. If you are interested in raising the level of discourse when it comes to Christian apologetics debates, then congratulations.

I'm your huckleberry. I'm your huckleberry. That's just my game.

Today, we're looking at another debate that you all voted and decided for me that we should do.

This is Greg Koukl versus Professor John Baker. The topic was, do objective moral truths exist?

Now, this debate took place back in 2009 at the University of Calgary, where Professor Baker was a professor there.

I'm not sure if he still is. Now, again, I don't have the time to look at the full entire debate.

I encourage you to, okay, because what you're going to find is that during the opening statements, both interlocutors should be able to unpack their main contentions and arguments and provide all the evidence to support their arguments in order to take a position on the topic.

Again, the topic is, do objective moral truths exist? What this means is that the person that takes the AF position or the affirmative, they should be providing arguments and evidence to show that, yes, objective moral truths do exist.

Then the person on the other side that takes the neg or should provide arguments and evidence to show that no objective moral truths do not exist.

Now, cross -examination should be challenging the opening statements, right? The main contentions that have been provided, the arguments that have been unpacked in the opening.

So let's go right to cross -examination and see what's what in clash. Now we're going to begin with a six -minute cross -examination for each of the speakers.

We'll begin with Mr. Koukl again. He will keep his answers short and to the point.

You know what? So this debate sounds like the audio is really not great. So you should probably turn on the captions for this.

And I'm going to see if I can try to hear this a lot better. We'll do our best.

It's an old video. What are you going to do? Okay, good. Dr. Baker, I was confused about some of the things that you said.

First of all, your opening comment, the debate is, do objective moral rules exist?

Is your answer yes or no to that question? Right. So here's the thing. The reason that Koukl is bringing this up, and I assume laying that framework, you know, again, for the audience is because Dr.

Baker just concluded in the opener. So you got to go back and look at the opening statement. But he just concluded a very underwhelming opening statement.

All right. There was no clear framework to help the audience understand, like how to think through the debate, how to adjudicate it from Dr.

Baker's position. The arguments themselves that, you know, he finally got to and delineated was only at the very end of his opening, but then he actually just ran out of time to unpack them.

He spent the majority of the time on evidence that supports his first contention, you know, which essentially tracked the idea or the argument for moral diversity.

But he never justified that argument at all. So, you know, or how the evidence that he listed provides any warrant for his claim.

Right. So Greg's strategy at this point is to bring the audience back in and get them thinking about how to judge what they've seen so far.

Okay. So you do not believe in objective moral rules, but you did say you believe in evil.

So can you explain to me what you mean by evil? So think, think of what

I've said, the moral, the human predicament is that moralities, moralities, remember, are designed to address.

One of the features of the human predicament is that people are capable of feeling horrible pain.

People are capable of feeling great distress. So in most moralities that look reasonable, that can be well grounded, that provide a possibly good way of life, there will of course be recognition of this fact.

So in most moralities, there will be rules which say that you ought not to cause to other people degrees of pain, degree, degrees of distress that make their lives something like unbearable.

So an intent, an evil act is an act designed to promote some great misery or some great pain, either to one individual or perhaps to many.

Okay. I agree with that, with that basic position of why is it wrong to cause people pain and misery?

Right. Again, this is Greg Koukl, the moral realist, trying to expose the assumptions going into Dr.

Baker's anti -realist view. Dr. Baker just got done saying that his definition of evil is when someone inflicts great pain or misery on someone else.

By the way, the rule of public speaking is put the microphone up to your mouth. I don't know why Dr. Baker didn't do this.

I don't know what else to do, right? Like, I don't want to blast your ears out. So we're working with the audio that we got, but that is what he said.

You know, that's why you got to keep the captions on. The problem with what he said is he's presupposing that it's morally wrong to inflict great pain and misery on others.

So in other words, he's smuggling in a moral assumption in order to construct his moral anti -realist system.

And that's what Koukl is trying to flesh out and expose. Is it because our culture has decided that in a pluralistic kind of way?

And if there are cultures who disagree and think it's fine to create pain and pleasure, are they obliged to do otherwise?

Well, I can't resist a true poet's answer. First poet says it a couple times.

I'm sorry, I have a little difficult time hearing. I'm sorry. First part of the answer is, why is it wrong to cause pain?

Because it hurts. If you don't know what's wrong with pain, you've never had a pain, right?

What's wrong with causing pain isn't that the causing of pain is in some way, for example, contrary to God's will.

That's to understand what's wrong with pain, right? That makes the causing of pain wrong because God doesn't like it.

I'm not bringing that into the discussion. That's the first part. The second part of the reply, what's wrong with pain, is that we can avoid pain, right?

It's part of the human predicament that we feel pain. We can so structure moralities that we can organize things so that people feel less pain than they would otherwise feel.

Why isn't that a complete answer? So, here's why what

Dr. Baker just did is not great, okay? This isn't a good answer. He's still missing a couple of steps here, okay?

Which is, if moral realism is false, which is Kokel's position, right? If it's false, then there is no such thing as objective moral values and obligations, all right?

But that's what's missing from this answer, a justification for moral obligations with regard to pain.

Pain hurts, okay? Agreed. I think we all agree, right? So, therefore, it's morally wrong to inflict pain?

Wait, wait, wait, wait. There's a couple of missing pieces here, you know? Our society has agreed that it's morally wrong to inflict pain and misery.

Our moral obligations derive from social agreement. Therefore, it's morally wrong to inflict pain.

You see what I mean? There's a couple of missing steps here that are not being acknowledged at all. All that stuff got skipped over, but this is where we really do benefit to slow down and zoom in on each part of the argument in order to make sure that we're thinking about all of these things very, very carefully.

Well, the question really is, what is it? Well, maybe I'll put it this way. You are admitting, then, that causing pain is wrong.

And that would be true regardless of what culture you're in and what other circumstances you may be in and whether your pluralistic culture happens to think otherwise.

You're saying that it is wrong. Now, that sounds to me a lot like moral realism. That is, it's an objective moral harm.

It's not just something that was invented by a human being. Okay, can you distinguish the two for us?

Think of what the human predicament is. I mean, describe the human predicament.

There's a lot more to it, of course, than that. If the function of morality is to do something about the human predicament, which is their function, then part of the function of morality will be to address the various things that constitute the human predicament, the realities of human life.

And so, not surprisingly, any morality with that kind of a goal will have rules which forbid the causing of, not causing pain, causing of unnecessary pain.

It's not the case that causing pain is wrong under all circumstances. Obviously, in certain kinds of medical procedures, it's useful to use the feeling of pain as a test procedure for whether you've gone too far or not far enough.

So, it's causing of unnecessary pain in most circumstances. Which circumstances vary with the particular realities of the situation.

Yeah, I agree that there are difficulties in trying to figure out what right moral principle to apply or when.

The topic of the debate, which was clearly explained by the moderator, Koukl reiterated it in the beginning of cross -exam, is do objective moral truths exist?

It's not, how do moral systems work across societies? It's, do objective moral truths exist at all?

It's almost like Baker is having a completely different conversation at this point. But maybe

Koukl can bring it back in. It is right or wrong to allow pain. But it sounds suspiciously like what you're drawing on is an objective principle regarding the issue of harm, that it is wrong to create harm in a person without proper justification.

And this is a broad, objective principle that can be applied in different circumstances.

And in fact, you're trading on that in all of these discussions. If in fact it isn't the case then, there could be cultures that completely disagree with your assessment about how morality ought to operate and might follow a completely different road map.

And consequently, they would be allowed to do that from your perspective as I understand it.

Could you respond to that please? So, Ashish, what I keep on asking is, what's wrong with causing pain?

My answer to that question is, it hurts. You got to answer the question that you are asked.

So we don't get to do this kind of a thing. I mean, I know these are more informal debates, right? So, you know, here we are.

But you really should in cross -examination answer the question that you've been asked. What you're saying is, what you just said is that what's wrong with causing pain is that it's contrary to some principle, which is grounded objectively.

I think you don't understand what's wrong with causing pain. It's the wrong way around. It's upside down.

Well, it seems to me that if it's wrong, then it's wrong. If it's not wrong, then it's not wrong.

I just got to cut off time there. So I guess I'm done. Thank you. Wow. Short cross -examination.

Kind of a weird ending too, to Kokel's time. I mean, it's kind of hard to tell exactly what

Baker was trying to imply there. I mean, maybe Baker thinks Kokel and moral realists like him are sort of missing the more materialist brute facts that inform and shape our moral set of principles.

I mean, maybe what he means, well, this is why

I really don't like when debate opponents don't speak clearly and articulately, because now we're left to try to infer what they really meant by their words here.

I mean, it could be the case that Baker is trying to say, because Baker mentioned something about God's will.

So maybe what Baker is trying to say is that Kokel has some kind of view of divine command theory. When Kokel talks about morality, he's talking about divine command theory.

By the way, divine command theory in one way to characterize is just the reason that an action is morally good is because God commands it.

I guess what Baker's trying to say is instead of noticing the necessity of avoiding great pain, Kokel is pointing to another kind of set of principles or conventions, which is divine command theory in his mind.

But I don't know if that's what he means because he's not speaking clearly, you know? Also, he didn't answer

Kokel's question. So you got to answer the question. Kokel asked him to respond to the idea of other cultures operating on antithetical moral assumptions in order to live by a different system.

And it appears that Baker's stance has no answer to these kinds of cultures. So this was his opportunity to respond to this, and he decided to stick to the question of pain and hurting or something.

So Baker's not doing a great job. At this point, he's guilty of doing what Kokel said he would do.

Kokel predicted in his opening statement that Baker was going to try to smuggle in a moral realism into his own system of moral anti -realism.

Now, if I were Kokel, I would have attacked Baker's argument for moral diversity a little bit harder.

You know, I would have provided some more tough questions and sort of forced him to articulate his argument and justify it, you know?

But it was, you know, I mean, it's a super tight cross exam. It's only like five minutes or whatever it was. Not a huge amount of time.

But right now, Kokel has the advantage. A major part of Greg's argument was the use of a very famous argument, as far as I know, first stated by Renford Bramborough in 1952 in the natural law, general natural law,

I think it's called. And the argument proceeds by attempting to show that moral realism is correct and moral anti -realism of the kind that I'm arguing is incorrect by producing an example.

Get to the question. So he produced the example of genocide and torture of children, which was the question.

So the question that I want to ask is, why do you feel that on a picture of morality which is designed to address the human predicament, any moral system would similarly prohibit such activities?

I'm just having a little difficulty here, I guess, sitting behind you like this. Why do I think that, I'm sorry, why do

I feel like this is a good word to use? Why, on what grounds do you think that with the picture of morality that an anti -realist like me is suggesting, where morality is designed to address the human predicament, such moralities as are viewed as reasonable wouldn't contain prohibitions of such activity.

Of course they wouldn't. Wow. What an awful, awful muddled question.

I mean, did you understand what he was asking? You got to turn the captions on because this guy doesn't like his own microphone.

Let me play this one more time because I think this is instructive. Let me just back this up. On what grounds do you think that with the picture of morality that an anti -realist like me is suggesting, where morality is designed to address the human predicament, such moralities as are viewed as reasonable wouldn't contain prohibitions of such activity?

Of course they wouldn't. Don't you think? Okay, I see where he's going with this.

This is not the kinds of questions that you should be asking in cross -examination. I mean, essentially what Baker is doing at this point is he's kind of saying like, well, you know, what do you think the problem is with my view?

You know, I mean, don't you think my view works? Why do you think it doesn't work?

I mean, that's not a great way to go about this. You got to remember what the topic was for the debate, right?

Do objective moral truths exist? I think Baker, he's watching a different debate or something.

You know, like he's turned to the wrong television channel. And really, I mean, this is the same problem that we see with a lot of atheists and they continue to make this, which by the way, you can argue as an atheist for some kind of ethical system.

I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that you set yourself up for trouble if you're trying to do what Baker does. And then when he tries to like argue against Kochel, the

Christian's position, he does the same thing that a lot of atheists do. They make the same mistake. Baker is confusing moral epistemology with ontology, all right?

Kochel never suggested that moral anti -realists cannot figure out that genocide is wrong.

That's not what he's saying. Kochel is saying that there is no objective obligation for another society to break from Baker's view of moral oughts, you know, and go and do something antithetical to that.

I bet somewhere in there, because Baker probably has no background in debate, I don't know what brought him up on stage in the first place, but it appears to me that he doesn't have a background in debate.

I wonder if Baker was thinking to himself, you know, if I ask the right kind of difficult question, if I word it in such a complex way that it's confusing,

Kochel won't be able to answer and he'll look foolish in front of the audience. And then I'll have a gotcha moment, right?

And so he proceeds to ask a question that nobody can understand, because guess what? If your interlocutor doesn't understand the question, chances are your audience won't understand the question either.

You got to keep the questions very, very simple. And the other thing is, like, Baker's job at any given moment is to keep laying a framework for the audience to help them adjudicate, even with his line of questioning, he's supposed to do that, and he's not doing that.

So this isn't going well for Baker. I think you're describing something different, though. If you wanted to make toast well,

I might have a series of instructions that would allow you to get to the end that you have in mind.

But of course, making toast well is not a moral kind of thing, it's just an activity, and you might have prescriptive steps to do that well that would make sense.

But we're talking about something that's not just how to live well, we are talking about a moral obligation to treat human beings in a way that is well, if you can put it that way.

Humans thrive under certain sets of circumstances, you described them. Why are we obliged to serve the thriving of other human beings when maybe if I thwart that in other people,

I can live better myself? My suspicion here is what you're doing is you're actually smuggling the morality that I'm describing into your systems, which is what makes the systems look appealing.

But the minute that you acknowledge that these are not objective, but they are subjective, they are the things that you have decided will help your thriving under that circumstance, and they have no force other than they get you what you want under your circumstances.

I think moral rules turn out to be something different, and the illustrations that I gave up there incite something in us, and what you saw, when you felt and saw about those things that I showed, wasn't like, well that's not getting us what we want in our culture as well as we would like it.

That violates what we've described or decided will give us moral flourishing or human flourishing.

I think what you realize is that these things were wrong, whether the culture that did it felt it was flourishing or not.

Right, and so what Kokel is pointing to is things that he laid out in his opening statement, which he talked about Matthew Shepard, who was brutally beaten and murdered for being gay.

He talked about genocide in Cambodia, and he talked about Emmett Till, which these are all horrific, horrific, you know, tragic stories on the scale of morality.

They're evil. That's what he's referring to. Now, this is a good answer, okay, but just being very picky here, I think

I would have pointed out the confusion that Baker is making between epistemology and ontology.

I really do. It needs to be pointed out. Otherwise, Baker might continue to confuse it in the debate moving forward, and again, chances are if Baker's confusing it, then somebody in the audience is too, right?

It's not a huge deal because the idea that Baker is smuggling in objective morality in order to create his system, it's a very strong point to make, so I'm glad that Kokel made it, but just being picky,

I would have done something a little bit different. Let me ask a different question. Why do you think that if one abandons the kind of moral realism that you espouse, which seems to have a single correct morality, that everything is going to fall apart and that we're stuck with relativism?

Relativism being the view that what's right or wrong is simply a function of the conventions enforcing your society.

Isn't there a third alternative, the one I described? Right. I mean, again, what

Baker's asking Kokel is, you know, well, don't you think my view actually is sound?

I mean, like, you know, don't you think that my view is good? You know, and the reason why that's not a great strategy is he's inviting

Kokel to just restate his opening arguments. That's all he's doing. He's basically getting

Kokel to restate everything that he said in his opener. You don't want your opponent to do that in cross -examination.

You're supposed to be, like, attacking your opponent's contentions, attacking the arguments that they made in their opening statement, pointing out the flaws and the errors in that thinking so that, theoretically, if those are bad arguments, that they kind of implode in front of people in real time.

That's not what Baker's doing. You know, it's like, well, Mr. Kokel, why don't you think my view works?

You know, why do you think your view is correct? That's going to really backfire against Baker because, watch,

Kokel's probably just going to restate whatever he said before. You described relativism as conventionalism.

Conventionalism is one type of relativism. Relativism is whenever the authority of the moral rule that's being posited comes from the subject and not from the object.

In other words, whenever it is the group or the individual, however it's characterized, they are the one who decides what's right and wrong.

But, of course, when you have those circumstances, then you have freed up the group to decide whatever they want in their circumstances, what is right or wrong, and you don't have any standing from which to object.

We can't complain that Jews are oppressing Palestinians, for example, because that's their own cultural problem.

They have their own moral rules. We have ours. There is, as you pointed out, a pluralism of moralities, and that's just a different one.

Now, my view is that we are in a position, because we can reflect and see that some things are wrong regardless of what people agree on and regardless of what culture they happen to live in.

But that can only be true if morals are objective in some sense, and that with regards to any given thing, like persecuting

Palestinians, there is an answer for that. It isn't a matter of what an individual culture or person decides.

Right. So, Kokel was just given free reign to just go back into his opening statement and draw out a lot of stuff that he already said and just say it again.

Right. And that's what sticks. That's what's going to stick with the audience on the way out the door. So, that was a horrible move by Baker.

Also, I wonder if Baker was trying to get at something a little bit different here, because he doesn't speak clearly enough, you know.

So, I think maybe his point got missed. Actually, I want to hear that again. Just do me a favor. Let's go back for a split second.

Why do you think that if one abandons the kind of moral realism that you espouse, which seems to have a single correct morality, that everything is going to fall apart and that we're stuck with relativism?

Relativism being the view that what's right or wrong is simply a function of the conventions enforcing your society.

Isn't there a third alternative? Right. So, he's asking about, like, why,

Cokel, why do you seem to think that if we do not go along with your particular view of morality, that everything is going to fall apart?

And then he mentions relativism. I wonder if Baker doesn't mean relativism here.

I wonder if he means nihilism, right? Because Cokel's right. Like, if moral conventionalism is what

Baker is after, then relativism naturally follows from that, okay? Because different societies will not agree in various points because they'll have different social conventions that they're operating in, right?

By the way, to use a very benign example of this, like, I'm part Syrian, and in the Arabic culture, it is extremely complimentary to burp out loud after a meal in order to show the cook that you greatly appreciated what they made, okay?

In America, not so much. Different conventions, right? I think maybe Baker was talking about nihilism, you know?

That is, for argument's sake, if anti -realism were true, it doesn't automatically follow that we'll all slip into nihilism, or nihilism's going to emerge from that.

And if that's the point that he's trying to make, he's not wrong. But again, I mean, like, is that what he's trying to communicate?

I mean, like, it's very frustrating because he's not speaking clearly. I think we need to get a translator for this guy.

That's my anger translator, Luther. Whoa! Yeah! What's up? One of the arguments that you used proceeded by saying that there is a vocabulary, the words like right, wrong, has a right, just, and so on and so forth, which are only usable if you think that there is a unique, correct morality.

Why do you think that's so? Why can't there be uses for these words in the several plural moralities that are describable?

Oh my goodness. I'll let you answer that question. I'll answer real quickly. Yeah, was he paying attention at all to Kokel's opening statement?

Does he know what this topic is really about? The topic of the debate?

What's that? I think we're, okay, we're getting to the bottom of this now. Here is a clip of Dr. Baker while Greg was giving his opener.

I mean, wow.

This was a very underwhelming debate from Baker. I would have thought that somebody with his background,

I think he's a philosophy professor that teaches ethics at that university. Somebody like that should have been up to the challenge to engage

Kokel in this kind of debate. He wasn't. He really wasn't. From my perspective, he had no background in debate at all, wasn't properly prepared, and came out to give basically what looks like a typical lecture from his classroom, essentially, on morality.

He gave a lecture. Go back to the opening statement and watch. He gives slides, no offense to teachers, but you don't put the amount of words on a particular slide when you're giving a lecture that Baker did in his opener.

I mean, it's just, it's a big mistake. He came to give a lecture instead of a debate. Because he did not engage the topic as well as Kokel did, because he really laid no framework to help the audience think through, to help them adjudicate the two positions that they're hearing.

Remember, it very often does come down to whoever laid a better framework in the debate.

That's usually who the audience thinks wins the debate. And because he never challenged Kokel in any meaningful sense in cross -examination,

Baker lost and Kokel won. Well, those are my thoughts on this particular debate. What I love is to see others interacting with the videos, coming at them from their unique perspective.

Look, some things I do miss, like I'm watching this stuff in real time. So why don't you let me know what you thought, who you think won, and put them down in the comments below.

Also, let me know, because we are keeping that list of further debates. Somebody asked me recently, like, how do you determine which debates to put up in the polls every other week?

It really does come down to how many people are requesting them. You know, because clearly, like a lot of people, this is what surprised me.

I don't want to go off on a tangent, but I'm really surprised that the Greg Bonson debate didn't win this time, because for the amount of requests that people have been asking, you know,

I just thought that was going to be the one. I guess you just never know, right? But that's how it goes, you know.

So if you have a debate that you really want to see me do, eventually we're going to get to it, okay? So I'm not going anywhere.

But in the meantime, this is how I figure this stuff out. So don't forget, there's other videos on this channel that are designed to bless you in the area of effective communication, particularly if you're a

Christian. So grab your tub of popcorn, take a look around, enjoy yourself, and I'll see you real soon on the next one.