Debate Teacher Reacts: Mike Licona vs Matt Dillahunty

On the latest Debate Teacher Reacts, I look at Mike Licona vs. Matt Dillahunty on the topic of whether Jesus was raised from the dead. Did Dillahunty outperform Licona, or was it the other way around? Find out in this video! :)

[vincentparrella]

Ladies and
.We have experienced once Dillahunty Dodge.

[jeremiah]

A fool is never satisfied by evidence he doesn't want to acknowledge.

[halleylujah]

Were you honestly surprised by Mr. Dilahunty in the beginning? This is classic Dilahunty this is his argument. He claims you cannot prove X. When provided with scholarly claims to prove X. I don't agree with your sources or how they gather data and they cannot prove their claims based off of my shifting scale. He does it in many debates. Yay Livestream!

[tommykiger]

New Christians online seem to have forgotten 1Peter 3:14-16
'14) But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.”
15) But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,
16) keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.

[Nameless-ptoj]

I’ve seen a lot of people criticize Mike Licona in this debate. I haven’t watched it fully. I’ll be honest, I’m in a phase of doubt and the last thing I need is watching a PhD NT scholar losing to an atheist activist like Matt Dillahunty. I don’t want to lose my faith. Christianity is a beautiful faith and I don’t want to go to Hell and I want to be with Jesus.

[introvertedchristian]

I don't know how it is done in professional sport debating, but I used to be part of an on line debate page, and it was customary there to stipulate who had what burden of proof from the beginning so the voters knew how to judge the debate. A debate on the resurrection could be carried out in one of two ways. The affirmative always has the burden of demonstrating that the resurrection happened, but whether the negative has a burden of proof depends on what is stipulated. It could be stipulated that only the Pro has the burden of proof, in which case all Con has to do is undermine Pro's arguments. Con doesn't have to show that the opposite claim is true. But they could agree that Con shares the burden of proof in which case Con would have to demonstrate that the negation of Pro's view is true. So it would be a difference in whether Con had merely to show that Pro's arguments fail to demonstrate that the resurrection happened, or whether Con had to also demonstrate that the resurrection did not happen. I was always annoyed with people who didn't stipulate the burden of proof at the beginning of the debate because it always lead to feuds over whether the voters were judging the debate properly.

So I'm curious if, in the kind of debating you're used to, like high school competitive debating, or whatever it was, whether in a debate like this one Matt Dilllahunty would've had the burden of showing that the resurrection didn't happen or if he only had the burden of undermining Mike Licona's arguments. In all of Matt's debates that I've seen, he never carries any burden of proof. He goes out of his way to avoid it. His posture is basically to say, "Nuh uh, " after everything somebody says. He's barely even a participant in the debates. He just takes a posture of, "I'm not convinced, " or, "That evidence is not good enough." He rarely even bothers to show a flaw in the other person's argument. He just says it's not good enough. I just find it lazy and uninteresting. I don't see any point in anybody watching a Dillahunty debate.

I mean if that were an appropriate way to be the Con in a debate, it should be trivially easy to win any debate. Just say, "Nuh uh, " to all of your opponent's premises, forcing them to have to give additional arguments for their premises. Then say, "Nuh uh, " to the new premises, and keep doing this until you run out the clock. I had a debate with somebody who tried that one time, and I called him on it in the debate. It seems to me that if you're going to dispute a premise in somebody's argument, you've got to give some reason for why you don't think the premise is true. Just saying, "Nuh uh, " or, "You haven't proved that premise, " is lazy and doesn't contribute anything to the conversation. I don't know, though. I'm not a professional debater. I'm just a hobbiest.

[LoveYourNeighbour.]

I've been SO looking forward to you doing a "debate teacher reacts" video on this one! I was so disappointed by Matt's tactics, when I had originally watched this :-(

[KingFillip]

The beginning scene, your forehead resting on the mic, that image spoke a thousand words 😂👍🍻

[beausutton]

Would love to see you review Sye Ten Bruggencate and Dillahunty.

[davidlopez-flores]

Tim Mcgrew is really good at responding to the question at 10:58

[akremer]

Definitely looking forward to more James White debates!

[mathewlanier]

I have never liked Matt. Watched a lot of his debates and he is just smug and unsophisticated. This channel is really helping me understand the deeper reasons why I dislike him. I knew he wasn’t answering the question but could hash out how. Thank you for you channel :) New Sub!

[philippaul]

When you skip into the video and the first thing you hear is "I'm beheaded and you've already seen my beheaded corpse" Wtf? Did I click the right video? lol

[joshyouwuhh]

It looks like Dilahunty is totally dependent on the allocation of burden of proof. He does good work standing behind pure scepticism and noting that his opponent doesn't have an airtight empirical case, but he has no choice but to keep refusing to make his own positive case. Which might be reasonable because there is a difference between a supernatural claim and a natural claim, but I don't think he developed anything...at all. He JUST crouched behind skeptical copes.

[trialbyicecream]

How do you only have 2k ish subscribers? I know this isn’t the main focus of your ministry but these videos are so helpful!

[DPM]

What no apologist ever admits (or realizes) is that the quality of the “evidence” proposed as supporting the existence of a particular miracle or supernatural proposition, is exactly the same quality of evidence that an apologist for a completely different and contradictory religion uses to support their miracles and super natural claims. And neither apologist believes the evidence for the other apologist’s proposition is at all convincing. Hmmm.

[Sean-fokg]

A proposition is either (A) demonstrably true, (B) demonstrably false, or (C) lacks sufficient evidence to warrant belief that it is true.

The person making the claim has the burden of proof. If you demand people only argue for A or B, then any schmuck can make any ridiculous unfalsifiable claim unopposed and with no debate.

This whole video is just crying about having the burden of proof for something you can’t substantiate.

[nickmorris]

~9:50 - I agree that his methodology is slippery but this isn't a great example of it because there's many potential non supernatural explanations for this such as aliens with advanced technology, it was a dream, we're living in the matrix etc.

Maybe it was covered elsewhere but the problem here is that 'supernatural' is not defined. You can't answer the question without having a clear definition of supernatural. Also, why would Matt accept a supernatural cause when a much less ambitious explanation will do... such as one of those I mentioned above or even just a 'sufficiently powerful' cause.

[pleaseenteraname]

It’s amazing to me that Dillahunty is literally like you know if you guys actually came here to watch me debate the topic, well I’m sorry because you’re gonna be disappointed because that’s not what I’m gonna do 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣. Could you imagine if this was a debate between a Christian and an evolutionarily biologist, and the evolutionary biologist came prepared with his robust case for evolution and provided the data and reasons as to why he accepts evolution and why you should, and who has written extensively about the topic, and the Christian in his opening statement just said you know guys if you came here to see my negative case against evolution you’re not gonna get that, instead here’s my reasons why I’m a Christian, it’s amazing to me how delusional Dillahunty is audiences.

[enoch]

Someone debating Matt Dillahunty in the future has to bring up the term "methodological naturalism" because methodology is going to come up again since he doesn't answer questions and brings up whatever topics he wants.
Someone should speak to him about the nature of presupposition and ask him to justify a purely naturalistic secular worldview with respect to the fact, that a thing exists called "the principle of induction"... which means by definition science cannot be purely objective... which means that any scientific model has to stand on the shoulders of assumption.