In case my comments get deleted, here they are:
Sorry, but as an atheist myself, I do not think Flew does very well in public debates, despite how much he is lauded by other atheists as a smart guy. Habermas does most of the talking, Ankerberg usually ends a segment after Habermas has had his last say, and the Christians in the audience were no doubt wrongly thinking that because Flew is a smart guy, his performance here shows them how weak the non-believer responses are. I would have argued that under Christian scholar consensus that Mark is the earliest gospel and ended at 16:8, it is reasonable (at least for the unbeliever who has a life and cannot just google Christian scholarship minority positions 18 hours a day) to believe that the earliest form of the gospel did not say a resurrected Jesus appeared to anybody, thus further implying, if patristic testimony can be trusted, that Peter also didn't tell the Roman unbelievers that Jesus made any resurrection appearances, thus further implying that fictional embellishment is the likely reason the later 3 gospels have resurrection appearance narratives, ultimately ridding Christian apologists of the very eyewitness evidence they admit is so crucial to their case. I would also have argued that scholars can neither identify the gospel authors nor establish their credibility or lack thereof, with any degree of reasonable certainty, and unbelievers are rationally warranted to turn away from Christianity's in-house debates on such matters, and to thus regard the critical issue of gospel authorship unresolvable. I would also have argued that, generously assuming the almost certainly false position of apostolic authorship of the gospels, the only resurrection testimony that comes down to us today in first-hand form are Matthew, John and Paul. One could argue that 3 eyewitness testimonies from 2,000 years ago is hardly sufficient to justify changing one's life and worldview. I would also have analogized witness Paul on the road to Damascus, to the witness against you in a murder trial. If that witness said he saw you pull the trigger, and your attorney gets him to admit that the other men standing there with him could hear you, but could not "see" you, despite the fact that it occurred on an open road where you couldn't be hiding behind anything, would you ask for the case to be dismissed because the witness is clearly delusional? Or would you ask the Court to give a legal instruction to the jury that they are allowed to infer a supernatural cause to explain your murdering somebody? Suppose the witness, like Paul, specifies that that he couldn't really say whether he was in his body or out of it at the time he saw you pull the trigger? Do you move for dismissal, or move for a jury instruction telling the jury about how fallacious it is to automatically dismiss miracle-claims? Sure is funny that when you aren't defending biblical bullshit, you "know" that miracles don't happen. If junior comes home from school with a million dollars in his backpack, you don't think the devil put it there. If a stranger on the bus tells you he can levitate by the power of Jesus when nobody is looking, you are no less suspicious of his honesty than an atheist would be. I would also have argued that because the liberals make a powerful case that eternal conscious suffering wasn't what Jesus intended with his teachings about hell, the truth about Jesus' resurrection hardly matters, it isn't like sinners are in as much trouble with god as today's fundamentalists insist. Unbelievers being wrong to reject the gospel is about as dangerous as our being wrong to reject string-theory. There's not enough danger in being wrong to intellectually or morally compel the unbeliever to get involved in the ceaseless bickering of bible scholarship and apologetics. I also would have told Ankerberg that these issues are very complex and that he could do more justice to them if he allowed full episodes limited to just one narrow topic, such as whether it can be reasonable to deny apostolic authorship of the gospels. Flew's performance here was contemptible to say the least. And Ankerberg's choice to cover so many issues, when he knows any one single issue in this debate could fill a book, means Ankerberg thinks quantity is more important than quality. A book-length defense of Mark as earliest gospel, and that he ended at 16:8, and replying to Wright and others who defend the long ending of Mark, would kick Christianity's teeth out of the back its fairy tale skull. THE ORIGINAL FORM OF THE GOSPEL DIDN'T HAVE ANYBODY ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY SEEING THE RESURRECTED JESUS, AND THAT INCLUDES PAUL'S EXPERIENCE ON THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS, THEREFORE, CHRISTIANITY DID NOT ORIGINALLY CLAIM ANY RESURRECTION "EYEWITNESSES" IN THE FIRST PLACE. FUCK YOU. http://turchisrong.blogspot.com
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