good evening I know some are still making their way over from the parking lot and into the facility and we want to first begin by thanking Truitt for hosting tonight's debate so let's give a hand for Truitt Baylor University true it's a great school got a great lot of great friends that go here and are part of part of Truitt and so if you're looking for a higher education the true it's a great place to go and they didn't ask me to say that either that's that's just something that I've come to believe and know about true it's a great place for you to consider for a higher education my name is Leighton flowers I am the director of evangelism and apologetics for Texas Baptist Texas Baptist is what is sponsoring this event called on the unapologetic conference which will begin tomorrow at Columbus Avenue Baptist Church and there at Columbus you will be hearing more from obviously atheistic Christian perspective about why we believe what we believe and learning how to defend and to explain why we believe what we believe but here tonight you're gonna actually see it unfold firsthand live in a debate between a Christian and an atheist and though we are having a debate and sometimes when people hear debate they think oh well that means people are going to be really mean and angry and ugly with each other you will not be witnessing that because I know both of the the two gentlemen sitting on this stage and neither one of those gentlemen are going to be that way they are both very firm and their convictions and they believe what they believe very strongly but they also know how to speak about what they believe without being overly contentious in other words they can disagree without being overly disagreeable I think it was Aristotle who says it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without necessarily accepting it and what we're doing today is a part of Education it is learning to understand other people's perspectives learning how to make sound reasoned arguments against those perspectives and we're going to see that played out live before we get started I have a few just announcements and things that I want you to be aware of first I want to thank us Atherton for her or helping to organize this event and as well as the unapologetic conference and did his parish and his crew for the camera work that they're going to be doing also the newest one on our staff our new lead apologist Eric Hernandez is right here in the front row stand up Eric in yellow recognize he'll no booing no bearing Eric and Matt have had debates before on other topics and so they have a history together and that actually your perfect introduction for what I was going to say next as audience participants tonight we're gonna ask that you not boo or applied during the the course of the event we obviously want you to be engaged and so we have actually planned for a time for you to engage with your own questions so you can begin to think and even maybe write down your questions as we go through the first portion of this debate because the mics will be open later for you to come up and let me emphasize this ask a question okay not make a debate point not try to finish something Matt didn't say that you wanted him to say or that that that dr. hunter says that you wanted to even say you wish you would have said this and you shouldn't that's not what this is for okay this is to ask a question so about under 30 seconds and we'll have people monitoring your microphone there so under 30 seconds just voice a question and there's not gonna be follow-up so you're just going to ask the question and to move on now if you'd like to get back to the back of the line again and ask another question that's your prerogative but it's just the one question and then allow our our presenters to to answer that question we want you as audience participants to learn from this discussion we're not having a debate in order to spread dissension or to say hey this is this is a way to divide or a way to have trouble within the church or the body a lot of times people put down having debates and and I think this is actually one of the best teaching tools that are available to our students because if a person is able to engage with a cordial and rational they and arguments over key issues that is one of the the best ways for you to become educated about what another person believes and and and I promise as you go through this evening if you objectively consider but the presenters and what they're saying and how they're saying it and listen to their arguments and learn this can be one of the greatest education tools that you will have at any University and so I hope that this this evening is going to be beneficial for you as as an education as well the structure of the tonight's tonight's debate will go like this we will begin with openers 20 minute openers from each of our presenters and then we will have ten minute rebuttals from each of our presenters and then we'll have two rounds of cross-examination where each presenter will lead in a cross-examination of the other and I will be guiding each one of these sections as we go through them and then finally in closing we'll have the audience question-and-answer time and so that's how tonight's debate will be structured and so though you're going to be holding your applause for the rest of the evening right now let's get all of our plaza in for our two presenters Matt del Conte and dr. Buxton hunter first up will be dr. hunter with his 20-minute opener well first I want to say what a privilege it is to be engaging in tonight's debate in this incredible institution and I have nothing but the utmost respect for the unapologetic skon furan s-- and i'm excited to be sharing the stage with Matt Dillahunty who is a really sharp guy and an excellent debater and so that should make for a lively discussion this evening now I don't want to be too forthright in my predictions about what's gonna happen on the stage tonight but I do we'll make this prediction if there is a clear winner to tonight's debate it will be a bald-headed bearded man just saying now I'm going to be defending the proposition that the Christian God does exist and in order to do that I'm going to be presenting two arguments for God's existence and a case for the resurrection of Jesus if God exists and God raised Jesus from the dead the Christian God exists period no matter what we want to say about anything else I'll begin with a simple syllogism tonight if you freely chose to come to tonight's debate then God exists you've really chose to come to tonight's debate therefore God exists now let's putting it a bit to simplistically it's not really my syllogism let's just back up and get a little more complex but hopefully not too much if God does not exist then libertarian freedom does not exist to libertarian freedom does exist therefore God exists when philosophers talk about human freedom they usually divided into two general categories on the one hand we have determinism which says that no free will exists or at least not the way that you think it does kind of sad on the other hand you have libertarian freedom which says Free Will exists yay and I would wager that for most of you out there the kind of freedom that you think you're talking about when you speak of your own freedom in your own free will every day is probably libertarian freedom and it's certainly the position that I affirm what libertarian Freedom says is that you are the originator of your actions and your choices or you have ability to do other than whatever you ended up doing determinism instead says that what we call your decisions is merely the result of what amounts to an extremely long train of dominoes or something like that events in the history of the universe led to your existence your life experiences the formation of your neural structure and the firings of neurons in your brain but we call those your choices but they literally could not have been otherwise in other words on determinism you had to come to tonight's debate there was really no other option it couldn't have been otherwise but here's the thing if a theism is true I suspect that that means determinism is true and if atheism is true then you have no free will and as others have said like my friend Erik Hernandez the last thing you are is a free thinker some thinkers however posit what they think amounts to a middle option between these two extremes perhaps it's not as bad as determinism hard determinism maybe it's what we could call compatibilism and I'm sorry for these really you know big words here at the beginning of the night but compatibilism basically says look you're free to do whatever it is that you want to do and what more do you want than the freedom to do whatever you want the problem is that on compatibilism your wants and desires that drive your actions those are also determined and it's fact just dominos all the way back again so ultimately what we're left with is still determinism no free will or libertarian freedom free will now the last I heard Matt held the position that I described as compatibilism which I say reduces to any other form of hard determinism in a discussion with Lawrence Krauss and Sam Harris Matt not too long ago said quote we all agree there is no such thing as libertarian free will the idea that I could have done differently so while it seems intuitively obvious to you and I but when I do like this I could have just as easily not done that or done this instead ultimately given the circumstances that was determined and it could not have been otherwise now in summary either you have free you you are free such that you could have done other than you end up doing or do you have no free will and all is determined like Matt's position requires but if you believe that you have freedom of the will that you should know that on naturalistic atheism libertarian freewill is just not an option for the universe would merely be a natural system of cause and effect if you have freewill God is the best explanation for that freedom for if God exists then the universe is not merely a natural system of cause and effect God could grant us libertarian freedom now deep down I think we all know that we have the freedom to do other than whatever we end up doing you really could have chosen not to come to tonight's debate but if you believe that then libertarian freedom exists as I've argued then God exists now there are actually a couple of implications to this argument that should also be mentioned first if determinism is true then we're left with what I would call moot morality now what I mean by that is that whether someone ends up becoming a philanthropist and helps people or ends up becoming a sex offender or some other kind of criminal ultimately whether that's good or bad right or wrong they ended up doing whatever they were determined to do and they'd have a novel new approach if they stood in court to answer for their crimes they could say it's not my fault judge the universe made me do it but if you all believe like I do that we really could have chosen otherwise and these people who engage in hate crimes or do whatever evil thing they do really didn't have to do that given their circumstances they could have chosen not to do that and lived moral lives then you're affirming libertarian freedom and of course as I've argued along with that comes God secondly if libertarian freedom does not exist then it means that whatever we believe is merely what we were determined to believe now this may stretch the mind and the brain and the head well the fact is it's not just your actions that are determined on determinism but also your thoughts and your beliefs so while you may think you have good reasons for believing that two plus two equals four that you're watching a debate right now or that bald-headed bearded men are the most attractive kinds of men those and all other beliefs were determined and could not have been otherwise this means that you are not free to choose against those things which are irrational that means that you can affirm determinism you can affirm atheism but you can't rationally affirm anything at all including your determinism as atheist philosopher John Searle says quote actions are rationally accessible if and only if the actions are free the reason for the connection is this rationality must be able to make a difference rationality is possible only where there is a genuine choice between various rational and irrational courses of action if the act cannot be otherwise then rationality can make no difference it doesn't even come into play in quote here's what this means for tonight's debate if Matt is unsuccessful in overcoming this argument then at least on the basis of tonight's debate you have libertarian freedom and should believe in God as I've argued but get this if he is successful in overcoming this argument there on the basis of tonight's debate determinism is true and you can't rationally affirm anything at all including that atheism is true or that the Christian God doesn't exist so let's just put it this way you're darned if you do darn if you don't secondly God is the best explanation for the beginning of the universe here I'd like to present a case that begins with the Kalam cup logical argument now for those who are familiar with these discussions you might say come on Braxton you're not gonna bring the old Kalam argument are you again you're darn right I've got a personal philosophy for my life if it ain't broke don't fix it and it ain't broke folks the argument may be stated like this everything that begins to exist must have a cause for its existence the universe began to exist therefore the universe must have a cause for its existence now when I say everything that begins to exist must have a cause we have zero counter examples of this principle 100% of the evidence backs this up and when I say the universe began to exist by universe I mean all of nature including multiverses vacuums or anything else if the universe had no beginning it has existed infinitely and without even a beginning to start from we could never have arrived at this particular moment that we're experiencing today because if it exists infinitely in the past and you crossed half of infinity you still have infinity to go and we would have never a lot arrived at this moment if you want a simpler way of saying it try jumping out of a hole without a bottom to it not too easy I'll leave it to Matt to bring the challenges to the individual premises of this argument but simply put for those that have never heard it before what I'm saying is that whatever begins to exist begins to exist because of something else and the universe is like that something or someone serves as the cause of the physical universe but what is that cause well the universe is made up of three things generally speaking time space and matter now since things can't cause themselves to come into existence and since time space and matter are the natural universe and it makes no sense to say that nature came before nature to cause nature then whatever the cause of the physical universe is must be a spaceless timeless and non material cause it also had to be able from a timeless state to bring the universe into existence from nothing are there things like that well some might say that the laws of logic or numbers could exist spaciously timelessly nah materially but the problem is they don't have what philosophers call causal powers that is to say they don't do anything however a mind without a body a mind independent of a body who would serve as a fitting explanation and would also explain how the universe could be created from a state of nothingness which has no potentialities no properties no powers and no possibilities thus a spaceless timeless non material sufficiently powerful mind serves as the best explanation of the beginning of the universe now interestingly when Matt has been faced with this evidence in the past and he has on several occasions responded by saying well perhaps maybe there's maybe all that's true but it's not God maybe the explanation is a spaceless timeless non material sufficiently powerful group of universe creating Pixies that's right Pixies now I understand that Matt is probably saying this tongue-in-cheek I understand that but hey let's just go with these universe creating Pixies because Occam's razor the principle that you should shave away everything anything that's unnecessary to explain your position all the unnecessary variables would leave us with one universe creating pixie so you'd have a spaceless timeless non-material sufficiently powerful singular universe creating pixie folks that is a description of God and they're just calling God a pixie so I'd like to be the first one to welcome Matt to theism but you pixie theist so in summary however you want to dice it God's the best explanation for the beginning of the universe third I'd like to express that I think we can actually go further than the God of of merely the philosophers God I think we can specify that this God is the god of Christian theism if God raised Jesus from the dead a small feat for a God who could create the universe from nothing then Christian theism emerges can the case be made I think so some reject the resurrection because it involves a miracle for some this means that it requires extraordinary evidence of the sort that overcomes the implausibility inherent to any such supernatural claim nevertheless I'd like to head that off with something that I call recalibrated plausibility what is recalibrated plausibility well if God did not exist or if Jesus was just any other first century Jew and of course the resurrection would be incredibly implausible but I've given good reason tonight to believe that God does exist and it is universally accepted or at least almost universally accepted by scholars that Jesus thought of himself at the very least as God's special agent to bring about the Kingdom on earth so those two features together give us what I would call recalibrated plausibility and I'll give you an analogy for how that works imagine that you encountered a group of people in a coffee shop somewhere who were excitedly telling you how they just saw this guy Neil walking on the moon can you believe it we have video of it we just saw this guy Neil walking on the moon now let's also imagine that you don't know anything about NASA you don't know anything about the moon landing or space exploration and so this sounds incredibly implausible in fact it's extraordinary it's an extraordinary claim but then let's imagine that later you actually do find out about this organization called NASA that has the sufficient power to put a man on the moon and you also learn that there's this guy named Neil who was in the 1960s claiming to be a part of NASA's program as if he was saying just watch my life and see what happens now go back to your friends in the coffee shop does their claim seem implausible no in fact it seems very plausible why because we have recalibrated the plausibility for the discussion now hopefully the analogy is simple enough to see NASA is like God in that God is the sufficient power to do something like raise someone from the dead and Neil is like Jesus in that Jesus was walking around basically holding up a sign saying watch my life and see what I do as a part of God's special program this results in recalibrated plausibility for our discussion so I'd like to say that the majority of my case will be built on what historians call bedrock facts a bedrock fact is considered as such by historians if it has two things going for it one it is highly evidenced and two and enjoys the consensus of critical scholarship and that includes atheists and agnostics and Christians and perhaps others with these caveats were prepared to consider the evidence first Jesus died by Roman crucifixion though it is sometimes argued that perhaps Jesus was able to pull off the resurrection because he never actually died by crucifixion this is no longer a serious consideration among sober minded scholars in T right response to swoon or apparent death theories like these thusly quote the hoary old theory that Jesus did not really die on the cross but revived and the cool of the tomb has likewise nothing to recommend it and it is noticeably important that even those historians who are passionately committed to denying the resurrection do not go by this route but you know what nc writes a Christian scholar and you would expect him to say something like this so maybe you'd rather hear from an atheist scholar German atheist New Testament scholar GERD lute Aman writes Jesus death as a consequence of crucifixion is in disputable but maybe you don't want a Christian or an atheist what's up with these extremes maybe you'd like a Jewish scholar Giza fur mesh says The Passion of Jesus is part of history but maybe on a Christian an atheist or a Jewish scholar maybe you'd rather have a liberal Christian scholar like John Dominic Crossan who writes there is not the quote slightest doubt about the fact of Jesus crucifixion under Pontius Pilate he says Jesus crucifixion is quote as sure as anything historical can ever be and quote but maybe you don't want a Christian an atheist a Jew or a liberal Christian scholar maybe you'd like a liberal Jewish scholar Paula Fredrickson says quote the single most solid fact about Jesus life is his death he was executed by the Roman prefect Pontius Pilate on or around Passover in the manner Rome reserved particularly for political insurrectionists namely crucifixion end quote we have non-christian reports that testify to the death of Jesus from others like the greatest historian of ancient Rome Cornelius Tacitus so one can maintain that Jesus perhaps never existed or that he never died on the cross but one would be arguing that in the face of literally all the historical evidence to the contrary to Jesus appeared after his death this is evidenced by the early creole nature of paul's statements in first corinthians 15 3 through 8 for reasons that we can get into if necessary this Creed though provided for us by Paul in the early to mid 50s ad can be dated to perhaps less than five years after the events in question it indicates that almost immediately after the events early Christians were claiming that Jesus was dead buried and rose again and now some Scotts skeptical scholars actually granted these people had such experiences to quote Frederickson again she says quote the disciples conviction that they had seen there is in Christ their permanent relocation to Jerusalem their principled inclusion of Gentiles as Gentiles all these are historical bedrock facts known past doubting about the earliest community after Jesus death Gary Habermas has been cataloging the positions of scholars who have written on this since 1975 and he comments as firmly as ever most contemporary scholars agree that after Jesus death his early followers had experiences that they at least believed were appearances of their risen Lord now the explanation for why these early believers actually thought Jesus had risen to appear to them is most often that they experience mass hallucination hallucinations of the Risen Jesus even though mass hallucination is both highly controversial as well as an attempt to do group psychology on people from a different culture from 2,000 years ago when it's hard enough to do psychology on someone in America in the 21st century who's sitting in front of you three the earliest disciples were committed to this belief such that they were willing to die for it as many before me have said liars make poor martyrs it's one thing to die for something that's not true when you believe that it's true such as the Muslim terrorists who flew the planes into the towers on September 11th but it's an entirely different issue to die for something that's false when you know it's false and this would have been the case about the earliest disciples of Jesus since if it was made up they were the ones who made it up now one might say this is a false dichotomy perhaps they weren't lying but were mistaken because of visionary appearances of Jesus that weren't actually real but this would of course loop us back to the previous consideration the hallucinations or visions would have to be defended as a hypothesis Fredrickson says quote I know in their own terms that they saw the Rays Jesus that's what they say and then all the historical evidence we have afterwards attest to their conviction that that's what they saw I'm not saying that they really did see the Rays Jesus I wasn't there I don't know what they saw I'm not I'm just saying as let's see where is it I wasn't there I don't know what they saw but I do know that as a historian that they must have seen something for scholars testified to these facts here I simply mean to reaffirm that scholars agree Jesus lived died by Roman crucifixion that others believed they had witnessed him alive after the fact and that those others were willing to die for that claim thus were it not for the fact that many would disregard the resurrection on the basis of its nature as a miracle it would easily serve as the best historical hypothesis however since what I've termed recalibrated plausibility I think accounts for that I think we're now free to make our conclusion and so the best explanation is the resurrection and the most appropriate that God raised Jesus from the dead and the most appropriate response is repentance unto salvation repentance by the way means to turn from your life without Jesus to a life with Jesus it means to turn from your sin and that doesn't mean you're a bad person from in my eyes or from a human perspective but we're all sinners and so to turn from that life without Jesus to a life with Jesus now Matt is an outstanding speaker he has quick wit he's sharp on his feet and he has a fantastic beard as we all can see and all of these things can be very persuasive and he's a really smart guy and he really does try to investigate the facts and deal with what's being presented and I appreciate that about him but I think he would agree with me tonight that we shouldn't be moved merely by rhetoric we shouldn't be moved merely by you know cliches or jokes that I might bring or that he might bring we need to be moved by the facts because cliches and quips don't change the facts in order to defend his position as the more appropriate into a rational position Matt will have to overcome these lines of evidence until he does this I'd like to invite you all to freely embrace Christian theism thank you [Applause] are they allowed to clap then apparently this would be weird cuz I need my glasses to read this but not to see you guys so hi hey yeah I know you're not supposed to clap or acknowledge or whatever else thanks so much for having me I'm really thrilled to be here my former church the church I grew up in would have never done anything like this and I realized we're not technically in a church that did this but you know there's a Church of Christ that invited me down to San Antonio to do three nights of debates they haven't had me back but the unapologetic conference has invited me back I did this was it two years ago year and a half ago in Austin Mike Laconia and I debated the resurrection and actually no it's like - Mike but I wish we had done that because I think we're on a slightly different track there so tonight does the Christian God exist there's probably some people who thought that dr. hunter was gonna walk in and say yes and I was going to march in and say no and then there'd be like this WWE brawl and that's just not the way things work there the arguments that are used here if we're going to be defending Christianity shouldn't be arguments that could be used by other religions because if you present an argument that's equally viable to Hindus Sikhs Muslims Jews whatever then we're not specifically talking about the Christian God that's happened a little bit but we'll get to more of that in the rebuttal the interesting thing here is that I'm not here to disprove God my position is not even there is no God which is what everybody thinks the Atheist position is instead I am not convinced that there is a God and for some gods I'm actually convinced that they don't exist now how do we go about solving a mystery and figuring out what the right answer is this is something we have to do all the time simple things there was a jar cookies in the kitchen and now some of them are missing let's solve the mystery hey Joey did you eat those cookies nope maybe there are plausible candidate explanations that we propose for anything and everything maybe the kid ate cookies but if we have exactly one occurrence of something like we have never interacted with this child before we've never had cookies in the house before the cookies have never gone missing before we don't really have a pile of evidence how do we draw a line between its most probable that will Joey ate the cookies than it is that God magically made the cookies disappear or that aliens came down and beamed part of those cookies up how do we do that on a single occurrence and particularly with regard to historic events where we don't have a time machine as far as I'm aware we can't go back and actually get the information we have to build the most plausible cases that we can now with historical events what we end up doing is saying okay are there other similar sorts of events and what do we know about people in general and we build up a case for what seems to be the most plausible explanation does that mean we're right no we might be so of the plausible candidate explanations there based on what we understand and sometimes we have to acknowledge that we just don't have enough information to reach a conclusion about what's the right answer there are answers that maybe the best answer that we currently have and they can be monumentally incorrect there can be answers that seem reasonable based on the preponderance of the evidence and those can also be correct it's entirely possible for you to be completely reasonable and wrong you want evidence of this consider how long people thought it was that the Sun went around the earth it was a most reasonable conclusion all of the available evidence pointed to it it's a completely natural thing it feels right it looks right it adequately describes what's going on and yet it is fundamentally wrong and it's completely counterintuitive to think that we're on a spinning ball that's spinning around and that's what makes it look like the Sun goes around us it took a long time to sort through all the details that led us to what we now understand to be the most correct answer and that's another thing about scientific findings they're not making proclamations about truth they are coming up with models that are the most consistent at making predictions based on what we know about what's likely to occur so maybe a little Joey didn't eat the cookies maybe he did but if we have a history if we have a a trend where we know that Joey really likes cookies we've caught him doing it before hey we know that Joey is a little liar that we've given birth day did you brush your teeth Joey yes well let's go check then I remember as a kid I wish I hadn't done this but it's true story I didn't like to brush my teeth and so my mom would be like well let's go check and she'd go in the bathroom and then she'd feel the toothbrush to see if it was wet and I kid you not in order to get around that I would go in and wet the toothbrush and put it back in there I just didn't want to brush my teeth and she'd go in and check yep toothbrushes rat thank you for brushing your teeth you're so good honey ahh I tricked her and that was that was the game for me later on I brushed my teeth because I saw what it looked like when you stopped brushing your teeth so I had good good reasons to do that when we go for the best explanation there are explanations that are sufficient to serve as an explanation or serve as a causal thing the god proposition is like a panacea I can't think of too many possible questions that couldn't be answered by God did it it's indistinguishable from magic it's the reason why I use the universe creating Pixies on occasion as an alternative so how can we look around the world and figure out whether or not religions or a particular religion or plausible well we can look at what we know now we don't know everything about the history and origin of religions but we do know that ancient people worship stones and then they worshipped spirits and then they worship spirits in the sky and then they were worshipped or respect it or admired or revered a single spirit in the sky and then after that we started listening to the people who claim to be speaking for these spirits in the sky and then it gradually progressed into the point where now now we're listening to the people who are giving us their interpretation of a translation of a translation of a copy of a translation of what somebody said that somebody in this guy wanted you know and I understand I shouldn't be glib within the sky and as a side note if I offend anybody tonight that's obviously not my intent I'm here because I want you to understand that there I was a Southern Baptist for more than 25 years we went through that last time when people from my old church came down to the debate I just want you to understand why people don't accept it and I think that it'll be intuitively obvious in summer garden and that's because we know people lie we know people are mistaken we know that eyeglasses are relatively new a new new invention and that people didn't always see very well I'm reminded of this every time I look down and realize I forgot to put mine back on most people tend to think that religions other than theirs are mistaken that these are the result of human inventions human mistakes sincere things it doesn't have to be that somebody lied we're not we're not always talking about an intentionally manufactured fraudulently religion as we would with Scientology or Mormonism where we know that somebody actually manufactured the claims about those religion in modern times and the evidence for this is just overwhelming to the point where I mean there's a Broadway musical exposing the Book of Mormon but we don't tend to think about that about our religion I took a comparative religions course my freshman year of high school and I remember sitting there going cashed all these other religions are so weird and not mine and then it was much later I was over 30 by the time I sat down and applied my skepticism and critical thinking to what I believed and why I didn't have a bad experience in church I didn't have man and get mad at God and I lost my job and thought God want me to me to be a preacher which is what people in my church had thought and so I was like okay God I'll do it let's get busy let's get started and then I found out that some of the things I thought I had good reasons for I just didn't doesn't mean they're false my position is not there's obviously no God it's not even Christianity as a manufactured fiction in the same way that I would say Scientology almost certainly is that's not it it's just I'm no longer convinced of that so we need something some methodology which when consistently applied manages to confirm one hypothesis and not others if you have a method that leads you to multiple different competing conclusions your method is flawed you know that's why we don't flip coins for things that are serious hopefully because you know a coin toss can lead you decide to cross the street and busy traffic or it can decide to have you stand there and wait for the traffic to go away we make decisions better decisions based on methodologies that consistently provide explanations problem is we don't always know what the answer is we don't have enough information to figure that out and so if there's several potential plausible or seemingly plausible explanations how do we tell which ones right now for Christianity in particular since the subject tonight is does the Christian God exist I have two lines of argument that are not going to disprove God at all but they are really difficult things to overcome if you're convinced that it is true and the first one is a notion that's been called the the argument from divine hiddenness essentially as we look around the world if there is give me any God model it could be the Christian God model could be a Hindu God model whatever define what its characteristics are what its goals are how it interacts with people what it wants and now you can make predictions about what sorts of things you would see in reality and if we don't see those things it's not confirmation that that God doesn't exist it could be that we're wrong about the nature of that God or what it wants but if you don't see those things that's a fairly strong disconfirming issue it's like if somebody says oh I got a dead body in the trunk of my car and I go out and I look and I don't find a body and I don't find blood and I don't find hair and I don't know the trunk looks pristine it doesn't look like there's ever been anything in there I can't prove that they didn't have a body in their trunk but there's strong evidence against the proposition now as a skeptic as somebody who advocates for scientific models all of my positions are tentative I'm not absolutely certain about anything as a matter fact I don't think you can be absolutely certain about anything which I'm sure will come up shortly but my position is I should be able to find and be consistently reasonable and if in fact there were a God who cared about clarity and reason who as I believed when I was Southern Baptists and his people told me they believe this God wants us to know that he exists he wants us to know what is his purpose is for our life he wants us to be aware he wants us to be able to fulfill our obligation under first Peter 3:15 to give the reason for the faith that's within us and to do so with gentleness and respect which I used to say kindness and I got that wrong but I'll Trane's stick with gentleness respect and kindness if that's the kind of God that exists and there are certain things that we would expect to see and it leads to the second similar line of argument which is the problem of inconsistent revelations now these two together talk about essentially the reasonableness of non belief that an honest actor and I cannot convince anybody here there are people almost certainly who will leave here as they have from any interaction I've had with Christians in my life since identifying as atheist they will leave and they will think well Matt's just been given over to a reprobate mind he's unreasonable he won't accept accept evidence you know he's he's just not bright enough or he's hardened his heart or he's he can come up with any excuses you would like to but the fact of the matter is I am being honest when I say that I sincerely am not convinced that there's a God and in many cases I'm convinced that there's not I can't prove it to you any more than I can prove to you there's no God because if a proposition is unfalsifiable that means there's no way to show that it's false and most of the God propositions are as far as I can tell unfalsifiable and while we're talking about what's in somebody else's head I think that that might be unfalsifiable as well we can we can get an idea about what's truly in somebody's head by how they act the problem is is that you can't be extremely confident about any of this unless you know the person and know their motivations and you can't really do that without getting in their head this problem of inconsistent revelation is one that I've described really kind of straightforward and simply and that is the First Baptist Church can tell you what's wrong with the Second Baptist Church and they can tell you what's wrong with the Methodist Church and they can tell you what's wrong with the Presbyterian Church and they can tell you what's wrong with the Catholic Church and then a good chunk of the Christian community can tell you what's wrong with the Jewish tradition they can tell you what's wrong with Islam and they can tell you what's wrong with Hinduism all I'm doing is agreeing with all of them that's what I'm doing we it's not even I appreciate the kind of life but this is what we do it's oh I recognize all these faults but I don't necessarily recognize them within my own and the only thing that changed about me was recognizing that my skepticism to my own religious beliefs as well and that if there was a God the God that I believed and if it was true and real that there were certain things I would expect to see and that as a sincere believer on my knees trying to do what God wanted me to do when I reached out for help I would get something other than silence and crickets which is what happened and people say well you know God will reveal to himself to you if you just do it in the right way and I put it in that phrasing because I've heard different ways of potentially doing it and when it doesn't happen they'll say well you weren't sincere your hearts been hardened God won't reveal himself to you he'll do it his time he'll do it when you're ready when you're contrite when you are repetitive how do you know that I wasn't I find people who have lost their car keys and God helps them out evidently I find people who never put any serious effort into understanding and studying either the history of religion the tradition the doctrines which church doctrine is based on which none of that they're just like I'm ready God and evidently God reveals himself to them now that's cool for them but when people tell me oh well you just did it wrong you try all that tells me is how convinced you are that you are correct it doesn't tell me how correct you are or that you have reason to think you're correct it's imagine that you came up to me and said hey I just did this nice thing for you and I said I don't believe you am I saying that you're lying no I'm just saying I'm not convinced but what if I looked at you and said you're a liar you didn't do that and you know for a fact that you're not lying how convincing am I ever going to be if there's any cautionary tale about how to engage with atheists or with skeptics and others who are sincerely portraying that they don't believe the worst thing you can ever do is say oh you really believe worse than that you know there's a god you're just in denial because they don't know no matter how convinced you are that's the case and I know that I'm this is probably the most difficult thing I could ever convince somebody of they're almost certainly being sincere and it's a horrible mistake for you to challenge somebody's sincerity because at that point all you're doing is talking about how you cannot be wrong it has nothing to do with whether or not they are in fact non-believers and reasonable I've heard the various excuses and to me and this may seem glib or insincere it's kind of like I've got a girlfriend but she goes to another school so you don't know her oh and I'd let you call or and investigate but you're kind of mean and you weren't nice to me about this and even if I let you call her and talk to her you wouldn't believe her anyway these are the same excuses that I get when I say you know what I was on my knees for a sincere sincerely sincerely RIA Dov time and got nothing people would ask me what would it take to convince you that a God exists and in particular what would it take to convince you the Christian God exists and for a while I gave the sort of glib answers that other people did you know if there was riding in the sky that said I am the Lord their God and everybody could read it irrespective of what languages they understood or even if they were illiterate that'd be pretty empowering powerful but it wouldn't confirm a god because I don't have a way to distinguish as arthur c clarke pointed out the difference between a god and a significantly advanced intelligence i'm a magician and on occasion and Mentalist mind reader and so i can do things that people have accused me of being in league with the devil i'm actually they accuse me that just for doing the TV show but i do things that can blow people's minds now if I were to have somebody pick a random him from the hymnal and I don't even know which him no we have and then I were able to tell you the title that song and what was about that be pretty impressive would you think that I got a message from God is that the best explanation or is the best explanation that there was some trickery involved maybe I can read minds maybe it's something has nothing to do with God but I can in fact read minds you how would you ever know that how could you tell if somebody could read minds my previous my wife ex-wife or whatever doesn't matter she wants it said we were watching sci-fi shows that the first time somebody shows up who can actually read minds we should kill them immediately because they are definitely going to take over the world but yet we see people do this all the time it frustrates me to watch shows like America's Got Talent when you see Mentalist and mind reader's up there performing because it's it's like the judges believe there's actual magic and ocean limb has got some powers and that's why smoke comes out of his mouth and I'm not going to ruin how the tricks worked for you guys today but it's frustrating for somebody who does that to watch people who are gullible I did tricks for people while I was in the Navy and they would say oh you've got demonic energy running through you and at the time I was a Christian and there's no way I wanted anybody to think that I was using demonic powers to do a card trick and so I would show them how the trick was done and they would look at me and say that's not what you did the first time and that tells me that they're convinced they can't be wrong they've reached a conclusion they think it's reasonable and no amount of evidence to the contrary contrary is gonna change their mind at that time but that doesn't mean that our minds are immune to change and it doesn't mean that we're always right the objections that are launched by me at all religions are the same ones that are launched by you and others that other religions as well and what I'm striving to be is consistent when there's a methodology presented that's going to lead me to consistently plausible reasonable positions I'm gonna go with that and I have yet to find one that consistently our reliability points to any God let alone the Christian God and what's more if there is a God this God should have a great understanding of logic of a reason of the nature of evidence of what should and should not be convincing and compelling to people and if that God exists where is he why doesn't he seem to care about clarity why is it that there's a debate ever what's preventing Jesus from showing up and appearing right here right now conclusively we're recording yes maybe picking doing it during the Superbowl might have reached a bigger audience but I'm pretty sure if we posted this video it would eventually get views that outstrip any Super Bowl so why doesn't that happen it can't just be because I'm given over to some reprobate mind or God moves in mysterious ways and other things if in fact there's a God who cares about truth and clarity who cares about each one of us who wants us to know that in fact he died and was raised for our sins then he has to do something better than presenting a story that has been altered passed on in languages that died out people don't even understand Shakespeare particularly well and yet we're going back to try to figure out what happened 2,000 years ago thanks now each presenter will give a ten minute rebuttal dr. hunter will be first thank you for that Matt and I like the cordiality in the debate and so as you asked that if anything is offensive to anyone here that they would just overlook that no that's not your intent I hope that you know that about anything that I say about the positions as well much of what Matt said is personal testimony things that have happened to him and of course that's none of my business and I won't be responding to those things however ultimately what Matt has said tonight is that Christian apologists or Christian theologians have not presented good enough reason to believe or a good enough reason that it would warrant belief in the Christian God I think that much was clear and so when we begin here tonight I just want to say that it's important to understand what we mean by good enough evidence and bad enough evidence that's very important in a debate like this and when it comes to Matt's position I think Matt would agree this debate is not about Matt Dillahunty it's not about Braxton hunter it's about you and it's about God and where you stand with God and whether or not the Christian God exists and so for that reason it would be important for us to consider what Matt might think would count as good evidence and my understanding is that Matt isn't sure what would ultimately count for good enough evidence because it hasn't been presented to him and if it does exist God would know what it is but he couldn't put his finger on what would be convincing that's what I've heard in the past so we don't know what would count as good evidence to him but we do know what would not count as good evidence for Matt and I would wager that and I don't mean to sound harsh with this I really like Matt you can tell he's a likable guy enjoyable to listen to but for I think for most of you in the audience that might be skeptics or atheist I don't think you have the level of skepticism or atheism that Matt himself holds to in fact frankly and this is just a point about the position not about Matt personally I think it's frankly an unrealistic level of skepticism in a 20-17 debate at this conference with Mike like oh no Mike asked Matt what if a comet collided with the moon and suddenly anyone and look up in the night sky and see that in multiple languages Hebrew and Greek it was written God exists what would you think about that was basically the question and Matt's response was basically that all we could say about that is quote we don't know how or why this event occurred in other words he that was the end of the quote but in other words he doesn't think that would count as good enough evidence now folks I think that that's major here tonight I think for many people if suddenly a comic collided with the moon and it said God exists in multiple languages that would be pretty good evidence likewise in a 2014 debate with Matt slick slick asked parting of the Red Sea parting of an ocean you're sitting there and someone says in the name of Jesus and the ocean parts you're going to believe in God now mass response no slick-ass well what would it take Matt Dillahunty says I just told you I don't know what it would take so Matt doesn't know what it would take for him to believe and if someone parted an ocean in Jesus name that would not count as good enough evidence to warrant belief so I don't say this to throw mud at Matt that is not the point at all the point is this if we're talking about what counts as good and bad evidence and it's not also about whether those things have actually happened or will happen that's that's that's a different point the fact is that if they did happen Matt wouldn't count that is good evidence so if you're out there in the audience tonight as a skeptic or someone who's on the fence or an atheist and those things like it being written on the moon or if the ocean parted in Jesus name if that would count as good evidence to you there's a pretty good evidence well then Matt's opinions about what should count as good and bad evidence I don't think should have any serious hold on you now let's talk about what it what else he said in his discussion here he said you know when you're going to bring a case for the Christian God's existence or something like that then you you shouldn't be bringing arguments that can be used by other religions now he didn't actually spell this out but he and I kind of think about the same sorts of things and I think I know where he's going with this and if I'm wrong he can correct me later but my first two arguments were arguments merely that God exists the resurrection case was brought to demonstrate that what we're talking about here is the Christian God you'll recall that I argued if God exists and God raised Jesus from the dead then the Christian God exists period that's all to it so the first two arguments that I brought were simple theistic arguments that could be brought by someone from another religion as long as it's a monotheistic religion and perhaps maybe you could apply it in other cases but the fact is I didn't leave those arguments there alone I followed them with a resurrection case to put a name tag on that God this is the Christian God so I'm not sure if he wants to say more about that later but I'll look forward to what that will be he says how do we get the probability of a historical event now here's the thing about when we do a historiography when we do historiography what we don't do is to work some kind of a mathematical equation now there are a few historians do that there very few those are Bayesian historians and maybe there's some other kind of method that some historians use that I'm not aware of and they do kind of get into some mathematical probabilities but that's not how typically historians do their work what they do is what's called inference to the best explanation so what they'll sometimes do is they'll put out a spread of possibilities for any particular historical event highest possible probability very probably true more probable than not more possible than not possible improbable those kinds of things and then they'll look at the evidence and they'll look at the different kinds of criteria that they have does this thing have does the explanation the hypothesis we're putting forward have explanatory scope that is does it account for a large number of the data it doesn't have explanatory power does it account for it easily it's it's kind of not kind of like trying to force a puzzle piece where it doesn't go it should slide in there nicely it does it have plausibility that means is it more likely to be true than false is it less ad hoc now you may have to say some things that you know you don't really know we just have to assume certain things kind of like if you have a triangle and there's a little spot of the triangle that's missing you have to assume that that's making the shape of a triangle sometimes you have to do that with historical analysis but you want something that's less ad hoc it doesn't pause it a lot of stuff that you don't really have good reason to believe or evidence for it to make sense of it and it's nice if it has illumination that the things that we learned about this actually could illuminate what we think in other areas of history and so when it comes to historical argumentation and heart historical investigations that we don't work with mathematical probability all the time like that we're looking and I'm not a historian but we're looking for plausibility what is more likely the case than not using inference to the best explanation now we get to the meat of what Matt was really trying to say and he was arguing from divine hiddenness why isn't God more obvious now I want to pause and just say I understand that there is an emotional aspect of that now he didn't bring an emotional argument but it is emotionally powerful when someone is going through some sort of sickness or terminal illness or they're going through a broken marriage or something like that it can be very difficult why isn't God more evident in my life at this moment and I can't handle that emotional problem of divine hiddenness but I think we can do something about the intellectual problem of divine hiddenness this will sound audacious to my friends here who are not believers but I don't find God to be all that hidden we have incredible reasons to believe that God exists we have incredible arguments and evidences from almost every area of investigation we have inferences from history and science we have philosophical arguments we have arguments from I don't use these but we could argue from personal experience now he's right your personal experience of God is it really evidential for him but just to put a little gravy on top of this thing tonight how many of you are convinced you had an experience with God and it would be very difficult to convince you that you haven't would you raise your hands we have all of these kinds of arguments many of them I'm not even bringing tonight so when every physical object in concept in the universe could be used as a reason to believe that God exists I'm not trying to be critical of those who don't believe and I certainly wouldn't be presumptuous if someone who has genuinely tried to have a relationship with God and for whatever reason that hasn't happened I don't know what to say about that you know it's it's almost like I don't want to respond to the point because I don't want to sound insulting to your personal position and I would never want to do that and I'm not saying that you that you've just didn't try hard enough for something like that all I'm doing is pointing to the evidence and it strikes me that everywhere I look there seems to be good evidence for God now I do understand why doesn't God show up every two years bodily and just announce it on television so that everyone can see but see that would mean that what God is looking for is mere intellectual belief the what God wants is not merely a lot of people to believe intellectually that he exists what God wants is for people to enter into a relationship of trust and loyalty with him and if God is aware as he would be that in this world with this amount of evidence the greatest number of people would freely choose to come into a relationship with him then God is not required to give more evidence than that just to suit our fancy and besides all of this Matt said in a video called who are you to question God that even if he were convinced that God exists that that doesn't mean that he would worship God in fact he said he doesn't believe in worship so he wouldn't worship that God now folks that means that this whole thing of divine hiddenness while I admit that it can be persuasive sometimes rings hollow in tonight's debate he talked about inconsistent revelations so I'll be quick about this because I don't have a lot of time the fact is that one thing that all Christians everywhere who are Orthodox Christians have always believed is that God exists and God raised Jesus from the dead so I don't know about the folks at 1st 2nd or 3rd Baptists here in town I don't know what they think on the 1st or 2nd pew of that church about the other folks in the other churches but I'll guarantee if they're Orthodox Christians they all believe God exists and God raised Jesus from the dead I'd like to say more about this thing about 2000 years ago how do we consider those people but I'll just say this it's almost like some people tend to think that the history is like bird box you've got to wear your something over your face and don't look because you might catch Christianity I'm not Sandra Bullock and this isn't bird box [Music] I'm just waiting as you say go okay I'm talking and there's gonna be a lot to get to because I've got to go through rebuttals everything else so he says he's just pointed the evidence I would dispute whether or not we've actually pointed to anything like evidence what we pointed to his arguments that are interpreted in such way but early on he began with this notion about free will and determinism and while I am on record as being a compatible estoy also done a video with rationally rules where he talked about that that's almost too much to begin going into but I will say that I don't accept that we have anything like libertarian free will and so if you're going to propose that God is the best explanation for something that I don't think we have I don't know how that can be convincing I also don't know how you could demonstrate that I could have done otherwise I can demonstrate that I feel like I could have done otherwise but we don't have a way to rewind the clock to in fact show that I could have done otherwise so how do you draw a distinction between the impression that you could have done otherwise and the fact that you could have done otherwise meanwhile the notion of an of a God of classical theism which would apply to Christianity as well is in direct conflict with the notion of libertarian free will because if a God knows everything is going to happen and created the universe and chose the universe in which I'm an atheist as opposed to choosing a different universe then I didn't get to make those choices I still made those choices within the context that universe but it was decided before me and when you have a Bible that says that everything goes according to God's plan and that he can actually make prophecy you can't have prophecy unless God already knows how things are going to turn out and all of this stands in dire conflict with the notion of libertarian free will now that's not a problem for me because I don't think we have libertarian free will but we're probably not going to be well suited to go down that path this evening the next thing you presented was the Kalam cosmological argument and as I pointed out many many many many many many times the Kalam cosmological argument is not an argument for the existence of God God is not the premises God is not the conclusion premise one everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence premise two the universe began to exist conclusion therefore the universe had a cause for its existence that's the whole argument everything else that ties it to a god saying oh that cause must be transcend space and time and be an agent my none of that is part of the Kalam cosmological argument those are assertions that are glommed on thought things that I don't think that we can possibly know about what type of cause might be sufficient and necessary to explain the origin of the universe so the Kalam cosmological argument is not and anyway a proof for God what it is is it's a little hanging fruit that makes it seem like you're being reasonable because of course the universe had to have a cause and then we go on and have a secondary conversation about the nature of that cause I'm not convinced that we know enough to conclude what the origin of the universe is or how we ruled out things like universe creating Pixies or a multiverse or anything else I understand that in some of those cases it pushes it back but just to say that gosh the proposed explanation for the universe sounds a lot like God is not compelling at all because God is a specific invention in many cases to explain the things that we don't know every time there's something we don't know we stick God in there and if God can be an explanation for anything it's an explanation for nothing as a matter of fact it has no explanatory power it is functionally identical to saying it's magic because we tend to explain the unknown in terms of things that we know now he also mentioned that if I can't defeat this argument about determinism then you all have libertarian freewill that's just a fallacy whether or not I can defeat any argument is irrelevant to what kind of will you have or anything else he measure that we have zero counter examples to this we also have zero examples of something not beginning to exist of something existing necessarily eternally we have zero countering zero examples of anything that has been identified as beyond nature I don't even know how you we could begin to investigate the supernatural we can investigate manifestations in nature and we may come up with a model that allows us to conclude that these manifestations are caused by something outside of nature but we're not there yet and we have no way to confirm supernatural causation this is the reason why science is not based in philosophical naturalism it's based in methodological naturalism science methods cannot consider supernatural explanations so when we talk about hey I'm just presenting the evidence and the evidence is all around and I don't think gods hidden what we're presenting here would not fit in with science by the way it also would not fit in in a courtroom because we no longer allow spectral evidence in a courtroom these are places where we learn how to live our lives and come up with new inventions courtrooms are places where we decide life and death decisions and that should be good enough I would think that if God can't stand up in a court of law or under the scrutiny of scientific rigor and critical thinking to where there's actually evidence for it then certainly would have to admit that we are using some alternate way of knowing that is necessarily on weaker footing than science and courtrooms now this notion that he brings up about recalibrated plausibility yes I completely agree and the way you recalibrate plausibility is to investigate and examine and come up with more data and that can't happen for a single occurrence it can't happen for historical events that we can compare it to other ones how shall not put the Lord thy God to the test well that already is going to prevent us from doing testing the Christian got it perfectly but when we tried to test for this when for example the Templeton Foundation does a an investigation of intercessory prayer what we find is that prayer doesn't work it works at the rate of chance and as a matter of fact if you know you're being prayed for those people did worse the the the contention is that perhaps they had performance anxiety that if they knew people were preyed on them and they praying for them it didn't get better this would somehow mock God so they actually got worse because of the stress is one thing this notion about the moon-landing there are people who deny the moon-landing I'm not one of them we've been to the moon the earth is not flat vaccines don't cause autism you know this is stuff that you can actually look up and investigate and you will find data and in many cases these are things that we can do multiple trials on now the bedrock facts and the minimal facts and Gary Habermas this thing I first of all there are people who don't think that Jesus existed the myth assists I don't think their own particularly good footing because it's not really that unusual to think that there's an itinerant Jewish rabbi in the first century because there were loads of but the facts that they're presenting as minimal effects are aren't confirmable and so what we're doing is saying he said well no you might not want to an assessment from a Christian theologian you might not want to assessment for an atheist you maybe you won't want for Hindu I don't want assessments from anybody I want data I want evidence because every single one of those things cited whether it came from an atheist a Jew a Hindu or a Christian is their opinion about what happened I want the data that leads to that opinion that's how we determine whether or not it's reasonable not because I can cite more references for my idea because the truth of a proposition isn't impacted in any way by the number of people who believe it or the sincerity of their convictions or how many other people agree with their opinions now I agree that we shouldn't be trying to do group psychology on people from 2,000 years ago which means which should point out that we also can't conclude that they were honest and reasonable well represented accurately presented and that we should accept it that's also an assessment of that there are people who would die for a lie I'm not I'm not assessing that anybody did or needed to die for a lie because what we have our claims and we have a dearth of evidence to actually be able to investigate and reach a reasonable conclusion on that I'm doing a video in the near future on compound inference it's a clever title but it gets into this notion of Occam's razor and problems with abduction and inference I won't go through it too much right now but this notion that I'm being too skeptical boy I get that a lot from people who believe all sorts of things that I don't believe mad I don't see why you believe that the Earth's around ball you're just too skeptical I don't think it's possible to be too skeptical because skepticism is not cynicism it is not asserting that something is wrong it is simply being intellectually honest and saying I am not convinced and I will not be convinced until the data compels me to be convinced and what somebody presents me with what convinced them it will either convince me or it won't and if it won't I need to be able to point out why I don't accept it and then they can evaluate whether or not I'm being too skeptical or whatever now when Lakota asked about you know the comets smashing into the moon and producing that with that you know God exists would that convince you know it wouldn't convince me that God exists for well the reason I already pointed out there would be arrogant of me and incorrect of me to think that I could tell the difference between what a God did and what some technology that I'm unaware of that this is how con artists work they play on what you think your kind of pop or folk understanding of what realities a magician's work I know too much about how we are fooling ourselves on a regular basis to say that yes that would be confirmation of God he did the same thing with regard to if we lopped off somebody's head and then they got up and walked out would you then believe in the supernatural no but I would believe that we lopped off someone's head and that they got back up from the dead the fact of something occurring is independent from whether or not I understand how it occurs and this is why when we talk about why won't God reveal himself yes if in fact a God revealed himself to me that does not compel me to worship or obey or anything else but it would certainly make it easier to get past these pedantic exercises about whether or not there's a god that actually exists and focus on whether or not this is a God that is worthy or deserving of worship or any whether any God could be there's no conversation confirmation of the supernatural ever any time the supernatural has been proposed as an explanation for something that we've observed and we've actually been able to narrow it down to what is the most plausible explanation the explanation has never been supernatural or magic that doesn't mean it doesn't happen just means we can't confirm it all right during this next session of the cross-examination it'll be 12 minutes long 6 minutes being led by each of our presenters so dr. hunter will begin by asking questions and what I want to ask of our presenters is if you are to ask a question please at least give about 30 seconds before you start to interrupt or to jump on each other's words I want you to be able to have a good conversation but having been in debates before I know it can get really confusing if you ask a question and you immediately begin to interrupt them while they're trying to get out of answer so at least let the the one be responding go at least a good 30 seconds before you jump in or maybe redirect the question or something of that nature and I'm going to give them as much a freedom as I can but at the same time if I need to jump in to make sure that the audience is understanding and that there's clarity I'll do that and so there's six minutes on the clock and dr. hunter you will lead in the first six minutes all right so Matt I think you've already answered this but I just like to get it clearly out there is it possible on your view to have absolute certainty about anything including your own existence I have no idea if it's possible I do not think that it is possible so in other words epistemic ly you're not certain of anything we're talking about Cartesian certainty like I know you have to accept the reality that you're in and all that but as far as like Cartesian absolute certainty you would your position would be we can't have that even about our own existence so far as you know so I'll try to do this quickly it's a really specific point and we may be talking about two different things basically when the cart does the cacciatore or some Hobbs pointed out essentially that's contingent on the validity of reason and whether or not we can ever show that reason is reasonable may prevent us from getting to absolute certainty which is why when I debated sites in Bruton keitai i called what i feel as maximal certainty so if i begin with identity non-contradiction excluded middle from that we can directly derive mathematics and then from that point you either have deductive reasoning that leads to things that are as certain as logic but I don't call it absolute certainty because I don't know how we can confirm the validity of reason okay thank you now you have said many times and I'm not sure if you said it tonight that we should believe something when it has been demonstrated can you define for me what you mean by demonstrated sure so in it's gonna be different for different claims and different claims are gonna require different types of evidence if you say I just got a dog I'm just going to believe you and part of it has to do with how that fundamentally affects what changes my worldview I know I know dogs exist I know people don't have dogs as pets and so I'm willing to accept that if you say I just got a pet dragon to borrow Carl Sagan's example I'm not going to believe that I'm going to need more and so what would be required to convince me that is going to depend entirely on what the claim is so if you've got a dragon I would prefer that you just show me that the Christian God exists well see that's the thing when we're talking about something that is capable of doing anything I can't tell the difference between God did it and some advanced technology you know it's like going to a magic show when you know nothing about magic that's why we that's why people conclude that oh my gosh darren brown's really reading minds yeah he's not yeah and so so would you say that you don't know what that demonstration would look like for the Christian God's existence I I have said that and I tend to follow it up by saying that if God knows if if a God exists then God does know what would convince me and God should be capable of producing that and the fact that he hasn't means that either he doesn't exist doesn't want me to know he exists yet is it possible that given your epistemic framework and I know you said that you thought it was reasonable to say that if a person part of the ocean in Jesus name or something that that shouldn't convince you but but is it possible to given your epistemic framework that there you've constructed a set up where it just isn't possible that short of God taking away your libertarian freedom which I know you don't believe you have that he could actually make you believe even if I had libertarian freedom god I don't see how that God demonstrating his existence would preclude my freedom now I'm saying short of him taking away your liberty and freedom and making you believe it may be that your epistemic framework is such that there's nothing that he could do that would actually make you believe no there's loads of things that I did not believe that I became convinced of based on good evidence the fact that I don't know what evidence would convince me for this particular claim is about the nature of the claim but God wouldn't have to violate my libertarian free will in order to convince me of this for example if somebody just appeared right here and said hey I'm Jesus I'm real I'm here to show you that would begin the process of figuring out okay do I have good reason to believe that's the case but you still might be skeptical that that's an apparition or that you're just having a mental issue or something that would be the initial assessment yeah that's why you investigate to make sure that you weren't you didn't just jump to a conclusion so if somebody parts the waters in the name of Jesus well what if they part of the water I'm sorry it's your question time okay is it the case that you're not offering a competing hypothesis to the Resurrection tonight correct okay I don't have a lot of time for that when it comes to let's say the freewill argument is it not true that on your view whatever you end up doing it could not have been otherwise and doesn't that extend to your thoughts and beliefs no it's my position that I have no way of knowing if it could have been otherwise yeah but you affirm the position of compatibilism right well I have in the past I've gone back on compatibilism just a little bit and and that's back toward a libertarian freedom or toward determinism well compatibilism is the notion that determinism is true and not in conflict with so it's not a move back to determinism I was never in a position to where libertarian freedom no I've moved back towards the notion that we don't have free will of any sort okay that's not this is why I said it's too complicated they it be something to be happy to discuss okay give us I don't know that it's relevant okay but given the circumstances my doing this right now even though I experienced that as a free choice and all those kind of things and there's thoughts and everything and I'm thinking through it that was determined and could not have been otherwise because our mental states are reducible to our brain states which are reducible to our biology right I'm just saying that I have no way of knowing that that wasn't determined how would you show that this was actually that whether or not this felt like something I did voluntarily or if I just feel it because we have a scientific study ship to show that the brain makes decisions before the consciousness is aware of it and that is troubling it's something we have a live in experiments we could talk about that but here's the thing I'm not saying that we've reached a conclusion I'm just saying that that's what the data showed okay but the point is your position currently is that am i doing this could not have been otherwise no I have no idea if you could have done otherwise and I have no idea how you could demonstrate that you could have done otherwise so anyone saying that they could have done otherwise is now made that determinism no okay we got to the effort into the first six minutes now Matt will cross-examine Lee the cross-examination for the seer I won't leave that as I know I'll use some of my time to get this saying you couldn't have done otherwise would be determinism saying I'm not convinced you could have done otherwise is not determinism it's a recognition that determinism is essentially part of this but I don't know how you would show that you could have done otherwise that's that's the problem with that but well that that wasn't I mean that I was asking you and that sounds like a respectfully that sounds like a little bit of a Dodge I don't know how you would determine that that wasn't what I was asking okay asking on your how can you tell here's my question how can you tell the difference between feeling like you could have done otherwise and actually being having been able to do otherwise okay here's a couple of things I know you won't like the first one you might like the second one but I doubt it okay the first one is I believe so our immediate experience that we seem to have libertarian freedom you know you've probably seen John Searle and and others say things like look it seems when I do this that I could have just as easily done this and that's a very difficult and that's very powerful to escape so and trying to be quick but so my immediate experience of liberty and freedom a good argument has to have premises that are plausible which means more likely to be true than not and any argument structured that would try that would convince on Vince me that libertarian freedom does not exist would rely on one or more premises they're less plausible than my immediate experience of a libertarian freedom sure but that doesn't okay so that's fine how can you okay where's the second one on high okay the second one is that I think if we don't have libertarian freedom then rational affirmations are impossible so there's a third one - you owe me - go ahead and say it or wait no because I'll deal with this one and we've got other questions and I don't want to spend all night on free will I thought this was something I wanted to address in the rebuttal as well and that's the notion that a calculator can reach a right answer irrespective of whether or not it has any free will so saying that we couldn't have reasonable positions without free will just seems to me an assertion that doesn't have a justification is that a question no but it can be now that we've you can i address that since you did say it well this this will touch on that so maybe the first question I had is reasonable non-belief possible I think there are people who don't believe and from their perspective they feel like they're good reasons for their non belief Wow okay I'm trying to figure out which it was dodged more right then as long as we both admit we're dodging a little well so that actually I don't think it was people people can it seems to me in correct me if I'm wrong it seems to me that you're saying people can be convinced they're reasonable even if they're not I think yeah okay I would agree with that but like going back to the moon example those people were being reasonable it's just their conclusion was wrong yeah okay is reasonable non-belief possible in the context of for example the moon or the earth sun example as far as what now like you could come to the wrong conclusion but you could be a completely reasonable based on you can be reasonable and be wrong can it's true a fool boy so I still would like to answer that thing go ahead why not what was it again the calculator could be right but but but it's purely a deterministic piece of technology right basically yes here's the thing that's that kind of proves my point because my position is that if liberty and freedom does not exist then rational affirmations are impossible that doesn't mean that your beliefs are false in fact if it were possible for a person have and I don't know that there's anything on contradictory about this for a person have 100% true beliefs they could have 100% true beliefs and yet they didn't get there rationally sure and the reason for that is because rationality definitionally is reducible to reason and reason is the process by which you deliberate over between beliefs and choose which is a good or a bad thing to affirm and if the libertarian freedom does not exist then we don't have rationality is impossible because you can't choose against the irrational yeah I don't think that I accept that at all because I didn't we we our decision-making machine machines and the things that feed into us the fact that we're having an argument or whatever else somebody may or may not become convinced and to them they may have this experience of oh I've changed my position on this nothing about determinism suggestor implies that you cannot change your decision based on new information that you receive that you're not a computer it's the fact that it's more complex obfuscates that which is how why I'm the original question was how do you tell the difference between feeling like you could have done something different and demonstrating that you in fact could have done something different I have no solution I've never heard anybody give a solution that other than well I really feel like I can and it would be absurd for me to think well actually first of all I do think how do you test it well I'd okay well I do think that if you do seem to have a belief about something that seems almost impossible to doubt then you are justified in affirming that and believing that until someone gives you good reason to believe that that is not the case so I do think that's true however however I actually have other reasons one of those is the moot morality thing I think that if libertarian freedom does not exist and we're left with moot morality and what I mean by that is whether someone ends up becoming a philanthropist or ends up becoming a sex offender ultimately it's not that they didn't think through things and it's not they didn't you know but ultimately it was determined yeah but that doesn't so the mere the premium grant that hang on so I got 10 seconds there are 16 the the primary concern about freewill and morality is how do we hold people accountable and the truth is whether or not they have free will that was the agent that took the action and we hold them accountable and we may not in fact have any choice in that thing but this notion that you should believe something and tell somebody changed your mind is actually a fallacy the notion that the burden of proof is on somebody trying to change your mind I understand that's how it works in practice but that doesn't mean that your position rational choice I'll go ahead move on to that if that's okay because it was supposed to be questioned okay so here's the thing this came up in your debate with Mike like Conan quite a bit if you felt like the whole night that that's what he was doing and I don't necessarily I don't think that's what he was doing but I can tell you tonight that's not what I'm doing I'm not saying if you believe something until there's good enough evidence you're justified in believing it even if it's something like the supernatural what I'm saying is something like libertarian freedom where it seems impossible it seems almost absurd to deny it yeah it seems like an extraordinary claim it seems like there's less willing suspension of disbelief in the Terminator movies because at least there the robots were robots you No so I would need I would need some extraordinary evidence where I come from extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence meet you all right we're coming to a final round of cross-examination which again each presenter will get five minutes and we'll start again with dr. hunter but what I want to prepare you for is the question answer time for the audience so you're about to get your chance to participate and so that'll happen in ten minutes from now so begin to prepare if you have not already the microphones will be on either side and and we will take them in order just in the line that you're standing and we'll just rotate from one side to the other if you'd like to stand behind the microphone and be in line for those those questions don't take your places yet but as soon as the cross-examination is over you can come to ask just one question remember no follow-up that way everyone has enough time that wants to ask questions so five minutes beginning with dr. hunter all right so when it comes to the Kalam cosmological argument I think you misunderstood me because I said in my opening statements I'm not I said I'm bringing a case that begins with the Kalam cosmological argument and so I've heard I've heard you before say well look the Kalam doesn't even conclude with God therefore it's not an argument for God well but of course often when we move on to that stuff that follows up then the questions begin you know that would have been addressed by the Kalam so when it comes to premise one of the Kalam you questioned did you question whether it's true that everything that begins to exist must have a cause and is it your position that it is epistemic lees possible epistemic aliy possible that universe could have come to exist uncaused out of nothing I don't know and I didn't address that tonight okay do you think it's epistemic aliy possible that universe came to exist uncaused out nothing and I know because this is so there are things that we cannot investigate and so we can't get back beyond the Planck time math breaks down at that point we can't so the proposition and one thing that you kind of raised was this notion that either there's to come out of nothing and I think you've heard I've heard you before use the the sort of nothing that rock stream of it was a reference to a quote from somebody else that's not what physicists are proposing my objection to Kalam is that the conclusion is therefore the universe had a cause for its existence well I give the Kalam at all why not just put that as a premise in the in the argument that you're actually building because if I already accept that the universe had a cause of its existence and that seemed superfluous okay but didn't you just raise a criticism that would have been addressed by the Kalam tonight raiser what you just raised it can I think you just raised a concern that I don't that's not didn't seem to be what physicists think that there's this nothingness that came before the gong doesn't address nothingness either no but you just said but this would have been addressed by the Kalam whatever begins to exist must have a cause for its existence that the word nothing does not appear anywhere so are you willing to move beyond the Kalam and talk about the claims after the Kalam of course okay so do you believe the universe had a beginning I'll say that I have no idea so here's the thing really short our local presentation of the universe the evidence points to some starting point that we cannot investigate and don't know anything about yeah it may in fact be absurd to talk about things prior to the Big Bang if in fact time began with a big bang I don't know I'm not a cosmologist and I don't know that we have sufficient understanding to actually say yes this is the case a matter of fact I have a physicist friend who's working in an alternate model to that okay so when you say do you think the universe had a cause for its existence I don't know okay but multiverse universe vacuum all contiguous physical reality my question is do you believe okay so you either have the universes past eternal or it's not is your answer just I don't know correct how could it possibly be that the universe could be infinite into the past I don't know how is it how could it possibly be that God is infinite in the past well we believe God is timeless I know it doesn't matter what you believe it matters what you go definitionally you asked how is it that God could be infinite in the past I'm saying definitionally well maybe something doesn't make it so well I know but you asked me how could God exist infinitely you did not explain how God you've just asserted that he does by definition you asked me definitionally something about the Christian God and I gave you an answer we believe he exists timelessly so so he doesn't exist infinitely so I don't have that problem actually you didn't give that answer touch us now but okay they're good oh yeah okay so the problem with the past infinite seems to be it doesn't it that if you crossed half of infinity if time and events there's no such thing as sorry Minh past events all just a series of events then infinity isn't a quantity its unquantifiable it's a concept to describe something that is that is there's no number four right so there's no such thing is half of infinity right then similarly there's no such thing as half of eternity I know this sure descry aren't you describing the very problem that I'm raising is that when you posit that the universe has existed forever whatever word you want to use for that isn't it the case that if that's true you would have this mathematical quandary where you never arrive at today no because if time began with the universe then the universe has existed since time began okay so then it's not past eternal I never said it was past eternal said you didn't know correct I don't know if the why is this so difficult I'm not a physicist I don't think anybody knows the difference between me and many apologists who also aren't physicists is that I'm not willing to pretend that I know just because I got stumped by a question and proposed something that can be an answer to everything why do you need to be a physicist in order to understand the philosophical point that the the universe can't be past infinite because we would have never arrived it today because a philosophical approximation is different from what actually happened at the origin of the universe all right five minutes now continuing with Matt leading the cross-examination yeah this is where the the frustrating things is that you know I constantly if I if I honestly don't know something I say I don't know and then people act as if it's absurd because they're convinced that they do have the right answer so when we're talking about how one could demonstrate that God existed there's the filthy illogical assertions there's the philosophical but there's nothing that I'm aware of that could enter into a scientific investigation or even investigation of a courtroom am I right about that are we kind of stuck in the philosophic well there are those people in the intelligent design community who do deal with science and and stuff like that I'm not one of those guys you'll notice I didn't bring a teleological argument tonight a design argument but I would say this since you asked me the thing about it is I think and I think that lots of other apologists have mentioned this to you I don't I know you don't agree but it seems like you're using your it seems like you want to use a method like you prefer methodological naturalism know is that not the case okay well clarify preferred methods that demonstrate that they lead to consistently reliable result okay great scientific processes do that the theological processes don't okay faith doesn't faith is not a path to understanding there's no position you couldn't justify based on faith and I know you're not appealing to that yeah I'm saying if what methodology can somebody demonstrate that we have a good understanding of its reliability that leads to the conclusion that a god any God let alone the Christian God exists okay I think those kind of when you say and I want to understand you properly when you say that God needs to manifest in some detectable way and I don't know if you said that's not but you've said it sure or God needs to you know it sounds like what you're saying is that there needs to be something kind of and I'm not saying science but something kind of science II that we can kind of test this thing and here's the thing here use my response to that so I'll do it by analogy let's imagine that we have a metal detector and that metal detector represents science or whatever you're proposing and you were to say man this metal detector every time there's metal this metal detector chirps it's like the best metal detector in the world therefore we have no good reason to believe that sand and water and trees and air exist that would be that would be a problem what you would do in other words is you would look for another device and I think what you're out tonight is philosophy and history and I think philosophy does reliably get us to answers and I've given you philosophical arguments but I haven't heard and it's not that you haven't said things about them you have and I've enjoyed it but I don't think you've said anything substantive to really deal with especially the Kalam cosmological argument so or the case that begins with the Kalam oh I did the substantive thing is that even if you concluded that the universe that next one it must have an explanation for its existence or must have a cause for its existence what do you know about that cause and how do you know it and whenever when you or anybody else has presented the case it is a list of assertions well can I answer so if it's if if it's the cause of all nature coming into existence then that would be if nature is space-time matter then the cause would have to be if you'v nature can't come before nature to cause nature how do you know that well because it's nature that we're trying to explain okay how do you know it's not a different nature well it could be but then you have I said all contiguous physical realities so what we would have is you would still have to have a cause for that nature coming into existence it would just mean you haven't gone back far enough yeah so what I would say then is the cause would have to be a spaceless timeless non material cause what what requires and how is that an assertion so I'm sorry it's your question the fact that I'm fine with the notion that people intuitively reach the conclusion that whatever caused the universe is apart from the universe but actually that sure apart from our local presentation of the universe Sagan use the word cosmos because the universe is a terrible word when you're talking about multiverses and you vanish into conflict so the cosmos is everything there is ever was irrespective of time or anything else so if the local presentation of the universe had to have some cause then the only thing that I can that I can know about that is that it seems to be the case that it couldn't have been our universe it caused itself so there must be something else yeah what that something else is or needs to be I have no idea because I have no way to investigate it I have no other universes to compare this to you'll notice that in my opening statements I specified that I'm talking about our local representation multiverses vacuum models whatever you want to bring up and it can't be past infinite for reasons that I'm happy to defend and I know you say well I just don't think we can know and I'm saying whatever comes before all that we can call Sagan's Cosmos which is a Greek word that means the world but Sagan's Cosmos all of that whatever comes before isn't that but I don't see what's the case that it needs to be an agent okay can I answer that we've got four seconds left it was a question I'll I'll go ahead and answer that so there's a couple of reasons why it has to be an agent first of all an agent would have causal powers now that doesn't that's not the insistent that's not necessary but that's not the end of the story also you have types of causation right so event event causation would be if I took this water ball model and threw it at the moderator and the microphone fell out of his hand that's an event that caused another event and I won't do that but then there's state state causation which is like a frozen pond where you have a log resting on the top of that pond this stay is causing this other state what you would have with the beginning of the universe is state event causation you would go from a state of timeless nothingness to an events the beginning of the universe the only thing that makes sense of that is agent causation okay there's just an assertion that that's the only thing you can think of it's not the only it's not just that it's the only thing I can think of and lastly I'll say this it would have to have libertarian free will and the reason would and the reason it would is because there was no prior determinism to lead to that event and what sorts of things have liberty and freedom agents do all right well one thing I am certain of obvious it's obvious that intellect causes people to lose their hair and all the brain food just makes the hair go away give a give a round of applause to our presenters and they'll be a great job [Applause] we can go is I'm good all right we are ready now for the question to answer from the audience so please go ahead and take the microphones I have to pee but that'll just make me more animate just being walking all right then okay go ahead and take your places this gentleman was at the mic first and I yes and so I will let him ask the first question again keep it to one question and keep it brief and if you'd like to go to the back of the line and and start again for another question that's fine but go ahead state your name and and ask the ask away I'm drew my question is for Matt the debate question tonight with does the Christian God exists and braxton answers that question with yes I'm wondering do you answer that question with a dogmatic no or a maybe and if you answer the question with a maybe then why do you self-identify as an atheist instead of an agnostic so I thought I hid this at the top but I was talking fast so I answered with neither know nor a dogmatic no nor nor maybe my answer is that I have no idea if the Christian God exists but the case for it that I've examined has been unconvincing and I can point out why I'm not convinced and why I don't think other people should be convinced atheism is not the dogmatic assertion that God doesn't exist although that is a subcategory of it it is I am not convinced that it God exists it's essentially God's on trial being accused of existing and the atheists are voting did you shake your head like I got atheism wrong yes okay well I'm so glad that happened if I walked in here and told people they got Christianity wrong how you think they're gonna take that probably not well yeah the thing is there's multiple usages of lots of words including a theism atheism generally speaking is disbelief I do not believe I am not convinced wait you keep smirking I think it's the proposition of belief that there is no God I don't think it's well you're wrong I'm explaining that to you as a gang I don't really care how you define it that's not weird unconditionally if you don't care how I define it why are you at my event yeah and what we'll do on the on the cross-examination please address who you want to ask the question to and then the the opposing side will we'll get about a minute to to rebuttal or to say anything and follow-up to the question that was asked so you want to actually want to take up format here for a second honestly I'd make no bones about the fact I'm an apologist second and an evangelist first I know that doesn't sound cool to anybody don't really care I want people to have real conversations with people that don't believe what they believe to come to the truth and so I personally I know there's a big debate about what an atheist should call himself or whether it's an agnostic whatever and there are people that get real heated about that I want to tell you something in terms of actually getting traction with someone and having a real conversation what matters the most to me is that we find out what they mean by what they're calling themselves and then go with that yeah the label is irrelevant whether you think I'm an atheist way to think of a fake atheist whether you think I'm an agnostic way to think I'm a dumbass whatever the label is irrelevant I stated what my position was and we can either address that or not but if you're here to tell me that I'm not a real atheist I'm gonna say that I've hosted the atheist experience for 15 years and that's probably good enough credit for most people and if it's not I don't care all right young lady right up here go ahead hi my question is for Braxton Matt brought this up in his rebuttal but I don't believe that you answered it probably just because there are too many points but I'd be fascinated to know how do you personally reconcile your belief in libertarian freewill with your belief in an omniscient God which would know the outcome of every one he creates yeah thank you for asking that that gives me an opportunity to answer it I've actually done debates with people that are who don't believe the same as me about libertarian free will who are Christians and I didn't think this would be a Calvinism debate tonight but maybe it is though so when we tell when we think about a God who is omniscient he knows all future things so are you asking me if he knows everything it's like it's already set so then how are we free is that your question yes okay so that would be and I'm not accusing you of this but that would be what's called a modal fallacy it's a category err knowledge isn't causal knowledge doesn't cause anything so God's knowledge of what I'm going to do in the future doesn't cause me to do it he knows it because I'm going to freely do it so it's just a it's just a category err it's a modal fallacy good Matt would you like to yeah this is why when I addressed it I pointed out that it's not contingent merely upon a God knowing it it's a God who knew it created the universe and had options did God create the universe yes did he have options of other universes here can I answer this can I answer that's why yes okay so so when when we think now this is gonna get really complex really fast so just hang with me but when we talk about philosophy Matt's aware of this we talked about possible world semantics and what we mean by that is not other worlds that actually exist what we mean is other other hypothetical worlds and if something is a possible world if it is a world that contains no contradictions okay so is there a possible world where Matt remained a Christian yes and I hope that that's the actual world we got an organ over here we could have an altar call and I'd love to see him come to Jesus tonight not counting on it but I'm just saying so so there are there is a possible world where Matt remains a Christian there's nothing contradictory about that however if when if God chooses to give me a liver train freedom then we have a subset of possible worlds which we call feasible worlds that's the worlds remain has liberty and freedom if God wants to give me a libertarian freedom it may be that among those feasible worlds there simply isn't a world where Matt freely chooses to remain a Christian now I personally don't believe that I'm praying that Matt does come to faith but that's the answer that we give okay just for clarity yeah are you suggesting that God could not have created a universe in which I have libertarian free will and sitting here today would have been a theist what I'm saying is that is a possible world but if God gives people libertarian free will that gives us a subset of those worlds and it may be that in none of those worlds where you have a libertarian freedom you choose to become a Christian so if God wants to get so yes God could make a world where you're a Christian but it would be one where he could be one where he does where you don't have liberty and freedom okay let me jump in here cuz I know I know this debate and you get some to Mullen ISM and Calvinism and it can go forever and ever and ever because I've been a part of that world so read on Braxton's page on Mullen ISM and in Matt's page to get more information about that we're not gonna get through all our audience questions if we don't move along go ahead my name is Ellis and my question is directed to Matt I don't remember exactly what you said towards the end of the the debate but on element of faith and as if you reject that but so Mike and I believe very much the Christian God much ever very much is based on faith so my question is if there is a God they determine predetermined that faith is a necessary element to experiencing him then you categorically reject that at that point is that is that what you're saying so it would depend in part on how we're defining faith I had a whole debate on whether or not faith is reasonable and and Blake was basically defending the notion that all faith means is confidence but I went more with the Hebrews 11:1 thing that faith is the evidence of unseen I find that to be a grossly flawed epistemology that could be used to justify anything and and I'm not saying that that obviously doesn't mean you're wrong and it doesn't mean they you know if there's a God he picked that model that that's wrong I'm just saying that I have a hard time I could say white people are better than black people and say it's based on faith and that would be a problem and so for the most important questions that we could possibly ask is there a god is there such thing as salvation what must I do to be saved it it's very troubling for me that not only is there not a clear obvious answer for those things you could still be able to reject it I mean anybody who believes in Satan thinks that there's somebody who absolutely knows God in his power and yet chose to rebel and reject it but to say that those things are conditioned on faith faith faith is some people called it gullibility I prefer faith is the excuse people give for believing something when they don't have a good reason because if you have a good reason you just state the reason you never say it's based on faith Brexton so I don't think that that's I don't accept that position I'm with Blake I don't think that's good local definition the word pista is used 227 times in the New Testament and we it often just means conviction of the truth of anything and that conviction can be based on evidence Hebrews 11:1 which you mentioned I think a good translation for that is faith is the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen and remember this comes in a chapter replete with examples of people exercising faith on the basis of incredible evidence I mean we're talking about all these characters in the Bible lastly I would just say Theophilus of Antioch in his letter to Otto like his book 1 chapter 8 begins to talk about what faith is and he describes it and I won't read it but he he basically describes it as when you have good evidence for something in your trusting that evidence so I think that's a good biblical definition of faith and most people believe on the basis of something whether I think that what they're basing it on is good or not alright go ahead my name is Bob and I have hearing aids so the question is to Matt I think I heard you say that we are decision-making machines yes and so my question is do you agree that no decisions can be made pertaining to past events of which you have not been personally involved one more time do you agree that no decisions you can't make any decisions pertaining to any past event of which you have not been personally involved because you were saying I believe that unless if people had these opinions that was not really evidence so it seems as though you would have to be personally there in order to prove anything and that would rule out anything in the past no that's that's that's not what I'm saying I apologize if that's the way it came off when I first heard the question I thought you were asking me if if I could make decisions that influenced event stand up in the past and that's the case can I make assessments of past events where I wasn't involved right I can be I can make assessments of all of the available evidence I have and determine whether or not I can make any sometimes I'm not going to be able to make a reasonable reasonable conclusion you know if I may a juror and the prosecution prevents presents all of its evidence I may not have enough evidence to reach a strong conclusion I may be forced to vote not guilty even if maybe I suspect that something's there I can of course make decisions about anything I'm presented past present future it's just that the the strength of my conviction and the accuracy and reliability of my reasonableness is going to be contingent on both what information I'm presented with and whether or not I'm exercising you know proper critical thinking methods so I don't have a problem with the notion that well I think we're always assessing past events like you asked me a question but that's in the past right and of course I was there for that but if somebody asked me did my parents have sex sometime between 1968 and 1969 I'm pretty confident they did because I'm here actually would have been 68 but and but that is based on the fact that I know I'm here I know how biology works and procreation I know people have sex I know and so there's a mass of evidence it's not just that one event if you asked me about an event like did so did Jesus walk on water well now I have to assess that in in the sense of alright are we are we assuming it's not frozen and that he's not dynamo with a trick for doing it did he actually get out and walk on water well they all the available evidence suggests that this isn't possible by any normal means and so now I need to assess whether or not it's reasonable to conclude that there was some supernatural means and I have no evidence of anything supernatural lots of claims about things that are supernatural and to me it's really strange that the that the rate of miracle appearances in the world seems to decline as our ability to investigate and film them on camera increases it's just like mysteries have started going away you know once upon a time there is pillars of fire posed a cloud and manna from heaven and all this other stuff and of course the website way why won't God Hill amputees but now it's it's like you know oh we were having there was the thing I saw the other day where somebody's sister was killed in a bus or a fire or whatever and the Bible survived and she's like it's a miracle and I'm like your sister died hi I'm baffled by the way people want to twist things in and we're gonna make it look like wow you know it to God be the glory no matter what all right let's do it two things about that one I make no assessment about Matt's parents past copulation experiences and secondly you know I think miracles happen every day I know that sounds cliche I really do believe that and I know you're aware of Craig Keener's massive work on miracles I'm sure you've heard about that and I think that's a great evidential discussion of miracles and I speak in churches I've spoken in hundreds of churches over the past 20 years and I'll tell you what I know that we don't we I know that we have it in all these cases looked at the evidence for these and all that but everywhere I go there are multiple people in every crowd that knows someone in their family who was healed of something in a way that the doctors have no explanation of what happened I realized that doesn't mean it's a miracle it could merely mean that there's some naturalistic they're not aware of however when this happens again and again and again it does seem like there's smoke there's fire I'm not saying that those things are miracles I think they are but I'll tell you this much it means that the idea that miracles don't still happen it's a defeater for that I think thank you to you both though I enjoyed it thank you okay so my questions about the Kalam cosmological argument and I have some major issues with it because I mean it's first premise is that everything that begins to exist must have a cause right but then if you claim that the cause must be some timeless spaceless God then you're making a special pleading because then what's the cause of the first cause what's the cause yeah of your God yeah thanks for that I I appreciate that so the reason that we do this it's not special pleading what we're saying is we're saying okay what what are we talking about we're talking about nature are we talking about we're talking about the physical universe Sagan's Cosmos however you want to put it we're talking about three things generally speaking space time and matter right so if we're looking for what the cause of all of space time and matter is you can't say well it's something in space or it's something that is in time or is made of matter it has to be something that is not those things that we're trying to explain which means it's spaceless timeless non material and as for then why we would say that it's a god or an agent that is sufficiently powerful first of all it has to be sufficiently powerful to begin the universe but secondly we would say that you know like I said a moment ago you have state state causation you have you have event event causation here we have an example of state event causation and an agent is the explanation for that secondly it would have to have liberty and freedom because there was no prior determinism to lead to that lastly you asked what about the cause of that it kind of like the old question who caused God or who created God if God exists timelessly the only kinds of things that need beginnings or endings are temporal things things in time if God exists timelessly then he needs no beginning and he just exists yeah and I can actually try and help for half a second so it's I spend as much time probably talking with atheists about how to better have better gir better argument to not make mistakes to say to arguing with is the Kalam cosmological argument was specifically designed to avoid a circular pleading in the original cosmological art because the original was everything has a cause for its existence and then of course the response is well what's God's cause so now you rework and the Kalam became everything that begins to exist so that you can exclude God because God didn't begin to exist it still has the problem that you're pointing out at the the second layer but it was designed to avoid that and I mean you demonstrate that that was the original Kalam no not the original Kalam the Kalam was the original cosmological argument like I'd have to go look up okay maybe you could say that to me later after and I could be wrong but that's the way I was taught was that there were so the caught there is no D cosmological that's right had a Gori of cosmological arguments and a version of that began with everything has a cause and then the problem was everything begins all right this lines a little bit longer so we'll do two in a row on this side just to come help catch up cuz the gentlemen that have been sitting that long been standing a little longer than you guys so two in a row on that side go ahead my name is Jason and I got a question for Braxton it's about the cosmological argument that kind of issue with that so this might be due to my confusion of apologetics but is the is the cosmological argument consistent with science up to the point of the Big Bang is that where God comes in and if that's the argument does that render like the whole creation part of the Bible metaphor and if if its metaphor when does the Bible stop be being metaphor okay great questions I appreciate so let me make sure I remember the first part of your question okay science and in the second part of the Bible okay I'm gonna go in reverse order so with the Bible there are various the Bible is a collection of books you know and so whenever somebody says well you're supposed to read the Bible literally I say I agree you are supposed to read the Bible literally where it's meant to be read literally we wouldn't look at the Psalms and say you have to read this literally because those are poetry right and so there's narrative there's poetry there's apocalyptic stuff in there the Gospels are greco-roman biography now Genesis chapter 1 which is really what you're talking about Genesis chapters 1 perhaps through 3 those just this one particularly is a very difficult genre to pin down and even before in pre scientific even like way back with say Augustine and they were talking already about what what exactly is it is going on here so there are various views on that I would point you to the work of obviously guys like William Lane Craig but also you could go there's a you know young earth creationists they have their stuff and then you can have guys like Walton John Walton he has a literary framework view there are various views on Genesis 1 so that's not a deal breaker if someone happens to believe that the as old as whatever you know 15 to 20 billion years or whatever that's not a deal-breaker now as for science yes I don't argue for the Kalam using science because I'm just not that scientifically minded I'm aware of that someone like William Lane Craig would do that but or some maybe some others but I argue philosophically but yes it would be consistent with science all the way to that point of the beginning of nature which is what science studies and then when we talk about existence sans the physical universe yeah then we're gonna have to talk about philosophy and stuff like that Matt okay next in line go ahead hi my name is Jonathan and I have a question for Matt and I guess it could be for both of you guys I believe that desires drive us to seek answers and things I guess in the world and and that so my question I guess is what is it ultimately that you want to believe I guess both of you yes I'm just curious oh that's easy I want to believe as many true things and as few false things as possible I have this one I I'm a like an obsessive learner like I have way too many hobbies like if there are people who if they came over to my house would be like gosh you're just a really boring guy and they're right except that if we took a list of all the things that I've done and explored and tried to learn about and I tend to research until I get to a point of diminishing returns but if something is true I want to know it it there's a reason why the James Randi Educational Foundation would test psychics and dowsers because if there were psychics and dowsers that could demonstrate that they could do what they said they'd do that would be worth knowing it would fundamentally change our understanding of the world so if there's something supernatural I want to know if there's an even if and if it's the case that there's nothing beyond nature I'd like to know that - I don't assert that that's the case because I don't think we know orexin I want to believe there's going to be a fifth Indiana Jones film I really want to believe that and see that's a debate loser right there I would like to believe and I want to believe it's gonna be awesome but why do I want to believe well I want to leave the truth and I think that's where me and Matt agree we both want to believe the truth and the thing about it is there are some true things that I don't like honestly there are some things that the Bible teaches that might not suit my every preference but you know what it doesn't really matter what I want to be true it matters what is true and I think the it mattering what is true is what Matt and I would agree about tonight over here go ahead first I just wanted to say yeah I was in that wine and I snuck over here to kind of cut like then you took two questions so maybe there is a guy but my question is for Brax figure we've heard you asked Matt several times what kind of evidence it would take for him to believe so my question is what kind of evidence would it take for you to not believe if an asteroid hit the moon and it said there is no God in multiple languages or if somebody split the sea and the name of Buddha would that change your mind yeah it's an interesting question actually my worldview my Christian is going to hang with me here the Christian worldview actually accounts for supernatural stuff happening in other religions I make no bones about I'm not the least bit ashamed to say that I believe there are supernatural forces that are positive and there's supernatural forces that are evil and so for that reason yeah as a deception I think there could be things in other religions now that doesn't mean that my worldview is not falsifiable he brought up false liability and I meant to get to that you're not gonna like what I say about falsifiability by the way for those of you that don't know a falsifiability is the if you if you have a good hypothesis you should be able to provide something that would show that it's false one thing that would show that it that Christian theism was false it's kind of hard to have Christian the Christian God if God doesn't exist so someone could show a lot of times people will say well you can't prove a negative well that's simply not true there are no married bachelors right I don't know that because I've looked all over the universe and I've found any it's because the idea is contradictory internally if someone could show that God so defined is contradictory well that would show that that God does not exist and people try to do that with problem of evil arguments and stuff like that so that would do it right there another thing with if you if you if maybe there was some one of the disciples and we had some good reason to believe we found some document that dates the right time maybe there's a group of these guys and they're all saying hey these guys are out there saying that Jesus rose from the dead and they're doing all this it's Buncombe and we know it's bunk and and they're liars and all that okay if there's something like that yeah that would be powerful evidence so I would be willing to change my mind if I was presented with good enough evidence to change my mind Matt do you say anything there I'll keep it brief this is what I was talking about in the opening statement when I say that we're all trying to solve these problems in pretty much the same way I agree with it by and large I agree with him on you know the notion of falsifiability and and the process changing minds where we disagree is on what evidence would be sufficient to warrant belief and it gets us to this point this happens everywhere and it's no fault of is I do it to everybody in this room has done it where all of a sudden we become convinced of something and now we're sticking with it until somebody actually proves us wrong and this is why what makes what I do so difficult because I can't prove you wrong all I can do is show that you might not have good reason to believe the thing that you're convinced you do that you know if we if I could show you that the ruler you used to measure by is not reliable you should walk away going wow every measurement I've ever made with that ruler is unreliable not that it was necessarily wrong just that I don't have confidence to think it's right we're both doing the same thing we've just kind of reached different Clark over here in the red shirt go ahead hi my name is John it's for you Matt talked a lot about evidence uncertainty tonight so basically up to two questions you know if if we can't really know for certain why things are certainly true one what benefit does it do to try to convince somebody bet the wrong and two I'm sure my teenagers back here would like to know why they are asked to ask to take test on things that are certain dear drew such as math or English or science sure so when I say when I say they can't be absolutely certain I also talked about maximal certainty that I began with essentially the logical absolutes of identity nan Chi and everything's derived for is as certain as we can be about everything and the world that we inhabit and experience it's as far as we can tell all contingent upon that so deductive arguments that tie back to that are as certain as we can be it could be that maximal certainty as I call it is ultimately absolute certainty we just don't have a way to demonstrate it because we don't have a way to demonstrate essentially that reason is unfailing however the tools of reason consistently demonstrate the reliability in giving us an accurate model of the world it's not like I'm likely to walk out into traffic you know and a bus appears out of nowhere and science enemy the world appears to operate in an orderly fashion and as long as that's the case then the best it's like people would say oh how do you solve hard solve system how do you know you're not the matrix I don't but until somebody shows me I am in the matrix and a way out there's nothing I can do about it I have to deal with this reality based on the rules that it seems to present to me and so why should they take a test because they're stuck dealing with the reality that there are consequences to not taking that test and not gaining that understanding it doesn't matter even if you were in the matrix let's say you're not in the real world you're in a construct and until until you have a way out you've got to deal with the rules of the matrix you're in now I I happen to be fairly convinced that I live in the real world and that I share experiences with other people but that's mostly because I don't think that my brain has written every wonderful song or been every obnoxious caller to the show so I'm fine with the notion that I share space with other people and tell somebody shows me differently braxton do you want to add to that no that's fine okay right over here question format are we only decision-making machines and I guess based this on your your current understanding and then is that different from a past understanding that you've had I don't know I don't know how that's difficult to answer I think there's a way you could look at it where we are merely decision making the same machines but you'd also have to look at it as we are so much more than that as human beings because not everything we make is some not everyday not even every decision we make is some sort of rational process I don't choose what I like matter of fact I don't think beliefs are a choice at all I think you can you your as an agent you are acting in accordance with your beliefs you become convinced of things it's not something I I just I'm now I'm gonna believe that gravity doesn't work that that just doesn't work out but we're not always remotely reasonable either I didn't choose to like chocolate ice cream I didn't choose to fall in love with somebody and I don't think there's any problem at all I think that while we could look at like love romantic love for example as something that could be viewed as ultimately irrational I think there's a way you can look at it is ultimately rational as well because I'm stuck on this rock as far as they can tell and I have to share space with people and things in my life affect their life the things in their life affect my life and so finding a way to live and work cooperatively is I mean that's just straight-up game theory on on how to do this and so maybe having someone that I'm potentially irrationally emotionally attached to is such a massive benefit to me in all these other areas that it's ultimately rational even if we don't recognize it that way so we're decision making machines but we're not anywhere near a perfect decision-making machine braxton do you want to follow up no that's okay probably the last question we have 30 seconds left manthis questions for you I don't want to misquote you did you mention that you believe the Bible might have been altered or certain stories in the Bible might be altered yeah I believe the version of the Bible we have is clearly altered and I don't think that that's remotely outrageous most Christian scholars that have spoken to about it they don't deny that it's altered it's just whether or not it's altered in a significant way like if you go to mark chapter 16 verses 9 through 20 we were talking about earlier they don't exist in the oldest and best manuscripts and that's where it talks about you know if you're a true believer you can drink any poisonous thing and it won't harm you and you can handle snakes well Christians can argue all day long about whether that should be in there or not but there's no real debate on whether or not it was in the oldest manuscripts and it's things like that the comet Johanna Johanna things like that where I think there were possibly alterations but even if there were none that doesn't change whether or not I find it Mexico boy yeah this this some of what I say maybe quotations from Craig Blomberg but Airmen Guard Airmen talks about there being 200,000 to 400,000 textual variants in all of the New Testament manuscripts before the printing press in 1440 AD since there are only a hundred and thirty-eight thousand words in the whole New Testament readers might think that that means every word was in question with most of them having multiple possible alternatives this is false these are spread among over 5,000 manuscripts there are 220 thousand translations into other Middle Eastern Eastern and European languages from Greek that means you have an average of 8 to 16 unique variants per manuscript not that scary I agree with him about the ending to mark chapter 16 and maybe I wasn't quite paying attention but maybe some of the other ones that are well-known and fortunately most of your Bibles though I grant not all have a scholarly notation because Christians are aware of this our seminaries teach this and good pastors let their congregations know about this so I agree with that part of what he said and I think it sounds like he agrees with me that the variations that we have the the you know the scare scare tactics but the difference is is way overblown yeah anybody anybody who's saying oh your Bibles just full of all kinds of false crap that somebody and they don't know what they're talking about there may be some of that blame the problem is because we don't have originals it's always an inference to figure out how reliable the version you have is it's one of the reasons why we ended up with a Protestant Reformation of the church isn't going to dictate what I need to believe I've had a personal relationship with Jesus and the Holy Spirit can guide me through the Bible and if that is actually all true that's fine and it doesn't matter if there's an error I think there are some errors that are perhaps significant to doctrine most of them probably aren't alright one more time let's give a round of applause for our two presenters now I will admit what I'm about to say now is not fair to our atheist friends but after all we are at a Baptist school and this is being hosted by Baptists so I take the prerogative to do as I wish because I'm a libertarian Lee free to do so and I will give a past world word in closing by just simply saying I'm very similar to to Matt in the sense that we were raised in Baptist churches both being told we were going to be growing up to be Baptist preachers and I came to a fork in the road I remember having those doubts in my life I remember we're looking up at my ceiling fan and I said God if you're really there just turn on the fan and I'll believe in you I will trust you I will know when you're there just turn on my ceiling fan and it didn't happen remember notice I'm sitting there go Lord if you just make that pencil right over there just make it hover across the room then I'll just know you're there I'll know it I'll just know it and then I'll serve you I really just be committed I know it and God got in my face and again he doesn't speak audibly to me I'm a Baptist I couldn't handle that but God it pressed upon me and saying Layton what if I did do that where would you start seeking for me the reason the Bible says it's a perverse generation that continues to look for signs and wonders is because when you begin to look on the external you will never hear the voice of God here and when you come to a fork in the road you either go to the fork in the road where you look for the science and the external or you start looking here and I started to realize that it's only when you begin to realize that God ordained faith and that he doesn't talk through the big storms and the big the big hurricanes he talks to the still small voice and when he gives you if he were to give you an external sign guess what you're gonna be looking for the rest of your life you know what's gonna happen I want to say okay guess what happened to me Braxton God turned on the ceiling Fame for me it was just amazing and what's max is gonna think God didn't turn on my ceiling fan well I maybe I should ask God to turn on my ceiling fan so what rock what's Backson gonna do instead of looking for the still small voice in the internal what's he gonna do he's gonna start looking for the external he's gonna look for the sign he's gonna look for the wonder and he's gonna miss the still small voice because God chooses whether he believes this or not the Bible says God chooses to speak through faith and I'm here to challenge you I'm here to challenge you you can go match route and look for the external and never find it and even come to the conclusion that no matter what he did if you Bob somebody's head off and put it back on I'm still not going to be convinced because it's not about what God's doing externally it's what he's doing here and I'm just telling you if you're still searching you're still seeking don't look externally look here and I promise you will find I promise you we'll find him if you continue to seek him with all your heart you may not believe that yet and that's fine if you come to the same conclusion I'm not trying to put him down here I'm simply saying that's my testimony that's what God did to me I can only say I was once blind but now I see I was once blind but now I see and you can never you can never take away the stories of the thousands upon thousands of people and I'll end with the CS Lewis quote if Christianity false if it's false it is of no importance it's not but if it's true it's of the most importance what it cannot be is just moderately important it can't be that that's why these kinds of discussions are so valuable because this is ultimately what drives the purpose of our life why are we on this big ball why are we here why do we exist and if that's something you haven't grappled with as a college student or even as a 70 year old who's already retired it doesn't matter what stage of life here and if you haven't grappled with that truth and asking yourself the question why am I here what's the purpose of my existence my challenge for you as a theist as a Christian is don't look for the external because our God is one who speaks in the still small voice of faith please continue to seek Him and seek him with all your heart I'm gonna close with the word of Prayer father I do pray that God everyone in this room regardless of where they are in their faith and their walk where they are in their doubts and their skepticism I pray father that you in your own wisdom in your own ways will continue to review yourself through this still small voice that we won't look to the external but we would continue to listen through faith and that you may be glorified in Jesus name Amen I want to invite you to the unapologetic conference right down here in the front row there are some Flyers that if you would like to come it's not too late there will be registration open at the door if you want to come and register at the door if you can't afford to go come talk to me or Eric and we will provide you scholarship we will find you a scholarship if you literally just I can't come up with any money for it you come see one of us and we will provide we will help you find a scholarship for that so don't don't not come because of money please grab one of those brochures he's heading right through the back with us and as you leave you can grab one of those brochures and hopefully we'll see you at Columbus Avenue thank y'all for being here good night be safe going home this video is made possible by supporters of the atheist debates patreon project you can find more information and add your support at patreon.com slash atheist debates
Unfortunately, if you've seen more than one or two of Matt's debates with apologists, you've seen this one. But it's still a fun watch.
But this time there's a bonus shithead in the Q&A, so that's cool.