Atheist Eddie Tabash thrashes the Christian Teacher in this debate on God

good evening my name is marker Gere and I am the stock Delhi debate coach it's a pleasure being here this evening debate is important it's an essential aspect of who we are as Americans it's our freedom of speech our right to speak what we wish and to hopefully be heard it's also an essential part of who we are as humans it gives us a chance to voice our thoughts our beliefs and kind of discover our core values tonight's debate does God exist certainly provides us that opportunity tonight's going to follow a very specific format agreed upon by both debaters it will begin with a 20-minute opening statement followed by 10-minute rebuttals then it becomes a cross-examination of successive questions three per debater the questions can last up to one minute and the responses up to two minutes each we then turn our attention to the cross-examination provided by the audience essentially questions that you provide by writing on your card when you entered during the course of the debate if you have a question feel free to write it down hold it up and one of the members of the philosophy Club will come by and pick it up and eventually those will come back to me to address to the debaters when I ask the question each debater will have two minutes for a response we will then conclude our debate with a 12 minute closing statement for each debater I would like to introduce the debaters this time on the affirmative mr. Randy Martin mr. Martin is the biblical studies department here at Bakersfield Christian High School concluding his seventh year on staff he also pastors Covenant Presbyterian Church as a Regents scholar at UCLA mr. Martin earned a BA with honors and philosophy while at Covenant Theological Seminary mr. Martin was the systematic theology Award recipient he graduated with honors and a Master of Divinity degree during his undergraduate years at UCLA mr. Martin had his beliefs concerning God's existence and the Christian faith challenged repeatedly this intellectual curiosity testing only serve to strengthen his convictions that the truthfulness of the Christian worldview is rationally well-founded on the negative mr.eddy Taba Sh mr. Taba SH is a constitutional lawyer in the Los Angeles area he graduated magna lot from UCLA in 1973 and obtained his law degree from Loyola Law School of Los Angeles in 1976 his father was an Orthodox rabbi from Lithuania his mother was a nosh wid survivor from Hungary after decades of spiritual searching eddie has determined that we live in a natural and not a supernatural universe he serves on the board of directors of the Council for secular humanism and its parent organization the Center for inquiry he is also a life member of American Atheists he has debated such eminent Christian philosophers as William Lane Craig Douglas gebet Richard Swinburne and peter van inwagen the debaters have decided to informally call each other by the first names I also wish to ask people to refrain from walking in front of the cameras as this event is being recorded without further delay mr. Martin your opening statement it's my privilege to affirm and argue for the existence of God and I thank God that I have a chance to do this as a preliminary starting point I want us to consider what we understand by the term God the notion of God which Eddie and I are debating tonight is that definition of God which fits the traditional statement of the problem of evil that problem can be stated with relative simplicity three cardinal premises first God is all-powerful secondly God is holy good thirdly evil exists now it's this notion of God that's at the center of our debate tonight a God who is all-powerful a God who is holy good this automatically rules out pantheism the idea that God and the universe are one of the same it automatically rules out polytheism that's not at issue we're also not debating some vague kind of supernaturalism we're debating this understanding of God what we may call the classical view of God the God we would identify essentially with the Abrahamic tradition perhaps the judeo-christian understanding of God I believe that both of us can take this for granted that that's what we're speaking to when we talk about the idea of God this evening now it's safe to say both of us believe this issue is quite important both of us passionately believe what we're trying to affirm and establish this evening but as Pascal would say if I'm wrong and Eddie is right then I'll live out my life with mistaken beliefs and I will die and nothing more comes of it but if I'm right and Eddie is wrong he will live his life with a very mistaken belief and then have to face God afterwards so it should be quite clear for everyone that the personal consequences of how you decide this question are incredibly significant in other words because so much is at stake you ought to give all the arguments and evidence for theism very serious consideration I won't be able to give all those arguments tonight I'm going to essentially focus on one or two first of all just as the traditional and classical problem of evil has been presented repeatedly against belief in God so theists have challenged atheism generally with the opposite problem the problem of morality now no doubt Eddie's been challenged often this way how to get morality from atheism that is if no God exists where does morality come from that's the place I intend to begin this evening now I want you to imagine a group of philosophers who are theists who believe in God they're discussing the key premises of the problem of evil as the discussion passes around the circle each one of the Philosopher's emphasizes his convictions concerning these three premises the first one says yes God is all-powerful yes God is holy good yes evil truly exists but on this particular occasion as the circle of atheists each speak to this particular conviction it reaches their last member one particular philosopher who speaks this way yes God is all-powerful yes God is holy good but no evil does not exist now immediately his fellow philosophers questioned him closely why do you deny the existence of evil to which he replies I deny the existence of evil because I deny the existence of morality now a very interesting discussion follows we can't follow it completely time prevents that but here was the outcome the group of philosophers say to their fellow philosopher this is a serious mistaken issue with respect to rationality and logic for instance you cannot claim that God exists and that he's all-powerful and that he's holy good and then claim that morali does not exist because if you deny that morality exists and therefore claim that evil does not exist then you have wrecked logical destruction on your claim that God was holy good one of our most basic premises about God is that he is wholly good in a moral sense not simply that he's a good mathematician or a good designer of universes but that God is good in a moral sense in the sense in which some things are morally right absolutely right and some things are wrong absolutely wrong in that sense God is holy good now if you make the claim that morality does not exist then you've also denied that morality applies to God and you've denied your claim then that God is holy good so consequently you cannot claim that morality does not exist while claiming that God does exist a God who is holy good that would be logically inconsistent so our theistic philosophers write papers they make it clear that classical theism logically entails the existence of morality that's to assert that the existence of God to assert that God is wholly good it logically commits you to the assertion of the real existence of morality therefore you possess the basis the ontological basis for making moral judgments that some actions are right and good and others are wrong and truly evil now coincidentally about the same time a Kadri of atheistic philosophers we're also discussing the classical problem of evil now these philosophers were the most common sort that we find today atheists committed to naturalism committed to Darwinism and they were reviewing the more recent history of this argument from the atheistic philosophers al Mackie to the recent refutation of the problem of evil by the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga but yet they were still voicing their opinions on how best to use the fact of evil in this world to motivate disbelief in the existence of God as they went around the circle sharing their philosophical strategies once spoke of his arguments about gratuitous evil another his arguments concerning the sheer amount of evil another the rhetorical value of the emotive impact of describing heinous acts of evil as motivating disbelief in God and they came to their last member let's call him Bill who exclaims I could no longer work on this problem as an attack against the existence of God because I do not believe that evil exists now in response bill's fellow atheists asked him how he had come to this conclusion bill replies this way I do not believe in evil because I did not believe morality exists but before they can respond bill says further and furthermore there's not a single line of argument you can think of that what logically compel me to believe otherwise he repeats it again I do not believe there is such a thing as evil and there is no line of argument you can think of that will logically compel me to believe otherwise I want you to recognize the nature of this claim that is being made bill is quite aware that many of his fellow atheists believe in evil many atheists make moral judgments make moral pronouncements and make references to actions being right and wrong many atheists attempt to live out their lives and what we would normally call a moral way what Bill is asserting is that morality is not in any way logically entailed or logically required by atheism that whatever the basis is for the morality believed by his fellow atheists it's not to be found in atheism itself let me put something to Bill's arguments in the mouth of a non imaginary atheist in fact his actual name is Bill dr. William provine distinguished University professor of biology at Cornell University dr. Provine holds that the joining together of atheism naturalism and our wisdom is a very tight conjunction that most rigorous scientists and philosophical thinking will join these three ideas together so in 1998 dr. Provine said evolution is the greatest engine of atheism ever invented naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly and then he lists these number one no gods worth believing in exists number two no life after death exists number three no ultimate meaning in life exists number four no human free will is existing and number five no ultimate foundation for ethics exists and he repeated that and stressed that in many many statements afterwards ultimately he says there is no foundation for ethics no ultimate foundation to be found in atheism now please note dr. Provine makes it clear that he still thinks that people will adopt a form of morality the same way you can adopt a kind of meaning in life you simply create your own meaning in life you create your own morale but here's what dr. Provine leaves unsaid as an atheist you do not have to create any system of morality to live by you're not logically compelled to have any morality whatsoever by your system of atheism naturalism and Darwinism and if you do choose to adopt for yourself for your life a system of morality it is not logically a feature of your atheism it has no logical connection to the ultimate nature of the atheistic and naturalistic reality that you insist is true it is simply your personal add-on you have accessorize your atheism but you purchased your ethics from some other place then your most foundational system of atheism naturalism and Darwinism now there are a couple of implications that I want us to see from this argument concerning atheism first if you have certain convictions about morality if for instance you believe that some things are truly evil truly wrong well you can't get that conviction and a logically compelling way from atheism and dr. bill Provine is certainly not alone and recognized in the argument that I'm making we also find this admission from one of the most celebrated atheistic ethicists in the United States of the last quarter century professor Kane Yeltsin among atheistic philosophers Nielsen has written more about ethics than any other philosophy here's what he said in a debate once with Christian philosopher JP Moreland the point about asking the question why be moral is to point out that there is no way of showing that an individual who doesn't care about people or anything else and is willing to be a freeloader and on a principle jerk need not be acting irrationally or making an intellectual mistake and so living Nielson goes on to say I do not think there's any such intrinsic link between morality and rationality at a certain point morality just requires commitment and subscription now what Nielsen is saying is that if a person wants to be an unprincipled jerk and a freeloader who doesn't care about other people there's no way to show that such a person is making a rational or intellectual mistake about his life that is there's no way to form a logically compelling argument to convince such a person that he ought to have a moral system if he begins with atheism this is to admit that you can't form a logically compelling argument to the effect that evil exists and that this person ought not to be evil in other words you can't get a moral system in any rational way from the intellectual belief system of atheism naturalism and Darwinism Minihan also makes my second point at a certain point morality just requires commitment and subscription he says in other words if you want a system of morality it is a leap of faith you can't derive it from your atheism naturalism and Darwinism so you simply invent one for yourself and that is the point that I'm making there is nothing in atheism nothing at all as a philosophical viewpoint that logically compels or logically motivates or logically provides the foundation for a moral system at all and if you do set forth some system of morality you are accessorizing your atheism but you're not getting those moral beliefs you're not getting those moral convictions from the essential atheism itself now how does this apply to the question of God's existence it has a very direct application if you really believe that morality genuinely exists you need to see that atheism can't get it for you the inability to ground morality and ethics is a very strong even one of the strongest arguments that God does exist and atheism is false on the other hand the theism that we are debating tonight is defined morally at its most essential level the essence of the nature of this theism invokes the essential concept that God is wholly good in a moral sense look at it this way to most of us it is so very obvious that morality is real there's a real right and wrong the moral statements are making true statements about reality for instance if I say that the Holocaust was truly evil I do not mean that it is personally the way I feel about it and perhaps you might feel differently and I don't mean that it's only relatively evil that is to say it's evil or was evil in its day but perhaps in the future it might not be evil and we don't want to say that it was evil and just simply some utilitarian fashion that it had the production of bad effects because in the future history might reverse its judgment and say the effects were actually solitary that maybe that's why Israel got its its homeland back or maybe it's why it evokes such great horror over that kind of evil that people became better people you see rational people understand deeply in a clear and vivid way that the genocide of action against the Jews was unspeakably evil not relatively evil not even a utilitarian fashion but even in the sense in which the logical problem of the problem of evil states it if God is holy good and if God is all-powerful and if evil exists real evil evil of that kind but that is a judgment you can't get out of atheism and because this is so a theism is most certainly not true let me mention a couple implications here one particularly for science if you can't get if you can't get morality from atheism what does that do for the scientific enterprise one of the most critical aspects of the scientific enterprise is this every single stage of the method of the scientific method requires that the researcher be absolutely committed to integrity where you can't trust his results from one step to the next from one step to the next from one step to the next you must trust that he's going to be absolutely trustworthy absolutely committed to a standard of what relative truth no utilitarian truth no a personal view of morality no he has to be committed to absolute truth or his results are a joke his results are worthless why are some people so aroused over the question of this Climategate recently and these numbers of emails that have been hacked into concerning the climate scientists because there was evidence that they weren't committed to an absolute standard of honesty and integrity but here's the problem if atheism will not give you morality if it will not give you an absolute morality then how can you trust the scientific method the scientific method relies upon a commitment absolute truth where its results are absolutely worthless so you see though atheism generally prides itself in believing that the scientific method is the best of all methods to determine what the nature of the world is in fact if you hold on to atheism consistently and recognize it doesn't give you an absolute morality then you have no reason to trust a scientific method because those committed to it who may be atheists are not necessarily committed to an ethical way of dealing science and we happen to see that often enough in the real world there is no rationally compelling argument from atheism naturalism and Darwinism for morality this conviction is not a new conviction more than a hundred years ago the philosopher Nietzsche was making this point the life of the West Nietzsche said is based on Christianity the values of the West are based on Christianity some of these values seem to have taken on a life of their own and this gives us the illusion that we can get rid of Christianity and keep the values this Nietzsche said is an illusion our Western values are what Nietzsche terms shadows of gods remove the Christian foundation and the values must go to or consider the French existential philosopher jean-paul Sartre he wrote everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist and man is in consequence forlorn for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself nor on the other hand if God does not exist are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior Sartre contended that whatever one chooses to do is right he even said we can never choose evil because evil doesn't exist finally the philosopher Bertrand Russell observed we feel that man who brings widespread happiness at the expense of misery to self is a better man than the man who brings unhappiness to others and Happiness to himself I did not know of any rational ground for this view or perhaps for the somewhat more rational view that whatever the majority desires called utilitarian hedonism is preferable to what the minority desires these are truly ethical problems but I do not know of any way in which they can be solved except by politics and war all that I can say all that I can find to say on this subject is that an ethical opinion can only be defended by an ethical axiom but if the axiom is not accepted there is no way of reaching a rational conclusion and that's the point atheism does not give you that grounding ethical axiom and you have to have that grounding ethical axiom in order to establish the moral judgment that evil exists thank you [Applause] Thank You mr. Martin mr. Thomas and reload statements am I on I'm on thank you okay I want to thank Randy for debating me on this most important topic I will address his points in my rebuttal but now I'm going to present my affirmative reasons for not believing in an all-powerful all good all-knowing God I will argue that the evidence in our physical universe clearly makes it much more likely than not that a supernatural self conscious personality which is this all good all-knowing all-powerful God does not exist my dominant theme will be an evidentiary one it will be a cumulative argument saying that the totality of the evidence points in favor of naturalism and not super naturalism and so God has swept away with all supernatural claims my argument is based upon the weight of the evidence and upon the assertion that naturalism which is more likely than supernaturalism as opposed to wishful thinking is the best inference to date to be made from the existing evidence before us now if I were to say to you the 2000 years ago here in ancient Bakersfield Green gremlins from the sixth dimension abducted members of the native population and imbued them with special powers and these people are now the guardian angels of the United States you would not believe me if I said I came here from Los Angeles not by car but by flapping my arms and flying you wouldn't believe me because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and such claims violate the laws of nature as we understand them and violate our empirical understanding of how the physical world operates now claims of miracles have the initial problem of bearing witness against selves since by their very nature they are violations of the laws of nature which are not supposed to be violated now all the supposed miracles that are used to verify the intervention and human affairs of some alleged God took place in a pre-scientific era why not today why don't we moderns have the same opportunity to observe these miracles today talking snakes talking donkeys worldwide floods Sun standing still people being resurrected from the dead have somebody turned into a pillar of salt there's no verifiable event in today's world that corresponds to these types of miracles if we were to look for the Loch Ness monster the alleged ancient sea serpent in that lake in Scotland and we scour the lake and it's not there we can conclude it's more likely than not that if we don't see it it is not there it does not exist not in that Lake we have more evidence that the laws of nature which a miracle would have to violate are in fact not violated than we have ever had that a miraculous violation did occur thus is very important the probability that a miracle happened a violation of natural law will always be lower than the probability that a miracle has not occurred and even the most religious among you conduct your life that way if there were a power outage or a collapse of the 99 freeway and somebody said we will levitate you to Tehachapi or to Santa Clarita you would not take them up on the offer because outside of your religious beliefs for which you make special allowance that is not really justified by the evidence you wouldn't accept the supernatural also there is the problem of consciousness being dependent on the physical brain so if a child dies at two months and pops out into the Hereafter would you have somebody speaking a language consciousness our very self awareness the language we speak internally is a result of sensory input into a physical and so without a physical brain without cortical neurons firing through synapses how can you even have conscious self-awareness so anytime something mental happens something physical happens there is no evidence whatsoever of thought or self-awareness that occurs without a functional physical brain so how can we go to heaven or hell or pay the price for a mistake in theology after death if we don't survive in the first place so if in fact there is life after death what keeps the consciousness together we know that an anesthetic or Alzheimer's disease can completely eclipse the brain well if you destroy part of the brain to destroy part of the consciousness but if you destroy the entire brain you pop out into the hereafter with your memory and everything else fully intact that does not follow the evidence isn't there also not only does the absence of evidence for conscious thought without a brain make like life after death implausible it also renders God's existence out likely because how does God think how does a being a super intelligence without a brain have thought and also as an immaterial being how does God with no intermediary process reach out and being a non-physical being outside of space and time how does God mechanically manipulate let alone create space and time these are very very powerful and I would say insurmountable problems now we talked about the problem of evil well in the Bible God says in the book of isaiah i make evil happen well if god can make whatever he wants to happen why the natural disasters why the holocaust why the all-powerful god allowing all of these horrible things to happen without direct explanation so the burden of proof is on the religionists to show that evil is not fatal to an Allgood all-knowing all-powerful God so even if we human beings need discipline we could use a military boot camp but not something like Auschwitz now Randy said well maybe the Holocaust resulted in some good things the re-establishment of the State of Israel an all-powerful all good God could not figure out another way to reestablish the State of Israel without the Holocaust is he that weak is he that lacking in power my mother did not emerge stronger from her experiences in Auschwitz she emerged quite broken so there wasn't any value there also God says in Jeremiah Jeremiah 18 8 if that nation against whom I have pronounced turn from their evil I will repent of the evil I thought to do unto them well how does God change his mind if God is all-knowing God knows from the moment that time began what he will do if he knows he's going to repent then he knew he was going to change his mind which meant he never thought he was going to do the first thing in the first place it really doesn't make sense and if Randy wants to artificially scale down his God so he doesn't have to defend any kind of biblical God tonight then he must tell us where God has deposited his revelations to us if not in the Bible because an aspect of an all-powerful Allgood all-knowing God who wants us to know him is that we have a place to determine where he has issued his decrees to us so that means that Randy then if he says ok it's harder to defend the biblical God than a generic God so I will toss the biblical God out of my life boat so I have less to defend then he has to come up with some other place because otherwise he admits that he is defending a God that is not communicative now some people may not like evolution some people may not like its implications but the issue here tonight is whether it's true or not and whether it is more likely if it is true on atheism than on theism and I'm saying it's more true on a theistic naturalism now when we talk about science we don't talk about absolutes Randi was wrong in that we talked about the best evidence the difference between science and religion is if I hold a scientific perspective I will change my position based on new evidence those of you who are religious particularly religious fundamentalists will not change your views about God and morality and God and creation based on evidence so mine is the more humble position because it is more amenable to following the evidence as opposed to being dogmatically locked into concrete but look at the evidence for evolution and why it's more likely on naturalism than on theism it's sloppy full of trial and errors and more than 99% of all species that ever existed are now extinct this is wasteful we have useless components in our bodies that do more harm than good like the appendix not only when at births the most people also the weight of the evidence shows that evolution is more likely than not because there is a hundred percent match of DNA sequences in the pseudo gene of beta globin as proof that humans and gorillas shared a recent common ancestor so the sloppiness of evolution the kind of trial and error bumping into blind spots and groping its way though it could be occurring under a deity is more likely on atheism than it is on theism but now we come to the argument from divine hiddenness why does God play hide and seek with his own children God didn't comfort my paternal grandmother Nazis were about to shoot her into a pit and God didn't comfort my maternal grandfather as he was about to be shoved into the gas chamber at Auschwitz why be so inaccessible except by ancient hearsay and by denying us moderns the right to see the same type of miracles why after my spiritual search did I find naturalism now Randy I think has said one of his sermons that when people like me don't come to God it's not because of lack of evidence it's because of some defect in our heart or some kind of sinfulness which puts blinders on us I submit it is due to a lack of evidence and it's a cop-out to say well you just don't have the right frame of mind or that you are too steeped in sin to see the reality it is dodging the evidentiary obligation to prove by a cumulative case at a minimum that this God exists if for instance Randy and I were levitated to the ceiling right now this podium turned into green mist if the San Diego Chargers won five Super Bowls in a row if something happened that was a miracle it would be easier to believe but remember regardless of how hard we look there are no verifiable supernatural miraculous events happening in the contemporaneous world subject to verification that is on par with what supposedly happened in the Bible and so every single event is better explained by naturalism than by supernaturalism in our daily lives so why do we not carry that through to the way we see the entirety of how the universe came about and also if God wants us to believe in him where is the revelation it is inconsistent with a God who wants us to know him that he didn't give us a reliable revelation so if randy says i'm not going to offend the biblical god tonight i can still bring that in because i'm epistemologically justified in making an attribute of the god that i'm attacking that he would want us to know his will and if he's not going to reveal it in the bible for argument's sake where else did he reveal it if he wrote it in our hearts how come we can all sincerely disagree on what was written in our hearts and a whole host of issues like abortion women's equality gay rights capital punishment slavery whether or not there should be gay marriage whether or not women should have full equality whether or not there's any difference in the intellectual capacity of the sexes or what their rights should be whether or not some religions are better than other all of these are unanswered directly and if randy says well we're not arguing the Bible tonight I'm going to say if God doesn't give us some revelation that is inconsistent with the God who wants us to know him and that makes God's existence less likely because an attribute would be he wants us to know him and if it's in the Bible there are a lot of problems with the Bible there all sorts of inconsistencies there scientific errors the Bible says that the earth was created before the stars we know that can't be true because planets are not formed until stars exist long enough to explode as a supernova and the debris from that forms the planets we know that the universe from the Big Bang is fourteen billion years old about give or take a few million and we know the earth is about 4.6 billion years old so the earth didn't come about until almost ten billion years after the universe came about also there is the argument from religious confusion why is it that so many Christians disagree why is it that people of all different religions disagree why does God allow sincere seekers to be in error in what his will is why is it for instance that my father a sincere Orthodox rabbi never found Jesus why is it that the dalai lama and eastern path mystics and yogis who go into deep meditation emerged not with some sense of a personal god but with some kind of cosmic mush that loves everybody why does an all good all-powerful God who wants us to definitively know his will who is even Randi said will call us to account after we die and in some magical way our consciousness still hangs together which has not been explained but nevertheless why isn't he more directly revealing except by ancient hearsay so basically when one religious person argues with another the one religious person is saying my unprovable invisible God is more powerful than your unprovable invisible God and that is not a demonstration of the truthfulness also if in fact we human beings are central to an Allgood all-powerful God who wants us to know him then how come he waited until just a little over a hundred thousand years ago to bring us about in a universe that already existed fourteen billion years and why did he wait fourteen billion years into the existence of the universe for us to come about also if we humans are so important that God is going to measure our eternal status by how we view him in a brief 70 to 80 90 years how come we are so insignificant in a vast vast universe our galaxy contains approximately 70 sextillion stars and current estimates say there are about 210 sextillion planets in the galaxy and they're about a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe why all this wasteful debris and if all these other planets are inhabited if there are billions of other inhabited planets for instance did Jesus have to successively incarnate on each of those planets and be crucified in order to save its inhabitants or that God have many saviors that are different for each president each planet so on earth you can only achieve salvation if you believe in Jesus but on Alpha Centauri 3 - you're only saved if you believe in xenon the first I mean how do we think of ourselves as having any significance in creation when we are such an infinitesimally small speck of dust in a vast universe of billions of stars and trillions of planets this is the argument from scale that the size of the universe is so great and earth is just such an afterthought amidst the gargantuan immensity of the universe that it is inconsistent with any kind of deity that deemed us to be significant and so if you look at the totality of the evidence in our physical universe not how you want it to be not whether you like it not whether it's convenient but if you look at the cold hard facts I will say cumulatively it is much more likely than not that the universe is natural not supernatural therefore that God does not exist thank you Thank You mr. Thomas rebuttal I'd like to begin by first of all addressing the issue of topicality my desire to debate Eddie tonight on the existence of God rather than the existence of the Christian God was in hopes that we might have a second debate but if we covered the second issue the Christian God first there wouldn't be any reason to cover simply the existence of God not because I shy away in any way not because I don't think there's sufficient reasons to defend the Scriptures so I want that to be very clear also it's because my first love is in theology my first love is philosophy and I love doing philosophical kinds of thinking and I think that's where we find a tremendous problem with a theism atheism lodged itself as the most significantly philosophically scientifically sound form of thought it prides itself as being the best explanation for the universe and it prides itself in depending upon science as its most fundamental methodology for determining what is and what isn't and I think that's something that we need to look at tonight and to see that virtually all of eddie's arguments that grapple with the idea that there's not enough facts to support the idea that God exists are really based upon an assumption that I think needs to be exposed this evening now before I do that I will want to say that I think there are great evidences great answers to the question of immaterial minds great answers to the so-called lack of miracles today there are great answers to the problem of evil to the improbability of God using evolution to create life what I happen to agree with that the problem of divine hiddenness depends how you're looking at it and where who you're looking for and where you're looking the problem of religious confusion well there's also a lot of religious understanding as well the argument from scale just answered that very quickly CS Lewis once pointed out that though it may look like that we're very tiny with respect to the universe start looking at the down size of things go all the way down to the size of an atom and guess what we happen to be basically right in the middle in terms of size the argument from scale doesn't work because you don't judge things by their size in terms of the value I mean a diamond is relatively small but most women think they're quite significant now Eddie the one line that Eddie principally wants to use to promote to deny God's existence is that theism doesn't have sufficient facts to support it that any so-called factual evidence such as the miraculous must be examined on the same grounds as all the other kinds of factual claims and in fact daddy's calling for a rigorous scientific standard a scientific methodology to apply to the question of God's existence this sounds fair it sounds reasonable however it isn't really fair at least it's not fair as fair as it sounds and it's certainly not an unbiased demand and here's why there's a very large but hidden assumption in Eddie's promotion of the scientific method Eddie does not simply begin with science to argue against the existence of God no Eddie begins with a kind of science approach that has already committed to naturalism and he uses this science that is already committed to naturalism in order to promote his arguments that God does not exist when Eddie says the word science or when he attempts to do things that fall under the rubric of a scientific methodology he's using that term that has been defined already according to the philosophy of naturalism now listen closely this way of defining science is quite common today let me read it to you from the National Science Teachers Association website on their definition of science now listen to this very carefully this is what's being taught as the standard understanding of science you'll see the hidden assumption of naturalism although no single universal step-by-step scientific method captures the complexity of doing science a number of shared values and perspectives characterize a scientific approach to understanding nature among these are demand for what naturalistic explanations supported by empirical evidence that are at least in principle testable against what against the natural world other shared elements include observations rational arguments inference skepticism peer review replicability of work now notice what this means science and naturalism are joined together at the hip by definition real science is supposedly naturalistic and naturalism is consequently scientific but if this is so then philosophically and logically this invalidates each of Eddie's demands for evidence of the supernatural existence of God that would pass the test of science what Eddie's insisting on logically amounts to this give me a naturalistic proof that the supernatural exists and I'll be satisfied and that commits the logical fallacy of question begging so really not a single idea or argument that Eddie seeks to bring in utilizing science or some aspect of science or that kind of an empirical approach to formulate arguments against the existence of God will actually work rationally unless Eddie first assumes naturalism but to assume naturalism is of course to assume his own atheistic beginning point now let me raise a second problem it's the problem of naturalism and Darwinism functioning together this argument raises the question if you believe seriously and atheism naturalism and Darwinism can you really believe in the trustworthiness of your rational cognitive thinking processes is your thinking trustworthy if you assume atheist and naturalism and Darwinism Charles Darwin himself expressed his doubts in this way with me he said the horrid doubt always arises whether the conviction demands the convictions of man's mind which have been developed from the mind of the lower animals are of any value at all or trustworthy would anyone trust in the conviction of a monkey's mind if there are any convictions in such a mind in a similar way JBS Haldane a British scientist evolutionist in the early 20th century he helped develop neo-darwinism he said this if my mental processes are determined by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms now this particular problem Darwin's doubt has been formalized into a fairly sophisticated argument the basic goes like this evolution depends upon natural selection but in the working of natural selection natural selection selects for adaptive behavior not adaptively true beliefs that in fact false beliefs are quite compatible with the process of natural selection natural selection wants to make you survive but there's a lot of strategies for survival that could be compatible with patently false beliefs let me jump ahead here to not just this kind of an argument but to an astral physicist who sees this the same way that as he sees the problem with evolution having produced our brains and therefore our brains being accurate in terms of understanding the universe this is dr. Michio Kaku professor of theoretical physics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York this Harvard trained physicist has his own syndicated radio science program he's appeared a night blind 60 minutes Good Morning America Larry King Live this is what he has to say about evolution and our ordinary common sense grasp of reality he says the reason that relativity meaning Einstein's theory violates our common sense is not that relativity is wrong but that our common sense does not represent reality we are the oddballs in the universe we inhabit an unusual piece of real estate where temperatures densities and velocities are quite mild however in the real universe temperatures can be blisteringly hot in the center of stars numbing ly cold in outer space and subatomic particles zipping around space regularly near the speed of light in other words our common sense evolved in a highly unusual obscure part of the universe earth it is not surprising that our common sense fails to grasp the true universe the problem lies not in relativity but in assuming that our common sense represents reality now what professor cuckoo is saying is this the naturalistic process of evolution has not evolved brains that perceive the true nature of reality reality accurately our most basic and ordinary empirical judgments about the world that is our common sense judgments based upon our five senses the very data gathering tools that are the basis of empirical science failed to grasp the true universe and that leads us back to Darwin's doubt he said this horrid doubt arises whether the convictions of a man's mind which had been developed from the mind of the lower animals are of any value or a trustworthy would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind if there are any convictions in such a mind now these conclusions are deadly for atheism the main philosophical and scientific theories that atheists holds so strongly undermined the ground of those theories themselves if you can't trust evolution to give you a brain that will accurately grasp reality how can you possibly have confidence in your theory of evolution or naturalism or atheism thank you Thank You mr. Thomas you see what Randy is doing is he's establishing a standard list way that would destroy all the common sense methods by which we know things by which we build bridges by which we grow corn by which we fly airplanes now he said that my scientism involves a predisposition to naturalism but that itself is evidentiary it's that my observation and the observation of science teaches me that naturalism is true if we do not adopt a naturalistic model where then is the proof of a supernatural force so what Randy is saying is don't follow the empirical evidence because that's a prejudice in favor of naturalism but he is not refuting that naturalism works in all cases in our daily lives now look we have proof in our day-to-day world that naturalism and science works otherwise this building wouldn't be standing and there'd be bricks and mortar on our heads we have no proof of the supernatural so in a balance of probabilities and remember I am making a cumulative argument based on the weight of the evidence naturalism wins out now the difference between Randy and me is that my scientific approach is subject to revision Randy says that I'm asking for a naturalistic explanation of the supernatural that's not quite right I am asking for evidence of the supernatural that would be verifiable if my dead parents walked in here right now and my father said to me in his inimitable Yiddish accent why are you here debating you should be at your office working and making a living I would know something was up and I might change places with Randy if I were levitated to the ceiling right now if all of a sudden mysterious beings appeared in the air and if all of a sudden Randy and I were transported instantaneously to a beach on Hawaii if a paranormal event occurred that I could not doubt I would believe so what is the difference my scientific naturalism is subject to revision based on the evidence his religious conviction is not which means he is impervious to the evidence and his argument is essentially don't bother me with the facts now Randy may not like evolution but he completely ignores the evidence that evolution is backed up by once again the evidence Darwin predicted based on homology is with African Apes that human ancestors arose in Africa that's been borne out Ernest Mayer a Darwinian in 1954 predicted that speciation would be accompanied with faster genetic evolution and a phylogenetic analysis has supported this prediction so every time that evolution has made a prediction it has been borne out now on the issue of morality Randy is playing a very very tricky game this evening because he wants to say that you can't have objective moral values without God but because he doesn't want to get into the Christian God he refuses to say where those objective moral values are deposited for us to determine what they are so I'm not trying to turn this into a debate about a specific Christian god I'm just saying that not getting into the Bible at all makes Randy defend some artificial skeletal God because he goes on and on about our objective moral values but he refuses to say where they are deposited now say God is good must be a morally significant statement but if God plays an explanatory role in ethics it still morally is it still morally significant to say that everything God commands is good and then we have the problem of the divine command theory is something good just because God says it's good or does like even Christian philosopher Richard Swinburne acknowledge the good exists independent of God but God has the omniscience in order to see it if something is good just because God commands it Randy needs to tell us where those commands are deposited so we can find them and what those commands are in every case so for purposes of tonight's debate let's hope that Randy condemns the biblical treatment of women as inferior the biblical condemnation of homosexuality the biblical condemnation of other religions let's hope that the God that Randy is generically defending tonight rejects all of those it is because I take the concept of evil so seriously that I cannot believe in God it is because of the atrocities in this world and I see no forthcoming explanation from this God that I cannot believe in him because this is the dilemma that Randy and all of you who believe in God face if he's all good and all-powerful every time an evil event gratuitous suffering occurs on earth it must be for only one of two reasons either God had to have this evil happen either do it or allow it because to not do so would mean a greater evil would result which means that this omnipotent being is impotent to have stopped a greater evil except by allowing a horrendous evil and that owes explanation or that the only way a greater good of a certain type could come about is if God allowed this particular form of horrendous evil so therefore playing often what Randy said God owes us an explanation if he reasonably expects us to believe in him as to why it is that the Holocaust had to be a precondition to the advent of the modern State of Israel in 1948 if God is omnipotent in all-powerful and all-knowing couldn't the early Zionist movement of the 19th century with Jabotinsky and Herzl and the Balfour Declaration and the British Mandate after 1940 after the 1999 1919 Treaty of Versailles couldn't all of those have resulted without any kind of Holocaust in the advent of the 1948 declared modern state of israel so that means that for those of you who are believers in a sense you are the ones who have no standard by which to condemn evil because every time an evil occurs you are bound by your own philosophy to say well this evil had to be for some greater good because otherwise God would not have allowed it but if God is not explaining what the greater good is then you have a problem here and this means that for those of you who are believers you have to admit that no amount of suffering on this planet would be inconsistent with the existence of God if there were a million holocaust if there were red ants coming out of the ground stinging each one of us if if our guts would be rotting if newborn babies would be in agony for years if there would be the worst pestilence and starvation afflicting all the 6-point a billion of us on the planet you still couldn't say okay now we've reached enough evil so that I have to admit that there is no God so that means that you are the ones impervious to evidence and you are the ones that can't really say something is is too evil or that something is really really evil because if it was really really evil God would not have allowed it because you believe there is an unknown or higher purpose you have to swallow ultimately all the evil that occurs on this earth which puts you in no position to condemn it which makes you in the most morally compromised situation so again in the totality of the circumstances it is far more likely than not based on everything that the universe is natural not supernatural and there is no God thank you okay at this time each person will be asking successive questions three in a row mr. Martin will have one minute to formulate a question mr. to Bosh two minutes for reply as again three in a row and then we will reverse write my first question again concerning the nature of morality that's when I'm most concerned and I teach ethics and so I'm quite familiar with the kinds of ethics that we find authored by those who consider themselves to be atheists and naturalist and so forth so my first question is just a simple question if Eddie can articulate which of the current modern ethical systems does he actually adhere to could he explain his system of ethics well first of all because the topic is does God exist let me say that even if I couldn't even if morality were subjective that doesn't mean that a natural law is violated and that there must be a god just because the kids don't behave on the playground against they book unless they believe in Santa Claus doesn't mean Santa Claus actually exists so I believe that we humans are in the process of still working out many such issues but the more we get away from religion the better we are at treating each other we don't burn witches at the stake because we've gotten away from religion I subscribe to an amalgam and whether this amalgam is acceptable to everybody or not it's based on human experience not on presupposing a divine author I believe that consequentialism the impact of what you do to others is important I believe there is a meta ethical obligation to future generations I believe we have to preserve the earth serve the people explore the universe I believe I have no right to harm another human being just because I disagree with them I believe I have an obligation to assist the less fortunate because human evolution has taught us that it is essential for the betterment of all humanity if we help the less fortunate but the point is I don't need to invent a previously unproven deity to deposit these ideals so that I can turn to you and say my views are absolutely [Applause] Eddie I've been stressing in what I've been saying that atheism does not give you in any kind of logical logically compelling sense any system of morality at all that you actually when you look at a theism naturalism and Darwinism and then you have an ethical system you've simply adopted that system that if someone can hold these same essential convictions you do and be fully rational and choose not to have any moral system and not to live in a moral way at all so my question to you is in what is it in the in your atheism and in your naturalism and Darwinism that actually urges you to be moral since it's not a theism and Darwinism and naturalism that does so we see I think it is atheism and I think it's secular humanism which says that humans and not some imagined creature beyond us are the measure of all things so for instance already I would say that I have a superior morality to that of the religious because I do not believe that some ultimate force is going to punish somebody forever just because they happen to disagree with how I view the universe I believe holding that view is itself immoral now Darwinism I believe has helped me evolve to the point that contrary to many religious views I would not oppress but rather give equal rights to gays and lesbians I believe that Darwinism has helped me see that my survival and the survival of those around me require that we care for each other and certainly one doesn't have to believe in a supernatural being yet to be proven in order to learn from the accumulation of human experience that we have to help the less fortunate and that were dependent on each other in fact my atheism my Darwinism and my secular humanism teaches me that because we have no supernatural being looking out for us all we have is each other and if all we have is each other and there is no supernatural force to care for us that makes it even more important that we help each other because if we don't no one else will we cannot rely upon a God to help the sick and the suffering and the hurting so it's even more imperative we do it ourselves my last question is this Eddie imagine right now a UFO landed right here and out stepped a creature that was far more advanced than we are in an evolutionary fashion in fact on his planet the felines had become the intelligent creatures and they ate monkeys they land here and they say Eddie all of you 6.5 billion look like monkeys we are far more advanced than you we're far more involved than you and we look at your planet and we see a great place to come in greys what possibly can you say ethically that would persuade a more intelligent advanced being in this universe there's accustomed to eating primates that it's wrong for him to do so well first of all even if I couldn't that doesn't mean that God exists automatically when the other wise doesn't just to give me an argument to stay out of this guy's kitchen table so the issue is does God exist not do we have to call upon a God in order to persuade some super alien from not munching on us as appetizers so but what I would say different from what the chicken would say to me before I ate it tonight at the wonderful panda restaurant up here what the what I would say is that our being sentient aware beings who strive for the good that this gives us this gives us that kind of value that we should not be devoured now what does the cow say to us when we say God has given you to us for us to munch on you we see the cow cannot make the argument as to an amoral awareness a desire to do good the the cow is unable to do that but we are and I would say that this spark in us even if it has evolved by purely natural means whereby we care for each other whereby we strive for improvement whereby we seek the good and seek knowledge and even follow evidence gives us a value even if there are no such things as immortal souls whereby we shouldn't be eaten by these twilight zone guys that come down to Bakersfield and again want to have me for dessert or some kind of munchy now we will reverse the order of the questioning okay well Randy for purposes of tonight's debate you want to keep it so generic that you want to keep the Bible out of it but yet you are saying to us that God is the final author of the absolute moral values by which we must live please tell us if God is so the author of those absolute moral values where are they deposit us for us to find out what they are and how we should conduct our lives I respond by saying first I did not want to keep it to a generic and God per se I think there's a robust understanding of God in the Abrahamic tradition it is Bible based it's rooted in Western civilization in our culture it's the understanding of God that pertains to the classic problem of evil now in terms of where does these morality where does this reside I would say that virtually everyone here knows and understands that it resides first of all in your conscience that most of us have a very deep core value understanding that certain kinds of things are not just simply wrong they're terribly wrong they're despicably wrong that witness and testimony exists in everyone's heart everyone's life unless that person is clinically diagnosed to be a sociopath or a psychopath right and wrong the idea itself ought and ought not is rooted in the heart mind and conscience of every normal human being I believe that is sufficient to testify to people that there's something greater than we we do not make up our own rules willy-nilly in order to live life we have a deep reverence for life but why we have a deep concern for other people but why when we ask the question why we began to search for the answer as to why this exists within us this sense of right and wrong why it's there and yet nature by itself cannot explain it philosophers have always understood that nature by itself does not give us a No the MIT standard of right and wrong the existence of morality within us is a significant important stepping stone in our search for God well here is here is why I think we need some good hiking shoes for those stepping stones of yours and that is I believe that gay people should be permitted to marry I know you don't I believe that women should be permitted to have abortions I know you don't some people believe there should be capital punishment some people believe there shouldn't be capital punishment some people believe there should be virtually open borders on immigration some people believe there shouldn't be if the solutions to all of these questions are not written down anywhere because you don't want to use the Bible tonight but are just placed in our hearts how come so many different and opposing solutions are placed by the same God in so many different in opposing hearts I'd respond this way that if you look through all of human history as far back as we can go and we're talking now five six thousand years ago that we really understand these things and across all the cultures of the world cultural anthropologists today are reversing the analysis of Margaret Mead some 6070 years ago they're willing to say and understand that we find a great commonality morality all throughout the world there's about six cardinal ideas that occur again and again in the moral systems of the world reverence for parents protection of marriage keeping sacred the human life within your tribe not taking people's property not bearing false witness within a court of law now those five ideas those fundamental ideas are things we often call the core values of Western civilization they're not unique to Christianity they're not unique to judeo-christian you find them in the code of hammurabi which was a pagan nation and my contention is that it's only since the advent of atheism that we have began to dissolve an understanding of these core values that exist trans culturally trans historically that's the history of it and that's the fact of it it's only in recent times that we began to have moral relativism it's only in recent times that we began to look at things and say well why couldn't it be this way it's only in recent times you'd be they'll say something like marriage that's had a definition an understanding that goes way back male/female can now be reinvented that's not based upon any human rights per se it's based upon a postmodern understanding that human beings create reality human beings don't bow to reality a philosophically dangerous and rather insipid idea okay is one more Randy you have said that there is an answer to my claim that the overwhelming weight of the evidence shows that consciousness is dependent upon the physical brain and that therefore there's no life after death and that God himself itself herself cannot even think because every time you have thought you have cortical neurons and synapses so how can God even think and how can we even survive our deaths when consciousness is so apparently and evidentially dependent on the physical brain which you didn't tell me what that response was please give it the question of the mind and brain is a long-standing philosophical problem is called mind-body dualism the position which Eddy is articulating seems to be the more modernistic view based upon naturalism and Tyrael ism that reduces everything with respect to the mind to the brain is called reductionism reductionism basically a search that there is simply only when it comes to who people are in the thoughts of their minds the neural processes inside the brain information theory today is challenging this idea significantly because there's two aspects to thought try to follow me here syntax and semantics when you have syntax you have the structure of the semantics when you have syntax you may have identical syntax in two respective so-called thoughts but you may have different semantics now when it comes to analyzing what's going on within the brain the chemical processes themselves can only give you what looks to be the syntax the structure it does not give you the meaning of that structure you might find a German speaker and you might find an English speaker having exactly the same syntax within their brains but their statements could in fact be different because they are in different languages the semantics are different which is a straw thisis against the idea that the mind is the brain these two cannot be reduced which in that sense continues to uphold the historic judeo-christian idea that there is far more to us than our physical bodies there's something that will in fact survive death now if God exists surviving death makes sense if God does not exist it doesn't it's as simple as that proof first that that God doesn't exist then you won't even have to prove there is no soul but if God does exist in the soul as a consequence at this time I'm going to get the questions from the audience and address it and the person to whom it's addressed answers first for two minutes and then the other answers for two minutes first to mr. Randy Martin why did you appeal to prudence when you talked about the implications of a lack of morality it seems irrational to reach an absolutist perspective by going through a utilitarian one I wasn't aware that I had committed that I consider that to be a fallacy utilitarianism does not give you an absolute morality I don't believe I appealed to prudence in any of my arguments perhaps my counter-argument was misunderstood as my argument which Eddy did a couple of times but I myself and I believe consistent of this that prudence and morality need to be separated one should not be reduced to the other if you hold to a naturalistic understand you know things the reason why you're good to other people because it's prudent it helps the human race to survive if you hold to a theistic viewpoint the reason why you're good to other people is because they're made in the image of God in response to one of my questions Randy did talk about morality being Bible based and he talked about the judeo-christian not just the Christian version and that's what I want to quote from the Old Testament numbers 3117 now therefore kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him but all the women children that I have not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves so we're talking about raping children here if in fact Randy has this sense of morality that is absolute and wants to distance himself from the Bible to defend a generic god I invite him to condemn what was ordered in numbers 31 17 and numbers 31 18 because that would show that he means what he says when he says tonight he is not defending a biblical morality you see a secular humanists would never condone such a thing because we believe that human experience teaches us that it is wrong but we don't have to invent a supernatural fantasy creature as a repository for these moral values to then turn around and say it comes from this God that we invented not from us and by the way this God is absolute so you see what's happening here is that Randy has not defended the supernatural but automatically assumes there is a God in whom his moral values are deposited but without proof next question to mr. Thomas how can a universe consisting of only matter and motion account for universals such as logic morals 1 & mini and prime numbers well first of all morals have become determined by our evolution today we would never support what the authors of this ancient book of numbers supported because we have evolved beyond that in our very morality as far as logic is concerned God could have had nothing to do with logic because the laws of logic are so Island clad by very definition that no mind diviner human could alter them so therefore to say two and two equals four is to state a logical proof that God could not alter so if such a law of logic is inherent in existence itself as our prime numbers they are not subject to alteration by any conceivable divine manipulation because that would result in contradictions and so if something could not be altered by omnipotence because the very effort to alter would result in a contradiction it means its existence is not contingent upon a supernatural being so it is the very holding of the laws of logic in all cases that you cannot be a and not a at the same time that shows that they are a natural element of our existence and are not derived from a mysterious transcendent supernatural force the philosophical problem of universals the philosophical problem of the one and the many the issue of prime numbers the status of logic Christian theologians and philosophers have always said maintained that the reason why there is diversity in the universe and creation and reality the reason why there's unity and creation reality is because ultimately all things are unified in an infinite personal reference point which is the mind of God the one of the many problem is an ancient philosophical problem first argued by pagans not by Christians they had problems understanding how there could be both unity and diversity they went into opposite directions they either went into a strict monism saying everything was one thing or they went in a strict kind of pluralism and atomism everything is its own individual thing but on the onset of Christian thinking when that perspective was brought into Western civilization and Western philosophy and the minds of Augustan on some aquinas these great philosophical problems were adequately explained wonderfully solved with the advent of atheism these problems have cropped up again in philosophy because atheism itself really does not give an answer for these kinds of things to say that we understand these things because Darwinism has formed us to understand these things is highly undercut by some of the theorists today such as I mentioned professor Michael Kaku who basically says that it just isn't possible in fact evolution has evolved our brain in such a way that we really don't understand reality the way it is he questions common-sense the very thing that Eddie relies upon so strongly there are evolutionists and physicists today that highly doubt the reliability of those things mr. Martin why is it that when good or a miracle happens God is given the credit but when bad disasters or evil happens no blame has ever affixed to him being all-powerful should you not have prevented this evil in the first place I see two questions there so it's difficult to know which one to answer let me say this about first preventing all evil if you're going to prevent all evil then you're going to destroy free will if you want to prevent all evil then if you take a step toward evil and I stopped you as God from doing evil then I have limited your freedom if I in fact act in your brain to keep you from even thinking evil I've evaporated your moral significance all together to have morally significant beings in the world that God created entails the possibility that some will go wrong many will go wrong perhaps all will go wrong it's logically consistent now what was the other part of the question being all-powerful should you not have prevented this evil in the first place that's what I answered well okay the other part what was the first bird why is God never given the choice I got it with miracles but and a disaster evil happens known as to blame well I hold to a robust theism that says ultimately God does take responsibility for the things that happen in this world can't explain it fully but that's why he sent his son ultimately to die because he takes responsibility for everything in the world that he has created he's going to redeem those who repent and turn and those who refuse he'll let them have their own way [Applause] why is freewill consider to be such an automatic virtue that it must trump every other consideration you have a five year old and three year old child are you gonna let the five-year-old push the three-year-old off the cliff just so the five-year-old learns and is able to exercise unbridled free will if we are able to do only 26 bad things but not 31 bad things is our free will so truncated couldn't an all-powerful being create people with freewill who default to the good more often than the fault to the evil if God is all-powerful couldn't God create free willed people like Randy and me who fight with words rather than clubs do Randy and I have less free will because we are civilized human beings who debate intellectually rather than a shootout at the OK Corral and if God can create a Randy and an Eddie who Duke it out on a sophisticated intellectual level couldn't God create other people more frequently who use words rather than bullets to try to grapple out differences do Randy and I have less free will than the two guys will be shooting it out somewhere in South Los Angeles tonight is it so imperative that there be so many evil doing hurtful people just for free will the advocate has to first show why free will has such intrinsic value that anything goes the most enormous suffering is permissible just so it can get played out I don't believe that has been established the argument has not been made mr. Thomas this is kind of a two-part also so be prepared you believe that humans have obtained complete knowledge of our space-time continuum and can God exist outside of our knowledge we human beings have not obtained complete knowledge that's why I'm not making an absolutist argument I'm making a cumulative case argument tonight I have said repeatedly that there is evidence that would convince me that God exists if such miraculous things happened Randi has never said oh there's evidence in return that would convince me there is no God so I am amenable to changing my position based on the evidence he is not is there a possibility that God exists outside of space in time that's highly remote is there a possibility that we are inside a giant pumpkin right now not inside a sports stadium yes but it's highly remote so the question is not is something logically possible it is does the weight of the evidence make it more likely than not and the weight of the evidence makes it far more likely than not that there is no God outside of space and time because we see no bubble in the universe outside of space and time that could contain anything and if God is outside of space and time if God is outside of time then he is non-existent if he is outside of space he's nowhere so essentially you are defining him out of existence unless you can show that there is a God dimension that you would have to prove by evidence not just by mere assertion which I don't think has been done so it's logically possible but the overwhelming weight of the evidence cuts against it I would respond that certainly our knowledge is finite we don't have a complete knowledge of the space-time continuum I would assert that God is himself outside of his creation you know there are only three possible shapes that reality could take think about this intellectually only three possible shapes either the universe is all there is as Eddy has stated that's a logical possibility of some sort either reality is God that is this universe that is is simultaneously God the Creator and the cosmos are one that's pantheism the third alternative is that the universe is the creation of a creator now if that is the case the creator is by the very nature of that conceptualization outside of his creation if creation is space-time if creation is the things that we see the physical universe plus many things in the physical universe we can't see then by the very nature of what theism has always asserted this creation is contingent it's dependent it was created God is necessarily outside of it there's nothing inconsistent with that there's nothing illogical about that in fact God being outside of space and time gives us good reasons for understanding so many things within space and time contrary to many of the assertions which Eddie has made tonight ultimately why we love one another ultimately why we would believe we should love our neighbor as ourself that seems to be information that's come from outside of the universe certainly don't find any animal species holding to that kind of an ethic mr. Martin by condemning gays the Christian faiths have successfully made many people believe that assault and murder of homosexuals especially the youth is okay how can you justify this violence I would argue that there is no statistical evidence whatsoever that there's a true correlation between a Christian understanding of homosexuality and violence done against gays in fact if you take a Christian understanding of the humanity of every single human being and we understand the words of Jesus in terms of what he described about loving every other human being then there's no place for violence Christ himself said that you do not overcome evil with evil you overcome evil with good I find it interesting that those who often claim this don't provide any real evidence for it what the bible does say is that you're going to find people who hold to all sorts of prejudices all sorts of evil against one another people have historically because of their own evilness adopted racism adopted some kind of supremacy viewpoint disenfranchised the disabled disenfranchised people who were homosexual the New Testament itself in 1st Corinthians 6 after stating the biblical view that homosexuality is wrong also says to the Corinthian church but some were such of you meaning that in a New Testament church there were many former homosexuals women and men who had practiced these things who had turned from the ways had become Christians the church didn't kill them the church didn't hate them the church loved them the church embraced them but brought them to Jesus Christ I will agree that everything that Randi has said is possible for today's church if today's church does one thing and that's ignore the literal words of the Bible Leviticus 20:13 calls for the death penalty for two men who engage in homosexual acts now Matthew 5:17 19 think not that I am come to destroy the law of the prophets I'm not come to destroy but to fulfil for verily I say unto you till heaven and earth pass not one jot not one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law till all be fulfilled so either whoever wrote the New Testament is a horrible draftsman and failed to articulate explicitly which Old Testament laws are nullified and which are not also the Old Testament calls for executing witches it calls for putting to death people who pick up sticks on the Sabbath so what that means it even calls for putting to death blasphemers so what that means is that today's Christians have evolved into a higher state of more conscious tolerance because they have moved away from biblical literalism not because they have embraced it so in Deuteronomy you're supposed to stone to death anyone who beckons you to worship a different God but nobody does that today so I submit that everything Randy has just said can be benevolently true if today's believers both Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians and Catholics move further away not closer to the precise wording of the Bible mr. Thomas if there is no God thus no value to life would not the Holocaust be justified no because and Randy start talking about the Bible and bringing people to Christ even though this was supposed to be a generic debate so let me say the Holocaust would not be justified as was an even greater Holocaust in the flood where innocent people little babies were wiped out no mass genocide is justified whether it's done by God God's commanding armies or by Nazis or by anybody but again you don't need to invent a fantasy supernatural creature from which you derive this because there's something that Randi has said which actually has a strong kernel of truth that it is written in our hearts but it's written in our hearts because we have all evolved to our current higher level of morality than we previously had in days when we were closer to biblical literalism but you don't need a deity for that I am an atheist whose family was the victim of the Holocaust you can't empirically say that my outrage is less than Randy's or that I have to secretly borrow from judeo-christianity to say it was wrong in fact I would say that it was probably a very long history of anti-semitism among many many Christian thinkers in the 2,000 years preceding the Holocaust that may have fanned the flames of that anti-semitism that doesn't indict all Christians but it does show that you don't need a super natural creature in order to have a deep love of humanity and be horrified at atrocity essentialist this question is about the problem of evil if I were to think that the problem of evil defeated my belief in God this would not decrease the amount of evil that exists in all of this world nor in the universe if I were to adopt the atheistic naturalistic Darwinian view of the world there would still be as much of the same kinds of things we call evil as before what adopting atheism does is this it makes all evil and suffering absolutely senseless absolutely without meaning absolutely without moral status if the arguments of atheism were really convincing concerning the problem of evil then not only what I ceased to believe in God I would cease to believe in such a thing as evil the things I do not like about this world I would rationally see as normal features of this world men dominate in women is pretty Darwinian and natural tribes of humans competing for scarce resources seems pretty natural in Darwinian war and conflict dangerous and deadly but not unnatural Homo sapiens killing to extinction in the and earth roles because we were smarter and not so ugly was certainly natural Western Europeans now Americans forcibly taking on the Native Americans and taking their land by conquest sounds pretty natural and Darwinian to me technologically advanced humans subjugating the more primitive and enslaving them seems pretty Darwinian and natural to me this is the logic of naturalism atheism and Darwinian ISM the atheist who are most rationally consistent have seen this but many atheists are rationally inconsistent and have not so I'm quite willing to work out the challenges of the nature of evil within my theistic beliefs for two reasons and a bad and ugly world atheism gives me no hope but theism gives me the bedrock ideas that tell me that God will deal rightly and justly with all evil God Himself will ultimately solve the problem of evil [Applause] due to time constraints this is our final question time this is our final question this is addressed for mr. Martin if we are to be judged why are we not solely judged on our level of compassion towards others and our moral fiber rather than a commitment to to a judeo-christian religion if there is one true God and that is certainly what I believe then that God's concern is ultimately for truth that God's concern is ultimately to reveal himself for who he is that God also says in the scriptures as Abraham said will not the judge of all the earth do right the reason why God's judgment is this way is ultimately because he has as the scripture say since we're bringing in Scripture now he has revealed himself in all of creation so that his nature and power are evidently seen by what has been created he's also revealed himself in the testimony of what is right and wrong within the human heart that of itself renders every man every man ultimately responsible to God God has not left himself without a witness in the world according to the Apostle Paul in the book of Acts missionaries have had some amazing discoveries of people in primitive cultures who still worshipped or believed in a one true God so it's not as though people are blind to this reality the question is do people earnestly desire to give their lives over to the Living God I once asked a young man if I could demonstrate to you without a shadow of a doubt that God existed would you want to serve Him and he said if I had to serve him I would not want to know him ultimately that's the issue well this is one atheist that if he revealed himself to me in such a way that I had no doubt that he existed what he wants from me I would have no choice but to serve Him but he has withheld that revelation for me as he has from many other conscientious seeking non-believers which invokes again the argument from divine hiddenness if there is an Allgood all-powerful all-knowing God who wants us to know him why does he just speak to us through the mode of ancient hearsay in fables and mythologies and fairy tales why aren't those miracles repeated today if some Savior God came back to earth died and was resurrected in front of me and floated up to heaven I would be the first person to lay the stone of his new church but that's not happening also we human beings with our rational thinking have a right to ask of this God why do you demand to be worshipped why are you such a cosmic egomaniac you love everybody and you have everything why do you need us to fall on our faces before you why not just judge us and how we treat each other why not give a Gandhi a very high place in heaven as opposed to someone who has claimed to believe in you and really has but has not been an ethical benevolent person in their lives so God would need to explain to us why he even demands not just worship but worship in the right modality rather than just saying in order to love me you have to love and treat each other well and that if you help the downtrodden the poor the hungry and the thirsty that's all I will ask of you because I myself need nothing that would be a far more natural God and if God is not that way he needs to explain to us why he's not that way thank you for your questions and thank you to the replies to the questions we now move on to our closing statements 12 minutes each and my closing remarks I want to say this to begin with today the case for theism philosophically and scientifically has never been stronger in fact somewhat recently a noted atheist advised those he was training in debate tactics against this that the theistic side was quote producing a plethora of PhD philosophers whose entire lives are devoted to defending the fundamentalistic Christian viewpoint with intricate in ever more elaborate arguments and it is true all sorts of scholars and philosophy and science and in all other academic branches as well are contending for the truth of theism in the marketplace of ideas and some of the newer arguments are exceedingly intricate complex and elaborate on behalf of theism this evening I've attempted to be much more straightforward and simple main aim my main argument concerning atheism and theism has centered around the existence of morality my main challenge to atheism has been that if you trust if you believe in atheism naturalism and theism then you have little reason to trust your actual senses now in concluding I want to just stress a couple of things that theism does that adds considerable warrant for the belief that theism is true one is quite broad the other specific broadly speaking let us say that you do believe in real morality a robust kind of morality a morality that refuses to be post modernized or relativized that says there is a true good in a true evil I've argued that this is very strong evidence that God exists that the idea of God makes sense now if the idea of God makes sense and a host of other facts theories and perspectives make sense as well first if God exists it makes sense as modern science now recognizes that the universe had a beginning if God exists it makes sense that the universe we live in is very finely tuned to allow for complex life that fine-tuning is in the opinion of some rather exceptional scientists beyond the ability a chance to produce if God exists it makes sense that so many life-forms supposedly evolved appear to reflect both purpose and design if God exists it makes sense that we find in nature irreducibly complex biological machines and the tiniest of living cells if God exists it makes sense that all the laboratory experiences experiments for the past 58 years which have attempted to create life out of non-life have failed but even should they prove successful in the future it would only prove that it takes an intelligent designer to create life not that life can occur by chance alone if God exists it makes sense that the fossil records which according to evolution should have just as many transitional forms as it does fixed forms shows virtually no transitional forms rather new life forms appear already fully formed in the fossil record if God exists it makes sense that our most basic ideas or morality are tied to an absolute set of core values if God exists it makes sense that across the span of human history and human culture we find these same moral values again and again if God exists it makes sense that religious beliefs are as old as humanity if God exists it makes sense that human free will is real not an illusion that moral responsibility is real people are truly responsible and accountable for their behavior if God exists it makes sense that our minds are truly more than our brains if God exists it makes sense that human life would not end with physical death if God exists it makes sense that all in Justices of this life will be rectified in the life to come now all these facts theories perspectives are very consistent with theism they've been argued very Abele by very good philosophers of a Christian persuasion yet each of these ideas or facts or perspectives does raise a problem or problems for atheism and theand naturalism and Darwinism in terms of his explanation of reality so the point is in the broad perspective of what we know about the universe there are a number of lines of evidence and facts that point to God's existence that give us a very strong warrant for believing in theism now my more specific concern besides morality itself being evidence for God's existence there's the matter of human dignity and human value it's the common sense perspective of most people to see that human beings have inherent or intrinsic human dignity for instance article 1 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights I want to stress that not only is the fact of morality itself a strong argument for God's existence but this deep sense of the value and worth of our fellow human beings is a strong argument as well in fact this knowledge of human value and dignity is a daily evidence in an everyday experience that God exists but it is only on the basis of theism that we have an absolute and unyielding foundation for basic human rights and dignity only theism gives us the grounding idea that human life is sacred in any sense and that sense of exceptionalism specialism and sacredness is the bedrock of all other human rights only theism declares that human beings are inherently worthwhile and intrinsically valuable only theism can declare we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal that they are endowed by the creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness only theism can authoritative least eight you shall love your neighbor as yourself in contrast atheism does not give us this kind of foundation for human rights and human dignity we see this increasingly in the works contemporary bio emphasis whose philosophers and scientists are working in the field of bioethics we see this in how they think from their atheistic and naturalistic perspectives about the question of human value and dignity for instance we have the recent work of a bioethicists in England Alistair Cochrane he works at the Center for the Study of human rights at the London School of Economics and political science in the past issue of bioethics Cochrane argued that we should discard the idea that humans possess intrinsic human dignity that we should reject this idea as the basis of medical ethics and public health care policies basically and wants us to do is to get rid of the old understanding that all human beings are sacred and now begin to judge each and every human being on his own individual merits consequently Cochrane calls for a bio ethical model of human beings that doesn't start with the assumption or belief that all humans are the same with respect to moral Worth and dignity rather he says we need a an approach we need an approach that judges the moral worth of each and every individual one person at a time and in this calculating of individual human worth some people are going to possess more of what makes humans worthy and some people less now it doesn't take much insight to recognize that the logic of looking at human beings this way is the same dangerous thinking that grounded social Darwinism the eugenics movement and which rationally authorizes the philosophy that some people are superior to others and because of their superiority ought to in some sense be their masters the point is this in the field of bioethics there is a tremendous movement to demote the status of human beings and to evaporate all ideas of human specialness in order to view us as merely animals so that the moral obstacles to experimentation on human beings at the life-size level at the embryonic level and at the microscopic level art of our DNA can be abolished and the philosophical forced for this movement is Christianity no judeo-christian ethics no it is atheism naturalism and Darwinism now what kinds of things does this lead to consider American ethics philosopher dr. Peter Singer Princeton University he was asked this question in a British newspaper in 2006 would you kill a disabled baby his response was yes if it was in the best interest of the baby and of the family as a whole now dr. singer is famous or infamous for asserting that it is entirely ethical to grant to the parents and the physicians the legal right to terminate the life of any baby up to 28 years of age if the parents parents wish it'd be done and he normally cites a disabled child as the kind of situation he envisions including down syndromes babies so I usually asked my hundred or so students each year how many of you are acquainted with a Down Syndrome child or person a family member or in the family member of a friend perhaps 10 to 20 percent every year indicate that they personally know a Down Syndrome person the bioethics based on atheistic naturalistic Darwinian ideas are taking us down the road where such persons are not likely to be given the chance or the right to live now do all a theist agree with this no we need to remember many atheists we have to be glad for this accessorize their atheism with a decent moral system but they don't get those essential core core values of their moral system from atheism that is the strongest kind of evidence that atheism intrinsically is false on the other hand robust ethics strong ethics of human dignity individual human Worth will always be the treasure of the classical theism that claims God is all-powerful and God is holy good the ethics of the one who taught us to love God with all our heart soul mind and strength the ethics of the one who taught us to love our neighbor as ourself thank you and our final closing statements well unfortunately all that Randy gave us tonight is I wish it were so so it must be so but there were no proofs he was essentially saying that he has problems depositing the location for our moral goodness unless we believe in a God and we need to believe in the God in order for there to be human dignity but how can there be human dignity if the God is based on the Bible where God orders people to be killed how can there be human dignity if you subscribe to a religion that says all you have to do is believe differently and you burn in hell forever what could be a greater slap in the face at human dignity than eternal punishment just for not believing the right way that is the most undignified way of treating people now Randy talks about morality but he did not take up my challenge to say okay the generic God that I am speaking of is the repository of ultimate morality so therefore I as a moral person though I believe in God reject numbers 3 17 and 18 where you can just keep virgin children for yourself and rape them he talked about the origin of the universe but he never explained how it is that if as is generally accepted time and space began with the Big Bang how anything could have caused the universe to come into existence prior to the Big Bang because cause-and-effect must play out in time and in space and also you do not need a supernatural creator for the universe to come about because at the beginning of the universe you didn't violate the first law of thermodynamics in that there was a balance in between positive and negative energy and so we can see that the negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy presented by matter now if you add into this the principle articulated by Stephen Hawking derived from Einstein's theory of relativity in which time and space though finite form a closed surface without a boundary you don't have a beginning point so once again if time and space began with the Big Bang how can something outside of time and space have caused it Randy didn't explain the mechanics of how this happened now he talked about the intelligent design well every single supposed example of intelligent design has been refuted by our scientists Michael Billy has a B he has said the flagellum the thing which gives a bacteria a motor to move around could not be reduced anything simpler but yet you see the same kind of thing in the type three secretory system of another bacteria and it's much simpler and doesn't have the same components we also know that DNA evolved because RNA was a simpler form of it we know that proteins have evolved because they can have different combinations of amino acids so each and every one of these examples of intelligent design have been refuted now randy seems to have a really deep-seated animosity toward the implications of evolution but that is not the purpose of tonight's debate the purpose of tonight's debate would be to show whether God exists or not not whether we want them to exist or not or not whether psychologically some people need them to exist or not to have an excuse not to harm other people with all of Randy's railing against evolution he was not able to disprove what I said about the DNA match between us and gorillas showing that there was a common ancestor he said that there weren't transitional forms well they just recently discovered in Canada Tiktaalik which was a transitional form between fish and amphibian and he talked about there not being enough transitional forms well given how rare it is and how difficult it is to fossilize there are many and also the proof of evolution is that different species from different ancient eras appear if we had horse horse fossils appearing at the same time as we have trilobites then we would see something as wrong if we had dinosaur remains appearing with human remains we would know that there was something wrong but because evolution has been borne out in showing that creatures have died out and that have existed in different epochs in different eras there have been no refutation also Randy has failed completely to refute my argument that our consciousness is based on the physical brain he talked about syntax and semantics totally ignoring the fact that if somebody snuck up on him and injected an anesthetic he wouldn't be able to talk about those things because his brain would be asleep well the footing his brain to sleep can stop him from thinking what about killing him entirely which is what death will do to him his brain will stop entirely he also was not able to add all refute my contention that miracles are much more unlikely than likely and that in our modern world it is far more likely that a miracle claimed that a violation of laws of nature is false rather than it's true otherwise we couldn't live our daily lives we couldn't build buildings or fly airplanes he also was not able to answer my argument from evil not able to respond to my contention that it is the believer who must accept all evil because it is the believer who must accept that any evil that occurs in the world occurs only with God's sanction and approval again evil can only have one of two justifications either it means that God is impotent and was unable to stop a greater evil unless the horrendous evil whatever it is took place and therefore God had to allow that horrendous evil or God is so inept that he could not have allowed a greater good to take place without having the underlying evil take place first also if we look at the evidence our world is less surprising on naturalism than on theism because on naturalism evil is more readily explained because since there's no one minding the store we would expect it to be that bad things and good things would happen in a mix but if there is a God then the theist has a much greater burden of demonstrating why it is this God allows so many horrible things to happen and Randi did not explain why it is that the occurrence of horrendous evil and suffering is so much more surprising on theism than it is on atheism and naturalism the occurrence of Holocaust of starvation of earthquakes in Haiti of children dying everyday of dysentery all of this is much easier to explain if you don't simultaneously postulate a supernatural being then if you do now he talked about fine-tuning in his closing statement well he didn't examine the specifics which is that there's no basis for saying that our universe is so finely tuned in the physical constants that there must have been the hand of a creator because in some things it's not that close to the edge where you needed a divine intervention for instance in the crucial establishment of the carbon atom carbon is in stars varies from its high and low point by just about 20% in terms of what's known as the million electron mega volts and this does not 20% up or down interfere in the creation of the carbon atom well that's not so finely tuned also there is a collision course between the fine-tuning argument and the design argument because on the one hand those say the universe is so perfectly designed that it is so wonderful and everything works so so well together and the fine-tuning argument says no the universe is so much on the edge of collapse it's about to fall down the only way it stays up must be because there has been fine-tuning at the edges so it doesn't collapse in on itself well either it's perfectly designed or it's a structure about to collapse and God has to keep holding it up that is a very very strong contradiction also what he has failed to recognize again is that there is no contemporaneous evidence that any of the alleged miracles of the biblical era happened because they are not repeatable any believable event must be repeatable and falsifiable unlike Randy who would not change his views based on any evidence who clings to that stubborn dogmatic religious belief that is impervious to evidence I changed my position if I saw different evidence you bring me a resurrected God who's gonna float up to heaven I'll fall on my face and serve Him the fact that I am willing to alter the beliefs I hold tonight based upon future evidence that would so persuade me but Randy is not shows that he is holding to a position of dogmatic rigidity and I'm the one maintaining an open mind ready to embrace new teachings if they appear to me in a believable fashion randy has totally failed in his effort to demonstrate the likelihood of the supernatural and that undercuts the entire platform he was trying to establish tonight I have been able to show that naturalism is far more likely than supernaturalism why because first of all we see evidence of naturalism every single day if it weren't for naturalism this microphone wouldn't work science wouldn't work airplanes wouldn't fly but there is no evidence whatsoever outside of wishful thinking and some tortured kind of verbal gymnastics for the supernatural because Randy has failed to adduce any strong evidence for the supernatural he has not defeated my evidence for naturalism and if the supernatural cannot be established God cannot be established and therefore I submit to you that upon the totality of all the evidence if you look at it and weigh it it is far more likely than not that the universe is natural not supernatural and that there is no God thank you [Applause] you you

Channel: newmoment

Views: 107,774

Rating: 4.5935097 out of 5

Keywords: Religion, Science, Universe, Christianity, Secular, Philosophy, Theism, Morality

Id: _sGu9zO7o3I

Length: 131min 7sec (7867 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 19 2017