Dan Barker | God does NOT exist

I used to believe in God like our very articulate and eloquent speaker before us I used to believe firmly in God I was an ordained minister I preached the gospel for 19 years I felt this presence in my mind as I prayed I got goosebumps as I was in communion with what I thought was the Holy Spirit of God as I read the Holy Bible and read about the resurrection of Jesus I dedicated my life to preaching that gospel that I thought was so real they gave so much meaning so much hope so much beauty to the world but I've changed my mind I now know I was deluded I was having a very real very powerful but mental experience that happens in most religions I won't tell you my whole story but I went through a process of D conversion that took four or five years starting as a firm believer evangelical street preacher in in the foreword to my book godless that tells that story Richard Dawkins writes Dan Barkin was not just a preacher he's the kind of preacher you would not want to sit next to on a bus that was me I was so convinced I was so in love with Jesus my Savior my Lord but I went through a process evangelical fundamentalist where I migrated into more of a moderate where I preached less hell and more love into more of a more liberal stage in my life until eventually I dumped out all the bathwater and I found out there's no baby there it's just words it's just arguments but from the very articulate words we heard tonight we didn't see any dots connected we heard a lot of argument but when it comes to evidence only two pieces were offered which we will probably get to personal experience and the resurrection of Jesus if nothing comes from nothing then God cannot exist because God is not nothing if that premise is true that nothing comes from nothing and if God is something then you've just shot yourself in the foot today is Thursday what is I mean mr. president Thursday what does it mean it's the it's the day that millions of people believed in the God for there was a gap in understanding there was a mystery what does that noise in this guy what are those lights what is all this what is that it must be an agency it must be some DEET it must be some being or something and they named it Thor and today we have a day of the week we don't have a Jesus day but we do have a Thor's day that we're that millions of people leave it and maybe some still do but that deity has found itself on the scrap heap of history just like when I look at the deity I used to believe in the God of the Bible it started for me with the simple idea that Jesus told a parable about the prodigal son a parable is what it's a fiction it doesn't matter if the prodigal son actually existed in history it was the moral tale that mattered the ancient Israelites made up a parable or a metaphor about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and a talking snake look up in the dictionary the word fable you will find it as a moral tale involving talking animals we know that Adam and Eve could not have existed because of evolution I assume everyone in this room accepts the solid fact of the evolution of the human species so Adam and Eve could not have been real people it was a metaphor and many Christians accept that fact they know there's metaphor figures of speech in the Bible but in my process if the prodigal son is a fabrication if Adam and Eve are a metaphor then what about this other character this Yahweh this Jehovah this Elohim character where do you draw the line when we know that humans are very good in inventing myths like the turtle in my Native American ancestry the turtle that swam across the waters brought up the mud from the bottom created the continents a beautiful story a wonderful metaphor but that didn't really happen the god character himself is also one of those fictions I came to realize may be a useful fiction maybe it gave meaning maybe it gave hope maybe it gave purpose I fix in none-the-less the reason I am a non-believer today is because of the lack of evidence in argument for a deity if there were any real evidence for a God then by now someone should have won the Nobel Prize for pointing that out any scientist in the world would jump at the chance to say here we go I mean if there is a hitherto unknown force of the cosmos that we haven't yet been able to determine what scientists in the world would not love to make that point that hasn't been done yet all we have are what we would call and I think many believers called God of the gap the thunder and lightning was a gap that is now closed the perhaps fine-tuning of the initial constants perhaps the origin of the Big Bang we do have some gaps in science in fact it is those gaps that drive science without those gaps we wouldn't have scientific inquiry what we are offered with is faith and belief and you were very eloquent in saying that you have a belief in a God that what you believe is God but belief is not knowledge belief is simply an assertion according to the Bible that you believers believe belief is the evidence of things not seen the substance of things hoped for belief is not evidence anytime you have to accept an assertion by faith you're admitting that that assertion cannot be accepted on its own merits it doesn't have the strength to be accepted as any other perhaps scientific hypothesis would be taken do scientists gather together every Sunday morning and their scientific sanctuaries and bow their heads and saying yes the Higgs boson is real I know in my heart the Higgs boson is real I will have faith I will be strong to the secular world who challenges my belief that the god particle is real oh man if if they did such a thing you would think they were pretty insecure on the concept wouldn't you yeah that's what we find with faith a constant puffing yourself up be strong resist the world believe in these absurdities in spite of the doubts the resurrection of Jesus Christ the story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the absolute worst example in could possibly give for the reliability of the Bible and I'm not exaggerating let me tell you why I'm not exaggerating many stories in the Bible are given once or twice the resurrection story is given five times you can compare them scholars have never been able to reconcile those contradictory accounts of the resurrection of Jesus and besides that and there are many of them with the tomb open or closed when the women arrived what message of the Angels give how many angels were at the tomb and so on besides that we see through the development in the first century of the Christian myth that the earliest stories were simple there were no angels there were very few remarkable events but as you go 10 20 30 years later you find more and more until you get to the book of John where you find these outlandish stories what you see in the development of the resurrection story in the New Testament is the development of a legend starting simple growing over time getting more and more fantastic it's a mistake to treat those accounts as if they were flat as if they all happen at one time we can see before our eyes the development from a simple unvarnished perhaps some element of truth in some story about someone who may have spiritually ascended like we say grandma died and went to heaven maybe the early Apostle said Jesus died and went to heaven but that exaggerated so the resurrection of Jesus Christ is not evidence for a god and even then it would just be evidence that a man rose from the dead how do you connect the dots we suffer also from a coherent definition of a god we have a proposition this house believes in God what is that word what is that word God mean there are many I don't have time to go into much detail but there are many incompatible properties that many theists assign to this deity much like saying this deed is a married bachelor can a married bachelor exist logically it cannot and there are mutually incompatible prop characteristics of this deity that many theists have put forward that make it a married bachelor for example God is supposedly an omniscient being who has free will but if you know the future you can't have four you will I'm not talking about human free will and that's a big debate whether we have it or not even atheists agree among and disagree among themselves but God presumably this being is a personal being with freewill who knows his own future decisions in order to have free will whatever that means you there has to be a period of indeterminacy during which you truly do have options I could choose coffee or tea I could choose this or that but if you know your future options you have no choice you have no freedom you are not a free personal agency so if your definition of God is that God is omniscient and free he cannot exist he's a married bachelor I know theologians try to tinker with definitions by the way if God cannot change what he knows he's going to do tomorrow at 12:00 noon that also puts some limits on his omnipotence doesn't it a lot of these arguments from design and teleology for example suffer from begging the question it's rather like the man who is amazed look at how all these rivers were made to flow right along the state boundaries how do you explain that it must have been a massive feat of engineering a huge economic development how did they get those rivers to do that isn't that incredible and yet that's how a lot of this teleological thinking is among how did the human eye evolve how did how do you explain that there must have been designed behind it it does look like design doesn't it those rivers look like they were designed to flow right along those boundaries it's an upside down kind of thinking and in a sense begs the question the the whole idea that in some of these teleological arguments that complexity requires a designer and Richards somewhere here pointed out in his book the blind watchmaker anything that is complex enough to design functional complexity any deity who could could design has to have a mind that is at least as functionally complex as the thing that it designed right if your premise is that functional complexity requires the designer if that's your premise then the mind of that deity also must buy that premise require designer and you get into this infinite regress of well then God needed a bigger God in a bigger God I think most scientists prefer to just stop with what we do know rather than speculate endlessly about a mountain of turtles another another lack that takes against the evidence for existence of a god is the lack of agreement among believers if there is a deity that you love and care about why do you know to believers agree on any social or moral issue you name it gay marriage a doctor-assisted suicide stem-cell research death of the war you name these social issues when struggling with you find devout praying Bible believing Christians on both sides of those issues Paul wrote in the Bible God is not the author of confusion but can you think of a single book that's caused more confusion than that Bible they don't agree why why not why shouldn't it be clear why shouldn't this all loving all caring deity make it clear to us it is not they have fought idea overreach fought with each other over these issues the 30 Years War which was based to some degree on the confessional differences over infant baptism and transubstantiation people were killed John Calvin had his friend surveyed has killed over a simple mist placement of a preposition the lack of agreement among believers is a serious problem towards the existence of an all-loving all carrying God and then of course the problem of evil and our previous speaker pointed out that that is probably the Achilles heel in theology all you have to do is walk into any Children's Hospital and you know there's no God at least no good God maybe there's an evil God those children are dying at the same random rate even though their parents are desperately praying desperately loving those kids wanting some kind of divine intervention and yet as an Gayler says who is the president former president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation nothing fails like prayer that would be evidence if you could give some scientific evidence that prayer actually makes an organic difference not just makes you feel better but an actual difference in the real world that would be something to put on the table the fact that that's not put on the table shows that prayer is pretty much talking to yourself finally there's no need for a belief in God millions tens of millions of people on this planet live happy lives productive lives moral lives purposeful lives lives of hope and meaning without deluding ourselves that there are these invisible personalities populating some supernatural realm we are quite happy thank you without that belief based on all of that is more likely to reject the proposition than to accept it thank you you

Channel: OxfordUnion

Views: 1,279,604

Rating: 4.0342441 out of 5

Keywords: Dan Barker, The God Debate, Oxford Union, Dan, Barker, God, Debate, Oxford Union Society, Freedom from Religion, Freethought Radio, Proposition, Opposition, For, Against, Atheism, Atheist, Faith, Christianity, Jesus, Christ, Belief, Believe, Choice, Religion, Existence, Universe, Question, Answer, Q&A, Oxford University, University, Debates, Debating, Interview, top:Religion, sfn:Dan, sln:Barker, evn:God Debate

Id: btJazTimH4M

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 21 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/precursormar]

I think this is the same event that Michael Shermer gave a great talk at. If you can find it, it's also well worth a watch.