Debate: What Best Explains Reality: Theism or Atheism? (Frank Turek vs. Michael Shermer)

[Music] dr. Turek is an award-winning author and co-author of multiple books like I don't have enough faith to be an atheist legislating morality and his latest stealing from God why a theist need God to make their case Frank is the president of cross examine org from whom he travels and presents powerful and entertaining evidence for the truth of Christianity we'll see some of that today he has presented at high schools and secular college campuses many who are antagonistic to his to his message in fact they were just telling me Michael and Michael Shermer and dr. Frank her and Frank Turk were at a recent college and they both were attacked by what they both called the snowflakes on campus so you can see that they have something in common there dr. Turk has debated several prominent atheists including Kurt the late Christopher Hitchens David Zellmer Silverman president of the American Atheists and of course dr. Schurman he's sure Murray's debated him once before dr. Turk hosts a weekly TV program I don't have enough faith to be an atheist and he has a radio program called cross-examined with Frank Turk that a year airs on 186 stations every Saturday Frank has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor which doesn't exist anymore handy and combs which doesn't exist anymore hang on Frank because there's something going on here faith on the far and politically incorrect which doesn't exist anymore either with Bill Maher in fact I believe you're on those second the last or the last episode where Bill Maher actually got fired or I got fired shortly after so beware of inviting Frank on your show a former aviator aviator with the US Navy Frank has a master's degree from George Washington University and a doctorate from southern evangelical seminary he and his wife Stephanie have three grown sons one of whom who is here today and make sure you go back to the book table he will be there if you want to meet Frank's son and ladies doin Frank Turek come on up [Applause] okay let's welcome dr. Michael Shermer dr. Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of skeptic magazine he's a monthly columnist for Scientific American and a presidential fellow at Chapman University where he teaches skeptism one-on-one I want to take that class he's the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers including why people believe weird things the science of good and evil the mole Ark and his latest book heavens on earth the scientific search for the afterlife immortality and utopia not to be confused with Ethiopia where I grew up one of the places I grew up dr. Schurman has been an invited guest on The Colbert Report 2020 Dateline Charlie Lowe's Rose Oprah and Larry King Live they also exist except for Larry King life so apparently Michael Shermer is a better person to invite on your show if you want longevity he has been interviewed on countless documentary documentaries which have aired on shows like PBS Discovery The History Channel the Science Channel and the Learning Channel he received his BA in Psychology for Pepperdine University his MA an experiment of his psychology from California State University in Fulton and his PhD in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University ladies and gentlemen dr. Michael Shermer thank you thank you all now our time is short today so as we proceed I will ask that you hold all applause while the person is talking till the end of his presentation that just gives him a bit more time so he doesn't have to talk to your applause but same with Harrah's and dude your time is up also isn't allowed okay laughter certainly allowed okay now dr. Shermer and dr. Turek will be assisted in keeping their timing with the two most beautiful girls in the world my wife and my daughter who are sitting up front they will hold up the two-minute warning the one-minute warning and the dude your time is up warning but will so just you can watch out for that debaters so let us begin with dr. Turks first 20 minutes introductory statement well thank you Neil for such a dry opening before we really get into this you know people always start by thanking people and it sounds so obligatory but it's really true this is hard to pull off an event like this so thank you Westgate church for hosting this and also thank you South Valley Community Church in Gilroy for helping with it as well thank you so much without those people we wouldn't be doing this and and thank you dr. Shermer who came up from the utopia known as Santa Barbara today that's where he lives so he's a smart man and thank you for doing this needle as well I've already been yes and the Charlie Rose show doesn't exist either anymore just so you know alright alright one other thing I want to mention and that is before we get started I'm from New Jersey which means I speak at 150 words a minute with gusts to 350 okay I'm gonna go really quickly in fact when we do these opening statements I think Michael would agree with me when you do debates the biggest problem is time you don't have a lot of times you have to compress a lot into a short period of time so we're up here playing beat the clock if you want this PowerPoint presentation I'm going to show you all you need to do is go to that website cross examined work forward slash debate send us an email and we're gonna send you this PowerPoint presentation even the slides I can't get to so you're not gonna be able to keep up with me you can look at it later if you're really interested in this material it's gonna be there by the way we're not going to share your email address with anyone but if you do that in fact if you do it right now it's gonna in the next probably five minutes it's gonna be in your inbox okay all right Anna you ready are we ready all right we're trying to figure out what better explains reality theism or atheism and one of the hardest questions to answer from the very beginning of time has been if there is no God why is there something rather than nothing why does anything exist in other words and I think when we look around the universe we have to figure out certain effects and these effects must have some kind of cause in fact that's how we know God exists we reason from effect to cause and there's a number of effects I want to go through here tonight the first is creation we'll talk about that first secondly is reason the idea that we can reason to true beliefs thirdly is the information found in DNA number four is morality objective morality dr. Shermer will agree that certain things are objectively right and other things are objectively wrong also evil why is there evil in the world if there is a good god I'm gonna argue that evil actually shows God does exist rather than not and then finally science why can we do science why is the world so orderly so we can actually do science it appears to be the product of a rational mind and if you notice each one of these effects that we're trying to discover the cause for is in an acronym I'll get to in a minute we're trying to figure out the cause I have to figure out what the cause is and so does dr. Sherman now dr. Sherman may not have the same one cause he may have several causes but these are effects that require a cause and this isn't an acronym known as crime CRI mes and we're going to just go through this as quickly as we can here in this twenty minutes the first is the idea that there really was and all scientists seemed to agree with this there really was at one point a big I'd like to keep the audience awake in the beginning all right there was a big bang as even atheists admit Stephen Hawking who had you know died earlier this year said almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the Big Bang now Hawking tries to come up with another explanation other than God I think he fails but he's admitting the data what's the data that space time and matter literally had a beginning out of nothing non beam not a quantum vacuum but nothing another colleague of his Alexander Vilenkin put it this way he said with the proof now in place cosmologists and by the way a cosmologists is not somebody that puts on your makeup all right cosmologists is somebody who investigates the origin of the universe cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of the past eternal universe there is now no escape they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning now the Lincoln is a believer in the multiverse if you heard of the multiverse there are other universes out there and ours just happens to be the one that looks designed even though there's no way to verify this but even for Lincoln admits that even if there are other universes out there the whole show needs an absolute beginning in addition to the universe exploded into being out of nothing it did so with extreme precision Stephen Hawking again put it this way if the expansion rate of the universe was different by one part in a thousand million million a second after the Big Bang the universe would have collapsed back on itself or never developed galaxies you changed the expansion rate that infinitesimal amount none of us are here you can't make any evolutionary argument for this why because this is the initial condition of the universe the universe started this way also the gravitational force is fine-tuned to one part in ten to the 40th power what's one part in 10 to the 40th power that's one part in one with 4008 you say Frank I can't get my head around that number I know neither can I let me just give you an illustration take a tape measure and stretch it across the entire known universe that's a long way set the gravitational force at a particular inch mark on that tape measure I realize gravity's not measured in inches but this is just give you a scale idea in your mind if the strength of gravity was different by one inch in either direction across the scale as wide as the entire known universe we wouldn't be here now I don't have enough faith to believe that that value just happened by chance somebody put that value right there now when you add up this these two arguments it's really two arguments here the cosmological argument and the fine-tuning argument you're left with two options here are the two options if the universe had a beginning we've got two options either no one created something out of nothing in a fine-tuned way or someone created something out of nothing in a fine-tuned way now which view is more reasonable this is the interactive portion of the program I think number two is more reasonable by the way both of these are miracles it's a miracle to have something come from nothing without a miracle worker it's also a miracle to have something come from nothing with a miracle worker the only question is which views more reasonable now ladies and gentlemen if space matter in time had a beginning out of nothing as even many atheists are now admitting then whatever created space matter in time can't be made a space matter in time in other words the cause must be spaceless timeless immaterial powerful moral well we'll get to that in a minute personal and intelligent now when you think of a being with those qualities who do you think of that's what we mean by God now the next argument has to do with reason now dr. Sherman is a dialogue with the Deepak Chopra admitted that he's a materialist Michael said I explained that I'm a materialist and a monist I do not believe that there is a body and a soul there is just a body there is no brain and mind just brain so Michael is buying into what we materialism and in effect materialism says that every thought you have have is the result of the laws of physics there's not really a mind there you're just a brain you're nothing but a moist robot and so I think that there's a problem with this because if dr. Sherman says my thoughts are determined completely by the non-rational laws of physics I want to ask him then so is that thought and all your thoughts about atheism so why should we believe any of them if every thought is driven by the laws of physics we don't really know if we have truth or not in fact the problem here is is that if atheism were true we couldn't even be able to reason because if we're just moist robots we're not reasoning we're just reacting and a former evolutionist or a gentleman wasn't evolutionist and realized the problem with his worldview Haldane put it this way he said this if my mental processes are determined wholly 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 he got it you know even Darwin recognized this was a problem with his view for another reason in fact it's called Darwin's doubt here's what Darwin said he said with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man's mind which has been developed from the mind of lower animals are of any value at all trustworthy would any would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind if there are any convictions in such a mind now reason makes no sense on atheism materialism but it makes sense on theism why because our minds are made in the image of the great mind and the laws of logic which allow us to think and communicate are based on his nature the third effect that we need to explain is information particularly the information found in DNA and the best way of explaining this is to take you to your breakfast table suppose you're a teenager you come downstairs one morning and you want to have a bowl of alphabet cereal and you see the alphabet cereals knocked over on the table and right in the middle of the table the letters fell take out the garbage mom what are you going to assume the cat knocked the box over earthquake shook house no you're gonna say that that's intelligent designed from an intelligent being mom or if you're walking along the beach and you see in the sand john loves Mary right down here in Santa Cruz what are you gonna say the waves did that crabs came out of the water and made that message no you're gonna say that had to be the product of a mind because you know and all your prior experiences that messages only come from minds they don't come from blind natural laws well if take out the garbage mom requires a message what about the message in every single cell of your body in fact every one of your 40 or so trillion cells has a message 3.2 billion letters long every letter is in the right order how did that happen where did and codes come from in fact what we're saying here is DNA is a message it's like take out the garbage mom but a lot longer and even Bill Gates admits this he says that DNA is a software program Gates said human DNA is like a computer program but far far more advanced than any software ever created I don't know about you where I come from you guys come from Silicon Valley don't you whenever there's a program there's got to be a programmer now Michael might say this is god of the gaps reasoning this is not god of the gaps reasoning why because we're not arguing from what we don't know it's not like we're looking we just haven't found a natural law to explain this yet it's that take out the garbage mom is actually evidence for an intelligent being when you see take out the garbage mom on your on your table you don't go well gee I I just can't find a natural law for this you go that's positive evidence for mom so we're not arguing from what we don't know it's not a gap we're arguing from what we do know the fourth effect we need to account for is morality in fact evil as well we're going to do these two together and Michael will agree there is objective morality here's the problem from an atheistic standpoint how can you discover who is morally better Mother Teresa or Hitler if there is no standard beyond humanity in fact how can you discover which one of these is better well what you need to do is you need to see a standard or NOAA standard in fact how do you know which map of Scotland is better here is it map a or map B what would you need to see in order to know you need to see a real unchanging place called Scotland because if Scotland doesn't exist then these two maps are meaningless but if Scotland does exist then we can see that map a while it's not perfect it's a better representation of the real map than is map B in other words there's an external reference to which we can measure both maps that that standard is what we can do to figure out which map is closer to the truth well that's exactly what we do when we compare mother Teresa and Hitler mother Teresa wasn't the standard Hitler wasn't the standard there's a standard beyond both of them by which we measure both of them and that standard is God's nature I don't see how you can come up with a standard external to human beings unless God exists now not long I was at a church in South Dakota in February I don't know why I went there in February but I did anyway we were doing our I don't have enough faith to be an atheist presentation over several nights the second night I was there we had the microphone set up and a couple of young men in their 20s got up to the microphone and they were atheists I didn't think anything of it because if you call something I don't have enough faith to be an atheist everyone's gonna show up however the next night I was there about a fifty year old man got up to the microphone and he had a question written on two sheets of paper and he began to read it about 10 seconds into his present and into reading the the question he just broke down crying he couldn't go any further so I walked off the platform I went down to him and he handed me these two sheets of paper and all he said was read it read it so I'm trying to digest this two page question as I'm walking back up to the platform by the time I got back up to the platform I realized that that man was upset for two reasons reason number one that man whose name turned out to be Steve had just discovered recently that a supposed friend of him hid friend of his a man by the name of Tom about a fifty year old man had been sexually abusing Steve's daughter from the time she was age 4 to the time she was age 14 right in his own home under his nose never saw it the second reason Steve was upset was because the two men who were there the night before were his sons who used to be Christians and are now atheists they said there can't be a good God because he wouldn't have allowed this to happen to our sister there is no God so I said to him Steve it's okay to be mad at God some of the Bible writers are mad at God Rita backache read read the psalm some of the Psalms read lamentations God where are you God can take it he's an infinite being but I hope at some point your sons are gonna realize this is not a good argument against God in fact it's actually an argument for God why in fact here's what I said to him I said when the time is right Steve I want you to say this to your sons if there is no God what that 50-year old man did to your sister isn't really wrong it's just your opinion why because if there's no standard beyond humanity it's just his opinion against yours by the way the man who did this is still walking the streets why everyone knows he did it but he's not in jail because every time the trial comes up Jessica the one who was abused psychologically checks out she can't testify against him she wanted to marry him so I said Steve when the right time comes I want you to say this to your sons if there is no God than the man who did this to your sister we'll never get justice he's not going to get justice here on earth if she doesn't testify and he's not going to get justice in the afterlife because according to atheism there is no afterlife do you really think that's the way the universe is you really think there's no such thing as justice the very reason you're upset rightfully so is because you know a great injustice has been done but there can't be justice or I should say there can't be injustice unless there's justice in fact CS Lewis put it best he said evil requires good and good requires God he says as an atheist my argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and on just but how had I got this idea of just and unjust a man does not call line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line what was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust in fact it's been also put this way the shadows proved the sunshine in other words in order to have evil you have to have good in order to have shadows you have to have sunshine well you can have sunshine without shadows you can have good without evil but you can't have evil without good now something's evil out there and Michael will agree there are many things that are evil then there must be something good what is that good that good is God's nature if there is no God then there's nothing ultimately good or bad there are just molecules bumping into one another now Jessica the girl that was abused decided to do something positive with this awful experience she actually wrote a book here it is not your princess by Jessica MIT so I read one chapter of this book and couldn't read it anymore why am I telling you this because her father Steve wants many people as many people as possible to know this because this happens too far too often in American homes now ladies and gentlemen it's the sexual abuse of children evil yes then God exists I know that sounds counterintuitive because Michaels going to ask them why would he allow it to happen that's a whole nother conversation but the point is you can't say God doesn't exist because it wouldn't be it wouldn't be evil unless he did exist because he's the standard of good by which we'd even know what evil was he is the standard of measurement finally science why is the world so orderly why can we do science Michael Shermer is a scientist he teaches a class on this why can we do science why is the world so orderly in fact you might ask yourself the question science requires nature to be goal-directed why is nature that way for example why do the planets reliably go around the Sun why don't they go in herky-jerky movements or random movements you say frankerz there's a law like gravity I know but why is there a law like gravity and why is it so precise and consistent it appears to be the product of a mind not randomness in order to do science you need consistent natural laws that can be relied upon fine tuned net laws where do these laws come from and by the way these laws affect living and nonliving things in fact take a take an oak tree for example where does an oak tree come from well oak tree comes from an acorn well how come when an egg egg or when acorn is properly nourished it always becomes an oak tree it doesn't become an elm tree or a birch tree or a seahorse right it always becomes an oak tree why is that well because it's programmed to become an oak tree yeah but who programmed it I mean it's an egg corn in the ground conscious going all right what do I need to do to become an oak tree no it doesn't even have a mind yet it goes reliably in a direction if it doesn't have its own mind to go in a direction there must be an external mind directing it toward an end that is what Aristotle called the unmoved mover Thomas Aquinas came along in 1200 ad and said that's gonna be my fifth way to argue for God even if the universe didn't have a beginning it needs someone to keep everything in motion an external intellect that's what we mean by God we wouldn't even be able to do science unless this existed unless this orderly natural world existed in fact sir Fred Hoyle it was an atheist after looking at arguments like this I don't think he ever became a theist or Christian don't get me wrong but he looked at the fine-tuning and some of these other arguments and here's what he said a common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as chemistry and biology and that there are no blind forces were speaking about in nature now what do we do with all of these effects creation reason information morality evil and science what did they tell us well I think when you break these down you get the attributes of what we call God from creation we know that the cause is immaterial timeless and spaceless he's also extremely powerful to create out of nothing from reason we know this being is rational from information we know he's extremely intelligent and has purpose from morality we know he's absolutely morally perfect and also personal because you only have a moral obligation to persons you don't have a moral obligation to impersonal forces you know go if you go try and dunk a basketball you're not sinning against the law of gravity we also know that this beam from science creates and sustains orderly natural laws now who fits this it seems to me that this is a theistic God identified without reference to any religion religious book we're just looking at effects and reasoning back to the cause so I'm saying that all of these things point back to our suspect God now if you and this God by the way is spaceless timeless immaterial all those attributes I just mentioned now if you want to go much further in this you can the book stealing from God is back there it goes through this in this order if you just want the debate PowerPoint you can get that and I want to point out that all the proceeds from the sale the books will go to feed needy children mine okay just so you know and here's my oldest little child who's now thirty years old his name is Zach Turk he's a captain in the Air Force there he is right there thank you he's hungry thank you Frank dr. Shimron will have twenty minutes now box trimmer thank you ladies and gentlemen brothers and sisters comrades and friends and seekers after reality I guess I'm here to defend reality which is a good thing because it's real tonight's debate on theism and atheism how many of you self-identify as theist that is you believe in God whoa look at the time I'm gonna jump ahead just just for a moment while you're in the hand-raising mode just for a moment just indulge me your atheists you have come decide there is no God or you don't believe that there is a God can you think of any reasons why sexually molesting a child is wrong okay can you think of any reasons why it would be bad really most of you can't think of any reason why this is wrong of course you can all right full stop that's good enough it's wrong because of all the reasons you're thinking of right now harm to a sentient being long term destruction of their psychological makeup you wouldn't want it done to you and so forth these are good reasons reasons to be good for goodness sake and not be evil for goodness sake I was once a theist as our host mentioned by the way you referred to us as candidates I like to thank you for your votes ahead of time tonight you know there is an election I mean I was serious about it I went to Pepperdine University it's a Church of Christ school I was a born-again evangelical Christian for three years I went door-to-door Amway with Bibles the whole thing I totally believed and then and then I became an atheist and I went door to door saying I take it all back sort of reminds me of what you get when you cross a Jehovah Witness with an atheist is someone who knocks on your door for no reason at all I once saw a bumper sticker that said militant agnostic I don't know and you don't either now it support we define our terms that little quip has some deeper meaning in it this term illogical meaning that is when thomas henry huxley coining the term agnostic in 1869 he meant not knowable that is there are certain things we can't get at philosophers today call these mysterion mysteries they can never be resolved this is what Huxley meant when he talked about God as an unknowable entity not you're waiting for one more experiment or another data set or a better argument and you'll make your decision one way or the other he didn't mean that nor did he mean like when I was on The Colbert Report we were talking about this in the green room and and I mentioned being an agnostic at the time and he said that's just an atheist without balls and I thought I don't like that I'm an atheist but there's two types of atheism there's weak and strong atheism strong atheist say I believe there is no God we Kathy assay I don't believe in God slight difference I don't think the first one is is this tenable a position I don't know that there is no God I'm not sure how you would prove it would be difficult to prove a negative in that sense prove that something doesn't exist but the null hypothesis in science that is I withhold judgment or I withhold belief until sufficient evidence comes in which would apply to any particular claim then I will reserve judgment I will remain skeptical I will not believe in your particular claim whatever it is Bigfoot aliens doesn't matter until you provide me the evidence show me the body and I'll believe in Bigfoot show me the spaceship but I'll believe in UFOs and so on it just depends on what the the evidence is and so lack of belief is this different from believing there is a lack of something now the proposition that does atheism or theism explain anything it's not quite right not believing in something or believing in something doesn't explain anything it's just saying I believe it or I don't believe it whatever the it is and it also leaves out all the other positions deism for example can explain things there was a creator the universe set the whole thing in motion with the laws of nature that are teleological and create structure and so forth and then step back and has had no further involvement in the process or pantheism everything is God which is more of a sort of a Buddhist version why aren't we talking about those or my favorite apathy ism which is I don't care if there's a God or not I think these words are more proxies for religion and science what better explains reality religion or science the oxford english dictionary defines religion as the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power especially a personal god or gods but that itself doesn't explain anything just believing in something or worshipping something isn't an explanation you wouldn't offer that say if you were wondering do vaccines work or do vaccines cause autism or does HIV cause AIDS you know whatever the question is you wouldn't say well I believe in I'm a theist so I believe in that well what are you talking about that doesn't explain anything maybe what you mean by theism or religion is God God did it God being a in your case I presume an all-powerful omnipotent all-knowing omniscient and all good I'm me benevolent entity created out of nothing the universe and everything in it who is uncreated and eternal a noncorporeal spirit who creates loves and can grant eternal life to humans but even that just saying well my explanation of X whatever it is planets gravity the universe something rather than nothing morality consciousness you know God did it that's not an explanation those are just words you're just plugging words into the blank the gap anymore then like people I deal with that or believe in psychic power astrology ESP telepathy and so on you know when they say well you know it's just magic power that happens is this you know this ESP does it that's not an explanation we still want to know how did God do it how does this ESP thing work so for example by you mentioned Deepak Chopra it was a good friend of mine and Deepak believes along with some other a couple other scientists Roger Penrose and this guy Stuart Hameroff anesthesiologist that consciousness arrives arises out of the microtubules inside neurons microtubules of these little infrastructures that couldn't hold cells together and they think that there's quantum effects inside these microtubules in which there's this kind of spooky action at a distance in quantum experiments that that's real and maybe this is something that happens between brains so I could read your thoughts because our neurons are collapsing the quantum wave fields at the simultaneous kind of synchronous to this wave and so my neurons are firing in synchrony with your neurons and so we're reading each other's thoughts okay I don't believe this I'm skeptical okay but it's a it's a it's a legitimate hypothesis that's out there to be tested but even if it's true that wouldn't be the paranormal it would just now be the normal it would be part of science part of neuro neuroscience part of quantum physics or it's even called that quantum consciousness okay so there's no such thing as the supernatural of the paranormal it's just the natural to normal and the stuff we can't explain yet the gaps we haven't filled there's lots of gaps that doesn't mean my particular preferred hypothesis is the right one simply because there's a gap science of this stance is very conservative because most ideas that people come up with are wrong including those by world-class scientists which is why scientists start with that thing the null hypothesis we assume your idea is probably not right but go ahead give it your best shot and let's see so most ideas and science turn out to be wrong that's why we're skeptical so in science we're looking Frank mentioned science and reason it's important to point out these aren't things science and reason are tools we use to try to answer questions so the moment you say that theism explained science that you're treating it like it's a thing like a reason is this thing sitting up there that needed to be created it's not it's more about think of it as a verb more than a noun it's it's something we do and the moment you open your mouth to make the argument that reason and science can't stand on its own you've lost the argument you've just used science and reason to argue that science and reason can't stand alone and and if story rest my case it's a thing we use to answer these questions so for example I'll give you just one of many we could address according to UNICEF about 29,000 children under the age of 5 die every day mainly from preventable causes that's 21 dead children each minute that's 10 point 6 million a year that's almost two Holocaust say year by the time I finish this sentence a couple more children will have died of these presentable preventable diseases about 70% of them are attributable to diarrhea malaria neonatal infection pneumonia preterm delivery or lack of oxygen at birth some of these the Gates Foundation is working to eliminate Sciences explanation these are all preventable causes preventable tragedies we know the causes of them we can eliminate the causes if we have the right science and technology we have the right science and technology medicine the delivery to these poor countries is the difficult part what's religions explanation how would theism explain this and we get things like well this is part of God's plan or you know God works in mysterious ways who knows what God has in mind for these grieving parents and these suffering children what sort of God would make a plan like this this is all-knowing all-powerful all good God maybe a less than powerful God maybe maybe God just simple simply can't save these poor children no I'm not talking about human evil like homicide crimes genocides that you would attribute to free will and the fall and and bad choices I'm talking about innocent children suffering grieving parents just in agony for the rest of their lives what what's the plan there you know Frank you talk about you know how beautifully design the universe is no it's not there's a lot of bad things that happen and most of the universe is not beautifully designed for life most of the universe is completely inhospitable to life and most of human life all the way up until really just recent decades has been largely just suffering and misery it's just the second law of thermodynamics and entropy running its course diseases felling people cancer killing people human violence and aggression war genocides these were quite common before just recent times now the problem with explaining these problems these forms of evil with theism is what I call the irrefutable God problem when good things happen who gets the credit God when bad things happen who gets the blame not God wow what a great system so no matter what happens the god hypothesis is confirmed what would it take to disconfirm the god hypothesis did just think let that just float there for a second what would it take for you to change your mind what would it take if you just say you know what I think this idea I have this theory this hypothesis is the explanation for whatever maybe it's not right how can I decide what what's my test so if it's that good thing happened good things happen so God exists and bad things happen so God exists what would it take to refute that it's irrefutable by definition it's simply an assertion and as the late great Chris Phrygians said in what i elevate it to Hitchens dictum that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence in his great book his last regular book the demon haunted world Carl Sagan opens up a chapter with a little vignette there's a dragon in my garage want to see it let me show you I got this dragon let me show me open the garage door you look in empty floor empty paint cans a ladder old bicycle where's the dragon oh you don't you know you don't seem sorry this is an invisible dragon visible dragon yes it's invisible well I tell you what I have some flour we're gonna spread flour on the floor and we'll catch his footprints as he walks around well you see this dragon hovers above the ground about a foot so he doesn't actually touch the ground well that's okay I got some of this spray paint stuff we'll spray and we'll catch the body form well no you see nothing sticks to this dragon but he's a dragon so that means he bellows out fire so he generates some heat and I have a thermal camera and we can detect the thermal signature of the dragon no see this is this this is a special dragon he's a cold fire dragon he spits cold fire so there's no heat signature you see where Carl's going with this what's the difference between an invisible hovering undetectable dragon and no dragon at all now you might say but but I feel the presence of the dragon I feel his love for me I feel like when I think about the dragon I get a parking spot when I wouldn't have and I met my spouse cuz the dragons gonna love for me and you know and the dragon explains why bad things happen and you know why is there a universe the dragon brought it in to existence these are not arguments these are special pleadings to affirm a hypothesis you already want to be true this is like playing baseball without the bases or the ball we have to have some kind of rules by which we decide what's true and what's not now the problem with faith that theists and religionists use is that it's not a reliable means of true knowledge a valid knowledge and if you say well but but but but wait dr. Sharat don't you believe in love I mean I love my spouse my spouse loves me my boyfriend my girlfriend you know there's no evidence for that yeah there is evidence you don't have faith in that you know what you call love without evidence stalking we use evidence and reason in all parts of our life if you're using reason you're on the side of science this is what we do if you're using faith you're not doing science it's not reliable you may get the answer by accident right but if your theory that the cause of things in reality cause of diseases and accidents and plagues and so on is that late at night women go out and cavort with demons you're either insane or you lived in Christian Europe 500 years ago that was the prevailing explanation for the physical world a lot of it witches and by the way parenthetically one of the arguments for why they believed in which is so strong is because if there's no witches but maybe there's no demons and if there's no demons maybe there's no God so there's a lot of pressure on the church to find evidence of these witches to support the super structure of a supernatural world that science was beginning to chip away of thou shalt not suffer a witch to live Exodus 22 18 today no one in their right mind believes this except in a few of these third world countries where witchcraft still exists so what what we need to do is be able to point to something and say look this is the evidence I have for my claim this is the evidence this is the arguments I bring see see see that right there look you can check it and you can run the experiment and you can consider the arguments and so forth so we have to make a distinction between external objective truths and internal subjective States so for example if I say there's 697 people in the room tonight that's a proposition that we can objectively confirm or disconfirm by simply counting if I say the greatest rock song of all time is stairway to heaven and I can prove it and you say wait a minute wait a minute of Freebird Freebird is the greatest rock song of all time okay these are internal subjective states I have an invitation go to Costa Rica to spend a week taking ayahuasca so I can discover this truth that everybody who's taken ayahuasca knows is real there is this other spirit world that really exists so I've met these people I say show me it point to it what you got to drink the tea and then you'll see like yeah but my friends that did LSD back in the 70s they say the same thing and we all know that's just brain wiring alright so this distinction I'm making here this would be something to point to what we're after tonight we're sliding into this area where it's internal it's subjective there's no experiment we're gonna run it look there it is these are simply arguments that I can't explain these five things something rather than nothing origins of life or just consciousness origins of morality good and evil but therefore you know God did it that that's again to conclude that's not an explanation you're just filling in the gap I'm gonna stick it in there well five hundred years ago you would have been putting in the gap women cavorting with demons will call them witches and burn them and that'll take care of that and you would have now looking back said that was a crazy idea let's not do that again we've learned something we learned about climate and weather and disease vectors and plagues and things like that their causes how did we learn that not from theism we learned that from science and science continues to close those gaps and fill those explanatory voids the aliens have come to tell me it's my time and with that thank you it's all right thank you [Applause] prior to the beginning we agreed that they would be allowed to go over a few seconds here or there and so I turned off my buzzer I was surprised that they went off sorry no so at this point we're gonna move into what is my favorite part of the discussion the candidates re the debaters my other hat is politics and Christians and things like that but so at this point we are going to have a 15-minute cross-examination where each debater gets 15 minutes to ask questions to the other debater and they get to answer it and then they switch roles after 15 minutes and at this point you can also throw in some rebuttal statements in them but however I do ask that if you do ask a question you allow the person that you're talking to to answer the question before you move on so we didn't really decide who goes first did any of you have a point okay yeah I mean again it's we've got about 30 minutes to dialogue so we'll do 15 minutes primarily from Frank and then at the end of 15 minutes I'll just kind of say so you can go great all right thanks Michael question I'll put on the board so everyone can see if you're a brain evolved by an unguided unintelligent process and all your thoughts are completely dictated by the laws of physics in other words you're a moist robot then why should we think your thoughts are true including the thoughts you've stated right here tonight okay we're operating at different levels here so your tell you it would be like if you wanted to explain water by looking at the quantum physics in the subatomic particles in hydrogen and oxygen atoms how do you get water out of these quantum these these quarks inside the protons and neutrons of the atom you don't it's a higher level explanation yeah much like we talked about emergent properties how do you get democracy out of atoms we don't you don't use physics to explain democracy you use political science so we're what we're talking about here is kind of different levels explanatory levels which is one reason why we have different fields of study to you know think about the cause of things and economics or psychology or whatever so well I agree with you on that that there are other fields of study but if you're a materialist unless you've changed your mind all that exists are molecules so again why should I believe what you're saying I'm consciousness what could that that's sort of a bizarre question what do you mean why should I believe it would be like saying you're made out of quarks and so why should I believe you what does quarks or atoms got to do with anything because if I if we're controlled by the laws of physics including our thoughts why should we expect our thoughts to be true okay I'm a compatibilist so I believe that we have volition and free will how well okay so it has to do with emergent property of complex systems so you and I have more degrees of freedom than a dog dog has more degrees of freedom what by degrees our freedom I mean places to move choices to make so rats make choices I'll press the left bar or the right bar I'll go down this alley that alleyway Dover those are choices rats make them dogs make them we make them and and we have more choices more degrees of freedom than say rats then say cockroaches okay so like what would be the difference between a drug addict hooked on oxycontin and you and I who are not you know you and I don't are not under that sway but this the poor addict is there's a difference there of degrees of freedom okay so I would I would answer it that way that it's it's kind of different levels of how many controlling vectors are at work do you believe the laws of logic exist well okay not without humans to describe them okay let me ask you this then yeah you're saying the laws of logics are just human constructions correct well okay two things one there is a reality that really exists so we can measure that the angle here you know to a bats brain or you know it may look different then then on my brain but there really is a table and it really exists even if I can't ever know what it's like to be a bat and know what it feels like to experience a table through echolocation rather than touch or sight but still that really exists of the laws of nature that we describe and interpret with mathematics and words those are human constructions there's no like second law of thermodynamics or or a Newtonian equation in a star a star is just doing what stars do when they get a certain pressure and temperature they convert hydrogen into helium I mean let me let me just ask you this and you send a human constructions then so let me ask you this before there are any human beings on the earth was the statement there are no human beings on the earth true yes okay well then how could the laws of logic just be human constructions then well but we're asking that today regardless of where answers no humans there's no one asking the question but it was still Joe prior to that how how could you and I even communicate if you had your own idea of the laws of logic and I had my own idea how could we even communicate unless we're we because there is a reality and we share a common neural anatomy to describe it in ways that are similar so this could set the problem of other minds how do I know you're read looks like my read okay these head scratchers that you get in philosophy 101 how do I know that you're not all a bunch of zombies and I'm the only one with the lights on okay look if my answer to this is the Copernican principle which says we're not special if this theraph is not the center of the universe you know that we go around this time with all the other plant we're not special we're just a little corner of the gallic Milky Way galaxy one of 100 billion galaxies we're not special so the chances of me be the super special one human that's conscious and self-aware and the rest of you or zombies walking around and you only look like your matenda ng to be conscious is very low so that that's how right but you're still not answering how these laws exist because they exist even if human beings don't exist the laws exist in the mind of God otherwise you and I couldn't even communicate okay okay so first of all they exist in the mind the mind I've got that that doesn't follow from this at all that's a separate assertion we can come back to that when we talk about that what you just said there is an assertion and you're using the laws of logic to say it if the laws of logic aren't objective that statement couldn't be true first of all okay so deca first of all it's not true that there has to be a god or else that why would God make two laws any special what's God got to do with the laws of nature nothing you're just saying well that's well that's the very point though I'm not talking about laws of nature I'm talking about the laws of logic but you want to talk about the laws of nature those are just words we're using conventions mathematical equations those are all human comes Michael I know you're not a postmodernist please there just were no no they're describing truths yeah but okay yep but okay the equation again back I'm skeptical you're a postmodernist they say say Newtonian equations they don't exist in the Sun the sun's just doing with the Sun it's just physical matter doing what it has to do we described it so before there were humans no there was no the Sun was not burning before there's no love no the Sun of course is burning doing its thing but there's no law there's no Newtonian equation to describe it well did it there's no de tournay equation to describe it in our minds because we're not here yet but that Newtonian equation is still not described being the truth of what was happening no not the equation well the equation describes what happens the equation doesn't do the work the equation is our way of of describing how it works right okay but that that existed prior to you and me ever existing the Sun was burning before you and I ever existed okay I think we're let me move on to another question okay talk about two different things here we're talking about the material reality of stuff that exists and then our description of it like well you you're going with emergent properties which appears to be a faith position anyway let me ask you this if God does not exist only molecules exist what is the nature of the moral standard called goodness and why are we obligated to obey it what is that little ruler if it's not God's nature okay back to where I started Frank can you think of any reason why sexually molesting a child is bad I can think of yes I can think of reasons but they're all based on moral principles which require God no they don't sure they don't really do you really need God to tell you and explain to you why it's wrong ss no not to tell me why it's wrong but you don't need God to know right and wrong you don't need God to be good you just need God to justify what it is nope what right there it stopped right there and lean out to God I know why it's wrong full-stop you know why it's wrong but why is it wrong so independent of you knowing it so Plato refuted this two and a half millennia ago it's called the Euthyphro problem whether you throw dilemma that is if God says say murder is wrong although technically by definition that's what murder means wrongful killing it but any case if are the reasons why God is saying that yes God has his reasons okay give us the reasons made in the image of God and skip the middleman all we need are the reasons why but you see that that implies a moral principle when you like before you said the reason you shouldn't sexually molest a child is because they're sentient beings and you wouldn't want them doing it to you or vice versa or whatever those are all other moral principles that need a source what is the source on atheists the source what is the standard leave atheism out of it atheism isn't anything it's just lack of belief in God . we could talk about civil rights civil liberties the rule of law where the rights conventions we okay I think rights come from the basis of it is human nature and what all of us want now I think we're born with an inherent innate sense of right and wrong we know from research like in Paul blooms lab at Yale for example with tiny infants these are like six months to a year old babies and they are showing a little puppet show so imagine there's this ramp and this puppets pushing this ball up the ramp and one puppet comes up and bashes the ball back down and it's fighting a little the puppet and then this is a great experiment okay make it an argument for I'm not disagreeing that we all know right from wrong that's not my point my point is not epistemology how do you know right from wrong my point is what is rightness on an atheistic materialistic worldview on a humanist worldview right and wrong is determined by a combination of our innate moral sense our upbringing what our parents teach us our family our social communities and so on which by the way have changed a lot you guys would have been in favor of burning witches and enslaving Blacks centuries ago you don't believe that anymore maybe fifty years ago most of you would have voted probably about 90% would have voted that blacks and whites getting married should be illegal it's not God's plan God separated the races by continents these were arguments made in the 20th century okay nobody here would argue that today Michael you're both a marriage most of you were probably against this I contend probably half of you tonight are already in favor of it or at least let it happen in ten years we won't even be talking about gay Michael why are any right is wrong right and wrong shifts over time and it doesn't come from religion doesn't come from the Bible there's no reinterpretation of when Paul said this he really meant gays should get married no that's not how moral change happens it's not happening through religion I'm not talking about moral change I'm talking about the grounding of morality we if we're just molecules well then if we do it then who's to say Hitler was worse than Mother Teresa who's to say that that that if there's no standard beyond either of them how can you say Hitler was wrong can you think of any reason why Hitler was worse than Mother Teresa if you say because he killed people then you just brought another moral principle and it's wrong to kill people why is it wrong to kill be about the survival and flourishing of sentient beings is a good and the more of we promote that and do it that's good Harvey Hitler says my bad Michael Hitler says no Hitler wants to flourish his sentient beans not you yes why is he wrong so he was wrong because it's going violating the sense that every autonomous person has of a desire to live and fulfill their destiny why is that a moral principle we ought to obey we're born with it we're born knowing it but why should we obey it we get it from like for example our constitutions that we write and we say this is what we're going to do and we're going in so if we write a constitution that says gay marriage is bad you're for that no no oh okay so there's a standard outside the Constitution you want to impose on it based on our nature yes it's it comes inherent with the species we're born with a sense of a desire for life freedom and autonomy which is why women have been fighting against the church for 2,000 years to have reproductive rights freedom from oppression from males and so forth and we have all bending to this because women say that's what we want unless it's something we want because we're born unless the woman is in the womb okay now let's let's talk right for a second let me let me go to a new subject no no no no wait wait wait wait no no your that time Mike brought it up I should I and hear me would it be immoral for me to stop you it it might be a good time to to use Bill Maher's line that Republicans are pro-choice all the way up to the time where their mistress gets pregnant and also conservatives seem to be pro-life all the way up until birth and then after that just war it's perfectly okay to kill innocent civilians in Iraq it's perfectly okay to put to death people on death row you've already argued that it's justifiable to kill certain people even innocent people do to some other cause alright so you we're already on the same page no no no no Michael what you just brought up there's a difference between the innocent child in the womb and a guilty murderer on without an innocent civilian in Iraq that we bomb using vitro that's why we try and minimize those because you know that person was valuable okay let me go on to final question only got three minutes left what does dialogue frame we don't have to all right but I want you I want you to put me on the spot what blind natural laws can create computer code billions of letters long okay first of all you were wrong about that business about DNA it's perfect there's not a single what no there could be mutations in it it's not not just mutations 8% of our DNA is viral DNA this is called lateral gene transfer it was discovered in the 60s and 70s there's a new book out called the tangled web tangled tree David qualm and I just had him on my podcast last week he talks about all the new research on this eight since the human genome project eight percent of our genome is viral how did it get there it came there from viruses two-and-a-half percent of our genome of everybody who's not in Africa does not have an African origin is neanderthal give me the explanation the theists explanation for why God put Neanderthal DNA two-and-a-half percent in our genome what's the purpose of that I don't know what the purpose is because I'm not a biologist but my question to you is no purpose is the DNA a computer program or not okay these analogies we use it's not a computer program this is just a metaphor we use to try to understand no it's not a metaphor it's it's one-to-one correspondence it's like computer code you can ask the moderator right here but you're just a neutral even though I am an engineer yes okay but really Frank I mean we can switch over now it's your turn put them on the spot there Michael the aliens of aliens are here again what I'm not following you Frank so for example from your beginning points how you're deriving that there must be a single personal creator who cares about me from the fact that the gravitational laws are a certain way I haven't gotten there completely yet because this is just the ISM yeah could it be a committee of gods it could be two or three or a dozen could be like a like a Board of Directors no it can't for a couple of reasons although you look at the Platypus you might think so well but I mean but I mean deism could be that could be it God sent him the hole right you're right yeah and runs the show it could be deism but I think when you go further you realize that God has intervened in the world since the beginning but back to your point one argument which I didn't bring up is the idea that the that everything that exists materially is composed and it needs to be composed by an external force now the force that composes the universe and composes matter can't be composed itself because then that being would need a composer as well yeah so what you're getting back to is an immaterial spaceless timeless composer that is pure actuality no potentiality that being is is isn't composed at all it's spaceless timeless any material who created only be one of the timeless bean if you're timeless do you have a beginning no yeah of course look if you're if you're the mummy say that again if you're timeless you have a beginning you can how you're not in time so now you're depending on the laws of logic that are failing because first of all we don't know of anything that came from nothing there's no example of this at all for example quantum physicists tell us that the things that are bouncing off all of us right now photons of light they come from the inside of atoms they're not in the atoms they're not sitting there waiting to burst out they pop out of the atoms out of nothing out of the quantum foam okay you've quoted Stephen Hawking quite a bit Hawking's point was that not that the universe comes from nothing that there's not this like creation event from nothing when physicists talk about nothing they don't mean what theologians mean they mean there's there's this quantum energy field out of which things pop from just the pure energy we know of no nothing okay this is a this is one of these linguistic epistemological walls I mentioned that we're going to hit we can't conceive of nothing it's not possible for any human brain to conceive of not sure it is that's what most don't think about thing no thing see the word itself no thing implies there's a thing of which there's no there's that would not even be nothing it would be like my asking you imagine yourself dead you can't do it because to imagine something you have to be alive Michael don't go don't go Lawrence Krauss on me I mean come on everything even even even atheists there's no visible if I say if I say I had nothing for lunch that means I had no thing for lunch I didn't eat lunch it doesn't mean I had something called nothing okay again we don't know anything about what the universe was like at the very beginning as far as we know it could be an infinite universe going all the way back not a beginning infinitely long ago that the Big Bang creation from the singularity point was itself just on the continuum of there's always been something by which I mean the nothing of quantum energy all right let me okay so again we're hitting a wall here I'm not saying I know what was there before nobody knows and we can never know as long as we're in this universe what was there before our universe it's just as possible that there were multiple universes and by this I don't mean you know multiple universes now I mean a sequence of these from which for example a collapsing black hole that collapses into a singularity point which is with Stephen Hawking's great breakthrough for his PhD thesis was that maybe this is how the universe started was a collapsing something like a collapsing black hole singularity point it's entirely possible this is pure science fiction at the moment that super advanced extraterrestrials could engineer a solar system in a star to collapse into a black hole and create a universe you could have multiple bubble universes popping in and out Michael this is a simple engineering for what would you call a beam that could create a universe out of a black hole Michael you're supposed to be the scientist you would call that God my my I'm claiming that any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial would be indistinguishable from the God you believe in you are you are you are coming up with a lot of speculations with no evidence as our you know you have no evidence of this God all's you have mo show you I have a gap I can't exceed C naught I have God it's not a gap well I'm losing you from what we don't know a reasoning front we do know if space matter in time had a beginning the cause must be spaceless timeless and immaterial know what that does not what is it oh no no let me give you some of these thought expenses here's a guy I just made these up here's the paradox of perfection of God exists then he's perfect if God exists he is the creator of the universe perfect beings must create perfect things the universe is not perfect there's no God okay solid logic good arguments fallacious that's the kind of stuff that all of these arguments are no it's fallacious - and then yes and then none of those follow from the points just to find what you mean by perfect well that's right you define it cuz I can tell we don't have a perfect when you're when you're talking about a world constrained by physical constraints there's no such thing as perfect design what engineers like Neil do is they find design that fits their purpose like this iPhone I unfortunately have to recharge every two hours now they could have they could have made the iPhone a lot bigger but if they did I'd be lugging it around like a suitcase you need to get the five whatever the point here is is that the engineers have to trade-off between size and portability and battery life so there is no perfect design unless you know what the intention of the designer is so so there's the analogy there is phone is fallacious or that statement you said but let me just ask you this this an important point here all right up here you see you see right here is today there's yesterday there's the day before yesterday there's last week let's say we don't know how far back this line goes the time line question is can this line be infinite into the past this would imply if that's true that not that it had no beginning that there was no beginning infinitely long ago the Big Bang would just be the latest beginning of this universe there could be multiple bangs it could be multiple universes going all the way back this would be like arguing there had to be a finite beginning or else we wouldn't be here tonight okay no matter what would happen you'd end up with this finite beginning but let me ask you this okay so on the design question since you had the timeline up there so we now know the universe is 13.8 billion years old and humans are roughly about a hundred thousand years old Christianity began about 2,000 years ago what was God doing that 99.9 9% of all that time what you know if this is all beautifully designed and elegantly and teleological and purposeful and it's all here for us so that we would be here boom here we are why the thirteen point seven eight eight nine billion years of nothing and then I think I'll send my son to this desert place in this Bronze Age culture where no one can write and I'll give them the message well what's the purple all that time Agustin actually answered that question he said he was creating hell for people who asked questions I'm telling you my best friends are gonna be there hitches say you know obviously would be great and I should come it's gonna be party time now Michael god that's a serious question though really cuz if you're if you're building us into it as something purposeful I realize you didn't go there with your organ different arguments that's okay how do you get to Christianity that you know Jesus died for us with thirteen point seven eight eight billion years of nothing and then I think I'll come in now well you could read a book by you Ross which deals with that question directly I have not read it myself I just said him on the radio program but I will say this that that God sacrifices retroactively in fact Hitchens asked this of me in the first debate we had he said what was God doing for all that time and and he Hitchens didn't seem to realize that Christ's sacrifice was retroactive to everything that happened before him so people that lived before him were still saved by his sacrifice so when God came working through free creatures a lot of people say he came 2,000 years ago because you had a relative time of peace with a Roman Empire that build a road system and a language Koine Greek that was all around the known world at the time it was the perfect time for God to come and spread this message through people around the ancient world did he did he die for the Neanderthals too yes if in fact there were naen Turtles who had the capacity to make moral decisions how about Homo erectus slightly smaller brains if in fact that was a human a human being yeah not they're not humans they're a different species of hominid how about australopithecine little Lucy with the little you know single tight sort of chip sized brain so in other words there's Christ's sacrifice comes a dog does my dog gets saved you see where I'm going yes it's all to go to heaven but cats don't clearly come on here here we we have agreement on this I will concede the point let the record show there is agreement that nnn-no I love cats they taste like chicken this is devolved I'm sorry he believes in evolution I'm D evolution nobody's ever going to invite me to be a moderator again huh or at least for the political candidates coming up how about Frank how about not just time what was God doing for 13.8 billion years but but space I mean we now know that there's roughly several hundred billion galaxies each of which contain several hundred billion stars and now looks like pretty much every star has half a dozen to a dozen planets if not more and moons and saunch what about all those what's what's the purpose of all that other stuff if we're supposed to be the focus just one little third Rock from the Sun in this tiny little corner of the galaxy what well fly all that but that hasn't been revealed to us if there are other life-forms out there but all those life-forms I should say all that space out there actually demonstrates the majesty of God I mean if if the clouds ended at the cloud tops or if the heavens ended at the cloud tops would go hey what's the big deal but when you see stars equivalent to grains of sand on all the beaches on all the earth spread out there that would take us over 200 thousand years at Space Shuttle seed to go between that speed to go between them you realize the majesty of God this is why both the old and the New Testaments say the heavens declare the glory of God in fact and in Isaiah chapter 40 and I and in Isaiah chapter 40 Michael where am i God God is speaking and says to whom will you compare me or who is my equal says the Holy One he says in other words you want to comparison here's what he says lift your eyes and look to the heavens who created all these stars and named them one by one because of his great strength and mighty power not one of them is missing how do you know that the Christian religion is the right one how much time you getting you know for example for example there's a billion Muslims who are absolutely certain you're going to hell because you chose the wrong religion and they speak with as much conviction they have great arguments and so on but for that matter my you know Jewish friends and rabbis they don't accept Jesus as their Savior they believe the same God the same book at least the first part of the book new Bible and they know the arguments you know for the resurrection the way witnesses the missing the empty tooth they know all those arguments and they go nope I don't believe it so it's interesting to me from a scientists perspective that you get so much diversity over such a long period of time and there's no convergence toward yep that's the right one like in science like Big Bang Theory versus steady-state cosmology that was debated for a couple decades Big Bang Theory eventually not the TV show the real theory one out because there was more evidence for it or you know just pick any scientific debate think it's kind of scattered shot for a few decades and then it starts to narrowly focus and then there's a convergence and a consensus that's the one these other ones are probably not true the thing that's curious to me about religion is that you get this sort of smattering this is our laughter life and this is the afterlife now this is the afterlife well which is the right one well they're all true or not all true nobody's gonna say that all true but what's your standard of objective standard say well we know that's the right one because look I can point to it and when you point to it why don't the Muslims go oh because it's not a process of chemistry that you'd have to be an atheist to believe in the process of chemistry that gives you all your thoughts we don't it's it's there's a freewill involved in fact the way I show that Christianity is true I go through the evidence that truth exists God exists miracles are possible and the New Testament documents are telling us the truth about the resurrection because if Jesus rose from the dead then whatever he teaches is true because he's God so I I just have a personal policy if somebody rises from the dead I just believe whatever they say okay now well Michael Michael you wanna point out in India there's a god man named sai baba he's dead now but he had millions of followers he could raise the dead he said he came back from the dead he could perform miracles millions of people believed it looks like you don't believe in Sai Baba sometimes people are deceived but let's run a very quick experiment here what wait stop right there sometimes we are right yeah we can be self to see I think we've just witnessed it tonight okay and I rest my case no Michael we are going to do a short experiment here this is for the Christians in the room Christians I want to ask you guys the question I want you to think of somebody you know who's not a Christian whom you'd like to be a Christian everybody got somebody friend relative okay next question am i one of them they're thinking about you Michael next question is the person you're thinking of on a relentless pursuit of truth they want to know if Christianity is true or not or are they apathetic or maybe even hostile how many say the person I'm thinking of is on a relentless pursuit of truth a hand and a half how many people say the person I'm thinking of is apathetic or hostile yeah there you go there's the answer free will they don't want it to be true most people are not on a truth quest around a hapless question if my friend Andy Stanley says you're saying this about Orthodox Jews they don't want to know what the truth I don't know what each individual person is there are a deeply religious as you okay they don't accept Jesus is your Savior okay so what I'm saying is these are from real my pains of quest people have free will okay they have free will they choose not to believe Jesus was the Messiah they even believe that there is a messiah just hasn't come yet mm-hmm that's pretty close mm-hmm I mean you gotta let a man for that right hey it's no but last couple of seconds to go ahead we go to QA so let's do this now we're gonna go right to QA we're gonna have two lines here and remember as we go to the questions it's one line because we only have one line but two lines oh I see that way we can go to we can each question each candidate sorry yeah each debater can get one question and then we'll go to the next one so we're gonna have two lines here we'll have the line for dr. Schurman on the right line for dr. Turk on my left my left I don't know right here they're both right next to each other right here so if you're for dot if you want to ask a question for dr. shimmer go on this side of the microphone you wanna have question for dr. Turek on the other side of the microphone that way we can either interchange between the two and here's the rules you know preaching no no long diatribes just a straight question if you need to set up the question you have 30 seconds for your question and at which point each of them will have the person you asked and please tell us who you're asking the question to that person will have two minutes and then the other person will have a minute to respond go ahead and your athlete tells your name to please my truck all right hi the camera has to be set in place sure so again two lines so I know who is who so dr. Shermer questions on the right of the microphone dr. Turek on the left of the microphone my left my left am i confusing you all Turek on his side Shermer on his side i was that when the cameraman gives us the go-ahead you guys can talk while we're doing that are you going to take a break are we ready hey come on Clint we ready okay okay go ahead please your name first oh he needs to get to the back too in the meantime you can pray for my soul yeah this allows us to broadcast this on the Internet so that's why we're taking this time are we good to go chat tell a joke well so so was this uh there was this guy on a desert island and he'd been there for like five years and finally he got rescued and when they came to rescue him they're hanging from the helicopter the rescuer said this is my wife's joke by the way she says it much better the rescuer said when we you know we saw all these we saw a few of these huts on their island what were they says well one was my house he goes oh great what was the other one right next to your first your house he said oh that was the church that was my church Oh oh that's nice and then he said well what was the other Hut over there and the guys get this really sad look in his face he's got an angry-looking face it goes that was the church I went to before are we ready okay go hi I'm Kevin disease and my question is to doctor Trek actually before I came here I was watching your debate with Hitchens some years ago before and Russ is resting his peace wrestle but he said something to which I didn't think you had a chance to necessarily respond to so he said if if Jesus he said could be possible to trace back the birth that there could be some type of immaculate conception but even if we were we were to be able to do that that would improve the proposition that any of this moral teachings were correct or that we should technically listen to anything he has to say on the subject of morality or doesn't prove the doctrine of Christianity and my second part of the question starts a very quick bilateral given every religious claim on offer given every doctrine profess or confection every assumed as if every believer should expect damnation as a matter of mere probability given profession of belief for how sincerely or seriously they hold their belief so why would any any deity want credulity running on their hardware rather than any any other moral behaviors I mean if I'm if I'm understanding the second part of this question why would why would a Christian God want credulity as why would a Christian God want what credulity why would he want worship and any sense to be he doesn't need worship he's an infinite being we get the benefit of worship repet you ha and that's right just like you would be jealous if your wife was dating somebody else rightfully so but I've known people that got over jealousy I would think a God could do better than that no jealousy is a good virtue if it's properly directed you should be jealous if your wife's dating somebody else right why would God be like that because He loves us because he doesn't want us going to idols or other other gods he wants to ensure that we get the benefits of knowing him that's why we're here so God just doesn't want intellectual assent even James the half-brother of Jesus who wrote that little book and the New Testament called James thank you even he said even the demons believe that God exists but they trembled they don't trust in him and the reason they don't trust in him is they don't want to right but sorry actually is one more thing how can you sorry sorry guys um how can you prove the truth of the Christian doctrine given every other claim of any other religion or any other book well I've got a minute but my books are very the be an atheist is what goes into that okay now proof depends what you mean by prove I think it's true beyond a reasonable doubt could I be wrong of course okay okay um question for dr. Shermer next well he can respond to Michael yeah let's hear from this young man over there I mean I agree with the first question I mean what's this whole business about I gotta have them believe in me this is like a barely better than a Greek god that gets angry and jealous and I mean if there's a God he can't be like us that's just you know full of emotions and all these flaws come on right it's called an impossibility so my question is how if the second law of thermodynamics is true then how can evolution also be true because it makes things DK over time so it cannot be go from simple to bigger and better yep very good we have a budding physicist here this is actually a very old kind of old-style creationist argument that intelligent design creationists don't use anymore because the the second law of thermodynamics only applies to closed systems in which the sources of energy are fixed and then they run down in an open system like the Sun providing energy to us or in the case a smaller fraction of our energy comes from the core of the earth that's energy put into the system you put energy in the system it drives complexity so for example you can put your coffee into the microwave and heat it up that's putting an energy system into into the cup into the coffee so the second law of thermodynamics was initially discovered just as a theory of heat dissipation and how it happened so and and it's there's really nothing magical about it it's like there's just more ways for say grains of sand to kind of fall into this gruel of uniformity versus say a sandcastle which requires some effort and energy to put into it and then gets washed away and so on so it's just the number of ways things could be and how much energy it takes to put into it so evolution starts with the premise that there's energy being put into the system now the whole universe of ultimately is running down the heat death of the universe will come about not in your lifetime fortunately and but but when that happens then of course there's no evolution cannot gain information which is the whole theory of evolution they're gaining information yes that's right this is really a good question the the information increase in genomes is trackable both in the fossil record through the phenotype or the morphology of the what genes do they make bodies but also now thanks to the human genome project and all the DNA sequencing we've had over the last 50 years or so we can track back I mentioned that 8 percent of our genome is viral due to this lateral gene transfer so when viruses get into the human body they can but viruses are but not exactly living organisms are sort of halfway between nonliving organic inorganic organisms they inject their DNA into our cells and that that can then be adopted throughout the whole body and then they get passed on to your offspring so it's it's a kind of a non Darwinian or do Darwinian mechanism of gene transfer but that also increases the information load of the genome so for example you and I are all made out of what are called eukaryotic cells these have a little carry out is the little nucleus of the cell where our DNA is stored but we also have these little things called mitochondria these are the little energy systems inside the cell mitochondria also have DNA and it was discovered by the great late great lynn margulis and MIT biologists through her theory that she called endo symbiosis that those little mitochondria were themselves once much simpler living organisms by themselves that then got through this sort of cooperative process incorporated into the cells that became larger and larger the little cilia that you see these little these little sort of threads that hang off cells and swirl around and push cells around to something the size of a cell water is like syrup you got to really push to go through it so they got to have something to propel them along those little spirochetes those themselves were once individual cells so you start adding these things up each of them have their own DNA the DNA becomes more and more complex information increases scales up very dramatically over long periods of time but quickly what Michael said is right about the first part where he said that once you have a living thing then it can take energy from the outside the hardest problem for natural ists and atheists is where did the first living thing come from and the information you're talking about is not enough to build a new body plan because even if you have new DNA in there you need epigenetic information which is the structure of the cell and you can't get that through mutating DNA that's why the Royal Society out there in the UK in November of 2016 had a meeting about why the current theory of neo Darwinian evolution is on the ropes these are the atheists saying this what is your explanation for where body plans come from g.od okay let's go to the not an explanation it's just why is it not an explanation if God exists why is it not an explanation you're ruling it out in advance such a thorough self-doubt presupposition say in 10 years biologists have all agreed yeah that's the explanation for body plant we come back and you go yeah of course course science can explain it I'm talking about this gap right because we're God the reason is because natural laws have not demonstrated the ability to create new body plants that's the problem body plans actually had we have positive evidence that body plants include an epigenetic information and and more DNA are required which means you need an intelligent being to infuse that into the system okay what I described happens naturally you just put energy and nature is caused by whoo all right sorry we want to give other people a chance thank you good but you're awfully hey great question hey Matteo okay why don't you come up here you're better tonight okay go ahead question for dr. Turk thanks thanks a lot and really praise your name please - Oh Dave Adler and I'm a physicist and some of my best friends are evangelical Christians and I'm always jealous of their faith okay so I spent a lot of time thinking about God and how I can reconcile it with physics and so I think tonight you presented what seem to be opposing views and on God and my question for you is is this really is it a problem for you if somebody doesn't believe in God or doesn't believe in Jesus specifically and if they have a different belief why do you feel that yours is right and theirs is wrong well I think there's evidence and if someone were to say like Michael believes his views right why is he up here debating it if he doesn't think it's right right he thinks it's right - the question isn't whether or not we have different positions the question is which position is through and if Christianity is true as CS Lewis said it's the most important fact in the universe it what it can't be is just moderately important but don't you is there a truth beyond science that cannot be proven yeah in fact that truth right there that there's trues beyond Sciences and a scientific truth you can't get all your truth through science people who say all truth comes from science well that truth doesn't come from science it's a self-defeating proposition so if there's a conflict between science and your religion if they disagree then do you pick your religion because you believe it and know it to be true give me a particular example because according to Christianity we believe in two types of Revelation general revelation which is the natural world which includes our ability to do science plus special revelation which is the Bible and those two if they're both true they don't contradict okay now there are there are places where we might think that they contradict at this point what do we do we keep doing research just like we as Michael keeps doing research in the scientific world Christians are still doing research in the scientific world to see how it lines up with the scriptures and sometimes we have answers sometimes we don't you want to respond to that yes so there is a pretty popular American religion embraced by millions of Americans that believes there were latter-day saints in fact one of them lived in Palmyra New York and he was visited one night by an angel who told them about was the main guy he told him about these gold plates that were buried in his backyard and he dug him up and he put his hat in his head inside this hat that was filled with these magic stones and he read those gold plates that were written in the Egyptian hieroglyphics and translated them and wrote them down and he had by witnesses to this who all signed an affidavit on the first page at the Book of Mormon and said I was there I saw it happen why don't you believe that because the evidence isn't there and I can make by the way I can make golden plates in my garage that's a miracle well secondly all the witnesses or most of the witnesses anyway recanted and thirdly Joseph Joseph Smith's case hang on hang on please me ma'am Joseph she's right Joseph Smith's translation of the Book of Abraham was found to be a forgery now I'm not saying Mormons aren't nice people don't get me wrong I just don't think the evidence is there for the claims of Joseph Smith let's go to the next question do you have a question for dr. Schauer yeah okay great the kids seem to love putting you on the spot according to evolution people are just pointless because they happen my chance but then why is harm wrong if it happens to things that are just pointless good question I call this alvey's error LV is LV singer Woody Allen's character in Annie Hall and woody has a flashback if you recall in the beginning of the film where he's a young child about your age and he doesn't want to do his homework anymore so his mom takes him to a psychiatrist Alvie why won't you do your homework anymore the universe is expanding the universe is expanding yes the universe is expanding and eventually it's all gonna blow up so there's no point in doing any of this I'm not doing my homework and his mother says what's the universe got to do with it we live in Brooklyn Brooklyn's not expanding the point is that we're talking about different levels of analysis yes we're made of atoms everything is made of atoms and molecules and DNA so chemical chemical we're just chemicals we're just a bag of chemical unique could phrase it that way that's it that's it's a certain level of analysis but we're so much more than that you know we're capable of all these just amazing things including finding purpose and meaning in life through each other it doesn't matter if there's a hereafter we live here and now we care about each other we love each other we we have purpose in interacting with each other that's very human and that's very valuable whether or not there is some outside source to validate it really doesn't matter you should just be good for goodness sake Frank yeah well I think we went through that for ad nauseam before but so let's go to the next question it's a great folks if you could just ask one question let me let me just say agree with Michael that you can make your own subjective meaning but there's no overarching meaning if God doesn't exist and there's no good if God doesn't exist even for dr. Turk yes sir and by the way we only have about ten more minutes so we probably won't get two more sir what's your name hello dr. Turk Frederick and so you said God is required to explain justice God is required God is required to explain justice and I want to ask you is God still just if Jessica's abuser needs only to believe and repent and then he will see Jessica and her father in heaven and we'll never pay for his crimes okay yes God is a God of justice it's axle until so a God of love and that's why Christ had to come the the accuser or the the person that committed the crime isn't taking the punishment on himself Jesus is that's that's why it and it's it's not fair you're right it's grace it's not supposed to be justice here's the problem though not just somebody who has done an awful crime like this every person in this room if you asked for justice and got it you wouldn't like it neither would I I don't want justice I want grace so you said him not going to jail in this life is not just it's just as not being served yet if you go repents he'll never even pay in hell well he'll get an eternal reward is that right he will no he will lose his rewards this is Christian theology you will lose reward he believes and repents if he does believe in repent he will still lose rewards in heaven yes he will lose rewards he will make it to heaven because Christ has has paid his sin for him is heaven not unalloyed bliss is heaven not what is heaven not unalloyed bliss for eternity is heaven not pure unalloyed bliss there is a hierarchy of rewards in heaven just like there's a hierarchy of punishment in hell how do you know all this from the scriptures you ever hear of them it's in there I don't ask question for me why do you have a quick room real rebuttal for the our response well I mean this is this is the ultimate one of the ultimate reasons why people well you know want to believe in God is so that there's some sort of cosmic justice as if Hitler couldn't have gotten away with he didn't get away you know okay you know there's a reason we have the Nuremberg trials we want justice now we're not gonna wait till some afterlife maybe there is justice in a cosmic courthouse maybe there isn't now we want justice and we want fair justice for all people equal under the law that's why we fight for these things not because we believe that it's all going to be sorted out later just hang them all let God sort it out no no no we're gonna do it right here oh we believe in both Christians believe in justice now and later okay next question it doesn't add anything all right my name is Jacob the doctor taking my my question dr. Shermer so there's a bit of hypothetical in it so please bear with me earlier you said that right and wrong shift over time and come from our innate moral sense as well as our upbringings which seems to say it's largely its social contract moral relativism so my question is what would you believe about a culture where rape and killing are morally fine and widely accepted and what in calling those views wrong or bad just be ethnocentric or cultural imperialism yep okay I'm not a moral relativists I'm an Objectivist I think the objective standards come from within part of our innate sense of right and wrong that we get just by being social primates we add on to that our upbringing our parents culture and so on the moral arc has been bending toward justice freedom liberty autonomy and so on over the centuries largely because I argue in the moral arc that we've been kind of pushing it in that direction due to the fact we are capable of interchanging our perspectives my taking your perspective of imagining what it's like to be you there's many drivers of the literature novels is one of them the fact that we can transport ourselves into somebody else's head in a novel means we can do it hypothetically here in real life I can imagine what it feels like to be hurt if I'm gonna hurt you so the basis of the golden rule which all cultures have discovered not just Christianity but all religions all cultures because it's it's based inside of us so from there much follows so for example we would argue that a cult okay so first of all there very few cultures where they just rape and kill and it's acceptable it's not acceptable it's only justified under certain conditions like an Isis for example they have these bizarre interpretations of the Quran where the it's okay to behead people and treat women a certain way and so but most Muslims in the West do not accept this okay so there's that that is very rare so for example even indigenous tribes where infanticide is much higher than it is in the Western world there's reasons for this it's that the hypothesis is the hardness of life not the hardness of heart the mothers who let this happen or do it they're no less loving just life is hard and they make a triage decision what we've been able to do over the last about century and a half is outlaw infanticide and then provide social services to help single moms and pregnant women and so on to reduce the levels of unwanted pregnancies and abortions and so I just wrote a column in Scientific American in which I heard let's get off the pro-choice pro-life moralization divide that's this that's making people so upset and just say what's the problem abortion why is it a problem unwanted pregnancies how can we all reduce unwanted pregnancies here are some tried and true techniques we know that work let's apply them and all get on the same page together because nobody wants more abortions we want fewer unwanted pregnancies okay that's one way to approach well again I think Michael is confusing what we would call in philosophy epistemology and ontology epistemology is how you know something's right or wrong ontology is the study of the actual standard known as goodness where is that standard and I think what he's doing is he's making the mistake again of assuming that the standard is merely in our hearts and it's not Journal to us if it's not external to us there's no way to say that the Jew that the Nazis at the nürnberg trials for killing the Jews were wrong but Frank if it depends on God's existence how do you know what God thinks is right and wrong well now you're again you're asking an epistemological you've got to know somehow you're not God yes somehow you've divined this from the spectators or you talk you and I Michael you and I agree well you and I agree how we know right from wrong some of the principles you know but how do you know what God thinks is right or wrong well partially it's written on your heart and even the Bible teaches this in Romans chapter to the Gentiles and I have the law of the law written on their heart so everybody knows it intuitively and you get more details in the Bible but you don't need the Bible to know right from wrong you know it intuitively I rest my case yes epistle you and I are the same on epistemology but on ontology you have no way to ground get well but on ontology speaking you wouldn't know you can't know what the mind of God is you have to interpret it through scripture or prayer or something right he's written it on our hearts and it comes from the scriptures as well yes a question for dr. sorry okay do two more questions and then we'll have to have a question for dr. Turek sir you've given a couple of arguments against evolution being able to gain information over time and my question is why is it that when you give these arguments you usually give a sort of an intuitive argument based on non-replicating examples let me explain if you walk along and you find a watch you know there must be a watchmaker and that's obvious because watches don't reproduce we don't get baby watches they don't grow up into new watches you use an example of alphabets and alphabets don't reproduce they don't have baby alphabets you used writing in the sand also it doesn't reproduce in the past you've compared DNA to an encyclopedia and you've said encyclopedias don't just appear on their own and we know that because there are no baby encyclopedias running around and you've used Mount Rushmore in the past as well yeah Mount Rushmore doesn't reproduce why is it that you always use these very very bad examples or do you just not know that evolution depends on a replicating system because they're not bad examples to say how did the system get there to begin with where did the genetic code come from from the very beginning it came out of replication it repeats over and over in a trot through actually gains information in order for something to replicate you need something something there to begin with the replication can start with a very very simple system of just a couple of molecules you you start with a couple of molecules and you grow over time let me ask you a question if we let let's let's grant that we have this PowerPoint code here built by Microsoft if we began to mutate this PowerPoint code randomly what would happen to the program this is called a genetic algorithm and we use this in computer science to actually develop things the alphago system for instance was designed under that exact same principle but that wasn't my question if we started to randomly mutate this PowerPoint code how long would the program stay up it could actually become better and this is what we've been shown yes it's not random right you create a thousand copies Oh so evolution is guided by whom that's not random Frank whose natural selection oh is it random guided by them it's either guided or it's random who's ignited by the survival of these replicating molecules generates more of them and the ones that don't replicate die that's it that's natural there's no designer pushing it'll that's that's called a tautology those that survive are the ones that survive next question last question for the evening folks thank you sorry about that we would love to this is my favorite part do but unfortunately we have to be out of here by 9:00 skip our closing arguments cuz I'm willing to give up my five minutes if you want to take it well I gotta say more I've got more you say so sorry Frank you don't have to give the Jesus speech they already believe huh they're already on your side you don't well let's let's preserve a captive audience really Frank let's proceed last question of the night thank dr. sure I I heard you state that the existence of God cannot be proved beyond science but the science of mathematics tells me with the 7.3 or 7.5 billion people in the world that for the odds of me and my wife meeting were 1 in 20,000 and then we have to extrapolate upon that the fact that we would actually start dating that we would actually be together long enough to have children the fact of the different possibilities of our DNA in the sperm and the egg all these mathematical probabilities that we couldn't even have our children and this needs to be duplicated for every generation going back to single-celled organisms to know that life can exist so the probability of all that happening basically is one in ten to the two millionth 685,000 power approximately the universe has 10 to the 80th power molecules in it so the mathematical science says that my existence and their existence is zero but yet here I am and here they are so how can anything exists science tell me I exist and not exist at the same time one and two is there any possibility that anything can be explained including God outside of science knowing that science tells me I'm not here but you get here I am is this for me or Frank I don't know I think it's too much for you hope it's are you servers for you cuz my answer is God Almighty cuz here I am but math tells me I can't be here okay if you won the lottery you went out and bought tickets tickets tickets it's bones would you think God made that happen I would think by God's grace by the fact that I'm even here yes but it's not you it's the guy next to you and he feels the same way oh my god I can't I win the lottery if I don't exist well he can't win the lawyer if he doesn't exist I was wrong it's that guy well he can't win the lawyer if he doesn't exist and in other words this is the law of large numbers somebody's got to win the lottery by the hindsight bias whoever one thinks it's unbelievable it's a miracle that we're forgetting the other boxes of all the people who bought tickets that didn't win people that and so on it's it's like it's inevitable that if you have that many opportunities something is going to happen like that okay so like in in terms of like miracles what's a miracle you know million-to-one odds look there's 325 million Americans million to one odds happen three hundred twenty five times a day it's inevitable it's going to happen it's like you're watching watch The Oprah you know next on Oprah we have this you know woman that's had these incredible dreams about airplane crashes and so far not one of them has come true stay tuned no you're not gonna see that show you're gonna see the show about the psychic who said the thing about the plane crash and then the plane crashed right so what about all the people that didn't explain the plane crash what about the people that said the plane was going to crash and it didn't crash all right so we have to take into account all the possibilities and then ask what are the chances that that one particular one happened so had you not met your wife and you met some other woman you'd be going this is the one for me she's a little taller not quite as athletic but slightly smarter and I loved her whichever one you married you're gonna be happy with it would be the same odds however that doesn't change based on me meeting someone else thank you want to respond and then I think we're done because it is not a clock and we have to as I said be out of here but I don't know if I understood the question completely but I agree with Michael that when you're looking in hindsight there's different probabilities than if you predict something to happen and it happens that's why prophecy is is so convincing but not just looking in hindsight like drawing the drawing the bullseye around the dart that's already there is not is not impressive but the other way oh that's uh dr. shimmer do you want five minutes in closing or do you yeah he's going to do it to you might as well come together you gotta get a page and John 3:16 and you already believe I don't know what you're already in church Frank anyway glad I don't have a prepared speech let me just talk to you off the top of my head and from my art you know I used to sit where were you sad for seven years as I mentioned I was an evangelical born-again Christian I went to Pepperdine University first four-year graduating class at the Malibu campus it was a great experience I very much enjoyed the Christian Fellowship I had there I took courses in the writings of CS Lewis the Old Testament the New Testament to life of Jesus I know the stories I know all the arguments I know the feeling that you know everything happens for a reason it's all falls into place whether this happens or that happens it's good it's bad whatever it's God's intent I know the arguments I know the feeling I get it okay and so what are we talking about here tonight well this business about reality okay the reason I like science is because it's the best tool ever developed for understanding reality because it has a self-correcting mechanism built into it it has a way of saying look we're all biased we're all subject to the confirmation bias hindsight bias and all these cognitive biases that lead us to find evidence to believe what we already believe and to ignore the disconfirming evidence everybody does it including scientists who have their cherished theories and so on and they hang on to them and they sort through the evidence to support it and so the difference is that in science you you can't do that and get away with it for very long because somebody else is going to try to find the flaws in your research so built into the scientific process which makes it so useful is that if you don't look for your flaw somebody else will it usually with great Glee in a published form to say aha I just proved the great scientist and made mine it and so on I don't see that religion has anything quite like that as I mentioned all these different religions I brought up several examples there's many more they believe as passionately as you do in their doctrines and beliefs they claim they have evidence they claim and they make great arguments how is an outsider to tell your anthropologist from Mars and you come to visit earth and you sit down with each of these different say 50 groups they're making these compelling cases and you say well I can't decide is there some experiment we can run to decide which is the right one no there isn't so I mentioned my friend Kent Miller who is one of the great biologists of the 20th century and teaches at Brown University and he was the he was the expert witness and the Dover trial this was the intelligent design creationism trial in Dover Pennsylvania and he was there on the side of science and evolution and and he's a Christian he's a born-again Christian he's not an evangelical he's Catholic but so I've known Ken a long time we talked about he knows all my arguments I know his arguments you know I said Ken why do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus and and he says it's my faith tradition it's how I was raised it works for me it's a truth inside me and that's it I'm not claiming I can prove it it's just my truth okay I respect that you know full-stop okay there's really nothing more for us to talk about on that particular thing and francis collins who i also know is the head of the National Institutes of Health he was the head of the Human Genome Project he's a born-again evangelical Christian and even he tells me you know that okay look III know you have arguments we have arguments it can't be settled you know it's a personal experience for me he talks about this in his book you know out on a path I don't hike and frozen waterfall the whole thing yeah okay I get that it's it's totally understandable there's these internal truths that we can't prove one way or the other like free will and determinism you know there's no good resolution to this to me it's a useful fiction I feel like I'm free I argue that I'm free I'm a compatible list I think there's a reasonable case to be made but plenty of people are determinist they also have good arguments some things you just go okay I'm just gonna play it fine but you don't have to let me make that as my final point you don't have to have this outside source we can get it from within and through each other through our families in our relationships through our communities extended families and communities through expanding out to our to everyone that we've all been working for centuries now on bending the moral arc toward justice and freedom and liberty and autonomy for more people in more places more of the time there are more democracies than there's ever been there are fewer homicides and crime rates is down over the decades more people have live under constitutional democracies now and have protections gays and women and minorities they're all human they deserve the same treatment as everybody else and that you don't need an outside source to tell us that you know you know how to find out just ask them would you like to be treated fairly they'll tell you yes Frankie you mentioned infidelities you don't have to ask God if how your spouse is gonna feel it whether they're cheating on your spouse is okay just ask your spouse you don't even actually have to ask just do the thought experiment in your head you'll know okay you'll know so you don't have to have the outside source if you want it fine but just be good for goodness sake that's good enough thank you dr. Durack i prefer to call this to come to evidence meeting rather than to come to Jesus meeting and let me just say that I tried to show that all of these effects have a cause and I think the cause is God I did not see other than speculations from Michael Sainte what it could be this it could be that he didn't really give a positive case for a world without God he didn't give a positive case for how in the absence of God any of these things could come into existence in fact I think that atheists have to have extraordinary faith because they have to have the faith that there is creation without a creator design without a designer laws without a lawgiver programs without a programmer freedom without free will because we're just molecules in motion order without an order or morality from molecules and rationality from randomness I think the evidence shows that there has to be a spaceless timeless immaterial powerful moral personal intelligent creator who created all things and sustains all things and whose every attribute is infinite I couldn't go through all the arguments today for that but I think that's the case now during the cross-examination we'd brought up Jesus and I think you could turn the science in crimes to sacrifice as well because if this beam does exist he's a moral being and he finds that the creatures he loves her in trouble at some point he's going to come rescue them September 29th 2006 petty officer Michael Monsoor his United States Navy SEAL operating in Ramadi Iraq he's got two other Navy SEALs flanking him there on a roof Mansour is in front of a doorway to that roof they've taken RPG fire ak-47 fire but they don't presently know where the enemy is so they're waiting for the next attack suddenly a insurgent from an unknown location throws a grenade on the roof it hits Mansoor in the chest and falls to his feet he has a split second to make a decision he can leave through the doorway behind him and save himself but if he does his two Navy SEAL colleagues in the prone position next to him will surely die so Mansoor yells grenade and then he jumps chest first onto the grenade it detonates 30 minutes later he dies his two Navy SEAL colleagues received minor injuries but they're fine one of the survivors said Mikey looked death in the face that day and said you will not take my friends I will go in their stead I've never seen the United States President cry until April of 2000 and he that's when President George W Bush called montsouris parents into the East Room of the White House and gave montsouris parents his Medal of Honor posthumously since then montsouris high school has named their stadium after him the golden trident the seal golden trident is at the 50-yard line and the United States Navy has named a ship the USS Michael Monsoor he literally gave his life for his friends there's no greater love than to give your life for your friends Michael Monsoor did it he sacrificed himself when he easily could have saved himself he died for his friends the question is has anybody or would anybody die for you and the answer is someone already has his name is Jesus of Nazareth Nazareth the same being that created and sustains the universe came added humanity over his deity came to earth and live the perfect life in your place and by trusting in him you can not only be forgiven you can be given his righteousness and he proved it by rising from the dead you say Frank how do you know that I don't have time in the next minute to go through all the evidence but let me just say this and that is Christian's do not believe that Christianity is true that Jesus rose from the dead because a series of documents we put under one binding called the Bible says it's true Christianity is true because an event occurred in fact Christianity would be true if the Bible had never been written because the book did not give us Christianity the resurrection gave us the book there wouldn't even be a New Testament if it wasn't for the resurrection what are Jews inventing a resurrected Jesus for to get themselves beaten tortured and killed every writer of the New Testament the exception of Luke is a Jew they already think they're God's chosen people why are they inventing a resurrected Jesus they're not the reason that we know it's true is because there's evidence it's true 1985 years ago he walked out of a tomb and proved to everybody that he truly was the savior he jumped on the grenade for us the question is have you accepted that will you accept that it's free why wouldn't you that's why we're here thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Cross Examined

Views: 87,012

Rating: 4.8145857 out of 5

Keywords: athiesm, frank turek, crossexamined, cross examined, apologetics, christianity, i don't have enough faith to be an atheist

Id: 8aZn7XUFSmA

Length: 124min 8sec (7448 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 01 2018