Hitchens-Turek Debate

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On Tuesday night, I debated atheist Christopher Hitchens, author of God is not Great:  How Religion Poisons Everything, at Virginia Commonwealth University. The topic was, “Does God Exist?”

Thanks be to God (and to you for your prayers) because I don’t think the debate could have gone much better.  There were several atheists who approached me afterwards to say that I had won.  One young lady actually apologized for being an atheist!  Her position was not well represented, and she said that the arguments for God were.

Hitchens was his usual charming and witty self (I really like him and said as much), but he did not answer any of the eight arguments that I presented for the existence of God.  And as many in the audience acknowledged, he dodged nearly all of my questions.

Here is the introduction of a long e-mail sent to me two hours after the debate by a VCU Philosophy professor who attended (this professor told me that he is completely “non-religious”):

Dear Dr. Turek,  I wanted to say once again that I greatly enjoyed your talk and that, in my judgment, you clearly and unequivocally prevailed against Hitchens. Your two mind-body arguments were, I thought, very good, as were your modernizations of the cosmological argument and the teleological argument. I was also moved by your argument that, given how vanishingly close to zero are the chances of there being any sort of life, let alone intelligent life, it is more reasonable to infer that there is a God than it is to infer that there isn’t — the first an inference, but not the latter, being an ‘inference to the best explanation’, as philosophers of science would say. 

This is from a Christian student who has doubts:

My name is Jeremy and I was at your debate tonight. I will tell you what, you opened up a new can of worms at the VCU campus.  You have opened the eyes of many of the “atheists” that go to VCU and well, you did an amazing job.  You have really opened my eyes up a little bit more to the fact that God exists.  As a Christian, I still have my doubts sometimes.  I am not going to lie.  But by faith I believe.  Something that Mr. God himself Chris does not comprehend. (That was a great closing statement that you made)  But thank you so much for coming to Richmond and actually answering questions and having a reliable debate unlike Chris who beat around the bush and really bashed you when he did not have an answer.  People on the group said you did a good job and you made up some minds. 

Here is an account of the debate from an atheist and a Hitchens fan who was very disappointed:  http://rudyhenkel.livejournal.com/2726.html.  (Note:  This gentlemen erroneously thinks I do this for money.  My honorarium for the debate goes to CrossExamined.org. He also dismisses my arguments without answering them and mischaracterizes a few things, but he tells the truth about Hitchens.)

We video recorded the entire debate, and interviewed many who attended.  As soon as we produce the final version, I’ll let you know where you can see it (we intend to post it on You Tube and put it on our TV show).

Thank you again for your prayers and support.  Our next college event is September 23 at UNC Charlotte. 

 

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God is Not Dead Yet

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The following is from Christian Philosopher William Lane Craig’s recent article “God is not Dead Yet” in Christianity Today.   I encourage you to read the entire article.  I include this section on the moral argument because of our recent discussion here about how the existence of objective morality requires God– a claim that atheists have yet to refute.

The moral argument. A number of ethicists, such as Robert Adams, William Alston, Mark Linville, Paul Copan, John Hare, Stephen Evans, and others have defended “divine command” theories of ethics, which support various moral arguments for God’s existence.

One such argument:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

By objective values and duties, one means values and duties that are valid and binding independent of human opinion. A good many atheists and theists alike concur with premise (1). For given a naturalistic worldview, human beings are just animals, and activity that we count as murder, torture, and rape is natural and morally neutral in the animal kingdom. Moreover, if there is no one to command or prohibit certain actions, how can we have moral obligations or prohibitions?

Premise (2) might seem more disputable, but it will probably come as a surprise to most laypeople to learn that (2) is widely accepted among philosophers. For any argument against objective morals will tend to be based on premises that are less evident than the reality of moral values themselves, as apprehended in our moral experience. Most philosophers therefore do recognize objective moral distinctions.

Nontheists will typically counter the moral argument with a dilemma: Is something good because God wills it, or does God will something because it is good? The first alternative makes good and evil arbitrary, whereas the second makes the good independent of God. Fortunately, the dilemma is a false one. Theists have traditionally taken a third alternative: God wills something because he is good. That is to say, what Plato called “the Good” is the moral nature of God himself. God is by nature loving, kind, impartial, and so on. He is the paradigm of goodness. Therefore, the good is not independent of God.

Moreover, God’s commandments are a necessary expression of his nature. His commands to us are therefore not arbitrary but are necessary reflections of his character. This gives us an adequate foundation for the affirmation of objective moral values and duties.

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Evolution Cannot Explain Morality

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Some atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, insist that morality is simply the product of evolution.  Common moral sensibilities (Don’t murder, rape, steal, etc.) help ensure our evolutionary survival.  There are number of problems with this view:

  1. Rape may enhance the survival of the species, but does that make rape good?  Should we rape?
  2. Killing the weak and handicapped may help improve the species and its survival (Hitler’s plan).  Does that mean the Holocaust was a good thing?
  3. Evolution provides no stable foundation for morality.  If evolution is the source of morality, then what’s to stop morals from evolving (changing) to the point that one day rape, theft and murder are considered moral?
  4. Dawkins and Hitchens confuse epistemology with ontology (how we know something exists with that and what exists).  So even if natural selection or some other chemical process is responsible for us knowing right from wrong, that would not explain why something is right or wrong.  How does a chemical process (natural selection) yield an immaterial moral law?  And why does anyone have a moral obligation to obey a chemical process?  You only have a moral obligation to obey an ultimate personal being (God) who has the authority to put moral obligations on you.  You don’t have a moral obligation to chemistry.

As I mentioned in an earlier post (Atheists Have No Basis for Morality), several atheists at a recent I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist event at UNC Wilmington struggled greatly when I asked them to offer some objective basis for morality from their atheistic worldview.  They kept trying to give tests for how we know something is moral rather than why something is moral.  One atheist said “not harming people” is the standard.  But why is harming people wrong if there is no God?  And what if harming people enhances your survival and that of most others?

Another said, “happiness” is the basis for morality.  After I asked him, “Happiness according to who, Mother Teresa or Hitler?,”  he said, “I need to think about this more,” and then sat down.  This says nothing about the intelligence of these people– there just is no good answer to the question.   Without God there is no basis for objective morals.  It’s just Mother Teresa’s opinion against Hitler’s.

See also Neil’s post: Does our Morality come from our DNA?

 

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The Religion in Science

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If current Big Bang cosmology is correct (and the evidence is very good that it is) then the entire space-time universe exploded into being out of nothing (see previous posts God and the Astronomers and Who Made God? ).   Therefore, the Cause of the universe would seem to have these attributes:

·         spaceless because it created space

·         timeless because it created time

·         immaterial because it created matter

·         powerful because it created out of nothing

·         intelligent because the creation event and the universe was precisely designed

·         personal because it made a choice to convert a state of nothing into something (impersonal forces don’t make choices).

These are the same attributes of the God of the Bible (which is one reason I believe in a the God of the Bible and not a god of mythology like Zeus).

When I’ve posed this conclusion to atheists, many of them responded by claiming that I was speculating—that we really don’t know what caused the universe (see comments on the posts above). This is exactly the kind of response that Agnostic Astronomer Robert Jastrow said is common for atheists who have their own religion—the religion of science. Jastrow, who once sat in Edwin Hubble’s chair at the Mount Wilson Observatory, wrote this:

There is a kind of religion in science . . . every effect must have its cause; there is no First Cause. . . . This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized. As usual when faced with trauma, the mind reacts by ignoring the implicationsCin science this is known as Arefusing to speculate@Cor trivializing the origin of the world by calling it the Big Bang, as if the Universe were a firecracker.

The implication of the creation of the universe out of nothing is that there is a Cause outside the universe with the attributes listed above.  That’s not speculation, but following the evidence where it leads.

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CIA: Your Chance to Make an Impact with Christian Apologetics

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If you have some expertise in the area of Christian Apologetics, we are looking for instructors to help us take I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist to students and churches around the country.  Greg Koukl and Brett Kunkle of Stand to Reason, and Jason Reed of Southern Evangelical Seminary will join me, Frank Turek, in leading the CrossExamined Instructor Academy (CIA), August 13-15 in Charlotte, NC.  Hank Hanegraaff, The Bible Answerman, will join us for a special Q and A on Wednesday night August 13.  This is a great opportunity for you to make an impact through apologetics. But hurry– the application deadline is June 24.  Click here for details.?

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Atheists: What kind of God would you accept?

Recently I posed a question to our fellow truth seekers who are atheists, and we had a great response and good dialog.

It let us understand a lot of the feelings and reasons for either accepting or not accepting the God of the Christians if He was real.

So here’s another question in the same vein (there maybe some overlap naturally).

Atheists, what kind of God would you accept?

Imagine that a God existed, what characteristics would you require of him before you accepted him as your God and what behavioral change if any would that cause in you?  E.g.

1. He would be more obvious about revealing himself (this I think is a given).

2. He would not send anyone to hell just for not believing he didn’t exist.

3. He would not allow suffering or evil.

4. He would punish bad folks like Hitler or hypocritical Christians with a bolt of lightning on the spot.

5. He would not require anyone to glorify or worship him.

6. He would not have any rules or regulations that we would have to follow.  etc.

So what characteristics would you require before you accepted him as your God. If the answer is None, that’s a valid answer too, especially if you say why.

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Suffering and Evil: Can God do anything?

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Can God do Anything? Can he create a stone so big that he cannot move it?

Part 1

In a response to one of our readers, I said that God cannot do anything. The reader responded?

“Then what about Miracles.”

In another post an atheist reader said:

“… God can suspend the law of gravity. God can make 2+2=5 if it suits his purpose …..”

But this seems to indicate a misunderstanding of the Christian God.

So let me see if I can clarify the Christian concept of God. I won’t try to speak for the god of any other religion or myth or a god of anyone’s personal creation. Why? Because that is only limited by your imagination.

In addition do understand that what I am about to present to you is Theology. That is, I maybe able to prove some of these concepts to you, but I can’t prove them all. However I do think that they are all rational, logical and self consistent. So take them as information to understand how Christian philosophers and how most of us on this site view God.

  1. God cannot do “anything.”

From the writings of the great Christian theologians, thinkers, scientists and philosophers, and from the Bible, we can derive the following of characteristics of the First Cause, uncaused Creator:

God cannot do anything which is not actually possible, for example contrary to the statement above, He cannot make 2+2=5,

He cannot stop being God,

He cannot make a round square in 2 dimensional space,

He cannot make black actually be white,

He cannot paint a door black with red paint bought from Home Depot and no added chemicals and no added activity on his part,

He cannot give someone freedom of choice in an area and then not let them choose in that area.

After all it would seem fallacious and irrational to try to argue that the source of all rationality could be irrational itself.

Here are some more:

He cannot sin,

He cannot cease to exist.

He cannot “not” be God.

He cannot make another God.

He cannot allow anything else to become God.

He cannot be irrational.

He cannot be evil.

He cannot be lonely.

He cannot be unhappy.

He cannot have unmet needs.

He cannot begin to exist.

He cannot forget.

He cannot learn anything new (at least as far as we understand).

The last few imply that He  cannot change his mind (because that would mean he’d learned some new information or remembered something He’d forgotten, He can however have always planned to do something different at a certain point in time, or plan to respond to a certain event in a specific way).

And he certainly cannot create a stone so big that he cannot move it. But we’ll cover that in a second blog.

So if someone asks you if God can do anything. Say “No.”

  1. The Miracles in the Bible are not “actually” impossible

As indicated in my blog of April 28th, Biblical Miracles do not fall into this category because they are not actually “impossible.” They are not irrational. Why do we say that? Well because any miracle or supernatural event recorded in the Bible could have been made to take place if enough technology, equipment or knowledge was available or if an extra-dimensional being was able to manipulate molecules, electrons, quarks or leptons. Look carefully, there are no truly impossible or irrational miracles in the Bible including the creation of the Universe and if an atheist were to suggest that creating matter from nothing is impossible, we’d say “Really, then why do you think it happened accidentally”.

By the way the feasibility of most of the Biblical miracles (short of creation) through technology is quite an interesting observation when you think about it. I doubt I can claim credit for it though, because, as with most things I think I have discovered, I always end up finding out that some other philosopher or theologian had already written about it 1000-2000 years ago.

An entry on my personal webpage titled “Is the Supernatural Impossible? Goes in to more detail about miracles (click for the link).

Let’s look briefly at the the water into wine miracle. The water was changed into wine most probably at the molecular level. It wasn’t water that was also wine (and while it could have been hypnotism, the passage indicates it wasn’t and anyway hypnotism isn’t “impossible”). He changed the water molecules into actual wine molecules (and very good wine at that). Was it synthetic wine? It probably was. (I say probably because of course he could have also swapped the water for pre-made wine – OK OK using the equivalent of a transporter beam…I’m a geek at heart).

What about dead men walking as in the case of those who came to life, again healing of tissue and reanimation of life (God created life to begin with – a merging of some multi-dimensional elements back to their original 4D ones) are all “possible” rational things. They are just not natural or common.

So we see none of these miracles are actually impossible.

Now it’s worth nothing that impossibility is usually seen best in philosophical or conceptual issues. E.g. making the square root of (-1) = 1. Or making the cube of 5, 124. All of which are rationally impossible.

You see making 1+1 = 3 or 2+2= 5 is not a matter of manipulating molecules. It is dealing with things at a much basic and in a sense a higher level. It’s dealing with things at the point of rationality. Mess with that and everything stops being cohesive, the universe starts to unravel, and you start to violate the very nature of God.

What about changing the laws of Gravity in the example. I would argue that God cannot change or suspend the laws of Gravity without having to then simultaneously attend to all the other effects of there being no Gravity. That’s not to say that he couldn’t also stop every individual thing from flinging out in to space using some other power, but the point is He would have to attend to it.

It’s of value to note that the original comment about Gravity by the atheist at the opening of this blog was said in the context of God being unable to be studied by science because he could change the laws of Gravity and we would not know about it. However, the nature of God being what it is and from the examples in the Biblical miracles, I tend to think that if God did do a miracle he would allow the side effects of the miracle to be apparent such that we could indeed measure it and see that an external agent had acted upon things. I also think that while God could indeed do things that cannot be studied by science, He could just as well do certain things that COULD be studied by science and point to him. So we cannot apriori assume that God did not do so. Maybe God has chosen to be able to be detected by Science. In which case would not science be the best way to detect him?

You cannot merely say that Science cannot prove God. If God wanted to, Science could indeed prove God. And contrary to what some believe, most Christians Theologians and Philosophers think that God HAS indeed chosen to leave his Fingerprint for us to detect. The question we are asking ourselves is “Why is he not more obvious about it?”, for that discussion you’ll have to wait for a future post titled “Why doesn’t God just show himself?” So for now know that the miracles in the Bible at not rationally or logically impossible.

  1. But I thought God was Omnipotent

(this section was updated with the definition of Pantocrator on 5/11/08 – I would like t
o express my appreciation to “db0” who allowed me to bounce these arguments off him and prompted this further expansion, I’m adding this back into the blog to allow people to see most of the argument in one place. )

 

God IS omnipotent (all powerful) but he is not omni-able (i.e. able to do “any”thing at least not anything irrational). The definition of power should not be confused with capability when it comes to the Christian God. There’s a clear distinction between the two. Christian theologians have long taught that God is all-powerful, not all capable when it comes to irrationality. And if you think about this, we see this as being tied into His character, His personality, His being. If God were to become irrational, it would violate his nature and he would cease to be God. God is a slave to his character (but then so are you).

But you say doesn’t the Bible say that God can do anything? Actually no, it does not. The word used in the Bible for Omni-Potent comes from the Greek word Pantocrator (Pantokrator). Pantocrator means all ruling. Almighty not all-capable. Let me explain.

When the Vulgate Manuscript was created as a translation from the Greek Septuagint (the Old Testament) into Latin, the Greek word Pantocrator was translated into the Latin “omnipotens”, which means having all the power (again note this is still technically correct as it means having power and strength not capability). The word is tied to rulers and ruling not to being all “capable.”

Over the recent years many Christians just started assuming that Omnipotence meant all capable and modern language uses it that way. But the original Greek and Hebrew do not support this. (BTW that’s what we think is infallible, the original Greek and Hebrew autographs written by the apostles and prophets. We don’t think the translations are or the copies are infallible.)

The KJV New Testament Greek Lexicon explains Pantocrator as:

Strong’s Number: 3841

pantokravtwr from (3956) and (2904)?

Transliterated Word TDNT Entry:?Pantokrator

Noun: Masculine?

Definition: he who holds sway over all things, the ruler of all, almighty: God

As you can see Pantocrator does not mean all capable even of irrational things. It just means powerful, mighty and ruler of all.

Hope this helps clarify where we stand.

Neil Mammen

By the way: Any errors in examples or theology are my errors and not those of the owners of this site.

Coming soon:

Part II. The correct response to: Can God create a stone so big that he cannot move it?

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Why Trust Reason if You're an Atheist?

Why Trust Reason if You’re an Atheist?

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If you read the threads of several of the blog entries on this site, you will see both atheists and Christians charging one another with committing “logical fallacies.”  The assumption both sides are making is that there is this objective realm of reason out there that: 1) we all have access to; 2) tells us the truth about the real world, and 3) is something we ought to use correctly if we want to know the truth. I think those are good assumptions.  My question for the atheists is, how do you justify these assumptions if there is no God?

 

If atheistic materialism is true, it seems to me that reason itself is impossible. For if mental processes are nothing but chemical reactions in the brain, then there is no reason to believe that anything is true (including the theory of materialism). Chemicals can’t evaluate whether or not a theory is true. Chemicals don’t reason, they react.

This is ironic because atheists– who often claim to be champions of truth and reason– have made truth and reason impossible by their theory of materialism. So even when atheists are right about something, their worldview gives us no reason to believe them because reason itself is impossible in a world governed only by chemical and physical forces.

Not only is reason impossible in an atheistic world, but the typical atheist assertion that we should rely on reason alone cannot be justified. Why not? Because reason actually requires faith. As J. Budziszewski points out in his book What We Can’t Not Know, “The motto ‘Reason Alone!’ is nonsense anyway. Reason itself presupposes faith. Why? Because a defense of reason by reason is circular, therefore worthless. Our only guarantee that human reason works is God who made it.”

Let’s unpack Budziszewski’s point by considering the source of reason. Our ability to reason can come from one of only two sources: either our ability to reason arose from preexisting intelligence, or it did not, in which case it arose from mindless matter. The atheists/Darwinists/materialists believe, by faith, that our minds arose from mindless matter without intelligent intervention. I say “by faith” because it contradicts all scientific observations, which demonstrates that an effect cannot be greater than its cause. You can’t give what you haven’t got, yet atheists believe that dead, unintelligent matter has produced itself into intelligent life. This is like believing that the Library of Congress resulted from an explosion in a printing shop.

I think it makes much more sense to believe that the human mind is made in the image of the Great Mind– God. In other words, our minds can apprehend truth and can reason about reality because they were built by the Architect of truth, reality, and reason itself.

So I have two questions for atheists:  1) What is the source of this immaterial reality known as reason that we are all presupposing, utilizing in our discussions, and accusing one other of violating on occasion? And 2) If there is no God and we are nothing but chemicals, why should we trust anything we think, including the thought that there is no God?

 

Dr. Frank Turek (D.Min.) is an award-winning author and frequent college speaker who hosts a weekly TV show on DirectTV and a radio program that airs on 186 stations around the nation.  His books include I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist and Stealing from God:  Why atheists need God to make their case.

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Is the Problem of Evil and Suffering Insurmountable?

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So how do Christians respond to this Epicurean question?

Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish evil, and God really wants to do it, why is there evil in the world?”

And especially for Dave the “suffering version of this =:

Either God wants to abolish suffering, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If he can, but does not want to, he is wicked. If God can abolish suffering, and God really wants to do it, why is there suffering in the world?”

{P.S. This was not the blog entry that I’ve been working on. I will post that shortly.}

ALERT: The above blog entry is now posted at: http://crossexamined.thehuntercreative.com/?p=57 Click to go there.

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What if the God of the Christians was real?

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Frank will be back in the US anytime soon, so he’ll be taking back the helm shortly. So as he returns, I’d like to ask our Atheist fellow travelers in search of truth this question:

Atheist readers, what if you were to suddenly find out tomorrow that the God of the Christian Evangelicals was real?

I.e. that He HAD created the world, had created you, the Bible was true, Jesus had died on the cross for your sins etc etc.

What would you do?

Now I realize that you may be wont to say: Ah, it won’t happen.

And I agree it won’t happen tomorrow and if you are right and I am wrong, it will NEVER happen.

But do humor me. What if it did happen?

I’m not asking HOW it would happen (see Frank’s earlier blog on this) but IF it happened, how would you react?

What is your response?

Anger? Agreement? Kowtowing to this being? Resigned acceptance, passive aggression, active aggression, resigned damnation?

Would you fall on your face and worship him? Why or why not?

What would you do?

Do you think a being that creates you automatically deserves your worship? (Note he does not needs it, but desires it.)

So what would you do if you found out tomorrow that the God of the Bible was real?

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