Debate: Christianity or Atheism?- part 1

Debate Format and Participant Introductions

Thanks for being here tonight. We really appreciate you being here. And welcome again to Apologia Church in Tempe for tonight's debate, focusing on the question, which makes more sense, Christianity or atheism?

So we thank you again for Apologia for hosting the event. My name's Robert Nelson, and I'll be moderating.

And my role is to support the participants.

By helping them when needed to adhere to the agreed upon debate rules, format, and time restrictions. The participants will be debating tonight's question of Jeff Durbin and Vocav Malone, as well as Omar David Kahl and Sean Cavs at Esplin.

Jeff and Vocav will take the affirmative position for Christianity. And Omar and Sean will take the affirmative position.

For atheism.

And you might be thinking, who are these guys? So I'm glad you asked. To answer that question, we're going to take a couple of minutes to break down the background and the bios for our participants. And we're going to start with our atheism team and Omar Kahl, who is in the dark jacket.

He is a designer and display artist at Urban Outfitters in Scottsdale, a longtime Arizona resident, earned his Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies in Industrial Design and Business from Arizona State University, where he met his wife of nine years, Amina.

And he appeared on the cover of the Phoenix New Times for his atheism activism. He enjoys the arts, cinema, travel, fine cuisine, science, language, and has studied a number of tongues, including biblical Hebrew, and has been known to read the dictionary just for fun.

And his teammate is Sean Kaz Esplin, who is in the white shirt. He is the creator of the betterthanfaith .com website. And it encourages visitors to never stop thinking and features atheistic tracks, t-shirts, and other resources designed to combat Christian propaganda.

Now, according to the website, Sean left Christianity as a teenager and has been an atheist ever since, and more recently, has been an active supporter of the ASU Secular Free Thought Society and the Mill Avenue Resistance.

So this is our atheist team. Please give them a round of applause. Now, the Christianity team, we'll begin with Jeff Durbin, who's in the blue shirt. He serves as the president of Apologia Christian Ministries, which is a Christian apologetics organization.

He's also the pastor at Apologia Church in Tempe. He's a pastor as well at the Calvary Addiction Recovery Center in Phoenix. He's passionate about reaching people for Christ, in particular, those who are hostile to the Christian faith.

He also is a speaker for churches, camps, and conferences across the United States, and has been married to his wife, Candy, for over 12 years and has four children. And his partner, Vocab Malone, in the tan jacket and the red t-shirt.

He is a Christian hip hop artist, slam poet, and has released five albums. He blogs at backpacktruth .com, hosts a weekly radio program on 1560 AM called Backpack Radio. He is currently pursuing a master's degree at Phoenix Seminary.

He's on the pastoral staff of Roosevelt Community Church in downtown Phoenix. And he's been married to his wife, Nicole, for eight years. They have one son, Malachi, and are in the process of adopting two more, which are named Luke and Micah.

Welcome Jeff and Vocab. All right, well, now that you're comfortable.

And you know the participants, it's.

Time to get up to speed on the rule and the format. So here we go. This is a formal debate between the participants. It doesn't involve interaction with any of our guests in the audience. We're glad you're here, but it's an interaction between the participants.

Here is how you can help. First of all, do not shout or cause any outbursts. If a member of the audience gets out of control, we'll pause the debate until they're removed. Also, now's the time to check your cell phone to make sure.

It's on silent.

And once you've done that, you can check the person next to you's cell phone to make sure they didn't forget to put it on silent. Now, to the debate itself, it's structured in two parts. One, having a break.

But the first part will begin with a round of opening statements, where each team will have 15 minutes to make an opening. And the Christianity side will go first to keep in line with the debate title, which is, what makes more sense, Christianity or atheism?

So we'll have Christianity go first.

That means atheism.

The atheistic team is going to have a last closing statement. They'll get the final word. Now, the clock begins running as soon as the team says their first word. The participants will get reminders when half of the allotted time remains.

We'll get a two-minute warning, a one-minute warning, and a 30-second warning. And each team can rotate who speaks during their allotted time as they wish. They don't have to split their time equally between the team members.

Now, the opening statements will be followed by an opportunity for rebuttals or responses. Each team will have eight minutes to do that in part one of the debate. The responses will be followed by a round of cross-examinations, where each team will have 10 minutes to question the other.

Now, in this part of the debate, the teams are allowed to target their questions during the cross-examination to a specific person on the other team, if they choose, or it can be open-ended to either, if they desire.

Now, during the cross-examination,.

The examining team has the floor.

They're the only ones allowed to ask the questions. And the team that's on the stand is not allowed to ask questions. And the person or team on the stand is required to provide honest, concise, forthright answers to the questions.

The team that's in the examining position even has the right to politely cut off the response if it's too long-winded, evasive, in order to provide time for other questions they wanna get to in the allotted.

Cross-examination period.

Now, after the cross-examinations, part one of the debate will conclude, we'll have a 15-minute break at that time, and we'll save the details for what part two includes at that time. So, with that, you know the participants.

You're up to speed on the format and the rules. It's time to start. First will be our Christianity team, Jeff and Vokap. 15 minutes, your time begins as soon as you speak.

Christianity, Atheism, and the Preconditions of Intelligibility

Hey, guys.

Hi.

There you go.

Thank you all for being here. We're very excited about this debate, not only because we believe it to be a question with massive implications for your lives now, but also for eternity later, but also because both teams have admitted to representing a particular worldview.

By coming in agreeing to the question and debate, both teams have established that we are not neutral. Vokap and I are unashamedly committed to Jesus Christ as God, come in the flesh, the one who died for the sins of his people, conquered death, revealed himself in conscience, creation, scripture, and by taking flesh, dwelling among us, and by revealing God to us.

Consequently, the one without whom this debate wouldn't make sense or even be possible. That is to say, we're defending Christian theism, not just any general form of theism. The truth, claims, and certainty of Christianity are based upon the revealed scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

Omar and Sean are in pre-commitment to atheism, a, free being from without, and theism from being theism or God. So they profess to not believe in the existence of God. Their denial of God's existence leads them in particular to an atheistic view of reality, knowledge, and ethics.

What you're witnessing tonight is a collision. It's a collision of worldviews.

Your job tonight is to act as judges.

You must judge the debaters, because this is a debate about worldviews. You must test for consistency. It will be tremendously important to pay close attention to what each team is standing on, not literally standing on, but you must remember that each team has beliefs about reality, knowledge, logic, human value, and dignity, and I encourage you to watch for arbitrariness, mere personal opinions, or unfounded prejudicial conjecture, and watch for inconsistencies.

Is the person acting consistently with what they say they are standing on? When their worldview doesn't work, are they forced to leave their platform in an attempt to borrow from the others? In my opening speech, I'd like to direct your attention to three specific points, make it easy, of observation to demonstrate that Christianity is the answer to tonight's question, the uniformity of nature, laws and logic, human value, and dignity.

Number one, uniformity in nature. In philosophical terms, what we're describing here is what's called induction. Simply put, that the future will be like the past. All of us live in this world, moment by moment, assuming that the future will be like the past.

Science, logic, laboratory tests, medicine, historical examinations, and everything else are all possible without it.

Today, we got out of bed and didn't think twice.

About gravity holding us down. We pulled our covers aside and we assumed that. All of us were sure to go to the bathroom this morning, because based on past experience, we know there'll be problems if we don't, correct?

If I were to build a fire right here.

In the middle of the room, and I was to ask everyone.

In the room to jump me by joining into it, what would you say? You see, nobody would join me jumping into this barbecue, because based on past experience, you know the fire is hot and it will burn you.

Nobody would be fooled into thinking that this would be the best experience ever today rather than yesterday. Everyone assumes that the future will be like the past, but here is a devastating argument that exposes that atheists not only know God, but are demonstrating a secret dependence upon him to live in his world.

Remember the worldview question. Atheism believes that the universe is a cosmic accident. All we have is time and chance acting on matter, just atoms banging around. There's no sovereign purpose, guidance, governing, and no reason to assume that tomorrow will be like today, or even that the next five seconds of this debate will be like the past.

Like Carl Sagan said, the cosmos is all there is, was, or ever will be. It's just sound and fury signifying nothing. Now, if you start with the God of the Bible, you can satisfy the preconditions of intelligibility for induction.

We believe in a personal, all-powerful, sovereign God who carries this universe along to its intended destination, Hebrews 1 .3. Christians have a reason for believing that the future will be like the past because we believe in a God who governs it by the word of his power.

Second point, laws of logic. Imagine for a moment that to win tonight's debate, I came into the room and said something like this. So if you go, come here, come here, here.

And if you go, come here, come here, come here. So we're done, all right?

Would you expect me to win the debate like that? No, you wouldn't, because something will be assumed tonight by both teams and by you, the audience. You see, both teams and you, the audience, will assume that there are universal laws of logic, that these laws are invariant, universal truths that we must hold to in order to live in this world and even have this debate.

Remember, again, the worldview question. Atheists believe that the universe is unguided and therefore random. Atheists like Sean believe that all there is is matter in motion, just stuff moving around.

Yet laws of logic are immaterial, abstract, universal entities. Let me simplify this. Have you ever tasted the law of non-contradiction? Has anyone ever tripped on a law of logic? Drank one, smelled one, tasted one?

And yet, here we have atheists who believe that all that exists is matter, appealing to and using things which are not made of matter. To use an example from another well-known debate between Paul Monada and Dan Barker, imagine for a moment a person came into this room arguing that only marbles exist.

All that exists is marbles, only marbles. All there is is marbles. But all the while, they were arguing, they were appealing to things not made of marbles. We would all notice that their argument is immediately refuted by the fact that they're appealing to things not made of marbles.

Therefore, every time they speak, they'll be refuting their own most basic assumption about reality that all exists is matter. An atheistic outlook leaves us here tonight with four complex bags of protoplasm with noises coming out of the holes.

In the tops of our bags.

In an atheistic worldview, there are no universals and nothing is necessary. Christians, however, can satisfy universal, necessary, invariant, and abstract entities, such as the laws of logic. Christians deny the claim that all that exists is matter.

We believe in a God who is logic, John 1 .1. To engage in contradiction is to engage in the nature of lying, and God cannot lie. We are made in his image in order to reflect the rationality and consistency that exists in his thinking in order to think his thoughts after him.

On this point alone, when asking which worldview makes sense, atheism or Christianity, it is our contention that atheism makes appeals to logic senseless because it can offer no cogent philosophical justification for the use of universal, immaterial, and necessary laws.

Therefore, Omar and Sean conceded the debate tonight.

By showing up.

Ultimately, we believe this evening's question will be answered and affirmed, and you need to hear this, as Christianity by both teams. By both teams. It'll be affirmed by us in what we say and what we're doing.

It'll be affirmed by them in what they're doing, but will not say. Therefore, we encourage you to watch closely as our opponents continually give evidence of leaving their atheistic worldview to borrow from the Christian worldview in order to do what they're doing.

They will assume the uniformity in nature, the rational intelligibility of the universe. They'll make claims about laws of logic, but you have to remember something.

They'll also talk about human value and dignity,.

But you must remember that in their worldview, humans are merely protoplasm. We're just bags of biological stuff moving throughout a purposeless and meaningless universe. In denying that God exists and that we're made in the imago dei, atheists lose the right to be morally indignant when protoplasm bumps into protoplasm.

We are simply dancing out our DNA. What a bag of fleshy chemicals does to another in a godless universe is wholly irrelevant. The Christian worldview teaches that all of us are created in the image of God, who is infinitely valuable and good, thus we reflect his value and worth.

On that basis, Christians can call evil evil and be real with it, and good good and be real with that.

Half the time remains.

Because we have an objective standard of good God. Therefore, we invite you to watch as our opponents give visible evidence of depending upon the Christian worldview in order to argue against the Christian worldview.

Thank you.

The clock has stopped as vocab comes up to the mic.

Thank you for coming out. We hope to do a lot more of these in the future. Jeff focused on logic. I'm gonna focus on history. My basic argument is that atheism cannot make sense of history's most significant event, the career of Jesus.

Now, when an atheist looks into history, they are forced to give a variety of naturalistic explanations in order to account for anything not natural. So for the life of Christ, they have to do this, especially for the resurrection.

But these explanations will fail to account for the evidence, and they'll actually wind up making nonsense out of historical knowledge. The atheist has a handicap when investigating historical claims because they cannot accept any non-naturalistic explanations for events, even if they are superior.

Now, an atheist may try to defend this prejudice by quoting David Hume, but listen, the a priori rejection of any and all miracle claims is a philosophical stance towards history. It is not a scientific stance towards history.

But the good historian would keep their philosophical bias to a minimum.

But unfortunately for the atheist,.

Metaphysics get in the way of doing good history. This forces them, for example, to undervalue the New Testament documents. For hundreds of years, scholars, critical scholars have been trying to get behind the four canonical Gospels.

But still, even today, most non-believing historians recognize that these documents are hands down our earliest and best sources for the life of Jesus, all written in the first century. I refer our more ambitious audience members to the stellar work of Richard Bakum for evidence that the Gospels are indeed all linked directly in some way to eyewitness accounts.

Now, the fact that eyewitness testimony makes up the fabric of these documents is a challenge to the atheist's most basic assumption about reality because they contain miracles. But if one has not already ruled out God as creator, eyewitnesses reporting miracles by Jesus is not impossible, especially if it is true that Jesus of Nazareth is unique in human history and that he is God incarnate.

If so, what would prevent the sovereign creator from entering into his creation if he so choose? And if he did come and dwell amongst us, what would prevent him from possessing and utilizing divine power?

And even though we know that the four Gospels are reliable, we can also get some information about Jesus from other sources, early non-Christian sources. For example, the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus tells us in his annals that Christus was sacrificed, or I'm sorry, crucified, quote, during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.

Another hostile source, the Babylonian Talmud, tells us that, quote, on the eve of the Passover, Yeshu was hanged, then it goes on to give the reason, because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy.

Note the charge of sorcery. Even the adversaries of Jesus recognize his power and miraculous acts, they just question the source. Another non-Christian source, Josephus, tells us the disciples of Jesus, quote, reported, note that word, he says reported, that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion, that he was alive.

Now remember, to the average Jewish person in those days, the idea of a crucified Messiah was a joke. But in the case of Jesus, we know that Jews and Gentiles alike not only recognized him as Messiah, or were actually worshiping him as God.

How do Sean and Omar account for people treating a dead peer this way? Secular authors corroborate this fact of worship. Pliny the Younger wrote to the emperor around 112, reported that Christians got up early once a week to meet together, and they would sing hymns, quote, to Christ as to a God, Carmen Christi in Latin.

What naturalistic explanation does the atheist want to use to explain how people were worshiping a man whom they knew only a generation or so before had been executed as a criminal? Historically, the atheist needs to posit a giant X factor into this equation.

Dead Messiah plus X equals the birth and rise of Christianity. The atheist cannot make sense of why devout, Sabbath-keeping Jews suddenly began holding.

Religious services on what is called Sunday.

This transition makes sense if we recognize.

They were honoring the resurrection.

By meeting on the day when it occurred. The atheist cannot make sense of how a group of zealous Jews who previously hoped for a military Messiah to drive out the Romans suddenly began pretending as Messiah, one who said, put away your swords, turn your cheeks, pray for your enemies, and pay your taxes.

The atheist cannot explain how a group of closed-circle, ethnocentric Jews suddenly saw fit to take the message of Israel's Messiah to all the nations.

Two minutes.

They cannot give a good answer as to why devout Jews who were, listen, fiercely monotheistic began worshiping as God a man who had dwelled among them. Did they lose their monotheism, or did something happen that caused them to know that Jesus shared the very identity of Yahweh?

The atheist cannot adequately account for why previously cowering fishermen will be willing to go to their deaths.

For refusing to deny the Lordship of Christ.

Remember, they were in a position to know whether this event occurred or not. So analogies with hail-bomb comet chasers or jihadi warriors failed. These questions I'm asking of them are based on open facts of history about some really strange things that happened in first-century Palestine.

These are strange things that the atheist cannot make sense of in any meaningful way.

One minute.

The Christian, however, can make sense of the life or the career of Jesus of Nazareth and all the odd events surrounding him, especially the resurrection, and it is this. Jesus Christ is a risen Lord.

Thank you.

We'll ask Omar and Sean to come up. They have 15 minutes to give opening statements. They get to choose who will go first. Your time will start when you begin this.

Atheism, Dictionary Definitions, and the Scope of the Debate

So I'm gonna talk fast. I'm very grateful for the invitation and opportunity to come and debate the question of which makes more sense, atheism or Christianity. I've known Bocat for a few years and we've had many conversations about these topics and he's challenging me to debate him in a public setting on a number of occasions.

I have never myself participated in a formal debate and it's humbling for Sean and I to try and come and contend against two experienced orders as pastors Jeff and Bocat. We certainly don't have the experience or skill in public speaking that either of them do and I hope you'll be patient with my attempts to communicate our position to you.

By the same token, I'm pretty certain.

That a number of you are rooting.

Or praying for our opponents. I highly doubt that any of you are praying for us, but I don't honestly believe that these supplications will have any effect either way. I also disagree with a full disclosure and to preemptively give credit where it's due, I am plagiarizing the majority of my arguments in the journal from Walter Siddick Armstrong, David Ramsey Sewell, and Paul Davies.

I'd like to start off this debate by saying that I didn't personally have any say in the topic of this debate. It happens that I am an atheist, although that was not always the case, but I am not here to defend my beliefs.

The question is which of the two alternatives, Christianity or atheism, makes more sense than the other? This presupposes that both Christianity and atheism do make some sort of sense. It should come as no surprise that atheism makes sense to an atheist and that if you're a Christian, as many of you are and as I was, that Christianity makes sense to you.

Note that the question of whether something makes sense does not imply that it is correct. It might make sense that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west because it orbits the earth, but this is false.

Note further that the question of whether something is logical and whether it makes sense.

Are independent of one another.

If you're a child and you read out cookies for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, it would make sense that you would think he's been there if there were bites taken out of them on the following morning. But the conclusion Santa Claus exists does not follow logically from this observation.

It is a non sequitur. There are numerous other possibilities I could explain it and some are much more likely than the others. In this debate, we will depend upon logic to examine the forcefulness of the claims that are being made.

A frequent tactic of Christians debating atheists is to assert that atheists cannot justify a recourse to logic because logic comes from God, but atheists don't believe in God. The question of whether a strictly materialistic worldview can justify the use of logic may well be an interesting question, although I think it is based on a number of faulty, unstated major premises.

But I am not here to logically defend logicality. We concur that the universe seems to be a logical place and we all have implicitly agreed upon the effectiveness of logic by ascending to a debate format.

Another common tactic of Christians is to try to insist that atheism must be synonymous with monism, natural materialism, nihilism, post-modernism, or what have you. Now, I may or may not be any of those things.

Or believe in any of those things.

And the question of what makes more sense, natural materialism, for example, or Christianity might be an interesting topic for debate, but it is not the topic of this debate. To conflate atheism with a category of atheism, even if it were the most popular type, amounts to a straw man or a red herring, or a straw herring.

As an example, I cannot personally conclude that we have been successful if we show that atheism makes more sense than Catholicism, since Catholicism is the most popular, statistically, type of Christianity.

That is not the topic in question. To make things more simple, we will appeal to standard dictionary definitions. The Oxford English Dictionary defined atheism as disbelief in the existence of God or gods and Christianity as the religion based on the person and teachings of Jesus and Nazareth or its beliefs and practices.

Two things are immediately obvious. First, Christianity is a religion and atheism is not. Christianity is comprised of teachings, beliefs, and or practices. Atheism is comprised of only a single disbelief or the rejection or absence of a single belief.

Atheism is not a creed to live by. Some Christians will try to define atheism as a religion or a worldview like Christianity is, but it's hard to see how disbelief in a single type of thing can constitute a religion or worldview.

Otherwise, disbelief in unicorns would also be a religion. Newborn babies do not have a belief in unicorns or God,.

For that matter.

Are they born atheists? Implicitly, Christianity is more demanding than atheism. It is not enough to form a mental concept of Jesus to believe that Jesus exists to be a Christian. Most Christians today would say that, would insist that Christianity entails an acceptance of Jesus Christ as the savior of the world, the son of God, the father and creator of the universe, as revealed in his word, the Bible.

All that is required for atheism is a single belief or its lack thereof. Leaving aside more obscure movements like Christian atheism, we see that the categories of Christianity and atheism.

Are mutually exclusive.

One cannot simultaneously hold the belief that Jesus is the son of God and that no God exists. Now, there are many ways of being a Christian as demonstrated by the number of sects and denominations that consider themselves such, and it seems that for just about any way a group defines Christianity, you can find another group who's willing to dispute it.

So the first question to ask ourselves is, if the way to be Christian is so fundamentally unclear that Christians themselves cannot agree on what it means, what does it mean to say that Christianity makes sense?

There are at least as many ways of being an atheist as there are ways of not being a Christian, and in fact, many more. But the difference in the case of varieties of atheism is that because atheism itself requires so very little, these ways need not be mutually contradictory.

You could disbelieve that God exists in conjunction with any of countless other beliefs or worldviews, but accepting that Jesus is the son of God and that the Bible is his word seems to impose severe restrictions on the types of worldviews one can reconcile to it.

This is not true of atheism. By definition, atheism does not strictly demand any other kinds of beliefs. You can disbelieve in the existence of God and yet believe, for example, in karma, animism, dualism, some sort of supernatural realm, ghosts, ESP, extraterrestrial intelligences, et cetera, which is not to say that those beliefs follow logically from the non-existence of God, but there's no reason that atheism is logically incompatible with any of these.

There are a number of predominantly Eastern religions that are essentially atheistic, composed of more than one billion people worldwide, Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, traditional Chinese religion, Thalangong, Shinto, not to mention secular humanism, and universalism in the West.

Now that we have defined atheism, let's take a look at the God Christianity requires. This being can be called the God of classic atheism, and he is agreed to be all-powerful, all-knowing, good, timeless, creator of everything, et cetera.

It is not enough for Christianity to say that God is all-powerful, but not completely good, or the creator of most things, and pretty powerful. Although in most ages of history, people who believed in anything that might be referred to as a God did not believe in any entity that possessed all of these attributes.

Absolutely, and there's nothing that logically precludes these lesser gods from existing, but Christianity today requires a deity to exhibit all of these characteristics fully. The first problem is that it's difficult to reconcile these concepts about God with some of the accounts we have of them in the Bible, or with reality as we observe it.

And the second problem is that something that possesses all of these attributes is a logically impossible being. No being that possesses all of these attributes exists. To say that God is a person means that he has a mind, albeit a brainless one, intentions, and acts in accordance with them.

He has thoughts, makes choices, and in the Bible expresses emotions. To say that God is a spirit means that his existence is not physical, not made of matter or energy, and not detectable through any empirical method.

If God is omnipotent, he can do anything he likes, though theists usually insist that he can only do logically possible things. This means that God's constrained by logic in a very fundamental way. It makes no sense to posit the source of the laws or regularities of the universe can only be God, when God is apparently subject to the regularities of the universe.

Ancient Hebrew Cosmology and the Firmament

Halfway point.

Mark will restart when Sean speaks.

This is my first time doing anything like this too, and so I hope I'll do a decent job. But first I want to tell you about the ancient Hebrew cosmology. Just like everyone around them, the authors of the Bible believed in a very different kind of world than we believe in today, or than we know exists today.

Essentially, the Bible describes the earth as a giant reversed snow globe with the water on the outside. There are pillars of the earth which hold up the land, and there are pillars of heaven which hold up the firmament.

The firmament is a, yeah, the firmament is the dome that's covering the whole earth there, and it holds out the water that's up above it, and it has little, the stars are just little things up in the firmament, and they can actually fall to earth.

There are also windows in heaven that water can come down through. I'm going to focus on the firmament itself, since it's an integral part of this view of the world, and we know it was accepted by Christians, Jews, and just about everyone else in the world until long after the New Testament was written.

The reason this view is so common is that the world as we see it with our eyes is very much like this. If you were to go up to the top of a mountain and look all around you, you would see what looked like a fairly flat world that essentially looks like that.

So people tended to believe that that was the way it actually was. The people who actually helped us leave this worldview behind lived long after the authors of the Bible, and in many cases, they were actually held back by their beliefs in biblical things, or persecuted by Christians who did support the Bible in opposition to what we actually saw.

In fact, there seems to have been very little progress in Christian cosmology in the 1 ,200 years between the third century theologian Origen, who said that the firmament is without doubt firm and solid, and Protestant founder Martin Luther.

I don't think this thing is working. Just, if I hold it up, switch the slide. And yeah, Martin Luther was always one to jettison reason and reality in favor of the Bible, and you can see him here recommending that you also do that.

You can also see a picture from his own version of the Bible depicting the way he saw the world based on what the Bible says. At least it takes into account the fact that the Earth is spherical, which was undeniable by that point, but still he has this solid firmament and a very different kind of world than what we actually see.

It shouldn't be too surprising that they believe in a solid firmament, though, because that's what the very first chapter of the Bible tells us about. And God made the firmament, which divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.

A lot of people try to take this to be some kind of a figurative thing, but it was meant, literally. They believed that there was water above that. The description of the firmament in Genesis 1 was meant just as it sounds.

It's not even supposed to be that high up. Even God himself believes in the Bible that it's possible for people to build a tower to reach the firmament where he lives, as we can see in the story of the Tower of Babel.

And now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do. He was actually worried that they'd be able to build their tower all the way up to heaven and so he came down to stop them.

Considering that the Jewish Talmud claims that some of the tower's builders intended to start a war against God, maybe he had reason for it. There's another interesting version of the story in the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, which didn't make it into the Bible.

In this version, though, the tower is actually completed and they tried to drill through the surface of the firmament to see if it's made of clay, brass, or iron. I don't think I can sum it up any better than this quote from Paul H. Seeley an evangelical Christian author writing in the Westminster Theological Journal.

Certainly anyone denying the solidity of the firmament in Genesis 1 bears a heavy burden of proof. It seems to me that nothing short of a clear statement to the contrary made by an Old Testament writer could allow one in good conscience to set aside this clear historical meaning.