Debate: Christianity or Atheism?- part 1

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

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Christianity or atheism? So we thank you again for Apologia for hosting the event.

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My name's Robert Nelson, and I'll be moderating, and my role is to support the participants by helping them when needed through a here to me agreed upon debate rules, format, and time restrictions.

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The participants will be debating tonight's question Jeff Durbin, and Vocav Malone, as well as Omar David Call, and Sean Kaz Esplin.

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

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And you might be thinking, who are these guys? So I'm glad you asked. To answer that question, we're gonna take a couple of minutes to break down the background and the bios for our participants.

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And we're gonna start with our atheism team, and Omar Call, who is in the dark jacket. He is a designer and display artist at Urban Outfitters in Scottsdale, a longtime

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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,

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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

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Hebrew, and has been known to read the dictionary just for fun. And his teammate is

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Sean Kaz Esplin, who is in the white shirt. He is the creator of the BetterThanFaith .com

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website, and it encourages visitors to never stop thinking and features atheistic tracks,

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T -shirts, and other resources designed to combat Christian propaganda. Now, according to the website,

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Sean left Christianity as a teenager, and has been an atheist ever since, and more recently has been an active supporter of the

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ASU Secular Free Thought Society, and the Mill Avenue Resistance. So, this is our atheist team.

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Please give them a round of applause. Thank you. And on the

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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

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Christian apologetics organization. He's also the pastor at Apologia Church in Tempe. He's a pastor as well at the

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Calvary Addiction Recovery Center in Phoenix. He's passionate about reaching people for Christ, in particular, those who are hostile to the

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Christian faith. He also is a speaker for churches, camps, and conferences across the United States, and has been married to his wife,

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Candy, for over 12 years and has four children. And his partner,

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Bo Cab Malone, in the tan jacket and the red T -shirt. He is a Christian hip -hop artist, slam poet, and has released five albums.

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He blogs at backpacktruth .com, hosts a weekly radio program on 1560 AM called

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Backpack Radio. He is currently pursuing a master's degree at Phoenix Seminary.

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He's on the pastoral staff of Roosevelt Community Church in downtown Phoenix, and he's been married to his wife,

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Nicole, for eight years. They have one son, Malachi, and are in the process of adopting two more, which are named

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Luke and Micah. Welcome, Jeff and Bo Cab. 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.

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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.

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We're glad you're here, but it's an interaction between the participants. Here is how you can help.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And the Christianity side will go first to keep in line with the debate title, which is what makes more sense, Christianity or atheism?

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So we'll have Christianity go first. That means atheism, the atheistic team is going to have the last closing statement.

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They'll get the final word. Now, the clock begins running as soon as the team says their first word.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The responses will be followed by a round of cross -examinations where each team will have 10 minutes to question the other.

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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.

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Now, during the cross -examination, the examining team has the floor. They're the only ones allowed to ask the questions.

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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.

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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.

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

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So, with that, you know the participants. You're up to speed on the format and the rules.

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It's time to start. First will be our

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Christianity team, Jeff and Bo -Kath. 15 minutes, your time begins as soon as you speak.

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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.

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By coming in agreeing to the question and debate, both teams have established that we are not neutral. Bo -Kath 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

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God to us. Consequently, the one without whom this debate wouldn't make sense or even be possible.

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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

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Old and New Testaments. Omar and Sean, I have a pre -commitment to atheism, a, free being from without, and theism from being theism or God.

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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.

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What you're witnessing tonight is a collision. It's a collision of worldviews. Your job tonight is to act as judges.

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You must judge the debaters, because this is a debate about worldviews. You must test for consistency.

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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.

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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?

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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 in nature, laws of logic, human value, and dignity.

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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.

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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.

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Today, we got out of bed, and didn't think twice about gravity holding us down. We pull our covers aside, and we assume that.

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All of us are sure to go to the bathroom this morning, because based on past experience, we know there'll be problems if we don't, correct?

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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?

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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.

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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

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God, but are demonstrating a secret dependence upon him to live in his world. Remember the worldview question.

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Atheism believes that the universe is a cosmic accident. All we have is time and chance acting on matter, just atoms banging around.

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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.

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Like Carl Sagan said, the cosmos is all there is, was, or ever will be. It's just sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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Now, if you start with the God of the Bible, you can satisfy the preconditions of intelligibility for induction.

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We believe in a personal, all -powerful, sovereign God who carries this universe along to its intended destination,

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Hebrews 1 .3. Christians have a reason for believing that the future will be like the past, because we believe in a

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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,

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I came into the room and said something like this. Take a look, look at it, look at it, here, it's right up, look at it, oh yeah, it's done, all right?

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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.

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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.

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Remember, again, the worldview question. Atheists believe that the universe is unguided and therefore random.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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We would all notice that their argument is immediately refuted by the fact that they're appealing to things not made of marbles.

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Therefore, every time they speak, they'll be refuting their own most basic assumption about reality that all exists is matter.

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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.

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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.

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Christians deny the claim that all that exists is matter. We believe in a God who is logic,

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John 1 .1. To engage in contradiction is to engage in the nature of lying, and God cannot lie.

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We are made in His image in order to reflect the rationality and consistency that exists in His thinking in order to think

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Therefore, we encourage you to watch closely as our opponents continually give evidence of leaving their atheistic worldview to borrow from the

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Christian worldview in order to do what they're doing. They will assume the uniformity in nature, the rational intelligibility of the universe.

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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.

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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.

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We are simply dancing out our DNA. What a bag of fleshy chemicals does to another in a godless universe is wholly irrelevant.

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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.

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

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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

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Christian worldview in order to argue against the Christian worldview. Thank you. The clock has stopped as vocab comes up to the mic.

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Thank you for coming out. We hope to do a lot more of these in the future. Jeff focused on logic,

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The atheist has a handicap when investigating historical claims because they cannot accept any non -naturalistic explanations for events, even if they are superior.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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I refer our more ambitious audience members to the stellar work of Richard Bakum for evidence that the

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Gospels are indeed all linked directly in some way to eyewitness accounts.

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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.

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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

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God incarnate. If so, what would prevent the sovereign creator from entering into his creation, if he so choose?

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And if he did come and dwell amongst us, what would prevent him from possessing and utilizing divine power?

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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.

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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,

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Pontius Pilatus. Another hostile source, the Babylonian Talmud, tells us that, quote, on the eve of the

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Passover, Yeshu was hanged, then it goes on to give the reason, because he has practiced sorcery and enticed

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Israel to apostasy. Note the charge of sorcery. Even the adversaries of Jesus recognize his power in miraculous acts, they just question the source.

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Another non -Christian source, Josephus, tells us that 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.

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Now remember, to the average Jewish person in those days, the idea of a crucified messiah was a joke.

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But in the case of Jesus, we know that Jews and Gentiles alike not only recognized him as messiah, but were actually worshiping him as God.

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How do Sean and Omar account for people treating a dead peer this way?

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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

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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?

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Historically, the atheist needs to posit a giant X factor into this equation.

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Dead messiah plus X equals the birth and rise of Christianity. The atheist cannot make sense of why devout,

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Sabbath -keeping Jews suddenly began holding religious services on what is called Sunday.

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This transition makes sense if we recognize they were honoring the resurrection by meeting on the day when it occurred.

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The atheist cannot make sense of how a group of zealous Jews who previously hoped for a military messiah to drive out the

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Romans suddenly began pretending as messiahs, one who said put away your swords, turn your cheeks, pray for your enemies, and pay your taxes.

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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.

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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 dwelt among them.

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Did they lose their monotheism, or did something happen that caused them to know that Jesus shared the very identity of Yahweh?

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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.

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Remember, they were in a position to know whether this event occurred or not. So analogies with hailbot comet chasers or jihadi warriors fail.

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These questions I'm asking of them are based on open facts of history about some really strange things that happened in first century

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

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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.

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Jesus Christ is the risen lord. Thank you. We'll ask

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Omar and Sean to come up. They have 15 minutes to give opening statements.

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They get to choose who will go first. Your time will start when you begin this group.

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Way more material than I could possibly present.

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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.

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I've been a vocab for a few years and we've had many conversations about these topics and it's challenging to debate them in a public setting on a number of occasions.

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I've 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,

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Jeff and vocab. 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.

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By the same token, I'm pretty certain that a number of you are rooting or praying for our opponents and 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.

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I also wish to read a full disclosure and to preemptively give credit where it's due, I am plagiarizing the majority of my arguments in material from Walter Sinek Armstrong, David Ramsey Seale, and Paul Davies.

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I'd like to start off this debate by saying that I didn't personally have any say in the topic of this debate.

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It happens that I am an atheist, although that was not always the case, but I am not here to defend my beliefs.

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The question is, which of the two alternatives, Christianity or atheism, makes more sense than the other? This presupposes that both

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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But the conclusion Santa Claus exists does not follow logically from this observation. It is a non sequitur.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 dissenting to a debate format.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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As an example, I cannot presently 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.

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That is not the topic of question. To make things more simple, we will appeal to standard dictionary definitions.

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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 of Nazareth or its beliefs and practices.

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Two things are immediately obvious. First, Christianity is a religion and atheism is not. Christianity is comprised of teachings, beliefs, and or practices.

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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.

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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.

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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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Christian is so fundamentally unclear that Christians themselves cannot agree on what it means, what does it mean to say that Christianity makes sense?

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There are at least as many ways of being atheists 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.

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You can 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

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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.

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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,

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ESP, extraterrestrial intelligences, et cetera, which is not to say that those beliefs fall logically from the non -existence of God, but there's no reason that atheism is logically incompatible with any of these.

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There are a number of predominantly Eastern religions that are essentially atheistic, composed of more than one billion people worldwide,

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Buddhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, traditional Chinese religion, Dalai Lama, Shinto, not to mention her, not to mention secular humanism and universalism in the

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West. Now that we have defined atheism, let's take a look at the God Christianity requires. This being to be called the

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God of classical 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.

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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.

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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.

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The first problem is that it is difficult to reconcile these concepts about God with some of the accounts we have of him in the Bible or with reality as we observe it.

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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.

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To say that God is a person means that he has a mind, albeit a brainless one, intentions, and acts in accordance with them.

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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.

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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.

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It makes no sense to posit that the source of the laws or regularities of the universe can only be God when

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God is apparently subject to the regularities of the universe. Halfway point, clock has been stopped.

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The clock will restart when Sean speaks. This is my first time doing anything like this too, and so I hope

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I'll do a decent job. But first I want to tell you about the ancient

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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.

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Essentially, the Bible describes the Earth as a giant reversed snow globe with the water on the outside.

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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...

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Sorry, I didn't switch this on. Yeah, the firmament is the dome that's covering the whole

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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.

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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

31:18

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.

31:28

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.

31:43

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

31:54

Bible, and in many cases, they were actually held back by their beliefs in biblical things or persecuted by Christians who did support the

32:06

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 3rd century theologian

32:18

Origen who said that the firmament is without doubt firm and solid, and Protestant founder

32:28

Martin Luther. I don't think this thing is working.

32:36

Just if I hold it up, switch the slide. And yeah,

32:43

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.

32:54

You can also see a picture from his own version of the Bible depicting the way he saw the world based on what the

33:01

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.

33:16

It shouldn't be too surprising that they believe in a solid firmament though because that's what the very first chapter of the

33:23

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.

33:33

A lot of people try to take this to be some kind of a figurative thing, but it was meant literally.

33:40

They believed that there was water above that. The description of the firmament in Genesis 1 was meant just as it sounds.

33:49

It's not even supposed to be that high up. Even God himself believes in the

33:54

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

34:01

Tower of Babel. And now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.

34:08

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

34:15

Jewish Talmud claims that some of the tower's builders intended to start a war against God and maybe he had reason for it.

34:22

There's another interesting version of the story in the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch which didn't make it into the

34:28

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.

34:37

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

34:43

Westminster Theological Journal. "'Certainly anyone denying the solidity "'of the firmament in Genesis 1 "'bears a heavy burden of proof.

34:52

"'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.'"

35:01

This is supposed to be a set of books divinely inspired by the all -knowing creator of the universe and yet it doesn't come close to matching up with reality.

35:11

This is why Christianity does not make sense. It's not unexpected that the ancient

35:18

Hebrews would have a similar worldview to that of their neighbors though especially considering that they were, if anything, less, if not more advanced than the other people in the area.

35:27

Less than two minutes. The Bible itself tells us that they were still using bronze tools and weapons while their neighbors moved on to iron.

35:37

Apparently not only did God not teach them how to work with iron but he wasn't even powerful enough to help defeat other tribes who used it as we can see in Judges 1 .19.

35:51

Sorry, one more. And the Lord was with Judah and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountains but he could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley because they had chariots of iron.

36:01

The God of the Old Testament is really a very human God. When it says that man is created in his image, it's not too far from the truth.

36:09

The roles are just reversed. He's jealous, vain, and cruel. He's not omniscient, omnipotent, or omnipresent.

36:17

Just like he came down from heaven to look at the Tower of Babel, he personally comes down to earth a number of times as do

36:23

Satan and angels who incidentally have hybrid children with women, human women in Genesis 6 right before God shows another human trait and regrets having made humans after which he proceeds to drown all but eight of them.

36:38

Is this one of the parts that's supposed to make sense? Another human trait that God has is a sense of smell.

36:45

The Bible talks literally dozens of times about how the aroma of burning flesh is pleasing to the Lord. And it says four different times that he gets all the fat.

36:54

Apparently God really likes burning fat. So do these things make sense for the kind of God that Christians believe in today?

37:04

Hopefully I can get through the rest of this during another portion. In opening statements, we move on to the next round of rebuttals or responses.

37:29

Each team will have eight minutes. Jeff and vocab go first. Time starts when

37:35

Jeff speaks. Hello. I'll get this fixed this time. Last time

37:40

I was having a little problem with it. Okay. So don't start that just yet. Sorry.

37:47

Make sure I don't knock this down. Okay. Well, we need to really look here tonight and just really describe that our opponents really are running out of time to make their case that atheism makes sense.

37:58

They've really minimized the tasks that was set before them this evening by saying that atheism is simply one thing, a denial of God's existence.

38:05

And that's all they require. Can you imagine for a moment if I were to walk into this room and speak to you in that way? I just have a belief that God exists, but it makes no impact on anything else that I believe.

38:14

I don't view the world in a certain way. I don't view people any way because of my belief in God. I have one belief that God exists and it affects nothing else.

38:23

You see, they've minimized the task before them by saying that their atheism is just a belief and people have different.

38:28

What we're saying to you guys tonight is this, is that no particular atheistic world you can make sense out of.

38:33

Induction, laws of logic, or the uniformity of nature, or human value and dignity. Important for you guys to respond to that.

38:41

So when they say Christianity, you can't agree on what Christianity is. Well, this is just where the glorious thing about God is, is that God has not only revealed himself in creation and conscious, but also he's revealed himself through his word and ultimately in his son.

38:53

So God has spoken so we can have certainty about what he says. Now, when they say Christians can't agree on what

38:59

Christianity is, well, that's an interesting claim to make because in 2 John 9, John says in the first century when people were coming in and teaching false teaching, he says, if anyone goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, he does not have

39:12

God. So Omar, the answer to your question is the answer to what a Christian is, is those who follow the apostolic teaching of Jesus Christ.

39:19

Those who follow the word of God. In other words, if you speak Christianese, but you deny what God says, you are not a

39:25

Christian. Simply a cannot be non -a. And so we need to really get into the most important parts of the debate tonight, and that's here.

39:31

On the one hand tonight, you have two atheists claiming there is no God. So there's no personal order or plan and no governing of this universe, just blind purposeless or random forces acting on matter.

39:40

They can claim that, but is that how they're living tonight? No. You heard all these things about science and he was butchering texts of the

39:47

Bible and everything else. We can get into that by the way in cross -examination. But their claim is the exact opposite of what they're standing on.

39:53

They're assuming that nature is what? Uniform. That's what they stand on. But their atheism is randomness and chance.

40:01

That is what they say. Haven't we all noticed that they're appealing to the universe as uniform and not random and is in fact predictable?

40:08

Ladies and gentlemen, you can't bring those things together. That is to say the atheist is a bag of contradictions because he can't make his worldview work with what he is doing.

40:16

Atheists try to reconcile this obvious conflict by saying we can appeal to the uniformity in nature because we observe that the universe exhibits uniformity.

40:24

But you see, that just begs the question, doesn't it? And you see, atheist philosophers like Bertrand Russell would point that out to our opponents because he argued forcefully that regularity in the past does not justify an appeal to regularity in the future.

40:38

Imagine for a moment an atheist challenging a Christian to give a cogent reason, a justification for his belief in God's existence.

40:45

And the Christian responded, because he just does. The atheist wouldn't accept that answer and we can't accept it from the atheist.

40:53

We are asking these atheists, what justifies their proceeding on the expectations the future be like the past?

41:00

They will argue for the necessity to be consistent. You heard that tonight, logical problems and this and that. But it's interesting, you gotta see that when they argue for logic and reason, that their naturalistic view of life is basically all is matter in motion.

41:13

Their worldview cannot provide the preconditions of intelligibility for immaterial, unchanging, and universal laws of logic.

41:20

Remember, friends, that the laws of logic aren't made of matter. Sometimes the atheist tries to provide an answer for this by saying that logic is just a social convention, but people simply just agree on what logic is.

41:32

Well, if that were the case, then vocab and I just conventionally decide tonight all who argue in favor of Christianity are being logically consistent.

41:40

All who argue in favor of atheism are logically inconsistent. You see, it's just totally arbitrary.

41:45

Atheists will sometimes say the laws of logic are something that happens inside our brains. But you see, if that were true, then the atheists would just undermine human freedom and the universal necessity of logic.

41:54

What's happening in their brains is not the same happening in our brains because we're not sharing the same brains.

42:00

Ultimately, when the atheist rejects God's existence and believes he is just the result of random chance occurrences, time and chance acting on matter, then he's not thinking, he's just fizzing.

42:11

Sort of like dropping a Mentos into a Coke bottle will cause it to chemically fizz. Dropping a Bible into Omar and Sean's lap will cause it to chemically fizz atheistic thoughts.

42:20

That's where atheism leaves you. And so atheism is left with no justification for the laws of logic.

42:26

Thank you. Vocab's first word.

43:07

Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Omar. I didn't hear any good reasons why atheism makes sense.

43:16

I heard a patchwork of misinterpreted scriptures from Sean and then the atheist did his atheistic skeptics annotated

43:25

Bible hermeneutic, which should never be trusted, and then said, look, this makes no sense,

43:31

Christians. I wanted to know why atheism made sense. That was a question

43:37

I was waiting to hear. Let's just say, everything Sean said about Hebrew cosmology is correct.

43:45

It does not follow atheism makes any sense at all. In fact, while trumpeting the achievements of modern science as well we should, he has no justification for why we can do science.

44:00

Science presupposes a number of things, most importantly, the laws of logic.

44:06

Atheism, while liking science, doesn't like the parent. It likes the child only.

44:13

The parent is the mind of God. Laws of logic are not material and atheistic worldview cannot account for them.

44:21

Omar came close when he said, we've agreed they're effective. We have agreed they're effective, but is that all they are?

44:29

Is that all the laws of logic are? If so, we can change them and agree that a different set of laws of logic are effective.

44:37

Two minutes. Now, I wish we could go through some of these texts, but I think this might be helpful to read a comparative cosmology from some of Israel's neighbors.

44:47

And maybe that'll help us see the way their cosmologies looked. The incarnation of this

44:53

God, this is Egyptian, cycle of the sun. The incarnation of this God enters at her first hour of evening, becoming effective again in the embrace of his father,

45:02

Osiris, and becoming purified therein. The incarnation of this God rests from life in the Duat at her second hour of pregnancy.

45:09

Then the incarnation of this God is governing the Westerners and giving directions in the Duat. Then the incarnation of this

45:15

God comes forth on earth again, having come into the world beyond his physical strength, growing great again, like the first occasion of his original state.

45:21

Then he has evolved into the great God, the winged disc. When this God sails to the limits of the base of the sky, she causes him to enter again into the middle of the night.

45:29

As he sails inside the disc, these stars are behind them. One minute. If you could go through this, you could see it's an

45:34

Egyptian explanation for the sun. Now, God made the sun on the fourth day, and just so the

45:42

Hebrews wouldn't worship it, says, created a greater light and a lesser light. Doesn't even use sun, because a lot of terminology with sun had cultic connotations then.

45:52

You have, in Genesis, creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, which, if they hold a big vein in cosmology, in a certain sense they agree with, out of nothing.

46:02

There's no battle of gods, and then from someone's body dropped the universe, which other ancient cosmologies do.

46:10

Greatly different, and the reason is because God made it and knows. There are no windows or pillars.

46:16

Look at those verses and see if they say what the atheists really say in regards to the universe, but you do have a

46:22

God calling things into existence that were not. And we can trust this

46:27

God to make sense of the universe, because he made it. Can the atheists make sense of why we can even make sense of the universe?

46:36

Balls of logic. And now we will have a rebuttal period for the atheist team,

46:47

Omar and Sean. Whoever you decide to go first, your time will begin. Sean, you have eight minutes.

47:25

They say that we don't have any reason for believing in uniformity in nature, and that we have to borrow from their worldview, where God makes things the way they are.

47:36

The problem is that we don't actually know exactly why the universe that we are in came into existence.

47:46

We don't know exactly what is beyond it, or why the laws that actually do govern it are there.

47:57

That doesn't mean that the best explanation for it is a supernatural omnipotent creator.

48:08

The best explanation is most likely something else natural, because that is all we see.

48:14

And we do see the reasons for things working the way that they do.

48:20

There are specific laws, such as gravity and electromagnetism, things that we understand fairly well how they work, and how matter interacts with other matter.

48:37

And that's all that it takes for us to be able to live in a universe that makes sense, where things do continue to happen the way they've happened in the past, because we still have these same laws governing all matter in the universe.

48:55

Likewise, the laws of logic, they're not exactly a material thing, but they are a description of the interaction of material things.

49:08

Jeff said, has anyone ever drank a log of logic? The real question is, has anyone ever taken a drink and not taken a drink at the same time?

49:19

It's all about the interaction of matter. It's not, that is why logic works, because of matter, not because of some immaterial law that's laid out by a god.

49:39

We'll stop the clock. We'll start it up when Omar speaks.

49:59

A little under six minutes. Okay, so Jeff and vocab, or mainly

50:16

Jeff, went back to talking about how atheism presupposes a certain type of worldview.

50:22

Well, that's simply false. And we looked at the dictionary definition of atheism. It doesn't presuppose any type of worldview. We have a billion atheists in China, and they don't all have a materialistic worldview.

50:32

Well, how do you explain that? Jeff talked about the arbitrariness of an atheistic worldview.

50:38

What is arbitrary is that if there is a god who declares what good is and what evil is, either it's good and evil because he says it's good, or it's good and evil because there's something pre -existing which dictates what good and evil would be.

50:53

If that's the case, then either goodness and evil is arbitrary, or it's dependent on a pre -existing law of existence.

51:03

If God is perfectly good, he could do no wrong and never could. This seems to pose serious limitations for a person who is omnipotent.

51:10

There are a lot of things that an all -powerful being cannot do if he cannot do any wrong. Another problem is what is known as the

51:17

Euthypro dilemma. Is an action good because God demands it, or does he demand it because it's good? If he demands it because it's good, then it cannot be said that God is an arbiter of goodness, rather that he is subject to goodness.

51:27

Goodness would be another regularity of the universe that precedes God, and the postulation of God's existence is what is supposed to explain the regularities of the universe.

51:35

But if an action is good because God demands it, it doesn't make any sense to say that goodness, whatever that is, isn't arbitrary, which is just a problem

51:43

Christians accuse atheists of being unable to resolve. So if God could arbitrarily decree it good to slaughter your enemies, take their possessions, enslave their wives, use their daughters for appropriate purposes, and smash the heads of their babies on rocks, as has been done in the

52:01

Old Testament, then it wouldn't make any sense to call this being good in any meaningful way. This would be a being that arbitrarily decides what goodness is.

52:09

Another one of Jeff's comments was that there's no way to talk about the uniformity of nature unless you're a

52:15

Christian. Well, this is simply not true. I like to quote Paul Davies because Christians love to quote

52:21

Paul Davies. They think that he's a pantheist, he's on their side. What Paul Davies is is a physicist, and his position on God does not support the

52:30

Christian worldview in the least. He says that science is founded on the hope that the world is rational in all its observable aspects.

52:36

That's what science is. If a plausible scientific theory can be constructed that will explain the origin of the entire physical universe, then we at least know that a scientific explanation is possible whether or not the current theory is right.

52:48

He also says many people like to believe in God's role as a prime mover, a first cause in the cosmic chain of causation, but what does it mean for a

52:55

God who is outside of time as God is supposed to be to cause anything? It doesn't make any sense. Because of this difficulty, believers in a timeless

53:01

God prefer to emphasize his role in upholding and sustaining the creation at every moment of its existence, but how is a

53:07

God outside of time able to uphold or do anything? This is something that actually has occurred to Christian theologians in the last 100 years, and they started to move away from this argument.

53:17

Jeff also talked about the fact that for an atheist, the entirety of your existence is some kind of cosmic accident.

53:25

This is simply not true. Again, to quote Paul Davies, the success of science is in the very least very strong circumstantial evidence in favor of the rationality of nature.

53:34

In science, if a certain line of reasoning is successful, we pursue it until we find it to fail. Has it failed?

53:41

Has anyone ever taken a glass of, what do we say, a glass of rationality and actually managed to do it?

53:48

No, because you can't possibly do something that is logically impossible. These two know very well that it's impossible to use something like logic to demonstrate the proof of itself.

54:03

That's something that's logically self -contradictory. Less than two minutes. I have another comment about the cosmic accident.

54:15

Why must the universe have a cause at all? Quantum mechanics shows us that uncaused events happen all the time. The existence of a universe without an external first cause need no longer be regarded as conflicting with the laws of physics.

54:26

This conclusion is based in particular on the application of cosmology to quantum physics. Given the laws, the existence of the universe is itself not miraculous.

54:34

Now, a Christian will say, well, how do you explain the fact that the universe appears to be so perfectly fine -tuned for the existence of life or the existence of logic?

54:43

Well, that's an interesting question. If you look at fine -tuning, when we talk about the laws of nature, what we are saying is that the universe exhibits certain regularities.

54:50

A law of nature is not a law in the legal sense decreed by some divine authority. A theist will want to say that any regularity at all requires further explanation.

54:58

One minute. This claim rests on the assumption that if there is no God, we should expect there to be no regularities in nature. There seems to be no reason to make this assumption.

55:06

Suppose that our God did create all the physical laws of our universe. Still, there must be other natural laws that apply to God. Any truth about the way that reality operates is a natural law.

55:14

If it's true that everything that God wills comes about, then that is a natural law. If it's true that God can think, then there must be laws governing his mental processes.

55:22

So even if there is a God, and even if God determined the laws of nature for our universe, God himself still must be subject to impersonal natural law.

55:29

Three seconds. But if there is, if there must be natural laws to which God is subject, then we cannot say that any natural laws demand an explanation in terms of God.

55:37

And this goes for natural laws of the universe. We see that this worldview, the idea that natural law can only come from a

55:43

God, itself presupposes that God is subject to certain types of worldviews, that he cannot do things that are logical and impossible. This doesn't make any sense.

55:50

A Christian must necessarily adopt a worldview that is self -contradictory.

56:03

Now both teams will move to the cross -examination round, where there'll be 10 minutes for each team to cross -examine the other.

56:12

We'll begin with Jeff and Vocab doing cross -examination of Omar and Sean first.

56:18

The 10 -minute period that you have during the cross -examination will start with your first word.

56:24

And for the audience, a reminder that during the cross -examination, essentially the team that's doing the cross -examination has the moderating power in their hand to direct these 10 minutes.

56:39

All right, Sean, thank you so much. Sean, thank you guys for being here, by the way. Thanks. Sean, you had said that -

56:47

Sean, you said that we don't know why the universe or how it came into existence. We don't know why the laws that govern it are there.

56:54

Is that correct? Well, we do have ideas about it, but we don't know definitively at this point.

57:00

So you don't know. So at that point, you live by faith. No, I don't claim to know.

57:07

That's the - So, but you - I accept that I don't know. Right, but you're assuming something about the universe and about the future of the universe, but you have no explanation.

57:15

And that's not faith? No, I am accepting that the most likely explanation for it is something natural.

57:22

I don't know for sure what that explanation will turn out to be yet. So you preclude the possibility of any supernatural.

57:30

So your naturalism drives your decision. No, I see no evidence for anything supernatural. And until I see some evidence for something supernatural,

57:38

I can't believe it. Do you believe in a sovereign God who governs the universe? No. No. Do you believe that you're, would you agree that your beliefs require a reason or justification?

57:49

Yes. Do you believe that the future will be like the past or that nature is uniform? Yes. You do.

57:55

What's your philosophical justification? I'm asking you for the justification, the satisfaction for the preconditions of intelligibility, for appealing to induction, and again, not using the past, because I'm begging the question, but the future.

58:08

What's your future justification? It's not about the past or the future. It's about the actual physical universe.

58:18

It, you know, it works the way it works. And as far as we know, it's going to continue to work that way.

58:23

And this is another fake memory of yours. I believe that the universe will work the way that it's worked for the last 33 years of my life.

58:32

By faith. I don't know that it will, so I believe that it will.

58:38

Okay, so would you, I'm gonna read you a quote from atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell on induction. He's an atheist, by the way. I have no reason to believe that it won't.

58:43

Okay, it has been argued that we have reason to know that the future will resemble the past because what was the future has constantly become the past and has always been found to resemble the past.

58:52

So we really have experience of the future, namely of times which were formerly future, which we may call past futures.

58:58

But such an argument really begs the very question of issue. That's what he's saying about what you're saying. We have experience of past futures, but not of future futures.

59:05

And the question is, will future futures resemble past futures? This question is not to be answered by an argument which stands from past futures alone.

59:15

We have therefore still, this is an atheist, to seek for some principle which shall enable us to know that the future will follow the same laws as the past.

59:23

What's your answer to Bertrand Russell's problem of induction? Again, there is no reason to believe that it won't.

59:31

That doesn't mean that it necessarily will, but until you give me a reason to think that tomorrow gravity won't work.

59:39

Yeah, I'm asking the questions right now, Sean. So given your disbelief in God and naturalistic worldview, are we required to follow absolute laws of logic?

59:49

Are we required to use absolute, to follow them? Yes. Yes. I mean, they aren't laws, though, actually.

59:58

They are just a description of the way the universe works. So are they something that happens in minds, or are they social conventions?

01:00:05

Neither. They're neither? No. So the laws of logic don't happen in minds, and they're not socially decided upon.

01:00:12

What we call the laws of logic are our conceptions of these things, but the reality of these things is just the interaction between matter.

01:00:23

So laws of logic are material? Yes. Okay, could you put one in my hand, please? We've already gone through this a bunch of times.

01:00:31

Well, material means made of matter, right? Correct. So if a law of logic is made of matter, can you spit that out on the table?

01:00:37

It is based on the interaction between matter. Matter interacting with matter, you're still coming back to the same point, though.

01:00:45

You're saying that laws of logic are material. Can I answer the question? Absolutely. Okay. So the question was whether the laws of logic would be something that you could put in your hand.

01:00:54

Now, laws of logic, like any law - Are they material? Are they material? In nature. No, I would say a law of the universe is not material.

01:01:01

So you disagree with Sean at that point? I do disagree with Sean. I would say that a law of the universe, or a law of nature, as being described, refers to a certain regularity of the universe.

01:01:12

In the same way you couldn't put gravity in your hand, you couldn't put an attribute of the way the universe appears to work in your hand.

01:01:19

Thank you, Omar. Omar, are laws of logic universal? As far as we know.

01:01:25

I don't know of any exceptions. Any place where laws of logic don't apply. This is a place.

01:01:31

Okay, Omar, thank you. Can you explain how a denial of God's existence, a denial of God's existence, would lead you to have a justification for universals at all?

01:01:42

Say that again? How would, with your denial of God's existence, how would you justify and appeal to any universal at all?

01:01:49

If all we are is atoms banging around, how do we get universals? I don't think I said that all we are is atoms banging around.

01:01:55

No, I'm making that assumption. Oh, well, maybe that's an erroneous assumption. Okay, well, are you a materialist?

01:02:01

Am I a materialist? Am I here to defend materialism? Well, I'm asking you personally, are you a materialist? I'm not here to defend my personal belief.

01:02:06

I'm here to say whether atheism makes sense. Right, does your denial of God's existence lead you to believe that all that exists is matter?

01:02:14

Not necessarily. Not necessarily? There could be other things aside from matter. Obviously, forces are not made of matter.

01:02:22

Okay, thank you. All right, I'm gonna change the track a little bit. Omar, do you believe, or this is for everyone, do you believe that we can actually know what happened in the past?

01:02:31

Could we have historical knowledge? With absolute certainty? No, of course not. But can we know? With absolute certainty?

01:02:37

I didn't say with absolute, can I know what happened? We know what happened 10 minutes ago. Within degrees of reasonability or probability, we can know.

01:02:44

Yes, with qualifications. With qualifications. We can have an idea. Do you believe that we can know Julius Caesar across the

01:02:50

Rhine? Is it possible to be known? It's not something that we can replicate it, so if we have good reason, if we have evidence that it occurred, we can know within a degree of probability, but it doesn't mean we can know for certain.

01:03:01

Do you believe that Alexander the Great was King Philip's son? I don't know if that's a historical fact.

01:03:08

I don't know if it's true. The historical facts you do know, how do you know them? How do I know the facts that I know?

01:03:15

I learn them. How do you learn them? How do I learn? I learn things the same way you learn things.

01:03:20

How do I learn historical facts then? How do you learn them? Yes. I assume that you gain the information and you decide if it makes sense or if it doesn't make sense, and you compare it to other things that you know about the universe, and that becomes knowledge.

01:03:35

When we're talking about Alexander, does it bother you that his two principal biographies were written 400 years after his death?

01:03:43

Does that bother you? I've never really thought about it. Does it bother you? I'm sorry, I can't help it.

01:03:49

So, does it bother you, Sean? Not particularly, because I don't have any kind of faith in Alexander.

01:03:56

You don't think he existed? I think he probably did, but I don't know. But you do have some faith in him. You have some faith in historical knowledge, do you not?

01:04:05

It's not unreasonable that he existed. If you said that he walked across the Rhine, that would be something that would require some evidence.

01:04:11

Does it concern you that the Gallic Wars, from which we got a lot of information about Caesar, Julius Caesar, were written around 50

01:04:17

BC, but our earliest copy is from 980. Does that bother you? I really don't see how that's relevant.

01:04:23

I didn't ask you to tell me if you thought it was relevant. I said it doesn't bother you. At this moment, I'm not bothered.

01:04:28

Does it concern you, Sean? No, I think that I think that it's - Okay, does it concern you that we only have about 10 copies of said

01:04:36

Gallic Wars? I think that it is a concern in trying to determine whether or not the information in it is true.

01:04:45

Less than two minutes. Why do you think I'm asking you these questions? Probably because it relates to the historical manuscript evidence for Christianity.

01:04:55

Well, not just that, but we have biographies of Jesus within the lifetime of eyewitnesses.

01:05:02

Even if you don't think it was written by eyewitnesses, you cannot deny it would be within their lifetime. And we have copies quickly after when they're written.

01:05:12

For example, John, written, let's say 100, we have copies from 125. Now, why are you so less certain about Jesus than you are

01:05:22

Caesar? I assume, because you, what's the problem? The problem is that when you look at these accounts, which no one claims that they were eyewitnesses, and both of you know, you've been to seminary, you know that these accounts in mainstream theology, no one considers these accounts.

01:05:38

I won't deal with this in my rebuttal, it's a false point. But go ahead. Okay, so the fact that when we look at these accounts, and we look at the chronology of when they were written, you can see how the accounts change over time.

01:05:49

When you look at Mark, written at best, maybe 30 years after the death of Christ, and then Mark, and then

01:05:55

Matthew, and Luke, and then you look at John, the story completely changes. By the time you get to John, you have a - Completely changes! You have an entirely embellished story.

01:06:01

Now, when you look at the closest Christian documents that you have, the letters of Paul, these documents don't mention anything about the miracles, the so -called miracle of Jesus' birth.

01:06:11

Could we stop there? Does Paul's documents mention the miracle of resurrection? Paul does talk about the resurrection.

01:06:17

Okay, I think they mention a pretty big miracle, then, wouldn't you agree? They seem to omit a large number of miracles. Was Paul writing a biography of Jesus no more?

01:06:25

Was he? Yes. He was writing letters. Okay, are we done, or do I have 10 seconds? Okay, so,

01:06:33

I would say this, that the real reason is your supernaturalistic bias, in that you can only accept material, naturalistic explanations, gets in the way of your history.

01:06:43

Now, the cross -examination is in the hands of Omar and Sean, and they'll be cross -examining

01:06:50

Bo -Kev and Jeff. You have 10 minutes. And your 10 minutes begins with your first question.

01:07:02

Okay, I have a few questions.

01:07:24

Can you tell me, what are the attributes of God? Well, I'll give you a few.

01:07:31

I mean, he's pretty awesome, so it's hard to put him in. Awesome, awesome, one. Yeah, awesome, he's one of them. He's infinite, he is all -powerful, he is good, he is holy, he is righteous.

01:07:41

Okay, that's good, that's good. What does it mean? He's Trinity, by the way, he's Trinity. Okay, what does it mean, if he is infinite, what does that mean, exactly?

01:07:47

Does he contain an infinite number of items? An infinite amount of? He's infinite in all his attributes. So when

01:07:52

I say, for example, that, I wouldn't just say God is loving, I would say God is love.

01:07:59

Is he also infinite hate? No. He doesn't contain hate. No, hate would be the opposite of his character.

01:08:06

And that actually goes back to a point you made, which is gonna actually help in the end. So God doesn't actually hate? He doesn't hate anything.

01:08:12

Does God hate? Now, when you raise the question of hate, I'm assuming you're meaning like a moral or evil hate.

01:08:18

I just mean the opposite of love. Yeah, does God love less? Absolutely. Does he hate?

01:08:23

Examples of hate, does God hate sin? Absolutely. Does he hate perfectly and infinitely? Oh, sure, absolutely.

01:08:29

Okay, so God is infinite love and infinite hate. He is infinite in all of his attributes, correct. He contains self -contradictory attributes, both love and hate, infinitely.

01:08:37

Well, hold on now, that's not a problem for my worldview, and I don't see it as self -contradiction either. He's infinite in all of his attributes.

01:08:43

That's not a self -contradiction if he's infinite in all of his attributes. It's not a problem for my worldview, it's a problem for yours.

01:08:49

Is he infinitely, what does it mean if he's infinitely powerful? What does that actually mean? That God has limitless power.

01:08:54

So he can do anything? Well, anything that's according to his nature. For example, we'd say sometimes these games we play, can

01:09:01

God create a rock too heavy that he can't lift? Well, that'd be a contradiction because God is all -powerful. He wouldn't create something contrary to his own nature.

01:09:07

That is all -powerful. So he wouldn't do it, not that he couldn't, he wouldn't. Exactly. Okay, so could he create?

01:09:14

For example, God cannot lie. God cannot lie. Against a character. Okay, so if he's omnipotent, is it possible,

01:09:21

I'm not talking about God now, is it possible for something to exist that is simultaneously, something that is infinitely destructible?

01:09:29

Which means that it can destroy anything to exist at the same time as something which is infinitely indestructible.

01:09:36

Could anything in the universe, could we have two objects, those two existing at the same time in this universe? They're. So something with infinite power to destroy and something which is infinitely indestructible, could that exist in this universe?

01:09:48

Or is that a logical impossibility? You know, I'll try to answer your question, but at some point along the way, Omar, you're gonna have to remember that the topic of the debate is which world makes sense and which makes more sense.

01:09:57

Yeah, I'm trying to make sense of how does this concept of God make sense. What you're doing now is you're asking a theological question about,

01:10:05

I guess, I'm assuming nature of some sort. I'm just trying to understand how is it that God can have these attributes which seem to cancel each other out?

01:10:11

He can destroy anything. But then he's also indestructible. I'll give you a straight answer for you. He is infinite in all of his attributes and he is holy, pure, righteous, and good in all of them.

01:10:21

And he knows every fact. Not only does God know every fact, Omar, he doesn't just take in knowledge of facts.

01:10:26

How do we know that he knows every fact? Omar, you gotta let me finish the question. I don't think I have to, actually. Okay. How do we know that God actually knows every fact?

01:10:35

Hold on one second. God is infinite in his knowledge and not only does he know things. How do you know that?

01:10:41

How do you know? I'm gonna explain it to you. Well, that's a question you should've known before you came to the debate, Omar. Well, this is the purpose of the cross -examination. God was in flesh and revealed himself to us.

01:10:48

That's how we know this. I don't think you can make points during my cross -examination. No, I answered it. You're not answering my question.

01:10:54

My question. I'm not trying to, Omar. Listen, the original point you had made, I was trying to answer. You asked me, does God know all things?

01:11:00

And I was trying to tell you that not only does God know all things, but he decrees what doesn't.

01:11:05

I asked you, how do you know that God knows all things? Again, God has revealed himself to us in creation.

01:11:11

What makes you know that you know? I'm gonna give you the answer. In creation, in conscience, it's displayed in all that you're doing right now.

01:11:19

How is what I'm doing telling you that God knows everything? Well, I'm showing you, I'm explaining, you're asking me how has

01:11:26

God revealed these things to us and I'm explaining he's revealed himself in creation and conscience. I'm not asking how he revealed himself. I'm asking how do you know that he has these attributes.

01:11:34

And Omar, Omar, I'm answering you and I'm not sure that you're listening. There's nothing about the universe that tells us that God has attributes.

01:11:41

Here's what I'm gonna make it easy as possible and something you should have known before you came to the debate tonight. God has spoken into history and revealed himself to us in creation, in conscience, in his word, through his prophets and ultimately in his son,

01:11:53

Jesus Christ, who reveals the father to us. God has spoken in history and that's why. Let me tell you one thing about an infinite number of things.

01:12:00

If God has infinite knowledge, that means there are an infinite number of things that he knows. That is a logical possibility.

01:12:06

Is that a question you're asking? I'm explaining to you why what you're saying isn't coherent. You're assuming that they're asking questions, right? I'm just making a statement about what you said.

01:12:14

What you said doesn't make sense. Yeah, you make me serious. You should be asking questions. Okay. You can make statements if you want.

01:12:19

Okay, I thought we were asking questions. I thought the rule was questions. Is the mind of God a rational system?

01:12:25

Is the mind of God a rational system? Yeah, is he rational? Well, in John chapter one, verse one, one of the documents that God has given us.

01:12:30

You can just tell me yes or no. Well, I'm gonna give the answer. In John one, one, it says, in our game, in our game,

01:12:35

I don't want you to waste my time. God is rational and logical because it's part of his character. It's a rational system.

01:12:41

Yeah. Well, not a rational system. He is logic. His mind is a rational system. His mind is a rational system.

01:12:48

Yeah, when you say he has a mind, that sort of presupposes that it's some kind of system which operates in a certain way.

01:12:54

Well, not that logic exists above God or below God. I'm talking about God's mind. Right, exactly, and I'm answering you.

01:13:00

In our game, hologos means, in the beginning was the word. So, it is a rational system. Reason, order, yes, he is a rational system.

01:13:05

Okay, is this rational system consistent and complete? Is God's rational system consistent and complete?

01:13:10

In his mind, is it consistent and complete? You're asking if God thinks logically? No, I'm asking you if God's mind is consistent and complete.

01:13:18

Yeah, sure, God's mind is consistent and complete. No rational system can exist which is both consistent and complete.

01:13:25

That's a logical impossibility. Therefore, your concept of God's mind is a logical impossibility.

01:13:31

This being cannot exist. So, what you're saying, Omar, what you're saying, basically, is that if God's not like you, he can't exist?

01:13:39

I didn't say anything like that. What I said is that if God's mind is a rational system and it is complete and consistent, then that's a logical impossibility.

01:13:48

No logical system can exist which is complete and consistent. Let's go a little second here. I don't know if it's a question, but it would seem like that would contradict itself.

01:13:57

We want to answer questions. If there's questions, we can go to the board. If you want to rebut it. How does

01:14:02

God know for certain that he's omniscient? How does God know for certain that he's omniscient? I think the definition of omniscient would include that.

01:14:08

Well, if he thought he was omniscient, then he would assume he was omniscient, but that doesn't prove that he is. I think

01:14:15

I might be omniscient. To know all proposition with absolute certainty,

01:14:21

God must know with absolute certainty that God is not mistaken, it's true. He could not know that because if it were false, then he wouldn't know it were false.

01:14:31

So, that's a logical possibility. The, well,

01:14:37

I don't know what the question is. I'm just pointing out. You're making a statement. You have to ask a question. I wanted to ask you, if you think it's possible the universe has a natural origin that you or we as a species just don't understand yet.

01:14:51

You think it's possible that there's a natural origin. Do I think it's, no,

01:14:57

I do not think it's possible that nature has at its root, nature. I don't think it's possible. Do you think it's possible that God could use a natural system, a self -sustaining system to create the universe?

01:15:08

Yes, the supernatural God could use. God could do that. Yes, but see, you're starting, but the thing is

01:15:16

God is supernatural, so it's not a natural system. What does supernatural mean? Above nature is how

01:15:21

I'd describe it. So it's, God is not a part of nature. Two minutes. God is not part of the created order.

01:15:29

I would define the universe as all created things. Okay, so God is not a part. Well, as an example, to the

01:15:37

Christian worldview, it shows very clearly that God existed outside of time and what he created.

01:15:44

He created ex nihilo out of nothing. So supernatural, he exists, self -existent from all eternity, none before, none after, and he speaks it into existence.

01:15:52

Why couldn't the universe be self -created by itself? Why couldn't? Well, it'd be a logical contradiction. Well, no, things pop into existence all the time through quantum mechanics.

01:15:59

Well, wait, wait, wait, can I? You're saying that quantum mechanics, where there's already things there.

01:16:06

Need to answer questions. Okay, well, I don't know what the question is. My question is whether it's possible that God could create, could use a process like, say, quantum mechanics, which demonstrates things popping into existence out of nothing, could he use that process to create the universe?

01:16:21

Is it possible that he could use quantum mechanics to create the universe? Is it possible the universe could appear in a way that doesn't require him to do anything?

01:16:31

Is that a possibility? So if you're saying God would be chilling outside of space and time, and all of a sudden, he's like, whoa, a universe is on my hands, where'd that come from?

01:16:41

No. No, well, he obviously wouldn't know where it came from. He obviously wouldn't know where it came from because he created a self -creating universe.

01:16:48

Is that possible? Could God create something that creates itself, is what you're saying,

01:16:54

I think. 30 seconds. I would say, Omar, nothing can create itself. That seems like properly basic.

01:17:02

Really? Yes. I have a quote from Paul Davies. I know you like him because you recommended his book to me.

01:17:11

15 seconds. I can find it. I might have to wait. Can we let him finish? Is that okay if we let him define the quote?

01:17:18

Is that okay? Because if you want the quote, go ahead and share. We'll close our time with the quote.

01:17:25

Time's up, except for the quote. Got it right here, hold on. The existence of a universe without an external first cause need no longer be regarded as conflicting with the laws of physics.

01:17:58

This conclusion is based in particular on the application of cosmology to quantum physics. Given the laws, the existence of the universe is itself not reckless.

01:18:07

Thank you for the quote, thanks for allowing me. Just a moment, we're gonna take a 15 minute break before beginning part two of the debate.

01:18:20

Part two will be a little bit shorter and the format will be as follows. Each team will have eight minutes to provide additional rebuttals, which will be followed by a final cross -examination period.

01:18:30

So we'll cross -examine again. And each team will have 10 minutes to make their final comments to close the night.

01:18:38

So we're gonna start part two promptly after the break. As a reminder, please refrain from coming up to talk to the participants during the break.

01:18:45

They'll be preparing for part two. They'll be happy to talk to you at the conclusion of tonight's event. With that being said, the 15 minute break begins now.