Dan Barker vs. James White, University of Illinois

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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00:09

Thank you very much.

00:21

Dan, just a reference to the very well -known text of 1 John 5 -7.

00:27

You said you had just recently discovered that 1 John 5 -7 is a text of sharing. Is that correct? Well, by recently

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I mean in the last 10 -something years. Recently since I was a preacher, yeah.

00:41

Okay, and you indicated that this means that the Bible has no tamper with it. Is that correct? The version of the

00:47

Bible, especially the King James Bible, has no tamper with it, yes. Okay, so are you at all familiar then with how 1

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John 5 -7 came to be in these Testaments? Do you know anything about Desiderius Erasmus? Yeah, I know the whole story.

01:01

Erasmus was trying to publish the first Greek version of the Bible. He could not find a version of the

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Greek Bible that had that. And yet, the Roman Catholic Church said that that verse was just in the Vulgate.

01:12

And they produced what now has turned out to be a phony document. That he succumbed to the pressure and he decided to go ahead and put that verse in anyway.

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But all scholars now know, and look at any modern translation. They all agree that that verse was phony, it was wrong.

01:28

There's no question from any secular scholar that I know about the side of the King James Bible, and advocates about the problem behind this phony story.

01:34

But he said, they produced the manuscript, who produced it? The Roman Catholic Church, intending the

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Vulgate, came up with a handwritten copy of what they said was an original

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Greek manuscript, which Erasmus felt pressure to accept. Although all scholars agree, there is no ancient

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Greek manuscript that has that verse in it. Now, the text that I cited, did they have the same textual problem that 1

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John 5 says? And did I quote 1 John 5? We're not able to take some of these scores.

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Romans 1 was one text, and Colossians 1 was the other. I'm not denying that you can argue indirectly for the

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Trinity in the Bible. I never said that. I'm just saying that the most common direct version that we used to quote all the time, the only direct reference to the 3 in 1, the triune, is that verse.

02:27

There are other ways to argue for it. I'm not denying that you can't use the Bible to argue indirectly. But you had said that I was citing from these texts, and you paralleled that with 1

02:37

John 5, 7. No, I didn't say any text was parallel to anything. I'm just showing that the Bible does have that notice of unreliability.

02:45

Okay, so the fact that we've recognized the labor of creation means that it's unreliable.

02:52

Yes, there is some unreliability in the Bible. We don't have any ancient document that has as much ancient evidence for its transmission as the

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New Testament. For its transmission or for its truth? Its transmission. No, but I don't know of a lot that have worse either.

03:11

The Bible has a lot of copies. Many, many, many copies. But they're copies of copies of copies.

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Most of them come from the Middle Ages, basically. Maybe, but it's irrelevant.

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It doesn't attest to its truth. It's just its transmission. Okay. Is it not the case that that requires us to believe that God is in time, and that God experiences a past, present, and future?

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And can you cite to me any modern Christian scholars who would say that that is the classical doctrine, the

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Christian doctrine of God, that He is found at time? Well, I know Augustine used to say that God was outside of time.

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He was one of the earliest. But there are many theologians who do think God is outside of time.

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But I think it's irrelevant to the argument, whether you're in time or out of time. If you're arguing that God is outside of time, what does to exist mean?

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To exist means to occupy space -time. That's what the existence means. You measure something by space -time.

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If God exists outside of time, then God does not exist. Putting Him outside of time does not negate the saying argument that He knows the future of God.

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That's it. How's Mr. Augustine? Thanks a lot.

04:45

This has been one of the best I have to say. You lost a hair from all that thinking.

04:50

Thank you very much. Maybe I'm halfway there. Maybe I have this far to go. This new slide is what

04:59

I'm offering. Is that what you're going to say? Have you heard that old joke that some people say

05:06

Atheism is a religion? Atheism is a religion and baldness is a hair color. It's not like I was supposed to see this coming.

05:20

This swine flu virus is going on right now. Everybody's kind of scared. Did God intelligently design that virus?

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God intelligently designed the mechanism that brought that virus into existence, yes. I believe all things that happen in time are part of this solving of the problem.

05:41

The natural selection. They're not the same. I support the existence of natural selection.

05:49

It's natural evolution, not unnatural evolution. So God caused the swine flu virus.

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So God caused the swine flu virus. God caused everything in time and space. That's why everything in time and space has a purpose.

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And that purpose can be either for the glory or for the veneration of heaven. Well, it's interesting that you make that argument.

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As you always say, you're still in a children's hospital to see if there's no good God. But I am not the first person to sit across from you and point out to you that your argument, from a materialist perspective, is akin to a notion that has no basis in your worldview.

06:28

Designing something that feels like cosmic broccoli just is not really relevant in a naturalist conservative worldview.

06:34

You're borrowing from my worldview to make an argument in regards to the nature of evil. I'll talk about that later.

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He said I'm a strong man. He said I'm a broccoli man. I guess this would be a good chance to ask him to define your experience.

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You know, it's very interesting. When you ask someone to define your spirit, and then you do not recognize that, as a naturalist materialist, you do not allow for anything outside of the materialistic realm.

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So you're asking me to define something that exists outside of the realm, and you allow any evidence to exist in it.

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So when someone says a spirit, a non -material entity, that lives and is conscious and, in fact, interacts with the material universe, you say, well, that's not a definition because I've never seen one.

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But again, you're simply saying that you're being like the person I call a nautical who says the universe is made up only of Mars.

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And when someone tries to prove the existence of something other than Mars, you say, but I haven't said that the existence of anything outside of Mars. Okay, I'm not asking to prove it.

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I'm just asking for a definition. What is it? I just gave you the definition. But what is it? You said it's an entity. Is it composed of something?

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No, it's not composed. It's not composed of matter at all. Does it occupy space -time? No. Then how would you know if it did exist?

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Well, again, you have to have some source of information that transcends the material universe to have information about non -material entities.

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In the same way, you have to have information about non -material entities, such as the laws of gravity. And information, what is information?

08:00

Is information material or non -material? It's revelation. It comes into the natural realm from outside the natural realm.

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You mean the ink that's on the page of this Bible? No, the message that the ink represents and the language in which it's revealed.

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So a message is words, and words are concepts within minds, right? No, I don't believe so.

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Mankind experiences revelation in that way, but that does not limit God to that realm.

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So the word spirit, s -p -i -r -t, exists somewhere out there, transcendent? That thing is actually a thing out there that we know exists because some authority told it to exist?

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But we can't define it. Yes, I do accept the fact that I realize authority is defined for me in those ways, and beyond my natural capacities and experiences in them.

08:48

Okay, I'm going to turn it back over to Dr. White. It's Dr. Bell. Thank you very much.

09:00

We heard at the beginning of Dan's statement that what I'm arguing for is the

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God of the gaps. I am not. What we saw this evening, when we looked at the mechanism whereby

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ADP is reconstituted to ATP, that is not a gap where we just simply don't understand something.

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What has happened over the past 150 years is not that gaps have been filling in.

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It's that as we have discovered more and more about the incredible biological complexity of our life, the questions for anyone who denies design have multiplied endlessly.

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So I'm not talking about the God of the gaps. I'm talking about a God of the facts. And the fact is that what

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I showed you on the screen is a mechanism. If you walked into Hoover Dam and saw the turbines sitting there, they're creating electrical energy as the water flows through, you would never cross your mind that there was a

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God of design. Are there any engineers in this room? Yeah, there are some engineering students. It takes a little work to create something like that.

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Now make it on that level and do it without any instruments. That's something called intelligent design.

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He says that he is proposing that we have reached the end of science. I am proposing nothing of the kind. I am saying to you that every fact of science is a fact of God, that every fact of science reflects the creation that he himself has made.

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And so I am saying to you that that is the very foundation of doing meaningful science. But I also say that true science does not preclude us from asking ultimate questions.

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And what it does, it becomes stunted and it becomes holding upon itself to no longer ask meaningful questions.

10:37

We have a long string of alleged biblical contradictions presented to us.

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I wonder if Dan would take the time to do a little googling around. I spent the last month on my webcast going through every single one in the exact same order that Dan just presented.

10:52

Because I have been spending the past month and a half since I was invited to do this, listening to Dan Gardner's debates.

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He used the exact same titles in the debate only a few months ago. And so I played every single one of his comments and stopped and responded biblically to each one.

11:06

And so I invite you to listen to the dividing lines for a fuller explication of each one of those errors.

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But I would like to give you some real examples. For example, it seems to me that to become a naturalist of materials greatly impacts your ability to do exegesis of the text of Scripture.

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Because honestly, I said this, Dan is a nice guy, but his handling of Scripture is horrific.

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Absolutely horrific. Dan Gardner does not know that Kamiohane is one of the most common sexual barriers in the

11:34

Testament. Dan himself, in talking to students at GW, is that George Washington University? Is George Washington here?

11:41

That's George Washington? Okay, I'd have to say that too. When he was talking to GW students, he said that his degree in religion was, as he put it, glorified

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Sunday school. So evidently, they didn't teach in two years of undergraduate degree that he took anything about sexual criticism whatsoever.

11:57

If he had looked at that, then he would know a lot about the transmission of the text of the Testament. And what he's saying here is not an argument in any way, excuse me, quorum.

12:06

I've written an entire book on the Doctrine of the Trinity. You will never find 1 John 5, 7 cited in it as a foundation for the

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Doctrine of the Trinity. But one that is really troubling to me, because I think it addresses the issue of epistemology, is one in which

12:21

Dan has been corrected multiple times. He did a debate with Doug Wilson in 1997.

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And in that debate, he raised many of the same issues. He raised the question about the Gospel of John. Jesus at one point says, if I testify to myself, the testimony is not true, there is another who testifies to me.

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That is the Father, who is referring here to the Jewish concept of having more than one witness, rather than often two or three witnesses.

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But then in a different context later, he says, even if I do testify to myself, my testimony is true.

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Why? Because I know where I've come from and where I am going. He makes reference to his divine nature, which takes him to a different context.

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Now, I've read Dan Barber's book about this, about his losing faith in faith. And when I read him,

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I try to read him in context. He goes to this list, he says this and this, that Christ God is

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Christian is not existent. Dan Barber once preached to Jesus, now Dan Barber doesn't preach to Jesus, therefore Dan Barber doesn't exist.

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Does that make sense? I don't think so. You have to allow for context, don't you?

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And the same thing is true in looking at John's chapter. The same thing is true, I spent half, if not half an hour or so, recently demonstrating that Dan likes to say,

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Rasach does not mean murder. And in the Doug Wilson debate, he got into an argument with him about the fact that, well, the

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Bible says you shall not kill, and then it tells you you can kill. And Doug Wilson said, well, didn't you notice that they were like in one chapter of each other?

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They think Moses is congregating himself. Yeah, well, if you know Hebrew, you wouldn't have done that. Doug said, do you think you know Hebrew? This is

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Moses we're talking about here. And the fact of the matter is, if you simply look up, and I have on my computer Bible works,

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I have Rx, all these scholarly resources, look up any of the Hebrew lexical sources, and I've taught

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Hebrew, and you will discover that the central aspect, the semantic domain of Rasach means to murder.

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Only by extension does the verb come to mean to kill. And so it can mean that, if the context would just be a lot of them.

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I'm not going to write all of them. If you're interested, if you found anything of merit in those types of arguments, look at the context of the text that Dan presented, and you will discover that there are, honestly,

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I could present to you a significantly better list of alleged foundations earlier. Those are simply based upon reading the text in surface -level fashion, and maybe that's what

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Dan was used to when he did what he did as a self -professing Christian.

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Certainly, the presentation of the Gospel that he delineated to the students at GW was nothing like any other. But if that was the kind of exegesis he did, well, now he's still doing it as an

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Atheist, and it seems a little bit odd to me that you would criticize Christians for having a surface -level view of the

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Bible, but then you turn around and use that very surface -level view yourself. And when Christians try to say we need to look at context, we need to make applications of principles, then you're not somehow allowed to do that.

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I find that to be a rather inconsistent thing. Finally, just a few moments I have here,

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Ed has often said for over a decade, just talk to any children's hospital and you know there's no good problem.

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I feel the weight of that emotional appeal, but I want you to try to hold off the emotion just long enough tonight to examine that assertion, because I submit to you it is evidence that Dan has to borrow from my

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God to make his arguments against my God. The reason that a child is suffering, the reason that a person dying,

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Dan Close would debate it once by reading a poem about a man whose mother was dying, and it tugs at the heartstrings, but it also demonstrates that the reason you and I detest death, the reason you and I detest sickness is because there's something in us that recognizes what we should be and what this world should be.

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There is something evil about these things, and we recognize that. And I simply submit to you that a naturalist of materials has no logical or rational grounds arising from neo -Garganian -like mutational evolutionary theory to care about what happens in a children's hospital.

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So, natural selection is just taking place there, isn't it? But you see, here's the thing.

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Dan wants to get me on natural selection. He wants to get me on Darwinism, because Dan loves music. He makes beautiful music.

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And I say to you, that is the lone evidence that Dan Barker has created the image of God and denies existence all along.

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He still knows what beauty is, what truth is, what honesty is, things like that.

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And that's the inconsistency that we look at this evening. Thank you.

17:12

Thank you, Mark, and thank you, James. I can set up a straw -man attack.

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Yes, I did a radio show with Manatta, and he cornered me into saying there's something true. But then he went on to repeat it and said, oh,

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Dan thinks the human brain is nothing more than broccoli. Well, obviously, a human brain is more complex than broccoli.

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But look what James and Paul Manatta are doing. They're taking out -of -context statements that were made.

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My point in that was to say that in the big picture of things, in the cosmic picture, the total cosmic picture, we don't matter any more than broccoli matters.

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I never pretended that broccoli somehow has a functional complexity of a human brain or any other type of brain.

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So it's a cheap trick to set up a straw -man and shoot it down like that. Now, logic, language, words, thoughts, they are all functions.

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And James is right about that, functionalism. They're all functions of a working brain. And so is our mind, a functioning working brain.

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This is my understanding. I don't speak for all atheists, obviously. But when the brain stops, the functioning stops.

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When the brain dies, the thinking dies. When the computer is unplugged, the software stops.

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When a computer is unplugged, there's nothing operating, is there? The brain is an operating, functioning thing.

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Thought does not happen at the level of neurons. And there's another straw -man that James is trying to set up. No one thinks that thought happens at the level of neurons.

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If you just read Douglas Hoffman's new book, I Am Strange, you see the amazing weirdness of this epiphenomenal functioning at a higher level, obviously.

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And I did compare it to digestion as an example. In that, as the stomach functions, it does what we call digestion.

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No one thinks that digestion, with a capital D, is a thing that exists out there. There's no cosmic digestion.

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When the stomach stops, digestion stops. It's just a word to describe how something works. In the same way, logic, thought, mind, are words to describe how this organ is working.

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They are not things. I repeat that this argument that James makes is actually closing the door on science.

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Are you suggesting that there will never be a natural explanation for the way those propagandas work?

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Are you announcing to us by authority that science will never, ever solve that question? And if you are, well, how very is that?

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How certain is that? It boils down to a design argument. Functional complexity is amazing.

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It is incredible. If you see a watch on the ground, like Katie said, or if you see the computer here that James is referring to, you go, wow, look at it.

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You see it now. But that argument has been put to bed a long, long time ago.

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And the simplest way of doing it was going back to, in my reading, going back to reading Doctrines of the Self -Esteem, but even in his blind watchmaker.

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If functional complexity requires design, think about that. Something's complex.

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It's an easy fact. It had to be designed. Well, the designer had to be at least as complex as what it designed.

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Didn't it? Right? When you see a watch, you assume that a human made something more complex than made the watch or the computer.

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Or you assume a group of computers, right? All of them, I suppose. A group of humans made the computer.

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So the mind of this being who created this complexity has to be at least as complex as this thing made.

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And if your argument says that functional complexity requires a designer, if that's your argument, then it would be theological not to conclude that the mind of the designer also needs a designer.

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If you're just going to assert the existence of this grand designer by fiat, then you don't need your designer argument at all.

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You may as well just assert his existence. You may as well just presuppose the existence of this designer.

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It's kind of like the guy who knows how in the world did they make all those rivers to flow right along the state borders.

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How do you explain that? Really. Think of the immense amount of engineering he took. Think of how expensive that must have been to do that, right?

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James is thinking backwards. He sees what he thinks is design, and he admits that natural selection is a part of the natural world, and yet he thinks natural selection has its limits.

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But scientists are repeatedly showing us over and over again the immense power of natural selection of accumulated small advantages over long periods of time that do result in exactly what appears to be intelligent design.

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It appears to be. But actually, you can have design in nature without intelligence. You can have design by the limited ways, arithmetically, that atoms combine, or matter geometrically, how molecules combine.

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There are certain laws, just basic laws, but they're not prescriptive laws, which describe how things work.

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And the laws of nature are not intelligent, and yet they can produce design because of survival.

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Or like Phineas Meany says in her play, there has to be a God, because look how perfectly the hand was made to fit inside the glove.

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Look at that. Four fingers and a thumb, right? We laugh at that. That's silly. But that's exactly what

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James is doing. He's looking at functional objects and he's saying, how do you explain that?

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Well, he explains it with more complexity. He explains it with something grander.

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And my five -year -old daughter, Christy, she was smarter than I was at kindergarten, she said, hey, Daddy, God made everything.

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Who made God? Now, when I was a theist, and I admit I had not a great education, it was just because the view was okay.

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I've done most of my research and study since then. And by the way, I've found out that I'm exactly right about the word rasak.

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And in my book, I explain the context. I think it is you who is taking that out of context. I explain the usage of the

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New Testament word, that the word rasak means kill, or even manslaughter, or something that even animals can do.

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I show that, I demonstrate that, and I'm not taking those words out of context. I know what the word says. And besides this, it's all beside the point, because God repeats the command not to kill with words other than rasak.

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So it's a smoke screen. It's a phony argument to try to salvage the reliability of the

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Bible. The Bible has no explanatory power outside itself. The Bible is written by primitive people.

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Anyone who uses the Bible has an authority. Even James admitted that there have been problems in the transmission of the

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Bible. And to his credit, he, it took me a lot longer, but he rejected 1

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John 5, 7. If any of you are reading the King James Bible, get your marker and cross that out of there.

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And there are other parts of the Bible as well that should be crossed off. What this shows us, James, is that Christians, even way back in the early times,

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Christians were in the habit of doctoring their documents. Yes, they were. We even know they tampered with Josephus in the year 9.

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We know that Christians mess with their documents. Yeah. And then

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I guess I would ask you to define, use the Bible to actually define the word trinity. I was doing a

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World Religious Conference in Canada. I sat next to a Hindu. Somebody asked a Hindu, how many gods are there in Hinduism?

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And I asked him, how many gods are there? And he said, in Hinduism, there's one god. And I said, what?

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There's all these different gods. And he said, the others are manifestations of the one god.

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And there's just one god and other gods. Well, I say that the trinity of the Bible is polytheistic.

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It's a Christian way of trying to not look polytheistic. But there are one god in three persons, three manifestations of the same god.

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In anybody's way of thinking, that is polytheistic. The trinity of the Bible is illogical and does not exist.