Dan Barker vs. James White, University of Illinois

1 John 5:7 and the Textual History of the Trinity

Reference to the very well-known text of 1 John 5, 7. You said you had just recently discovered that 1 John 5, 7 is a text of Shurim. Is that correct? Well, by recently, I mean in the last 10-something years.

You recently said that I would preach it, yeah. OK. And you indicated this means that the Bible has an intangible root. Is that correct? The version of the Bible, especially the King James Bible, has an intangible root, yes.

OK. So are you at all familiar, then, with how 1 John 5, 7 came to be in these Testaments? Do you know anything about Desiderius Erasmus? Yeah, I know that whole story. Erasmus was trying to publish the first Greek version of the Bible.

He could not find a version of the Greek Bible that had that. And yet, the Roman Catholic Church said that verse existed in the Vulgate. 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. But all scholars now know, and look at any modern translation, they all agree that that verse was phony and was wrong. But there's no question from any secular scholar that I know about the side of the King James Roman Catholic Church about the phony document that's told the story.

But you said they produced the manuscript. Who produced it? The Roman Catholic Church, intending the Vulgate, came up with a handwritten copy of what they said was an original Greek manuscript, which Erasmus felt pressure to accept.

Although, all scholars agree, there is no ancient Greek manuscript that has that verse in it. Now, the text that I cited, do they have the same textual problem that 1 John 5 says? And did I quote 1 John 5?

We're not even going to take some use for it. Romans 1 was one text, and Colossians 1 was the other. I'm not denying that you can argue indirectly for the 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 three in one, the triune, is that verse.

There are other ways to argue for it. And 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 John 5, 7.

There isn't any text that parallels between the two. I'm just showing that the Bible does have that menace of unreliability. OK. So the fact that we've recognized the labor of creation means that it's unreliable.

Yes. There is some unreliability in the Bible. Do you know of any ancient document that has as much ancient evidence for its transmission as the New Testament? Verse transmission or verse 2? Transmission.

No, but I don't know of a lot that have words here. The Bible has a lot of copies, many, many, many copies. But they're copies of copies of copies. Most of them come from the Middle Ages, basically. Would you agree with Bart Ehrman that by the date of the January of the New Testament is the single best-attested and most ancient-attested document of antiquity?

Maybe, but it's irrelevant. It doesn't attest to its truth. It's just its transmission. OK. Very quickly, you just used your Fang argument, the freewill argument for the non-existence of God. Is it not the case, again, that that requires us to believe that God is in time and that God experiences a past, present, and future?

And can you cite to me any modern Christian scholars who would say that that is the classical doctrine, the Christian doctrine of God, that He is found at time? Well, I know Augustine used to say that God was outside of time.

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

To exist means to occupy space-time. That's what the existence means. You measure something by space-time. If God exists outside of time, then God does not exist. Putting Him outside of time does not negate the Fang argument that He knows the future of God.

That's interesting. How about you, Mr. Augustine? You're one of the best, I have to say. You lost your hair from all that thinking. Maybe I'm halfway there. I'm halfway smart enough. This new swine flu virus.

Is that what it is? Have you heard that old joke that some people say Atheism is a religion? If Atheism is a religion, then baldness is a hair color. It's not a hair color. As you can see, it's pretty.

This swine flu virus is going on right now. Everybody's kind of scared. Did God intelligently design that virus? God intelligently designed the mechanism that brought that virus into existence, yes. I believe all things that happen in time are part of the solvent of creation.

And the mechanism that brought that virus into existence is evolution? The natural selection. The natural selection. Okay. So you do support evolution. I support the existence of natural selection. It's not evolution.

It's not natural evolution. So God designed the mechanism that brought the swine flu virus into existence. 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.

And that purpose can be either for the glory or for the restoration of children. Or to fill up the babies in the beginning of life. That could be his purpose. Well, it's interesting that you make that argument as you always say you're schooling in a children's hospital to see if there's no good God.

But I'm not the first person to sit across from you and point out to you that your argument from a spiritual perspective is akin to a notion that has no basis in your worldview. Designing something that kills off cosmic broccoli just is not really developable in a naturalist conservative worldview.

You're borrowing from my worldview to make an argument in regards to the nature of evil. I'll talk about that later. He said I'm a strong man. He said I'm a broccoli man. Okay. I guess this is your chance to ask me to define your experience.

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 are allowed for anything outside of the materialistic realm.

So you're asking me to define something that exists outside of the realm that you allow any evidence to exist in. And when someone says a spirit, a non-material entity that lives and is conscious and in fact interact with the material universe you say, well, that's not a definition because I've never seen one.

But again, you're simply saying that you're being like the person I call a nautical who says the universe is made out of only marble and when someone tries to prove the existence of something outside of the marble you say, but I haven't said that the existence of anything outside of the marble is safe.

Okay, I'm not asking for proof. I'm just asking for a definition. What is it? You said it's an entity. Is it composed of something? No, it's not composed of matter at all. Does it occupy space-time? No.

Then how would you know if it did exist? Well, again, you have to have some source of information that transcends the material universe to have information about non-material entities. In the same way, you have to have information about non-material entities such as the laws of water.

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

So the message is words and words are concepts within minds, right? No, I don't believe so. Mankind experiences revelation in that way, but that does not mean God is part of that realm. So the 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 us it exists, but we can't define it.

I do accept the fact that I realize that authority is defined for me in those places and beyond my natural capacity to experience it. Okay, I'll turn it over to Dr. White and his first rebuttal. Thank you very much.

Intelligent Design, God of the Gaps, and the Facts of Science

We heard at the beginning of Dan's statement that what I'm arguing for is the God of the gaps playing up. What we saw this evening, when we looked at the mechanism whereby ADP is reconstituted to ATP, that is not a gap where we just simply don't understand something.

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

So I'm not talking about the God of the gaps, I'm talking about the God of the facts. And the fact is that what I showed 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 them, you would never cross your mind that there's not a design.

Are there any engineers in this room? Yeah, I guess an engineering student? It takes a little work to create something like that. Now make it on that level and do it without any instruments. That's something called intelligent design.

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.

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

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

Because I have been spending the past month and a half since I was invited to do this listening to Dan Barber's debates. 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 vividly to each one.

And so I invite you to listen to the dividing lines for a fuller explication of each one of those errors. But I would like to give you some real examples. For example, it seems to me that to become a naturalist in materials greatly impacts your ability to do exegesis of the text of scripture.

Because honestly, Dan is a nice guy, but his handling of scripture is horrific. Absolutely horrific. Do not know that Kamiohami is one of the most common secular variants in the New Testament. Dan himself, in talking to his students at GW, is that George Washington University earlier this year?

That's George Washington? Okay. I didn't see that too. When he was talking to GW students, he said that his degree in religion was, as he put it, glorified Sunday school. So that meant that he didn't teach in the two years of undergraduate degree that he took anything about textual criticism whatsoever.

If he had looked at that, then he would know a lot about the transmission of the text in the New Testament. And what he's saying is not an argument in any way, shape, or form. 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 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 Dan has been corrected multiple times.

He did a debate with Doug Wilson in 1997. And in that debate, he raised maybe the same issues. He raised the question about the Gospel of John. Jesus at one point says, if I testify to myself, if that's always not true, there's another who testifies to me.

That is the Father. He was referring there to the Jewish concept of having more than one witness, rather than multiple Jewish witnesses. But then, in a different context later, he says even if I do testify to myself, my testimony is true.

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. Now, I've read Dan Barber's book, Godless, about his losing faith in faith.

And when I read him, I try to read him in context. He goes to this list. He says this and this, that Christ God as Christian does not exist. Dan Barber once preached Jesus, now Dan Barber doesn't preach Jesus, therefore Dan Barber doesn't exist.

Does that make sense? I don't think so. You have to allow for context, don't you? And the same thing is true of looking at John's chapter. The same thing is true. I spent half an hour, if not half an hour or so, recently demonstrating that Dan likes to say, Asah does not mean murder.

And in the Doug Wilson debate he got into an argument with me about the fact that, well, the Bible says you shall not kill and then it tells people to kill. And Doug Wilson said, oh, didn't you notice that they were like in one chapter of each other?

Do you think Moses was kind of making this up? Yeah, well, if you know Hebrew, who would have done that? Doug said, do you think you know Hebrew? This is Moses we're talking about here. And the fact of the matter is, if you simply look up and have on a computer Bible works, Iconics, all these scholarly resources, look up any of the Hebrew lexical sources, and I've taught Hebrew, and you will discover that the central aspect, the semantic domain of Asah means to murder.

Only by extension does it then come to mean to kill. And so it can be that, if the context would just be a Bible, and I don't know if you've read all of it, if you're interested, if you've 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, honestly, I can present to you a significantly better list of alleged foundations.

I really can. Those are simply based upon reading the text in a surface level fashion. And maybe that's what Dan was used to when he did what he did as a self-professing Christian. 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 Atheist, and it seems a little bit odd to me that you would criticize Christians for having a surface level view of the 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 application of principles, then you're not somehow allowed to do that. I find that to be a rather inconsistent thing. Finally, in just a few moments I have here, Ed has often said for over a decade, just talk to any children's hospital and you know there's no good problem.

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 God to make his arguments against my God.

The reason that a child's suffering, the reason that a person dying, Dan closed what David did 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.

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

Natural selection is just taking place there, isn't it? But you see, here's the thing. Dan wants to get me on natural selection. He wants to get me on Darwinism, because Dan loves beauty. He makes beautiful music.

And I say to you, that is the glowing evidence that Dan Barker was creating the image of God. And deny his existence all you want, he still knows what beauty is, what truth is, what honesty is, things like that.

And that's the inconsistency that we have to see today.

The Image of God, Moral Knowledge, and Human Suffering

I want to thank you, James.

I've been set up with straw man attack. Yes, I did show him that, and he cornered me into saying something true. But then he went on to say, oh, Dan thinks the human brain is nothing more than broccoli.

Well, obviously a human brain is more complex than broccoli. But look what James and Paul and I are doing. They're taking out of context statements that were made. My point in that is 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.

I never pretended that broccoli somehow has a functional complexity of a human brain or any other type of brain. So it's a cheap trick to set up a straw man and shoot it down like that. Now, language, words, thoughts, they are all functions, and James is right about that, functionalism.

They are all functions of a working brain. And so is our mind, a functioning working brain. This is my understanding. I don't speak for all the philosophers, but when the brain stops, the functioning stops.

When the brain dies, the thinking dies. When the computer is unplugged, the software stops. When a computer is unplugged, there's nothing operating, is there? The brain is an operating functioning thing.

Thought does not happen at the level of neurons, and there's another straw man that James kind of set up. No one thinks that thought happens at the level of neurons. If you just read Douglas Hofstadter's new book, I and Strange Food, you see the amazing weirdness of this epiphenomenal functioning at a higher level, obviously.

And I did compare it to digestion as an example, in that, as the stomach functions, it does what we call digestion. No one thinks that digestion with a capital D is a thing that exists out there. There's no cosmic digestion.

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. They are not things. I repeat that this argument that James makes is actually closing the door on science. Are you suggesting that there will never be a natural explanation for the way those problems work?

Are you announcing to us by authority that science will never, ever solve that question? And if you are, well, how very is that? How certain is that? It boils down to a design argument. Functional complexity is amazing.

It is incredible. If you see it, watch it on the ground, like David said. Or if you see the computer here that James is referring to, you go, wow. Look at it if you see it now. But, that argument has been put to bed a long, long time ago.

In the simplest way of doing it, because going back to in my reading, going back to reading Dawkins and the self-esteemed, and his blind watchmaker, if functional complexity requires a designer, think about that.

Something's complex. It's an easy fact. It had to be designed. Well, the designer had to be at least as complex as what it designed. Didn't it? Right? When you see a watch, you assume that a human made something more complex than maybe a watch or a computer.

Or you assume a group of computers, like all of these, I suppose. A group of humans made a computer. So, the mind of this being who created this complexity has to be at least as complex as this thing made.

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. 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.

You may be able to just assert his existence. You may be able to just pre-suppose the existence of this designer. 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.

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? 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.

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.

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 the matter geometrically how molecules combine.

There are certain laws just basic laws that are not prescriptive laws that just describe how things work. And the laws of nature are not intelligent, and yet they can produce design because of survival.

Or like Cleo Sweeney says in her play, there has to be a God, because look how perfectly the hand was made to fit inside the glove. Look at that. Four fingers and a thumb, right? We laugh at that. That's silly.

But that's exactly what James is doing. He's looking at functional complexity and he's saying, how do you explain that? Well, he explains it with more complexity. He explains it with something grander.

And my five-year-old daughter, Christy, she was smart enough as a kindergarten teacher to say, hey Dad, God made everything. Who made God? Now, when I was a theist, and I admit I had not a great education, that is to say it was okay.

I've done most of my research and study since then. By the way, I found out that I'm exactly right about the word Rostock. And in my book, I explain the context. I think it is you who's taking out the context.

I explain the usage of the New Testament word, that the word Rostock means kill in a manslaughter, or something that animals can do. 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 Rostock. So it's a smokescreen. It's a phony argument to try to salvage the reliability of the Bible.

The Bible has no explanatory power outside itself. The Bible is written by primitive people. Anyone who uses the Bible has an authority. Even James admitted that there have been problems in the transmission of the Bible.

And to his credit, he took me a lot longer, but he rejected 1 John 5 7. If any of you are reading the King James Bible, get your marker and cross that out of there. 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 early times, Christians were in the habit of doctoring their documents. Yes, they were. We even know things happened to Josephus in the year 9.

We know that Christians messed with their documents. Yeah. And then I guess I would ask you to define, use the Bible to actually define the word Trinity. I was doing a World Religious Conference in Canada a few years ago, and I sat next to a Hindu.

And somebody asked the Hindu, how many gods are there in Hinduism? And I asked him, how many gods are there? And he said,.

In Hinduism, there's one.

God. And I said, what? There's all these different gods. And he said, the others are manifestations of the one god. And there's just one god and other gods. Well, I say that the Triune God of the Bible is polytheistic.

It's a Christian way of trying to not look polytheistic. But there are one god and three persons, three manifestations of the same god, in anybody's way of thinking, that is polytheistic. So, the Triune God of the Bible is illogical and it does not exist.