Debate: Does God Exist? # 13

My main question is, the second part of it is, do you think that those people that those faces represent, can they be the result of rain on rocks over long periods of time?

What is the point? Which one's more probable? Is it possible that rain over rocks, like we're the result of rain on rocks?

Is that possible? Or is it, or could, would you? Oh, let's see, because someone carved the faces on Mount Rushmore, someone must have made people.

Is that where you're going? Yes. Okay. No, because someone carved the faces on Mount Rushmore means there are two invisible unicorns at Camp Quest.

Thank you very much. Matt. No comment. The issue. Right. See, Matt thinks that's a totally devastating and convincing argument, because someone had to carve the faces on Mount Rushmore, therefore someone had to make people.

Right. Well, there's a design argument, I think, has value, but there's some unfortunate subjectivity in it, because you will interpret evidence based upon your presuppositions.

If you presuppose there is no designer, then there can't be any designer, or any designer evidence. If you presuppose that it's there, then you have the ability to be objective on the evidence and say, yes, it is possible.

So which view allows more objectivity? The Christian one, which says, yes, it's possible, but it may not have occurred, or the atheist one, which says, no, it's not possible.

At any point of your life, during your childhood, did you ever believe in God? Oh, absolutely, yes.

I was going to be a preacher. I say I came from a long line of clerics, unbroken tradition, going back to John Knox.

My father was a minister, my uncle, on and on back. My great -great -grandfather was a

Harvard theologian who wrote about the validity of slavery as a Christian institution, how

God had ordained slavery as the curse of Ham, one of the sons of Noah.

So yes, I was quite devout up until about age 16 or so when

I started reading some of the things my father preached against, some of the works of thinkers and so forth, and then they made the further mistake of sending me to college.

Very bad. Some of these people here are saying, like, they're not quite going along with the program.

Maybe they shouldn't. The Amish got it right. It's very bad to send kids to school. So you're, one of the major reasons for choosing not to believe in God was based on the things that your father preached about and the things that...

As I said earlier, I was born not believing in God. I needed to take a look at what put these

God things into my head and what harm was coming from them, and I do feel that it is by and large harmful.

I really do. So it came about by reading. It wasn't any kind of great revelation.

I didn't wake up one day and say, doggone, I'm an atheist. I tried to think, well, maybe there's a universal soul.

Maybe there's certain validity to all religions, and finally, you know, don't throw away the baby with the bath, that kind of thing, and the more

I thought about it, there was no baby and there was no bath to this thing, is the answer to your question.

And so you never, like, sat back and thought to yourself, if all of those things that you believed to be true when you were younger, that faith that you had, and you grew up and you saw that it was false, but you never once thought that all those things that you read in those textbooks or maybe the things that even your father preached, did you ever think that those things may be false because you once believed that it was true?

So can you believe that maybe the things that you're basing... How do I say this? Can you believe that maybe the things that you've concluded to now might be false since you once believed they were true?

Oh, sure, sure, sure. And I am very open to any evidence to the contrary. That's the difference between faith and the worldview that I now express.

If you present... Now, what would be valid evidence that there's a God? Okay, well, that's really up to you to show me.

But did you see the movie Independence Day, you know? Now there wasn't any doubt there were

UFOs. Look up there. There, you know, evidence of that character. Something that everyone can say, well, yeah, there's a

God. Then, you know, that's fine if there's a God, then there's proof of it, but there is no such thing.

But, you know, if any of the things that are predicted in the Bible, if the trumpet shall sound and the dead shall be raised, if incorruptible, if all of these things come to pass, the four horsemen ride, a third of the stars fall to earth, have you ever contemplated what would happen if one star hit the earth?

If any of those things happen, then I'll throw out all my blasphemous writings, go sign up, get baptized and believe.

I'm an atheist or an agnostic, and I've often been asked, where do I get my morals? And to me, that's such an absurd question.

It's an absurd question. I have no answer for it. I was wondering if you have any answer for it. Okay, morals evolve and are developed.

As I say, the morals of Christians take a look... Have you ever read the Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne?

I suggest that you read it. Read some of the writing, read the writings of Martin Luther, where he said the proper way to baptize a

Jew is to tie a millstone around his neck and throw him off of a bridge.

Our moral codes evolve, our humanistic codes evolve. By painful evolution, we do a lot of backsliding.

Right now, there is an attempt by some to take us back to the Middle Ages by denying the scientific method, saying that evolution is false and that the myths of Genesis are true.

And they are making inroads in our culture, and this is particularly frightening. In one generation, we could indeed be back in a

Dark Ages. So keep it up, and be proud. Don't reject the term atheist.

Another thinking human engaged in seeking truth. Thank you. Thank you.

Yes, sir, go ahead. You're the last of the litter. It's not absurd to ask an atheist where he or she gets her morals from.

That's not an absurd question at all. You'd have to demonstrate logically why it's an absurd statement. And I can say, where'd you get your clothes?

Where'd you get your food? Well, that's an absurd statement. Okay, sorry. Where do you get your food? Where do you get your morals?

It's extremely important that we understand from where you get them. If you get them from an atheistic perspective, they must be derived from one of two places, basically, or a combination of.

Your own preferences and social pressures and norms, or a combination there within. That means that, well, that's all

I can think of. You've got others. Let me know, and I'll say there's three, then. But the thing is, it becomes a subjective experience.

Why is it, then, that what you would think would be morally wrong? I might think is morally right, or vice versa.

Who would be right or wrong? If you want to say, well, society determines that, then what you're saying is the majority determines what truth is, or what is right.

No, I said, if you were to say that. If. Okay, and if you don't believe that, then good for you, because that would necessitate that there be a moral standard that society has to answer to, and that it is not the one or the thing that forms morality.

A Christian worldview can account for morality. Now, you may not agree with that, but we can account for it.

Don't lie, don't cheat, don't steal. Why? God says not to. Okay. So, why is it wrong as an atheist to steal?

You can say because it hurts somebody else. And the

Bible says you know it's wrong because the truth of God is written on your heart. You justify the scriptures themselves.

And you do not, I'm sorry, but you're not giving me anything logical to demonstrate why you have any objective moral standard.

Well, they're relative. Now, let me show this here. Everybody kind of agrees, and Matt just says to not lie is a good thing, right?

We shouldn't lie. Now, let's say you're in a situation where a child comes to your door frightened and comes in and opens the door and goes and hides in the closet.

And then an insane maniac who is a child killer known to be escaped from an asylum comes down the street with an axe and bangs on your door and say, where's the kid, is the moral thing to say,

I don't know, or second closet on the left? Should I respond? Okay. Still, the atheist has not given us any objective standard by which we can judge what is right or wrong.

And you can laugh, and you can say you don't need to, but you know what? You don't live,

I can, you don't live that way, do you? You don't live in the way that you would teach.

Morals are relative and subjective. Great. Then I'm going to go up to Mr. Kagan and I'm going to take a gun and I'm going to rob him.

Why is it wrong? You could not give me any reason other than subjective experiential reasons to demonstrate that it's wrong.

But I can. God says don't steal. Matt, if that's the only reason you don't steal, please go on believing in God, okay?

All right. Quickly. Let's get these three. You all have been a patient audience. Yes, I have.

Very good. Very good indeed. Let's go for about five more minutes and wrap it up quickly, okay? All right, sir.

This question is for you. Fine. I'll try and make it short. I hope, perhaps, you are familiar with the concept of irreducible complexity and biological separation.

Sure am. And I would like to know... There is no such concept. It's a concept made up by fundamentalist religious people.

Go on, please. All right, sir. Well, the whole structure of the cell itself has been scientifically proven, not proven by Christians or anything like that.

But it has been proven by scientists. that if you remove certain pieces of a cell, then the cell ceases to be able to function in another cell.

And there are different kinds of cells with respect to that kind of situation. That every cell has pieces in it that if you remove them, then they just can't work.

And the pieces of the cell that construct those pieces, they themselves are irreducibly complex and they can't be...

And I'm not trying to waste your time or anything. I know... So the question... No, no, no. I understand this question. Okay?

This is an argument right out of the book. This is an argument right out of the Discovery Institute at Seattle, Washington, the intelligent design think tank that also came up with the idea of an irreducible mousetrap that only had so many parts.

And the idea is that it could not have evolved, that it's so complex it had to be created.

Darwin dealt with this very argument in his book, The Origin of Species, which people who condemn it have not read.

I suggest you read it. Yes, there are simpler forms of cell organization of amino acids and things.

Ask a biologist, don't take my word for it. But the irreducibly complex argument does not work.