Debate Teacher Reacts: Dinesh D'Souza vs Bart Ehrman

Cross-Examination as the Key to Judging a Debate

Is this you trying to figure out who won the last apologetics debate? My name is Nate Sala, I'm the president of a Christian apologetics ministry called The Clear Lens, and before I jumped into ministry, I taught debate.

So if you're looking for some clear principles and ways to determine a real winner for apologetics debates, then you've come to the right place. On this particular episode, we're looking at Dinesh D'Souza versus Bart Ehrman.

Now this debate took place about 10 years ago at Gordon College. The topic is theodicy, God, and suffering. That's a little vague, it's not quite clear what exactly the opponents will be arguing for and against.

I'm assuming that Dinesh D'Souza will take the position that suffering is best explained by Christianity and Bart Ehrman will oppose that. Now this debate, again, is almost two hours long, so what I'm going to do is focus on cross-examination because that's where a lot of the magic happens in terms of debate.

So without further ado, let's go ahead and jump into the video. All right, all right, all right, let's go and cross-exam.

Debate, debate, debate, let's do it. All right, so Dinesh, I want to know whether you believe that God answers prayer, and if you do think so, do you think that God sometimes does intervene in our world?

And the more involved part of that is if you think that God does not answer prayer, then I'd like to know that he doesn't intervene. I'd like to know in what sense you consider yourself a Christian. If you do think that God answers prayer and does intervene, then I'd like to know whether it bothers you that God doesn't answer prayer.

Stop, stop, stop. This is not—Bart.

Is not asking one question. He's asking like five questions here. That's always a bad thing to do. Maybe some debaters think it's a good thing, okay, because they think, I'm going to drop seven different questions and my opponent won't be able to answer them, obviously, because nobody can keep track of that, and when they don't answer all of them, they're going to look stupid, right?

And probably my guess is D'Souza is not going to be able to answer all of these questions, but the downside to that is if your opponent can't track five different questions, neither can the judge, neither can the audience.

So, Ehrman already is not doing a great job. Let.

Me go back and actually count how many questions. I say five. I want to know whether you believe that God answers prayer. One. And if you do think so, do you think that God sometimes does intervene in our world?

Two. And the more involved part of that is if you think that God does not answer prayer, then I'd like to know and that he doesn't intervene. Three. I'd like to know in what sense you consider yourself a Christian.

If you do think that God answers prayer and does intervene, then I'd like to know whether it bothers you that God doesn't answer prayer for people who are starving to death and being tortured and who are being murdered and so forth.

Four questions.

Four questions. And my guess is, again, D'Souza is not going to track this and neither is the.

Audience. Not all of them. I think that God can and does answer prayer. I think that God can and does intervene in the world. He has and I believe he still does. And however, I see this intervention in the world as rare, as an expression of God's gratuitous love and something that does not occur on a regular basis.

In fact, if it did, there would be no, we could no longer speak of the lawfulness of nature. So a miracle by definition is a rare contravention of a natural law. But I do believe it does happen and has happened.

Okay. So he answered two questions. Okay. And, you know, Ehrman's questions are probably designed to be a little bit more rhetorically punchy, not genuine questions about what D'Souza's own faith or emotions are, which is fine in a debate like this, but not when you pile all of them on at once.

That's not going to help. The problem of evil is often seen as a problem for the believer. I want to suggest it is a problem also for the unbeliever. Because if there is no God, is it not a fact that we are evolved primates, Darwinian creatures, if you will, in the world, struggling to survive and reproduce without an intelligent designer or a benign creator?

Now, if that is the case, here's my question. Isn't it true that the magnitude of human evil defies Darwinian explanation? And what I mean by this is that there is evil in nature, but evil in nature seems very frugally confined to survival.

A lion might eat an antelope. But have we ever met a lion that wants to abolish every antelope off the face of the earth? There's no lion Hitler, if you will. A lion will, when hungry, kill. But human evil outstrips Darwinian necessity.

You have people who want to wipe out entire tribes, and there's torture and cruelty that seems, again, to go far beyond the needs of survival and reproduction. So what is your explanation, if we are Darwinian primates, wherefore comes this kind of evil?

What's its source?

I'm torn on this one. Because on the one hand, this is right in line with D'Souza's original opening remarks. By the way, if you want to see the full debate, I've left the link in the show description down below.

Because D'Souza makes the point that evil is not just a problem for the Christian, it's a problem for the non-believer as well. And the point that he's making right here is there's something characteristically different about human creatures and all other creatures on the earth.

We express evil. We instill suffering in ways that all other creatures do not. And Darwinism does not explain everything. But my issue is D'Souza has not clearly tied this question back to something that Ehrman said in his opener, because Ehrman never talked about evolution.

And so judges in the audience are probably not going to make that connection. As a matter of fact, judges are probably thinking to themselves at this point, when did Ehrman even talk about evolution? So I don't know.

Let's go ahead and see what Ehrman says. Yeah, that's a great question.

I'm not sure I'm convinced that human evil far surpasses what you find in the animal kingdom. And I don't know what criteria one uses to establish what would be human evil that goes up to a certain level.

But beyond that, well, there must be a God. That doesn't make sense to me. But I'm thinking about my cat right now. Now, my cat loves torture. Cats are evil, that's why. It doesn't kill the mouse because it's hungry.

It tortures the mouse for hours if I let it. This is something that simply happens in the animal kingdom. Hitler was an oversized mouse. I think that the Holocaust is, I think, more readily explicable if humans have no constraints on them from above than it is by assuming that there's a God who answers prayer.

And so I don't see it as really a problem for, I mean, you keep referring to atheists, which I would consider myself to be an agnostic. I consider the enormity of evil in the world to be a much bigger problem for somebody who has faith in a God who created this world and is in some sense sovereign over this world and occasionally intervenes in this world.

It's a much bigger problem for somebody of that sort than for somebody who simply says that it is, in fact, there is no divine person over this world in control of it, no loving creator who is in charge of it, that, in fact, we're just here by ourselves, and that's why there are tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes and Holocausts.

So this isn't bad. Ehrman's response.

Isn't bad, especially because he came up with the whole, you know, cat torturing the mouse illustration on the fly, or it seems like he did. Of course, it would have been better if he had drawn from some kind of data or something to support himself here.

It's always better if you can do that in cross-exam. The downside to his response, though, is that this does not fully address D'Souza's challenge, because D'Souza wasn't talking about torture in his example.

D'Souza was making a point about the difference in magnitude with regard to killing. Humans are just way worse in magnitude. And so, in other words, there's no such thing as a lion that is seeking to eradicate all antelopes or whatever D'Souza said.

So in that sense, then, one cat torturing one mouse doesn't adequately address the challenge. It's a nice try by Ehrman,.

But it kind of fell short. My turn. Right. You suggested that somebody who suffers now may experience a billion years of happiness in the afterlife, and that, therefore, I'm not looking at the whole of Christian theology, only at a very small sliver.

And you said that I would prefer that we all lead a hedonist life here on earth. So this is good.

This is exactly what D'Souza said in his opener. So Ehrman is engaging D'Souza on his own words.

That's good. I guess I want to know whether you believe in hell, and whether people are punished in hell, and whether it's an eternal punishment, and whether God loves the people who are suffering eternal punishment in hell.

I'm especially thinking of, for example, somebody in, let's say, in some part of Africa, say in southern Africa, who has gotten AIDS, or somebody who is not a Christian, who has gone through horrible suffering here in this world, and then dies, and suffers torment for billions of years.

So I want to know whether you believe that, and if so, how that relates to your understanding of God. It's a good question.

Well, I'll say, I'll answer the question. I want to address, before I do, very briefly, the example that you gave about the cat and the mouse, because I think it is a, in a sense, based on a fallacy. The mouse who is being tortured by your cat is not being tortured in any sense that we mean the word torture.

If someone is torturing me by playfully tossing me up and down with a big bayonet waiting for me to land on it, the reason I'm being tortured is that I can anticipate death. I can see it. I can imagine it.

I have the cognitive faculties to apprehend it, and therein lies the torture. The torture is that I'm being playfully dangled before I'm going to be killed in a manner that I can anticipate. There's absolutely no sense that a mouse has the cognitive faculties, in fact, apparent, it seems that no animal does, to be able to foresee death, to know what death is like, to know that it is going to die.

Why does it try to escape? Because it is, it has a survival instinct built into it, which is Darwinian. But that doesn't mean it has the cognitive faculty to know, I will die. Human beings all die. Death comes to everyone.

The natural instinct that says run away when you see the lion is not the same as the one that, and so, and in the example that you give, the anticipation is necessary for the torture to make sense. Otherwise, if the cat is dangling the mouse and the mouse feels nothing, except I'm being dangled up and down, there is no.

Torture. Does the child who is thrown on the bayonet know that he's going to die? No. But, but,.

In that case, the evil is in the intention of the person doing it. And in this case, the question is whether the cat dangling the mouse is itself engaging in torture in the same way that the Nazis did when they treated the Jews in the way they did.

The Self-Imposed Nature of Hell

Okay, let's talk. These guys are good.

They are, they are good on their feet, the both of them. Ehrman's really given it to D'Souza at this point, and D'Souza is real nimble. I mean, like, you know, not even hesitating. Clearly, this goes back to something that I said in the last episode, which is your debate falls back on your preparation time, the research that you've done, your role-playing, you know, if you go through a fake interlocutor before you get up on stage with the real one.

Clearly, these guys have done the hard work. This is pretty good. The Christian view of God is that God.

Is salvation, right? The Bible says salvation is the gift of God. Now, for many years, I used to think that the Bible was saying that salvation is the gift from God, but no, it doesn't say that. Salvation is the gift of God.

God is the gift. God is the gift. Now, we, as human beings, have the free choice of saying yes to the gift or no. So easy as God made it, that all we have to do, no matter what the wreckage of our lives, no matter what the sins we've committed, all we have to do is utter the word yes.

That's it. That's the only prerequisite for salvation. That does it. So if someone says no in the face of a yes and you may enter sign, and if God himself is salvation, to say no to God is to say no to what God is.

That is my definition of hell. If God is goodness, purity, beauty, truth, and you say no to God, you are cutting yourself off voluntarily from those.

Divine attributes by your own will. Yeah. So this is the C .S. Lewis response, kind of, you know, hell is not imposed by God. It's self-imposed. You know, the gates of hell are locked from the inside, and people freely choose to reject God, even if they do suffer in this life.

Now, is that an emotionally satisfying answer to the non-believer, whether it's Ehrman or in the audience or the, you know, whatever? Probably not. But in terms of an argument, it shows that there is no inconsistency in this view up to this point.

And what does God do? God merely acquiesces in.

Your free choice. So, this is the simple paradigm. There are multiple tough cases. What about the Hindu who's lived a decent life and has never heard of Jesus Christ? I'm not addressing those cases. I noticed.

But I'm not ducking them either. I'm not ducking them. Yeah, you should. And I'm happy to address the issue because here I think we have a different question, which is the Bible says clearly that Jesus is the only way to salvation, and I believe that.

Some people interpret that to mean something else. All those who have not explicitly accepted Jesus go to hell. That is one possible interpretation of the other statement, but not the only one. And in fact, there are many Christians who do not interpret the first statement in the Bible to mean the second statement, which is an interpretation of the Bible.

Therefore, if you were to ask me, what happens to the guy in Papua New Guinea who's never heard of God or never heard of Jesus? My answer is, I don't know. I leave that to God's infinite mercy and justice.

But no, I'm not declaring that that guy goes to hell because I'm not sure that Bible statement A leads to.

Interpretation. B. My turn. Okay, so again, Ehrman's question was, how can you reconcile your Christian position that there is hope for people beyond suffering in this life if God also sends people to hell?

And the answer is, that's not exactly the Christian view. If you take it seriously, people send themselves to hell when they choose to reject God. So, the hope remains, and the choice is yours, essentially.

And so, D'Souza's done a pretty good job there handling.

The question. Suffering ultimately is not an intellectual problem. It's an emotional problem. If you lose a child, you might wonder why. But really, your main concern is to alleviate the suffering. How do I feel better?

How do I have this wound bandaged and overcome? So, here's my question. Who has a better practical remedy for suffering? The Christian who can say this to someone, you know, you've lost your son, but you have the hope of an afterlife in which you'll see him again, offering genuine consolation to a bereaved person in that circumstance, or an atheist.

Who says, stuff happens. Right, this is the William Lane Craig approach. I'm sure other apologists have done this. It's a very standard response. One of the responses to the problem of evil. You've lost.

Your son. There's no explanation. There's no remedy. Get over it. As a practical matter, who has more resources for coping with suffering? The Christians, who started the Red Cross, innumerable organizations to alleviate suffering, or atheism, which basically says, this is the world as it is.

Again, it's a.

Great question, because what it's doing is it's shifting the burden, because now Ehrman has to explain what we sometimes call like the impact calculus is for his particular position.

And so, let's find out what Ehrman says. Yeah, actually my view of this, you might be surprised to find, isn't going to be your view. I think easy answers in the face of real suffering are cruel. I think when you have your son commit suicide, or your daughter get killed by a drunk driver, or your wife die because of an aneurysm, that the simple comfort of don't worry, they're in heaven now, really doesn't go very far.

I think it's a platitude that, in fact, I find offensive, because it doesn't take seriously the real nature of suffering. And I'm frankly,.

I'm surprised by this answer. It may be that Ehrman was not prepared for this question, so he's answering extemporaneously here. But the bottom line is, you have to go into these kinds of debates. I said this before, well-researched, well-prepared, you have to do role plays, you have to have somebody come in and fact-check you and double-check you, all that stuff.

And you have to be ready for these kinds of challenges that will, you have to anticipate that in cross-examination and in rebuttal, so that you can respond well. This, like I said, is a standard response by Christian apologists, what D'Souza just asked here.

And Ehrman should have been able to deal with that better, because what he just said is wrong. There are all kinds of data to show that even prayer alone provides positive coping mechanisms to deal with suffering, for people who are dealing with suffering, even including depression and anxiety.

You know, a quick Google Scholar search can find the studies that I'm talking about. They're all over the place. I mean, what is prayer if it's not a religious activity accompanied by a worldview that there is a God in heaven who is listening, and if there is a heaven, then your loved one potentially is there with God, the God that you're praying to?

I mean, this was just an awful response, and it definitely does not bear out by the data. And so on this question, D'Souza definitely wins the challenge here.

Throughout this entire debate, I've been puzzled a little bit by what seems to me almost an intellectualizing of the problem on your part, that you can kind of solve it by coming up with clever answers.

And this just strikes me like a slogan. I think that the way you comfort somebody is you do what the friends of Job did when he was suffering. They didn't give him platitudes. They came up to him, and they sat with him in silence for three days.

Oh, and then? You show your human support for a fellow human being. You put your arm around the person, and you tell them that you feel for them, and that you love them, and that you're there for them.

And in my opinion, that does a world more good than a platitude about the afterlife.

The Burden of Proof and the Afterlife

Well, Bart, let's look at this for a moment, because that's a very revealing statement. None of us knows what comes after death, right? You haven't been to the other side of the curtain.

No, I know, but you just said you did.

No. No, I didn't say I did. I said you are offering someone the hope….

Earlier you talked about people living forever in the afterlife, having suffered here,.

And now you've just said that this person is in heaven. I said it's a central proposition of Christian theology, which it is.

And you agree with it, don't you?

And I agree with it on the basis of revelation, but I want to….

Yeah, but that's not knowledge. That's faith.

I want to come to your point. As a matter of reason, engaging you as an agnostic, right? Here we have death. It's the final wall or curtain. None of us have been to the other side,.

Right?

There is no other side.

Well, there's something that comes after….

Well, hold on a second. There is no other side? That doesn't sound very agnostic-like, does it? I mean, that sounds actually very certain of Verman, who I thought he said he was agnostic, but now he's saying there is no other side with certainty?

For death, whether it's life after or nothing. But my point is we are not in a position to know.

Something is not nothing.

Either there is life after death or there isn't. Can you think of a third option?

There's no other side. That's a nothing. That's not a something.

All right.

You wrote a book about it.

The point I'm trying to make is that you are declaring to be a platitude, something that is very much an open question, a real possibility. In other words….

It's a…. Yeah, and you're admitting it's a possibility you don't even agree with.

No, I'm…. In a normal debate, if we were debating the existence of God….

If I were a judge and I was looking at Herman and how obtuse he's being at this point, because this is semantic obtuseness, I would… I'd probably be docking points as well. I mean, this is…. Clearly, we know what Herman… or excuse me, what D'Souza is trying to communicate.

Herman, at this point, is just trying to…. You know, D'Souza is out there saying, well, the sky is blue. It's not really blue. It's, you know, it's teal. It's like, okay, man, we got it. Let's just…. Let's get to the heart of the issue.

In a normal debate, if we were debating the existence of God, the burden of proof would be on me, because I'm saying there's a God, and I would need to prove it. In this debate, the burden of proof is on you, because you're saying there is an inherent inconsistency between Christian theology, the Christian God, all-powerful, benevolent, and the framework around that God,.

And the reality of suffering. Okay. It's ironic that D'Souza talks about a framework, because he's laying a framework. A good debater lays a framework wherein a judge…. Really, what they're doing is they're telling the judge how to determine the winner.

And so, here is D'Souza, and he's laying this out. Now, Herman can challenge this, but the bottom line is D'Souza is laying a framework by which everybody should determine who the winner is. And now, if Herman doesn't address that, if he lets it go, and he doesn't live up to the framework that D'Souza just laid out,.

Now he's in trouble. So, I am perfectly permitted to say, okay, let's see if there is this stated inconsistency. This theology posits the afterlife. I don't have to prove it. I'm simply saying, once you look at the full framework,.

The inconsistency disappears. Yes, you've intellectualized the problem.

That's why we're having a debate. But I don't mean to imply that suffering doesn't remain a deep problem or a deep mystery. The point I wanted to make about life after death is there is something in human nature that longs for life to go on.

Cultures throughout history and all religions have posited the afterlife as an arena of cosmic justice. Now, they could be making it up, but they could also be right. So, why would you dismiss a real possibility, which gives real hope and real consolation, as a platitude?

Because it is a platitude. You're saying it's okay.

What's a platitude? Is it a statement?

The platitude is that you have just told somebody whose daughter was killed in a car wreck that.

It's okay because she'll be in heaven now. I don't think I said it was okay. I said that despite the intensity of this suffering, this does not provide comfort.

It has for millions of people through history. It's created enormous guilt as well. It's created terrible suffering from people who think that they shouldn't mourn somebody because, after all, it was God's will.

Where's the evidence? Where's the evidence?

It's created pain for people who feel that their mourning is inadequate because they.

Should be actually mourning more. Most people feel like, you know, if my child is in heaven, then it should be okay. Well, it's not okay, if I may.

Oh, my goodness. That last part was an exercise in pure speculation. Now, I don't think D'Souza cited any studies either, okay? But D'Souza is ultimately the one asking the question. So, the onus is on Ehrman to support himself when he makes those kinds of claims with some data, with some studies, with anything that can back him up here.

And the fact is, the studies show the opposite. And so, Ehrman has, again, shot himself in the foot on this particular issue. That goes to D'Souza for sure. You know, at the end of the day, this debate was kind of close.

I mean, just looking at what both opponents are capable of, they were very agile, very nimble. They could think quickly on their feet, and that really does help, especially in a cross-examination. Now, out of the entire series that I've done so far, I'd say this one was probably the best one, just looking at matching skills, opponent versus opponent.

It was pretty good there. It could have been a lot better. It could have been actually really close. This could have been a slugfest, like the end of Rocky, punch for punch, were it not for Ehrman's key missteps in a couple of areas.

And that last one, when he makes a claim that really runs up against a lot of the data and studies that I mentioned in the video, that's where he made a humongous blunder. And that's where D'Souza, in my opinion, took cross-examination away from Ehrman.

Who do you think won the debate? Let me know in the comments below. I'd love to see what you guys think about that. Also, if you have any ideas about which particular debates that I should look at in the future on this series, then go ahead and let me know in the comments as well.

And finally, if you're a Christian looking for effective ways to communicate your faith that actually trade on the principles that I talk about in these videos, then make sure to go to our website. It's clearlens .org.

Thanks for watching, everybody, and I'll see you on the next one.