Debate: Does God Exist? # 5

CARM

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That's the great secret. Don't live for life after death, live for life before death.

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The people that are trying to push this on you, and Matt excluded, he's a nice person, but by and large the world's religions attempt to control you.

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I actually heard that Pope this morning say something in effect, I'll paraphrase, but you only have freedom by believing the tenants of the church.

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Right, letting them tell you what to do with your body, everything, all of those things. That is the control.

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There is freedom on this. Now, the arguments that Matt made can apply to anything.

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He was nice enough to mention invisible unicorns, and I suppose he was perhaps referring to the two invisible unicorns of Camp Quest.

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This is the camp for the children of atheists and other non -believers I told you about. But Matt, now do not fall into heresy.

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No one said they're pink unicorns. They may be pink, but a few moments spent with a good

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English language dictionary on the word invisible, and you'll know why no one can really say that.

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Unicorns may be or not. Now, at Camp Quest it is said that there are two invisible unicorns.

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You can't see, hear them, taste them, touch them, walk right through them. They don't leave any unicorn droppings.

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They can't hurt you, they can't fly, and they don't leave the campgrounds. Okay, there were some things, but they're there.

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And there is a prize of a godless $100 bill for any camper who can prove they aren't there, using logic or anything else they want to use.

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Now, the godless $100 bill is one that was manufactured prior to the 1954 when

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In God We Trust got stamped on the money. Somehow we managed to get through two world wars, a civil war, various other things, and without In God We Trust on the money.

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But then they put In God We Trust on the money, and America lost its only war. It's amazing the way people think that Katrina was

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God's punishment for gay pride marches. I was in a debate right after Katrina, by the way, on national radio with somebody out in California, and I said, now look, let's imagine the following situation.

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A levee is about to break, and the floodwaters are coming through, and you can have your choice of one of the two.

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Either 500 atheists building as fast as they can with sandbags to repair the walls, or 500 fundangelicals burning their knees out, praying that the levees hold.

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Which do you want to have? Well, they were outrageous that we could have both. We'd have the people both working, and that's not the condition.

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One or the other, do you want the people praying they're going to hold, or do you want the people working for it?

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Hands that help are better than lips that pray, said Robert Ingersoll. You know, you are in charge.

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It is your world. You take care of it. A process of proper thinking, proper thinking as defined by Matt.

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Let us hack the Pentateuch and make a new book of Matt. Perhaps slip him in between Leviticus and Numbers, or the

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Gospel of Matt. How we do it, the rules of logic. What are the rules of logic? Well, here they are, and they came from God.

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How do you know that, Matt? Where does it say that? We've got a lunatic outfit in northern

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Kentucky up where we live called Answers in Genesis that has a thing called the Creation Museum.

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It costs $27 million where they try to teach young minds that the earth is only 6 ,000 years old.

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That is an error on the magnitude of saying that the difference between New York and Los Angeles is 17 miles.

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That's how big an error it is, and yet they want people to believe that, and they are pushing it on them.

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And what do they use? They use the infallibility of the big book, the Holy Bible, the

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Word of God. Which one do you want? The one put out by the Gideons, or the

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Catholic one that has the Apocrypha in it? Which one is correct? I take

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Gideon Bibles from time to time. I think the Gideons want you to do that and annotate them for the thing. It is said that it is a naive man who thinks his daughter has religion when she comes home with a

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Gideon Bible in her suitcase. But you can think about that too, and it will come to you in the middle of the night.

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I want you to know, because this may be one of your few chances to have someone tell you about it, the way that logical fallacy works.

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There are several basic arguments for the existence of God, and they all boil down to these few.

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One is the argument from authority. It's true because the Bible says it is.

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Back to the invisible unicorns. Every so often a little camper at Camp Crestwell says, well,

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Edwin should prove the unicorns are there. And I said, no kid, no, no, I have faith. My daddy believed in them, my daddy before him did.

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I have a big book that tells about it. It's far too holy for the likes of you, kid. But they're there.

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You've got to have faith. Right. Okay, so we have the argument from authority.

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We have that it's true because the Bible says it's true. How do you know the Bible says it's true?

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Because the Bible says it's true. Then we have the argument from ignorance. That's the invisible unicorn argument.

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It's true because you can't prove it's not true. Well, prove there are no invisible unicorns, and we'll go on to yours.

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Then we have the argument from design, that you can't put a bunch of parts together in a washing machine and come out with a

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Chevy. Give that some thought of how truly ridiculous that is. Evolution and physical processes of growth and development, development of mind, logic, human behavior, and so on, is not by accident.

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It happened in a series of very precise steps, very predictable within the bounds of science.

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Become educated about your world. Religion is not the answer.

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It is, in many cases, the problem. Education and logic and science is the answer to the solution.

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We may still live and not overpopulate our planet like maggots on a dead possum and become extinct because of absurd religious ideas.

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We can make it if we abandon some mythology that is very rapidly destroying us.

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Thank you. Thank you. We'll now move to the five -minute conclusions, and I believe,

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Edwin, you were going to go first in the five -minute conclusions. Again, I thank all of you. The reason I'm going first is by agreement on the rules of formal debate.

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Because my fellow human, Matt, has the burden of proof, as I said,

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I don't have to prove anything. Matt has to prove his thesis, does God exist? Well, prove it,

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Matt. I've proved the invisible unicorns exist by every rule of logic you have.

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Because Matt has the burden of proof in formal debate, he gets to go first and open the debate and state the essential matter, and he also gets to conclude the debate and have the final word.

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That's fine. Same works in criminal prosecutions in court or jury trials.

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The party with the burden of proof goes first and last. But you know what?

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This little device here is called a BlackBerry. I'm not advertising BlackBerrys particularly. You've all got stuff.

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I'm going to turn it off so it doesn't ring. Amazing. This little thing gets telephone messages. It gets e -mail.

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It gets the Internet, all kinds of things. A device negligently not mentioned in the

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Bible, which was a Bronze Age culture. Bronze Age, they didn't even have the use of iron or certainly not steel.

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Iron was a very great commodity. But these were people who rode around on horses, didn't know anything about electronics or computers, and they did the best they could.

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If they say that the altar was three cubits around by one cubit across, which would make pi three, not 3 .14159,

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we can forgive them for that because they were primitive people without the knowledge. If they say a bat is a bird, we can also accept that.

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But when you start saying everything is true. Now, Matt, to his credit, has not said every word in the

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Bible is true. He's a much higher ethical standard, that going to the guts of the matter, that God exists because logic exists is what he's saying.

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But wouldn't it have been nice if Moses had had something like this? Just imagine.

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If Moses had something like this, he might have saved 39 and a half years of wandering in the

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Sinai and not wound up in a country with no oil. How about that?

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God Almighty put him in a country with no oil. Amazing, isn't it? These are primitive myths.

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These are stories of people. Now, there is nothing wrong with myth. Myth can be true without being literal.

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If there's a myth on the founding of the city of Rome, well, Rome was founded. If there's a myth for how various things came about, they did come about.

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But no one really, I don't think, any educated Roman really believed that Rome was founded by Remus, whose brother

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Romulus and Remus were suckled by a she -wolf, or alternatively that Aeneas, the son of Priam, king of Troy, came and founded the city.

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Take your choice. But when it comes to the mythology of the Bible, which is also a beautiful myth and has certain legitimacy for raising issues, then it's accepted as true by the fact that the

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Bible says it so. Now, students, people who are listening,

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I may not have a chance to talk to you, but we're going to have some fun in the question and answer period, I'm sure. That's always my favorite part of this thing.

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That's where you stamp on an atheist and get him and prove, you know, you're right and they're wrong and they're going to hell and so on. But you do not prove an unknown by appealing to an even greater unknown.

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You do not say, because I do not know where things came from, because I don't know where life came from, where the universe came from, what the destiny of humans is.