Craig/Harris debate

Alpha & Omega Ministries

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Webcasting around the world from the desert metropolis of Phoenix, Arizona, this is The Dividing Line.

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The Apostle Peter commanded Christians to be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us, yet to give that answer with gentleness and reverence.

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Our host is Dr. James White, director of Alpha Omega Ministries and an elder at the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church.

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This is a live program and we invite your participation. If you'd like to talk with Dr. White, call now at 602 -973 -4602 or toll -free across the

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United States, it's 1 -877 -753 -3341. And now with today's topic, here is

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James White. So did you tell me somebody was complaining that our music is dated because there's too many instruments in it?

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Is that what modern music is, is you can't get enough musicians together? I'm thinking we could get

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Lecrae to do us a favor. I think he would, but I'm not sure everybody in our audience would really be able to follow that all that well either, so it's hard to say.

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Anyway, hey, welcome to The Dividing Line. Before I jump into our topic for today,

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I would like to welcome to our phone lines or to the program, or to however you want to put it, the right reverend

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Dr. Michael O 'Fallon, sir. How are you? Good, James.

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Can you hold on just a second? I'm calling Steve Camp to see if he can just do a banjo version of Run to the Battle. Hold on just a second.

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Yeah, no kidding. No, I'm serious. Somebody said there were too many instruments in it. Is this a new trend?

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You're a music guy. Is music today supposed to have fewer instruments or what? Well, I think it's just trying to apply the regulative principles to your show.

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Well, if we did that, we would only have either classical music, because R .C. Sproul uses that, or George Beverly Shea, you know, something along those lines.

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Well, improperly applied. You just have to stand on top of your office and shout, so you're not using a microphone. That's true.

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Which really wouldn't get us very far. Hey, I'm looking at our website, which already has a beautiful banner add up, and you click on that, and it takes you over to a website hosted by,

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I think that's you, sovereigncruises .org. And so we are announcing today the

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Apologetics Cruise that will be taking place, Lord willing, and Harold Camping is wrong,

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January 2nd through 8th of 2012, which is well after,

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I think in October of this year is when the Eternal State starts. So we're really pushing it into the

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Eternal State here, but January 2nd through 8th of 2012, and so that's why

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Mike is on the phone line with me. Do you think anyone's going to notice, Mike, that in the third picture to the right there,

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I'm in a kilt? You know, I think my face is covering up your exposed legs, and I think

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I did that purposely. I don't think you did. I think we can see one left calf there. Yes, yes, you can, you can, but nothing more than that.

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We had a huge group there on that cruise. We did. That was fantastic. We did. And I will let you know that while I was huge on that cruise as well,

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I took both of my kilts with me to Glasgow in February, and they now fit again. So I'll be able to bring one of them along, and I'm sure you're really excited about that.

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Yes, and hopefully by the time we get there, I can wear one as well. Well, hey, you know what, if you want to make that your goal,

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I'll bring both of them along, because you did something. You wore a kilt for something.

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Was it band or something? Yes, back in my high school, Dunedin High School, that was the thing.

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We were bagpipers, and we had the Scottish Highlander band. There you go. So that's what we did.

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You'd know how to do it, and you wouldn't make fun of me like, unfortunately, everybody else on the cruise does.

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Anyhow, that's irrelevant. We are looking at this thing, and this is a massive, massive ship.

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Now, you've been on every ship on the ocean. Have you been on this one? Yes, we have.

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We've done a couple conferences on this particular ship. Let me just tell you, especially if you're folks that are veterans of doing the

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Alpha and Omega cruises, and this will be, I believe, our 11th cruise, James, believe it or not. 11th cruise.

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11th cruise. I collect all my room keys. I have them all in my office. You always get your portrait done time after time, and this time we won't have to use the wide -angle lens.

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But it's just going to be incredible. This particular ship, guys, those of you that have been on our other cruises, we've really gone.

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James, he has that kind of caviar and fine wine type of taste. We've been on some of the smaller ships, the more luxurious types.

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But this one is still a very luxurious ship. It has an immense amount of cabins and space on it and conference space, which means that we won't have to be run out of our conference space for bingo or something happening at the bar or whatever the case may be.

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We've got our conference space from basically 24 hours a day that we can use it.

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So with this ship, it's almost 140 ,000 tons. It's the second largest ship in the world.

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140 ,000. It is incredibly stable. So even if you're in the worst at seas, and I'm saying this for the benefit of Rich Pierce, that this ship is incredibly stable.

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Even down the middle of this ship they have a street, and with shopping malls and all the inside cabins look into the center of the ship.

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So if you're someone who has maybe not gone with us because you're afraid of how you're going to feel or whatever the case may be, on this ship we're giving everyone the opportunity to really have an incredible time bathed in the word, really involved in the apologetics of defending your faith, of being able to have that elbow time with James and with some of our other speakers and presenters, and we're going to be adding on to the list as time goes on.

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But we get all of that, guys, including your food and your drink, as long as you're Reformed Baptist and not

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Presbyterian, for $399 per person starting at. And we can hold that rate until April 15th.

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But all of that included, your conference time, your food, your accommodations, everything else, for six days at sea,

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I just don't think that there's anything else that can touch that. And that's always been our goal with Alpha and Omega.

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James has always really made a point of that, is to make sure that we can make this as affordable as possible, even to the extent of making sure that Alpha and Omega doesn't really get anything out of it, but just to make sure that you have the opportunity to be with us.

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It's that special of a time. Well, now, and what's more unusual is... I threw the ball back at you.

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Well, yes, what's even more unusual is the fact that we're going out of... Yes, hello. Ah, now we've lost him.

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You there, Mike? No, he can't hear me. We've lost him, too.

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Well, hopefully Mike will be back here in a moment. We're obviously having technical difficulties again.

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The Internet had worked just fine. Ever since I left for Minneapolis, maybe it's me,

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I don't know, but starting 45 to 50 minutes prior to the program today, we started having problems again.

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He's calling in again on line one. Hopefully we'll be able to get him back and...

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What? It dropped.

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So we are having major difficulties, and I apologize for that. I don't understand what's going on.

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Evidently neither does anybody else anywhere. So let me just tell you, hopefully we can get

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Mike back, and if he does call back, we need to let him know we did hear everything he had to say.

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But here is the rest of the story, and if we need to deadcast the rest of this and then post it, that's what we'll have to do.

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But I was given the opportunity of choosing different points of departure, and every time we've gone out of Florida, the folks in California have complained.

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And every time we go out of California or Vancouver or something, then the people on the

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East Coast complain. And so this cruise, you click on the link and follow everything, this cruise goes out of Galveston, Texas, which means you fly into Houston.

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Now everybody can get to Houston, so everybody in the middle should be very happy, but everybody should be happy because it's not difficult to get from Florida or California or wherever to Houston, Texas.

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And I've contacted some folks down in Houston to see if there's a possibility of our being able to arrange a debate.

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And, in fact, Mike was talking about actually doing the debate on the ship, which might be something to do as well.

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That's a possibility. But in any case, a lot of folks in the middle of the country would be able to make it because we're flying out of Houston.

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And like I said, any place, because Houston's a major hub, you can get there from all over the place.

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And so that's going to be exciting as well. It's also during a normal vacation time.

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A lot of the folks that go with us have families, they've got kids, and January 2nd or 8th is normally a time when people have off rather than having to go back immediately and stuff like that.

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So I'm hoping that's going to work. I've already mentioned, Mike likes to ask early on, and it's,

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I don't know, it's hard for me to think ahead real well. But Mike asked me to come up with the topics that I would be addressing on the ship.

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And I guess I've slipped into the Bart Ehrman mode as far as titles go.

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Short, pithy titles with a long expansion from there. But I have verified, exposing the presuppositions of liberal denials, the apostolic authorship of the

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New Testament books. In other words, I'm going to go through why we believe that Paul actually wrote the pastoral epistles, 2

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Peter, responding to Forge. I was trying to come up with something, what's the opposite of forged would be verified.

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Verified, inseparable, the wrath and love of God at Calvary, try to figure out what that one is all about.

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You can sort of tell. Unknown, Muhammad's ignorance of the New Testament and the Christian God shown from the

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Quran. And then we, only I would have a title that is a

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Greek word. Fopox, is Mike back? I'm sorry.

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I can't hear, I can't see you because you turned the light off out there. So I can neither see nor hear you anymore. See if it'll pop up.

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Let's, let's see. Hello, Mike. Hi, James.

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How are you? Hey, guess what? We heard everything you said. Fantastic. But Cox Communications is playing games with us.

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And I was even on the Janet Mefford show a week ago

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Friday. And right as they came to me nationwide program, I can hear them just fine.

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They can't hear a word from me. So we heard right up to the end of what you said and then disappeared.

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And so since then, I have been explaining to everyone why we're going out of Galveston. And the fact that everybody can get to Houston real easily.

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And that means everybody from all of the United States can make it. And I was just now going over the titles of my presentations.

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And I was just mocking myself for having used a Greek term. But what

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I was thinking right as I said, I said, Oh, I should have waited to get Mike back. And I could have asked Mike to pronounce the

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Greek term. And that would have just been even far more entertaining than my having said that it was

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F .I .P .O .X. The Roman Eucharistic Sacrifice in Light of the Ones for Allness of the Cross. Now, is that not the geekiest title you've ever had on a cruise?

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You know, I'll have to look back and see what other titles you've had to really measure that.

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But certainly, I think really what the listeners can understand is that this is not a cruise meant to just do it for a cruise sake.

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What we're trying to do is really have a conference where people can really be involved and not just have hour -long seminars and so forth and then be done and go play for the rest of the day, but really have time to be able to sit down and ask you the questions that they want to ask, to be able to learn more from you during that time.

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That was the whole concept behind doing this 12 years ago. And now we really have the opportunity at this point to make it happen.

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So, I think this one, certainly you're going to be more tired at the end of this one than refreshed.

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That's for sure. But I think that for the people that can come with us, this is more than almost a seminary type of experience, almost a

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LaBrie Institute sort of experience that we're going to have at sea. So, on a huge, huge, massive ship out at sea, and it's going to be an exciting thing to do.

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Now, you said that the special price, though, is only through Friday. It's only through Friday.

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And we have a certain amount of cabins that we have that are inside cabins that are very spacious.

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When you think of a cabin at sea, if you folks have never been, it's still going to be 170 square feet, the size of a small hotel room with your own restroom and everything else, no bunk beds.

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If you have two in a cabin, you can either have a roommate or you can put them together and have a full -size queen for you and your wife or vice versa for a wife and a husband.

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But it really is a comfortable time. It's a time where we can really be together. We'd love to have you call in, folks.

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You can call us at 877 -768 -2784, extension 103. 103 is the one just for this cruise.

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And for those of you that can, put a deposit down and not your full payment, and that deposit is fully refundable.

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If you can put a deposit down, we can guarantee that rate of $399 before we have to give those cabins back to the cruise line.

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So we'd love to have you on board and be with us this year. All right. Well, hey, Mike, thank you very much for joining us on the program today.

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And, of course, we will get this program posted as soon as we possibly can because the vast majority of our listeners are podcast listeners.

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It's amazing when I travel around the world how many people listen to the podcast.

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It's just an amazing thing that we're able to do these days. Now, do they have on -board tennis courts?

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They do have a full -size basketball court on board, but I'm sure that we could probably have a tennis court in Cozumel or Belize or Costa Maya.

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Yeah, yeah. There would be no problem with that. Because by then, if I'm bringing an extra kilt for you to wear, then you'll be right back to the form you once had as a professional tennis player.

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And only if you are playing with me. That would be the thing. All right, brother.

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Okay, now let me get this straight. You're going to play tennis with Mike, and he's going to wear a kilt? Yeah, he has to wear the kilt while we're playing tennis.

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I get it. Okay. Okay, we will not hold you to that one. Mike, thanks for joining us today.

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We look forward to what the Lord is going to do with our time at sea. And did we lose

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Mike? There he is. There he is. There he is. Sorry, somehow you had been put on hold.

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I'm not sure how. But we look forward to what the Lord is going to do with us when we have the opportunity of doing this. And we'll have updates on that website when we have further speakers and if we do a range of debate -type things and stuff like that, right?

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Yes, absolutely. Praise the Lord. Okay, thank you, sir. Amen, guys. All right, God bless. Bye -bye. All right, so that's coming up January 2nd through the 8th.

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I put him on hold in case you wanted to say anything to him. And I'm looking forward to it.

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Those topics are topics that mean a lot to me. And if you're listening on podcast, remember that super -duper itsy -bitsy -teeny -weeny price is only through this

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Friday. So that's always something we do when we launch things off to try to help give us an idea of who wants to come along and provide that kind of assistance.

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So that's the Apologetics Cruise, January 2nd through the 8th. Now, I had to reset the phones and everything.

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Hopefully we are back on track because today I wanted to, in fact, I need to plug this in.

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Hopefully it's not already on. There we go. And over the weekend, you are aware of the fact that over the past couple of weeks, actually, two debates with William Lane Craig have been posted, both with atheists.

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The one with Sam Harris I listened to yesterday once I got back from Minneapolis.

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And I had seen a lot of commentary online, but I wanted to listen to it myself.

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I don't know. I guess I have some bias here because there was a group that wanted to bring me in to speak.

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They had contacted Dr. Harris's representatives to look into the possibility of setting up a debate.

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And the initial response, clearly one that is regularly given to people, the initial response was one that began with the requirements, which included first -class travel and accommodations and a speaking fee of $25 ,000 to walk through the door, which is why it didn't take place, obviously.

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And I'll be perfectly honest with you. When you have opponents who have $15 ,000, $20 ,000, $25 ,000 speaking fees just to show up, even if I had someone that had that kind of money in support of this ministry, which we do not,

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I don't know that I would want to contribute to the Sam Harris Retirement Fund in that fashion.

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I mean, I just don't know. I mean, I would love to see these folks challenged on a meaningful biblical basis, but at the same time,

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I'm just loathe to make these people ever more rich, to do ever more of their own spreading of their disbelief.

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It's a difficult situation to resolve. And so as I listened to the debate, there was probably some prejudice in my mind, in the sense that I sort of figure if you're getting paid $25 ,000 to be standing in front of this audience and people have come from a long distance and so on and so forth, if you're getting paid $25 ,000,

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I sort of expect you to really produce something meaningful, not just the same old, same old.

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And I listened to the opening statements, and there are a couple places where I would have differed with Dr.

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Craig's presentation. But in general, it was a meaningful presentation of the grounding of morality in God.

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I would have had a whole lot more about the transcendent nature of God. It would have been a much more specifically Christian presentation.

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In that sense, not a general theistic presentation, but a much more specific presentation.

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There would have been differences there, but you understand what the issues are. And even when

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Sam Harris gave his presentation, I, you know, at least for the first 20 -minute opening statement,

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I was trying to follow, trying to understand from his worldview what his perspective was.

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And, you know, Craig had done a good job in critiquing, even in his opening statement, this benefit to sentient beings concept and all the rest of this that is part and parcel of the

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Sam Harris presentation. And so I was trying to hear, well, how does he ground that?

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Does he show reflection upon his own position?

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The older I get, I really want to hear whether my opponent has heard what the other side is and has thought those issues through.

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Because that's something that I just rarely hear in debates is that kind of thing.

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And so I listened and, you know, he spoke very calmly.

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He tries to speak with some level of authority. When you specifically slow down your speech, people think that you're making very important points and things like that.

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And so I found it interesting. And then Dr. Craig gets up and he gives his 12 -minute rebuttal and he really does focus in upon the weak elements of Harris's presentation.

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And as Harris rose to do his 12 -minute rebuttal, there were some really needful things that needed to be addressed.

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There were questions laying on the table. There were challenges that had been made on a logical and philosophical basis to what specifically

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Harris was claiming. And Craig had taken the time to quote him.

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And at one point, I think in the rebuttal we're going to listen to, we're going to listen to the 12 -minute rebuttal, I think at one point there is a statement by Harris where he claims that most of what

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William Lane Craig was quoting from his own book was actually Sam Harris quoting somebody else and therefore it was irrelevant or inappropriate citation.

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He didn't give any examples, which bothered me. I mean, I'm going to tell you something. When Robert St.

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Jenna started misquoting The Fatal Flaw, it wasn't difficult for me to explain why he was misquoting me.

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And so I found it a little bit odd for Sam Harris to say, well, I was just quoting other people there.

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Well, it wouldn't be very difficult for you to explain why I was misquoting them and disagreeing with them or something like that.

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So I found that a little bit strange, and it never came up in the rest of the debate, which I also found strange.

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I mean, if someone was saying I was misquoting them, I'd want some examples. But as Sam Harris stood, there were many questions on the table.

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And what I want to listen to is I want to listen to the 12 -minute rebuttal that Sam Harris offered, because I was simply shocked.

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Someone who is getting paid. I mean, I don't know what he got paid for this debate.

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But when I was involved and a group was bringing me in and wanted to know what it would cost to have

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Sam Harris come in and speak, they said $25 ,000. Now, this was at Notre Dame. This debate took place at Notre Dame, which, by the way, yeah, did.

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It was interesting. I could have never done that debate, obviously, without debating the moderator. And it is interesting.

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I want to listen to, and since we're having technical difficulties, we'll get the time to listen to. I'm going to get some of the audience questions in, especially some of the first ones, which were specifically

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Notre Dame students. Wow, wow, wow, wow. It must be so painful to be a

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Roman Catholic apologist, like a Jimmy Akin or a Tim Staples or one of these people, and to listen to Notre Dame students.

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Oh, my goodness. Well, you'll see when we get to it.

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So I want to listen to some of the audience questions. But what I want to listen to is the 12 -minute rebuttal from Sam Harris.

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It just amazed me that someone receiving this kind of money in that kind of context could put forth a performance like this.

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I think after this he should be removed from the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism stuff, because this was straight back to the, okay,

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I have a constituency, I have my supporters, I'm going to throw out my red meat. It almost was like I need to get my supporters excited, and this is the 12 minutes

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I'm going to take to do this. And then in my eight -minute rebuttal coming later, I'll try to respond to some of these things. But now it's time to throw out all the standard red herrings that get radical atheists excited.

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But, of course, I'm going to do it like I do it, like Sam Harris does it, and that is I'm going to do it with a measured tone, and I'm not going to be excitable or excited or anything else.

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I'm just going to throw it out there and watch what happens. I would say

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I was deeply disappointed, but how can you really say that meaningfully, since atheists don't have, as this debate demonstrated, don't really have a meaningful way of grounding morality in the first place.

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And so, you know, if this is how they do it, this is how they do it. But I want to listen to the 12.

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Let's listen to the 12 -minute rebuttal period here from Sam Harris, and I will be starting and stopping it.

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That's what we do on this program, and commenting on what he has to say.

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Well, that was all very interesting. Ask yourselves, what is wrong with spending eternity in hell?

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Well, I'm told it's rather hot there, for one.

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Dr. Craig is not offering an alternative view of morality.

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The whole point of Christianity, or so it is imagined, is to safeguard the eternal well -being of human souls.

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Immediate stop. That is not the whole point of Christianity.

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Dr. Harris should at least, given his claims of expertise and scholarship, should at least try to understand the religions that he is responding to.

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And I was glad that Craig, a couple of times, talked about his gross misunderstandings. And even given the large divide between myself and William Lane Craig theologically, there were a number of gross misrepresentations.

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But, at this point, guess what? Yeah, theology matters.

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And once again, we have one of those situations where it could probably be argued, and argued fairly effectively, that he is responding to what he has heard from people like William Lane Craig and others, who have a very anthropocentric, man -centered theology.

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But the welfare of human souls is not the heart of Christianity.

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Where do you get that from the Bible? Where do you get that from meaningful theological formulations?

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The heart of Christianity is the self -glorification of the triune God. The demonstration of His glory,

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His power, His majesty, His holiness, His justice, and in light of all that,

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His mercy and His love. And one of the things that, again, would bother, I think, most of our listeners in listening to this debate, was very frequently, right under the surface and sometimes coming to the surface of the debate, was this very man -centeredness.

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Most of the objections we're going to listen to here from Harris are all focused upon this God is an evil

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God because people go to hell and there's suffering and all the rest of this stuff. And unfortunately, even if, you know,

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Craig avoided even getting into all this stuff. He said, folks, this is not, if he wants to debate theism, we can debate theism another time.

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Notice he didn't say Christian theism, but we can debate theism and the existence of God another time. But this is a debate about whether you can have morality without, and he said

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God, but really, to be honest with you, it should be a God, given the presentation that was made. But that's not the heart of Christianity.

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And obviously, were I to debate, if Sam Harris were to slum and to debate myself, that would be part and parcel of the presentation that I would have to make.

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Now, happily, there's absolutely no evidence that the Christian hell exists. And I have to wonder what kind of evidence the naturalistic materialist

30:34

Sam Harris would accept about the existence of hell. Of course, I don't think there's anybody in hell right now, so I'm not sure what the relevance of that is.

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But what evidence would he accept? You know, when you make this kind of statement, and you haven't even given a meaningful foundation for your epistemology, what are you trying to do other than to impress your audience?

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I think we should look at the consequences of believing in this framework, this theistic framework, in this world, and what these moral underpinnings actually would be.

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9 million children die every year before they reach the age of 5.

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Picture an Asian tsunami of the sort we saw in 2004 that killed a quarter of a million people.

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One of those every 10 days, killing children only under 5. That's 24 ,000 children a day, 1 ,000 an hour, 17 or so a minute.

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That means before I can get to the end of this sentence, some few children, very likely, will have died in terror and agony.

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Think of the parents of these children. Think of the fact that most of these men and women believe in God and are praying at this moment for their children to be spared.

31:55

Now, what you're listening to, of course, is a long, drawn -out...

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Well, it's a red herring, obviously. It's an admission on Harris' part that he can't respond to the questions that Craig has placed before him.

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I mean, that's why I say he should just be knocked... If he thinks he's top -tier, this performance was a clear demonstration that he's nowhere near top -tier.

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In fact, I can't think of any of the ones who are considered to be top -tier who are top -tier. I mean, Dawkins is so ridiculous it's not even in the realm.

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And Hitchens is by far the best speaker of all of them. But even Christopher finds ways around dealing with direct assaults upon his position.

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I mean, look what he did in the debate with the Intelligent Design guy, where he just...

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The guy was going at him and doing... We covered it on The Dividing Line. He was going at him appropriately, and yet Hitchens managed to get him into a conversational mode where he just melted down completely.

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No, it was not Dinesh D'Souza. D'Souza is a Roman Catholic. He's not an Intelligent Design guy. This was the one

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I covered just a few months ago here on the program. And so, at least

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Hitchens would probably try to come up with something more than this kind of just, oh, let's refurbish the argument from evil thing.

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But even then, again, how I respond to this and how William Lane Craig would respond to this are very, very different from one another.

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I mean, he's going to mention Paul Copan's book, and okay, that's fine. But the answer to the problem of evil is going to be very, very different if you have a theocentric,

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God -glorifying view of the whole purpose of the world, or whether you have a man -centered, salvific view.

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And what I mean by salvific is the center of what God is doing is trying to save as many as possible.

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You are going to answer the issue of the existence and purpose of evil completely differently depending on what your foundations there are.

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And there's no question. I mean, don't you think, this is one of the things that bothers me. So many people come up to me.

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I was speaking in Southern California, speaking near Biola. Why aren't you willing to debate

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William Lane Craig? I am, but he won't debate me because he won't debate

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Christians. But would it not be massively useful in the apologetic community to address these theological issues that are absolutely foundational to how we do our apologetics?

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And I think one of the reasons he won't is he would have to admit, yeah, you know what? There are theological issues that are absolutely primary to the philosophical position that we take.

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It has to be for a Christian. And that would really throw a light on, I think, the backwardness of the

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Craig realm of apologetics where you start with philosophy rather than theology as your foundation.

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But wouldn't it be massively useful, especially in dealing with the problem of evil, to have a debate on how you answer the problem of evil?

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I mean, just on the level of allowing students to think these things through, the benefit, the edifying benefit would be massive.

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And there's one side willing to do it and one side that is not willing to do it. And I think that would be extremely useful.

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And it could be done well. It could be done respectfully. It would be done biblically. And I think that would be awesome.

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But that's what you're hearing from Harris here. And if you don't start with the assertion of the centrality of the revelation of Jesus Christ outside of him, there can be no human knowledge, there can be no human predication, then you really don't have it.

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You have to sort of build up to a final presentation that, well, actually there is a reason to believe that there is a purpose for all that takes place, including the death of 9 million children before age 5 in this world.

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That there is a purpose in evil. That there is no such thing as purposeless evil. Now remember,

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Craig would actually say that there is no purposeless evil either, because as a Molinist, God looked through all the possible universes and came up with the one universe where the maximum number of people are saved.

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But that doesn't mean that the evil is purposeful because of a divine decree, a personal

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God -glorifying divine decree. It is only purposeful because this was the best universe that God could come up with.

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And there's a vast difference between those two. Vast difference between those two visions.

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The grounding is very, very different. And their prayers will not be answered. But according to Dr.

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Craig, this is all part of God's plan. Any God who would allow children by the millions to suffer and die in this way, and their parents to grieve in this way, either can do nothing to help them or doesn't care to.

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Now this is one of the things that I disagreed with Martin Bashir on. We all applauded

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Martin Bashir's interview with Rob Bell.

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But I was uncomfortable with it. I think what appealed to many of us was that he gets so many softballs all the time that to see someone actually say, hey, you know what?

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What you're saying doesn't make any sense. We're all like, ooh, ah, ooh, ah. But let's be honest. The first question that Martin Bashir asked

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Rob Bell wasn't a fair question. He didn't give him the right option. He says, well, you know, these terrible things that have happened, either

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God can't stop them or he doesn't care. And that's exactly what Sam Harris just said. And the answer to that is neither.

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God has a sovereign, glorifying purpose in his decree and in everything that takes place.

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That's just the way it is. And that option isn't even on the table, and it wouldn't be an option in light of the person he's debating.

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Now I didn't get the feeling that Sam Harris is all that familiar with the issues relating to the various methodologies of apologetic approach and the differences that would be represented by William Lane Craig and all that kind of stuff.

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But it did strike me that this kind of either -or situation just shows such a surface -level understanding, or, well, obviously a surface -level misunderstanding, on the part of Dr.,

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great scholar Dr. Harris. He is therefore either impotent or evil. And worse than that, on Dr.

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Craig's view, most of these people, many of these people certainly, will be going to hell because they're praying to the wrong

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God. Which, of course, is not why anyone has ever gone to hell, Dr.

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Harris. Dr. Harris needs to understand that people go to hell out of God's justice in regards to the fact of his broken law.

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Their praying to false gods is a manifestation of that, but it is not the reason of that.

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There needs to be a payment for the breaking of the law because justice is the very foundation of his throne, as we are told in the

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Book of Psalms. And so, this kind of red herring, throw this...

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I mean, this is what you get at the local Saturday morning atheist meetings.

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And it has next to nothing to do with the subject of the debate. That's why

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I was just... I really think that this should put Harris down in the third, fourth tier.

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Because while he may speak well and slowly and with measured tones, what he's throwing out here shows no meaningful reflection upon the issues at all.

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Just think about that. Through no fault of their own, they were born into the wrong culture, where they got the wrong theology, and they missed the revelation.

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Through no fault of their own. That's why they go to hell, is that through no fault of their own.

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I mean, they are just innocent as the driven snow. They have God's creation all around them, and yet they love their sin, and they lie, and they cheat, and they steal, and they lust.

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But it's no fault of their own. Yes, there you have... You know,

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I really think atheists should avoid doing theological critiques, especially when they don't seem to have any interest in actually understanding what it is they're critiquing.

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There are 1 .2 billion people in India at this moment. Most of them are Hindus, most of them, therefore, polytheists.

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In Dr. Craig's universe, no matter how good these people are, they are doomed.

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In Dr. Craig's universe, or at least in a biblical universe, there is no such thing as a good person,

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Dr. Harris. That's your problem, is you have a morality that grades on the curve, and you have no concern for understanding of or interest in the holiness of God.

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In fact, let's be honest, you detest it. You know it's there, but you detest it.

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If you are praying to the monkey god Hanuman, you are doomed. You are doomed because you are suppressing the knowledge of the true

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God that is there, and that suppression involves a twisting of the creator -creation relationship that results in your praying to a monkey god named

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Hanuman or whatever it is. But that is an illustration of, a symptom of, the underlying rebellion problem and sin problem.

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You'll be tortured in hell for eternity. Now, is there the slightest evidence for this? No. It just says so in Mark 9 and Matthew 13 and Revelation 14.

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In other words, as a presupposition, there can be no divine revelation. Its consistency with the rest of Revelation or the resurrection of Christ or something like that just needs to be dismissed because, well, you know, you can't put it under a microscope because I'm a naturalist materialist, and I think in circles.

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Perhaps you'll remember from the Lord of the Rings, it says when the elves die, they go to Valinor, but they can be reborn in Middle -earth.

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I say that just as a point of comparison. Yeah, it's brilliant. So God created the cultural isolation of the

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Hindus. He engineered the circumstance of their deaths in ignorance of Revelation, and then he created the penalty for this ignorance, which is an eternity of conscious torment in fire.

43:50

Eternal fire. I've got the fire part. Lake of fire. Okay, I suppose he probably would, as a naturalist materialist, would assume that it's, you know, a physical fire with physical properties that, you know, puts off a certain kind of, you know.

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But the idea of the nature of the punishment fitting the heart of the one who's being punished, probably never even thought about that.

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Okay, on the other hand, on Dr. Craig's account, your run -of -the -mill serial killer in America, okay, who spent his life raping and torturing children, need only come to God, come to Jesus on death row, and after a final meal of fried chicken, he's going to spend an eternity in heaven after death.

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Now, you see, when you have someone who can put together, with, again, very seriousness,

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I'm a doctor, you need to listen to me, very seriousness, these contrasting situations, which are grossly distorted in both situations.

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I mean, how common is it for the serial killer? What you do is you're trying to create a contradiction that does not exist if you actually allow for the truth of the matter.

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And so when I hear people doing this, it's easy to recognize it. They've automatically disqualified themselves as individuals seeking after truth.

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They instead qualify themselves as people suppressing truth. But it is true that the worst sinner can be saved by the greatest

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Savior. And his objection is based upon his ascribing innocence to one group and evil to the other.

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Now, he failed completely during the entirety of this debate of ever grounding that, and it was pointed out to him many times there was nothing he could do about it.

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But what he's done, despite his own failure, is he has attributed, without necessarily stating it openly, innocence to one group and guilt to the other, and now

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God is guilty of treating the guilty as if they're innocent and treating the innocent as if they're guilty.

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And unless people sit back, listen, analyze, think logically and rationally, they don't see this.

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And you know the people who have the least tendency to think through these things logically and rationally?

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The very atheists who pride themselves on their open -mindedness and their free thinking.

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They're the very ones who won't even catch it and will be impressed with this kind of bogus argumentation.

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One thing should be crystal clear to you. This vision of life has absolutely nothing to do with moral accountability.

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And please notice the double standard. Yeah, no moral accountability. Forget about the cross, forget about the violation of God's law.

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No moral accountability because, well, I get to define what's moral. That people like Dr. Craig use to exonerate

47:06

God from all this evil. We're told that God is loving and kind and just and intrinsically good.

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I will have to give him one point at this point. I was disappointed that at one point in Craig's presentation, when he defined

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God and he listed the attributes of God, they were all attributes in regards to mercy or kindness or goodness or compassion.

47:31

There is nothing, nothing about justice and uprightness and holiness.

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Nothing about God's desire to express his wrath and to make his glory known through the punishment of sin or anything like that.

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Nothing whatsoever. When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust because he visits suffering on innocent people.

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Which, of course, there are none to begin with. A scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath.

48:10

We're told that God is mysterious. Really, I didn't hear. I don't recall hearing

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William Lane Craig say that. I know I haven't. And I know I've heard many of my opponents attribute to me a retreat to mystery when

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I've not used it. So, something tells me this is the atheist red meat section where you just repeat the stuff so that your followers think you're on page with them and they already agree and that's going to get them excited and make them think you won the debate.

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Who can understand God's will? And yet this is precisely, this merely human understanding of God's will is precisely what believers use to establish his goodness in the first place.

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If something good happens to a Christian, he feels some bliss while praying, say, or he sees some positive change in his life, and we're told that God is good.

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But when children by the tens of thousands are torn from their parents' arms and drowned, we're told that God is mysterious.

49:18

Again, this man was paid $25 ,000 to stand up there and demonstrate that he is absolutely either grossly ignorant of the faith he's critiquing or just so dishonest he can't even begin to get it right.

49:32

That's why I said at the beginning, I don't know if someone came up and said, you know what, I want to see you debate Sam Harris, I want to see you just expose these things,

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I want to see some meaningful cross -examination, which doesn't seem to happen very often in William Lane Craig's debates, I want to see this happen and I will pay

49:47

Sam Harris whatever he wants to go there. I'm not sure that I would do it. I mean, I would enjoy the debate.

49:53

I really would. But, man, there's just something ethically wrong about enriching someone for being just so either dishonest or just downright ignorant.

50:05

This is how you play tennis without the net. And I want to suggest to you that it is not only tiresome when otherwise intelligent people speak this way, it is morally reprehensible.

50:17

Now, okay, yeah, I think it is morally reprehensible. For Sam Harris to be paid $25 ,000 to stand up there and babble like an idiot.

50:25

I think it's morally reprehensible. I think it's morally reprehensible for him to pretend to be an expert on something when he doesn't even show the first bit of concern to actually accurately represent the position he's critiquing.

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I find that morally reprehensible. But I have a reason for viewing something as morally reprehensible.

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Because we as human beings are called, we create an image of God to represent Him truthfully.

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Why is it morally reprehensible from his worldview? I mean, it's his feeling, it's his emotion, but that doesn't make it morally reprehensible.

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This kind of faith really is the perfection of narcissism. God loves me, don't you know?

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He cured me of my eczema. Now, this is an interesting section. Listen to the kind of surface -level, unbiblical

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Christianity, unfortunately popular in the world today, that he responds to.

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And there's a reason why this kind of Joel Osteen -ish, Rob Bell -ish

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Christianity has no apologetic. Because there is no defense of these things.

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And it makes it pretty easy for the atheist to strawman true Christianity in light of the prevalence of this type of stuff, because we live in a land under the judgment of God.

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Culture. He makes me feel so good while singing in church. And just when we had given up hope, he found a banker who was willing to reduce my mother's mortgage.

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Given all that this God of yours does not accomplish in the lives of others, given the misery that's being imposed on some helpless child at this instant, this kind of faith is obscene.

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To think in this way is to fail to reason honestly, or to care sufficiently about the suffering of other human beings.

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And if God is good and loving and just and kind, and he wanted to guide us morally with a book, why give us a book that supports slavery?

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Why give us a book that admonishes us to kill people for imaginary crimes like witchcraft?

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Now, of course, there's a way of not taking these questions to heart. According to Dr.

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Craig's divine command theory, God is not bound by moral duties. God doesn't have to be good.

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Whatever he commands is good. So when he commands the Israelites to slaughter the

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Amalekites, that behavior becomes intrinsically good because he commanded it. Now, of course, as soon as this kind of, again, shallow, this has been dealt with a thousand times before, it's dishonest to repeat it without dealing with the responses.

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But that's what you get from atheists. Atheists, as a whole, lack a moral grounding to be honest in their criticism of the religion that they hate so much.

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And they may demonstrate more of an honesty toward false religions than they do toward that which they know is actually true, and they are suppressing that knowledge.

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So the Amalekites, there's nothing there about the Amalekites being sinners.

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There's nothing there about the Amalekites being individuals who have rejoiced in their detestation of God's holiness and God's creation.

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Nothing like that. Nothing like that at all. And this just is not honest representation, but it's not meant to be.

54:11

He's not trying to be right now. Well, here we're being offered, I'm glad he raised the issue of psychopathy, we're being offered a psychopathic and psychotic moral attitude.

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It's psychotic because this is completely delusional. There's no reason to believe that we live in a universe ruled by an invisible monster,

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Yahweh. So there you go. If you take his ignorance and his dishonesty, his unwillingness to actually deal with the

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Old Testament text in the context which is provided, and that's dishonest, and it's evil.

54:43

So you take his evil, and then on the basis of that evil, you then turn around and call the creator of the universe a monster.

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And anyone who would believe in the creator of the universe is a psychopath. There you have the face of the new atheism.

55:01

Give me money for lying to your face. There's the new atheist right there.

55:09

The difference for most of the atheists is that they would not, at this point, be able to be nearly as calm and measured as Dr.

55:16

Harris as he utters his blasphemy. They would be spitting in your face at this point. That's been my experience in dealing with that kind of atheist.

55:24

But he is very measured in his blasphemy. But it is psychopathic because this is a total detachment from the well -being of human beings.

55:39

It so easily rationalizes the slaughter of children. Just think about the

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Muslims at this moment who are blowing themselves up, convinced that they are agents of God's will.

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There is absolutely nothing that Dr. Craig can say against their behavior in moral terms, apart from his own faith -based claim that they're praying to the wrong

56:05

God. Now, that's a very surface -level characterization, but I would say that I would have a different foundation, a better foundation, a more biblical foundation for saying to the jihadists that what you're doing is morally wrong than William Lane Craig would.

56:24

Because, you see, he's beginning from bare theism. Well, he's actually not even beginning there.

56:31

He does not start with the centrality and necessity of Christian theism.

56:38

And so while he will eventually say, in response to one of the audience questions, or during one of the rebuttal periods,

56:44

I forget which one it was, that while he studied Islam as part of his doctoral studies, and he is convinced that while there is much in Islam and its monotheism that is good, etc.,

56:55

etc., that the person of Jesus is central. Well, of course, the person of Jesus is central.

57:02

But the issue is, if God has revealed himself definitively in Jesus Christ in a special way, then it follows of necessity that that revelation of Jesus Christ is the foundation for holding anyone accountable today.

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And a person following, whether it's the Book of Mormon or the Quran, is fundamentally denying the reality of the testimony that God the

57:30

Father has given in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And so it is beginning with that central affirmation of the

57:40

Christian nature of the revelation that is so very, very important. I didn't get through all of that, and I still have the phone calls to get to, so I guess

57:48

I'm going to have to hold them over to Thursday's program. We'll start with them and finish them up.

57:54

And then I'd like to hear from you all on Thursday. Your thoughts, as you listened to the

57:59

Craig Harris debate, if you were as disappointed as I was, shocked as I was, at the surface level of the kind of responses that Sam Harris provided, especially during this 12 minutes.

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We've still got, from looking here, I'd say about three minutes left in his rebuttal, and then there were at least two of the audience questions, maybe three of the audience questions, one of which was brought in Fatima and things like that.

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I want to take a listen to that as well. So join us on Thursday afternoon,

58:35

Lord willing, live for the program, and I'd like to hear from you about what you thought of this exposure, from my perspective, of the real nature of the new atheism, as little more than the old atheism, but said with retracted claws at times, shall we say.

58:53

Thanks for listening. We'll see you on Thursday. God bless. We were standing at the crossroads

59:13

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