We played to a packed house last night—about 550 people, including some friends who made the long drive up from Seattle. I don’t know what the special sauce was that made it happen, but Western Washington University had lots of students interested in the debate question, “Does God Exist?” They seemed a lot more engaged than that they were there just for extra credit.
I gave more information about the debate here. I expect to have access to the video in a few days and will make that available when I do.
The debate
The debate went as I suspected, with our Christian opponents avoiding the typical arguments that I hear from the conservative Protestant apologists—the Moral Argument, Design Argument, Transcendental Argument, Ontological Argument, Argument for the Truth of the New Testament, Fine Tuning Argument, Argument from Prophecy, Cosmological Argument, Who Would Die for a Lie? and so on.
I’ll let the debate video speak for itself, but let me give a quick summary of the Christian side. This presumably is a Catholic vs. Evangelical thing, but our opponents were pretty easy to agree with. To give you a flavor of what we were up against, here are some of their points:
- Proofs for God don’t work
- “God” has many definitions, and the God who scolded Saul for not killing enough Amalekites is not my god.
- God is that whisper of something important in life; God is behind the wonder you see in a Hubble telescope image.
- God is a mystery. Don’t think you have him figured out.
You can imagine how an atheist would object to some of this, but at least the Christian position wasn’t strident. The Catholic church meddles ineptly in some social issues (abortion, contraception, and same-sex marriage, for example) but that is mercifully a subset of the problems caused by some fundamentalist Protestants.
My debate approach is always to give some challenging arguments for atheism, preferably arguments that they are unlikely to have heard before. I’ve explored a couple of dozen in this blog, and the ones I picked for this debate were:
- Historians reject the Bible story
- Mormonism beats Christianity
- Because there’s a map of world religions
- God has no impact on reality
The results!
The debate used Oxford voting, which means that votes were taken before and after. The audience could decide between Yes God exists, No God doesn’t exist, and Undecided. The audience began with 18% undecided and the rest 3:1 in favor of God. Afterwards, some of the Undecideds had migrated. The official result was a 2% increase for the Affirmative (God exists) side and 3% for the Negative side. Go team!
If one believes that there is an omnipotent deity,
one can therefore believe absolutely anything else,
for everything else is thereby made possible.
— Descartes by A.C. Grayling