Panel debate on the existence of the Christian God and if it matters

This panel debate is on the existence of the God of the bible and if His existence matters to the world. This panel style conversation involves Christopher Hitchens, William Lane Craig, Lee Strobel, Douglas Wilson, and Jim Denison. I think this panel discussion is one of the best for any person who is new to arguments for and against theism because the listener is hearing the best of the best from both sides. The only negative point of this debate is that the moderator involves himself too heavily in this discussion, which is really, really, really, annoying.

Enjoy!

Understanding Evil

There is evil in the world. I can't think of any normal person that would disagree with the statement, "There is evil in the world," and I don't think anyone will ever not wonder why there is evil in the world. How could you not think about it? I'm sure all of us think about it at least once during our day because evil actions happen every single day from weather to human actions; you will encounter something evil first-hand or by seeing/reading it via media of some kind. What do we make of this knowledge? How can the world be so evil and also have a good God watching over it? Christopher Hitchens has, in the past, characterized God as a being that watches the world with folded arms while we humans endure suffering and pain of all kinds. So, can God truly be good if he allows such misery, anguish, and pain to go on?

To understand the problem, we must identify the problem. Yes, there is evil in the world, we all agree on that, but what is evil? My definition might be substantially different from yours. Some might think it evil that humans can become fat by eating too much ice cream and other sweet, tasty treats. Others might think the death penalty is evil. However, we can certainly agree on some things that would be easily labeled evil, e.g., murder, disease, rape, child abuse, slander, famine; the list could go on. While that short list brings to mind things that are evil, we still don't know what evil is by reading that list alone. The list is representative, it doesn't give us the origin of evil. So, like any researcher, let's explore what some of the great thinkers have concluded on the problem of evil in the world.

David Hume, an 18th century philosopher, formulates the problem of evil this way:

"Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?" 

"[God's] power we allow [is] infinite: Whatever he wills is executed: But neither man nor any other animal are happy: Therefore he does not will their happiness. His wisdom is infinite: He is never mistaken in choosing the means to any end: But the course of nature tends not to human or animal felicity: Therefore it is not established for that purpose. Through the whole compass of human knowledge, there are no inferences more certain and infallible than these. In what respect, then, do his benevolence and mercy resemble the benevolence and mercy of men?" 1

Hume was most likely agnostic, since in his writings there is ambiguity of which side of the theist/atheist debate he was on. There is however, no doubt that he was against some of the religious activity of his day, so some simply label him irreligious. Whatever his position, there is no doubt that he questioned the attributes of God as described by Christianity, i.e., God's omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience. Hume's questions seem to be clear defeaters for God's mercy and ability to prevent evil. I'm sure bad things have happened to you and you think, "Where is God?" or "Why did this happen to me?" I have and I'm quite sure all have thought something along those lines. Why do bad things happen to us?

Looking at Hume's argument, "Is he willing to prevent evil, but not able?" I'll begin the first section.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Hume's argument seems to be devastating to Christianity doesn't it? If God is all good, all loving, etc., then he should stop evil from ever happening. Before we answer the question Is God willing to prevent evil, we should know what evil is. First, evil is not a thing; it doesn't attach itself to the bumper of your car, nor can you introduce yourself to evil and talk to it. Evil is a lack of good, it's the lesser good. Another way to think of evil is to think of free-will. Augustine, a 4th and 5th century philosopher, said, ""And I strained to perceive what I now heard, that free-will was the cause of our doing ill." 2 Augustine viewed evil as a perversion of the will turned away from God to lesser things.

When we ask the question, is God willing to prevent evil, we have to define our terms first and know what we are asking. Are we asking if God is willing to make every decision for us? To ask the question appropriately would be to ask, "Is God willing to make us robots to prevent evil?" When asked that way, we can see that in order for evil to be eliminated, you have to eliminate our free-will choices. When our free-will is gone, it necessarily follows that evil will no longer be an option.

Atheist philosopher Antony Flew 3 thought the man could be immutable in his goodness and still make free choices in other areas of life. Will man not have the ability to freely choose in the afterlife and be completely good at the same time? Why can't man be like that now on earth? It would seem that God could simply remove evil as an option for man to choose.

Greg Koukl answers this objection quite nicely:

"God could have created such a world. Freedom in the larger sense (the ability to make choices) does not require freedom in the narrow sense (the ability to make moral choices). 

They miss the big picture, though: God would not have accomplished a second purpose. He not only wanted free creatures; He also wanted plenitude, that is, the greatest good possible. Plenitude--the highest good, the best of all possible worlds--requires more than just general freedom; it requires moral freedom, and that necessarily entails the possibility of evil. 

Since all that God made is good, even those things which appear evil only appear that way because of a limited context or perspective. When viewed as a whole, that which appears to be evil ultimately contributes to the greater good. 

For example, certain virtues couldn't exist without evil: courage, mercy, forgiveness, patience, the giving of comfort, heroism, perseverance, faithfulness, self-control, long-suffering, submission and obedience, to name a few. These are not virtues in the abstract, but elements of character that can only be had by moral souls. Just as evil is a result of acts of will, so is virtue. Acts of moral choice accomplish both." 4

So we can see that certain virtues (which are essential to our character and desired by humans) couldn't exist without moral choices made by moral souls. Since moral freedom must exist for the "best of all possible worlds" to exist, moral tragedies will result from our moral freedom. Hume's argument is not a defeater for God's omnibenovelence, omniscience, and omnipotence; rather his argument is simply a good conversation starter for the problem of evil. While Hume's argument is answered, we're not out of the woods yet. I will follow this post with the "Best of All Possible Worlds" argument.

Related content:

Understanding Evil: The Best of All Possible Worlds

Sources:

1. Hume, David. "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion". Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4583. Retrieved 2008-08-15.

2. Augustine, Confessions VII: [III] 5. 

3.  Antony Flew, "Divine Omnipotence and Human Freedom," New Essays in Philosophical Theology, 1955 (referenced in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3, 138) 

4. Greg Koukl, Augustine on Evil, http://www.str.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5124

Are the New Atheists Arrogant?

After reading S.E. Cupp's article "The arrogance of the atheists: They batter believers in religion with smug certainty" (she's subtle isn't she) I can't disagree with her. Cupp, an atheist herself, is a little upset with the new atheists approach in dealing with the ultimate question: Is there more to life than this? Here's what she says about her father becoming a theist:
"As a longtime atheist, I was a little surprised. But eventually I came to be relieved by this development. While my friends' fathers were buying flashy sports cars and exchanging their wives for models, my own father was turning inward and asking: Is there more to life than this?

I was also proud of him for becoming a student again. As I watched him pore over C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel and even neoatheist thinkers such as Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, I thought it amazing that he still wanted to learn something new.

It was a revelation I'd experience over and over again - meeting faithful believers and discovering that, no matter how long they'd been in the fold, many were still on a dogged quest for spiritual knowledge."
Cupp realizes that the serious Christian thinker is always learning and not static in his pursuit of God and truth. Many do not know this, but it's something that is slowly coming to public knowledge thanks to the efforts of men like Alvin Plantinga, William Lane Craig, and many other Christian thinkers. As an atheist, Cupp was proud of her father for dealing with the tough questions that Christians face.
How does Cupp feel about the attitudes of the new atheists? Does she think that they are seriously trying engage theism and learn about it? Or does she realize that they are trying to belittle theism and trash it?

"Which brings me to the problem with modern atheism, embodied by the likes of Harris and Hitchens, authors of "The End of Faith" and "God Is Not Great," respectively. So often it seems like a conversation ender, not a conversation starter. And the loudest voices of today's militant atheism, for all their talk of rational thought, don't seem to want to do too much thinking at all. As James Wood wrote in The New Yorker, "The new atheists do not speak to the millions of people whose form of religion is far from the embodied certainties of contemporary literalism. Indeed, it is a settled assumption of this kind of atheism that there are no intelligent religious believers."

What spiritual quest are they on, except to put an abrupt end to those like my father's? For them, the science is settled, the data are conclusive and the book (no, not the Good Book) has been written. Time for everyone else to pack up and move on to other business, like, presumably, accumulating wealth and fulminating at the sight of the nearest Christmas tree.

The militant atheist wants nothing more than to spoil the believer's spiritual journey. That's both meanspirited and radically unenlightened.

Though more than 95% of the world finds some meaning in faith, God-hating comic Bill Maher shrugs this off as a "neurological disorder." His version of a quest for knowledge was a series of scathing jokes at the faithfuls' expense in the documentary "Religulous."

The latest incarnation of the thought-eschewing secularist is American Atheists spokesman Dave Silverman, who sums up the argument this way on atheistnexus.org: "Religion is my b****." He has also tweeted, "Yes it is a myth. Deal with it. All delusions are myths."

It's these snarky and condescending rejections, not of faith itself but of those who profess it, that reflect a total unwillingness to learn something new about human nature, the world around us and even of science itself. While the neoatheists pay only cursory attention to dismantling arguments for God, they spend most of their time painting his followers as uncultured rubes. The fact that religion has inexplicably persisted, even despite Copernicus, Darwin and the Enlightenment, doesn't seem to have much sociological meaning for them.

The truth is, folks like Maher and Silverman don't want to know about actual belief - in fact, they are much more certain about the nature of the world than most actual believers, who understand that a measure of doubt is necessary for faith. They want to focus on the downfall of a gay pastor or the Nativity scene at a mall."

I can't add anything to Cupp's correct understanding of the new atheists' material. They don't seem to want to meet and discuss the important questions in life, but they do seem intent on destroying faith with sophomoric jokes and ad hominem fallacies. You can read S.E. Cupp's full article by clicking here. If Cupp keeps an open mind and continues on her quest she'll more than likely find what she is looking for.

The Appeal of Christopher Hitchens

I really like listening to debates, especially debates that involve Christopher Hitchens and I especially enjoy the debates that he and Dinesh D'Souza have had in the past; there's nothing better than two gladiators of rhetoric duking it out. I'm writing this piece mainly because of a post over at Wintery Knight's blog. Reading that reminded me of Hitchens and I wanted to write a blog post about him.

Hitchens is an interesting guy, a very interesting guy. When he's in a debate, you want to let him talk, not only because he has the cool British accent, but because he really brings out the emotional roadblocks to religion, Christianity in particular. He is a wordsmith, he's intelligent, and he's fun to listen to, even when he's dogging your belief system; he's just a likable guy. What does he rely on in debates? Rhetoric. Strong rhetoric. So strong, in fact, that if you don't know the rebuttals to his assertions, and you're a Christian, you probably would question what you believe.

The emotion of the person is what Hitchens aims for and he's very good at it. Usually, he'll mention the crusades, how he sees God as just standing by with folded arms until his intervention 2000 years ago, God just watches a person get raped and does nothing about it, you know those sorts of things. So, he knows what buttons to hit to trigger your emotions and he will get you to think about these things.

Christopher Hitchens is a very descriptive speaker. He's notorious for comparing God to a dictator, which gives you this image of a very demanding, evil, God that will strike you down for just about anything. This is the kind of assault that Hitchens takes on God, but really it's an assault on Christianity, which brings me to my point that Hitchens attacks religion, not the existence of God. If you break down his case, like Wintery did, then you'll see that he doesn't have strong arguments against the existence of God, rather he argues that religion is evil and a poison to humanity.

An argument that Hithcens gives about God not intervening for mankind until 2000 years ago seems like a good one, but William Lane Craig broke it once (at a panel discussion or in his debate, I can't remember the setting). Craig said stated that if mankind lasts 100,000 years longer, then it wouldn't have been that God waited all that long at all to intervene would it? Chris more or less said, "No I guess not." So, that shows that the arguments Hitchens gives are just emotional. His arguments are not full-proof, they rely solely on rhetoric and performance, which looks good in debate, but when analyzed closely will crumble.

As I said earlier though, I like Christopher Hitchens, he's a great guy and he's fun to listen to. He does well to show the cruelties of religion, but in my opinion, the horrors of man's past just shows that we need a Savior even more. Those events show the sinfulness of man and really don't prove that God doesn't exist, however, those events do show that religion doesn't work, only a solid relationship with God works.

So what is the appeal of Christopher Hitchens? His speaking ability. He's funny, very descriptive, you know a wordsmith. People love wordsmiths, e.g. Gilmore Girls, Seinfeld; those are great shows for the painting of words, so to speak, that the characters perform. I encourage you to listen to Chris' arguments so you can the emotional barriers that people have to Christianity. It's really important to know why people don't put their faith in God so we can answer the questions they have. If we don't, then people will continue to have a barrier to God.

Christopher Hitchens debates here.

Dinesh D'Souza debates and lectures

Dinesh D'Souza, author of books such as: What's So Great About Christianity, What's So Great About America, and others, is a Conservative writer and speaker who once served as a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His apologetic method is strong on rhetoric, reason, and historic facts. D'Souza has had debates with many key atheists/skeptics and has defended Christianity well. Check out his various mp3 debates and lectures below.

D'Souza vs Michael Shermer on God, Religion, and Morality

D'Souza vs Christopher Hitchens: What's So Great about Christianity?

D'Souza vs Daniel Dennett: Is God a man-made invention?

D'Souza vs Dan Barker on Christianity versus Atheism

Dinesh D'Souza: A Reasonable Faith: Intellectual Foundations for Communicating the Gospel in American Culture

for more visit bringyou.to's website or here at Wheaton College's resource page.

Dinesh D'Souza at Wikipedia.