Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort debate two atheist (The Blasphemy Challenge people)
I watched the ABC News-sponsored debate about God's existence that was streamed this morning. The debate was generated by the Blasphemy Challenge on You Tube inspired by Brian Fleming's film (which I reviewed on the blog last year). Watching clips of some of those challenges illustrated a fundamental mistake that is replayed over and over and over when many atheists debate the existence of God: They don't take the trouble to first really understand the theist view and represent it correctly. Many of the atheists' challenges in the ABC debate are simplistic misrepresentations or questions that have been answered, perhaps not to atheist satisfaction, but they've been answered. Yet the same questions are posed as if they're slam dunk winners because there is no answer. That doesn't mean atheism isn't true or that theism is true; it means many times these debates are just unimpressive and tedious on their face because at least one side doesn't show up having done their homework. It would at least be relevant to rebut the arguments offered in favor of theism how the appearance of design is actually the result of random, blind mechanisms. It would be relevant how to prescriptive incumbency of morailty can arise from material sources. Those weren't offered.
First, the "blasphemy of the Holy Spirit" is not completely understood theologically, but at the very least it isn't (and no one has claimed) that it's uttering the words "I deny the Holy Spirit" as is repeated in the challenges. In the debate Kelly,the atheist, thought she scored points by pointing out the absurd idea that someone could go to Hell by saying "I deny the Holy Spirit" yet Hitler could go to Heaven if he were a Christian. (She erroneously claimed Hitler was a Catholic, which shows she doesn't have the most fundamental conception of what Christians claim is being a Christian. Membership in a church [especially as a child] no more makes one a Christian than saying "I blaspheme the Holy Spirit" sends someone to Hell.) Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is, at minimum, rejecting the Spirit that creates trust in Jesus Christ, the source of salvation. It's quite logical that rejection of the Holy Spirit would be an obstacle to salvation in Christian terms.
The biggest mistake many atheists make is living up to their prejudices that theists are stupid and irrational. That leads them not to bother to understand what they are debating. They believe dismissal is enough. Kirk Cameron related a conversation he had with Brian Sapient, the other atheist, before the debate. Kirk ended the conversation by telling Brian, "I'll be praying for you." Brian told him, "I'll be thinking for you." That's actually not the mirror response to Kirk's. Brian, as an atheist can't pray, won't pray. He presumes that Kirk, as a Christian, can't or won't think, or at least do it well because theism is irrational. About the only decent debates I've ever heard between atheists and Christians are those that engaged philosophers against the likes of J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig because at least their debate opponents were canny enough to realize that Moreland and Craig have some rational arguments since they're not idiots.
Ray used an argument from design to "prove" theism. The atheists responded by asking him, if creation is scientific, to take them to the "universe factory." They were making the claim that science must be empirical or first hand experience, or it doesn't qualify. The problem with that claim is that there are many theories in science, origins most notably, that make claims about the past, things we can't witness first hand. Much of science is reasoning to the best explanation from the evidence. That's why design is a fair "proof." We witness evidence of design and our experience tells us that designed things have a designer.
Kelly and Brian responded to this with what they thought was the unanswerable question: Who then created God? Now, you may not accept the answer, but it isn't rhetorical. It's been answered in an intelligible way. (For the answer, see William Lane Craig's work on the Kalam Cosmological Argument.) The answer may not be empirical, but as I've already mentioned much of science isn't empirical and rationality is not science.
Kelly claimed that the existence of God would negate science. Science is the adding of knowledge, and belief in God would simply halt that attempt. Kelly's statement indicates a great deal of faith in science and an ignorance about the history of science. The history of science is not an smooth compilation of increase information; it's actually one of radical change, replacing theories completely, and starting over with new ideas where the evidence leads. And it's not the ancient past. Darwinism is a recently arrival on the science of science, not even 150 years old. Einstein's theory of relativity was a revolution in science and that's about a century old. Science isn't a clean, progressive field of knowledge.
And if science is all there is, then how does she justify the rationality she is devoted to? Science doesn't prove rationality, it is guided by it. Rationality isn't the product of biological organisms. In fact, if we are simply natural mechanisms then we can only behave along predetermined courses and rationality has nothing to do with our conclusions and scientific theories. If rationality is science, then take me to the "rationality factory."
Likewise, she and Brian asserted that atheists can be good, too. That's an unremarkable claim and avoids the theist's challenge of how atheism grounds morality. What makes morality prescriptive in nature, rather than simply descriptive? Where does the ought come from, rather than only the is? She claimed that it's the accumulation of generations of experience. That's descriptive, not prescriptive.
Kelly claimed that atheism is a lack of belief in God. True. But she and many other atheists use this to put the entire burden of proof on theists as if they are the only ones with a positive claim to prove. Atheism may be a lack of belief in God, but it is still a belief - a belief God doesn't exist. It's a conviction that something is the case in the world. It's not a withholding of belief. Atheist hold a burden of proof just as much as theists.
They both also made an unusual claim that we're all born atheists and have to be taught theism. They didn't offer any evidence for this claim. If that were true, I'm not sure how belief in God would have gotten started in our purely naturalistic world. And why, then, is atheism so rare? Why isn't atheism more common if it's every human's initial state? They can't consistently appeal to generations of superstition, because they already appeal to those same generations that have given us the cumulative wisdom that we call morality. Those ancient people couldn't be completely naive since they already borrowed from them. Now our ieas of God may need to be filled out with more detail that our initial concept, but that's not the same thing as being natural atheists.
It was amusing that Kelly claimed that Ray's arguments for theism were loaded with appeals to emotion. He actually expressed his arguments from design and morality quite straightforwardly. Yet Brian and she repeated used loaded language to marginalize theism. Most commonly they labeled it "magic" and substituted "flying spaghetti monster" for God. That's fine, it's a debate trick to gain the advantage. It's just ironic they accused Ray of doing what they actually did.
Brian argued that naturalism is the best explanation because of Okham's Razor, the principle that (as he incompletely offered it) the simplest explanation is the preferred one. Okham's Razor says that the simplest explanation that adequately deals with the evidence is the preferred one. What Ray tried to argue was that naturalism and atheism doesn't account for all of the evidence of design and morality. Theism may not be as simple as atheism, but it deals better with all of the evidence.
If you want to know what mistakes I thought Ray made, I guess there was only a few minor ones He did appeal to the Bible when he used the Ten Commandments in his argument from morality. That didn't negate what he said about morality, it just seemed to violate what he said he'd do. He easily could have done what he intended to accomplish with general appeals to universally accepted morals, clear cases. I also wouldn't have claimed ahead of time that he would "prove" God exists. His explanation of how we recognize design, what counts as information, could have been more detailed to help those who are used to thinking in evolutionary terms see his point. But these are small weakness; there weren't any intrnal contradictions or problems with his arguments. He presented very persuasive arguments that the atheists didn't even rebut, much less refute. It was just a bit of hype I would have avoided.
Kelly and Brian repeatedly claimed that Christians are motivated by threats and guilt. That was another misunderstanding of the role of morality in Christianity. And most fundamentally it sets up a false dichotomy between religion and rationality, religion and science. That was their biggest mistake in the debate.
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