BBC1 TV brought together two groups of people to debate the above question. It covers ground that I think readers here will be familiar with but it is fun to watch and the non-religionists are pretty good at making their case. The show consists of four parts of about 15 minutes each. Part 1 is below and the next part comes on automatically at the end of each.
I think that an important development in the decline of religion is the focus on evidence as the basis for believing in something. As soon as the question is posed that way, religion loses. Unable to come up with positive evidence, sophisticated religionists rely on negative evidence, i.e., unexplained phenomena. They start off by disavowing belief in ‘the god of the gaps’ but immediately revert to it because they have nothing else. What they do is abandon the discredited old gaps such as the eye, the rainbow, and the “miracle of childbirth” and pin their hopes on new gaps such as the origin of the universe, morality, consciousness, and the origin of life. The really sad thing is to see them so desperately want those questions to not be answered. For such people, ignorance truly is bliss.
As is often the case, we had two religious people give long testimonies about how god ‘spoke’ to them at times of personal crisis. The moderator was pretty good. He was sympathetic when they spoke but also actually asked them what they meant when they say that god spoke to them. However neither was asked whether anyone else heard the voice of god or whether they recorded god’s voice.
What was fun was to see the people who belong to different religions trying to skate over their differences and the obvious fact that each religion thinks the others are false. Even within their own religions, they disowned what the majority of what their fellow believers believe, while the atheists had no such problems.
Atheists are uniters, not dividers.
The goddists were very fond of the god of the gaps arguments.
The “something comes from nothing” argument is only answered by special pleading. Everything was created except for one thing. Then we get to “turtles all the way down.”
I’ve never been impressed by the fine tuning argument. Fine tuning should be called “apparent fine tuning” just as we now call biological design “apparent design” -- now knowing that natural selection is responsible. I think the fine tuning is “apparent” partially because we probably don’t know enough about fundamental physics to say definitively if there is actually fine tuning going on -- it could be that upon examination the fine tuning will evaporate or turn out to be a false problem. Second, there are mechanisms suggested such as quintessense which account for example the cosmological constant which would remove the fine tuning problem. There are also lots of other potential mechanisms which could account for fine tuning, for instance if there are an indefinite amount of inflationary big bangs which have occurred, a small portion of which will permit life. Finally even if the “fine tuning” problem can not be eliminated, how is “goddidit” going to get us any closer to solving the mystery. Should we throw up our hands and substitute cosmogony for cosmology when we have unresolved issues?
If there’s no sin in the Christian god then sadistic bullying is good, because according to the propaganda Ol’ Yahweh is a sadistic bully who kills people just because he can.
What difference does it make if “atheists believe in nothing”? First of all, it’s not true. Second, the question before the forum is “what’s the evidence for god?”
If someone says “the voices talk to me” then a visit to the psychiatrist is generally warranted. But if the same person says “god talks to me” then they’re considered holy.
I was not impressed by the goddists’ arguments. That’s because I’ve heard every one of these arguments before and they weren’t convincing then.
Before any kind of debate like this can occur, you first have to agree upon the definition of “evidence”.
Theists point to sunsets as “evidence” of god. And if you have the gall to inform them that a sunset is only evidence of the refractive nature of light, they call you “soulless”. And if you agree and inform them that they don’t have a soul, either, then they get all angry and try to get you fired from your job.
Evidence: Objective, repeatable, verifiable observations that can be interpreted in only one way by a disinterested third party (or an antagonist). If you say a sunset is evidence of god, and I claim a sunset is evidence of the refractive nature of light, then it’s not evidence in favor of any single proposition and must be discarded.
They don’t get this at all. Especially the argument from personal experience types like William Lame Craig. They say it’s communicating with god — I think a small brain tumor could be involved or a peculiar genetic defect in the wiring of their frontal, temporal and parietal lobes.