Debate on the existence of God, Thursday, Aug 19, 8pm CST

-
EDIT: The debate is now available for download! Get it here. (Thanks to Brian Knapp for generously recording and mastering the event!) A complete transcript is now available here.

EDIT 2: Post-debate discussion is underway! Check out Chris's blog post on self-deception and my general recap.

On Thursday, August 19, at 8:00pm CST (9:00pm EST), I will be streaming a prerecorded audio debate with philosophy graduate Chris Bolt through the internet, while listeners and myself may engage in live text chat. To listen and/or participate, just go to paltalk.com and visit the room called Chris Bolt Ben Wallis debate Does God Exist. The room will open at approximately 7:45pm CST, fifteen minutes before the stream begins.

The debate itself is scheduled to take place at 6:00pm CST. So, the stream you will hear at 8:00pm will be unedited and raw, having just finished recording only a few minutes earlier!

I will also post a download-able mp3 of the debate here, so feel free to check back for an update.

Chris Bolt is a presuppositionalist Calvinist apologist, a fan of Bahnsen and Van Til, whom I expect will use a transcendental argument in our debate. He is a philosophy graduate, theology student, and regular poster on the website choosinghats.com.

I hope to have a lot of fun, and anyone interested is welcome to share in that for the Paltalk stream this coming Thursday!

Enjoy!
--Ben Wallis

Comments

Agreus said…
I think you were the clear victor in the debate Ben. However, my only criticism is that you offered Mr. Bolt a solution to the problem of induction, while at the same time saying it was irrelevant to God's existence. If it is irrelevant, then why engage him on this point? You do not have the burden of solving the problem of induction.
August 31, 2010 at 2:42 AM
Jack Schmitt said…
Excellent debate, the cross-examining really highlighted the weaknesses in Bolt's argument.
October 19, 2010 at 2:09 AM
Truthseeker said…
Hello Ben,

It was an interesting debate. As you said some won't find you justification for induction satisfying. The real problem is for induction to work the uniformity of nature is necessary.

I would ask the question how do you account for the uniformity of nature?

I have never heard a satisfactory answer to this question that is consistent with itself from a non-Christian worldview.
December 23, 2010 at 11:49 PM
Ben Wallis said…
Truthseeker,

I hope you enjoyed the debate! In response to your question, the answer is that we must assume the uniformity of nature/experience because otherwise we can't make plans or develop strategies for living our lives. As I mentioned in the debate, even something as simple as stretching out one's hand to capture a morsel of food requires that we have uniformity for some short duration of time in our immediate environment. The same goes for practically everything else we do. So I just don't see any way out of making this assumption if we want to be actors in the world. Otherwise we can't make plans to achieve any of our goals, because the only reason we can expect a plan to work is because we can recognize how it fits into the regularities of our experiences.

I should add that the Christian is in the same boat. He can claim that his assumption of the uniformity of nature/experience is part of a larger body of religious doctrine, but that doesn't give him any epistemic justification for it! He just has a bigger bag of unjustified assumptions.

So, once we see the unusual position we are in, it seems to me that the only thing we can do is humbly accept our predicament. We can never know that the uniformity of experience will hold, but we make that assumption, anyway, because we like to make plans and act on them---i.e. that's the kind of people we are.

I hope that helps!

--Ben
December 24, 2010 at 5:51 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

James Anderson and non-contradiction

-
Dr. James Anderson has recently completed, with Greg Welty, the forthcoming paper "The Lord of Non-Contradiction," in which he argues for the existence of God from the laws of logic. We may divide the argument into two portions, the first where he holds that there is a necessarily existent mind, and the second that such a mind must be the mind of God. His summary of the first part of the argument proceeds thusly: "The laws of logic are necessary truths about truths; they are necessarily true propositions. Propositions are real entities, but cannot be physical entities; they are essentially thoughts. So the laws of logic are necessarily true thoughts. Since they are true in every possible world, they must exist in every possible world. But if there are necessarily existent thoughts, there must be a necessarily existent mind" (p20). Of course this is a summary only, and in the full paper each step in this argument is carefully defended with sub-arguments. For my o
Read more

Why did God want Jesus to suffer?

-
Christians face an interesting theological challenge regarding the crucifixion of Jesus, insofar as we want to know why Jesus had to suffer in order to save the faithful. God, being omnipotent, appears to have the power to save the faithful, regardless of whether he also sent Jesus to suffer on the cross. In order to explain why it was better for him to do so, we might be tempted to invoke the notion of justice. However, if we want to appeal to God's favorite system of justice to explain why Jesus had to suffer, then we must know why that system is ultimately good for us. Since we do not in fact know how God's rules of cosmic justice are ultimately good for us, then no appeal to those rules will serve as a satisfactory explanation.
Read more

Some comments on Brian Knapp's post

-
Unfortunately it has become somewhat common for atheists to deny that they have any burden of proof in religious debates. While this may sometimes be true in some limited sense, I find it problematic for at least three reasons: First, it seems quite evident that many of the atheists who employ this tactic are in fact positive atheists, which is to say that they take the assertive position that there is no God, rather than the weaker position of unbelief in the existence of God. Now, it may be more interesting to talk about the justification for theism rather than that for positive atheism, but nevertheless the position of the nonexistence of God does indeed require some justification, and so anyone defending that position certainly has a burden of proof in that regard. Second, even a negative atheist has basic obligations to facilitate communication. In any two-way conversation, each party shares some measure of responsibility not just for communicating clearly, but also for assi
Read more