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University of British Columbia - Vancouver Debate with Dr. John Shook on question of "Does God Exist?" First up was the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where I had a full slate of talks plus an important debate. Although my lectures and debate were publicized together, my talks were rather sparsely attended. (Fortunately, the Campus Crusade staff had hired a film crew to record all these events, so now we’ll have videos for the website of my talks on “Dawkins’ Delusion,” “Should We Believe Only What Can Be Scientifically Proven?,” “Is the Fine Tuning of the Universe due to Design?,” and “Is One True Religion Even Possible?”) By contrast, the evening of the debate both the auditorium and the overflow hall were filled to capacity of over 1200 students, and another 300 had to be turned away for lack of room! I’ve since been told that even the UBC administration has taken notice of the size of the event and are now considering how to encourage more opportunities for students to engage in “religious discovery.” The question under debate was “Does God Exist?,” and my opponent was Dr. John Shook, a philosopher with the Center for Inquiry in New York, a secular humanist organization. Reading Shook’s website in preparation for the debate, I discovered that he’s an ardent proponent of naturalism, the view that “the only reality is the physical reality of energy/matter, as gradually discovered by experience, reason, and science.” What’s funny about this is that he also holds that “it is impossible to prove by experience/reason/or science that nothing supernatural exists.” This just is to say that naturalism cannot be proved! But then how could the naturalist ever justify his own viewpoint? Shook admits, “If naturalism needs outside assistance with fully understanding its own foundation, then naturalism is evidently incomplete and false.” Naturalism is thus self-defeating: it tells us to believe only what is justified by experience/reason/science, but it cannot itself be justified by experience/reason/science! By contrast, it occurred to me that my five arguments for God are all based on experience/ reason/science, so that I could beat the naturalist at his own game. I therefore decided to frame the debate as a debate between naturalism and supernaturalism, challenging Shook to justify naturalism while I used his own tests for truth in support of a supernatural God. This strategy worked perfectly, and the debate played itself out as one over naturalism vs. supernaturalism. Our debate was, shall we say, “rollicking.” This was due to two factors. First, UBC and Vancouver in general is overwhelmingly secular. Consider this: only 3% of the population of Vancouver attends church! Can you imagine? That’s worse than England! The day of the debate a local minister advised me over lunch to brace myself for the attack. “This is Richard Dawkins territory,” he said. “These people are deeply secularized, they disdain religion, and they’re nasty about it.” Boy, was he prescient! I’ve never debated before a more hostile, partisan crowd. One Christian student later complained, “I felt outnumbered.” But my attitude was, “Great! These are the people I want to reach.” Second, the moderator of the debate, the student president of the UBC debating society, encouraged the students to register their approval of points they agreed with by rapping on their desks and applauding, and he even coached them on how to do this! Well, as you can imagine, that was all the Dawkins-types needed to hear! As a result, the proceedings were less like an academic debate than the Oprah show. It was entertainment rather than education, cheering for your man rather than being challenged by ideas and learning something new. The desk-banging and applause was fascinating to me in one respect: it was like having one of those audience reaction meters you sometimes see accompanying the presidential debates. When a debate is conducted in silence, one never really knows how the audience is responding. What might strike you as a weak and paltry argument by your opponent might be seen by the audience as a real body blow! I was often surprised and even baffled at the things the non-Christian students applauded. For example, in response to my philosophical argument against an infinite past, Shook said, “This shows that we shouldn’t consult mathematicians about what exists,” and the students broke into applause. “What a strange thing to applaud!” I thought. I explained in my next speech that this was precisely my point: that while infinity may be a useful mathematical concept, that doesn’t imply that it can exist in reality! Or again, in response to my argument for design based on the fine-tuning of the universe, Shook said, “If the universe weren’t fine tuned, then maybe other forms of life would have evolved,” and the secular students erupted in applause. “This only shows that he doesn’t understand fine-tuning,” I thought. So in my next speech I explained to the students that if, for example, the atomic weak force were to be altered in one direction, the universe would have been nothing but hydrogen; alter it in the other direction and there would be nothing but helium. Increase gravity too much and the universe collapses to a singularity; decrease it too much and the universe expands so fast that stars and planets could never form where life might evolve. In the absence of fine-tuning, there wouldn’t even be chemistry, not to speak of complex, self-replicating organisms! During cross-examination, I pressed Shook on the scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe, and he admitted that he didn’t know enough about it to make a judgment. It was obvious that he didn’t know anything about cosmology. When it was his turn to cross-examine me, he asked about how religion provides a reliable guide to what moral values there are. That gave me a chance to make it crystal clear that my moral argument was not in any way concerned with our knowledge of moral values but with the foundation for moral values. I explained that as a Christian I believe God’s moral law is implanted in men’s hearts, so that we grasp moral values instinctively; but the question I’m concerned with is the foundation of the values we grasp. He simply left the point and went on to my argument about the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. He asked me what external corroboration there is that the biblical narratives are true. I thought, “Boy, he doesn’t understand New Testament criticism either!” That gave me the chance, not only to refer to some books on extra-biblical references to Jesus, but more fundamentally to explain that historians read the New Testament documents themselves as valuable historical sources, regardless of extra-biblical corroboration, and I listed some of the standard criteria of authenticity historical scholars use. After the cross-exams, we each gave a closing statement. |