SOUL FOOD:No one wins in religion debate

If only everyone were as rational as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, no one would believe in God and the world would be a safer place for us and for our progeny.

Or at least that’s what these authors of bestselling books that dispute the reasonableness of religion and a belief in God would have you think.

And so would other atheists, like Brian Sapient and Kelly (one name only, like Pink or Cher), co-founder and core member respectively of their five-member “Rational Response Squad,” or “RRS,” for short.

The evils of this world stem more from religion than from anything else, these atheists assert. In “Atheism Redux,” published in the winter issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Bradley Shingleton surmises that “recent phenomena, such as the rise of religiously fueled terrorism, the coalescing alliance between conservative churches and political activists, and the spread of hostility to science, rooted in types of fundamentalism” have led them to this view.

As I mentioned last week, Sapient and Kelly recently debated two Christian evangelists (actor Kirk Cameron and pastor Ray Comfort) on ABC News’s “Nightline Face-Off.” Their topic: “Does God Exist?”

In March, Cameron and Comfort watched a “Nightline” segment that profiled RRS and its “Blasphemy Challenge,” which invites teens to deny the existence of the Holy Spirit on videotape, then post it on YouTube. The evangelists, whose “The Way of the Master” radio and TV program had previously been featured on “Nightline,” asked the show’s producers to sponsor a debate between them and RRS.

Cameron and Comfort wanted to challenge the RRS claim that to believe in God is irrational. ABC agreed and the 90-some-minute debate was streamed live via the Internet with excerpts later aired on “Nightline.”

Before the debate, it was widely publicized that Cameron and Comfort would prove scientifically that God exists without appealing to faith or the Bible. But at the start of the debate Cameron said they proposed to show “that the existence of God can be proven, 100%, without the use of faith.”

To me, there is a difference. And in the course of the debate, Comfort did point to the Bible’s Ten Commandments while making a moral argument for the existence of God. Sapient called foul.

Had I chosen the question for the debate, I’d have instead made it “Is It Irrational to Believe in God?” As it was, this was a debate no one won — not the atheists, not the theists and certainly not the audience.

On the whole, the debate made me want to leave the cyber-room. Watching the atheists was painfully akin to watching an open-mic standup comic bomb. Kelly does a fair Jennifer Coolidge impersonation — without her timing or her wit.

I looked to Melinda Penner for some insights on my reactions. The director of operations for Stand to Reason, a Christian ministry dedicated to the rational defense of the faith, she has a master’s degree in the philosophy of religion and ethics.

Many of the questions Sapient and Kelly posed to Cameron and Comfort have already been answered, if not to their satisfaction, she said. So I asked Penner for an example.

Fair enough, she replied. Kelly asked a question she treated as rhetorical and unanswerable: If God created the universe, who created God?

This question, says Penner, has hardly escaped philosophers. Its quick-and-dirty answer being that God, as an eternal, self-sufficient being, doesn’t need a creator.

Which to a critic may sound “like cheating,” Penner admits. But, she says, “It’s not.”

By way of explanation, she referred me to philosopher William Lane Craig’s recent work on the centuries-old Kalam Cosmological Argument. On his website, www.reasonablefaith.org, you can find several popular and scholarly articles he’s written as well as some of his debates on the argument. Just be prepared to spend some time.

In the case of the ABC debate, Cameron and Comfort didn’t really unpack this argument, perhaps because of time constraints. As Penner pointed out, a debate necessarily compresses a discussion.

For it to be useful, its topic has to be well formulated and the debate’s format needs to allow not only for its affirmation and negation but also for, as Penner put it, “some back and forth.” The ABC debate, she said, needed more of that.

She viewed the claim that Cameron and Comfort could “scientifically prove” that God exists as something of an overstatement — hype that couldn’t be lived up to. All things considered, though, she thought they managed to present “a sound, potentially persuasive argument” for the existence of God based on arguments from morality and design.

Sapient and Kelly derided both, yet, as Penner pointed out, the argument for God from design convinced even Antony Flew, a prominent Western philosopher who several years ago abandoned his lifelong atheism for theism. His book, “There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind,” is due out in November.

Apart from their ridicule, neither Sapient nor Kelly presented evidence against the argument.

“We are all acquainted with examples of design in our experience,” Penner told me, “and [we] intuitively recognize it from randomness.”

At least one atheist in the audience of the ABC debate found the argument convincing. “I find the ‘design means there was a designer’ argument to be perfectly logical,” an e-mail from him to Cameron and Comfort said.

As for Sapient and Kelly, Penner thinks their belief that theists are irrational and stupid worked against them, leading them, as she expressed in her blog, “not to bother to understand what they are debating.” Instead, “they believe dismissal is enough.”

Another problem with such debates in what Penner called “popular culture” rests with their audiences. They don’t have, she said, “the tools to evaluate the arguments.”

Debate societies are now rare in our schools; students aren’t taught informal logic or how to reason. Instead, Penner said, they’re persuaded by “personalities and rhetorical flourishes.”

Any good book on reasoning or logic, she added, would help remedy that.

For a full transcript of my conversation with Penner, e-mail [email protected]. You can also find more on this debate as well as several others on Penner’s blog at www.str.org, where she noted that debates such as this one are often “unimpressive and tedious” because participants show up without having “done their homework.”