Dr Greg Bahnsen - Bahnsen-Tabash Debate: Does God Exist? (Part 1)

This recording has been released into the public domain by the Bonson Institute, where we aim to bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.

Good evening.

My name is Brian Berry and I am currently the president of Truth Seekers. And on behalf of our organization, I'd like to thank you for coming and welcome you to tonight's event. Does God Exist? The Ultimate Debate. I believe that tonight's debate will be an awesome and comprehensive debate. Nevertheless, while Truth Seekers welcomes guest speakers, the views expressed by those invited are not necessarily those of the Truth Seekers staff itself. A statement of our beliefs and purposes enclosed in the program which you received this evening for our event. And now, Dan Warmer and Mark Coleman will introduce tonight's speakers, Dr. Greg Bonson and Mr. Edward Tabosh, respectively. Would you please join me in welcoming these two fine gentlemen.

Answering the question, does God exist? In the affirmative will be Dr. Greg L. Bonson. Dr. Bonson has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Southern California. In addition, he is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a member of the Society of Christian Philosophers, and a member of the evangelical philosophical society. Dr. Bonson was the first person to receive two simultaneous degrees from Westminster Theological Seminary, a Master's of Divinity degree and a Master's of theology degree. Presently, Dr. Bonson lives in Southern California. There he is a teaching pastor of Bayview Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition, he is a resident scholar of the Southern California center for Christian Studies. He is the author of five scholarly books which deal with the following Ethics and Practice, the Theory of Knowledge, and Christian Apologetics. All of these topics that Bonson specializes in are directly relevant to tonight's debate. Dr. Bonson is a veteran of numerous debates with such broad topics as religious truth, sociopolitical application and and other fine topics. As one can see, Dr. Bonson is more than qualified and capable of defending Christian theism, for he has not only studied and written on the philosophical and academic issues involved, but he has also demonstrated an unusual ability to articulate and express his views cogently. I am confident that whatever your view may be, whether you're an atheist, agnostic, or a theist, you will enjoy Dr. Bonson.

And answering the question in the negative this Evening will be Mr. Edward Tabosz. Mr. Tabosz comes to us with a Juris Doctorate from Loyola University and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles. He is currently an attorney in Beverly Hills, California, and has served formerly on the Board of Directors for the American Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Taabash's father is a Rabbi who is trained in one of the oldest and most prestigious rabbinical schools in all of Europe. His mother was a survivor of the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Despite the fact that Mr. Tabas disagrees with his father's theology, he remains a sincere and avid supporter of pro Israeli activists. He is also involved and active in organizations, all the major organizations for the separation of church and state and the pro choice movement. He has also been a speaker for Senator Dianne Feinstein and the honorable President of the United States, Mr. Bill Clinton. Tonight he will be speaking for himself and the views that he puts forth tonight are not necessarily to be attributed to any organization in which he is involved, nor to Ms. Feinstein or to the President of the United States, Mr. Bill Clinton. By agreement of both the participants in tonight's event, the moderator will be Mr. Don Botelli, who is one of the advisors for truth seekers. Please join me in welcoming all three of these gentlemen who will participate in our debate this evening.

Thank you, Mark and Dan. Welcome ladies and gentlemen. The resolution before us tonight is in the form of a question. Does God exist? I would like to preempt my remarks by saying that just recently I have learned the correct pronunciation of Mr. Tabosz's name. So please forgive me if it seems like if I drift back into the old pronunciation that I'm talking to two different people. Tonight, the Nutra Suite has finally had its revenge. The format for tonight's debate will be divided into four segments. Segment one will consist of two 15 minute opening statements followed by two questions each of cross examination. The cross examination phase of segment one will be followed by two seven minute rebuttals. Segment two will be the same as segment one with the exception being that the speaking order will be inverted and the speaking time shortened. Immediately following segment 1 and 2, there will be a brief intermission in your program that hopefully you receive tonight is a blank yellow piece of paper. If during segment one or two you think of a question you would like to ask either speaker, write it down and during segment one or two for collection during intermission, please write in the top right hand corner of your card the name of the speaker you wish to address. When you are finished, please pass your question from the center of your seating row toward the aisle. The usher will collect the questions to be screened by a panel to possibly be answered during segment three. Segment three will consist of 30 minutes of questions and answer vis a vis this written format for Mr. Tabosh. Dr. Bonson. Each speaker will have 90 seconds to comment on each other's question segment four will consist of two 10 minute closing statements. In addition, I would ask that you would please refrain from any applause during tonight's debate. While I am sure your support would be appreciated by the respective speakers, since this debate will be strictly timed, your applause will only reduce the time your speaker has to present his arguments. I would also ask that you abstain from using flashbulbs when taking pictures tonight in appreciation for their obvious distracted distractive effect. I would also ask that you also refrain from any external verbal participation which is a speech and debate way of saying please let the debaters do the debating. We have Aggie host here tonight and I feel it's my duty to inform you that they are undefeated in Freeborn Hall. And finally to Mr. Tabosh and Dr. Bonson, I would ask that you help me to remain as obscure as possible by adhering to the pre agreed format. I'm convinced that the audience is here to listen to you two gifted gentlemen debate each other, not to hear me reprimand you for breaches of debate protocol. Having said this, I would now like to invite Dr. Bonson to present his 15 minute opening statement. And until we have heard the last word on this issue tonight, may clear minds prevail. Will you please welcome Dr. Bonson and Mr. Tabai.

Thank you very much for coming out. It's really great to be here. I'm glad to engage in this debate because in the first place I think it's a great privilege that God by His grace has called me to believe in him and I trust that I might honor him and what I'm doing. I am glad to be here as well because I've enjoyed reading what I've learned about my opponent and I think this will be a good exchange. Maybe we'll have even a better one when we go out to eat afterwards. But when I found out that he was an alumnus of ucla, I was all the more glad that I was asked to come to this debate because I'm really sore about losing out on the Rose Bowl. Tonight's debate is kind of like going to a movie after it started, say midway through the screening of the movie. In order to understand and assess the conflict or the struggle that you're presently seeing, you have to catch up with the background that you haven't seen but which explains and actually develops what's now going on presently on the screen. And I think that's true about tonight's debate as well. You really can't understand and evaluate what you see and hear up here until you look into the unspoken beliefs which are really the context of what's going on. There is a crucial and a determinative intellectual background to tonight's public conflict between the theist and the atheist. A background which involves radically different flying philosophies about reality, knowledge, human value and conduct. On the one hand you have a view that says the world is at base, matter in motion, and over against that a view that says the material world is actually the creation and is controlled by a sovereign and all knowing personal God. These different ultimate perspectives or worldviews are the context in terms of which Ponent reasons, what he takes to be relevant, what method and standards of reasoning he employs, how evidence is recognized, how it's assessed and how it's applied. Mr. Tavish has a fundamental philosophy of life, an underlying worldview which he brings as background baggage to the debate tonight. So do I. We each have as yet unspoken beliefs about the nature of reality, human experience, the possibility and methods of knowing, and how we should live our lives. And when all is said and done, these two opposing worldviews will guide and always be at work in our respective arguments or our appraisals of evidence. For example, atheists can be undaunted when Christians show the historicity of Christ's resurrection, pointing to it and saying, see, there's a miracle. But you see, given the atheist naturalistic presuppositions, he believes that someday, or he can believe someday, scientific explanation of that event is theoretically possible, in which case then it's not a miracle. On the other hand, theists are not dissuaded when atheists point to the evidence of natural disasters or children suffering in the world. For you see, given their presuppositions, God has a morally sufficient reason for ordaining such events, and thus they are not contrary to his goodness and his power, given those presuppositions. In both cases, the underlying worldview is the controlling factor in the reasoning and conflicting conclusions to which the proponents come. And thus progress can be made in the atheist theist debate only if we recognize that we all have, as it were, come into the movie midway and we must confront the philosophical background to our disagreements. Tonight's debate comes down to a choice between the conflicting worldviews and in terms of which we will be reasoning and arguing tonight. Now, I believe that the existence of the Christian God is an objective reality which is rationally provable. Please note four things though, about what I've just said. First of all, notice that I am defending Christian theism. Specifically, I don't believe there is any unambiguous and coherent notion of theism in general, I'll be defending the Christian version of theism. Secondly, our concern here tonight is with the question of the truth of atheism or of theism, not with psychological motivations, not with subjective desires or the social functions or even the personal character of theist or atheist. The truth about God either way, and the truth about devotees to theism or atheism. Again, either way may be happy or it may be sad, it may be useful, or it may be counterproductive, it may be corrupting or it may be ennobling. But regardless, whatever the truth is, it remains the truth. Thirdly, remember that an argument need not be accepted by everyone for it to be nonetheless conclusive. We must obviously distinguish between proof and persuasion. Personal persuasion is subjectively qualified. Proof is not. For you see, something can exist, for instance, a cancer for which the doctor has proof. Something can exist even though a person is unpersuaded that he has cancer and even offers reasons, maybe avidly reasons, against the possibility that he has cancer. We're dealing here with proof, not persuasion, tonight. And fourthly, many hearers need to disabuse themselves of an old canard that goes something like this. Faith is believing what you know ain't true. Or faith takes over where reason leaves off. Faith is not something that stands over against reason, whether above reason or contrary to reason or however you wish to put it. Rather, reasoning itself rests upon the presupposition of faith and collapses as arbitrary without it. Now, to make this point, I've chosen to look not to what committed Christians have reasoned or said, which you might feel is too easy and partisan on my behalf, but rather to have us consider what our hostile opponents have pointed out about a central problem in philosophy. We'll look at an issue treated by David Hume, the 18th century Scottish skeptic, and also by Bertrand Russell, 20th century English philosopher. Both of these men wrote in strong opposition to religious faith and especially to Christianity. The problem we're going to look at for a few moments here is the problem of induction. Among the expectations with which we encounter experience and and encounter the world is the expectation that uniformity can be found between the diverse events, things or experiences in the world. This expectation may in some cases be quite explicit and self conscious, but it need not be. For instance, when we learn to drive a car or to speak a foreign language, we usually pay close attention to what is the regular function of certain parts of the car, or of the grammatical rules and ordinary word usages of the language. But we eventually come to do these things more automatically or more habitually. And we no longer consciously think about the expected uniformity or use of cars. Or our use of language. Our learning and reasoning tacitly assumes that the universe is such. That uniformities are expected and exhibited in similar things. Even though they are separated by time and space. That the way things happen can be viewed as instances of general laws. And what has occurred in the past is a reliable guide for predicting and thus adjusting to the future. Now, this can be described in an elaborate and abstract way. But not many of you are philosophy majors and would want me to do that. The fact is, each of us is very familiar with what I'm talking about. From personal experience. We're all quite acquainted with the process. Of moving. From particular facts in our experience. To general truths which are exhibited by those particular experiences. For instance, children don't merely conclude from their pain. That a particular case of flame is burning them. They usually project that fire in general. Or, if you will, all fire. Any fire will burn as well. From observed regularities or associations, we infer universal regularity. Even in the unobserved cases or yet future cases. In popular parlance, we say we assume the uniformity of nature. The method of generalizing from observed cases to all cases of the same kind Is called induction. The basic guiding principle here is that future cases will be like past cases. That similar things will behave similarly. So, for instance, if certain conditions and events Bring about a certain effect today. The same factors will cause a similar effect later. I'll give you a down to earth example. Why do we expect toothpaste to spurt from the tube when we squeeze it? You might call this the toothpaste proof of God's existence. Okay. We support that expectation in terms of two things. One, our past experience with toothpaste tubes. And two, the belief that nature is uniform, that the future is like the past. Without that second belief, we would not be able to learn from experience. We would not be able to use language. We would not be able to rely on memory or advanced science. All of which involve observing similarities. And projecting them into the future. Moreover, our belief about uniformity. Or the inductive principle. Is a very firmly entrenched belief. When scientists found that there were deviations. In the expected orbit of Uranus. They did not draw the conclusion. Okay, nature is not uniform after all. That just impelled them to start looking for another factor. As yet unknown. That was influencing the orbit of Uranus. They did not give up the inductive principle. But they Rather hypothesized the body, which, by the way, we now know to be the planet Neptune. And so from toothpaste to the planets, we believe in reason in terms of the inductive principle. Now, David Hume's question was this, and I quote, what is the nature of that evidence which assures us of any real existence and matter of fact beyond the present testimony, senses, or the records of our memory? By what logical right, he was asking, do we claim to know that some empirical generalizations are true? What, asked Hume, are we warranted in asserting on the basis of our experiences? He said to be very strict in his empiricism only that in the past, or in the cases so far observed, such and such has been the case. Hume said we have no basis for projecting that into the future. And I quote him again, he says, if you insist that the inference is made by a chain of reasoning, I desire you to produce that reasoning. Now, of course, many people make the mistake of responding to Hume saying, hey, listen, we all assume the future will be like the past. Hume said that he understood that there is no question that in practice we act that way. But as he said, and I quote him again, I want to learn the foundation of this inference. And then there are people who say, well, we know it's very probable, even though it may not be certain. But that misses Hume's point as well. Hume knew very well that we don't have certainty about all matters of science. His point is that we have no logical right to affirm on the basis of our past experience that even probability is true of the natural order, and so that the principle of induction is left without a foundation. Bertrand Russell, the 20th century philosopher, said that we cannot justify our belief in induction on the basis of the past success we've had in believing that the inductive principle is true, because that too assumes that what happened in the past is going to be like the future. Let me quote Russell here. The inductive principle is equally incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience. Experience might conceivably confirm the inductive principle as regards the cases that have been already examined. But as regards unexamined cases, it is the inductive principle alone that can justify any inference from what has been examined to what has not been examined. All arguments which on the basis of experience argue as to the future or the unexperienced parts of the past or present, assume the inductive principle. Hence, we can ever use experience to prove the inductive principle without begging the question. So now do we have reason for believing the inductive principle? We need to set the Christian worldview, the theistic worldview, side by side with the atheist worldview, and ask which one comports with the inductive principle and thus provides the preconditions for science, language, learning and any intelligible human experience. And I would say it's certainly not atheism. Atheism's view of reality and historical eventuation cannot provide a cogent reason for what all of our reasoning takes for granted. It is debunked by its philosophical arbitrariness at just this point, as even men like Hume and and Bertrand Russell realized. Accordingly, it is most reasonable to believe and entirely unreasonable not to believe in God. For God's existence is the precondition of all reasoning whatsoever.

Thank you, Dr. Bonson. Mr. Toas, would you please now give us your 15 minute opening statement?

There is a reason why those of us who do not believe in the Christian concept of God have decided not to adopt that belief. And that is a lack of evidence that pertains to our experience of the physical world in which we live. And I must say that the Christian concept of God itself is highly offensive to a rational conceptualization of a just omnipotent being. Because what kind of God is it that would tell me that my sincere disbelief in that theology will result in eternal punishment? What kind of a cosmic egomaniac is this to cast people like me in a lake of fire and take flaming vengeance on me as is said in the New Testament, and to do all the things to me that will happen throughout the New Testament? Damnation and everything for those who believe not the gospel of Jesus Christ? Where is the evidence to our sensory perception, even to our concept of the order of the universe, to the order of the physical environment in which we live? Where is the evidence that that whole cosmos is structured by a being that has so sinister a purpose for us, so sinister a purpose as to consign us to eternal damnation because we cannot bring ourselves to believe and that is invisible. I submit that such a being is not a God, but a devil. And I submit that such a being is non existent. And if such a being were existent, then this is not a God, but a cosmic trickster who is playing a colossal scheme of hide and seek because we can't see this being. If this being truly exists, the let it not speak to me from the antiquity of ancient books and tell me that I have to believe in it, even though I have no direct evidence because of the hearsay of people who live 2 and 3,000 years ago, why not appear to all of us directly, in fact, God? You who, if you're listening and you're really there, show yourself right now. Come out of hiding manifest on the stage. Do a colossal miracle, levitate this building. Do something to show me more than the words of ancient men, as women weren't even permitted to draft and participate in the Bible. Show me something more than ancient hearsay from the dust of antiquity to prove your existence. And if you do not meet my challenge, I say to you, if you're awake and listening, that you are violating your moral duty to manifest yourself, considering that you yourself have erected such harsh penalties to befall all those of us who will not believe in you. If there is such a penalty to be paid for disbelief, then you must, to be fair, give us greater evidence to induce that belief, rather than to expect us to take questionable testimony from primitive times as a basis for making a judgment about the nature of eternity. And so I would say that not only is there no evidence, but that the Christian concept of God is an immoral monster for positing such eternal punishment for understandable lack of belief. If I am sincerely wrong after I die, God should say, well, Eddie, you blew it, but it's understandable. I didn't give you much to go on, so you still get to avoid the barbecue pit. But the fact that Christian theology says that if we do not accept Jesus, it's the grill room, that is something which is offensive to the nature of not only normal human evidence, but it's offensive to our nature of right and wrong. And where is the proof, other than a dusty old book written thousands of years ago of questionable authorship? Now, the argument is that there is design in the universe, but if there is such design, then the theists can't have it both ways, because intelligent planning in the universe means that there are physical laws that we can apprehend that have uniformity of application. And if those physical laws have uniformity of application, and the design is such that it possesses pattern, precision and regularity so that we may know that that design is reliable, then those very laws cannot be violated by the introduction of unprovable miracles. And so the claim for miracles is itself a violation of the very claim of design. And the theists cannot have it both ways, because if the universe is so well ordered, like a perfectly running mechanism, then it means that that design reveals to us that we can apprehend the uniformity of the rules which are inviolable and which are invariable and thus the very claim of miracle violates that principle of design and uniformity. And that would tend to show that if a God exists, it is not the God of Christianity or, or Orthodox Judaism or Islam. It is not the invisible male deity in the sky that gets a temper tantrum every time you don't worship him in the right modality. It would show that that deity is more or less the pantheistic concept as articulated by Spinoza, which is a being that is a prisoner of and subject to its own laws. It means that the God force is as much a subject of its laws as we are, because the uniformity and design of the universe reveals laws that are predictable and immutable and that do not get altered. Also, when I was 5 years old and the rabbis were teaching me about God's parting the Red Sea, my first impulse was to become quite jealous. I was jealous because it meant that my ancient forebears got a chance to see direct proof of something which I was being denied. They had the opportunity to witness a miraculous directly, and I was being denied that opportunity because miracles no longer happened. And I told the rabbis that if we could go to the Santa Monica beach and see God part the Pacific Ocean in a miraculous fashion, that would induce belief. And why is it that we must rely on a book written, I guess, altogether somewhere between 1350 BC and maybe when everybody got it together about 250 AD which wasn't even in its initial codified form until 325 in the council of Nicaea, where even the book of Luke, as I understand it, only made it into the Gospels by one vote, and other books were discarded. So if we have a book that took about 1400 years to put together, of dubious authorship at a time without word processors, without reliable testimony, without floppy disks and mag cards to show fidelity to the original text, without even good Xerox machines, how in the world are we to be expecting that not one word in that book is in error? How can we expect not one word in that book is in error? And in the Gospels we see a few errors and or contradictions. The Resurrection One book says that two women went to the tomb. Others said three women. One book says that the stone was already pulled aside when they got there. The other book says, no, it wasn't. It was pulled aside when they got there was one book says there was an angel outside saying he is risen. The other said there was one man in a white garment inside that it says, no, there were two guys inside. And so if the Bible is absolutely Inerrant. There could not be this contradiction. There couldn't be this God of the Old Testament that says, yes, you Jews, you're my people, you are my sons and daughters, you are my chosen people. And then in the book of Thessalonians, talking about how the Jews are accursed because of their denial of Jesus and that they are contrary to men. There also could not be chapter 7, verse 14 in the book of Isaiah, which says that in fact a child will be born not to a virgin, but the original Hebrew, Alma is young woman. If they wanted to use the word virgin, they would have said Bethullah, not Alma in the original Hebrew. And then to say that his son will be Emmanuel. Well, Jesus's name was not Emmanuel. And the whole chapter of Isaiah was talking about assigned to a king 600 years before Jesus was to be born, 600 years before Jesus, a king who was being beset by the kingdom of Israel and a kingdom to the east. And this was a poor king of the kingdom of Judea who was besieged. So the whole point is that not only is the Bible not containing evidence in the physical, rational universe to exhibit its authenticity, it doesn't show internal consistency. And even if it did show internal consistency, that does not mean that its claims of supernaturalism are true. Now it's true that I can't explain every phenomenon in the universe, but I don't have to. If there is lightning, and I don't necessarily know how that came about, that doesn't mean that the superstitious offering of somebody from a primitive tribe that says that this is the alligator God who gets angry at the trees, that doesn't mean that that's true. So the fact that religionists can fabricate myths that explain away as of yet unknown phenomena doesn't mean that their God of the gaps, that their filler is true. I don't have to say that I can prove to you that there are not, in the words of Dr. Leonard Peacock right now, a convention of gremlins on Venus studying Hegel have to prove to you because such a thing is so outside the ordinary sensory and scientific and empirical everyday experience of the normal course of these very immutable laws. The theists say show design because of that, because of that, the burden of proof is on them to show that there are a convention of gremlins on Venus studying Hegel and even a little Immanuel Kant if you want to add spice to it. So again, where is the proof? If somebody is going to tell me that my eternity depends on the Acceptance of supernaturalism which is unprovable. And show me a book which came from the murky past and is already over 2000 years old. And to tell me that that book was written by infallible people and that the testimony in there is without mistake, even though nothing was written down contemporaneously during the New Testament. There is nothing in the New Testament, perhaps we'll disagree on this, that was directly witnessed by an author of the New Testament, the Gospels. The Gospel of Mark was written maybe 75 AD which was about 45 years after Jesus died. The Book of Revelations, which supposedly houses the infallible word of Jesus as to the final destiny of the world, wasn't written until about 100 AD, about 70 years after the death of Jesus. What possible proof is there that each of these books was written without mistake? And that when the various councils throughout the first 16 centuries met to decide which books were to be part of the canon which were not, that their decisions were infallible? Where is the proof that the cosmic entity guided the selection of every book so that what was deleted and what was accepted was without error? And also where is the proof that there is such a curmudgeonly ill tempered God as the one in the book of Exodus who ordered Moses to have a guy stoned to death because he did nothing more than pick up sticks on the Sabbath? I don't want to know that kind of God. Also, I have concrete proof that God is already in error. God made a mistake in the Bible and has been proved empirically wrong by history. God said in the third chapter of Genesis that the woman shall be ruled over by her husband. I submit that the past three millennia of human history has shown that was a bad idea. So we see then that there is a strong likelihood and in terms of miracles, we have to accept the most believable that ancient human beings superimposed on a fabricated being, their ancient concepts, patriarchal societies invented a patriarchal God who was nothing more than an extension of their own primitive psychological yearnings. And there is no concrete scientific or empirical proof to demonstrate that that entity governs the world today and will punish us forever because we do not believe in Jesus. I submit that the Christian God is an unproven Myth.

Thank you, Mr. Tabosh. Before we move into phase two of segment one, earlier I asked that you please abstain from using flash bulbs. I know for a fact that the truth Seeker organization didn't order this, but the Kalagi host has instruction from their own supervision to remove anyone that uses flashbulbs during this debate. So I would just advise you to, if you'd like to stay in the audience, to please abstain.

Thank you.

We will now move into phase two of the question and answer period. The first question will be from Dr. Bonson to Mr. Johnson.

Can you just give us the timeframes of those questions? Again.

Each speaker will have who is asking the question will have 60 seconds to ask questions. Perfectly answering the question. Dr. Bronson.

David Hume admits that the uniformity of hanging is not rationally justified by a fear of common practice, not by appeal to probability. Bertrand Russell admits that it's not rationally supported by appeal, past success or to any kind of human experience. Mr. Tabosh, on what rational basis do you then, as an atheist, justify belief in the inductive principle?

I justify belief in anything, whether the inductive or the deductive principle, pursuant to what my sensory experience, aided by scientific tools will demonstrate to me. But I feel no obligation to believe in claims of the superl of which there is no evidence and which violate not only my sense of moral justice, as the exclusive club of Christianity portrays itself to be, but also believe.

You're ranging way beyond.

But. But also. I know it's part of it. It's part of the answer. Part of the answer is that it's.

Looking for the inductive principle.

Okay. The inductive principle is a question of reasoning from one item to another. And in that sense, for purposes of discussion tonight, it's no different to principle. There's absolutely no difference between the two. And what you do is induction or deduction builds upon or strips away excess dross based on the physical evidence that you have to work with. That is how you develop your tools for induction or deduction.

And.

And they are a sensory, empirical manifestation, and therefore they do not require recourse to stepping outside the perceptible universe to a postulated supreme being.

Mr. Tabosh, you may ask Dr. Bonson a question.

Well, Dr. Bonson, since you said that it is your purpose to defend Christian theism, I wanted to ask you about the fundamental fairness of a God that would. And it says in the New Testament. Many places talk about damnation, hellfire, lake of fire, inflaming, vengeance, taking fire of taking vengeance on flaming fire. All those who believe, not Jesus. If in fact Jesus is the only modality to salvation for our eternity, shouldn't God give more direct evidence by directly appearing to each of us? Isn't it fundamentally unfair? For instance, for as many Christians have said, my mother, an Auschwitz survivor, miserable life Dies and winds up in hell?

I'm not sure. Perhaps, Eddie, you've been asleep at the wheel of your studies. The Christian claim is brief precisely that God has made direct appearance to us. And he's done so in any number of ways. First of all, he has done so in every single one of your sensory experiences that you try to appeal to or to make intelligible in your reasoning. He does so because without his existence, you cannot make sense of the inductive principle by which you reason from past experience to the future. I'll rebut your answer in a minute. So I don't want it to be unfair to you, but what I'm getting at is that God hasn't left Himself without a witness. He testifies to you in the very fact that you're trying to reason and debate tonight and to reason in a uniform fashion. God has appeared in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. That's the Christian claim. We can get into that later. But to say, why doesn't God directly appear? Is to miss the whole point. God has directly appeared. You wish to know about the fundamental fairness of God? The strange thing about that question is that within the worldview of atheism, where all reality is matter in motion, there is no fundamental fairness about anything. In fact, there are no ethical notions whatsoever. There's just matter in motion, things happen, and that's all there is to it. And so for an atheist to try to raise a moral consideration against God is itself contradictory. It's to give up your worldview, presume on mine for a while to get an idea of fairness, and then turn around and try to use that against my worldview as well. God is fundamentally fair because he has given abundant evidence to all men in their use of science and their use of morality, their understanding of human dignity. God has made Himself abundantly clear to all men. And God will not, according to the teaching of Scripture, send anybody to hell for not knowing better.

Thank you, Dr. Bonson. Dr. Bonson, you may ask Mr. Dibosh a question.

Mr. Dibosh, in your opening presentation, at one point you challenged God to appear and to make Himself known. Right? Now I'm very glad that he has not chosen to do that and to bring the day of judgment by his appearance in that way. But, and I'm glad for your sake, because if he did appear, it wouldn't be just an academic matter for you. But I have a question about that. If you don't meet my challenge approach to things now, I'm just going to ask you to reason in a consistent way. If God exists, deal with this as a hypothesis. I know you don't at this point affirm it. But if God exists, would it be reasonable? Would it be true to his nature as God, as sovereign, as the one who has final authority, and so forth? Would it be true to the nature of God to submit to your authority and say, you lay down test for me, let me prove myself to you, and then finally, oh, thank you, you'll believe in me. Wouldn't he be God if he submitted to that kind of test, Dr. Bonsape?

Absolutely. And the reason why I say that is because if I elected to believe in this entity, absolutely. And the reason why I say that is because if I am expected to believe in this entity, then this entity, in fairness, that has so much power compared to me, assuming that it exists, would be morally obligated to recognize my dilemma in lack of perception and to give me a concrete sign. This entity with its omniscience would have the knowledge to know that with all my struggles and in this world, with all my struggles with science and philosophy, I have not been able to see this being and it would understand. It has to make a greater demonstration of its existence. And so if God created us. Now, using your hypothesis, if your God exists and is supposedly a God of mercy, then the very act of mercy would entail a manifestation of its being to us so that we could have concrete proof, particularly particularly since, and I still will fight about this, but I still read the New Testament as providing eternal punishment for those who do not accept the gospel of Jesus Christ. And I'm saying if that's the stakes, if even the finest, most selfless people in the world wind up in some kind of eternal punishment if they reject the gospel of Jesus, which I think is fundamentally unfair to do the to do to them. But if that is how it is set up, then I absolutely believe that that God is required to give concrete, manifested evidence of its existence so that we do not make that fatal eternal mistake. If the stakes are so high, then I think that God is incumbent upon us to show itself. And if it were not so, then God should not have implanted in me the reasoning facility to look this way. If it's not so, God should not have designed my mind in such a way that my questioning of the God's fairness leads me to this doubt.

Mr. Debosh, Mr. Debauch, would you ask Dr. Bonson a question?

Okay.

Dr. Bunsen, you didn't exactly answer my question last time, and I choose to Repeat it about the biblical claims in the Book of Thessalonians, Book of Romans, in the Book of John, only saying that those who believe in Jesus Christ will have everlasting life. What about the Auschwitz survivors, like members of my family who chose not to believe in Jesus or any God after that experience? What about the sincere Buddhist monks who simply have said, yes, I've looked at Christianity, but I choose not to be? Will my mother an Auschwitz survivor? Will the Dalai Lama, will the Buddhists all over the world, will the sincere atheists, will they all wind up in hell? Or what will be the fate of all of us who really say, you know, I simply cannot buy into this, and I reject the Gospel of Jesus Christ as being mythology. Will we, because the Bible says so, wind up being damned?

The answer is yes, you will. Let's explore that just for a moment. In a sense, this question is really a version of the challenge that you offered in your opening statement. If God doesn't appear to me right now, if he doesn't accept my challenge, then I'm not going to believe, and so forth. When you ask now, what will God do when people reject the evidence that he's given of himself, do not live according to his character, will not accept his offers of mercy and so forth, and despise him altogether, and live unto themselves as though they were God, as though they could issue challenges to him and say, you meet my criteria. Let me play God, and then I'll let you be God after I'm satisfied. When people reject the obvious evidence of God's existence, and it's a rational necessity to believe in him, to use morality to engage in scientific inference and so forth, when people do that, then of course God will be true to his own character. He will say, in the end, you will not determine the final end of things. I will determine them by my own character. If the doctrine of hell is not true, then God is not true to his character because God says, those who will be with me must emulate my character. They must be like me. Now, of course, he is under obligation to show what he is like, and he has done so. He's done so pervasively. He's done so, as the Apostle Paul says, in a way that cannot be avoided by any man. And it's only for that reason that Christian theology teaches that those who end up going to hell do so by their own perverse choice. Now, if God were to say, I'm going to create people, and even though they, in the face of obvious evidence, despise my character live unto themselves and I'm just going to let them come to heaven anyway. God is basically saying, they don't have to be like me. My character really means nothing. He's saying, I despise you. You have chosen to reject me. Now I hope you don't continue to do so, Mr. Tabosh. But for the moment, if you reject God and then he says you're going.

To live with me for eternity, then.

He'S basically saying, I'll not respect your wishes. Thank you.

We'll move to the third phase of segment one, which will culminate segment one and we will now have Dr. Bronson's seven minute rebuttal.

By way of rebuttal of what you've heard from Mr. Tabosh so far in our evening's debate. About all Mr. Tabosh has demonstrated is that he personally does not like the Christian God. But we really have to ask, please do so, no matter what side of the shoes you're on. The fact that he's told you he doesn't like things in the Bible and he doesn't think this is right and so forth, how in any way is that philosophically relevant to our debate? That's what I want to know. How is it at all relevant that Mr. Tabosh doesn't like the Christian God? Now it would be relevant to the debate if his implicit assumption is this. If I don't like something, then it doesn't exist. But that would be intellectually childish, wouldn't it? Kind of like the child who gets angry at his restrictive father and pulls the covers up over his head and says, you don't exist because I don't like you, or throws a temper tantrum because he doesn't like spinach in his experience. And so spinach doesn't exist. I mean, do we really think that way? Do we assume that because we don't like something about God that he can't be God? Well, if we don't assume that, then actually most of the time Mr. Tabosh took was wasted because all he's told us is a piece of autobiography. He doesn't like God. I also think, by the way, that he's greatly misjudged and distorted what God says in the Bible. I mean, you present these little events out of context and not telling the whole story. He tries to make God look like a real meanie. But I mean, that's a standard thing. Criminals never think the police have done fair by them. And Mr. Tabosh is a criminal in the universe. And when he talks about God, he's going to make him out to be a meanie. There's no doubt about that. You see, the point is there are people in this world that I don't happen to like one bit. I'm sorry to admit. I admit that I try to love everybody, but there are some people who are real asses, you know? But is the fact that I don't like them one bit affect their reality? It's okay, you don't exist because I don't like you. I mean, that's about all you've heard and that's just not philosophically cogent or sound in the tabloid that was passed. The debate tonight, Mr. Tavish is quoted in a way that is similar to something he said in the debate already. He says if the God of the Bible actually exists, I want to sue him for negligence for being asleep at the wheel of the universe when my grandfather and uncle were gassed to death at Auschwitz. And let me, before I deal with you as a philosopher, deal with you as a person. I think it's tragic that that happened. And I don't want you to think for a minute that it's just a matter of playing debate games that we talk about this. But since you've raised it, I want to respond to that. You have to understand that if the God of the Bible does not exist, you have lost all principled moral complaint about what Hitler did to your relatives. In a godless universe, what one animal does to another animal is ethically irrelevant. For, you see, there is no rational basis for moral indignation or outrage. In a godless universe, there is no moral obligation. What happens in a world where it's matter in motion just happens, period. You see, we're left on the atheist conception. We're left with Mr. Tabash Tavish's feelings, pardon me, and desires. We're left with his feelings versus the feelings and desires of, say, a Hitler. And neither one of them in a godless universe have any more right than than the other. Indeed, as a staunch defender of liberalism and a supporter of personal freedom, Tabasz really should, in terms of his atheist worldview, defend Hitler's freedom to do whatever he wanted to do. In a godless world. Might makes right. Hitler had the might to kill your relatives and you have no complaint with that. Of course, you really do have a complaint. You refuse to see the foundation of that. I have a complaint and you should join me in making that complaint based on the character of God. My main point here is that moral absolutes do not comport with a Materialistic view of the universe, the atheist view of the universe. It makes no objective sense to call Hitler evil if this is a godless universe. I mean, a certain bag of biological stuff that is subject to the laws of chemistry and physics did certain things to other bags of biological stuff on the atheist universe. There's no moral consideration here at all. Mr. Tabosh has used what is often called in philosophy of religion, the problem of evil against the Christian worldview. But he has to understand that in order to use that argument from evil, he must first be able to show that his own judgments about the existence of evil are meaningful, which is precisely what his unbelieving worldview cannot do. Logically speaking, the question is how the atheist can make sense of taking evil seriously. Not simply as something inconvenient, not simply as something unpleasant, not simply as something contrary to your desires. The moral indignation which we feel about Auschwitz and other kinds of evil in this world just doesn't comport with theories of ethics which atheists espouse. Theories which prove to be arbitrary or subjective or relativistic in character upon analysis. Usually atheists try to argue that evil is based on human reasoning and human choices, and thus in the final analysis it's relative to the individual or culture. When the atheist professes that people determine ethical values for themselves rather than having them based on the absolute unchanging character of God who has made himself known to all men, the atheist implicitly holds that those who commit evil are not really doing anything evil, given the values that they have chosen for themselves. Given the values chosen by Hitler, who can complain he did not do anything evil? The atheist must secretly rely upon the Christian worldview in order to make sense of his argument against God based on Auschwitz and other things of that nature. That is to say, anti theism presupposes theism in order to even make its case. The problem of evil, you see, is a logical problem for the unbeliever, not for the believer.

Thank you, Dr. Bonson. Mr. Tabosz, will you now give us your seven minute rebuttal?

Well, with all due respect, I believe that it is Dr. Bonson who is just being autobiographical. The only thing is, rather than his personal sense of should and shouldn't be, he is using an ancient book which to me is filled with great moral flaws and also has no evidentiary basis for belief. Now, Dr. Bonson says that without God I have no basis for the moral complaint against Hitler. I submit that with God I have an even greater moral basis because there is an even large Blum. And that is, how can an omniscient, omnipotent being that is supposed to be full of mercy and justice sit by while innocent people to the millions are tortured and gassed to death by Nazi Germany? And so, not only that, but if you compound that horror with the fact that the decent people who were the victims of that holocaust are supposed to, after going through the Holocaust, go into an eternal holocaust because they didn't accept Jesus, you have the most monstrous conception of God. Now, if I have, or if we as human beings, according to Dr. Bonson and other Christian theists, have the intelligence to, in their view, apprehend and understand that the Bible reveals such great moral truths, I submit that we also have the intelligence to see beyond the illusion, to wake up from the myth and superstition and say, hey, wait a minute. What is this God that takes so many decent millions of people? And just because they didn't pray the right way or pray through the right figure, the right intermediary, they wind up eternally damned? What is this God who opens the pit of hell to all those who simply adopted the wrong theology or sincerely adopted no theology? This is not. This is not a God that many of us want to worship. And if God is the designer of the intellectual capacities that we all used to analyze issues of philosophy, then God is also, unavoidably the designer of the thought processes in my head which lead me to reject the Christian God of the Bible. And so what kind of an impossibly ridiculous being is this to plant in my head the seeds of rejection, knowing that he plans for me eternal punishment because I have exercised the rejection for which he inclined me in the first way, by the way my thought processes have been composed, this is a very cynical, dangerous being that makes many of us in such a way that we sincerely can't accept certain postulates and then tosses us into a lake of fire for eternity because we follow those very inclinations which he, the Christian God Himself itself placed in us. This is not a God that's worthy of believing. And it's not a question of. Of whether Dr. Bonson's autobiography or my autobiography prevail. It's a question of when human beings collectively look at and analyze what it means by morality, we do have some independent right to assess a situation for ourselves. If the God of the Bible had not stayed the hand of Abraham, and if the God of the Bible had made Abraham kill his son Isaac unto an offering, I think that we should be able to say that that was wrong. When God instructed the ancient Israelites to wipe out to the last breathing person every Hittite without taking into account the innocent children among them to be spared. I think that was a problem. I think that if Sodom and Gomorrah story is true, that it is not possible that there wasn't some innocent children in either of those two cities who didn't deserve to survive, even if the adults were irremediably wicked. I also think, and again showing the absurdity of, of biblical mythology, that it was very cruel of God to turn Lot's wife into a pillar of salt merely for looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah, particularly the poor woman on a low sodium diet. So I think that when you look at the fact that the types of supernatural absurdities which occur in the Bible would be believed in no other context, but there is a kind of sui generis modality of suspended credulity that comes to the Bible, that we compartmentalize the normal analytic process that we use to confront and to deal with every other of the human condition. But that when it comes to the Bible we suspend our rational analytic capacity and accept the most outrageous fairy tales and horror stories as actual truth, which we would not do in any other context. It tells us something and it gives us a legitimate basis for doubt. It would be more appealing to believability if those things set forth in the Bible were the types of phenomena which we saw manifested in all other areas of human life. If supernatural events were a daily occurrence, if the appearance of angels and supernatural beings were something that accompanied our daily experience, that is something that would make the Bible more believable. But to say that in an empirical universe that the only exception to the standard laws we live with every day is the biblical account of truth, I think is a very, very weak argument. And so I submit that the evil supernaturalism of divine retribution for failure to pray the right way is an anathema to justice and that this God does not in fact exist.

Thank you, Mr. Tavosch. We will now have a three minute intermission. During this intermission, if you feel like you'd like to write down A question for Dr. Bonson and Mr. Tabosh, would you please write it down and pass it to the center aisle? And we'll have ushers collecting them. We will now begin segment two.

With.

Mr. Tabosh and a ten minute opening statement.

When an incongruous sight, you have to have humor about life. Here I am standing with the Bible like a TV preacher. Love the irony of existence. I quote from the Book of Mark, chapter 16, verse 16. And he he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved. But he that believeth not shall be damned. Now I have a problem with that. And my problem with that is that there is no proof that only those who believe as set forth in the Book of Mark will be saved and that others will be damned. Let's take Gandhi for instance. Here is a man who rejected Christianity. He gave of himself to Priya's people. Whether his concept of nonviolence may have been a little bit impractical, he meant well and no one could impugn his motives. He was selfless and was as close to the giving self effacing concept of a saint as we've seen seen in the 20th century. Is he burning in hell just because he, like many of us, had some kind of spiritual cataract that blinded us to the true reality of Jesus? Is Mahatma Gandhi in hell because for all his good works he didn't accept the Gospel of Jesus? Is the Bible reliable? When the first gospel wasn't even written until about 75 AD when in the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 AD a lot of records were destroyed. When the earliest fragment we have of a biblical text and we have none signed by the authors themselves was a few pieces from the Book of John in anywhere between 135 AD and 150 AD more than 100 years after Jesus. When the books of the Bible weren't even codified into a uniform canon of what's in and what's out until about 325 A.D. 300 years after Jesus lived at the Council of Nicaea. And when as the former California Episcopal bishop James pike points out in his book of this Beautiful that the Gospel of Luke was the gospel with the least number of votes and made it by only one vote out of 318 bishops who were there and where there were a lot of other gospels I think about 30 that were rejected and we looked at the Bible according to the finest scholars in Old Testament. Bible study began to be written the old testament about 30 BC and was not in fact according to the modern biblical scholars and even the orthodox rabbis who believe in the inerrancy of the Old Testament was not codified until about 250bc we see even the Old Testament was written by a span of over a thousand years. How could it be that in over a thousand years not one word of mistake crept in when you had a primitive society with none of the modern stenographic capacities that we have today? There was no ancient Israelite equivalent of a word processor. There were no Xerox machines. There was no verifiability. Superstition was rampant. How can the writings of a primitive society supersede the rational facility of a modern society? How can we, as modern human beings on the cusp of the 21st century, be the philosophical and moral prisoners of ancient unprovable superstition? If in fact the Bible were true, then I would recommend that God do what we do with our law books every year. Update them, file updates, revised editions, deal with the problems of modern technology, deal with the problems of pollution, deal with problems which we know very well were not even anticipated by the biblical authors. But let us not take a book that was frozen in time 2000 years ago and claim that it, many times, just speaking an obscure parable, is, carries with it eternal truth that holds for today without error or without mistake. So I think that, contrary to Dr. Bonson's contention that I respectfully submit that it is perfectly rational of people like me to reject the inerrancy and the metaphysical literal truth of the Bible. And if for some quirky method of historical fact, it's true that every word in the Bible magically is true, it is a truth so preposterous that those of us who can't accept it should certainly not be punished for our failure to so accept. And if Dr. Bonson feels that, and another distinguished Christian philosopher, JP Moreland, feels that he's had direct contact with Jesus, that he has met Jesus and has been convinced internally of the certainty of Jesus divinity, why can't the rest of us have the same internal certainty of a more universal benevolence? Why is it less logical or less compelling by our sensory perception experience of the world to say that even if there is a God, this God will accept all of us based on our goodness and not punish us just because we don't worship him in the right fashion? What if we turn around and postulate a God of the 21st century who says, you are all my children and all I want you to do is love each other. That is how you worship me. But I don't need to be prayed to directly. And if you happen to like Muhammad better than Jesus or Buddha better than Jesus, it's your choice. I just want you to be good to each other because you're my children. I would say that that is an even more plausible concept than the Christian deity. It is a more magnanimous concept. And I don't believe that I am precluded from superimposing my own value system on of magnanimity and morality just because I reject the Bible. See, Dr. Bonson sort of begs the questions. He initially begins with the fundamental premise that the Bible is true or that the proofs in it are already established and that those of us who don't see those proofs have a severe kind of spiritual blindness. And he doesn't accept the fact that, that there are compelling reasons to reject dates of the Bible. And he doesn't accept the fact that there is a common sense, self evident, compelling notion that beautifully justifies the idea that a true God would not have such an exclusive country club of either you worship him the right way or you get punished. Punished. So I think that if we're talking deities here, that I can come up with a more divine, true, just, merciful concept of God than the biblical God who punishes us for rejecting its existence. But what about the argument from design? Isn't this great uniformity of law? Isn't this great immutability? Isn't the fact that German shepherds always have German shepherds and that they don't have roosters and that roosters give birth to roosters and that roosters do not give birth to rainbow trout, doesn't that sort of say that these rules in the universe hold? And if they hold, then they hold across the board? And. And thus we turn the argument for design back on its proponents and say your very argument defeats the theistic concept you're trying to promulgate because your very argument postulates a universe that is locked into a sequence of perceptual laws that no one can violate, not even God. And then if we have a concept of God, we are thrown back on the pantheistic notion of Spinoza, which sees God as just the zeitgeist, the inspiring aspect of nature. And then we don't have room for. We don't have room for any proofs because they have not yet been adduced that the universe is dependent for its creation and continued sustenance on a supernatural invisible being outside the universe. That within the time and space conceptuality of this universe that it is being contained and supported and upheld by something outside the universe. The argument from design argues the opposite. The argument from design argues that the laws of the universe are uniform even onto its creative elements. And that would negate the Christian concept of God.

Thank you, Mr. Tabos. Dr. Bonson, may we now have your 10 minute opening statement?

I have a great appreciation for my opponent's feistiness that he wants to continue to show you know, he has the sharp tongue and can issue these challenges to God and so forth. But I am still waiting for proof of the kind of, you know, things that he just throws out there on his own authority, that there can't be a hell because of this reason. He can superimpose his values and so forth. I want you to notice something about what's going on in the debate here tonight. In the first place, Mr. Tavish has not yet understood the challenge that's been directed to him. He has very little time left to deal with, and I hope that he'll use it when it does come. In my opening remarks, I pointed out that the inductive principle needs a rational foundation and that we use the inductive principle when we reason, when we engage in discourse, when we do anything to make our experience intelligible. Everything Mr. Tavish has been saying tonight, all of his reasoning, all of his argumentation, fallacious or not, all of it has assumed the inductive principle that there's a uniformity in nature that is not the design argument. So I hope that he gets to the debate tonight and catches up with what's going on, because no one is arguing the teleological argument tonight. Your opponent is arguing that those who argue against the teleological argument and those who argue in favor of it, those who argue against God and those who argue for God, everyone who argues assumes the uniformity of nature in the inductive principle, and we haven't been given a rational foundation for that. In fact, the inductive principle is contrary to the atheist view of the universe. So atheists continue to reason, continue to draw on past experience and to draw conclusions from past connections and that sort of thing, and yet they have no basis for believing that they have the right to do that. I'm just waiting for an explanation. It hasn't been given. When you appeal to sensory experience, you beg the question. By the way, better atheist philosophers than Mr. Tavish have already pointed that out. Hume and Bertrand Russell both pointed out you can't appeal to experience to prove the uniformity of nature. Why? Because the appeal to experience already assumes the uniformity of nature. Now, as you consider the background worldviews of atheism or Christian theism, I want you to. The life of the atheist is riddled with inconsistency and thus is exposed as being utterly irrational. Atheists will presuppose human dignity and attend the funeral of a friend or to honor a relative, even a child with down syndrome. But then they will turn around and argue that man has no dignity is no different than any other product of evolution, like a snail or a natural dog or a horse. I don't see how they bring these two things together. The ape insist that man is nothing more than a complex of biochemical factors controlled by the laws of physics. And yet he kisses his wife and his children when he goes home as though there is something called love that each of us share in the family. The atheist will argue that in sexual relations anything goes. There are no moral absolutes. Don't impose your views on on others. He'll even defend prostitution, but then indignantly condemn child molesters or morally repudiate necrophilia. You see, the atheist is just a bundle of contradictions. He can't bring his worldview into harmony with itself. He'll suggest that things which happen in the universe happen randomly. It just is that way, arbitrarily. Talk about primitive thinking. That's far more more primitive than anything you can find. Even in the time the Bible was written, it just happened. But then he'll turn around and he looks for regularities and law like explanations of events. He looks for uniformity and predictability in the things that he studies in natural science. You see, the atheist doesn't have a workable worldview. He may go on and on autobiographically about how he doesn't like the God of the Bible and doesn't like the doctrine of hell and all that, but he doesn't have a workable worldview in terms of which to reason in the first place, to argue at all. And he exposes its weaknesses at every turn in his life. You see, you can claim that there is nothing spiritual, nothing immaterial, nothing abstract and universal, that only concrete, particular things exist. You can claim that events are just random, that there's no personal plan or control or purpose in the universe. You can claim that reality amounts to nothing more but matter in motion. But you can't act or reason in that way. And as long as Mr. Tavish continues to reason, as long as he continues to assume the uniformity of past experience with what he's saying now, what conclusions he draws scientifically, how he makes his experience intelligible, he's not living in terms of his own assertion about the nature of reality, we have to ask the atheist, why should you be rational? I mean, if man doesn't have a mind, he's just, you know, just has a brain that's subject to the laws of chemistry and physics, then there is no objective reasoning and there's no freedom actually for us to consider evidence in an argument and choose one way or another. You know, just like weeds grow, so the mind of man does whatever it does, while the law, laws of physics. We have to ask the atheist, where is the origin of life? On the evolutionary hypothesis we are led to the irrational view that life spontaneously generated. And yet science today, all of biological science, proceeds on the opposite assumption, that spontaneous generation is wrong. As a matter of fact, no matter how much you tinker or work with a cake mix, you're not going to get the cake mix to make a political constitution. No matter how much you tinker with the cake mix, you're not going to get it to make a dream of a spring day. Why is that? Because the elements of a cake mix have nothing to do with what we're talking about when we talk about political constitutions and dreams and so forth. These are different kinds of things. Similarly, inorganic matter doesn't, by a mechanical reconfiguration, give rise to organic things. That kind of thinking is mythical. It's going back to the days of alchemy. But that's what the atheist worldview leaves us with. We don't know why we should be rational. We can understand the origin of life. On the atheist worldview, why should we think in terms of scientific inference? This is what I keep driving at. If you're a materialist, there is no uniformity in nature. There is no answer to Hume's skepticism, In which case the atheist can't assert anything, even that he doesn't like God. Why should we be moral? In terms of the atheist universe? On a naturalistic principle, there is no right or wrong. There's just might, there's just what happens. You can't find obligatory authority anywhere in the world if it's just matter in motion. You see, the atheist just cannot answer the tough questions of philosophy. He cannot make intelligible use of his rationality, of scientific inference, of moral obligation. Now of course some atheists will say, well we don't need to answer that. Reality is simply this way. That is to say, he wants to be arbitrary. Well, if you're going to be arbitrary, don't bother to debate, just say, I'm going to say whatever I want to say. Or sometimes atheists will say no answer is possible to those deep philosophical questions. No one can know for sure. Of course that's self contradictory, isn't it? If no one can know for sure, then how do you know that no one can know for sure? Basically what atheists end up saying is everybody knows nature is uniform, everybody knows there's moral absolutes, everybody knows these things. And you know what? On that point I agree with the atheist. Everybody does know these things, but the problem is they don't comport with atheism. These things that people know very well, they continuing evidence that you need a Christian theistic worldview to make sense out of experience. These things don't comport with atheism. Key philosophical questions are answered by atheists arbitrarily and inconsistently in a way which can't make sense out of ordinary human experience and reasoning. And atheists try to hide this gaping defect in their theorizing from themselves, but it's not being hid from you. Tonight I want you to consider a parallel. A person who were to come tonight and argue no air exists, continues to breathe air, doesn't he, while he argues. And when I point out that if, as he says no air exists, he couldn't be breathing, it would be intellectually inept for him to respond, no, you're wrong to say my theory implies I couldn't be breathing because in fact I am breathing. You see, he would be so self deluded that he wouldn't catch the significance of the fact that the facts belie his theory and the facts, the most common facts of life, inductive reasoning, scientific conclusions, moral judgments, making experience intelligible, belie the theory of atheism. Intellectually speaking, atheists continue to breathe. I know that. They continue to reason, to be scientific, to make more moral judgments. I don't doubt that. But the atheistic view of things would, in theory make such breathing impossible, would render science arbitrary, logic impossible, and ethics nonsense. Atheists work hard to hide this intellectual poverty from themselves. That's why they look up verses in the Bible and try to ridicule things rather than getting down to the basic issue of do you have a philosophy of life in terms of which you can reason about anything at all? Evolve. And they pretend, philosophically speaking, that they're not breathing God's air all the time, they're arguing against him. The Apostle Paul in Acts 17 said to the philosophers in ancient Greece, in him, in God we live and move and have our existence. You see, God is the very atmosphere of our lives. He's the intellectual precondition of all of our rationality and all of our morality.

Thank you, Dr. Bonson. We'll now move to phase two of segment two with cross examination and the first question will be asked by Dr. Tash. Excuse me, Mr. Tabos.

Two questions each, back and forth, same as yes sir. Okay, okay, okay. Dr. Bonson, my challenge to you is I accuse you of conducting this debate as if it's already a given that the Bible written over this span of more than a thousand years absolutely contains no error whatsoever, and that magically unlike any other book in human society, that the Bible, when it speaks to supernaturalism, is correct, that everything else is incorrect, and not notwithstanding the murky mists of authorship in the ancient antiquity of many books of the Bible, that not one word in it is a mistake. How do you defend rationally your claim of absolute biblical inerrancy so that we can be sure that the Bible is the highest manifestation of divinity we have in written form?

Well, there's a very strange form of reasoning that goes on. Mr. Tabish speaks this way. He wants to know how it could possibly be in an ancient primitive book that there is just no mistake whatsoever. How could it be so unique and so different? What have we forgotten here? What is the claim? Now I'm not saying it's true in this, but to answer this question, what has my opponent forgotten? He's forgotten that on the Christian claim the Bible is inspired by an all knowing, sovereign, eternal God and that therefore God is able to bring it about even through alleged primitive people, that no mistake is made in what he says. Now again, I am not asking. I didn't. By the way, he keeps wanting to bring this up. Have you heard me refer to the Bible once tonight, except in a passing allusion at the end just a moment ago, I haven't come and say, look, the Bible says there's a God. You've got to believe. The Bibles we have keep going back to that. But he wants to keep going into these things. But the answer to the question is if the Bible is what it claims to be, if it's accepted on its own terms, it is the word of the true God who knows all things, controls all things and can bring it about, therefore that the book is whatever he wants it to be. Now no other book is like that book. Christians are not embarrassed by that claim. They think that's one of the things that sets forth their faith to the world. No other faith, not the Hindus, not the Muslims, no one has a book like that. In fact, there's only one or two other claims that even come close to that claim. But if the claim is true, the answer to your question should be used to you before you came to the debate tonight. It's God's word through the words of men, and as God's word, it's without error.

Thank you. Dr. Bonson. Dr. Bonson, would you please, please ask your question to Mr. Talbot.

I heard you refer Mr. Tabish during your second speech tonight of compelling proof that the Bible is erroneous about its doctrine of hell. And in the process, you spoke of your right to superimpose your own values. Now, I'd like you to explain to me because I guess I'm busy up here trying to write and take notes. I. I miss that somehow. I mean, I heard you say you don't like it. I heard you ridicule it. I heard you say all sorts of things to appeal to the audience to say, oh, you're not going to like this either, but could you please tell me now what the compelling, rational proof is that the doctrine of hell was mistaken?

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