Dr Greg Bahnsen - Bahnsen-Tabash Debate: Does God Exist? (Part 2)

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.

But could you please tell me now what the compelling rational proof is that the doctrine of hell is mistaken. Repeat the proof. Not just your ridicule.

The proof is the same as my ridicule of the concept that there are gremlins on Venus studying Hegel at this very moment. When someone asserts the supernatural. Preposterous. The burden of proof is on them. I don't have to prove that there are not flying saucers resting atop this building right now. There may very well be. I don't have to prove that they're not because it is outside the sensory, scientific and empirical experience. And so what I'm saying is that as a rational human being, I have a right to look at an ancient writing that has no verifiable evidence of divine inspiration and say that it's entirely harsh and unacceptably cruel. Eternal punishment, just for mistakes in theology is something so cruel that to accept it violates every common sense notion of morality. And what I'm saying is a double edged sword. That if I, as a human being do not have the rational capacity to look to this biblical account of hell and say this is a moral obscenity, then human beings wouldn't be able to look to it and say this is justifiable. Even those who say that the Bible's eternal sentence upon non believers is justifiable are making a recourse to their own reasoning power to make that claim of support for the Bible. And I'm saying that it is in terms of basic justice and mercy that the concept of eternal punishment for merely a mistake in philosophical thinking, if the Bible happens to be true, is what we would call cruel and unusual punishment and punishment disproportionate to the crime.

The. Thank you.

Mr. Tus. Mr. Tus, would you please ask your question to Dr. Bonson?

Yes, of course. If. If.

No, I'm supposed to ask.

I'm sorry, I.

You just answered. Now you ask who? You just answered the question right now.

I asked.

That's what I said.

Okay.

That's what I said.

Okay.

I got.

Didn't I. Did I say that?

No. Dr. Bonson, you said that Christians believe that the Bible is inspired by God. And you said that the way that such a supernatural event could happen as a book written over so many centuries could be infallible is because of the guidance of the divine Creator. Let me ask you then, what is the proof? I Want to put you to the proof that the Bible is inspired by God and that everything God wished to say to humanity is contained in the Bible and that in fact that divine inspiration resulted in a book without mistake. What is the proof of that?

Okay, I'm going to answer your question. Along the way, let's remember that you are supposed to be showing that God doesn't exist. I'm to show that God does exist. You're now asking to debate a theological point about the inspiration of Scripture. And I'm glad to meet you at whatever level you wish to. But let's remember that what we are ultimately going to have to deal with is worldviews. In terms of the Christian worldview, the proof that the Bible is inspired is rather clear. God Himself makes this claim as a self authorizing claim. He identifies his own word and says, those who reject His Word are reduced to foolishness and absurdity in their reasoning because they cannot make sense out of the world in which they live. They cannot make sense out of morality, cannot make sense out of rationality, cannot make sense out of science, cannot make sense out of human dignity, cannot make human experience intelligible. So God on His own authority reveals his word. Now this is the Christian theory here and no one's asking you to accept it. That's not we're debating tonight. But you ask this question and it should be obvious that within the framework of Christian reasoning and philosophy, the Bible has that ultimate authority. And those who reject it. This is what I'm telling you tonight in terms of my arguments, who reject it are reduced to absurdity. And so the proof that the Bible is the Word of God is not only that it makes that ultimate claim and it verifies it in that all who reject it cannot make sense out of science, morality and so forth. They are, as the Bible puts it, fools. Not in the name calling sense, in the descriptive sense. That they are mentally dull and refusing to take what is obvious to everybody and draw out the conclusion and worship God in the way that they should. As Paul says in Romans the first chapter, God has made himself known to all men so that they are without excuse. But they suppress that truth and unrighteousness. They rebel against him and their reasoning is made futile as a result of it. And what I'm showing you tonight is that your reasoning is futile. It's philosophically arbitrary.

Thank you, Dr. Bonson. Dr. Bonson, would you ask.

Now I do get a question?

Yes.

Okay. Sorry about that.

Excuse me.

Mr. Tavish, the first time you said this in your Lecture. I kind of passed over it because I didn't really think you wanted to assert something that is so philosophically preposterous. But you come back to it so many times, I'm now going to use my fourth question and ask you it. You keep referring to things which are outside sensory experience being unproven, so that if you can't see something, if you can't observe it, then you can't know it. And so my question is, if you are working on the assumption that all knowledge is based upon empirical experience, is your thesis that all knowledge is based on empirical experience itself based on empirical experience? Is that an observational claim? On what basis do you know that all knowledge is limited to what you can physically encounter in the empirical world?

Because I don't restrict all knowledge to what I can counter in the physical world. I restrict it to. To all knowledge that can be by inference derived from the empirical world. To say that a supernatural being exists outside the universe and that the universe is sustained on that breaks the chain of command of empirical causation. But to say, for instance, that subatomic particles exist and that microcosmic subatomic particles exist is an extension of trying to determine the components of larger macrocosmic entities. But even though neutrinos and neutrons, electrons and protons escape the human eye, they are inferrable along the same causal chain of command, and as are the larger objects that they constitute. However, unlike microscopic entities, the notion of a God that is transcendent to and outside the universe and actually leaps away from that very causal chain of command, that is something which is not empirically inferable from the evidence available to us. So things don't have to be seen if there is a causal chain that can lead to their inference. As for instance, viruses, we can't see them, but we see that they are in a continuum along the same chain of command of causal events. But to go outside the universe and say God stands to the universe and as an Adam stands to this wooden podium, I believe is not analogous because God is outside the causal chain and the reasoning does not empirically follow.

Thank you, Mr. Talbot. We will now move from the cross examination phase to the five minute rebuttals. Mr. Talbosh, will please give us your five minute rebuttal.

Well, Dr. Bonson wants to focus me away from the Bible, but I can't let him do that, you see, because he believes as a Christian theist. And Christian theism, by very definition stands or falls on the Bible. Now, I'm afraid that Dr. Bonson did something which was very much question begging. He said that the Bible is self authenticating because it makes that claim. Well, I know Mr. Dr. Bonson as a fundamentalist Protestant Christian probably would not like the claim of the Roman Catholic Pope to divine infallibility. But a Roman Catholic could make the same argument and say, wait a minute, that claim is self authenticating by the papacy. Also, a few years ago on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, a guy came down from the Hollywood Hills carrying a sign saying he was the Messiah and he was very entertaining. And I walked up to him and I said, what proof is there? And he says, because I say so. So if all you have to do to claim divine authority to write in a book of antiquity that you in fact are the word of God, then anybody could lay claim. And here's the point. Everybody's claim would be as valid as anybody else's claim. So if self authentication is a very, very dangerously poor argument to get at the notion of divine authority, because all religions claim authenticating, there are Buddhist monks who will tell you that the proof of their doctrine can be experienced directly through a meditation process and that that itself is an even greater authenticity because you can experience it directly. Shouldn't that be a superior mode of inquiry, your direct experience through meditation than just an ancient book that was written such a long time ago? Does that mean then that the mystics, the yoga masters of India, the Taoist masters of China and the Tibetan Buddhists and the Zen Buddhist masters of the Japanese language islands, that they are superior to Christians because they don't rely on putative words written in a book, but they engage the experience directly. And so wouldn't that be a greater authenticity and leave Christianity in the dust? Because then the Eastern religions based on direct experience aren't just on written hearsay, but on direct encounter with the infinite through direct contemplative merger? So that would seem to not only establish some kind of deity, but it would certainly be the most powerful rejection of the Christian deity that God is not something that you can, that you have to read in a book about, but that you can experience directly. And this brings me to a very important point. If this God exists, then why shouldn't it be amenable to direct experience rather than asking us to believe the hearsay of a bunch of ancient authors whose authorship isn't even authentic? So if in fact the divine creative force exists, why would it manifest through ancient Bibles without updating them, without giving updated confirmation of miracles? Why would that God not turn around and Say, forget what men have written about me, they're just men and women weren't even permitted authorship in those patriarchal societies. So why don't you experience me directly? And if we can experience God directly, then we have no need for Christianity because that explodes the whole concept of Jesus as a valid intermediary. And so the point is that if the Bible fails by its claim of self authentication to validly make that claim, if it is nothing but a self serving proclamation, then Christian theism, which is what my opponent is defending tonight, not theism in general, but Christian theism, falls apart completely because it is dependent on that book. And I'm arguing a larger point, which is the fact that a book claims something doesn't mean it's true. Otherwise the people who write books about their UFO abduction experiences are telling the truth because they're self authenticating it and they're putting it in a book. So I would say the Bible with its inconsistencies, with its irregularities and its span of over a thousand years in composition is simply not a valid basis to say all our brothers and sisters on this planet will go to hell unless they believe in Jesus.

Thank you, Mr. Tabosh. Dr. Bonson, will you please give us your five minute rebuttal?

Well now I really am convinced, with all due respect to my opponent as a human being and so forth, care for you and I'm not at all trying to to take down your dignity, but I really am convinced now that your worldview reduces to philosophical absurdity. We have heard Mr. Tavish claim that all knowledge is either by direct observation or he said, as though he were answering my question. He didn't. It's either direct observation, he said, or it's empirically inferable. That is, it's something you can infer from your direct observations. Don't you see that the claim that all knowledge is observational or based on empirical inference is itself a claim that's not observational nor is it based on empirical inference. No number of observation reports from people in the world will logically infer will bring down the conclusion that all knowledge is restricted to observation. That is a self refuting claim. And our opponent here tonight hasn't even thought through his worldview enough to realize that he stepped into this. And now you see, he doesn't know any of the things that he has claimed tonight whatsoever because he hasn't proved them by observation. Notice that he claimed there can't be a hell because that's just too preposterous. Oh, did he observe that it's too preposterous. Now on the one hand you have an opponent here who says you only know what's based on observation or by inference from it. And then you have him making all sorts of claims that have nothing to do with observation and no attempt is even made to make them observation. So you see, he contradicts himself in the very process of trying to defend his atheism. He tells us that proof is not by a mere claim to inspiration. Of course I didn't say that it was by a mere claim to inspiration. I talked about the fact that the Bible must first make such a claim. It must be self attesting or we wouldn't have any reason to take it to be that way. And I said those who reject the claim are reduced to rational absurdity. Not all claims to self authentication are in fact true. I know that you can have some guy wander down from the Hollywood Hills and make all kinds of claims that have nothing to do but the Bible says reject this claim and you're made a fool intellectually, morally, in terms of human dignity and all the rest. What Mr. Tavish just totally skirted so he could get back to his ridicule approach rather than debating is that I said that we prove the claim of the Bible from the impossibility of the contrary. That it's the very foundation and precondition of, of what all of us do all the time in our reasoning, in our making moral judgments and our living with one another and making human experience intelligible. Throughout this debate, repeatedly we've heard false assumptions set forth as though he has the right to just say it on his say so. Isn't that strange for a man who just got upset about thinking I was making a claim true just because it was claimed? He's told you about the. The questionable text of Scripture, the questionable authorship. I'm prepared to defend every one of those points. The text of the Bible, the authorship of the Bible. Were that the issue tonight? It's not. All I want to point out is that his saying that they're questionable shouldn't lead you to think so. I'll give you extensive scholarly bibliography to show that he does not know what he's talking about. He assumes arbitrarily that the Bible doesn't have good credentials as a text. It has excellent credentials. Compare the Bible to what we know about the text of Plato. There's only about a 1200 year difference between the evidence we have for the New Testament and what we have for Plato. And yet no one questions that we Understand what Plato said and so forth. And yet we have this man making a claim that you can't trust the text of the Bible. These are false assumptions. And I just don't want you to think that Christianity crumbles because a man makes claims about it crumbling. It doesn't. Mr. Tavish's appeals for evidence, for the plausibility of reasoning don't make any sense in terms of his own worldview. His own discourse and debating has assumed the uniformity of nature and the inductive principle. But the worldview he's come to defend cannot rationally warrant or even make intelligible the assumption that that we can use the inductive principle, that we can reason from the uniformity of nature. As David Hume showed. Mr. Tabosh has been reduced to skepticism tonight. And yet he keeps making claims to knowledge even though he has no rational foundation for him by continuing to implicitly use and affirm the principle of uniformity, even though his most distinctive and crucial presupposition can't rationally allow for that affirmation.

Thank you, Doctor.

Engaging in debate has become its own refutation.

We'll now have a five minute intermission and I'd like our panel who have been screening the questions to please bring them up. And we will head into the next 30 minute question and answer period in five minutes. Thank you. Responding to each question, both Gentlemen will get 90 seconds to comment and then we will alternate questions. And the first question will go to Dr. Bonson. Dr. Bonson, you have done a good job in disproving Tabosh's arguments against why he doesn't believe in God. But the burden of evidence lies with you. You must first prove that God does exist. Please prove it. You have not proved more than God. You have not proved that God does exist more than Tabosh has proven that God has not. Merely a human projection.

I believe that is, I think the person who's asked the question has really missed the point of the argument. I have proved that God exists in that all proof requires an assumption about induction and the uniformity of nature. And only the Christian worldview comports with that assumption. And therefore God is the foundation of all reasoning about any matter work. Now, I've set that out there as a philosophical argument. I'm waiting for some refutation of it. I'm not asserting that just on my own authority. I'm saying atheism doesn't comport with the uniformity of nature. The Christian theistic view does. And that shows that that worldview is more rational than the other that the one is irration. As a matter of fact, the questioner says that the burden of proof is on me to prove that God exists. Well, that's a very misguided philosophical notion. I hope you didn't all come in here tonight with the presumption of atheism. You should have come in here to realize that philosophical worldviews all have the burden of proof to show that they make sense, that there's a reason to believe them and so forth. Atheism has not offered any reason, any constructive reason for why its worldview should be believed. What I have shown is that if you reject the theistic worldview, if you affirm the atheistic one, then you undermine all reasoning, all science, all human dignity, all moral absolutes, and so forth and so on. No, I don't have the burden of proof any more than my opponent does. Or if you will, I would speak from a Christian standpoint. Since God is so clearly known to everyone and we all come in here knowing God, the burden of proof is on people to show that he doesn't exist.

Thank you. Dr. Vaughn, would you please respond?

Well, I believe that in a sense the burden of proof is on the proposer of the supernatural phenomenon. And I say that to go back to Dr. Peacock's analogy of who has the burden of proof about the convention of gremlins on Venus studying Hegel. And I believe that the one who posits an entity of supernatural quality outside the boundaries of the natural universe, outside of our experiential comprehension, that that is the one who has the burden of proof. Now I believe that there are many, many good and intelligent people who do not see this evidence, this ever present evidence that Dr. Bonson sees of this God. Dr. Bonson acts as if this God were somebody sitting in the audience who could be seen. It's almost like the invisible friends we all had when we were a child. The three year old says, I want you to meet my friend Ralph, but you can't see Ralph. Well, I can't see Dr. Bahnson's Ralph, who he calls God. I admit that I don't see Ralph and I don't believe that my inability to see Ralph is because of a defect in my perception. I believe that it's up to Dr. Bonson, since Ralph is invisible, to prove that Ralph exists. And in the absence of that, I believe that the burden of proof is on him because he is postulating the claim that requires going outside of nature.

Thank you, Mr. Tabosz. Question to Mr. Tabos. Explain morality and its Inception into a pro atheist, pro science world.

The morality and its inception, practically speaking, is no different from what a lot of believers think. But it is superior. It develops from compassion, from mercy and for understanding the plight of the human condition. And its derivation comes from the fact that I absolutely do not believe in Dr. Bonson's God and yet I have no trouble condemning the Nazi Holocaust, even if my family were not direct victims of it. During the break, a gentleman with a very distinguished British accent came up to me and said that the Nazi Holocaust is not the only evil in the world. That's true. There are so many other evils. Where is this God? And the final point I would make is that the superiority of the atheist derived compassion is evidenced by the fact that we don't talk about how justified it is for people to go to hell forever just because they made the wrong theological choice. That to me is the most damning, immoral obscenity articulated by Christians. The notion of damnation for non believers violates every fundamental sense of common sense and fair play. And I think I, as a rational human being am qualified to make that judgment, even if Dr. Bonson's God gets upset with me.

Well, you're not really qualified to make any judgment whatsoever until you can give a rational foundation for reasoning or for moral, moral absolutes. And in your answer, you haven't done it. You've simply once again asserted your point of view. And it's not as though we shouldn't hear your point of view and talk about it and so forth, but to debate tonight, and you were asked to offer proof and you haven't done so, you've just simply said, you know, atheist compassion is better, and so forth. Well, hey, let me tell you, the French Revolution and the Soviet Gulags were not actually the best representation of compassion anybody has found in history. Atheists are quite capable of oppression, of being nasty, so and so's and so forth. The difference is that atheists, you see, have every reason to act a bunch of asses because in their worldview there's nothing but matter in motion. When an atheist talks about being compassionate, I'd like to know, how do you ask molecules in motion to be compassionate? You're going to have to change your worldview to make sense of what you're saying tonight. Mr. Tabosh.

Thank you. Dr. Bonson, a question. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs. Where is the extraordinary proof of your extraordinary claim for God's existence?

Very good. You're right. Extraordinary claims do require extraordinary proof. And here's extraordinary proof when you talk about a claim which, when rejected, undermines the possibility of making intelligible all other claims, that's extraordinary. For you see, if I reject the idea that there's so many pounds of Cocoa Puffs in the world, that claim doesn't really have an effect on a whole bunch of other claims. It may affect claims about how much money can be made for selling cereal and so forth, but it's rather limited. But when you make the extraordinary claim that the philosophical precondition of intelligibility for anything is based upon that worldview, that's a rather magnanimous thing. And now that hasn't been disproven. In fact, that has been assumed in all of what my opponent has had to say, that the universe is uniform, that we can use the inductive principle, that there are moral absolutes, and that comports with the Christian worldview. And that's why the extraordinary claims of Christianity or about the existence of God or the supernatural have been met with the extraordinary proof that when you reject it, you undermine all philosophical possibility of making rationality, science, morality possible. You see, in a sense, the supernatural is the presupposition of the intelligibility of the natural. So whenever anybody appeals to the natural world and says, this is intelligible, I say, you're already assuming a worldview that you reject.

Mr. Tabosh, would you please respond?

Well, the problem with Dr. Bonson's argument is that he assumes what he has completely failed to prove thus far. He's talking about morality deriving only from the Christian God and cannot derive from anywhere else in the same level of moral sublime quality. But he has never proved his Christian God. His claims of biblical self authentication and his claim that the Bible is not mistaken is something he has not proved. So if the Bible does not support the Christian theist position, and there's no other document that supports the Christian theist position, and there's no other avenue other than the Bible in which God allegedly said to people, only Christianity is the way to reach me. Then I think that Dr. Bonson has a problem. Because the orthodox Jewish rabbis who argue with me day and night in my life could come up to him and say, we don't need the Christian overlay on initial Judaism to be highly moral people. And then a Buddhist could come along and say, we don't need your anthropomorphic concepts of a self willed, conscious, separate deity to have moral concepts. And so could the yoga masters of India say the same thing. So could Gandhi say to Dr. Bonson, I don't have to be a Christian to recognize these truths.

Thank you, Mr. Tabosh. A question for Mr. Tabosh. Since you probably support the right of abortion, how does the and deaths in the concentration camps differ from the unborn child in its mother's womb? That is for the child dying is held in a concentration camp.

Well, I didn't think I'd be having to reprise my abortion debate, but here goes in 90 seconds. Okay, first of all, up until the 32nd week of pregnancy, when abortions are no longer occurring, there is no capacity for consciousness. Consciousness. Conscious awareness can only come about when the cortical neurons in the brain are linked to each other by a system of synapses. And until that is in place, there's no capacity for self awareness, which means there's no capacity for consciousness, which means there's no capacity for suffering. Also, no one at law is ever required to sustain the existence of another person. If you wake up in a hospital and you're attached to some great scientist, you wouldn't be required to give of your bodily functions to sustain that other's existence. So to require a woman to sustain a pregnancy, her will would be the only time in our legal system where one human being is required to give other bodily functions to sustain the life processes of another. And in this case, that other is not fully developed and is entirely dependent upon the woman and is inside her. And as I said, the latest that abortions occur are at 28 weeks of pregnancy. More than 97% of them are completed by the 20th week of pregnancy. And the significant brain function to sustain an awareness of pain and consciousness doesn't even have possibility until much later on.

Could you please keep that down, please? Thank you, Mr. Tabosh. Dr. Bonson, would you please respond to that?

Yes, notice the contradiction again in my opponent's reasoning here. He tells us that it's all right to execute these developing human beings because according to him, there's no capacity for consciousness up to a certain point. And yet earlier in the debate, you heard him say that we only know things based on observation. And I'd like to know on what observational basis does he know what consciousness the developing fetus has or doesn't have or is even capable of having? Are capabilities something that you observe as well? You see, he just can't decide which worldview he wants to use. As a matter of fact, what you see in the case of the developing fetus is always a matter of degree. There is no question after conception that you have all the biological components here of a Human being. The child does not become a human being when it is fully developed in its mental capacities. I can't believe a man who has relatives who were killed under that kind of thinking would now apply it to innocent unborn children. For you see, if you start saying those people that you don't deem fully developed can now be executed, then we're right back to Hitler and the genocide of people that you think aren't fully developed.

Thank you. Please keep that down. I didn't know this was going to turn into an abortion debate.

You asked the question. Sounds pretty good. Moderator.

Question for Dr. Why is it so obvious that morality cannot exist without God? Aren't you making the mistake of assuming that reality is only a physically probable phenomena? Why can't reality be composed of a physical as well as an ethical law?

Well, I suppose if somebody wished to advance that worldview, it would be something similar to what Plato did. I'd be glad to appear at another debate and debate that worldview, but that is not the atheist worldview. The atheist worldview assumes that it's matter in motion and other forms. I mean, I could state it more in a more sophisticated way if you want to go to a graduate course in philosophy, but you know what I'm getting at. But there have been worldviews that say you have matter and then you also have the realm of ideals or abstract notions. And you could have the ethics there, and you could have science in the material world. And the problem with that worldview is, as it was for Plato and everybody else who tries to be a dual you can't bring the two together. You can't relate the two. You can't use the principles for one to explain, understand, or be in touch with the other. But the most important thing relevant to tonight's debate is that this is not an answer available to my opponent. Because if he wishes to assert that there are immaterial realities like moral absolutes, he's going to have to give some account of that that is consistent with his denial of the supernatural, the abstract, and the immaterial.

Thank you, Dr. Boston. Mr. Tabosh, would you please respond to that?

Well, I think I'm just going to give such abstractions and demonstrate how they work in response to my opponent's challenge. And that is, we know that love can be experienced because love is what we define it. It doesn't have to be a supernatural phenomenon. Love doesn't have to go outside the realm of human experience because we define it as a feeling that we have. We don't Define it as a separate, invisible entity that floats around the universe. So if love can exist for the atheist, and I assert that it can, then I think that morality can exist for the atheist. In fact, I would say that the theist has a problem because the theist then has to justify this. Gods, and I'll use the term again, being asleep at the wheel when awful events happen in the universe. Also, the theist, the Christian theist, has to justify the books of the Bible where God does some very terrible things to some very innocent people or essentially provides capital punishment for an offense no greater than. And if you have this kind of a disproportionate divine hand slapping you down, then I think that the onus on justifying morality falls back on those who. Who would defend the immoral acts of this colossal being. I refer again to the Book of Numbers, which is in the Bible. No one can get away from it. God orders Moses to have a man stoned for nothing more than picking up sticks on the Sabbath. I mean, talk about proportionate punishment. That's very dangerous.

Thank you, Mr. Tabas. A question for Mr. Tabas. Each of your arguments contains such words as monstrous, ridiculous, justice, plus absurd. Each of these words assumes a sense of value in a universe without design. Where does this sense of value base itself?

The sense of value comes from our experience as human beings looking at the human condition and struggling with the vicissitudes of life and coming up with, as best we can, realistic answers. It does not come from inventing in our own minds a fictitious being who we then vest with the authority to control us. It doesn't come by pretending that something outside of ourselves exists and then using that something outside of ourselves to then put moral controls on us. Just like love does not require a postulated supernatural being in order to be a valid emotion, love does not require the God of Christianity in order to abound among people of goodwill. So it is that love is not the only great moral good that can exist without deity. So can charity, and most of all, so can mercy. So can the realization that because we are alone on this planet, that all we have is each other. And that makes more poignant and more. More tragic the importance of our caring for each other. That is a high morality that comes from the absence of a divine parent.

Thank you, Mr. Tabosh. Dr. Bonson, would you please respond?

In an atheist universe, there's no obligation for us to care for each other whatsoever because we're nothing more but bags of biological chemicals and things subject to the laws of physics and Mr. Tabosh has been asked a very good question. It'd be nice if he finally would come out and address it and deal with it rather than skirting it. How do values comport with his view of the universe? Now, no one doubts that atheists feel love. I agree they do, because I know they're made in the image of God. I can account for the love that they feel, I can account for the compassion they want to show. But they cannot account for it because every time they do, they end up appealing to things which are not molecules in motion. Talk about fictitious projections. He thinks that's what my God is. Without this God we couldn't reason at all, make these moral judgments. But you make a fictitious projection that there is something like value or love when all you have to work with are molecules in motion. It should be commented somewhere along the line because it's just not right for a man to keep making remarks that are distorted and false and just think he can walk away from that publicly. The Bible does not teach capital punishment for nothing more than picking up sticks. And yes, I know the book of numbers and yes, I'll be glad to debate that with you. Anyway, the man who picked up sticks defied God to his face. And for that he was executed.

Thank you, Dr. Bonson. Question for doctor. Say that the proof of God's existence is obvious, yet the only proof you mention is some complicated philosophical argument about inductive something or other inferences and what seems to me to be very indirect subjective circular logic. Is there any obvious proof for those of us that who never took a course in obscure philosophy?

Oh sure. Although I really do appreciate the spirit of that since I teach philosophy and I know the frustration of those who don't study philosophy and they think all of this is gobbledygook and so forth. I assure you this is not just verbal ledger domain and so forth that not all philosophers would agree with. Dr. Bonson, they like to argue with this. But what we're talking about tonight in the history of philosophy is known as transcendental reasoning. Reasoning about the preconditions for the intelligibility of empirical experience or whatever it may be. And it isn't just a matter of subjective feelings or reasoning in a circle. A transcendental argument proves itself from the impossibility of the contrary. And I can give you passages in the Encyclopedia Philosophy and other standard works not written by Christians necessarily that talk about that line of reasoning. That's what we're talking about. And here, now, can this proof be understood by People who don't want to go through all the sophistication of philosophy class. Absolutely. I've come here because it's an academic institution and tried to do something between very popular and something that I would have done in graduate school in philosophy. But I could do something, you know, just very, very popular. And that's what I'm doing. When I talk about, you know, on the atheist worldview, people are nothing more but matter and motion molecules, you know, moving around. Now, if that's all we are, and if all we know is our sense experience, then what I'm saying is we have no basis for making projections into the future about what might happen, you know, in terms of science or anything. And therefore, atheism is irrational.

Thank you. Dr. Bonson, you're out of order. Please. Would you please respond to that, Mr. Bosch?

Well, I think that one of Dr. Bonson's techniques is, regardless of how I answer, something to accuse me of dodging it. And that's going to be probably the only thing eternal about this debate. So I'm going to accuse him of the same thing, and I'm going to say that I believe that he has dodged the proofs of God, and he has dodged, most importantly, the proofs of the text that underlie his claim that God not only exists, but exists in the way that Dr. Bonson says God does, which is as a Christian deity. And so I believe that as long as Dr. Bonson gives what to me are totally weak responses to justify the inerrancy of the Bible, that regardless of his other appeals to things in a natural order, those other appeals would argue that against a Christian God, those other appeals, even if they showed a deity, would show a deity of universality. They wouldn't show a deity that is exclusively favoring only those who believe in Christianity. And so I believe that if Dr. Bonson wants to make his point for a theistic entity that is exactly as dependent, depicted in the Christian Bible, that Dr. Bonson has to be very careful to make sure that everything in that Christian Bible can be proven to be true beyond a reasonable doubt, as we say in the courtroom. And I think that he has not sustained that burden of proof.

Thank you, Mr. Tabosh. Mr. Tabosh, if you say there is no God, how do you explain the existence of the universe?

Well, I think that we have to talk about what we mean by God. If you're talking about Spinoza's God, then maybe we agree that the word God can have application. But Spinoza's God is not a separate Being that can be prayed to. Spinoza's God is not a separate conscious being that says, okay, this person believes in Mormonism, this person believes in confidence Catholicism, and I'm sending one or the other to eternal damnation. So you see, the point is that if the universe is derived from an unknown beginning, that does not mean that our inability to yet concretely define that beginning, though I think we can have some greater assumptions than blind faith religionists can. That doesn't mean that we have to cling to superstition until the answer comes along. That doesn't mean that until we define viruses, we had to believe it was evil spirits making people sick. Certainly the universe does show us certain things, and that is that the laws of physics are immutable and universal in the universe. If that's true, the that does not allow for a transcendental being beyond the universe to violate those laws on one planet in the solar system a few thousand years ago.

Thank you, Mr. Tabosh. Dr. Bonson, would you please respond?

Yes, I don't think that I have avoided any of my opponent's questions whatsoever, although I think repeatedly he has portrayed them. And only half of what I've said say about self authentication. He has yet to deal with the problem of Hume and Bertrand Russell and the principle of induction and so forth, and I'm going to keep bringing him back to it, whether he is happy with it or not. He has yet to deal with the problem of Hume and Bertrand Russell and the principle of induction and so forth, and I'm going to keep bringing him back to it, whether he is happy with it or not. But about the origin of the universe, to say that we don't have an answer to that and we're working on it, is to say at this point we don't have a foundation for our understanding of the world that we're studying, that we, as far as we know, it's totally arbitrary. It's just the chance world. But if it's just a random chance world, we can't account for it, we don't know where it came from, and so forth. Then why do we apply principles that are contrary to randomness, contrary to chance in trying to understand it? You see, the atheist just can't have it both ways, appealing arbitrarily to, well, it just happens and we don't know why. And then saying we have to have an empirical reason for everything if we're going to believe it. Mr. Tavish simply will not stand still in his philosophical worldview and decide what his theory of Knowledge is and make his theory of reality comport with it. As a matter of fact, atheists have a real difficult time explaining the origin of the universe. And in the end they end up saying something like everything that we see came from nothing. I'll give you the quotations later. My time is going to run out here. But it has run out.

Thank you. Thank you, Doctor. That will end our 30 minute question and answer period. We will now move into the final segment of this debate, segment four, where we will conclude this debate with 10 minute closing statements. Mr. Tabosz will lead off with his 10 minute closing statement. Thank you, Mr. Tabash.

Well, this is the last opportunity I have to address you as a group. And I would say that notwithstanding Dr. Bonson's swipes at me, and I think that immortal line of being a criminal in the universe is, is a lot of fun. But notwithstanding that, I think that I don't have to demonstrate the impossible in order to be able to talk about the possible. Now certainly the idea of the hydrogen and the carbon and the basic building blocks of life on this earth are much more plausible from what we can perceive than a putative mythological being, some equivalent of ancient society's giant frog or giant crocodile God or whatever. I think that when you create a myth in order to fill in the gaps of what you don't know, that that doesn't validate, that doesn't validate the argument. I don't have to know exactly how my typewriter was put together in order to know its limitations. I may not know exactly what piece went where first, but I do know that my typewriter will never be able to make coffee. That's the nature of the beast. So I may not know exactly which atoms came together first. And neither does Dr. Bonson, though he may pretend to buy his attempt to seize upon divine knowledge through the Bible. But I do know that however it begun, and I think the Big Bang theory is a scientific theory that is plausible and that doesn't depend on supernaturalism. But however the universe begun, I think that we do today know its qualities to a large degree. So I don't know how this microphone was put together exactly, but I know that it carries my voice more than it would if I were not speaking through it in a hall this size. So I know that the universe in what it shows me does not depend upon violations of its own laws. And I know that the universe is not so structured that there is an invisible being who periodically but hasn't done so in 2000 years, violate laws in order to make a point. And I believe that, that being if it wanted me to believe in it, should have had the rabbis take me to the Santa Monica beach in 1955 and part the Pacific Ocean, the same as the Red Sea, was allegedly parted. When I did this debate on this campus in March of this year, I began by saying that no one will believe me if I tell you that 2,000 years ago here in ancient Davis, that a spaceship from Mars visited this very site and set in motion a special machine which would determine that 2,000 years later a University of California would be built on this site and it would be renowned for its veterinary school. Now, none of you will believe me because there's no proof that such things happen. There is no proof that flying saucers landed in Davis 2,000 years ago because there's no proof that they land in Davis today. And there's no proof that the destiny of this university wasn't finalized 2,000 years ago, because there is no proof, proof that the present at any given moment can predict precisely what the future configuration will be. If you had proof that people 2,000 years ago could predict exactly what future universities would look like, you would then believe my claim. But you don't. And I can tell you, and I think that I'm being a little bit more magnanimous than my opponent, that I would never, even though I'm convinced of what happened 2000 years ago on the sacred spot, I would never tell any of you that you're going to go to hell forever because you don't believe in what happened. Even though I believe that in fact the flying saucer came and the prediction came true. Because verifiability is something that we justifiably can look to in whether or not to believe the supernatural. And self authenticating accounts in books written a long time ago don't prove the supernatural if there is no visible outside evidence of the supernatural. If Dr. Bonson chooses and wants to meet me somewhere in the California coast and demonstrate to me that he can walk on water, I submit and I pledge to all of you I will be duly impressed also if Dr. Bonson will come with me to the skid row in downtown Los Angeles and have just a few pieces of fish and feed hundreds of people, and I see those fish multiplying in his hand out of nowhere to feed the multitudes of homeless in downtown Los Angeles, then I would be duly impressed. So if these extraordinary events can in fact occur, then they must visibly occur outside the boundaries of a book that does no more than claim about them. Because you see, that reduces the Bible to the same kind of literature as the UFO abductees who claim that they have been taken aboard UFOs and that their bodies and minds have been modified. In order for the God of Christianity based on the Bible to be nothing more than the ancient version of Elvis Presley sightings, we need verifiability that such types of violations of the laws of of nature can and do occur. Or better yet, we need verification that they were not laws of nature, but that they were part of nature and that we have in other human beings the same capacity for duplication. So if other people can resurrect from the dead, if other people can by the energies within their body, suspend the laws of of gravity, if other persons can materialize more out of little then if miracles can be replicated today, it would help the Evidentiary foundation of the Supernatural Claim I have a friend who is a born again Christian and I told him that the claim in South India at Banaras is that Sai Baba, a Indian guru capable of making ash appear out of nowhere, and there are pictures of him holding an urn upside down taking out gallons and gallons of ash and materializing pieces of candy for the little children out of nowhere. And this born again Christian friend said to me that unless it is trickery, it is of the devil. Why do the Christians say that if supernatural power is manifested by anybody other than their God is of the devil? Why can't a believer in Satya Sai Baba say that if Jesus did it, Jesus is the devil? Why is it justified for believing Christians to say that supernaturalism when manifested by other people is satanic? But it's not okay for other types of spiritual seekers to say supernaturalism as manifested in Christianity is satanic. Where is the proof Way? Where is the proof that the miracles of Jesus of Nazareth occurred? And if they did occur, where is the proof that they are the only ones that ever happened? 100 Tibetan monks will testify that their leader, when he died, bodily dematerialized and disappeared in a golden light. Why is that any less verifiable? Why is that any less believable than the claim of Jesus of Nazareth? And if they're equally believable, why should not that revered Tibetan lama be considered the equal of Jesus of Nazareth in terms of spirituality? Why this childish claim that only our guy is the man and everybody else's guy is not the man? Where is the evidentiary justification to back up the supernatural claim that your supernatural being can beat up anybody else's supernatural being on the block, that verifiability, that veridical evidence has not been adduced by any Christian thinker whatsoever at any time. And so I would recommend, if you have to believe in a God, don't believe in one that's going to send you to hell forever just because you don't buy the right theory. Believe in a God that loves everybody. And if you can't believe in a God, then let's really concentrate on loving each other because I suspect it's all we've got. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Tabat. Dr. Bonson, would you please give us your 10 minute closing statement?

Well, what lessons have we learned tonight? I think this much is plain from Mr. Tavish's rhetoric about, you know, burning in barbecue pits and things of that nature and challenging God and claiming things about mythology that having a sharp tongue is not a sure indicator of possessing an equally sharp mind philosophically or using cogent reasoning. Great emphasis has been placed in my opponents speaking tonight upon the idea of visible verification. Well, in the book of two, Peter, chapter one, the apostle Peter makes this. For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known unto you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, for we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. Now, just reading the verse doesn't prove that to be true. But you need to be aware that the nature of the system he's arguing against says God has provided visible verification. And so when he keeps saying, we've got to have it, we have to have it, the point is it's been given. And according to Peter, he wrote this at a time when people could check out the claims. After all, hostile witnesses could easily have disproven it if they wanted to. He said, it has come into history. We have the empirical verification. Now, a much stronger claim, you see, and this is the one that Mr. Tavish really relies on, is that even apart from claims like this, in a dusty old book with inauthentic authorship and all these kind of fetic, unproven slanders that he gives against the book, he'd say, well, you can make that claim, but it's just implausible. Over and over again we've heard about the plausibility or the implausibility of this, that it's more plausible about flying saucers than about miracles and resurrections, whatever it may be. But remember that the way in which you and I'm talking to all of us, whether we happen to agree with me or with him, all of us just have to Understand, this is a matter of intellectual integrity to note. What you think is plausible is a reflection of your basic conception of reality and how you know what you know and how you should live your life. Plausibility is rated by your worldview, I grant. I mean, it doesn't bother me in the slightest that he finds the miracle claims of Christianity implausible. I don't expect the person who doesn't share my worldview to think they're plausible. But of course, I find the things he's saying to be implausible. Now, should we just stand here and call each other names and talks and magnanimity and all that, or should we get down to the philosophical tough job of arguing about these worldviews in which comport with rationality and morality and so forth. This is what Mr. Tavish has not done tonight. The bulk of Mr. Tavish's argumentation has simply been philosophically irrelevant. He's engaged in the, I think, childish assumption that. That if he doesn't like something, then it doesn't exist. He has the right to superimpose his values like the God revealed in the Bible. The God of the Bible doesn't exist? Well, I mean, his likes are irrelevant to what does and does not exist, just as mine are. But he engaged in that form of reasoning and it ought to be exposed as such. He says the God idea is preposterous. Well, of course, what he's saying here is not proof. It's just personal pontification. What you think is preposterous is a function of your underlying presuppositions. Mr. Tavish has said that at one point he said, I can't explain every natural phenomenon, but I don't need to. Well, you've missed my point. I argued that you can't explain any natural phenomenon. And so every time you say, I want natural proof, I want empirical verification. My point is your worldview can't account for anything in the world, miraculous or not miraculous. He says when we come to the Bible, we should not suspend normal analytical procedures. I agree with him. No one has asked him to do that. My whole point is that all of our normal analytical procedures presuppose the God that is revealed in the Bible to make sense out of the inductive principle, moral absolutes, human dignity and all the rest. Just what has been missing in what Mr. Tabish said tonight. You go back and if you get the tape, listen to it. He did not offer or even attempt to offer one constructive proof for his own thesis or conclusion. He spent his time simply trying to say he didn't like what I was saying. He found this preposterous, implausible barbeque pits and all the rest. But did he bother to prove what he came here to debate tonight? No. Now, I may not have persuaded you and I may not have proved what I think that I have proved, but at least I have come here and offered you a form of proof. It's called transcendental proof, proving something from the impossibility of the contrary. I've looked at his presuppositions and shown that they violate the conditions of rationality and shown that the Christian theistic view does not. He could not offer a rational warrant for the uniformity of nature or the inductive principle. And so he has left all of sorts scientific inference, all of our daily experience, our learning memory, our study of the past, and even our use of language unintelligible. His worldview doesn't make intelligible what he's been trying to do tonight in reasoning and arguing. In fact, he's even engaged in the just egregious self contradiction in his theory of knowledge that we only know things on the basis of empirical experience and that he's made all sorts of claims that have nothing to do with empirical experience, including the claim that we only know things based on empirical experience. He couldn't defend his ready appeal to moral absolutes. He couldn't show why he wasn't being arbitrary when he condemns one thing and condones another thing. My opponent never explained how atheism allows that humans have more dignity than snails or dogs. How love is anything more than some kind of, I guess what, indigestion that you feel how life could arise from non life. He had no answer that accounts for laws and concepts and rationality. He simply couldn't cogently answer the challenges that were given to him. On the other hand, the proof of God's existence is that without him you cannot prove anything at all, whether in science or ethics or just ordinary human experience. You can't make sense of or offer rational evidence for the inescapable assumption of uniformity which atheism violates. That assumption is foundational to all thinking and all reasoning. You can't coherently assert any kind of moral evaluation or judgment of people are nothing more but molecules in motion. And so we found tonight that atheists are uncomfortable with the need for being tough minded in philosophy. I know that they can be ridiculing us and I'm certainly sorry when any kind of debate comes down to that. Even if I have engaged in that. But tough minded philosophical thinking has just not been found in the case that he's tried to offer. Atheists thoughtlessly profess, and they are emotionally committed to an underlying worldview that happens to render the reasoning, science and ethics view unintelligible. If atheists were consistent with their uncritical fundamental beliefs about the nature of reality, they aren't of course. But if they were consistent, they couldn't make sense of what we all take for granted, from toothpaste to the planets. So contrary to their professed theoretical presuppositions and actual practice in the real world, in debates before real university audiences, atheists, there's uniformity in nature that they can appeal to the absolutes of ethics. But on atheist presuppositions you can't intelligently account for reasoning or discourse or debate at all. What I'm saying here Simply is that Mr. Tavish is a living contradiction. He cannot account for his fundamental convictions about the world, about life, and about how we know what we know. Indeed, it's evident that he's not even thought seriously and critically about such matters because he just wanders off contradiction when he starts talking about these basic matters. He's indulged in reasoning, which is really, and I don't mean this personally, pathetic for its arbitrariness and its contradictory character, for its unproven emotion driven pronouncements, basically a line of thinking which violates the fundamental criteria of rationality. The atheist is satisfied to ignore the need for intellectual justification and explanation, the need to gain consistency within his total beliefs, and the need to demonstrate systematic cogency in his overall perspective on the world, man and values. And in this light, atheism, for all its proud boast of scholarly adequacy, is a kind of intellectual adolescence which refuses to think hard, face the facts and be tough minded. Atheists live when all is said and done and you push them by blind and contradictory faith about how we know what we know and what the nature of reality is. Atheism is arbitrary and irrational, all the while dressing up in the costume of rationality. Philosophically speaking, it's really much closer to superstition, undisciplined reflection and wishful thinking than to science. No wonder the scripture says that it's the fool who says in his heart there is no God. Paul says, professing themselves to be wise. Those who are unbelievers, they became fools. That is not name calling. That's a description of what happens to your reasoning when you will not admit the obvious. Mr. Tavish is in a lot of company, but the fact that there are a lot of people who do that sort of thing doesn't make his thinking any less superf superstitious or arbitrary. He is simply taking his intellectual autonomy for granted.

Thank you very much. I hope tonight's event has been both educational and eye opening for each of you. Please take the time to give us some feedback by completing the response cards that were provided in this evening's programs. You can turn them into any usher in the table or at the entrance. Also, if you're interested, this event has been recorded both by audio and video and if you'd interested in getting a copy of that, if you could get a hold of Truth Seekers via the phone number on the response card or the address in tonight's pamphlet. Another additional note, Tomorrow night Truth Seekers will be sponsoring Mr. Greg Bonson once again in Chemistry 194 at 7pm it's another hall on campus. He will be speaking on the topic of Does Morality and Ethics depend upon God? This will be an excellent opportunity for you to hear his thoughts once again and to articulate your own as he will be fielding questions from the audience firsthand. Truth Seekers would also like to thank the Ramada Inn for providing the accommodations for this evening. In addition, a special thanks to all those who have aided physically and financially in making this event take place. Thank you for coming and have a safe trip home. God bless you.

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