Timeless Wisdom - Debate at the American Atheists Convention

Welcome to Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Hear thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs. And to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles, go to DennisPrager.com.

The question for the debate today is, does the Jewish God exist? Resolved. Resolved. Resolved. The Jewish God exists. Mr. Prager will be taking the affirmative. Dennis Prager is one of America's most respected radio talk show hosts. He has been broadcasting on radio in Los Angeles since 1982. His— it's hard to read down here. There we go. His popular show became nationally syndicated in 1999 and airs live Monday through Friday at 9 AM to noon Pacific time from KRLA. Widely sought after by television shows for his opinions, he's appeared on Larry King Live, Hardball, Hannity Collins. Do you like Hannity Collins? CPS Evening News, The Today Show, and others. I think everybody knows Frank Zindler. Frank Zindler will be taking the negative today, and I don't know where Frank's bio is. Frank Zindler is the editor and director of American Atheist Press. He is a former professor of biology and geology and internationally renowned science writer and linguist.

Hebrews.

Zinner is also a leading authority on ancient and biblical, Bible-era languages, as well as the alleged historicity of Jesus Christ. He's examined these and other topics in a number of books and magazine articles, including The Jesus the Jews Never Knew, one of the most documented criticisms of the Messiah myth, based on the meticulous examination of the original Jewish source materials. Frank Dr. Dennis Prager has participated in more than 400 radio and television interviews and debated leading creationists and theologians. Theologians. It's Sunday morning, folks. It's not Friday afternoon anymore. His professional affiliations include American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, and the American School of Oriental Research. Okay, so here's how it's going to go. They get 15 minutes to present their initial arguments. I'm going to step down off the stage during that. I've got these little sign cards. Sitting down there holding up the sign cards. They do 15 minutes each, then they do a 10-minute rebuttal each, then a 5-minute summation each. Then we take questions. Quick, succinct questions. Right? Um, after they get questions, they do a 2-minute response, then the other side gets a 1-minute rebuttal. Then we'll sum it up with a 5-minute response at the end. So without further ado, I'm going to let it go off and I'm going to bring up our distinguished guest to give his 15-minute start. So let's kick this sucker off. Hi.

First, thank you.

Dennis Prager.

Have a great day. First, and I hope this doesn't count for the, you know, well, you take 2 extra minutes too, if it's okay. First of all, I want to thank you for having me. Any group that has people that they disagree with is an impressive group. So I need to say that to you. It's a big deal that you have somebody who will make the arguments as best as he can for the existence of, in this case, the Jewish God, which I'll explain in a moment. So I salute you for having me. It's a big deal. I pride myself in doing the same thing on my radio show, which here in Minnesota is on 1280, but I know you're around the country, so just look it up. It may well be in your city too. I have people I differ with all the time. I give them more time than I have when I interview them. And it's very, very important. And it's almost classic, what I'm about to say. This is truly America. A believing Jew wishes atheists a happy Easter. You know, it's really one thing that we can salute America for, right? I mean, that we're all here, whatever our background, and we're not beating each other up. I mean, you know, that's a big deal in human history. Not yet. As you will— not yet. Okay, fair enough. Well, I'm 6'4", 240 pounds, so, you know, I'm even bigger than you. So I do want to say that. Also, you did slightly make it even harder for me because my first contact with you was through Ellen Johnson by phone. She was so nice, so sweet, and I thought, "My God, if all atheists were like her." Not that atheists are any nicer or not nice, but if any group has such nice members, it's going to win converts. I mean, that's just the way it is. My theory in any event is that there is nothing— it's not arguments that tend to win people over as much as human models. Kind, fine, wonderful atheists will win more atheists. Kind, fine, wonderful Jews will win more Jews. Kind, fine, wonderful Christians will win more Christians, etc. That's generally, I think, even how it goes. That's not to say that the intellect is not important. One more thing: normally I don't introduce myself because I've already been introduced, but if you don't know me, it's also relevant for these And more relevant than the fact that I'm a talk show host is the fact that I have been teaching the Bible from the original Hebrew at the University of Judaism, now American Jewish University in Los Angeles, for 20 years. I have about 200 CDs on the Torah out, so I have a very strong background in these areas, quite aside from the talk show. Okay, so those are the preliminary comments, and thank you again for having me. First, the, the, the result is that there is— the Jewish God exists. Let me explain that. That was not my title. I like the title. I just want you to know it was not the one I chose, and I'm happy you chose it, but I, I need to explain it. Jewish God doesn't mean God is Jewish. The idea is so preposterous that, that, you know, no one I know Not the most fundamentalist Jew believes God is Jewish. There are elements of God that are Jewish, like when he answers Job with questions. That's a Jewish trait, to answer questions with questions. But I see nowhere where God, for example, buys only wholesale. So there is no evidence that I know of of God being Jewish as such. But the Jewish God means the God that Judaism introduced to the world, or the Jews introduced to the world. Is relevant because if that God doesn't exist, then all of Western monotheism has no basis. Not Christianity, not Islam, not any variation of any of them. So the Jewish God is the key issue, or the, the God that the Jews introduced to the world. I do believe in this God, and I believe that, uh, I believe about this God that this God created the world. I believe that this God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses at Sinai. I believe that God wants us to love our neighbor as ourselves. Leviticus 19:18. And, uh, those are things that I believe. Let me talk about belief for a moment. I have talked to atheists for many, many years on my— through my radio show. And, uh, there, there is a challenge that I'd like to offer you at the very outset, and that is this: I have experienced, uh, more doubts among the believers than among atheists. Which is to the believer's credit. I never meet atheists— I always ask atheists— not always, but often ask atheists on my show and elsewhere, I say, "Do you ever doubt your atheism?" And they go, "No." But if you ask almost any believer, including Mother Teresa, as it now turns out, "Do you ever have doubts?" "Of course! Of course! How could I see children with cancer and be absolutely certain there is a loving God who governs the universe?" Of course I have doubts. And so it's very interesting, because one of the intellectual arguments of atheists is, "We are the skeptics, we're the ones who challenge ourselves intellectually, you religious people, you just have dogma." But to be perfectly honest, I think you have more dogma than most of the religious people I know, because every religious person I know acknowledges doubts.

You don't.

Not you, everyone. I don't know all of you. You know what I mean. I mean collectively. So I just want to say that at the outset, that's a challenge to you. You see, I look at a child with cancer and say, "Is there really a good God in this universe?" But you look at a child born from sperm and egg and see only natural forces. Nothing ever makes you think, gee, maybe there is a designer or a creator? Nothing. In other words, I will list to you 10 things that cause me to wonder about my position. You have none? Nothing is so magnificent, so extraordinary? You hear Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and music is my field, I also conduct orchestras, and you hear that and you are certain that we went from an amoeba to Beethoven's Ninth? Indeed, went from inorganic matter to Beethoven's Ninth? You're certain? I mean, nothing in you says, "Wow!" Just even, "Wow!" I mean, it doesn't— So this is a puzzle to me. And so it's something I'd like you to respond to if you want. You know, I'm not going to tell you what to say, obviously, but it is a question that I've always felt that I wanted to ask ask at an atheist convention, by golly, and you're letting me do it. God bless you. Oh, I mean, I, I, whatever, whatever. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Whomever, whoever, to whom it may concern, bless you. Okay, let me, let me, let me offer you a very powerful argument related to what I just said. It's offered by a rabbi named Milton Steinberg, who, who was deceased quite a number, a number of decades now. An American rabbi who went from, uh, I don't know, from atheism atheism, but I think at least agnosticism, to faith in God. And he has— I'm now paraphrasing, it's not exactly his words, but it is exactly his meaning. And I have always found this to be a very honest and powerful argument. And this is the way he put it, said the believer in God has to account for one thing: the existence of unjust suffering. And that's big. And I acknowledge that. But he said, "The atheist has to account for the existence of everything else." And so, that to me is a very fair challenge. I acknowledge, if there is a good God, how would one explain all of the unjust suffering? It's a very fair question, and we can deal with it in time. But I admit that's my challenge. But you, whoever is the atheist, has to account for the existence of everything else, and your answer is chance. It just happened. Why did it happen? You don't know, because why is not a scientific question. A natural question, a naturalistic question, is how. Why is a theological question, spiritual question, or whatever, but it's not a scientific question. Why is there anything You don't know, and I don't know, but at least I posit there is something. Forget the— I'm not here to debate evolution because I have no issue with it. It's not an issue for me. What is an issue for me is why is there anything? And your answer— you don't have an answer. There is no atheistic answer because it's not in the realm of atheism to answer that question. You can only say There are things we cannot know. Now you could say science will fill in all the gaps, but it will never fill in the gap of why is there anything. That, that is not science in the realm of science. And so I have to explain the existence of unjust suffering, you have to explain everything else. Why is there anything at all? And you don't have an answer. I do have an answer, and I find it a more compelling answer. Now, of course, one of the typical challenges is, well, you posit that there is some divine being, well, who made the divine being? With all respect, I have never found that to be an intellectually powerful answer. And it isn't, and I'll tell you why. It isn't because only physical things have beginnings and ends. God definitionally, even if you think it's voodoo, the definition of God to those who believe there is a God is non-physical. So who made God is, is an oxymoronic question. It's, it's a self-contradictory statement. And what if I say Bill made God? So you'll say, oh, okay, who made Bill? And then so you'll just— it becomes a game. But it's not a game. God has no beginning and has no end. That for those who posit with. But material does have a beginning and does have— matter does. Non-matter, which is what we posit made matter, doesn't have a beginning and doesn't have an end. In order to be an atheist, you have to believe the following, and if I have you wrong, then I want to be corrected. And I mean that sincerely, because I, I, I don't like saying things that are wrong. I, I don't mind saying things that you don't agree with, but I don't want to say anything But if I understand atheism, you have to believe that, one, consciousness is just a series of chemical interactions. This whole notion of consciousness, that I know me, I know you, I am aware, for the atheist that is just a series of chemical and neural synapses and connections. It's all basically chemistry and biology. That's all it is. So it's almost a figment of our imagination, consciousness, because really it's just, it's just a bunch of chemicals interacting. I don't believe that. I think consciousness is not purely a natural phenomenon of neurons and chemicals. Number 2, if you're an atheist, you have to believe that everything came from nothing. I can't believe that because everything material has come from something. It doesn't spontaneously appear. Number 3, if you are an atheist, you have to believe that sheer chance, and unlikely chance at that, made everything that we have. Everything that we know came about through chance. A mutation here, a mutation there, a mutation this one, this evolved this way, this one perfectly adapted this way, and we end up with Beethoven's Ninth. Okay, if you are an atheist, you have to believe— and I know you may differ on this, but please hear me out because I debate this a lot— and I think that if you deny this— you see, I debate a lot with religious people. I don't like when religious people are not intellectually honest, and I don't like when atheists are not intellectually honest. If there is no there is no God, the universe has no meaning. And you have to be honest to acknowledge that. You can say your life has meaning, your children, your friends, your work, your love of art, of course. But that's all subjective. There is no objective purpose. It's all— what we are essentially are self-conscious rocks. That's what we are if there is no God. Now we may be, but one must honestly confront the fact that that's all we are and there is no ultimate meaning. Now here's the point. I believe that there is ultimate meaning. It isn't pointless, all of our emotions, feelings, sentiments, consciousness, intellect, art. I don't believe it is all ultimately meaningless. Therefore, I, therefore, Therefore, there must be something that has infused this world with meaning, and that is a creator. That who, a meaning giver, gave us meaning. You have to also believe that morality is purely subjective. I have never argued, I never will, that atheists can't be moral. That is idiotic. An atheist can be, pardon the phrase, saintly. An atheist can be a beautiful, wonderful human being, and there are many despicable religious people. That's a given. That's not my point. My point is, though, that if there is no God who says, "Thou shalt not murder," there is nothing objectively wrong with murder. Murder is then only subjectively wrong. I don't like murder. Nazis did like murder. If there's nothing that transcends Nazis and me, me, then there is nothing objective to say murder is wrong. But in my gut, I believe murder really is objectively wrong, not because Dennis believes it, but because it really is wrong. And if it really is wrong, not just subjectively, then there must be an objective source of morality, a transcendent source of morality that we call God. If you're an atheist, you have to believe that love love, learning, goodness, the arts are all ultimately just chemical interactions. I find I don't believe that. I can't prove it. I don't offer proofs for God. On sheer evidence of what my intelligence tells me, I can't believe that everything I just mentioned is just a series of chemical interactions. Love is real, not just chemistry. Art is real. Beauty is real. Goodness is real. Intellect is real. Consciousness is real. Morality is real. Meaning is real. But none of them are real. They're all just chemistry in the final analysis if there is no God. Finally, and because— and of course I could amplify on all these for a long time, but we have the 15-minute rule, and I obviously will will abide by it. All the evil committed by religions, I'm the first to acknowledge it. I wrote a book on antisemitism. If any person knows, if any member of any group knows about religious evil, it's Jews who have suffered so terribly for so many centuries at the hands of religious people calling Jews Christ killers or whatever it might be, infidels, whatever it might— I know religious evil. But secularists and atheists have totally equaled it. And the argument that Stalin or communism and Nazism, well, they were religions too, is a dishonest argument. They were based on atheism. And if you deny that, you are like those who say that no religious, really religious people ever committed evil, because if they were really religious, they wouldn't have done the evil. No, really religious people have committed evil, and really atheist doctrines have committed evil. Nobody, nobody has a monopoly on doing evil. Not religious people, not secular people, not atheists. Unfortunately, the human condition is so often depraved that there is a vast amount of evil done, whether it is by the Stalinists butchering religious people or it is religious people butchering atheists and anybody else. That's the human condition, and we continue. Thank you.

I think we should give a round of applause again to Dennis for his very polite and witty opening statement. I wasn't sure what to expect since I had never had the pleasure of actually seeing one of his broadcasts or television appearances, and I had read a few of his books, but I'm delighted. I must say, though, at the outset, I am a little bit puzzled. I'm not sure I really heard any arguments for the existence of the Jewish God. What arguments I think I did hear are arguments I normally hear for the Christian God. And we need to prove that the Jewish God exists. And so these proofs, of course, have to be specific for the Jewish God. Clearly, common sense tells us that a proof proof for the existence of Zeus can simultaneously be a proof for the existence of Jesus or Yahweh or Osiris. We are going to have to have some specific proofs. But then too, we need to know exactly which Jewish God we're talking about. It may come as a surprise to you to learn that Judaism is not a monotheism. It is a henotheism. The ancient Jews, at any rate, believed in many gods, but they only worshipped one. They had a special chief god. In the first verse of Genesis, it says, "Bereishit bara Elohim," "In the beginning the gods created." the heavens and the earth. So we start right out with a polytheistic statement, and we need to know which, if maybe all of those gods, Dennis is going to try to prove, but we'll have to find out which of them, or if he's going to actually try to prove all of them. Now I know that Elohim is always defended as being an honorific plural, but it might come as a interesting thing to you to learn that in the King James translation, the word Elohim on 240 occasions is translated as gods, which is the way I would translate it. In the beginning, gods created the heavens and the earth. The Hebrew Bible gives us the names of a number of Jewish gods. We have, of course, El, El. That's clearly a singular. We have Yahweh, the secret name supposedly of El. We have El Shaddai, often referred to as, thought of as being the god of the mountain. We of course have the person that we are often accused of worshiping, namely Satan. We have Asherah, a goddess. We have Shekinah. Maybe Shekinah is not in the Bible. It might be just in the Talmud and the Kabbalah. We have Baal Peor. You know, the ancient Hebrews were marrying the Moabites and going off to worship Baal Peor, and then Phinehas came and struck through with his spear the Israelite man and the Moabite woman in the act, and the plague was stayed. Now, ordinary Jews probably don't believe in the following, but there are still Kabbalistic Jews, and during the Middle Ages there were lots of Kabbalistic Jews who, according to Israel Shahak, himself a Holocaust survivor and author, in this case in his book Jewish History, Jewish Religion, He says that Kabbalistic Jews also believe in the existence of a first cause God who produced then a male God called Wisdom or Father and a female God, Goddess, called Knowledge or Mother. Man, how I wish I had Dennis Prager's voice. For somebody who does this much talking to have a voice like mine, I don't know. This god and goddess then in turn did the nasty, presumably in paradise, and from them a son was produced, sometimes called Small Face or the Holy Blessed One, and a daughter called Lady or Matronita. And sometimes Shekinah or Queen. Now keep in mind that the Jews, although they claim to worship only one God, at least many of them do believe in the existence of other gods as well. And just for what it's worth, the first commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me," that is the same word Elohim. So I mean, that the first commandment is admitting that there are other gods, but you just must not have any one of those ahead of Yahweh. Now, Dennis, in order to tell if your proof is valid or not, we're going to have to have a definition of the god or goddess you intend to prove. Almost always— this I have to attribute to David Eller, who spoke yesterday— Almost always when we talk about gods, we literally do not know what we're talking about. Not only the atheists don't know what people are talking about when they're talking about gods, but the people who claim to believe in them don't know what they're talking about either. The reason is there is no definition, almost always there is no definition for whatever the god is. Usually a debate on the existence of a god, an undefined god, takes this format. I have proved that Gnorc exists. No, you haven't. Yes, I have. In your dreams. It's that technical. In defining your god of choice, Dennis, you're going to have to do more than merely describe it. We need to know more than if it is male or female and whether its gender is anatomically determined. We need to know more than if it is infinitely good or infinitely naughty. We need to know why and how it is different from angels, demons, and all other supernatural beings. He loves the word supernatural, and I think it is a good word. This means something that's above the natural. I don't know how that's possible, but anyway, the word is— conveys that. We will need to know first what a god is before we can form a limiting definition for the particular god you chose to defend. Since I'm a scientist and since Since observations guided by the scientific method are the only way that we can discover truth about the world, I will demand an operational definition of your chosen God. In science, when we have to deal with a logically fuzzy concept such as length, time, hardness, whatever, we define these terms in terms of operations that we can perform. That's operational definition. What operation can we perform? Hardness is determined by scratching. What scratches what?

Length—

measures of length are determined by comparing something to a universal standard platinum-iridium bar. Time is defined or is measured as to how much sand goes through the hourglass or how many vibrations, how many atomic vibrations in time delta t approaching zero, and so on. And yesterday we had an excellent lecture from Dr. Krauss on the subatomic particles and dark matter and dark energy and things like this. These are all determined by indirect methods, but there are operations that you have to perform in order to see that atoms, for example, exist. Now, God is the fuzziest of of all concepts. And so we really need an operational definition. What operation, what test, what observation can we perform that will indicate the existence of this particular god or goddess? Now I don't care about an operational definition for the Trinity or Allah or Osiris or any of those. We want to have an operational definition of your God. Now, if you can't give us an operational definition or test that we can perform, then we will have to conclude that your God is meaningless. In science, for a proposition such as "X exists" to be meaningful, we have to be able at least to imagine a test that we could perform in order to demonstrate that, or to decide decide the claim.

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The proposition is scientifically, at any rate, meaningless. Now ethical claims and aesthetic claims are scientifically meaningless, but they can have emotional meaning. But I'm talking now about scientific meaning, which is what we need. If you claim that miniature unicorns congregate every night in your hall closet, there is immediately a testable test that we can imagine to test that, whether miniature unicorns are doing that. However, if you are claiming that undetectable unicorns are doing the nasty in your closet every night, well, there's nothing we can even imagine that we could do to decide whether that's true or not. That claim would be meaningless. It could not even be true or false. And that is because only scientifically meaningful propositions or statements can be true or false at all. The miniature unicorn proposition can be tested, as I've just said. If tested, it would probably be found to be false. The undetectable unicorn claim cannot even be tested, so we forget about it. It's meaningless So let's don't waste our time on it. Now if you can come up with an operational definition of your particular Jewish God, we'll try it out right here. Your test for Yahweh, however, or whoever it is going to be, should, however, be better than this test for Zeus. Father Zeus, if you exist, in the next 3 minutes, give us absolutely B, no sign. Now, as I said, if you can't come up with an operational definition, then we have no way to know what you think you are talking about. And that's very important. Work. If you don't know what you're talking about, how can we know? So we have to have this operational definition. If you can't tell us what to do to detect your deity, we won't need the rest of this debate and we can go to lunch early. So what you need to do in your next 10 minutes is the following: 1, define the term God in such a way that it will discriminate God from angels, demons, genies, elves, fairies, dead saints, cosmic consciousness, and all the other supernatural beings that people sometimes talk about. 2, define your chosen Jewish God in such a way to equate it or distinguish it from other gods or goddesses. And 3, give us an operational definition specific to your God. When we perform the indicated tests, If it should turn out positive, we want to be sure that we haven't actually detected Jesus or Osiris or Zeus or Freya or maybe Huitzilopochtli. Now, we sure don't want to think that we have detected the Jewish God if, in fact, the god that we detected is Huitzilopochtli. She did not would not appreciate people worshiping male gods over her. So that could be rather dicey. So anyway, I think Dennis has a big task ahead of him, and even though I have 2 minutes left, I think I'm just going to rest my case at this point and challenge Dennis to come up with an operational definition so that we can have a meaningful proposition to be evaluating. Thank you. Dennis, you have 10 minutes.

Thank you, and thank you, Frank. Thank you for the compliment on my voice. It's for my In a chosen profession, it is helpful, I acknowledge that. But your voice is quite fine, I might add. And I don't say that in the way that Barack Obama said that Hillary Clinton was quite lovable. This was sincere. Maybe that was too, I don't know. First, there were just some factual errors in what Frank said. Said, and it's— most of the arguments are one man's views and opinions versus another, but some things are stated and they're verifiably true or verifiably not true. It is verifiably not true that Elohim is a plural word in the first sentence of Genesis. It is verifiably wrong what he said. The Hebrew, which I happen to know like I know English and I've been teaching it my whole adult life, the Hebrew is in the beginning. Bara is singular. The verb is how you know what the noun is. That, that's, that's what tells us. Just like the word fish. The fish swims or the fish swim. You know, on the basis of swims and swim, whether fish is plural or fish is singular, and it's the same exact word. The fish swims means it's one fish. The fish swim means it's more than one fish. So it's the verb that tells you what the noun is. The verb there is in the singular. No one has ever translated it— no one ever has translated it as plural. Now, are there Jews who at times in Jewish history believed in other gods? Of course there were. The prophets rail against them constantly. This is not a revelation of the atheist convention. It was a revelation of Jews themselves. The battle to keep monotheism pure in Jewish life was an ongoing one. Of course it was. That's not here or there. So what? If there's such a thing as normative Judaism, and if there isn't, then the whole thesis is preposterous, because anytime I'll say this is Jewish, you'll say, Well, but there are Jews like Israel Shahak, who's an atheist, who believes the following. But Israel Shahak is Jewish by birth, not by conviction, so it's irrelevant. You might as well take somebody born Christian who totally rejected it and then cite him on behalf of Christianity. Israel Shahak has no standing on anything with regard to Judaism. Nothing. He would acknowledge it. He is ethnically a Jew. He is religiously an atheist. So it's irrelevant. I mean, you could find Jews who believe in anything. There were Jews who believed in magic. There would be Jews who believe— undoubtedly there were Jews who believed in Zeus. So you're going to say, is Zeus the Jewish God? I mean, it's— never confuse Jews and Judaism. It's not fair, any more than you confuse American values and Americans. There are Americans who believe anything. But I think we have certain basic principles that identify American values. And all of the other, all of the other ones, I mean, Baal Peor is— I don't know why it was even raised because it's not a Jewish god. It was, it was a Moabite god. Exactly isn't noted. Satan, Satan in, uh, is not at all in the Hebrew scripture what it becomes in the Christian scripture. Satan is not the devil. Satan, first of all, is almost never mentioned in the Old Testament. Uh, Job is where he makes his biggest appearance. And Satan in Hebrew only means opponent. That's all it means. Or adversary. That's all it means. It doesn't mean devil. It doesn't mean anything else. It, it is even continued into modern Hebrew. It has no other meaning. It's just the opponent got up and said the following. That's all it is. And, and it's make-believe. And Jews always knew it was make-believe. It is an All of Jewish history, from the Talmud on, the whole story of Job was regarded as, in the best sense of the word, a fairy tale, but a very powerful, meaningful one. But Jewish tradition held, if there's such a thing as normative in the Talmud, that Job never lived, let alone that Satan is not a devil. So these are not relevant protests in any way. Judaism has always posited one God. God from Genesis 1:1 onward. When it says Elohim as plural, it's because Judaism fully acknowledged that of course there are other gods. Obviously pagans believed in many other gods, so you will use the same term, Elohim, other gods. Of course there were other gods. A monotheist recognizes that there are other gods. He doesn't recognize them as gods, but he recognizes that others view them them as gods? Of course they weren't idiots. They knew that other people had other gods, and that's all that it means. So who is the Jewish God? It is the God, uh, from Genesis 1:1. Now, this is not— oh, how did I— how is this distinguished? The first question that Frank asked from the Christian God. Well, the truth is many Christians do believe in the God of Israel and the Jewish God. They have added things that Jews don't accept, like the Trinity. God doesn't have a Son in Judaism. There is no Holy Ghost as such in Judaism. There is no Trinity in Judaism. That's correct. In that way, there are additional theological premises that Christians will have regarding the deity. But we do share— obvious why there's such a thing as Judeo-Christian values. There are things that we share and things that theologically Jews and Christians don't share. But I gave you the normative Jewish God. Now, definition? Of course there's no definition of God in a scientific sense.

You're—

I'm being accused of something that is, that is a non sequitur. If we're here to scientifically establish that there is a God, we're wasting our time. No one ever offered God as within— if God were measurable, God wouldn't be God. That's the whole point. God does transcend nature. Now, that is definitional. That you don't like it because everything should fit a scientific paradigm— I want you to define happiness. I wrote a book on happiness, a bestseller, number one bestseller on happiness, Happiness Is a Serious Problem. And, and in it I wrote, dear reader, I have spent 10 years writing a book on happiness and I can't define it. The fact that something doesn't have a scientific definition doesn't mean it doesn't exist. As one Supreme Court justice once said about pornography, "I can't define it, but I know it when I see it." You can't define happiness. None of you can. I've looked it up in the dictionary. It's preposterous. It's meaningless. It's just a redundancy about the phrase. Feeling good or whatever. Well, you could feel good and not be happy. You could feel bad and be happy. Happy. So it's not just that at all. But I, I dare say the fact that we can't define happiness doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. The most important things in our lives are not fully definable or measurable. Measure your love for your child. Where? On what? What paradigm will you measure it exactly? The most important things in life aren't aren't scientific, aren't provable, aren't measurable. So the lack of a, of a scientific definition of God is the best thing about God, because it doesn't— it can't be contained. Now, you may say it's nonsense. You have the perfect right to say it, but you can't say it's nonsense because it's not scientific. There's too much that's non-scientific that means something to you, like your of a child, unless you believe, well, it is quantitatively ascertainable on the basis of serotonin emissions. And if that's the way you describe your love for your child, I feel for your child. Darling, my serotonin levels are very high today. This God that Judaism brought into the world with the Hebrew Bible changed history Whether you like it or you don't like it, that is provable. That is provable. William McNeill, the great university professor at the University of Chicago, the great historian of the Western world in his History of the West, said the Jews changed history with monotheism. It is the most radical change in history that there is a transcendent being who judges all people the same way, Jews and non-Jews. Everybody is judged the same way. Have you been good to your fellow human being? That was brand new in history. It knocked out the tribal notion that the only people you had to treat well were members of your tribe. Love your neighbor as yourself. God judges all people. It introduced linear thinking into history. All, all human thinking prior to the Hebrew Bible was circular, was cycles. Everything repeated itself. Everything repeated itself. Whether it was Mesoamerican life or whether it was Eastern Asian life, you just go around and around and around the great circle, as in the circle on the Indian flag. It's just the life. Life is a circle. And out of nowhere comes this belief. No, it's linear. There is progress to be made. You break out of the cycle, you make the world better, you end slavery, you end what the Greeks did to ugly children and deformed children, putting them on mountaintops exposed to die. It was this God that Jews believed in that ended all of that. It was this God who said that all human life is sacred, all including ugly children, everybody. That's why the British, when they went into India, ended sati, where a woman, a widow, would jump onto the funeral pyre of her husband when his body was consumed by fire. He said, excuse me, there is one morality, and we don't allow women to die on their husband's funeral pyres. We're not multicultural in that way. There is one universal universal morality. This was all given by the belief in this God. He is not scientifically provable, but it was the greatest change in human history.

Well, I didn't realize it was going to be this easy to win this debate. I really thought he'd come up with some definition. Not only did he not come up with an operational definition, which I'm not terribly surprised at because nobody ever has in history, but I really didn't get even a real description of his God. There are a few qualities that he seems to attach But it's not clear what God we're talking about. And incidentally, the singular verb is not all that surprising because the first and second creation myths in Genesis are borrowed from previous cultures, from the Babylonians and so on, and they were progressively edited into a monotheistic or henotheistic format. And it's just the plural noun there which tips us off and lets us know the real history, that Judaism evolved like everything else from completely polytheistic societies. Now we again now seriously do not know what we're talking about. I don't know what God it is that Dennis thinks he has proven or attempted to prove. He mentions Satan. He's quite correct, of course. In Job, Satan is simply the opponent, but in Jewish evolution, religious evolution, as well as Christian and Muslim evolution, he turns into the devil. But how How do we know what is what if we don't have a definition for any of these? We have no idea what the relationship is or isn't between the God of Genesis 1:1 and the Christian God. The Jewish God of Genesis 1:1, I should say. So, as always, we have no idea what to prove or disprove. It's boxing a marshmallow trying to figure out where the boundaries are of this being. Now, since he cannot come up with an operational definition and admits that there is no way to detect his God, I'm reminded of one of the aphorisms in David Eller's book. He says the undetectable and and the nonexistent are very similar. And so I have to say that Dennis Prager's God is very similar to a nonexistent God. I want to just say one thing about— my notes are kind of disorganized, which is usually the problem I have in debates. I jot things down and when I want to sort them out in a logical fashion, it becomes a little bit difficult, especially with my double vision. But he mentions that because of religion that at least is traceable to Judaism, slavery was eliminated. But I don't know how that can be attributed to the gods of the Bible. Because they were the ones that set up all the rules and regulations for keeping slaves in the first place. And it was the Bible that was the mainstay of support for all the slave owners. And as you know, it was among the heretical people in the colonies, at any rate, in the early United States, that the abolitionist movement began. It was such as Thomas Paine, who was the first person to suggest that Jesus might not have been a historical figure, in English that is, and the Quakers and groups like that, who were in many ways moving away from the biblical mythology. Now, Dennis has, since really, as I say, he's already lost the debate. He cannot come up with a test test or definition that we can use to prove his God. And I must point out that a scientific demonstration is the only one that has meaning in the sense of demonstrating existence. Now, the other things that he talks about, like beauty, perceiving Beethoven's Ninth Symphony— I mean, I write symphonies, so I am very sensitive to this whole idea myself. Yes, symphonies have meaning in an emotional sense, but they have no veridical meaning in the sense that we could make a statement such as, "Haydn's symphonies are more beautiful than Mozart's symphonies." I happen to know that Dennis is very fond of Haydn, as I am. There's no way you could imagine testing that. The problem is not everybody would agree that that is true or false. You could come up with all kinds of spectrum of opinion on Haydn versus Mozart. Now, we could dream up scientific tests, including serotonin and endorphins and all sorts of other things, in order to tell tell whether a given person prefers Mozart or Haydn or Zindler for that matter. I love to put my own name in sequence with people like that. My article on ethics without gods has been reprinted for many years in a little book called Choosing a Life Philosophy, which is used as a college textbook of readings. In the first edition of that book, there was Aristotle, Zindler, and Billy Graham. Aristotle isn't there anymore, and I still am. But I think they chose Plato, actually. And that's fine, because Plato had something to say that is relevant here. Dennis would have us believe, I think, I think, correct me if I'm mistaken, but he would have us believe that morality, a sense of what is right and what is wrong, somehow comes from this undefined God. Plato, in his dialogue, the Euthyphro, has an argument which I have to paraphrase, but it goes something like this. Is an act act good or bad because it is simply in and of itself good, inherently good or inherently bad, or is it good or bad because a god has said so? And if in fact it is good or bad because a god has said so, then why did the god say so? Did the God say this is good and that is bad because of some higher principle, or did he say this simply on whim? Now when you look at the Jewish laws, many of them, they look very, very much like whims. Don't wear cloth woven of two different fibers and things like that. Now, if this is good, and if goodness, knowledge of good, has come from a God, and if it is simply the whim of that God, then we have no way of knowing really what is good or bad. It's just God says so. God said it's good, and there's nothing we can predict. And God can do anything, say anything. Well, that would make him detectable, wouldn't it? But anyway, God could say anything is good or anything is bad, and we'd have no way of predicting what the next good thing is going to be. We have no other principle. On the other hand, if there is something inherent about goodness or inherent about evil, then we don't need the God at all. We just go directly to the principle. We go over God's head, so to speak. And so we really have no need of gods. Now of course in anthropology we study, and Professor Eller yesterday did a wonderful job I thought, and his book is even better, at showing how moral systems evolve and have evolved, and they are indeed subjective. And they are different from place to place, but the constraints of evolution have made it necessary for certain universals or near-universals to be present in moral systems.

Systems.

We don't need a God to be good, and we certainly don't need a devil to be bad. Thank you.

I must say, I have been in many, many, many, many debates in my, in my life. I never announced that I had won one, especially when I hadn't. And, uh, so this was, this was a new experience for me I have my debate opponent announce that he had won a debate, which is remarkable given that he won a debate that was not even the subject. If the subject had been prove God's existence, the Jewish God's existence, I wouldn't have come. I, I, I, I never offer proof. My whole point is that proof is a scientific term. God is not within the realm of the physical, therefore not provable. So no debate was won since that was not the issue. There was an intellectual sleight of hand done here, by the way. I know what I say pretty well, that's why I record everything, by the way, and I'm glad that this is being videoed so you can check whether I'm right or Frank is right. So Dennis admits that there was no way to detect his God. I will give $1,000 to the Atheists Association. Are you tax deductible?

Yeah.

I will give you $1,500. If in fact I ever said that God was not detectable. I didn't even use the word detect or detectable or detection or any other variation on the verb detect. That was a sleight of hand that he used here. I said God is not provable. That is very different from God is not detectable. They're not even related. I detect God every day, folks. That you don't is your loss, in my opinion, and you and my superstition, in your opinion, that's fine. But folks, I detect God all the time. So, so that if you don't detect God, uh, at the existence of everything that I enumerated earlier, if it, if it is all chemical, that's fine. You detect— you, because you have confined your reality to that which is measurable. I have not. I accept all of science's revelations, but science does not reveal all truth. There is much more to life than just what science tells us. It's a rather boring life, in my opinion, frankly, if only that which is measurable scientifically exists. As I said, happiness is not measurable scientifically unless you do just serotonin levels. So, folks, I didn't lose the debate. You may think I did, but it's certainly not on the grounds that Frank pointed out. It was never about proof. It was, does the general public Jewish God resolved. The Jewish God exists, yes, and is detectable, and has made the most difference in the history of the world. Belief in that God provable? Absolutely no. I never spent any time proving it, and I think that proofs for God's existence are foolish. There are arguments for God's existence. And the other word that was thrown in to make it was definition. If we go back to— Dennis can't define God, therefore he loses debate.

Debate?

Where, where the question was whether God exists, not whether God is definable. Since I can't define happiness, would we have it, would we have a debate? Dennis can't define happiness, ergo happiness doesn't exist. But I don't want to repeat myself. Slavery and the Bible. The Bible started the movement to the end of, to abolish slavery. But yet you'll say, well, wait a minute, it allows for slavery. Yes, it did, absolutely. It was in bondage it indemniture, if in fact you want to be very precise what it was. If I owed you money and I didn't pay you back, or I stole from you, then I worked for you for 7 years. And if I really loved you, I could stay even longer than that. And there was a law in that very same Torah that you are not allowed to return a slave who has run away. An immediate impossibility, therefore, for the maltreatment of people who work for you for no money, which is why what a slave was and what the Torah made it ultimately abolished. That's why the Western world abolished it. These were— everybody acknowledges, including atheist historians, that it was Christians overwhelmingly who made the abolitionist movement. And they did so exactly reading their scripture, that God created the human being in his image, and a black is in God's image every bit as much as a white person is in his image. Of course, nobody could— look, people could do whatever they want with any text. There are people who— there were fascists who believe in the Constitution, there were communists who believe in the Constitution. I can't account for that. And there are people who could distort the Torah. But the intent of the Bible was clearly, since the major act of God was to liberate slaves, it doesn't take a big leap to understand God is not a fan of slavery. And the prophets make it clear God liberated not only the Jews but also the Ethiopians and others. We are not talking here just about one group because God cares just about one group. God cares about everybody. That is what has led people to do these things. To do, in other words, abolish slavery. The definition that Frank gave for morality was also a very interesting use of language. Language, a sense of what is right and wrong. Please, please, if that's all morality is, then it's like a sense of what is tasty and not tasty, which is exactly what it is for someone who doesn't base it on some transcendent source. It's a sense. That's correct. For him, it's a sense.

Not for me.

For me, there is an objective good and an objective bad because they emanate those standards from a transcendent God. I debated the subject, is there an objective good? Can we be good without God? At Oxford, with Oxford's professor of moral philosophy. And he acknowledged at the outset— he was an atheist as well— and acknowledged at the outset, if there was no God who says murder is not wrong, there is no way to say murder is not wrong. All you can say is, in your opinion, you don't like it, just as in my opinion, I like Haydn. I like Haydn, I don't like murder. It's all a bunch of he had other reasons that he doesn't believe in God, but he was intellectually honest enough to acknowledge: no God, no objective morality.

Well, um, since he can't come up with a definition, and he can't come up with a test, but yet he claims he detects God, he's got a problem there. If he detects God but can't tell us how to detect God, what do we make of that? Is that— have I really contradicted myself somehow? I don't think so. I think if he can detect God, then he should be able be able to tell us what that God is. In other words, he should be able to define it, and he should be able to tell us what to do to detect that God. So I again assert I have won this debate. So now, since you can't define God, we can't imagine how to test it. I mean, we wouldn't know if anything we did had anything whatsoever to do with the God that Dennis has in his mind. And yes indeed, the God that he has in his mind is chemistry. I'm a neurophysiologist, among other things. I haven't been active as a neurophysiologist in 25 years, but that was what my doctoral studies were in. And I can tell you that everything we do, every pleasure we experience, every pain that we feel is—

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Physics and chemistry. It's the product of natural selection, evolving forms more and more wonderful, as Darwin said. But that is what it is. There is no meaning in the universe. He's right about that. The universe is without meaning. Meaning is what we ourselves ourselves, human beings, create for ourselves and those with whom we live. It is childish, I submit, to look for a cosmic father in the sky. We atheists don't need to be born again, we have simply grown up, as the bumper sticker says. Now, again, Dennis Prager criticizes my use of morality in terms of sense of right and wrong, good and bad, but in his books I have been absolutely unable to find a definition of goodness. He goes on and on about goodness as being what the God of ethical monotheism requires, but nowhere does he define how you tell what this goodness is, or what this goodness is. I want to end by just saying that Dennis has some misconceptions when he talks about what atheists believe. Coming after yesterday, of course, atheists don't believe anything. All atheists are from Missouri. You gotta show me. We have no beliefs. This is what is the characteristic thing of atheists. And when he says that atheists have no doubts about their atheism, that is kind of meaningless also, because any one of us would be no longer an atheist in a trice. If you could show us some evidence for whatever god or goddess you think exists. All we are saying when we say that we are not doubting our atheism is simply that we have not yet been shown the evidence. We have not yet been shown any proof that would make us go on with anything other than the presumption that all there is is matter and energy and information. There are ultimate questions such as the origin of the universe or universes as we may now be talking about, again since Dr. Krauss' lecture yesterday. These are at this moment untestable and you may have remembered that Krauss was concerned about whether physics physics is now getting into a metaphysical area where we cannot imagine a test. But he seems optimistic that at least some of these new theories will be in fact testable. But at this moment we cannot go there. Physicists are trying, but you and I as not physicists still have to wait and see. But until these claims, whether it's physics or in theology, can be testable, at least in the imagination, they are beyond the bounds of science, they are beyond the bounds of knowledge. Thank you. Alright, everybody is lining up. See, I couldn't have predicted that one, now could I? Okay, here's what we got. We gotta try and make one line if we can, or no, I guess that's not gonna happen. Just be nice to each other. Okay, now please, though, let me make something clear. The line is for questions, not statements. Okay, please ask a directed question to either person. The person will have 2 minutes to respond. And then the other person who was not directed the question originally will have a 1-minute response. Yes, uh, first, just a real quick comment because it was a very bad error by the gentleman on my left, on your right. Sir, Hitler was Roman Catholic. He was not an atheist.

And only pray yes for that guy, all right?

If you want proof of that, just ask for a question.

Do you have a question, Spike? General, one at a time. I never said that he was an atheist. I said that Nazism was atheistic.

No, it was not.

Yeah, okay, fine. I believe you're entirely wrong. That is the reason they had a swastika and not a cross. It had nothing to do with Christianity. It had nothing to do with Judaism. And I accept the crap done in the name of religion. You have to accept the secular Dennis Prager, go ahead.

My question is, you have made the statement earlier that your morals come either directly or indirectly from your God. Prove that.

I believe that God wants me to love my neighbor as myself. I believe that God has talked to me. Folks, you're stuck on this proof issue.

You have this circumscribed view of God.

Of what of all reality is a provable, measurable, scientific thing. Fine. I know you have a materialist view of the universe. I have a more expansive view. That's all. I accept your material view, but I think there is something beyond. You think it's all chemistry and molecules. I believe it's more than that.

I don't laugh at you.

I don't deserve laughter for that. It is not a laughable proposition. It is a pretty damn serious thing that some very fine minds believe in or not. Have actually entertained. That you, I believe, you have a circumscribed view of reality. You believe that I have a superstitious view of reality. Fine. As I say on my radio show, I prefer clarity to agreement. I don't care if we agree, I want it totally clear. I am uninterested in proofs of what is not provable.

Okay, two things. Hitler was a Catholic in good standing when he committed suicide, but after that I guess not. But he was very strongly supported, was never excommunicated, strongly supported by the Catholic bishops of Bavaria, at minimum. Pius XI was a strong supporter until Hitler started nationalizing the schools, and Pius XII himself is known as Hitler's Pope. He's a Pope by that title. As far as our sources of morality are concerned, Dennis and I are moral or immoral, in the cases where we are both, for the same reasons. These are the fact that we are both subject to the same social pressures and the same educational cultural milieu that has made that made us what we are, and the way we are similar and the way we are different. It is not anything coming from a God. And when the questioner says, how can you prove that your God is doing this? Of course, you can't. And you can only object to our demand for proof. Can I comment?

Oh, sure.

Do you want to add anything?

I want to comment on this thing, because I've done a tremendous amount of research. I'm a member of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Of the board appointed by the president. I have a lifelong interest and have written a great deal on the Holocaust. So let me just tell you of one question that I posed to two Jewish sociologists, Pearl and Sam Oliner, O-L-I-N-E-R, who wrote a book on altruism, which has always fascinated me. Why do people do good things? They are both secular Jews. One was in fact saved in the Holocaust and one was not. They both lived through it, but one was not actively saved by anybody. I asked them, with all of your study of the Holocaust, and you are secular Jews, you're not religious, all of your lifelong study of altruism, if you had to go back now to the Holocaust, and you could knock on one door to have somebody risk their lives to save you from the Nazis, Nazis? Would you knock on a lawyer's door, a doctor's door, or a priest or nun's door? And they said without question, a priest or nun. All right. Thank you.

I meant to respond to that. Yes, yes, of course. Um, I don't know how that has anything to do with the source of morality because you just said that, that the Catholics supported Hitler.

Yes, so I want you to— well, yes, there were many Catholics who supported Hitler. A lot A lot of Christians utterly failed, but the disproportionate number of those who saved Jews were religious.

Yeah, but I wish we could have been there to check the oxytocin levels in the brain of these various people. Because oxytocin is known to correlate strongly with altruistic behavior and maternal behavior and nurturing behavior. And we We do not yet know what are the various stimuli that can cause oxytocin levels to rise and fall in different people's brains, but certainly this is among the things that was found to induce oxytocin levels. Well, alright. I have a short question. Yes, question, go ahead. Dennis, is there a Jewish God out there somewhere keeping score on people, and at the end of our short life going to decide whether we are going to heaven or to hell.

I happen to believe in the 13 principles that Maimonides constructed for Judaism. One of them is that there is ultimate reward and punishment. And to be perfectly honest, it gives me a great deal of solace to know that Mother Teresa and Adolf Hitler do not have the same fates.

Well, they do have the same fates. As a matter of fact, you know what happens after we die. That's awesome.

Yes, I have come to a remarkable place.

Go ahead, Frank. Yeah, you know, actually Dennis has convinced me there is a God and I am he. And I am I'm going to be really nasty to Dennis after he dies if he does not immediately convert to Zimblarism and start believing in me. Because I might, you know, he might torture me. He's bigger than I am. And because I'm God and infinite, I'm a very good actor, and I might just pretend to be dead, or might pretend to admit that I'm not a god even. Imagine that self-contradictory, but being infinite I can do that. And I'll get even with him after he dies. I will torture him for an eternity. So Dennis, did God get right with Zimblin?

Well, it's a caricature of the Jewish understanding of God, wherein belief in that God is immaterial to whether or not you are rewarded. A good atheist, according to the Jewish God, has the same rewards as a good believing Jew.

Do you agree with that?

Don't caricature a God I don't believe in, nor the God of Judaism, ever possible. You are not graded on your beliefs, you are graded on your behavior.

If you keep on believing that false God, you're going to be in trouble. Okay, next question. Dr. Zengler, Stephen Hawking wrote a book about 10 years ago called Standing on the Shoulders of the Greats. He cited Johannes Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and Einstein himself, that they were all deists, believed in a supreme being, that there's not— the universe cannot be a random accident. How do you respond to 6 of the greatest scientists in history? This, of course, is true. They all came came before Darwin, didn't they? Uh, you know, Paul Thayer, yes, but they all came before Darwin. Um, Thomas Paine, whom I admire immensely, was a deist also. In fact, he actually had some nasty things to say about full-blown atheists. But quite clearly, had he lived a little bit longer, he would not have been a deist. He would have been an evolutionist. The thing is, until evolution with natural selection was understood, the question of why are we the way we are, how did we come into existence, was a bottomless mystery. And it was only with the discovery of the principle of natural selection, simultaneously by Wallace and Darwin, by the way, that we then had an answer to that question. And of course, the people that are mentioned, for physicists, and they really were not dealing with this question directly. So we can forgive them for being deists. But Einstein would totally disagree with you. He says there's overwhelming evidence for a supreme being. Oh, he did not. Einstein was quite eloquent about the perils of believing in a personal God. This is in his essays Thoughts out of my later years. Older years, later years. Yeah, out of my later years. Okay, your response? No. Next question. Mr. Prager, it appears that you believe that God spoke directly to Moses on Mount Sinai. Can you give us the criteria by which you would determine if your Jewish God was speaking to Moses, but was he or was he not speaking to Joseph Smith when he created his golden tablets in the Book of Mormon? Just a criteria, how would you create, how would you discriminate between those two?

Well, number one, if God did not speak to Moses in Sinai, then there's no Christianity, there's no Islam, and there's no Mormonism. So, so This is a— this is pivotal from the Jewish perspective, and that's the one you've asked me to speak on. I utterly respect any good person, including good atheists, so certainly I respect good theists. That there are people who believe that Joseph Smith communed in some way with God is a non-issue to me, because I measure people by their behavior, not by their theology or not. A good atheist is terrific in my book, a good Mormon, but I have no— there's no reason for me to add to the beliefs that have been seminal to Western history, such as the revelation of the Ten Commandments. I don't think the Ten Commandments came out of Moses' head. I don't believe that monotheism came out of Moses' head. I don't believe that the entire moral framework that changed history came out of Moses' head. If you do, you do. I don't. I think that the cut, the change that took place with the advent of the Torah was so great, the break was so awesome. You went from the Egyptian veneration of dead and death, the pyramids are tombs, the Bible was the book of the dead, and you went to the opposite, entirely opposite view that life needs to be celebrated, that every human is precious. This break with everything heretofore believed was so monumental that I ascribe it to a divine intervention. That's it. That is my argument. That this has so changed history that 3,000 years 4,000 years of Jews have believed it and led, in many instances, very ennobled lives because of it. These are very powerful to me. They may not be powerful to you, and I accept that fact. They are very powerful to me and to many others who have given this a lot of thought.

Frank? It's amazing. Can anybody recognize in what Dennis said an answer to the question, how do you know that that God was speaking to Moses but was not speaking, or was or was not speaking, to Joseph Smith. How many of you can tell he answered that? Okay, exactly. You know, we of course can't even tell whether God spoke to Moses, whether Moses was even historical. There's a lot of people now who think that Moses did not exist, any more than Jesus of Nazareth. So the evidence, of course, for Joseph Smith is pretty clear. If you go back and look at the stuff, you can see it's clearly a hoax. But certainly Moses did not have it all in his head. And that's doubly true if Moses never existed. Next question. Mr. Prager, I'm really confused. You said that you can't prove God, and to try to prove God is ridiculous. And yet you can detect him. Is that true?

Yes.

Okay, well then I gather from your particular choice of verbs that you feel that the methodology used by our criminal justice system to determine guilt or innocence, namely one based on scientific method and evidence, is incorrect, and indeed we should go back to supernatural insights to determine who's guilty or not guilty of crime.

How would you make that leap?

I don't— Well, that's what a detective does, isn't it? Isn't that what the nature of the verb is?

Yes, but guilt or innocence of a suspect is provable. God's existence is not. I don't know why this drives you crazy. Well, excuse me, I do know why it drives some of you crazy, because you really do believe that if it is not in the world of matter, it cannot exist. That's where we differ, and that is important that you understand that. I think you're limiting your understanding of reality. You think I'm superstitious, fine. But let's be clear that you're not— you're rephrasing the problem only shows me how you are— you don't encounter even this often enough that there may be realities that are not material. This is scientism. This is not science. This is the worship of science. This is not the use of science.

I am—

my brother is a professor of medicine at Columbia University.

We are—

and in fact an Orthodox Jew. I am a religious Jew but not Orthodox. And he loves science. It's his life. But he doesn't believe that it is all that there is.

You do.

I think you're impoverished. That doesn't mean you're bad. It doesn't mean I have contempt for you. For you? I think you're impoverished. I think you're tone deaf to a reality that I hear. You think I hear Joseph Smithian, and I'm not picking on Joseph Smith, uh, you were, so I'm using that. You think I am a hoax. Fine. I think you're impoverished. So we now know the difference. Clarity is a virtue.

Well, um, Dennis uses the word scientism, and he when he accuses us of worshiping science. I've never worshiped anything since I became an atheist. I didn't find this— apparently this is the word that people use when they can't defend themselves against science. For those of us who require scientific rigor in our reasoning and our daily activities, this is scientism. Well, I'm sorry, if this is scientism, I'm proud of it, but I don't see any need for that word.

The reduction of human goodness to oxytocin levels is pathetic.

Well, it is true though. And all of these beliefs, all of these things that you claim exist in a non-material realm, they also exist in a very material realm, namely the neurons and glial cells in your brain. This is where Haydn resides. This is where the Ninth Symphony resides. This is where the beauty of the sunset resides. It's all in the chemistry of our physical brains.

Well said.

Next question. Dr. Prager, Leviticus 25:44-46 basically says that Hebrews can take slaves from the heathen that live among them, that sojourn among them, and you can basically use them as slaves forever and will them to your children as an inheritance forever. They're your slaves forever. Now think about 7 years and get to go free in Jubilee. Why would I, as an African-American, man who's a descendant of slaves, because basically chattel slavery in the United States was just like that, why would I support or believe in your God?

Well, for one thing, for one thing, as I said, this is just historical fact. It was in fact religious Christians. I'm not even claiming Jews were. Jews were too small a part of the American population in the middle of the 19th century. It was in were in fact religious Christians who led the abolitionist battle both in the United States and in Great Britain. They obviously read these scriptures to understand that God believes that all men are created to be free. And without that God, there is no reason why might doesn't make right. This God said might does not make right. There is a right that transcends physical ability. Also, even for that heathen slave, if he ran away, you could not not return him. This ensured a certain level of humane behavior or you lost, you lost your investment. They ran away and you could not return them. It was like a divine sanctioning of the Underground Railroad.

And that was only for Hebrew slaves.

No, that wasn't. The Hebrews— al tafsir eved lachonav— do not return a slave to his to his master, and it did not stipulate that anybody did not say Hebrew slave, slave period.

Again, you know, it may very well be— I don't have the verses myself right in front of me— that any kind of slave is to be freed after 7 years, or runaway is to be free, or not returned, I should say. But something that I want to look into in Israel Shahar's Shahak again. He's written several books, and one of them he deals with the role of Jews in the slave trade. And I have not had time to look these up, but those of you who are interested may want to see what Israel Shahak has to say about the substantial family role of Jews as slave traders of African slaves. So this is something I want to—

Okay, folks, Israel Shahak is a self-hating Jew like Norman Finkelstein, they exist, they're often children of Holocaust survivors. The Holocaust did some very sad things to many Jews. But he was himself a Holocaust survivor. Yes, that's right. And believe me, one doesn't leave Auschwitz or whatever camp he was in, he was in a camp, quite intact. And as Blacks have suffered, we know there is self-hate that deeply persecuted groups have. It's anti-Semitic, it is an anti-Semitic Bible. And I very rarely use that term to say that the Jews had any disproportionate role in the slave trade.

So you think that his self-hate is why he is saying that the Jews had a significant role?

There is no doubt in my mind that is a lie. It is a lie. Of course there were Jews, there were everybody, there were groups, there were individuals of every group in the slave trade. Jews, however, were in no way disproportionately involved.

Okay, we'll just have to look it up. Okay, next question.

Mr. Prager, we as atheists see that love, cooperation, even our morality have come out of our evolution, and without those we could not have survived as a species.

You maintain that instead love and morality have come from your God.

So my question to you is, if your God told you that rape, murder, and theft were the moral things to do, would you do them? No, I wouldn't, but if you were asking me the question when I was in 4th grade that used to ask me, they would say, Dennis, can God do anything? I said, yeah. And then I fell into the trap. Okay, could God make a rock so heavy he can't lift it? This isn't playing with words. The God who commands that you love your neighbor as yourself cannot then self-contradict and demand rape. So it's It's inconceivable. I would know that I was hearing voices.

Okay, I wonder how he knows that he's not hearing voices otherwise. Well, you know, this whole thing, can God build a wall so sturdy that he cannot tear it down, this is what made me an atheist finally, actually, that very question, an all-night bull session in the dorm room. Of course, I had already studied symbolic logic and philosophy by that time, and so I realized in the flesh that this is a very, very important question. It shows that an infinite being is a contradiction in terms. It is what philosophers call an incoherence. If God is infinite, he's everywhere. God is in the devil, and God is in me saying he doesn't exist. Next. Next. Yes, can you hear me? Yes, get right up into that microphone. Oh, okay. Mr. Prager, I very much enjoyed listening to you today. You're an eloquent speaker and you have a very fine intellect. I do disagree with you, but I'm going to ask a question, but I need to state an assumption first. If my assumption is incorrect, Mr. Prager, I'm sure you'll correct me. It's my assumption about you that there is much— very many things in this universe, much— that you would state are facts, and you would only state them as facts because they've been demonstrated scientifically. And you may have not conducted the science yourself, but you have trust in peer-reviewed view in scientific literature. There's probably— is that a fair assumption?

Very fair.

Yet there are other things that you would suggest, or I think I've heard you say today, that transcend science, are not provable, nonetheless are true, factual, and exist.

You said factual. I said exist.

Exist.

Factual implies empirically verifiable.

Okay, very good. How do you go about distinguishing between the two?

When— well, you do it yourself. We all do it. I'll give you an example based on something that Frank said earlier, and that was the, you know, whether you say Haydn's better than Mozart or Mozart's better than Haydn is purely subjective. Okay, how about this though?

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Um, is Mozart better than belching?

If somebody decided to make a tune belching, sir, I could sacrifice to existence, not preference. What I was asking is how do you distinguish between what requires scientific ground—

I'm answering. I'm saying to you that we all make such distinctions where something is not empirically verifiable and yet we would state, unless you can't. Now, can one state that Mozart is better than Happy Birthday? Happy birthday to you. You, is that as good as Mozart's Don Giovanni? No, it isn't. Now, is that a fact? No, it's not a fact. Is it verifiable empirically? No, it's not. But if you are so stymied that you can only make factual scientific statements, then you can't say that Mozart is better, that Don Giovanni is on a higher level than Happy Birthday. And so, and that, by the way, is what has happened in in our secular age, where you have fecal matter and menstrual blood in art galleries parading as art, because everything has become subjective. There is no artistic truth. There is no artistic excellence. Everything is a matter of opinion. Everything is subjective, and we are paying a terrible price.

Okay. Again, I shouldn't be surprised, but once again Dennis Prager, you've done it again. He was asked the question, how do you distinguish truth and falsehood between statements of existence and not statements of preference? And that was repeated, and yet Dennis has not told us what he does to determine statements of existence. We still have no clue what he means when he says God exists or anything else exists for that matter. We've discussed preference quite a bit, and that hasn't been very enlightening either. But once again, he's evaded the question. Okay, we have 10 minutes of question and answers left, and then there will be 5 minutes of closing statements for each participant. Question? Is it Dr. Or is it Mr.?

I never go by doctor. I have an honorary doctorate. I don't consider that to be doctor, but you can call me anything more or less that you like. But I think of myself as a Mr.

And I'm having a hearing problem this weekend, so I might have misheard you, but it sounded like you claimed that all material things have or had a beginning and the non-material things —do not necessarily have to have a beginning, therefore your God did not have to have a beginning.

That's right. You heard me right, despite your hearing problem.

Okay, my question then is, why should we assume that because you say your God always existed and never had a cause, that we can't say, well, if you can't accept the fact that the universe came into existence, why should we accept that your God didn't have to have a creator too?

Well, I'll tell you because because there are different criteria for measuring their existence. We do know that nothing comes from nothing. We do? Yes. Because— yes, we do. And so, but if you believe something came from nothing, which you have to believe, then that leap— that's— you have made a leap that something came from nothing on its own, and you find that to be intellectually satisfactory? I don't. And so we have— we part ways here. You— and that's what I meant by my first statements. I acknowledge the problems that I have, and every religious person I do. But you don't acknowledge any issues because perhaps you fear that the slightest amount of self-doubt, the entire edifice you've erected will come crumbling. But your atheism should be stronger than that. And the fact is that you have this issue too. The idea that everything came from nothing is a leap of faith. A leap of faith. You have made a leap of faith.

Folks, I've been on the receiving end of a debate before, and it is very, very difficult. What Mr. Prager is doing is very difficult. Please, no heckling whatsoever. Okay. I regret that Dennis was not here yesterday for Lawrence Krauss's lecture because his claim that something cannot come from nothing, despite that being a colloquial equivalent of the first law of thermodynamics, It is now, of course, not at all the case, and you heard Dr. Krauss yesterday talk about virtual particles, what I've always called vacuum fluctuations. Right this minute in Dennis's brain and my brain, particles are popping in and out of existence in microsecond periods of time, and the idea is growing again and on the large scale it's not even testable, but people are thinking maybe now it can be testable, that universes, plural, pop in and pop out of existence as just enormous vacuum fluctuations completely analogous to these tiny virtual particles which have been detected and can be detected, and Krauss did a marvelous job yesterday. I was so excited in describing how those particles are detected. So this is not wrong. The question is absolutely correct, and yes indeed, things do come from nothing. Next. Dennis Prager, the Jesus Seminar concludes Mithraism is a precursor religion to Christianity. Would you agree Mithraism, the navigational religion from which we get the zodiac, accounts at least partially for the linearity of monotheistic Christianity?

This— I know this won't satisfy you. I do not make assessments of other religions. I make assessments of other religionists. I've been asked since 1990 since 9/11 if Islam is a violent religion, and I have answered since 9/11, I assess practitioners, not their religions. Where Christianity came from is not my business. My business is, are Christians going to be good people? Are Muslims going to be good? Are Jews going to be good? My preoccupation is goodness, not theological veracity. So I am agnostic on that issue because it doesn't concern me. I want to know, is a person moved— if you are moved by your atheism to be kinder, more just, honor your parents— let me say something about the honor of parents in a moment— but if you are, then I really honor your atheism. I mean, I'm not what you may have expected when you have somebody who defends God's existence. I deeply believe in this God, but ironically, this God has told me that what most matters is good behavior. So if an atheist is a good person, I embrace you. I don't think, though, that in the long run, without a God basis for goodness, goodness will prevail. I think it's more like cut flowers ethics. Just as cut flowers, cut from their soil, look like they're going to live, when they're removed from their soil, over time they will wither and die. And I think that ethics will wither and die over time when cut from the religious soil that in the Western world nourished them. That is my worry. But my preoccupation is goodness, not convincing people of my theology. And so that's what matters to me about Christians. Christians in America have made a spectacular country. I am very blessed as a Jew to live in a country that such good Christians made. So I have I have no interest in deciding whether or not there is truth to their claims. It is of no interest to me, frankly. Only of interest to me is what did they produce? And I apply that consistently, including you. I want to give you one example. Can I, or should I save it for my final words? I don't care.

Why don't you go ahead? Go ahead, take another minute. No response.

I want to tell you, I want to give you an example. An example of where in real life, not in fascinating seminars on molecular development and oxytocin levels, where the rubber hits the road is in real life. So I'd like to propose to you the following. I've done a radio show for 25 years, and an issue that I learned through my show was the increasing existence of adults who do not speak to their parents. Adult children who have decided not to speak to their mother and/or father. As a parent, I cannot imagine a greater nightmare. It's in some ways more painful than the actual death of a child, where a child has decided to die vis-à-vis the parents even while living. So I have a question, and I don't know the answer, but it is a legit question. Do adults who are angry at their parents and believe in the Ten Commandments coming from God, where they say— where it says, "Honor your father and mother," will that adult be as likely not to talk to a parent as the secular adult equally angry at a parent who does not believe that God said, "Honor your father and mother"? I ask the question because in my gut I believe that those who believe in the Ten Commandments as a divine commandment in a divine document are more likely to talk to a parent they're angry at than the adult child who does not believe in the Ten Commandments coming from God. I may be wrong, but if I am right, it adds very powerful argument that having God behind goodness is a better insurer of the survival of goodness.

I also must add my voice to this, that I appreciate Dennis far more than I expected I would be able to, and I think he has been quite an eloquent spokesman for a number of points. Yeah, two things. This was kind of a ramble again, but The questioner actually asked something about Mithraism, and all I want to say about that is that I think the 12 tribes of Israel are zodiacal figures, actually, and the sun god went through the 12 signs of the zodiac in the course of the year. Apparently, 12 tribes were invented in Babylon where the Jews learned astrology, and the 12 tribes of Israel then, of course, were reflected in the 12 disciples, 12 apostles, who carried this astrological imagery still further. But none of them apparently had any real existence. There may have been a few actual tribes of Israel, but certainly the 12 as 12, probably not. As far as belief in the Ten Commandments and honor your father and your mother, we mustn't lose sight of the fact that at least half of the Ten Commandments have nothing to do with morality. They are purely ritual things that have no practical significance. Significant section. And so the people who you ask and say, do you believe in the Ten Commandments, or do you follow the Ten Commandments, they may say yes, they do. But again, in their daily lives, the Ten Commandments might as well not exist, because they act and react from moment to moment the same way we all do, not the Ten Commandments. It's the same social pressures, the same evolution ordinary biases that cause us to react in certain ways given certain stimulus, pressure, and so on. So the Ten Commandments isn't going to make any difference with honoring your father in his old age. Okay, it is 10 minutes to 12. We're going to have two more questions and then we're going to have closing statements. I know we knew it was happening. Well, I hope I get it.

My name is Frank Roper, I'm from Southern California.

You seem to be one that likes to toy with semantics, so I would like to do the same thing with you.

I can't stand playing with semantics.

I like to be precise. Let me make my question very clear. You made the statement earlier, and this has come up before with atheists, and for me it's a very insulting and demeaning thing, is that you said He said that atheists have to be just as responsible for our wars as the religious do for their wars. Now I can think of lots of wars where religionists have been fighting with each other to force their ideology, their philosophies, their ideas on the opposing side. Just because there is a leader of a war that may be an atheist because he does not believe in gods does not make it an atheist war. And I would like you to name for me one war where the side that was an atheist, an atheist leader, forced his people, his troops, the people that were behind him, to learn the ideology— which there is no ideology— of atheism. Okay, give up their religion and have no God. Just name me one war.

Stalin. Stalin. I happen to know Russian as I know Hebrew, and that "uchniatheism," scientific atheism, was law from 1927 until the end of the Gorbachev era. It was imposed upon people. You were persecuted if you started a church or a synagogue. You were sent to Gulag. And that is exactly what he did. He massacred vast numbers of Orthodox priests, priests. Mao did the exact same thing with his scientific atheism in the tens of millions. That you don't know this is, with all respect, and I don't expect everybody to know it, but it's your ignorance, not my semantics.

Dennis, I don't think semantics— this is really, really preposterous. I'm sorry.

The question was, was war by no means a good thing? Atrocities in the Soviet Union were committed in the name of atheistic communism? No, no, no, no, no. If you want to—

I have a textbook on Maoist and, uh, I read it 30 years ago. But the point is, atheism was not the motivating force in the war. Thank you. Absolutely not. It was accidental that the people that waged of the war were atheists. And they did indeed teach atheism because, of course, they had to liberate the people from the oppressive Orthodox Church, which had been in cahoots with the tsar. So the only way they could do that was to try to teach atheism or atheistic principles or knowledge of atheism. Now, we were fortunate in the colonies. That the church was very weak and there was no particular state church all over the colonies. So we didn't have to oppress religion the way it was necessary in the Soviet Union. We were very, very fortunate. Okay. And question. Thank you for allowing me to speak. This question is for Mr. Mr. Sandler, actually, I thought I heard you say, and correct me if I'm wrong, that you might— that it's not that you deny God, but that you would like to see a proof of his existence. In other words, demonstrate that God exists. And so my question is, doesn't that move you closer to Gnosticism than it does atheism, which in my understanding categorically states there is no God and will not That's it, that's the end of the argument. Now, I'm not sure you said Gnosticism or Agnosticism. I think it's— I'm sorry, Agnosticism. The belief that it's not that you deny God, but you just don't know, you're skeptical. Okay, that's Agnosticism. That's a term coined by Thomas Henry Huxley. Agnostics are atheists also. An atheist is someone who does not have a God belief. An agnostic historically was a person who said, well, maybe there's a God, maybe there isn't, I can't tell. But when he says that, it's at the same time saying he does not at that moment have a God belief. Therefore, agnostics are atheists. Okay, we have one last question. Yes? I'm a Christian. I also, I listen to Dennis a lot. I love the man. Unfortunately, you don't have a radio program. I've also started to listen to 950 and Atheist Hour on Sunday morning. So I'm, I call myself a free thinker. My question is, and I used to be more of an agnostic than an atheist. I didn't know if there was really a God, but I basically had an experience anyway. And I believe that the God of Judaism is similar to my God in Christ. I don't, I didn't go to church today because I don't believe in churchianity. I totally believe in the separation of churchianity and state. It's a whole different discussion. But my question is, we keep talking about the brain as something material, which it is, but what is mind? The mind is an information processing system, and the problem is I don't think it can discern information from disinformation or lies. The task of disinformation is chaos and warfare. The test of true information is information. Two words. Organization. I maintain the value of human manifestation. We have a question.

Information age or the kingdom of God.

Sir, would you respond please? What was the question? I heard the statement but I didn't hear the question. No, I'm asking you what is mind? Is it just a chemical process or is it an information processing system? And how do you discern information or truth versus disinformation or lies. And the ultimate manifestation of disinformation would be warfare. The ultimate manifestation of information would be the information tours organization, which is the human body. Okay. Mind, of course, grammatically is a noun, and we tend to think of nouns as being things—table, floor, whatever you think. Mind, however, in reality should be thought of as a verb. Mind is a process. It's two minds. And the brain, of course, is the computer, if you will, in which this process takes place. The brain is, of course, the human brain is a product of long online evolution, and it is designed in connection with various senses, to be able to perceive stimuli and to process them in order to determine whether something is really there or really not there. Of course, it is a fallible system, and so we have problems sometimes— some people have a problem with determining whether dreams are reality or not. And we see the failure of the brain in the Bible, where again and again people People have things revealed to them in dreams. For all we know, the whole Bible may be the result of bad dreams. That makes sense, doesn't it, actually? So we don't know always whether something is true or false. We have to depend upon additional information.

It's what's surreal and what's real. I beg your pardon?

It's what's surreal and what's real. Do you have a response?

No, I'm ready for the final.

Okay, we're going to go to the final statements. Each person has 5 minutes to complete a final statement, and then we'll close this thing off. Go ahead. You want to stand up?

Okay, I want to reiterate my thank you to you for having me. I think I I'm very happy I came, by the way.

I think it was worth it.

I think it may have taken some of you aback that I really, really am more preoccupied with goodness than with spreading faith, as it were. I want to spread faith because I think that goodness won't survive the death of God for long, but I am most preoccupied and most concerned— I'd much rather have and be in the presence of a kind atheist than an unkind religious person. I'm not alone in that, by the way. This is not self-aggrandizing. But having said that, I do want to bring to your attention challenges that you might want to raise among yourselves. You don't have to answer me. I know Frank will, but it doesn't matter to me. It matters whether you take this seriously, what I'm about to offer, not to win or lose, but to ask you sincere questions. See, if this were the 18th century, I would be very, very compelled to a secular enlightenment view of life. Having seen the results of secularism, which is a mixed bag— obviously there are certain good things like secular government— I don't have faith in a secular future. And let me give you a couple— I gave you the question whether or not people believe in all of the Ten Commandments. I would still like to ask that question. Every religious person I know who has had had problems with his parents. I don't know of any example of their cutting off ties to the parent. Every case on radio and every case in my personal life where I have seen this, it has been a secular individual who cut off. Because when you believe, whatever your chemical balances in your mind or brain are, when you believe God demands you treat your parents with honor, that can overcome a whole host of chemical details. That's a big deal, and God is more powerful than chemicals. That's exactly why I believe in God and believe in the importance of God. And I look at the university. University is the secular temple. It's essentially a godless universe. There's more drivel and nonsense at the university than there is in the hardest of hardhat unions. It is the stupidest place in America, the university, with all of its knowledge. The only people who believed that men and women were basically the same were PhDs. You had to go to graduate school to believe something that imbecilic. And that is a product, that is a product about the staggering amount of nonsense that comes from a secular world. There's plenty of nonsense in the religious world, but it's mostly about religion. Most of the nonsense that comes about society comes from the secular world, and the university is my classic example. I went to an Ivy League university. Professors taught me every day Men and women are basically the same. Give a boy dolls, give a girl trucks, and you'll see she'll love trucks and he'll love dolls. These were fools. Well-educated secular idiots. They taught me every day that America and the Soviet Union were equally responsible for the Cold War. These were moral idiots that I studied under. All secular. There is a statement in Psalms: wisdom begins with reverence of God. I said it when I was a kid in Jewish school. It meant nothing to me. When I was at Columbia, I realized how true it was. The death of God led to the death of wisdom. It has led to the death of the arts. The secular 20th century has largely produced crap in music, and crap in the arts. Yes, there were a handful of exceptions, but go to your local gallery today and see the garbage out there. The meaningless, utter meaningless stuff that sells for millions of dollars, beginning with Jackson Pollock dripping paint from a ladder onto a canvas now sells for $10 million. There are consequences to secularism, just as there are consequences consequences to religiosity. As I said earlier, no one has a monopoly on evil, but the monopoly on foolishness is moving toward the secular world, as I saw in my universities. So please don't think that once you've gotten rid of Zeus and Yahweh, you are free and the human oxytocin spirit will take over and make a good world. It didn't, and it won't.

Thank you for having me. Well, again, I want to thank Dennis. We've certainly, even though I did win the debate, he's done a heroic job. Again, I'm going to be a little bit disorganized, but hopefully I'll get everything in that I want to say. First of all, I do have to say that over again, since Dennis has not been able to define the Jewish God, we cannot know whether he exists or not. I'm using he, but anyway, whether it exists. Exist or not. In any case, the Jewish God or gods are just one or a couple of perhaps millions of gods that have evolved and have been created by men and women. Most gods apparently are created by men, although I'm mindful of Mary Baker Eddy and Ellen G. White for Seventh-day Adventism, but most gods that I'm aware of anyway seem to have been invented by men. But anyway, it's just one of a passing phantasmagoria of gods and goddesses and other divine things, and I hope you noticed that he never succeeded in distinguishing between gods and angels and devils and demons and tooth fairies. And so we really don't know where his God sorts out on this spectrum of supernatural beings. In David Eller's book, we read that there's a chapter on making gods. Gods are being manufactured all the time. Every year or so another god is invented. And I say that in the sense that these gods are announced to the world with fairly definite characteristics and qualities. But you know, well maybe you don't know, how many of you were reared in a religion? Okay, that's pretty much what I would have thought. There aren't that many second or third generation atheists. Atheist. When you were still a believer, do you think that the God you believed in was the same one exactly as the God of the person sitting next to you? Probably not. And you know, all we can say is probably not. We have no way of knowing, do we, whether you were worshiping the same God or different gods And again, the reason we don't know is you have no way of testing it. None of you, when you were believers, and that included me when I was a devout Lutheran, could know. We couldn't define the God that we thought we believed in. And so we had a bunch of reflexes that made us appear to be going through the rituals and the observances of our particular religion, We did the motions the same way as other people in the church, but whether we were worshiping the same God or not, we had no way of knowing. I think now we do have to end this by saying, since we cannot detect these gods, we have no way of knowing whether the Bible or any other holy book is indeed the product of information coming from a supernatural natural source. In fact, all the evidence that we can find shows that all Bibles are man-made, or a few woman-made ones, but most of them are man-made. And since all Bibles are human products, it is more likely that the information, the rules and regulation in those Bibles, in those holy books are indeed human creations also. And because there are certain universalities in these different holy books, it is more reasonable to suppose that these rules and regulations that are virtually universal are the product of evolution of a particular social species, that these are the rules rules and regulations that allow a species, a social species, I want to emphasize social species, to come together to compete with other species and with other populations and to evolve into the debate that we've had here today. And when people say, well, you evolutionists are saying humans are just animals, Well, we are animals, but I think the course of the debate today, the civility of this debate, the urbanity of this debate, and at least this debater, shows that being just an animal is not in any way an insult. Thank you.

This has been Timeless Wisdom with Dennis Prager. Visit DennisPrager.com for thousands of hours of Dennis's lectures, courses, and classic radio programs, and to purchase Dennis Prager's Rational Bibles.