A pair of philosophers who couldn't be more different met Friday night at Purdue University to debate the question whether faith in God was reasonable. The combatants were William Lane Craig a Christian philosopher who has written, debated, and lectured extensively on theism and Alex Rosenberg, the philosophy department chairman at Duke and a widely published advocate of atheism.
If you'd like to watch all or part of the debate you can view it here. The introductions begin about four minutes in.
Rosenberg offered, in my opinion, a number of weak arguments and one fairly good one. I think he's right to point to human suffering as counting against the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God, but that argument by itself is not enough to make belief in God unreasonable. His best argument, however, was implicit in his question as to why God didn't create a world in which everyone had free will but always chose to do right. I thought Craig's dismissal of this was premature. Surely that world is a logically possible world and thus one which God could create, so why didn't he?
I thought Rosenberg was disingenuous when he sought to deflect the force of Craig's attack on the views he advocates in his book in which he endorses moral as well as other forms of nihilism. Craig points out that by Rosenberg's own admission atheism produces nihilism. Rosenberg replied - unconvincingly, I thought - that nihilism does not follow from atheism but that both of them follow from science. Thus, Rosenberg argued, if one wishes to embrace science, which all thinking people should, one should be an atheist as well as a nihilist.
I think this view is mistaken. Science does not entail either atheism or nihilism. Science is simply the search for empirical truth. Taken straight, unencumbered by the philosophical presuppositions of some of its practitioners, it has nothing to say about the existence of a God. Atheism, however, certainly does entail nihilism, both moral and epistemological.
Craig, for his part, made a number of arguments which, though they're not proofs that God exists, can rationally be accepted and thus together make belief that there's a God a reasonable epistemic position which was, after all, the topic of the debate.
For what it's worth the auditorium audience voted 1390 to 303 in favor of Craig as the winner. Online viewers voted 734 to 59 for Craig, and the judges voted for Craig 4 to 2. I'm frankly not sure what those two judges who voted for Rosenberg saw that I didn't.
