The debate is now available at
http://www.choosinghats.com/audio/ChrisMichaelDebate.mp3
Please let me know if you have any comments or questions!
Thanks,
Michael
Goodness Over God: The Blog Associated with the Counter-Apologetics Podcast of Ben Wallis and Michael Long
Only 5 mins in and I'm at a loss. "... the ultimate good reason to believe in a Christian God is that God says he exists"
ReplyDeleteYes, that comment really threw me, too. I guess that refers to the personal experience he claims to have had of God's regenerating spirit, or some such. We may have Chris on the podcast soon---I'm hoping next week---and if so then I'll try to remember to ask him about that. I'm worried that Chris might want to take his god-experiences uncritically. A couple of times in the debate with Michael he mentioned that he has no reason to doubt those experiences, and I wonder what he means by that. After all, we're all human and we make mistakes. Shouldn't we ALWAYS be willing to consider the possibility that we're wrong about how to interpret our experiences? That seems to me a fairly uncontroversial idea. Maybe Chris just means that when he does subject his interpretations to scrutiny they hold up. But if that's the case, then that's something we can talk about. I'd be curious how he thinks he can justify attributing his experiences to the divine intervention of God.
ReplyDeleteIn any event, the debate was fantastic, and I really enjoyed it! And I don't usually enjoy formal debates these days (I used to, but I think I've gotten sick of them now...), so the fact that I enjoyed Michael's is really something!
I think Mr. Long was on the way to making a very good point when you pointed out how silly Chris is to consider himself an “infallible god detector”. His world view is already riddled with problems; let alone the issue of the deceiving deity. Anyone holding a world view that allows for conscious magical beings that can create illusions and manipulate the physical laws of the universe at will; could not make sense of anything; since at any moment they could just be under an illusionary condition created by some magical deity. This is a big problem for the theist who is trying to use the problem of induction as some sort of gotcha with non-theists. While they think they have the POI solved they have actually made it worse because in their world view physical laws can be suspended and events can occur at the whim of some magic man in the sky.
ReplyDelete@ JC - that's a point that I've tried to make again and again by showing that an alternative non-Christian monotheistic worldview is just as valid (or invalid) as the Christian worldview, by those terms.
ReplyDelete