Reader Mizrob sent this 13-minute video in which philosopher Peter Singer dismisses the notion of the Christian god simply by showing that “the world around us” doesn’t comport with such a God. (His debate opponent is a mustachioed Dinesh D’Souza.) The most obvious stumbling block to such a god is the suffering in the world, but Singer dismisses the typical Christian response to suffering: it’s an inevitable result of god-given free will.
Many of us know these arguments and counterarguments, but it’s still salubrious to hear a smart person address them. The issue of suffering, both produced by natural disasters and in non-“fallen” animals, is the Achilles Heel of any religion that espouses a beneficent God.
Finally, he takes up the Biblical assertion that Jesus would return during the lifetime of those who heard him preach. Even if you’re a literalist about just the New Testament, this is a problem.
If you have some spare time on your hands, here’s a different debate, two hours long, between D’Souza and Singer, on the topic “Can there be morality without God?“
Of course God exists. Each believer has their own God who lives between their ears. The basis for belief in God is believers think they are special and will not really die. We need to grow up and accept the finality of death. End the Delusion
There is a whole lot of superstition and ignorance in the world and where ever you find it, religion will be close by. So close that often there is nothing between the religion and the ignorance.
As a Norwegian I find that the constant debates about god, jesus and the basis for morality which we see in countries like the US quite bisarre.
As has been shown again and again, there’s far less violence, crime and other things which can be considered “bad morale” in countries where non-belief are common
In Norway, where I live, here’s been a lot of debate the last years about the rise of violence in some schools in Norway.
Nothing compared to the US, of course (we have strict gun laws), but nevertheless, the trend is worrying. Who are the people responsible for this increase of violence? Religious people mostly, belonging to “the religion of peace” (guess which religion that is)
It’s sad really, I have lots of muslim friends, and some of my pupils are muslims and they are decent and kind people.
But it’s a fact that people responsible for the increased crime in Norway (not to talk about Sweden which is far worse) are god fearing people. And it not all muslims either, there’s a lot of Christians among these criminals. This is not to say that believing in god or allah or (pick your god here) makes you a morally corrupt person ( my mother is a decent Pentecostal) but at least it shows that there can be god morale among people hostile or indifferent to religion, like most people now are in Scandinavia
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Since D’Souza is nominally Roman Catholic (although his views are more in line with Evangelical Protestantism), he should be aware that Catholics believe Christianity necessites a modification and shift in priority of the morals of pagan Greece and Rome, but that the latter still has a lot going for it.
Catholics hold that 1) God grounds our concept of goodness and that 2) God imparts the ability to do good through grace, but that frequently non-believers actually DO get it right.
The high regard of Catholic theologians for Aristotle and Cicero (the latter not especially theistic) would imply that the answer to “Can there be morality without God?” is “up to a point, yes”.
But as I say, DD often thinks more like an evangelical than a Catholic.
D’Souza is occasionally a clever (though shallow IMO) presenter of philosophical arguments, but as an ethical thinker I find him contemptible.
I said this at least twice before here at WEIT, but I still think that just about the weirdest thing Christopher Hitchens ever said was that Dinesh D’Souza was one of his best debaters.
” … the weirdest thing Christopher Hitchens ever said was that Dinesh D’Souza was one of his best debaters.”
That would be true if the definition of “best” was saying something over and over and louder and louder.
As someone from a Catholic family, I can tell you that Catholics are generally a pretty open minded bunch. They accept Evolution. They accept scientific facts. And yet they do it while still maintaining traditionalist beliefs. They are experts at this because they’ve been doing it for a couple thousand years. Though I am an atheist, I can appreciate the Catholic viewpoint on a lot of things.
Without first a demonstration of ‘duality’ and how this state could influence physical existence then there is no need to consider any of religions other claims.
rz
Difference infers two and autonomy.
Love Singer. Dinesh is insufferable. His elocution drips with derision and sanctimoniousness.
Thought experiment:
*If* there is a god, who has a spare thunderbolt, which mortal would he smite (Singer or D’Souza), and why?
The Judeo-Christian God would definitely smite down Singer for his plethora of unpardonable sins, not the least of which is his advocacy of rights for soulless animals, and elevate D’Souza to heaven as the court philosopher.
There is not one good reason for their god to have created carnivores. If there were no carnivores, there would be no predators and no prey. If you have ever seen an animal being eaten while it is still alive, you will realize that any god that would create things that way is one sick fuck.
Agreed but please leave out the curses as this is a family friendly site.
No, no! It’s not sadistic, agonizing gore! It’s drama! The wonderful dramatic drama of natural selection. Of course an aesthete like god would create in this manner! Or so says John Haught.
What pushed me toward atheism was a medical book I came across when I was around 20. It was filled with page after page of photos of babies with hideous deformities and people with horrible diseases. Seeing all these photos in one place shook my faith and it never recovered; I realized that if God existed, then he devoted a lot of thought toward coming up with tortures to inflict on people. In other words, He was a sadist and could not be good, if “good” has any meaning [if you say “Whatever God does is automatically good” then it is pointless to praise him for being good]. I did not become an atheist right then, but I decided that God exists, but he isn’t good [it doesn’t follow that just because God is powerful that he must be good–the Greek gods, for example, were no better morally than humans, committing rape, murder and so on]. It was a few years before the last embers of faith died and I accepted atheism.
Peter Singer sums it up quite nicely. and so polite, nearly deferent.
As much as I like him, he cant replace the Hitch, but then, he’s not pretending to. (I’ve just been watching some Hitch, hence my unfair comparison)
Thumbs up for Singer. The less said about Mr D’Souza, the better.
Hmmm, Singer mentioned animals starving etc. One could argue that that’s kinda unavoidable from time to time in a natural ecology. But what he omitted to mention was the number of quite unnecessary and sadistic ways in which animals are killed by other animals. It’s only a very lucky animal that gets killed by a fatal bite to the neck from a lion. Someone on this list a few weeks ago mentioned a couple of monitor lizards feeding on an injured deer – they didn’t kill it, just munched their way up from its hindquarters. Even more telling are parasitic wasps which paralyse caterpillars so their grubs can eat them alive. What possible excuse is there for those? I’m sure the ecosystem wouldn’t suffer at all if they didn’t exist. If one believes G*d created all things, then He created those horrors – what sort of painstakingly sadistic, ingeniously perverse, horrifically twisted mentality does it take to think of that?
cr
Quoth Chuck (letter to J. D. Hooker, 13 July [1856]) :
Makes sense
I have spent years trying to fathom how/why some people believe in the Christian god or any god for that matter.
I suggest that low intelligence/education plays a role as does the cultural milieu but the promise of an after-life seems to magnify self-interest and self importance. It seems that people will believe anything, no matter how irrational, on the promise of ‘eternal life’ – no matter how empty that promise.
I encounter people on a daily basis who know nothing about the world in which we live,who have lived complacent, conformist, boring lives and yet they KNOW they are going to heaven because they believe in god/Jesus, etc. UGH!
Plus they give hundreds/ thousands to their church. You only have to glance at the Swaggart crime family. There’s even a split screen that shows how much they are receiving while the preaching is going on.
They would have millions and it’s a scam. A con aimed at the vulnerable, weak, sick and foolish that gives them the promise of salvation while asking for donations and selling cds, dvds, all sorts of merchandise. The Baker’s got busted for it so it’s amazing the Swaggarts are still going strong. With their indoctrinated off spring to further the cause when Jimmy meets his maker.
Why not send your money to a fund that does good works like Animal Rescue, Animal hospitals, children’s charities or disease research?
The Swaggarts should go to hell ….just wish sometimes there was such a place. Oh and a quick note on that….why would going to hell be a punishment for evil people? Wouldn’t Satan (another thing god can’t defeat) be happy to have his doers of bad deeds in hell with him?
Yeah the scammers who put the stories in the bible really didn’t think it through…..and these were the intelligent ones of the era.
I’ve never heard the argument for instincts as a way that an omniscient god could have solved the evil/free will problem. The good god could have installed all with instincts against committing evil acts. This would be no more a violation of our free will than it is when one is sickened by the thought of having sex with their child or by the idea of eating feces.
I have to run and didn’t hear Singer’s argument, but the “sin is an inevitable result of free will” is so easy to dispose of. If true, we’d either be sinning in heaven or have no free will in heaven, both of which are unpleasant conclusions for Christians. Also, does God have free will, and does God sin?
I’m not an especially smart person, but I wonder how arguments like that survive in such unsophisticated forms for so long… Ultimately they’d have to admit that God could have given us free will without a sin impulse and then the question is “why didn’t he?” Of course, “God works in mysterious ways”…
You guys should really check out Neil Carter’s brilliant blog:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godlessindixie/
He writes so many engaging, well-crafted articles that deconstruct Christianity in a really easy to understand and scholarly manner.
Jesus wasn’t mistaken about the Second Coming. He said the Son of Man was going to come with an army and encircle Jerusalem and lay it low. He stands in the temple complex and says it is all going to be taken down. About 40 years after this ostensible prophecy, Titus Flavius arrives and does just that. The temple was taken down; only a part of one wall remains today. That seems like a pretty accurate prophecy to me, and an important lesson about what Christianity is really all about. Especially, it is about supplanting messianic Judaism and its associated Jewish rebellion with a docile belief system that would render unto Caesar that which was Caesar’s. And there was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth, as thousands were crucified.
Jesus wasn’t the son of God as there is no proof of God’s existence and many biblical stories have been proven wrong or nonsensical. Jesus was defying the rabbis and gathering a following. It was put about by those who were close to him that he performed miracles. He brought back the dead, he made bread from stone, he even gave sight vs K to a blind man. Makes me wonder though why he didn’t bring sight back to every blind person?
People were easily duped back then and believed in miracles. When the word was put out Jesus had performed miracles the average Joe believed it.
Jesus wasn’t actually heard of until 50 years after his crucifixion. And nothing was written about his childhood, or early life. His birth date wasn’t December 25….there’s no account of that.
But you say he was spot on about the second coming. That’s supposed to happen when Jesus returns isn’t it? And the good are taken to heaven and the rest are destroyed.
People can prophecies appear to have been predicted before the event when it wasn’t. Moses supposedly wrote in Genesis. He wrote about camel trains and bread, both of which hadn’t been invented for 60 years after Moses death. So Moses was talking about things that would happen when he was dead. How? They weren’t prophecies. His reference to these things was in his lifetime.
The end of the earth has been prophesied quite a few times by different Christian religions. Never came to be.
Revelations is like having an acid trip. Its like something out of The Hobbit.
Intelligent people believe in solid fact and prophecies and oral stories are made out of fantasy and a way to convince weak minded followers.
Please use only ONE name when commenting.
There’s massive reasons in the Christian Bible to know it was put together to gain power by the church leaders over the mostly illiterate, superstitious masses.
Christianity rose its ugly head after thousands of years of people living on earth with multi gods. The population didn’t begin with Adam and Eve. If so how do you account for the Babylonian civilization, the Sumerians, the Persians, Romans, Greeks etc etc. These civilization had their own gods and never fought each other about who’s was better. In fact they often borrowed stories from each other. The Christian stories have stolen heavily from former gods stories. Look at the Egyptian god Horus who lived 1500 years before Jesus.. Jesus life is a mirror image of Horus’s. The halo was taken from Ra the sun god. Praying, robes, incense, all were taken from pagan religions. Even the word amen.
25 December is never mentioned in the bible as Jesus birth date. It was decided that day would be Jesus birthday to phase out the pagan celebration of Saturnalia.
It’s obvious and drives me crazy this alone has a pretty good argument against the Christian Bible.
Then you gave the fact that there are 140,000 contradictions, 20,000 historical mistakes and absolute rubbish in it. It has been edited, reedited and destroyed and things taken out, things put in.
Early Christians fought among themselves killing each other over things in the bible. There was even two pope’s at one stage for each faction.
Heresy was put in place to stop people from disbelieving or asking questions. Priests taught it’s a sin to seek wisdom to keep the masses dumbed down. Services were kept in Latin for a reason.
And this free will nonsense. God kept killing his creation including new borns and animals for sinning which he created coz he created all. His himself was a child murdering tyrant who killed people for the smallest reasons in the OT. God gave people free will so that’s why there’s sin which is a cop out excuse.
How can a benevolent loving God who forgives if you repent sit back and watch the horror and cruelty that humans have meted out to other humans and the barbaric treatment of animals through the centuries? He was always around in biblical times to meet out punishment and give orders to kill to certain men. He sent angels down to sort humans out. He was very hands on back then. But for he last 2000 and so years god hasn’t been appearing to his children. He’s just gone. That’s sus.
His could have wiped out sin surely instead of killing humans and flooding the earth then killing more humans. What was the point when sin continued?
He’s omnipotent so he could have just got rid of sin. It doesn’t make sense. Like when god wanted the Egyptians to free the Jews from slavery and the pharoah said no. His spent day after day sending locusts, plagues, boils, turning the Nile into blood and killing the first born of every Egyptian family. Wow. Why not just wave your hands and free the Jews yourself, god? Easier. And omnipotent gods can do anything.
In the past couple of centuries people have gotten smarter and the church’s hold on people has gotten weaker. Scientists have worked out by mathematics and geology that the earth couldn’t have been flooded with that much water, that the ark couldn’t have survived an hour in those waters and it had no steerage so that’s a no brainer. Giants, men who lived to 900 and still fathered children, every baby born mentioned in the bible was a boy. Talking donkeys and snakes. Only happened in biblical times.
God works in mysterious ways, you can’t question god, no one can know God’s plans…..the excuses for his allowing more suffering and cruelty in the world are not explanations.
I cant understand why millions still believe. The only “proof” of God is from a book that is nonsense from start to finish. That’s it.
For a story this big the proof of its authenticity should be solid, tangible and plausible.
You are using two names, and you can use only one. Please stick to a single name.
Also, this comment is too long; please read the Roolz.
An inscription found carved into the wall of a concentration camp said “If God does exist he has a lot of explaining to do when I see him”