Kind Courtesy Ms Carol Smith of the Atheist Alliance
Mehul Kamdar
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
- The Riddle of Epicurus
Christopher Hitchens debates Intelligent DesignModerated by Ben Stein, who starts off with the old canard about no
atheists in foxholes.
http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2008/1/28/hitchensKnocksIntelligentDesign
Hitchens knocks intelligent design
Atheist debates creation advocate Jay Richards in Dinkelspiel
Auditorium
January 28, 2008
By Shelby Martin
During an animated debate yesterday in a packed Dinkelspiel Auditorium,
atheist Christopher Hitchens and intelligent design advocate Jay
Richards clashed over the evidence for God's existence.
"There are no atheists in foxholes, but there are plenty in
universities," said host Ben Stein, famous for his role as the dull
economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, during "Atheism vs.
Theism and the Scientific Evidence of Intelligent Design."
"We are lucky — blessed, I would say — to have two extremely smart
people here today," Stein said, giving both participants 14 minutes for
their opening remarks.
"I can't imagine it'll take me 14 minutes to demolish intelligent
design, as I refuse to call it," began Hitchens, the author of the 2007
bestseller "God is Not Great."
He cited the existence of evil as evidence against a benevolent
designer.
"If everything was designed," Hitchens asked, "what are we to make of
the designer who has subjected so many generations to barbarism,
misery, ignorance, slavery and early death?"
He added that any person who looked to nature as evidence for design
must contend with the fact that 98 percent of all species that have
ever existed are extinct.
"Whose design?" asked Hitchens, to applause from many audience members,
including a dozen wearing "Atheists of Silicon Valley" T-shirts. "What
kind of design? What kind of caprice, what kind of incompetence, what
kind of cruelty?'
Richards congratulated Hitchens on his rhetoric, but dismissed the
atheist's perspective.
"A sneer is not an argument," said Richards, a program director for the
intelligent design think tank Discovery Institute.
Richards encouraged the audience to see atheism and theism as two
competing hypotheses, saying he would lay out "a laundry list of
facts," and ask whether they fit better in an atheistic or theistic
worldview.
For theists, "there is a personal being, a transcendent, eternal,
personal being," Richards said. "This being is by definition goodness
and love."
As his first evidence for theism, Richards argued that all people feel
"simple moral truths."
"We all know that it's wrong to torture little children just for the
fun of it," he said.
The fact that nature seems to be organized rationally and
mathematically suggests evidence for theism, Richards said, as does the
"fine-tuning principle" — the idea that the laws of the universe are
set up just right to allow for life. He added that the universe's
inception at the Big Bang is also evidence for a creator.
"Anything that begins to exist must have a cause for its beginning,"
Richards said.
The intelligent design advocate next appealed to "irreducible
complexity," one of intelligent design's central tenets. He cited the
bacterial flagellum and the cascade of blood-clotting factors, saying
that they must be designed because they need all of their parts at once
to work and could not evolve little-by-little.
"Processes that require foresight are inaccessible to natural
selection," Richards said.
Hitchens then requested the chance to ask Richards a question.
"Do you believe Jesus Christ was born of a virgin?" he asked when
Richards assented. "Do you believe he was resurrected from the dead?"
Richards said that he did.
"I rest my case," said Hitchens. "This is an honest guy, who has just
made it very clear [that] science has nothing to do with his world
view."
Stein interrupted with a question for Hitchens.
"Many people are deeply religious," he said. "Are they just stupider
than you?"
"I think I am smarter than most people," Hitchens said, but he added
that religion plays an important part in human history.
"Religion was our first try at philosophy, it was our first try at
epistemology. It's what we came up with when we didn't know we lived on
a round planet circling the sun."
The event was broadcast by the Church Communication Network to churches
around the country. Listeners could send questions via fax or email,
and audience members at Stanford could turn in written questions to be
answered by the debaters.
Richards stated that just as the designers of Mt. Rushmore made the
monument very different from the hills around it, "intelligent agents
leave markers for their design."
"The existence of a creator God is something we can discern from the
world around us," he concluded.
Hitchens disagreed.
"The world as we know it works as the world might be expected to work
if it did not have a designer," he concluded. "We can finally grow up
if we resign ourselves to this increasingly inescapable truth."
The event was sponsored by The Stanford Review, the Intelligent Design
and Evolution Awareness club and Vox Clara: A Journal of Christian
Thought at Stanford.
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