catholicsphere

I have to say that the difference between yesterday’s and today’s segments of the debate were like night and day. Kirk and Ray actually showed themselves more knowledgeable in today’s segments, making me think that I was a bit hasty in my assessment and should have exercised some restraint before passing judgment. Although, I still stand by my statement that Ray did not meet his own requirement that he would demonstrate the existence of God without referencing the Bible or faith.

On the other hand, Kirk — being a former atheist himself — did appeal more to logic, reason and creation in order to make his points. To that extent, Kirk did much better than Ray in the debate; a surprise given that Kirk billed himself simply as “an actor”.

At times, Brian and Kelly both looked much more nervous during this segment. Brian offered some interesting rebuttals, but certainly nothing that came close to his goal for the Rational Response Squad of “eliminating Christianity”. Kelly, on the other hand, often looked foolish, mainly because she tried to over-dramatize her statements to the point that she said things that were often untrue.

As an example, she said that there is no evidence that is not highly disputed that Jesus ever existed. She made it a requirement that only commentary from contemporaries of the day would suffice as evidence, and dismissed evidence which was close in proximity — such as that of Josephus because “he wasn’t contemporaneous”. Ok, so that’s true. But, so what? Josephus was so close — growing up in the years just after Jesus’ death — and was a Jew that could hardly be called sympathetic to promoting the Christian faith; especially if Jesus never existed. There’s no way he would have named Jesus, and more than likely would have mentioned the fraud that Christians were trying to perpetrate. That he doesn’t do so is quite adequate in disproving Kelly’s assertion.

Ray also picked up on an important point: Kelly relied much on the history books but dismissed the Bible, one of the largest and most accurate histories in the world (having been tested by archeology, other histories, etc throughout the centuries). Further, she takes the accuracy of those things on faith, while rejecting the Bible.

Kelly’s answer that “if they can take things on faith, so can atheists” undermined her entire position. If that is the case, then it could be said that such a faith is no more rational than theistic faith — and, in fact it is more irrational because it discounts a huge amount of evidence that is rational, logical and true, even though not strictly scientific.

As I said yesterday, I don’t think anyone was swayed by the debate. I believe the same was said on last night’s Nightline. There were questions left unanswered by both sides — although I actually think that Kirk and Ray (Kirk actually covered for Ray in a number of cases, it seemed; and sometimes looked uncomfortable with the direction that Ray was arguing) answered more and provided a case for a reasonable faith. All in all, if I had to decide, I’d call it a draw.

On a final note … to the woman who asked about how cancer and evil figure into God’s “perfect” creations — man and the world … a point I made in a post a few weeks ago, after the Virginia Tech incident, is perhaps relevant here. Ray’s answer of us living in a fallen world touched upon it, but didn’t make the point strongly enough. God provided an answer of love and hope after man went astray … His Son, Jesus, who brought into the world the hope of everlasting life of happiness.

For us Christians, we love Him because He first loved us.

[tags]atheist, debate, kirk cameron, ray comfort, way of the master, rational response squad, abc, nightline, o’reilly, christian, catholicsphere, bible, faith, apologetics[/tags]