Michael Shermer Debates Dinesh D'Souza
Socratic Club Debate featuring Michael Shermer and Dinesh D’Souza, Monday, October 15, 7 PM, Austin Auditorium - LaSells Stewart Center, Oregon State University. Topic: "Is Christianity Good for the World?
For part 2 see below:
Read what D'Souza said about atheists here.
See also where Christopher Hitchens Debates Dinesh D'Souza
11 comments:
D'Souza is a great speaker. There is no doubt about that. That only makes what he says that much more frustrating, though.
I know he's wrong. I don't understand how he can't see it. He's obviously smart. How can he make such obvious mistakes?
Josh, can you be more specific? I don't see where he ever dropped the ball.
Shermer clearly was remiss in not pointing out that part that Martin Luther and the Lutherans (great name for a band) played in the Holocaust - along with the maniacally anti-semitic (and definitively pro-Hitler) Catholic church!
Shermer had little to contribute to this debate. D'Souza was much more focused. He won.
Shermer's data dump was a good reality check on religious haughtiness but he did not connect emotionally on the point. Ie: He clearly demonstrated that rules don't help, but did not make us feel it. Strange..
What I am seeing as a consistent theme in these debates is the fact that the infidels clearly expect the believers to defend the Bible - instead, they defend only theism. This is a position that has strong teleological arguments for it, and zero empirical arguments against it. Who can win in that sand?
The real fight must be in the area of the empirical. Who has the better cosmology? The Bible - with its rigid ceiling, hiding the abode of the gods? or the infidels, with their telescopes - showing that there are no gods there?
D'Souza will find less hospitable sand when he argues Hitchens!
Bill Ross
http://bibleshockers.blogspot.com
I posted before I got to Shermer at all.
As you pointed out D'Souza was more focused, and I don't think that Shermer used his questions during cross very well.
That said, D'Souza didn't explain some things very well. For example, he made the claim that the atheist dictators who slaughtered millions did so because they were atheists. He even mentioned the counter-argument that Dawkins and others give that they did so in spite of their atheism, not because of it. Then he went on and basically gave the argument (I'm going from memory, so this might not be entirely correct), that these people did so because they were trying to 'make a better man' or some such thing.
That isn't atheism. He seems to be quite confused about what atheism is.
There was also his claims that Christianity provides the framework for science, while obviously ignoring the problem of miracles, which would defy natural law. If your belief system is based on a violation of natural law, how can it provide the basis for the study of those laws?
The argument was that the fact that there are laws implies that there is a law giver. Why? He just asserted it.
I could go on with other examples. There is no doubt about it; he's an awesome speaker, but there isn't anything new here.
I'm sorry but I failed to see how D'Souza presented himself as a "great" speaker. An impassioned speaker, certainly, as he made several appeals to emotion, but not great. That Michael Shermer failed to wipe the floor with him simply shows that the atheists fail to call them on the fundamental premise of Christianity: that the bible is the principle source of knowledge of the will of god and the only testimony to the life of Jesus the Christ.
In failing to get Christians to stand behind the authenticity of the biblical narrative you can't force the empirical argument. D'Souza described several cultural and sociological attributes and said simply, without any evidence presented, that they were the result of Christianity. He posited that science exists because of Western Christendom and summarily dismissed the "science" of every other society that ever existed. Not only is the assertion absurd and patently false but if he is as intelligent as many posit him to be then he is either ignorant or an unabashed liar.
One example is the argument about slavery. D'Souza describes what is essentially the cultural tide rising against slavery (although not entirely abolished one might note) and posits that it was Christian in its making. If one were to read the bible for its position on slavery one would find only two essential admonishments. First, jews were not to have other jews as slaves. Second, slave owners should beat their slaves only enough to keep them in line and no more. D'Souza fails to acknowledge (or I suspect conveniently ignores) that during the time of abolition the proponents of slavery were both Christian and often invoked the bible in support of slavery.
Again, in a debate one needs to bring it back to the bible as the source of the Christian experience. Failing to do so allows your opponent to fabricate a pseudo-theology that can shift and twist its shape at will to evade the counter argument. Bring it back to the bible and force them to either authenticate what is says or repudiate it. We shouldn't allow these "Christians" to distance themselves from their holy book.
Second, in countering arguments against atheism one should point out that atheists have no common doctrines, no uniform creeds, and are not a "group" like Calvinists or Catholics. There are no tenets to atheism other than lack of a belief in a god and it is therefore erroneous to treat them as a group. It's understandable that Christians, identifying as a group as they do, would see the rest of the world with a group bias. D'Souza attributes to atheism the evil in Pol Pot's Cambodia. Atheists see a deranged dogmatic Marxist and like-minded followers at work in Pol Pot's Cambodia. It is telling to note that the first "group" usually killed by these lunatics is not the clergy but the intellectuals. Go figure.
kCorn is ON TARGET.
Mushy theism is impossible to refute - because of its mushy nature. Keep the focus on the assertions made by Moses regarding the cosmos...
Bill Ross
http://bibleshockers.blogspot.com
zzThe slavery issue is very instructive. Indeed, Christianity did not INVENT slavery, so any argument in that direction is misguided.
But Chrisianity did VALIDATE slavery, and played a major role in the Civil War. The Christian South was merely defending their GOD-GIVEN RIGHT to own slaves. That is undeniable!
Shermer seems to be a nice guy... but will being a nice agnostic really impeach Christianity? I don't think so. You have to take the gloves off...
Christianity is impeachable soley on these grounds:
* Christianity rests on Moses
* Moses declares a deity who lives just above the sky ceiling
* we have looked and not only found no God, but we found no sky ceiling!
Bill Ross
http://bibleshockers.blogspot.com
Woundedego, "soley on these grounds"?!?
Because Christianity happened "long ago, in a galaxy far, far away" it can't be falsified. All of its accounts are beyond reproach. Bang away. Simply put, you can't prove a thing against it. Unless you can nail it down to actual assertions.
Maybe I overstated, but maybe not.
The point is that you have to have two things to turn it over:
* actual assertions (things that can be falsified)
* evidence that those assertions are false
What is increasingly difficult to find is the first - actual assertions. The religious debaters stick to the untestable. Hence, the debaters flounder, trying to prove the unprovable.
Bill Ross
http://bibleshockers.blogspot.com
I take a different stance, Bill. I guess we both agree and disagree. I liken the Christian faith to a row of dominoes jetting out in different directions. Whether you choose to knock them down in the middle (Moses) or at one of the ends (Scriptural errancy, internal inconsistencies in doctrine) it's still going to fall. I knew nothing about Moses' cosmology when mI deconverted. The thing that did it for me was the problem of evil and suffering and its incompatibility with the character of the Bible's God and the nature of the Bible's promises. Other people will be less persuaded by this argument. Fine. Doesn't make it inherently weak. Just means that someone has found a way to live with it. Maybe they will be more swayed by a "heady" argument mired in the fine points of Biblical scholarship.
By the way, Shermer really screwed up when he did not own up to the fact he was factually incorrect about the number of verses in the Bible about homosexuality.
If you are wrong, and are shown to be so, the thing to do is to admit it. Period. Shermer dissed the messenger. That was a contemptible act.
Bill Ross
http://bibleshockers.blogspot.com
>>>>Joseph:...I take a different stance, Bill. I guess we both agree and disagree...
Perhaps we should each start a denomination. You can be the "Multi-Stream-Dominoists" and I'll be the "Falsifiable-assertionists."
What I mean to say is that unless you have a hypothesis that actually makes a prediction then you can't falsify it. You can't, for example, disprove that Muhammad flew from the Temple Mount up into the sky where Allah/Jehovah and Zeus are presumed to be unless you have a way (ie: a telescope) to disprove it.
The "problem of evil" is not falsifiable. Evil exists. It is in the Bible. God, in the Bible, is up to his neck in alligators. His own sons rebel. He has nothing but malcontents around him all of the time. How is a bunch of human suffering, of which he is (in the Bible) hardly aware, let alone concerned?
Bill Ross
http://bibleshockers.blogspot.com
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