The great god debate on Nightline

Most has been posted on YouTube.

Can somone explain to me why anybody is talking to Kirk Cameron about evolution? Did he even finish college? High school?

I am kind of disappointed in the atheistic defense, although I grant you that any self-respecting atheist debater wouldn't stoop to debating Kirk Cameron in a public setting. They did a really crappy job of defending evolution, for instance. Among other things, they needed to at least mention that no one on the stage was a biologist and was not an expert (and Cameron probably never even finished high school biology), and trying to argue piecemeal about a discipline you have no training in is a very bad idea no matter what the topic is.

I also thought their defense of an atheistic moral framework was rather weak. They touched on it by talking about the evolution of societies, but they never made the point clearly: morality evolves socially. Social forces drive what kinds of behavior a society values, and those values are imbued in children. You aren't making conscious, rational decisions every time you decide to do something (like lend your roommate some money) by weighing its moral merits. You've been conditioned to recognize certain kinds of right and wrong, and you have a very gutteral reaction most of the time.

Their response to Pascal's wager was also terrible. "I don't want to be in heaven with a megalomaniacal god" is perhaps the worst response you can give. It's logically flawed and just reflects anger and frustration. The right answer, and the one that people like Hitchins gives, is that with respect to every other religion, Christians are also atheists. They risk the wrath of Allah every day, and it doesn't seem to bother them.

The one thing I think they handled somewhat well is the question of the historical figure of Jesus. Or, actually, as I reflect, I think it's more that the Christians' arguments are laughable in and of themselves. They actually said that you can't pay attention to the historical records because people lie, and the Bible is axiomatically true. So, basically, the Bible is true because it's true no matter what all the other evidence says.

Great. Awesome. I'm convinced.