{"id":1513,"date":"2011-04-14T09:11:15","date_gmt":"2011-04-14T13:11:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=1513"},"modified":"2011-10-12T12:38:25","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T16:38:25","slug":"how-to-instigate-a-god-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2011\/04\/how-to-instigate-a-god-debate\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Instigate a God Debate"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Courtesy of Religion Dispatches.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Last week I had the chance to catch what was probably the biggest God debate of the year, in this genre of blockbuster, YouTubed<\/a>, college-campus bouts. The topic was “Is Good from God?”\u2014is religion necessary for objective morality? The debaters were William Lane Craig, the evangelical philosopher, and Sam Harris, who launched the New Atheism movement.\u00a0My report appears today at <\/a>Religion Dispatches<\/a><\/em>. Instead of focusing on the arguments per se\u2014for them, see a play-by-play at Common Sense Atheism<\/a>\u2014I spent my time hanging out with the debaters and the student organizers before and after the event. Here’s a bit of it:<\/p>\n

\n

Controversy was the intent all along. \u201cThe main reason we did it was for the discussion in the dorms,\u201d says Malcolm Phelan, a junior, who helped put the debate together and gave the opening speech. He\u2019s tall, a bit lanky, steady with his eye-contact, and erring on the side of clean-cut. Around here, he\u2019s someone who can get things done and get money out of the administration. Even professors talk about him with a shade of awe. As a freshman he was class president, but then he quit student government for greater things. He also has a visionary streak, and a knack for stringing winged words together into crescendos. Busy Notre Dame students need this, he says. They live in an \u201cupper-class Catholic Disneyland\u201d and need to be shaken up. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t necessarily call myself an instigator, but\u2014\u201d he says, trailing off. His word, not mine.<\/p>\n

Phelan\u2019s co-conspirator behind the scenes was Arnav Dutt. Someone introduced him to me as The Thinker. While he talks, he looks down and pauses mid-sentence if it isn\u2019t coming out exactly right, his eyes covered behind glasses and a Justin Beiber-type mop-top. He\u2019s the child of a Catholic and a Hindu, both non-practicing. Like Phelan, Dutt considers himself an atheist, though his education has been mostly in Catholic environments. \u201cThis issue\u201d\u2014that of the debate\u2014\u201chas thrust itself on me my whole life.\u201d He takes it seriously and wonders whether some of the critics are right; maybe a big debate is the wrong approach. When I ask what he thinks it will do for people, he turns pensive again. \u201cThere\u2019s a big difference between what I think they\u2019re getting and what I hope they\u2019re getting,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

While I was at Notre Dame, I had the pleasure of a long afternoon’s conversation with John O’Callaghan, a philosophy professor there who specializes in Thomist thought, and who runs the Jacques Maritain Center<\/a>. Before the debate even happened\u2014I guess<\/a> the same afternoon we met\u2014he put together a very different kind of essay<\/a> from mine, a reminder that the debate’s apparent choice between religion and science isn’t one we have to make.<\/p>\n

\n

The greatest among our Christian forebears certainly didn\u2019t think we had to. Even if one remains unconvinced by the logic of Aquinas\u2019 Five Ways, the attitude expressed in them is not one of natural explanations in competition with God. His natural science was almost unimaginably false with regard to what we now know or claim to know. But the reality of natural causes that allows for scientific understanding was for him the best and \u201cmost manifest\u201d argument for the existence of a god, a god Who does not compete with His creatures but, rather, enables them.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The upshot of all this should be obvious enough: if you’re looking for the subtle truth, maybe a big staged debate like this isn’t the place to find it.<\/p>\n

I remember an instance of good, anyway, with or without God, when Arnav Dutt and I were leaving the debate. A woman dropped her pocketbook as she started walking out into the rain. A handful of others around noticed, and called out\u2014\u201cMiss! Miss!\u201d\u2014and handed it to her. \u201cThat\u2019s nice to see, after this,\u201d I heard Dutt mutter. I think I also heard some irony.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week I had the chance to catch what was probably the biggest God debate of the year, in this genre of blockbuster, YouTubed<\/a>, college-campus bouts. The topic was “Is Good from God?”\u2014is religion necessary for objective morality? The debaters were William Lane Craig, the evangelical philosopher, and Sam Harris, who launched the New Atheism movement.\u00a0My report appears today at <\/a>Religion Dispatches<\/a><\/em>. Instead of focusing on the arguments per se\u2014for them, see a play-by-play at Common Sense Atheism<\/a>\u2014I spent my time hanging out with the debaters and the student organizers before and after the event. Here’s a bit of it:<\/p>\n

Controversy was the intent all along. \u201cThe main reason we did it was for the discussion in the dorms,\u201d says Malcolm Phelan, a junior, who helped put the debate together and gave the opening speech. He\u2019s tall, a bit lanky, steady with his eye-contact, and erring on the side of clean-cut. Around here, he\u2019s someone who can get things done and get money out of the administration. Even professors talk about him with a shade of awe. As a freshman he was class president, but then he quit student government for greater things. He also has a visionary streak, and a knack for stringing winged words together into crescendos. Busy Notre Dame students need this, he says. They live in an \u201cupper-class Catholic Disneyland\u201d and need to be shaken up. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t necessarily call myself an instigator, but\u2014\u201d he says, trailing off. His word, not mine.<\/p>\n

Phelan\u2019s co-conspirator behind the scenes was Arnav Dutt. Someone introduced him to me as The Thinker. While he talks, he looks down and pauses mid-sentence if it isn\u2019t coming out exactly right, his eyes covered behind glasses and a Justin Beiber-type mop-top. He\u2019s the child of a Catholic and a Hindu, both non-practicing. Like Phelan, Dutt considers himself an atheist, though his education has been mostly in Catholic environments. \u201cThis issue\u201d\u2014that of the debate\u2014\u201chas thrust itself on me my whole life.\u201d He takes it seriously and wonders whether some of the critics are right; maybe a big debate is the wrong approach. When I ask what he thinks it will do for people, he turns pensive again. \u201cThere\u2019s a big difference between what I think they\u2019re getting and what I hope they\u2019re getting,\u201d he says.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

While I was at Notre Dame, I had the pleasure of a long afternoon’s conversation with John O’Callaghan, a philosophy professor there who specializes in Thomist thought, and who runs the Jacques Maritain Center<\/a>. Before the debate even happened\u2014I guess the same afternoon we met\u2014he put together a very different kind of essay<\/a> from mine, a reminder that the debate’s apparent choice between religion and science isn’t one we have to make.<\/p>\n

The greatest among our Christian forebears certainly didn\u2019t think we had to. Even if one remains unconvinced by the logic of Aquinas\u2019 Five Ways, the attitude expressed in them is not one of natural explanations in competition with God. His natural science was almost unimaginably false with regard to what we now know or claim to know. But the reality of natural causes that allows for scientific understanding was for him the best and \u201cmost manifest\u201d argument for the existence of a god, a god Who does not compete with His creatures but, rather, enables them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The upshot of all this should be obvious enough: if you’re looking for the subtle truth, maybe a big staged debate like this isn’t the place to find it.<\/p>\n

I remember an instance of good, anyway, with or without God, when Arnav Dutt and I were leaving the debate. A woman dropped her pocketbook as she started walking out into the rain. A handful of others around noticed, and called out\u2014\u201cMiss! Miss!\u201d\u2014and handed it to her. \u201cThat\u2019s nice to see, after this,\u201d I heard Dutt mutter. I think I also heard some irony.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[37,54,29,41,78,84,52,11,40,100,92,33,16,75],"class_list":["post-1513","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-atheism","tag-conversation","tag-dialog","tag-double-truth","tag-drama","tag-ethics","tag-evolution","tag-existence-of-god","tag-logic","tag-performance","tag-proof","tag-rational-choice","tag-religion-science","tag-tourism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1513"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1520,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1513\/revisions\/1520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1513"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1513"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1513"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}