Does God Exist? Lenny Esposito vs Richard Carrier

By: Jason|06 June, 2012|Categories: Audio|Tags: debate . Lenny Esposito . Richard Carrier . the existence of God

Come to Reason Ministries have posted the audio from the debate between apologist Lenny Esposito and atheist Richard Carrier:

Part 1

Part 2

(If you’re having trouble accessing the audio, you may need to like the Come to Reason Facebook page). The exchange took place on Wednesday, May 23, at the University of California.

Lenny Esposito is president and founder of Come to Reason Ministries. He is a contributor to the popular Apologetics Study Bible for Students and has written articles that have appeared in The Los Angeles Times and the Southern California Christian Times.

Richard Carrier is a historian and philosopher, specializing in the philosophy of naturalism and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome. He is the author of several books including Why I Am Not a Christian: Four Conclusive Reasons to Reject the Faith and Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism.

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Doug Peters

Carrier’s “argument” is a bizarre one…
Because God could/should/would (according to Carrier’s infallible theology!) have “done it differently” this means that “anything that is” cannot be evidence for God.
On the other hand, since we don’t find God under every stone, each stone constitutes a “successful prediction” of atheism.
The double standard is mind-boggling.
Edward T. Babinski

Carrier is saying that we see a cosmos in which life at best is in equilibrium with death. There’s birth and death. And it’s taking place on the shaky surface of one teensy planet, a planet with a history of mass extinction events, massive plagues, massive natural disasters. And about half of all fertilized egg cells of every species never get to be born (including fertilized human eggs), but are naturally, spontaneously aborted. And in fact up till the 1700s half of all children who WERE born died due to childhood illnesses, infections, etc. So it’s not a matter of demanding God be under every rock. There’s plenty of rocks out there, planets circling other stars. And judging by the lack of life in seven of the other rocks circling our sun, life may be pretty rare, especially multi-cellular and intelligent life forms. So, death, including species extinctions, including mass extinction events, are as normal as biological evolution and our cosmos is in equilibrium with death, and our rock, the third from the sun, seems to be the only one inhabited by living organisms, most of them with smaller brains than ours and less conscious (although some large-brained mammals do exist besides the higher apes, like elephants and dolphins). Most of the rest of the cosmos is filled with uninhabited rocks, deadly radiation and other dangers to life.
Anonymous

So… I see that the comments are closed in your post on the September Speaking tour. I clicked on the link to the ‘Stand to Reason’ blog and the first post is promoting an ‘intelligent design’ event in SoCal. Not exactly a promising start!