Does God Exist? – Debate between Dan Barker & Jerry Bergman

If you missed the debate on Friday don’t worry there wasn’t any ground breaking evidence supplied that will shatter the faith of millions or anythings.  Personally I like the debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye a bit more than this one.  One of our groups members (Greg Brahe) also wrote a great review on the event here on Inspiring Doubt.  Greg did I far better job than I will really detailing the debate as it progressed.  Reading his article I was reminded of certain parts of the debate and I was finally able to “laugh out loud” at some of the absurd things that were said.  Thank you for such an in-depth write-up Greg.

Dan from FFRF did extremely well but did a bit too much Bible bashing for my tastes.  Given his background I expected some and it was nice to see someone be able to argue with Apologists in their own language.  From what I gathered Dan’s primary message was that Christianity is wrong because there is no evidence beyond the bible which he has studied in depth as a former preacher.  He cited inaccuracies, contradictions and immoral verses all to support his points.  He also took his time to refute common Apologist arguments before Jerry had time to make them.  Dan took his time to focus the debate on the question posed and did a good job refuting it.

Jerry also provided some decent arguments however, many of them lacked substance… and seemed to draw more from personal experience than  evidence which as a scientist I was expecting.  And many times instead of providing evidence he often said things like, “I’ve read a lot of books” or “everyone should be doing their own research.”  Which, don’t get me wrong I’m all about encouraging people to read and do their own research, however it felt a bit like I was being told to read his books.  This coming form a guy who’s published over around 20 books (from what I saw on the tables) he sounded more like a salesman than a researcher.  I really wish that instead telling us to read his books and saying there is evidence he would have had some available to show us.

I felt like Jerry’s primary message was that it is unfair for educators to be prevented from teaching Creationism in schools and that it is not right to discriminate against educators who have religious beliefs.  To be honest I agree with part of his main point, educators should not be discriminated against for their beliefs however I am not convinced that there is a “witch hunt” going on in higher education as he claims.  He has a book out there that details a list of educators that have been “discriminated against for their religious beliefs”.  I might actually read this one if I get the chance.  I’m interested to know if they were let go because of their beliefs or let go for other reasons.  I am very skeptical that out of the hundreds of thousands of educators in this country that the couple hundred he has found and written about constitute the witch hunt he claims.  I am fully expecting many account to have two sides the person who was let go “because of their beliefs” and the school that let them go for their “official reasons”.  The biggest problem about his primary message was that it barely addressed the topic of the debate.