The Great Debate

I gave a lecture at an Objectivist conference back in 2003, and here's the transcript:

God, Faith, and the Supernatural: The Objectivist Perspective

When I did a test-run of it before leaving town for the conference, I met a bunch of people who get together regularly to chat about philosophy and theism and all that. Fast forward to this past weekend, where developing that talk and chatting with these people over Thursday lunches turned into an interesting encounter.

Rock-star Christian scholar/apologist Gary Habermas was brought to town. He's debated the famous atheist philosopher Anthony Flew a couple of times, they talk on the phone a lot, and he interviewed Flew just as his famous conversion to deism/theism was happening (maybe even helped break the story?).

Habermas was brought here by some local believers to speak for an hour or two and give his perspective on Flew's conversion, and to give some presentations on what he's written about in his books (he's considered a huge expert on the history of and evidence for the Resurrection). And most interesting: they came to our discussion group and asked me and my friend Rob to debate him. You know, like local canon-fodder. :^)

There were 50 people in attendance (half believers, half not). I started the evening by going one-on-one with him for about an hour, then Rob worked with him for an hour, then all three of us were on stage for an hour of anything-goes Q&A with the audience. Pretty interesting experience, I've never locked horns with a theist at his level of training and experience. Since he's actually a heavily-trained, bleeding-edge kind of guy, he said some things I'd not heard before, and I left thinking that I might want to write a little paper about his meta-argument that evidence for the Resurrection (even assuming it is completely iron-clad) could demonstrate there is a God (much less that He is the one Christians think He is).

Anyway, Rob wanted people to have something to carry away and think about. Lacking time, I handed out booklet-printed copies of that lecture from a couple of years ago. But because it was designed for an Objectivist audience, I decided to write a new Preface to try to motivate and orient a mixed audience to get something out of it and not start pulling their hair out in frustration quite so quickly.