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Does God Exist?: The Debate Between Theists & Atheists

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This book is divided into three sections: (i) the transcriptof the oral debate on the existence of God between Christianphilosopher J.P. Moreland and atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen; (ii) commentaries on the debate by two Christian philosophers (William Lane Craig and Dallas Willard) and two atheist philosophers (Antony Flew and Keith Parsons); and (iii) concluding thoughts by Moreland and Nielsen. I agree completely with the conclusion of Craig's flow of the debate, that Moreland won the debate. In fact, Moreland's victory in the debate was so decisive I am left wishing that Keith Parsons had been Moreland's opponent; I wonder if Nielsen even took the debate seriously. In light of this, I am baffled why a secular humanist publisher like Prometheus Books would choose to pubish this particular debate, given that the atheist side was so poorly represented. For that matter, I am surprised that even Thomas Nelson originally published the book, for even theists should want the atheist position to be given its best representation. However, Nielsen's critique of theism is not representative of most atheist philosophers. Nielsen relies upon a critique of religious language in which he argues that "God" is literally meaningless. Not only do most atheist philosophers not use such an argument, they disagree with it! Unfortunately, as a result of Nielsen's "strategy" of putting all his eggs in an ineffective basket, readers are deprived of the opportunity to see an exchange between Moreland and atheist philosophers who make substantive objections to Moreland's arguments. To be sure, Antony Flew and Keith Parsons both make excellent, *representative* objections to Moreland's case, and Moreland responds to those objections in his final remarks, but we are reprived the opportunity to see how Parsons and Flew would respond to that, and so on. I therefore discourage *buying* the book.

However, I encourage interested parties from both sides to borrow the book from someone who already owns it (e.g., a professor or a local library). I just wouldn't recommend spending money on the book when the atheist debater did such a poor job representing atheism. Even theistic philosophers would agree that Nielsen could have defended atheism in the debate better than he did -- much better in fact -- and that's why I discourage buying the book. And because theistic philosophers care about the truth, even they would admit that atheism wasn't represented as well as it could have been. (For example, most theistic philosophers I have read endorse J.L. Mackie's _Miracle of Theism_ as one of the best philosophical cases for atheism. They don't agree with the book, but they agree that Mackie's book is one of the best cases for atheism in the philosophical literature. And if you asked any of those theistic philosophers, they would tell you that Nielsen did not use any of Mackie's arguments. Therefore, Nielsen's arguments are not representative of the best arguments for atheism.)

Moreland gave two arguments for theism: the comsological argument and the argument that God resurrected Jesus from the dead. We have responded to both of these arguments (thought not necessarily to Moreland specifically) on the Secular Web, and would welcome an exchange with Moreland should he want to answer our rebuttals.

This book is a written version of the debate between J.P. Moreland and Kia Nielsen. Both men are well known in their respective fields. Moreland a Christian theist and Nielsen an Atheist, "duke it out" and try to convince us if there is or is not a God. Even though I like J.P. Moreland, and he clearly wins the debate, he isn't at his top form. Further, Nielsen is sloppy and presents an old and already disgarded argument.

The strength of this book are the contributors: Lane Craig and Willard (Christians) and Flew and Parsons (Atheists) right good strong rebuttals. They all write their position with dynamic passion. I'm partial to William Lane Craig in this book, but must admit that all the contributers did a fine job and therefore, make this book a must read.

I've always eagerly read, listen, and disucussed this very serious matter of ultimate questions: Does God Exist? This book is well edited by Peter Kreeft. Unlike many books of this sort, Kreeft's introduction aids the reader into the debate and if one is new to the questions of philosophy, the background provided become even more important. The debate itself is average. Even though I admire JP Moreland and think he is a great Christian theist, he would receive an average rating. Kai Nielson, however, does a poor job and I agree with another reviewer that Moreland would have been better "stacked" against Keith Parson, one of the book's contributors.

The book's strength are the writings from the editor (Kreeft) and the contributors (Christians: Craig and Willard/Atheist: Flew and Parsons). The contributions are thought provoking and the writers takle the subject head on. Even though I'm parcell to Dr Craig, I think all the contributors did an outstanding job in analyzing the debate. For their comments alone, this book is well worth the time and price.

In "Does God Exist", J.P. Moreland and Kai Nielsen debate the same topic, but end up talking past eachother most of the time.

Unfortunately, each individual chapter within the book is much too short for anybody to establish much of a case for anything. This is probably the biggest flaw of the book- for it leads to some mediocre exchanges. Despite this limitation, however, some fairly important issues are discussed.

J.P. Moreland presents a fairly strong case for the existence of God by way of the Cosmological and Teleological Argument, and Nielsen barely offers a rebuttal in return. On the other hand, Nielsen offers the Incoherency Argument, in which God is alleged to be an incoherent concept. In my opinion, this is a bad argument, but Moreland doesn't really offer much of a rebutall either. It seems as though both Moreland and Nielsen are arguing in completely different ways and, as Craig notes, there is very little "clash" as a result.

The four extra participants, however, do pick up the slack a little bit. Flew and Parsons (atheist) actually offer some rebutall to Moreland's arguments, which Moreland gets to respond to later in the book (successfully, I think). Craig offers a very level-headed and fair analysis of the debate, while offering additional support for the Teleological argument. Willard's essay is nicely written, although it seems to be a bit off-topic, as he presents his own case for belief rather than analyzing what was already said by Moreland and Nielsen.

Overall, "Does God Exist" is a worthwhile, but not essential, read. There are much better debate books to be found.

I found this book good for people beginning to grow in Christian Apologetics. Atheists look elsewhere for rocksolid defenses of atheism. I would call this book biased if it weren't published by Prometheus Books (who publish many other Atheist Apologetic books).
This Book opens with an overview of the theist/atheist debate, written by Peter Kreeft. Wow, he really put the debate into perspective for me and I found his introduction the best part of the book! Moreland begins his debate by using Mathematical Proofs and then states the existence of Jesus Christ as a proof of God's existence (which I wish he would have kept out). Kai Nielson, although one of the leading atheistic defenders and a good writer, really fails to get his points across strongly. His main point, which he beats into the ground, is his inconherence argument of a creator. If this book determined the ultimate truth, we would all believe in a God. Moreland wins the debate, which is blantantly obvious. Good book read it if you get a chance!

All of the protagonists in this book are sharp, knowledgeable (in some ways but not others), polite, and engaging. The Christians probably "won," though I am not sure whether that is because of laziness on the part of the atheists, or the inherent weakness of their position. Of the primary debaters, Moreland is more on target intellectually, though less original. All the secondary debaters made good points.

The besetting weakness of this book (ironically, Nielsen and Craig agree) is that Nielsen is too contemptuous of or bored with conventional arguments for God to engage them. He thinks Hume and Kant have answered them in theory, why go to the mat on details? (Nor does he even explain why their arguments were so forceful.) Instead "God" is incoherent by definition, case closed. He then blames Morehead and Craig (in a polite way) for the poor debate: Get over this proof of God thing, already! His attitude was not much better in his debate a few years later with Craig. Perhaps rather than debating God with orthodox Christians, Nielsen should have taken part in activities he liked, whether darts or snow-boarding. Yawning in the face of your opponent is not only rude, it leaves the impression one lacks reason.

Nielsen's own argument was to me sometimes interesting, but seldom persuasive. "It makes no sense to say something is indirectly observable if it is not at least in theory or in principle directly observable as well." Not only do modern theories in physics seem to contradict this dicta, in reality, we don't directly observe anything -- sensual images cascade to consciousness along a long series of photo-chemical and mechanical reactions, whose validity we cannot test directly. In that sense, I sometimes wonder if God may not be more directly "encounterable" than anything in the sensual world.

Much of Nielsen's argument rests on the weight of abstract adjectives that apply more to the God of Advetic Hinduism than of orthodox Christianity. "You can't encounter a transcendent being." "An infinite individual is a contradiction in terms," because an individual must be "distinguishable from other individuals and thus finite." But the Christian God, as opposed to Brahma, is not "infinite" or purely "transcendent" in the senses that his argument require. Nielsen is likewise fond of the word "anthropomorphic," though as one respondent points out, the Christian view is theomorphism: that we are created in the image of God. Given his contempt for orthodox Christianity, it is perhaps not surprising that Nielsen admits he knows little about the gospels or cosmology. Why does he come to these things, anyway?

Philosophy for Craig is a contact sport, and he vigorously sorts arguments right and left (or right and wrong), as happy to contradict Moreland as Nielsen. I am not sure he has always been so cheerful about being contradicted, but his arguments are forceful, knowledgeable, and to the point.

Overall, Anthony Flew seemed pretty good, honest and "present" as the Buddhists say. But a second weakness of this book is that the skeptics argued erroneously from comparative religion, and the Christians answered them only partially. Flew accused Jesuits who identified the Chinese "Tian" with "God" of a "Jesuitical maneuver." In my opinion as a China scholar, Matteo Ricci, the primary Jesuit in question, was on the right track. Many people who have studied Chinese culture in depth have agreed, including the great Kang Xi emperor, the scholar James Legge, and others. (See my True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture.) A case can be made from anthropology that people in most cultures around the world have in fact been aware of the Supreme God as understood by Christians.

Parson's argument about molecular evolution unfortunately goes unanswered; I think this is an interesting topic for debate. His argument against the resurrection seems to me like begging the question. He complains that it is "more reasonable for an atheist to believe just about any alternative scenario, no matter how improbable." Whatever happened to proportioning belief to the evidence? Parsons says, suppose Mother Theresa claimed she could fly by flapping her arms. Obviously we would not believe such a report, so why believe the resurrection? Such an example only shows he has not really come to grips with the nature of and evidence for the resurrection (see, in particular, N. T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God), or of the Gospels. I argue in my new book, Why the Jesus Seminar Can't find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could, that Gospel miracles are "realistic, purposeful, constructive, respectful, and pious." The picture of Mother Theresa flapping her frail arms like a pigeon qualifies in none of these regards. Parsons is going to have to read the Gospels more fairly if he wants to persuade anyone that his explanation is the true one.

Flew assumes the Christian Creator "sees the production of human life as an or the main object" of creation. So why bother with all those other galaxies? But Christian intellectuals who have grown up on C. S. Lewis (most of us, maybe), have never claimed that God's only purpose in creating is human life. Who knows what else he has in mind? Flew replies in advance that the response "His ways are not our ways" is just a post hoc response. On the contrary, admitting the limits to our knowledge has been part of Christian theology from ancient times, and is in general wise epistemology. As Confucius said, "To know what you know, and know what you don't know, this is knowledge."

I find the atheists represented here enjoyable to read, and highly knowledgeable in some areas. It must be tough to be a professional philosopher: aside from logic, language and epistemology, you have to know a little bit about almost everything, it seems. Here you get useful bits of knowledge and thought from most all the contributors, though.

This book is simply fun to read. There are arguments of all sorts about the existence of God. There are comments on the arguments from various people and comments on the comments. I certainly enjoyed it.

Moreland, as the Theist, gave several arguments for the existence of a Supreme Being (although I have to admit that he didn't include my favorite of them, the ontological one). Nielsen's argument for atheism was essentially the positivistic one: that key religious claims are unfalsifiable and therefore meaningless.

But there were a couple of surprises. First, Moreland made a serious effort to rebut Nielsen's arguments, saying that God is in fact detectable and that therefore key religious statements are indeed verifiable. And second, Moreland used some scientific arguments to bolster his claim! This surprised me, given that Moreland's understanding of the Science he was using appeared to be somewhat shallow. Also, scientists play for keeps. When a scientific theory gets shot down, it's generally as dead as a doornail. I was wondering if Moreland really wanted to play for such stakes.

Some people were surprised that Nielsen used only one argument. I wasn't: it is a powerful argument and it is all he needed. Still, I was surprised by a couple of things from him. First, he dismissed the belief in existence of Zeus as plainly false and superstitious. I think such statements, while they may be valid, are subject to as much debate as the main topic. Second, I expected Nielsen to say that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus was weak. He didn't do that. Instead he said that even if he were to concede that Jesus was resurrected, that would not be evidence in favor of the existence of a Supreme Being.

All in all, a well-done book.

This book has the best of intentions, but leaves one feeling a bit flat. The first big issue I have is with the introduction, done by Peter Kreeft, and poorly, for he gives a description of the problem from the CHRISTIAN perspective only. Oh, he talks about atheism, but only as a believer sees it. For example, he lists Pascal's wager as an argument for the existence of God. Now a die-hard Christian might see it that way, but educated atheists and Christians alike can see that Pascal's wager is an argument to BELIEVE in God, not an argument for the EXISTENCE of God.

The bigger problem is that the primary debators, Moreland and Neilson, debate two entirely different issues, so end up with dueling monologues. Many think that Moreland won the debate. I disagree, because Moreland has the tougher task, having to prove both Nielson wrong (who argued that the term "god" is meaningless) and himself right. That is, proving the term "god" to have meaning doesn't prove that such a being exists. Neilson would be the victor by winning either one. So the deck was stacked against Moreland, and in a draw of that sort, I'd give the nod to the negative.

The saving grace of the book is in the contributors who, with the possible exceptionr Craig, all offer wonderful insights on the issue, leaving Moreland and Neilson looking worn out and irrelevant by comparison. One could be forgiven for wondering why, say, Keith Parsons and Dallas Willard (two of the best contributors) were not selected for the debate. Willard even comments on the intellectual disconnect between the primaries.

So its a decent book, but it could have been so much better.

You know something is terribly wrong when everyone who comments on a debate -- including the debaters themselves, subsequently -- think the debate sucked. It is obvious why to almost everyone: theist and atheist alike. The two men, with J.P. Moreland representing the Christian side and Kai Nielsen representing the atheistic side, couldn't be more dissimilar in terms of both their intellectual priorities and debating styles. The result of this is that the two men completely talk past one-another. As one of the theistic commentators noted (Craig), one of the most fundamental elements of a good debate, clash, or the head-to-head, back-and-forth treatment of various common points, is entirely missing from this. It almost reads like someone spliced together arguments from entirely different debates. I would also agree with Craig that this is largely Nielsen's fault: he put all of his eggs in one basket, and refused to address any of the points raised by Moreland. He talks, almost with pride, about how he just doesn't give a hoot about the historical Christian proofs of Jesus Christ's resurrection. Now, I think almost all of Moreland's arguments, from his arcane cosmological argument to his statistical arguments to his scientific arguments (interesting how theists are quick to invoke scientific theories which support their position even as they attack other theories which are at least as well-established by evidence), are poor stuff. However, he at least supplies Nielsen with an ample amount of material to cover in their debate. Nielsen refuses to engage Moreland, however, and keeps on his incoherency argument, which, while I think essentially valid, is poorly presented by him. As if this wasn't bad enough, I also share Moreland's irritation with Nielsen's thoroughly dismissive attitude toward science. No, scientific models will never attain the level of certainty found in logical or mathematical proofs, but they are still the best we have to work with and, indeed, given the wide-range of evidence for, say, the big bang theory, which is the theory invoked by Moreland, it is unimaginable that this theory is flat out wrong. In all likelihood as we learn more it'll be revised to incorporate new discoveries, but given the power and likely permanence of the theory, it is intellectual irresponsible to dismiss it out of hand as Nielsen does here. Nielsen comes off as an arrogant and thoroughly obnoxious intellectual lightweight who has refused to do his homework.

Other contributions are better. Namely, Keith Parsons and Dallas Willard. Willard presents impressive philosophical arguments in favor of supernaturalism, and completely wipes the floor of Craig and Moreland, who rely on poor scientific and metaphysical arguments. Parsons takes on Moreland's points head-first, pointing out hidden assumptions and bad premises in his opponent's arguments. He is also scientifically literate, and devastates Moreland's argument concerning abiogenesis (which is really Fred Hoyle's argument). Flew's contribution isn't terrible, but it left me cold. It is, however, superior to Craig's contribution.

I give this book two stars for some decent commentary by Parsons and Willard, but I won't suggest purchasing this book just for their pieces, since their contributions make up a very small proportion of the total page-space employed. Otherwise, this book stinks, because the debate stunk.

The high ranking is for the "contributors" (Moreland, Craig, Willard, Parsons, and Flew) for both sides of the issue. Their essays were serious and showed interests in the question "Does God Exist?" Unfortunately, though this book represents a "debate" on the existence of God between Moreland and Nielsen, it was very one-sided with Moreland emerging as the victor. I was quite surprised that Nielsen provided such a weak rebuttal to Moreland's arguments for God's existence. In fact, Nielsen even engages in some ad hominem tactics in his final essay (What more can you do after you lost?) in which he makes reference to Moreland's and Craig's age as a factor contributing to their "confusion" of using science (big bang cosmology and the anthropic principle) to augment the cosmological and teleological arguments for God's existence. What does age have to do with anything? Besides, I consider this as such hypocrisy! Nielsen begins his first speech with the supposition that rational people who have both a good philosophical and scientific education should not be theists! Why make an appeal to science education on the one hand to support your view but denounce it later when you can't deal effectively with it?