There was a debate last night at Franklin and Marshal university that I went to. The chance to see Paul Kurtz speak live is what drew me, I had never seen him speak before.

The topic was "Resolved: Goodness without God is Good Enough", with Paul Kurtz supporting it and William Lane Craig opposing it. Craig is a professor of philosophy from Talbot School of Theology, I had never heard of him before. For those that don't know Paul Kurtz is chairman of the Council for Secular Humanism among other titles and awards, and is one of the most active humanist writers and speakers there is.

Unfortunately the debate itself came of somewhat poorly because the two speakers where really holding different debates. The single sentence topic failed to properly set the context of the debate, and both speakers took a different context based on their backgrounds. Kurtz was arguing for the idea that people can be good without believing in god, really arguing against the common Christian conceit that Christians are better people then non-Christians. Craig ,on the other had, was arguing the more abstract concept that "good" only has real meaning within a religious system.

On a technical level Craig would have scored better, speaking better and laying out his argument more clearly. As a speaker I would mark him down only for excessive use of quotations in his speaking. Kurtz had a tendency to ramble and repeat himself a bit, and failed to put his argument together in way that was really clear to the audience. But Kurtz got in some excellent points and sparked the only spontaneous applause of night.

As for the arguments themselves, I think Kurtz's argument was better but also far easier. While many Christians have the irrational idea that Christians are better then other people, only the most fanatic would argue against the idea that at least some non-Christians have been good people. Craig avoided even trying to argue this point like the plague, conceding the point from the very start and refusing to address it later. Kurtz's argument was ultimately founded in an emotional appeal to the good done by individual non-theists, but for the point he was arguing that is probably the best argument anyway since it's nearly irrefutable.

Craig's argument that god is necessary to give good meaning was weak, but didn't come off too badly during the debate because Kurtz never directly addressed it. First, Craig went to great lengths to point out that he was arguing for theism is general, not for Christianity, but then kept referring to beliefs and ideas that are largely Christian. Second, several of the arguments he raised against atheism could be equally applied against his argument for theism. Third, several of the reasons he tried to use to buttress his points where circular.

Jay

What's all this *just One* True Religion stuff about - especially with all the cross-pollination?

Craig would have disagreed sharply with that. A large part of his argument for theism was based in the idea that goodness can only have real meaning if there is some single, objective, absolute standard of goodness. We may not know what it is, but it has to exist.

This is a good example of how his argument for theism was for Christianity in disguise. For somebody from a polytheistic background or somebody that believes in an unknowable god this whole argument makes no sense.

Jay

My personal perspective is that morality and religion are actually distinct concepts. The majority of people actually derive their religious beliefs from their morality and not the other way around.

For such a belief to make sense, I have to believe that 'good' has meaning outside a religious context.

The only positive argument I could give for this off the top of my head is that we can talk about morality without talking about religion. If 'good' only had meaning within a religion then we couldn't talk about it except within a religious context. Contrast it with 'sin', sin is a purely religious concept. You can't even describe sin without involving a religious context.

Background wise, it's all self taught. Even with the programming I do for a living, I learned far more on my own, reading and experimenting, then I did in school.

Jay