Sunday, August 10, 2008

New Bonus Episode: Responding to Ravi Zacharias (from the Reason Driven Podcast)


RD co-host Jeremy Beahan joined Danny and Mikyle from the Reason Driven Podcast to help the duo with a follow up to their debate with Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias. The interview portion of that episode is included here, but you can get the entire episode as well as the Debate with Ravi from their website www.reasondriven.blogspot.com


To download this or any previous Reasonable Doubts episodes click here.

6 comments:

Lee said...

I just listened to this podcast on the train to work this morning – very good, in particular the question raised about what immoral act could God do, I need to think about this more – it does seem to have the feeling of a killer argument/question. I just have to formulate it in a very simple way to be able to use it.

Lee

Anonymous said...

Lee: "...the question raised about what immoral act could God do"

Apologist William Lane Craig states in a bizarre essay (below) that no matter the atrocity committed, if it comes from God’s instruction then by definition it isn’t immoral.

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5767

From Andew Ryan - ar@wlv.ac.uk

RonH said...

In the essay Andrew points out, Craig says, "Suppose we agree that if God (who is perfectly good) exists, He could not have issued such a command [genocide]. What follows? That Jesus didn’t rise from the dead? That God does not exist? Hardly! So what is the problem supposed to be? "

The problem, in my opinion, is that Yahweh's behavior makes more sense if you think of it as a story to justify a natural act of genocide on the part of the Israelites.

Unknown said...

"Ravi is the master of the red herring."

If this is so, would not the use of this and other rhetorical devices requiring the purposeful twisting of words or meanings,(straw man and the one I can't remember the name of that involves the deliberate use of an alternate meaning of a word),constitute lying,(false witness), and therefore be a violation of the principles by which he claims to live?

Just curious, thanks.

Unknown said...

I'm listing to the original interview with Ravi from the Reason Driven Podcast and I'm finding it very painful. The interviewers let Ravi walk all over them.

Their first mistake is to allow him to assume the God of the Bible exists and base his reasoning from that assumption. If they grant him that assumption, then it's pretty much impossible to use logic or reason to refute anything he says.

The second mistake was to back away from a biological explanation for morality. That immediately undermined any competing explanation for morality compared to what Ravi offered. He could smell the blood in the water.

TRC said...

Thanks for a great episode, Jeremy. I just discovered your podcast and am trying to get through all the episodes. This one in particular really caught my eye as my father was a HUGE Zacharias fan. He tried to get me to listen to him for a long time and I resisted. And now, when I really want to listen to him, I am having the hardest time locating the original mp3 that the Reason Driven Podcasters recorded with Zacharias. Do you happen to have the original interview with the Reason Driven podcasters posted somewhere or saved? I would be very interested in hearing it. The link on the Reason Driven website is broken.

Thanks so much for all you are doing to advance skepticism, reason, doubt, and common sense in discussions of faith and religion.
Your podcasts have helped me immensely!

Sincerely,
TRC