Campus Freethought Alliance

So to write this before it becomes too distant history. Our recent (Last Tuesday) event was a showing of the God Delusion Debate DVD at Strosacker Auditorium, and I have to say it went over rather well. This was our first event co hosted with Christian InterVarsity Fellowship, which is a great opportunity to promote thought among people. We had around 150 people during the showing, which was even more than we had for Ask An Atheist forum.

The video was the best part of the night, an attempt to make people re-evaluate their thoughts on a Supreme Being. It had a rather unfortunate ending though. While John Lennox made wonderful speeches all through the night, so much that even I would give a decent weight to the watchmaker, he ended with a bit of witnessing that undermined his entire argument. His -Central- proof is the ressurection of Jesus, which of course is a massive rationality leap from the watchmaker theory. This short clip sums up the entire debate nicely.

That said, questions didn't turn out so well. The first question was about how aliens walk among us and what each thought about said aliens. How...do you deal with things like that? There was also around a 5 person showing of the Revolutionary Communist Party of America ( http://revcom.us/ ) for their specific brand of craziness.No organization that promotes violent revolution is to be considered acceptable. They passed out flyers for a rather biased book that our President Batool Zaidi had to disclaim. CFA is against non-rational thinking, not anti-deist.

The panellists did level job of answering, with one bit I absolutely loved. A request was "With logic alone, support why you believe the way you do." IV's side threw about some mention of the historicity of the Bible and a few scriptures, which end up recursive in their logic. (And wow were they fast! IV can pull an answer out of scripture fast enough that you think they had google built into the book! Whether the bible is fact is the question though.) Passed to our panel, Brendan McGrail started a proof with "You assume you exist and that your senses are an accurate enough depiction of reality to allow you to survive." And with that assumption explained why he is an atheist. To do that, from scratch is something to be said for reason. Dr. Lennox said atheism cannot answer certain questions such as "Why am I here?" or "Is it moral to poison my grandmother?" I say it cannot provide as satisfying an answer as the bible, but it can provide a resolute answer. And an answer created from scratch purely by the powers of human reasoning is far more powerful than one handed down by a book, to be believed on faith.

Your sceptical blogger,
Sam Rees

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