If you have a couple hours to kill you can download and watch a debate between philosopher and atheist Daniel Dennett (author of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) and Dinesh D'Souza (conservative writer and one-time policy advisor to Ronald Reagan).

The download page is hosted at Richard Dawkins' site -- you can grab it as a QuickTime file or follows links to the video chunked out in segments on YouTube.

Labels: philosophy, religion

So why think God must be improbable? According to classical theism, God is a necessary being; it is not so much as possible that there should be no such person as God; he exists in all possible worlds. But if God is a necessary being, if he exists in all possible worlds, then the probability that he exists, of course, is 1, and the probability that he does not exist is 0. Far from its being improbable that he exists, his existence is maximally probable. So if Dawkins proposes that God's existence is improbable, he owes us an argument for the conclusion that there is no necessary being with the attributes of God—an argument that doesn't just start from the premise that materialism is true. Neither he nor anyone else has provided even a decent argument along these lines; Dawkins doesn't even seem to be aware that he needs an argument of that sort.¹

Labels: philosophy, science