On behalf of the sponsors, Campus Crusade for Christ, Athletes in Action, and Priority
One Associates, welcome to a critical thinking event! A university should be more than
simply a place of learning about things, but a place to grapple with issues of truth, who
we are, where we come from and where we are going. Tonight we are going to grapple
with the issue, "Does God Exist?" Although you may not agree with ideas proposed here
this evening, I hope you will be intellectually stimulated and motivated to further study
and further thinking about this age-old debate. Out of respect to our two esteemed
debaters, I would ask that the audience refrain from any emotional outburst or support or
disapproval (usually confined to a building near by!) during the presentation, so as not to
interfere with their making their points clear.

I would like to thank our debaters for participating in tonight's event. Taking the "No,
God does not exist" position will be Dr. Douglas M. Jesseph, Associate Professor in the
North Carolina State University Department of Philosophy and Religion. Dr. Jesseph has
a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton University and obtained his B.A. in Mathematics

Taking the "Yes, God does exist" position will be Dr. William Lane Craig, a
lecturer/speaker and author residing in Marietta, Georgia. He got a B.A. in
Communications from Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, a Ph.D. in Philosophy from
the University of Birmingham, England, and a Doctorate in Theology at the University of
Munich. I thank both of you.

If you will refer to the inside of your program, you will see the format of tonight's debate. Dr. Jesseph won the toss of the coin earlier and will go first for 20 minutes. Dr. Craig will go next for 20 minutes. Then each will speak for 12 minutes, then each for 8 minutes, and finally each will end with 5 minutes. At the conclusion of the formal debate, you will be asked to fill out a comment card. On this card, you will be asked to vote on who made the more convincing argument. We will conclude with a 40-minute question and answer time. Ladies and gentlemen, let us begin. Does God exist? Dr. Jesseph, the floor is yours.

Let's look, then, at that first major contention, that there no good reasons to think that
atheism is true. Immediately I have to disagree with Dr. Jesseph's definition of atheism.
He says, "Atheism is the claim that there is no rational justification for belief in God."

That is not atheism. That is agnosticism, which holds that you don't know whether God
exists or not. Atheism is the claim that God does not exist. That is a claim to knowledge
and therefore demands justification. This is most evident by the simple fact that many
Christian theologians believe in God by faith and do not hold that there are any rational
proofs for the existence of God -- for example Karl Barth. But nobody, by any stretch of
the imagination, could call Karl Barth an atheist. So Dr. Jesseph has to carry his
arguments against the existence of God if he is to prove atheism.

(1) I will agree that when more familiar forms of explanation are available, then we
should prefer those. But he has got to show that therea re these more familiar forms of
explanation available for the facts that I will be discussing, and I don't think that there
are. He says that you can't test God as an explanation. You can run tests toveri fy God's
existence. As we will see, certain beliefs or predictions have been verified by the
evidence, and I think, therefore, this constitutes a verification of the theistic hypothesis.

(2) His second argument is that if you hold to one view of deity, that must deny
alternative deities. Well, that is only logically necessary. If a certain concept of God is
shown to correspond to reality, then, of course, contradictory concepts do not correspond
to reality. But that is no argument against any concept of God or the existence of God.

(3) Thirdly, he asked, "Isn't evil inconsistent with God's existence?" I think not. There is
no contradiction between the two statements "God exists" and "Evil exists." Now Dr.
Jesseph will try to show a contradiction by supplying some additional premises. He says,
"If God is all powerful, He can create any world that He wants. And if He is all good, He
would want to create a world without evil." The problem is that neither of those
additional premises is necessarily true. Consider the premise that if God is all powerful,

creatures, then He cannot guarantee that they will always do what is right. It is logically
impossible tomake someonef re e l y do something. And so what Dr. Jesseph would have to
prove to carry this objection is that there is a possible world of free creatures which God
could create which has as much good as this world does, but without the same amount of
evil. Now how could he possibly prove such a thing? I couldn't even imagine how you
would go about proving this.