A debate from 2014, I believe, between Andrew Bernstein and Dinesh D’Souza, hosted at the University of Texas. Arguments about religion typically fall into three categories:
1. Philosophical arguments about supernaturalism, faith and reason, the source of morality, and so on.
2. Scriptural arguments about passages in the religion’s core texts.
3. Historical arguments about the record of the religion in practice.
One striking feature of this debate is that history is most prominent in both Bernstein’s and D’Souza’s arguments: Why did Rome fail? How individualistic were the Greeks? What did Christianity accomplish in the Middle Ages? How brutal were the religious wars of the Reformation? What was the significance of the Enlightenment of the 1700s?
Related: My episode in the Philosophers, Explained series on C.S. Lewis’s contemporary defense of Christian ethics:
Excellent debate!
It’s amazing, in a way, that religion has and has had the hold and consequences on mankind that it has had, and yet it is clung to as a matter of life and death. That speaks to the profound importance of philosophy as such, our fundamental need of a view of where we are, what we are, how we know, and what is the good. There’s no escape.
Great job by Dr. Bernstein. Perhaps the most fundamental point he made is that religion has given respectability to irrationality. And perhaps the most fundamental point that D’Souza made, towards the end in answer to a question, I think it was, and as almost an aside, was the Christian idea of forgiveness. Given Christianity’s view that man is depraved (Original Sin), they need a God who forgives them for being alive.
Thank you for referencing this debate, Dr. Hicks.