Does God Exist? (Frank Turek vs Christopher Hitchens)

The Question

Does God exist — billed in the debaters' materials both ways: "Does God Exist?" and "What Best Explains Reality: Theism or Atheism?" The second title is the fairer description of what Turek set out to do.

The Christian Case

Turek presented eight arguments for the existence of God in sequence — a cumulative case rather than a single chain. (The debate's own description records the number; the documented heads include the origin of the universe, its fine-tuning for life, and the existence of objective, immaterial moral values, with the reality of free will and consciousness pressed in the exchanges.) The method was inference to the best explanation: reality has features — a beginning, a calibration, a conscience, a mind — and theism explains them as atheism, on its own resources, does not. Turek also turned Hitchens's book against its subtitle: the evil done by religious people cannot count against God's existence unless there is an objective moral standard by which to call it evil — and that standard is the very thing atheism cannot supply. His closing, preserved in the campus newspaper's report, refused the caricature of a God who hates his opponent: God's attitude, he said, is that "there is a Christopher Hitchens and I love him" — and that he died for him.

The Opposing Case, at Full Strength

Hitchens prosecuted. Religion, he argued, is our first and worst attempt at explanation — a supernatural dictatorship under which mankind is watched, judged, and threatened from conception to beyond death, and the proper response to such a tyranny, were it real, would be resistance, not worship. The scriptures show their human manufacture in contradiction and borrowed myth. The fine-tuning of the universe impresses him not at all: most of the universe is lethal void, and a designer who took billions of years and mass extinctions to arrive at us was either incompetent or indifferent. And the moral argument inverts: everything good believers do, unbelievers do without God, while religion adds its own unique evils — theocracy, the war against medicine and pleasure, the terrorising of children with hell.

Where It Turned

Where the Biola debate would turn the following year: on the difference between the question asked and the speech prepared. Hitchens's case, again, was overwhelmingly a case against religion — its record, its texts, its psychology. Turek's eight arguments stood in a row at the side of the stage, largely unengaged; the debate's own published description records that he "did not answer any of the eight arguments that were presented for the existence of God," and while that is the Christian side's own channel speaking, the pattern is confirmed by the shape of every surviving account, including neutral ones: the campus paper's audience verdict dwelt on manner — one Hitchens supporter found him "rude and dismissive," while Turek, to a student who disagreed with him, was "at least likable." Likability is not logic either — but unanswered arguments are unanswered arguments.

The Verdict

Turek won, on points. On the motion as billed, one side presented an eightfold case for God's existence and defended its central charges — that atheism borrows the moral capital it spends — while the other delivered a magnificent indictment of religion, a subject adjacent to the motion and considerably easier. The honest caveats: Hitchens's portrait of religion's record contains truths this room does not flinch from, and Turek's cumulative case varies in strength link by link (students should grade the eight separately, not as a bundle). But a debate is won on the question, and the question was God.

Watch For

The closing move. After two hours of combat, Turek ends not with a syllogism but with the gospel aimed at his opponent by name — contention and love in the same sentence. That is the tone this whole Studio exists to teach.