SOUL FOOD:TV debates about God limited

O n Sunday, in Berkeley Breathed’s comic strip “Opus,” Michael J. Binkley, one of the characters, remarked to the strip’s penguin namesake, “Man, here’s a surprising trend: Atheist books are suddenly best-sellers!”

“Maybe not so surprising,” Opus replied.

Surprising or not, it’s true. As Bradley Shingleton pointed out in the winter issue of the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, “the two top-selling volumes among ‘religious’ books in November 2006 were actually atheist manifestos,” according to Publisher’s Weekly.

A half year later those two tomes — Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Sam Harris’ “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” — are still garnering great attention and noteworthy sales. Now, “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon” by Daniel Dennett and “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchens has joined them.

Oddly, all have found faint praise among reviewers, including fellow scientists and scholars. As Shingleton notes, Harris and Dawkins have been taken to task “for their fundamental misunderstanding of religion.”

What has been dubbed a “new atheism” by publications as diverse as “Wired” and “Time” was, however, at first largely ignored by believers.

Only lately has there been a rush to debate by an array of religious advocates. Dennis Prager took on Christopher Hitchens on his radio program. Rick Warren sat down with Sam Harris for Newsweek.

Mark D. Roberts, senior pastor of Irvine Presbyterian Church, scholar, professor and author of several books, including “Can We Trust the Gospels?” sparred for three hours with Hitchens on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show. Roberts has since been covering points missed on his blog (10-plus lengthy posts and counting) at www.markdroberts.com.

How does Hitchens err in his argument about religion? Roberts counts the ways.

In citing Hitchens’ misrepresentations of New Testament canon alone, Roberts, a graduate of Harvard University with a doctorate in New Testament and Christian origins, enumerates and stops at 15.

Which hints of how limited — even given three hours — these debates on the existence of God have often been.

“Talk radio, in most cases, is not well suited to careful, reasoned, extensive discourse,” Roberts writes. “It’s much better for sound bites.”

Recent debate formats — whether radio, magazine or televised — have dealt with the question of God’s existence in an exceedingly truncated manner. Yet none have quite made me squirm as much as ABC News’ “Does God Exist?”

Here, in a exchange moderated by Martin Bashir, child star Kirk Cameron (“Growing Pains”) and evangelist Ray Comfort of the Christian ministry Way of the Master were pitted against atheists Brian Sapient and a woman known only as Kelly, both members of “the rational response squad,” a group of atheists who produce the website www.rationalresponders.com.

Cameron and Comfort proposed to prove — apart from any appeal to faith — that God exists.

From the start, the program seemed baiting. In pre-recorded clips, Cameron and Comfort are shown being shouted down and in one case assaulted while preaching on the streets.

In studio, Bashir asks them, “To what extent are you provoking that reaction? Is it really the message or is it your behavior that’s provoking that adverse response?” He introduces them to their audience as “unashamed evangelists.”

“Unabashed atheists” Bashir calls Sapient and Kelly. On their website, he explains, they invite visitors to take the “Blasphemy Challenge” — to deny on camera, to be posted online, the existence of the Holy Spirit.

Kelly and Sapient exude an almost adolescent smugness. Both seem blinded by the belief that anyone who believes in God is an irrational dolt.

In a debate about the existence of God, it would “be relevant to rebut the arguments offered in favor of theism,” Melinda Penner later wrote of the debate in her blog.

Penner is the director of operations for Stand to Reason — a Christian ministry whose mission is to train Christians “to think more clearly about their faith and to make an even-handed, incisive, yet gracious defense for classical Christianity and classical Christian values in the public square.” She holds a master’s degree in the philosophy of religion and ethics.

During the ABC debate, she notes, Comfort presented arguments for the existence of God from design and from morality. How might the appearance of design instead be “the result of random, blind mechanisms,” she asks?

Explain how a “prescriptive incumbency of morality can arise from material sources,” she suggests. Put another way: “Where does the ‘ought’ come from, rather than only the ‘is’?”

A morality that comes from generations of cumulative experience — as Kelly claims it has — is merely “descriptive, not prescriptive,” Penner explains.

Does God exist? Bashir called it “perhaps the most fundamental question any of us could ever ask.”

The current books and debates addressing it, though, have left me hungry for more and better. After reading her blog, I contacted Penner with some questions about the strengths and weaknesses of the ABC debate and how better discussions might be possible.