his past Wednesday (March 21, 2012) I participated in a debate titled “Does God Probably Exist, or Not?” at Virginia Tech. My debate partner was a very loving fellow who was an undergraduate in International Relations. My two atheist opponents were a PhD student in Physics and the other was an undergraduate in biology. I was thoroughly pleased and impressed with the university and the love and kindness that the organizers and participants extended to me. I certainly felt like I was in a friendly atmosphere and sensed no hint of hostility.
I thought the debate went very well. My only criticism was that I was under the impression that there was going to be a twenty or twenty-five minute cross-examination period but that never came to fruition. I present three arguments for the existence of God: the argument from contingency, the fine-tuning argument, and the moral argument. For the contingency argument I used Thomas Aquinas’ argument. The fine-tuning argument was an abductive form and a slightly modified version of Robin Collins argument. The moral argument was an abductive argument modeled after David Baggett’s version. In a few following posts I’ll share my arguments and methodology in more detail but here are the forms of my arguments I used: