This debate was put together so that members of an audience could ask two notable sides of the debate on the existence of God; William Lane Craig (Christian) and Christopher Hitchens (Anti-Theist), to explain a few topics that prove one way or the other that their side is the more correct answer to the question: “Does God exist?” During one particular segment, Craig brings up the idea that Jesus came to Earth at the perfect time, that the bulk of all history’s human population came immediately after Christ spread Christianity. He claims that 2 percent of all humans whom have ever existed lived prior to Christ’s life because virtually all time after 1 AD was when historians agree that there has been a rapid, consistent world population boom. He says that God knew this would be the best time to harvest his faith in the people because the ideas would spread more quickly at the start of a boom than any other religion ever has before.
His logic however, is flawed. One cannot say that Christ’s presence at that time was at the base of a major population boom. In fact, it is proven that 93% of all the world’s population throughout history lived during and after the Industrial Revolution, over one and a half millennia AFTER Christ. In that regard, God’s timing for placing Christ on Earth was NOT “perfect.” This means that there was a period of growth in population size between the first coming of Christ and the Industrial Revolution where only 5% of the world’s population over time would have learned of Christianity. By Craig’s logic, the real “perfect” time would have been right before the Industrial Revolution. Hitchens states that Christ could not have come at that time because historical records were too accurate and scientific at that point to “allow for such nonsense” to have been recorded as history.
After one segment when Craig says that his beliefs do not PROVE God’s existence (rather, they just present “the most probably hypothesis” out there), Hitchens counters with a quote directly from Craig’s book, saying that should a conflict arise between a theory based on faith and a theory based on anything else, the former would take precedence over the other. This clearly outlines Craig’s bias, that his theories are founded on unproven premises.
Although Craig clearly lost a few points of critical logic, he was able to come up with questions to which Hitchens did not know how to answer. To answer some of Craig’s questions, Hitchens had to base his arguments on his own established idea that God doesn’t exist, therefore, the audience favored Craig in the end. It just goes to prove, although the theist side of this argument makes loops of contradiction and unsteady interpretation around itself, once a follower of faith hides behind a curtain of personal uncertainty, the absolute answer that they do now know but someone else does (namely God, or his extension in Jesus), they can attain the common support.
In our world where atheism and anti-theism is becoming more prevalent, there may eventually be a time when the theist point of view will no longer dominate the debate based on followers.
I made these changes because most of them I felt helped clarify my points in a way of summing them up better. My previous wording was a little confusing given that this metaphysical topic is already so deep. If you notice, most of the revisions are made toward the end of a paragraph, where the idea is concluded better. In particular, I felt that it was necessary to put the population example into better perspective. It was a big part of the blog and together, the numbers of population size did not make much sense the way I was putting everything. There were statistics I left out before to save space and have the words flow faster. I realize this was not important, but rather it was causing the blog to slow down a bit.
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