Peter Singer vs John Lennox - Is There a God?

Most public academic debates concerning the existence of God tend to feature religious apologists who propose sophisticated philosophical arguments for the existence of a supernatural or transcendent Being. Here is where we're exposed to things like the ontological argument, the argument from necessity and contingency, the kalam cosmological argument, the moral argument, Pascal's wager, the argument from design or its fine-tuning cousin, etc.

There is something disingenuous about such approaches, however, because the Gods these apologists believe in go way beyond the scope of their own philosophical arguments. Finding a necessary being (or a first uncaused cause or a fine-tuner or a transcendent, immaterial mind or whatever they want to claim) in no way tells us that therefore Mary got knocked up immaculately, that Joseph Smith wasn't just a charlatan and a fraud, that Mohammed wasn't really a pedophile, that Jesus resurrected and ascended to heaven, or that evolution is just an illusion perpetrated by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Even if these arguments could establish the existence of some sort of supernatural transcendence (and you can be the judge of that yourself), these arguments utterly fail to tell us anything substantial about the nature of said transcendence: whether it's one being or many, whether it's personal or merely abstract, whether it's concerned with human affairs, whether it interacts with the physical universe, or whether it's interested in having a personal relationship with you.

So, it is kind of ironically refreshing in a way to see in the following debate with philosopher Peter Singer, that Oxford mathematician John Lennox tries to argue quite explicitly (and without much mental prestidigitation) for the existence of the Christian God specifically and not just the so-called philosopher's God (a perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnibenevolent being), as other apologists tend to do in their dishonest attempt to seem intellectually sophisticated while defending utterly primitive and irrational beliefs inherited from illiterate goat herders. Whether he succeeds, of course, is another story, but the exchange between the two thinkers is cordial and amiable, and quite interesting as well.

I'll post the debate between Lennox and Richard Dawkins in a few weeks, so stay tuned.