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Voice: With 50,000 watts of "Praise Power," this is WMUZ Detroit.
{Opening Theme Song}
Introductory
Al Kresta, host: Well, here we are on a Tuesday afternoon; you're listening to "Talk From The Heart" on WMUZ. I'm your host Al Kresta. Thanks for sticking with me today. I suspect you're going to be treated to a discussion today that perhaps you've never heard before. It is a discussion on the topic, "Does God Exist?" and I'll have with me John Koster, who has written a book called The Atheist Syndrome. He is a Christian who maintains that the men and women who founded modern scientific atheism all shared certain common experiences which contributed to a certain type of mental illness that he {adverb unintelligible} calls the Atheist Syndrome. [1] Also with me will be Frank Zindler. He's the director of the Ohio Division of the American Atheists, and I'll give you a little more background on both gentlemen in just a little while.
This question, Does God Exist?, of course, is perhaps the single greatest question a human being can ask. Mortimer Adler, in his Great Ideas Syntopicon, mentioned that more consequences flow from the answer to this question than perhaps any other question that human beings can ask. Does God Exist?
Many of us, of course, when we think about atheists and atheism, set up straw men, things that are easily able to be knocked down in our own intellectual imaginations. And I thought, well, sometimes we're a little unfair to our opponents in matters of this sort. Instead of continually preaching to the choir here, I thought today we'd give ourselves an opportunity to let an atheist come on and debate his point of view. It should be illumining [sic ] and instructing for all of us. You will certainly have an opportunity to interact with our guests. Our number will be two-seven-two, forty-one eleven. I don't suspect we will get to the phone lines until one -the earliest I can imagine is one-twenty, and I would think the outer limit'll be about one-forty.
Now that's going to be our topic today. Why do Atheists believe that God does not exist? What is their evidence for it.? We'll also be talking with John Koster about what evidence there is for the existence of God. Is there a reliable revelation? And you'll be able to take part in this discussion. Our number again is -keep it written down - two-seven-two, forty-one eleven.
{Commercials}
Al Kresta, host: We're coming up onto 1:06 on a Tuesday afternoon. My topic today, "Does God Exist?," a debate between John Koster and Frank Zindler. Let me introduce my guests. John Koster is the author of five non-fiction books and more than one hundred articles which have appeared in magazines such as Civil War, Times Illustrated and American Heritage . He is a contributing editor to World Book Encyclopedia in Chicago and Tree of Knowledge in Britain. As a journalist for twenty years his articles and features have been syndicated by the Associated Press and U.P.I. He reads seven languages including French, German and New Testament Greek. And John has been on with me before as we talked briefly about his book, The Atheist Syndrome. And, John, thank you for joining me again on "Talk From The Heart."
John Koster: Well, you're welcome very much. It's a pleasure to be here.
Al Kresta: Frank Zindler is my other guest. Frank is the director of the Ohio Division of the American Atheists. He's a former college professor in biology and geology. He was seventeen years at the State University of New York. His specialty is neurophysiology. Currently, he is employed as an editor and linguist [2 ] in a scientific publishing house in Columbus, Ohio. He was raised a Lutheran, was going to be a minister, got interested in biology, and through his study, he began to find that there was no reason to believe in God. And that took care of his ministry opportunities.
Well, Frank, thank you by the way, not only for being here, but I'm glad that since you didn't think there was evidence for the existence of God that you didn't pursue the ministry!
Frank Zindler: {Laughs.}
John Koster: Well, {unintelligible} . . . not an Episcopalian.
Frank Zindler: I'm not sure I followed that {unintelligible} but thank you for having me on.
Al Kresta: I'm not certain that everybody who goes into the ministry believes in God in the first place!
Frank Zindler: Well, you know that's interesting because I've known quite a few Jesuit priests, for example, who really are Atheists, and some Episcopalian priests who were Atheists and a number of other clergypersons who really didn't believe in god but thought that they were doing something important socially, and so they continued to keep up the hypocrisy of being believers.
Al Kresta: I think, gentlemen, I suspect from your remarks, Frank, and John, I would say from what I know of you, that we can agree at the outset that this question about the existence of God is an important question. Frank, would you -
John Koster: Oh yes, absolutely.
Al Kresta: Would you agree, Frank, that this is an important question?
Frank Zindler: Yes, I think it is, because if any of the gods or goddesses exist, that people have worshiped or worship, it tells us something about what is happening in the world, and what may happen in the world. On the other hand, if none of these supernatural beings exist, it tells us that we humans are on our own resources, that we have to make decisions wisely, that we cannot depend upon a "Big Brother" in the sky to solve our problems for us.
Incidentally, Al, before we get into this good discussion, could I just give a brief plug for our Dial-an-Atheist line there in Detroit?
Al Kresta: Go ahead.
Frank Zindler: We have a Dial-an-Atheist line there. The message changes I think every day. It is your area code, three-one-three, there, and it's not a toll call. The number is two-seven-two, nineteen eighty-one. Again, that's two-seven-two, nineteen eighty-one. It's a recorded message and it's Atheist commentary on everything from soup to nuts. {Laughs.} Sooner or later you'll hear biblical criticism, and political commentary, historical analysis, philosophical analysis, all kinds of stuff. So if any of our listeners are at all curious as to what Atheists think about this or that, they should dial the line up.
Al Kresta: Okay. We will - Let me explain a little bit of the format for today.
Frank Zindler: All right.
Al Kresta: It'll be a very flexible format. This is not formal debate. Not many people understand the dynamics of formal debate anyways [sic]. But they do understand discussions. They have 'em over soup and coffee. They have them at bars. And so, that's what I'd like us to have today, is a discussion.
Frank Zindler: Okay.
A definition of god and Koster's repeated unwillingness to discuss it; Koster's digressions into neurophysiology.
Al Kresta: I'll moderate the discussion. And I'll get the ball rolling with some questions and try to establish some continuity. But you gentlemen will really be running with it.
Let me just ask, John, since you make the assertion that God does exist, let me ask you then, as we begin this discussion today, to define, briefly, God, so that we know in some measure what we're talking about.
John Koster: {Laughs.} Okay. I'm going to have to fall back on scripture, because I really can't define God in my own subjective personal level.
When Moses was in the desert and saw the burning bush, he said "Who are you?" The answer he received is "I am that I am." To me God is the Ultimate Being in existence. God is there whether we want him to be there or not. [3 ] What I dealt with in The Atheist Syndrome was not trying to prove the existence of God, but to show some of the flaws in the mechanism of denial that led people to think that atheism was more scientific than religion - specifically more scientific than Christianity.
Al Kresta: Okay. Now again, just let's take a little bit of time to elaborate that point. In your book The Atheist Syndrome , as you said, this is not a case for the existence of God that you presented. But it's -
John Koster: No. It's for the unscientific nature of Nineteenth Century Victorian atheism and how that affected the Twentieth Century and atheist theory ever since.
Al Kresta: Your claim is that the founders of modern atheism as one examines their lives and looks at their common experiences, that what you see is some sort of pathological -
John Koster: "Pathological" might be too strong a word. I think you see a strong evidence of mental illness. That doesn't indicate that they were psychotic, or that they were, you know, raving lunatics. What it indicates is that they had such a strong bias against religion that they could not possibly accept any evidence in favor of religious reality, that they reacted only to the negative evidence which they claimed to find in the science of the Victorian Era.
Al Kresta: Okay. Now, bringing us back then to a definition of who God is, you rely upon scripture for a definition of who God is.
John Koster: For my definition.
Al Kresta: Okay.
John Koster: I think that you can possibly come to have a knowledge of God outside of scripture. I think many people did in Classical times. I think that if you look, for instance, at some of the things that Socrates or Cicero said, it's very clear that without any recourse to Judaism or to Christianity, which of course at that time did not exist, that they had a reasonably clear concept of immortality, of God, and of the Ultimate Ground of Being. They did not understand it, I think, as clearly as Christians can today, but they were aiming in the right direction. I've heard many of the same things, incidentally, from Japanese, from Vietnamese, from American Indians of various tribes, that the undercurrent of religious reality appears to underlie all human experience until it's rationalized away by some sort of system. [4 ]
Al Kresta: Okay. Frank, you want to -
Frank Zindler: If I could comment on that -
Al Kresta: Please do.
Frank Zindler: {Laughs.} I'm not at all surprised that John is unable to define his god; because if he could define his god, then we could set up a test to test for the existence of this deity. Since we cannot define it, and since we cannot test for it, it puts his god along with most of the other gods and goddesses, beyond the pale of meaning. They are meaningless constructs. The sentences that involve his god - [5]
Al Kresta: Well, Frank, let me just, let me just -
John Koster: Okay, just to work him -
Al Kresta: Hold -
John Koster: Let's deal with something - Let's deal with something, Frank, that can be tested. You say you know something about neurophysiology, right? [6]
Frank Zindler: Right, which you show very little understanding of in your book, incidentally. [7]
{For a few seconds at this point, both Mr. Koster and Mr. Zindler spoke simultaneously, none of which was intelligible on the air.}
Frank Zindler: What's that?
John Koster: I think you'd understand that that book was not written as a scientific text.
Frank Zindler: Well, that's very clear. It's a creationist polemic. It's sort of like what Henry Morris or Duane Gish write. It's really quite outrageous, I think, as a description of that period of time. And what you talk about psychology bears very little resemblance to modern neuropsychology. It's sort of Freudian armchair "psychologizing" with very little substance.
John Koster: Which is okay when Freud did it against God, but not when I do it in his favor. [8 ]
Frank Zindler: Well, I'm not a Freudian. I have never -
John Koster: Neither am I.
Frank Zindler: - been a Freudian. I think Freud sort of got lost. He was not in the mainstream of scientific psychology, which really starts with Pavlov and continues on through the behaviorists and then on into the neuropsychologists.
Al Kresta, host: Gentlemen, listen. We're moving - we're moving away - we can pick up the thesis -
John Koster: Well then, basically, you subscribe to the behaviorist school of psychology then.
Frank Zindler: As far as it goes. But I go beyond that because I understand that all behavior is chemically determined.
Al Kresta: Okay, hold on. Hold on. Listen. One of the ground rules of this thing is that this is my show.
Frank Zindler: Okay!
{Laughter from both Mr. Zindler and Mr. Koster.}
Al Kresta: All right? Now, the three - the three of us get talking like this and nobody's gonna hear a thing.
John Koster: Okay.
Al Kresta: So, here's what we're gonna do. I want to get back to this question of whether the God that you referred to, John, is a meaningful construct. I think this is going to plunge us into some philosophical discussion.
John Koster: Okay.
Al Kresta: And Frank, this question of the meaningfulness of religious assertions -
Frank Zindler: Yeah.
Al Kresta: - is probably going to occupy us for the next few minutes. So, why don't you hang in there, and we'll come back, and talk about whether John's assertion of the existence of God is a meaningful assertion, an assertion that can be tested, or either falsified or verified.
You're listening to "Talk From The Heart" on WMUZ.
{Commercials}
Al Kresta, host: You're listening to "Talk From The Heart" on WMUZ at 1:18 on a Tuesday. And my guests are Frank Zindler, the director of the Ohio Division of American Atheists, and John Koster, author of the book The Atheist Syndrome. We are discussing the existence of God. And Frank, your claim is that if John is unable to define God -
Frank Zindler: Yeah.
Al Kresta: -then, in a sense, the debate is at a disadvantage because how can we verify or classify something which is undefinable? [9]
Frank Zindler: Well, that's right. I mean - you know, if I say his god - How could I say his god does not exist if I don't even know what his god is supposed to be?
Al Kresta: Okay.
Frank Zindler: - what he claims it's supposed to be?
Al Kresta: Okay, John. Response?
John Koster: Let me talk to something that Frank claims that he exists. [sic] He says that all consciousness is essentially chemical or electrochemical, right? [10 ]
Frank Zindler: Consciousness is a process. It's the result of the ongoing chemical changes and electrical changes in the brain.
John Koster: That idea has been around since, I believe, the 1860s, right? That's from Helmholtz [11] and people like that.
Frank Zindler: Ah, yeah. They were the great pioneers of this. And of course, this grows stronger with every week. You know there are many journals devoted to this now. And there's no serious contradiction of this among the scientific community that I know of - with the possible exception of John Eccles, [ 12] who thinks that my soul - he told me one time -my soul exists in my left hemisphere. When I asked him how come the left and not the right, he said that's where my speech center is. {Laughs.} I suppose that means that people who are mute are zombies having no soul. But with that exception, there's no serious question about this.
John Koster: Well, Eccles doesn't really exist in outer space. He's building a collection of information that was previously believed in by Sir Charles Sherrington [13] and Wilder Penfield, [14] both of whom also were also [ sic] Nobel laureates as Eccles - [15 ]
Frank Zindler: Well, Penfield, I think, was an Atheist. And uh -
John Koster: No, he was a Christian. In fact, he-
Frank Zindler: {Laughs.} Well, he was a very strange one, then. Certainly I have very little problem with Penfield's experimental work.
John Koster: Okay.
Evidence for souls, spirits, and an
afterlife; can all the primitive peoples of the world be wrong?
Frank Zindler: But, anyway. No. There is no evidence for a soul.
John Koster: But Penfield said there was, didn't he? [ 16]
Frank Zindler: I'm sorry?
John Koster: Didn't Penfield say that there was?
Frank Zindler: I don't remember that in Penfield. Of course, he's one of the old-timers. But certainly no modern neuropsychologist that I can think of has any room for the soul or spirit in his work.
John Koster: I don't think that's true at all. I think at the University of Edinburgh virtually the whole department believes in something like that.
Frank Zindler: Ah well, I think that's crazy. - {keeps talking as host speaks}
Al Kresta, host: Hold it. Wait. Let me just jump in here. Frank.
Frank Zindler: {continuing} all the time. While I'm on this -
Al Kresta: Frank, Frank -
Frank Zindler: Yes.
Al Kresta: Hold on. You said "that's crazy." I wasn't sure what that was a reference to.
Frank Zindler: Well, the idea that the entire psychology department at the University of Edinburgh believes in spirits. I mean that's - I perhaps should have said -
John Koster: I didn't say spirit but I said soul. I think - it may have been not every person in the entire department, but I know that there has been a lot of literature published out of there by people who believe that an independent mind or soul is entirely possible. [17]
Frank Zindler: Well, of course, almost all research that is published has no use of spirits or souls. We talk about receptors, and neurotransmitters, and electrical circuits, and so forth. You know, the idea of soul and spirit is a biological misunderstanding. The ancients thought that breath, or spiritus in Latin, was the vivifying force that differentiated a living body from a dead body. And since spiritus is a physical entity, and can exist outside the body at least momentarily, the idea came about that spirits can exist outside the body. And you can have spirit possession and all this sort of thing. But it was simply a misunderstanding. Breath is not the vivifying principle. After all, plants are alive and they don't have breath. So the word pneuma in the Greek New Testament means breath; so we have the "holy breath," or hagion pneuma, the "holy ghost." It's all just biological misunderstanding. They didn't understand biochemistry in those days.
John Koster: Well, let me use a transcultural example here. Sioux Indians - the word qua-neeggee, [18 ] which means 'ghost' in their language, has nothing to do with breath. But they believe in spirits very clearly.
Frank Zindler: And what does it mean?
John Koster: It means 'ghost.'
Frank Zindler: Well, what does 'ghost' mean in its - in its earlier -
John Koster: 'Deceased entity.' 'Person whose body is no longer alive.' [19]
Frank Zindler: Well, I think you'll find that in the vast majority of cases, words that mean 'ghost' or 'spirit,' and even in some cases 'mind,' originally meant 'breeze' or 'breath' or something like that. We find that ruach in the Hebrew Old Testament, nephesh, all of these words in their primal sense meant 'breath' or 'breeze' or something of that sort. Anima in Latin, also, had this same sense. So an animal was thought to be alive because it had anima, or breath. Plants were not thought to be alive, and that's why Noah didn't have to take them in the ark to save them. They weren't thought to be living things.
But, certainly we're talking about very primitive understanding, now, when we talk about spirits and souls. This is totally unknown to modern neuroscience.
John Koster: Well, this is something that I've always had to quarrel with Darwin about. Darwin and his successors, Huxley and people like that, had a sort of an intense racist view that primitive people had to be stupid or that they had to be closer to animals than we are. I have always seen them as culturally different, but as essentially just as human as you or I - [20 ]
Frank Zindler: Well, I would agree with you. We have -
John Koster: Then why - is the idea of soul or spirit so universal among them? [21]
Frank Zindler: Because none of these people who are primitive in the sense of not having modern science, none of these primitive people had the chemical understanding to know what differentiated living from dead. And the most obvious difference is the presence or absence of breath, in some cases the presence or absence of blood. So you find, also, some passages in the Bible that think that blood is the vivifying force. But these are certainly concepts that would be discovered by every tribe just about everywhere and one certainly shouldn't be surprised about that.
John Koster: Why is it so universal if it's so false? [ 22]
Frank Zindler: Well, as I just said, the people who make up these things do not have access to the actual chemical understanding of what's going on to differentiate life from non-living. And the only observation they can make when a man just suddenly dies, is that he isn't breathing any more. And so, it's very logical, given the circumstances, to think that it was breath that made him alive.
John Koster: How do you deal with the fact that people who are sometimes restored from physical death can report experiences outside their body? [23]
Frank Zindler: This can be done without being near death. It's very easy to do that with hypnosis, for example. All that you need is some abnormal situation, whether it be disease or suggestion or anesthesia which blocks off the input from the body surface to the brain. And so the brain begins to function as though it is disembodied. A lot of experimental stuff has been done on this. I've experimented on this myself.
John Koster: Oh really?
Frank Zindler: Yes.
John Koster: And do people report substantive experiences outside their bodies?
Frank Zindler: Yes. They tell about flying out the window and exploring the outside, and coming back through the window, and floating around near the ceiling and looking down at their bodies. It's a reproducible sort of thing.
John Koster: Interesting. Now, if it's reproducible, tell me this. Is the information they bring back accurate, or is it inaccurate?
Frank Zindler: It's inaccurate.
John Koster: Consistently inaccurate?
Frank Zindler: Of course. Yeah, well, I mean, unless they've previously been outside to see what's out there. But, whenever you do experiments on this to control to see whether they can or cannot determine information that is hidden otherwise, you find that they can't do better than just average guessing as far as accuracy is concerned.
John Koster: And you maintain that's a universal finding?
Frank Zindler: Oh sure. Sure. Yeah, these "near death" experiences, as I've said, this "out of body" experience is the result of the brain being cut off from communication with the body surface.
John Koster: Well, how does - how do the sensory receptors function if the brain is cut off? In other words, where is it getting the information from if it's not in contact with the eyes or the mouth or some other sensory organ? [24 ]
Frank Zindler: Well, this is from the memory banks in the brain itself. I mean, you have memory. For example, if you were to be blinded this afternoon, if some horrible accident caused you to lose your eyes, you would still have visual memories, wouldn't you? Of course.
John Koster: Absolutely.
Frank Zindler: Of course.
John Koster: Well, would you be able to - would you be able to visualize things that you had not seen before? [25 ]
Frank Zindler: Sure, because you can put things together from their components. You could - maybe you've never seen a purple house before - but you certainly could imagine one, couldn't you? Because you have a memory of purpleness and you have a memory of various houses, so that the brain can reconstruct these things very easily.
John Koster: And you don't see this as in any way independent of just the receptors? In other words, if the brain has the capacity to reconstruct things that it has never seen -
Frank Zindler: Sure it does, so that we can do trial and error in the brain without actually having to move our bodies, for example, into dangerous situations. The brain sort of walks through things in advance, and those things which turn out to be plausible - then maybe the entire body goes along and does. But that's one of the nice things of higher vertebrates is they apparently are able - we call it thinking things through. But basically it's assembling and disassembling sensory components until something is produced that seems to be workable.
Al Kresta, host: You're listening to "Ta -
Frank Zindler: But you know, you mentioned that -
Al Kresta: Hold on, Frank. We'll come back and let you and John continue interaction on this question of - "Does God Exist?" And we'll recap in just one moment. Two-seven-two, forty-one eleven's our number if you want to begin lining up on the phone lines. My guests again: John Koster, author of the book The Atheist Syndrome, and Frank Zindler, the director of the Ohio Division of American Atheists.
{Commercials}
Al Kresta, host: We're discussing, today, the topic "Does God Exist?" The director of the Ohio Division of American Atheists, Frank Zindler, my guest, and John Koster, author of the book, The Atheist Syndrome, on this topic. Let me see if I have - I can recap for us here, gentlemen.
John, at the beginning, Frank alleged that you had inadequately defined God, so that really there was not - wasn't a very meaningful word for us. We had no way to verify or falsify this God that you asserted. And as I understand it, you asked Frank then, well, what about human consciousness or a soul or a sense of identity. Is there not some analogy between, you know, human consciousness and our inability to fully define it, and God himself, our ability [26] to fully define him. Frank's response was that, well, consciousness is simply the result of electrochemical reactions. And, where do we go from here, John?
John Koster: Well, I'm, actua - what I'm trying to get at is that if this is true, then it should be impossible for a person who has a near-death experience or is otherwise completely unconscious and rendered what we would say is clinically dead, to bring back accurate information about what was going on around the operating table at the time he was being restored.
Frank Zindler: Well, wait a minute.
Al Kresta: Would you agree that that's the case, Frank?
Frank Zindler: Wait a minute.
John Koster: Yes, ask Frank about that.
Frank Zindler: There is very definite experimental evidence that anesthesia does not necessarily completely cut off all ability to register auditory input. Studies have been done which show that a person under anesthesia can sometimes remember quite accurately things that were said in the operating theater. And, some of these things have been repeated in purely experimental situations, that anesthesia does not cut off all the sensory inputs equally.
Al Kresta: Maybe what would help us here, listen. Maybe what would help us here is to have a particular instance or a case, John, that you could propose that maybe Frank could then take a look at. Do you have an instance in mind?
John Koster: Well, I recall reading in Recollections of Death, by Dr. Michael Sabom, [27] that a number of people reported exactly what was going on not at a time when they were anesthetized, but at a time when there showed no heartbeat or brainwaves.
Frank Zindler: Well, again, I was not there to see that those were accurate reports.
John Koster: Oh, okay. But if they did - but if they did show a response through outside surroundings which was correct, giving the position of people, conversations that took place, medical techniques that they had not seen, things they don't usually show people, like in defribillator pads, and giving somebody an injection directly to the heart, or pounding his chest, something that's hidden from the average layman, but they could report this taking place, and what people said, when they had no heartbeat, and no breath, and no brainwaves, then they may, in fact, have experienced life after death. [28]
Frank Zindler: Well, this is - this requires more corroboration. Certainly. And -
John Koster: Okay. It requires a great deal of corroboration, but it took place.
Frank Zindler: Yeah, a lot of these anecdotal things, when you do have an opportunity to check into them, you find that things aren't quite as reported, that there's a certain amount of retroactive examination going on.
Trying to get back on the subject;
historic evidence for the existence of Jesus
Frank Zindler: I am curious that when asked to define god, John, you mentioned Moses and the interaction at the burning bush with Yahweh saying 'eheyeh 'asher 'eheyeh, "I am who I am." And, you know, I think that's one of the most interesting examples of primitive religion, because what that's really all about is he's trying to get the secret name from the deity. In the ancient world, the priests and priestesses of the different gods and goddesses held their power because they knew the secret name of the deity. And the whole covenant between Moses and Yahweh was the agreement: give me your secret name and I'll carry out your sacrifices and so on for you. And this is why the Bible commands the death penalty to anyone who pronounces the name of god aloud. [29] Moses knew the secret name, finally, Yahweh, and, -but - god wasn't going to give in right away. They had to dicker a bit, you see. And so we have this, "I am who I am," and he says, "No, but what's your REAL name?" {Laughs.}
John Koster: Well, I'm rather relieved to see that you think Moses actually existed [30] because usually when I deal with atheists, they will deny that either Moses or Jesus actually had a historical -
Frank Zindler: Well, I treat Moses as a literary character just as I do Jesus. I don't know whether he did or not.
John Koster: Let's talk - let's talk about that. Let's talk about Jesus a little bit since this is a - [31 ]
Frank Zindler: Okay, yeah.
John Koster: Do you believe that he existed historically?
Frank Zindler: Well, there's no evidence that he existed.
John Koster: Ah!
Frank Zindler: That's not quite the same as proving he did not exist.
John Koster: Okay, well, what evidence do you say would be acceptable to you to believe that Jesus actually existed?
Frank Zindler: Well, certainly we would want at least some eyewitness accounts, wouldn't we?
John Koster: Well, we have the four gospels, right?
Frank Zindler: Well, those were written too late and none of those were by eyewitnesses. As you know, the authorship -
John Koster: Well, they were probably - they were probably dictated by eyewitnesses to people who took them down.
Frank Zindler: Well, there's no proof of that. In the identification of the different gospels with the supposed authors - Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John - this came late in the second century. [ 32] And so we really have no idea who wrote them. But from internal evidence we know that they could not have been eyewitnesses. Matthew and Luke -
John Koster: Excuse me. Isn't that rather dated research? I rec - that sounds like it comes out of the Tübingen school of theology. Don't most people accept now that all the gospels were written in the form they exist now by A.D. 100?
Frank Zindler: Well, by 100, I wouldn't quibble with that. [33] Well certainly -
John Koster: That's only about seventy years after the date of the crucifixion. [34]
Frank Zindler: Well, now wait a minute.
John Koster: So they didn't come from the Second Century, did they? [ 35]
Frank Zindler: Certainly by the year 100 we're talking about way after the time that some of these things supposedly would have happened.
Now "Matthew" and "Luke" plagiarized over 80 percent of the Greek text of Mark. So that wipes them out automatically. They wouldn't have to plagiarize if they had been eyewitnesses. Mark-
John Koster: Well, Luke never claimed that he was. Luke came afterwards.
Frank Zindler: What's that?
John Koster: Luke never claimed to be an eyewitness. He -
Frank Zindler: Okay. So I'm just - eliminating the gospels one at a time.
Mark couldn't be an eyewitness because he makes geographic errors and so forth and we rule that out. John, I think everybody agrees, is too late to have been an eyewitness. We go to the epistles of Paul, those which can be agreed upon as belonging to the same author, and we find that he knows nothing whatsoever of any biographical history of Jesus. All he has is the idea of someone who is sacrificed and who inaugurated a sort of cannibal feast, the - what became the Eucharist or the Mass. The rest of the epistles are far too late to be of any significance.
There are no eyewitness extra-biblical authors. We have Tacitus and we have Josephus, who were all born after the alleged date of the crucifixion. [36] So they automatically are not eyewitnesses. They were simply reporting on the already existing cultural movement that we now call Christianity.
Al Kresta, host: John, I'm gonna let you, of course, respond to that.
John Koster: Okay.
Al Kresta: But first I want to introduce some of the people who make this show possible. You're listening to "Talk From The Heart" on WMUZ. I'm talking with John Koster, author of The Atheist Syndrome, and Frank Zindler, director of the Ohio Division of the American Atheists, debating the question "Does God Exist?" Right now we're focusing on the historical existence of Jesus Christ. Our number: two-seven-two, forty-one eleven.
{Commercials}
Al Kresta, host: Here we are, at 1:38, discussing the topic "Does God Exist?" The question has moved now to a more concrete historical question, and that has to do with the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth. Frank Zindler, the director of the Ohio Division of American Atheists, maintains that there is certainly no evidence that permits us to say that Jesus existed. John Koster, a Christian, author of the book The Atheist Syndrome , says, well, certainly the evidence is significant, and permits us to say this. John, you want to respond, no doubt, to some of the biblical criticism offered by Frank.
John Koster: Right, I am at a sort-of disadvantage here because I am not a particularly good Christian, and it is obvious that Frank is an extremely good Atheist. But let me - let me say a few things. I am rather surprised to find out that we can invalidate anything Josephus wrote because he and Jesus were not contemporaneous. It's sort of strange to say that Carl Sandburg couldn't write anything about Abraham Lincoln because their lives didn't overlap, [37] or that I could not write anything about Adolf Hitler because he was killed before I was born. [38 ] This type of thing.
Suetonius [39] was also a Roman writer and he mentions many things that are paralleled both in Paul and in the gospels. Pliny [40] mentions the early Christians, although he doesn't mention Jesus explicitly in a biographical sense. He mentions seeing Christian rituals about 114 A.D. Jesus is mentioned, at least obliquely, in the Talmud, [41] and he is mentioned specifically in a number of works of the Apocrypha, which were not accepted into the Bible, some because they were deemed to be unacceptable for moral reasons, [42] or some because they just was [sic] considered to be inauthentic. But there's a tremendous amount of written evidence stemming from the first century that there was an earthly life of Jesus.
Frank Zindler: Well, the Apocryphal works, of course, are even later than the gospels that have stayed in the Canon. And Suetonius, as he points out, is even later than Josephus and Tacitus. Now, of course, what we are seeing here, is these are historians who are reporting upon a religious movement that was part of their day. Now, to say that the fact that there was a religious movement implies that the object of worship existed, is like saying that because the ancient Egyptians worshiped Isis and Osiris, and there's [sic] reports of them doing that, that Isis and Osiris actually existed. There's no reason to suppose that Jesus existed any more than Isis and Osiris, and Zeus and Thor and the whole celestial zoo.
As for the fact that Josephus could perhaps have been reporting on a real historical personage even though it was a person who lived before his time, we would have to have some evidence that Josephus was referring to some documents, some historical documents, annals or something like that. And there's nothing like that. The passage in question in Josephus bears all the marks of being an interpolation and it has Josephus saying things that he couldn't possibly have said as a good Pharisee Jew. He could not have said that Jesus was the messiah and was resurrected from the dead and then continue to go on not believing that Jesus was somehow associated with god. And we know from Origen's testimony, Josephus was not a believer in Jesus as the Christ or messiah. So the evidence that Josephus' passage there is an interpolation is overwhelming and I don't know of any Greek scholar who seriously questions that.
John Koster: Well there was a Hebrew scholar named Dr. Schlomo Pines who translated a message from Arabic, which he did in 1971, as I believe.
Frank Zindler: Yeah. Yes.
John Koster: An Arabic translation -
Frank Zindler: Right.
John Koster: -of Josephus from the original Greek into Arabic.
Frank Zindler: Yeah.
John Koster: He found that the Josephus passage substantially was the same as it was in Josephus. Although as I believe - [ 43]
Frank Zindler: Well, the Arabic dates it, of course, puts it quite late. It would have to date from the date and the time of the Arab Expansion. And the evidence is pretty good that the interpolation was put into Josephus by Eusebius, a church father who lived in the 300s. So there's no problem with the Arabic translation. It is certainly understandable. But it certainly gives no support to the authenticity of that passage.
John Koster: Let me quote you another example of Josephus which he wrote, not as a Christian but as a Jew, indicating that there may have been stories of a resurrection circulating even in the early Christian times. Are you familiar with the Wars of the Jews, the fall of Jerusalem?
Frank Zindler: Go ahead.
John Koster: You know the name Simon Bar Gioras?
Frank Zindler: Simon what?
John Koster: Simon Bar Gioras.
Frank Zindler: Bar Gioras? Oh -
John Koster: Simon Bar Gioras. Simon Bar Gioras was one of the leaders of the factions who were fighting to keep the Romans out of Jerusalem.
Frank Zindler: Yeah, right.
John Koster: Now, when Jerusalem fell, Simon Bar Gioras took shelter in the caves under the city. He came out, appeared before the Romans dressed in - and I quote from Josephus - a white robe and a purple mantle. When the Romans saw him they were horrified. For a moment they didn't know what to think. Then, after they thought about it, they realized he was a real person and they apprehended him.
Frank Zindler: So?
John Koster: What do you take from this?
Frank Zindler: {Laughs.} Well, it's just another story. What am I supposed to take from it?
John Koster: That he was staging his own resurrection because the Romans all knew that something very strange happened after the crucifixion and were frightened.
Frank Zindler: Oh, boy. That's stretching it, isn't it? {Laughs.} [44] Well, I - {unintelligible}
John Koster: {unintelligible} - Josephus inserted which wasn't inserted by a forger. He put it in himself. And yet it could very possibly point to the resurrection of Jesus.
Frank Zindler: Well, I see no connection between that and the particular passage in question.
John Koster: Well, I think if you know psychology you know that perception is always subjective, isn't it?
Frank Zindler: Well, -
John Koster: {Laughs.} I mean, I could see a religious message if I wanted to, and you could see it as being irrelevant if you have already decided you don't wish to believe in religion.
Frank Zindler: Well, I don't think any impartial panel of Greek scholars would think that the one thing supports the other.
John Koster: Well, I think it would depend [45 ] on -
Frank Zindler: I don't know of anybody but you who's ever suggested that.
But anyway, you still don't have any proof of the existence of god, apparently. [46]
John Koster: Well, you see, you have to define proof! [ 47] Now, we've just dealt with the fact that we don't have any proof of the existence of Jesus, unless you're willing to accept about ten writers, whom you find various reasons for saying did not write in his lifetime, were not functioning as reporters. I mean we can suggest there are no videotapes either. [48]
Frank Zindler: Well, that's true. You know, I might be more inclined to believe if there were a videotape surviving from that period. That's a good p-
John Koster: Well, I would tend to think it was a forgery since the video camera wasn't invented then. But that's - [49 ]
Frank Zindler: Okay, I stand corrected. That would be a good - that would be a good argument!
John Koster: {Laughs.}
Al Kresta, host: Let's continue our conversation in just one moment.
{Commercials}
Al Kresta, host: It's 1:46 in the afternoon. Frank, let me ask you a question. It sounds to me, as I listen, that you're using a degree of historical rigor -
Frank Zindler: Yes.
Al Kresta: - regarding the person of Christ that we're not able to use for other figures of ancient history.
Frank Zindler: Oh, but we can! In fact, even more so, because most of the other figures of ancient history themselves left writings - Julius Caesar, for example. And, Alexander the Great did leave some writings, which don't survive to this day but were certainly still around several centuries into the Common Era and were cited by various other historians, and so on. And there are accounts by eyewitnesses. We have coins minted by him, and so forth. So, actually, we have very rigorous evidence of the existence of these other characters from the ancient world, and -
Al Kresta: Well we have, at the same time -
Frank Zindler: - that we don't have any writings by Jesus is very curious, don't you think?
John Koster: I don't think we have any manuscripts by Caesar [50] or by Alexander. We have copies of their works that were made by later copyists, right?
Frank Zindler: That's right.
John Koster: The oldest Virgil, I think I recall, goes back to about the fourth century.
Frank Zindler: That would probably be correct.
John Koster: Well, we don't deny, do we, that Virgil was a real person.
Frank Zindler: No.
John Koster: Why?
Frank Zindler: But we have a transmission of his own writings, but there's nothing that even purports to be the writings of Jesus of Nazareth.
John Koster: Well, having been a journalist for twenty years, Frank, and having covered a really fantastic number of people telling the truth and some who were not, I think that when you have - when you're looking at somebody, if you don't have a translation or a transcript of his own writings, and you hear essentially the same story, with minor differences, from three or four people, you can kind of draw a vector line. You're probably looking at reality.
Frank Zindler: Well, that would be so. But that has nothing to do with the Bible because the gospels contradict each other in incredible ways. For example, the two genealogies that were concocted in Matthew and Luke disagree even as to who Jesus' grandfather was, and they can't agree on the number of generations. They are utterly at odds. Certainly this bars the - this shows evidence of fraud. And -
John Koster: Well, I would disagree, Frank. I think that when you're dealing with documents, if you're looking for fraud, you look for extreme consistency. [51] If -
{For a few seconds at this point, both Mr. Koster and Mr. Zindler spoke simultaneously, none of which was intelligible on the air.}
Frank Zindler: You do know that there is one Greek manuscript, a fairly late one, in which these two genealogies agree a hundred percent. The people who transmitted the books of the Bible were, of course, not very honest people. They had an axe to grind. And so we see that the later the manuscripts, the more harmonious they become. But the earliest manuscripts show great contradiction.
Al Kresta, host: Frank, what - Frank, let me jump in. What axe - this - what axe would they have had to grind? You mentioned that the people who transmitted the manuscripts, you know, were very dishonest people. I - first of all, I mean I don't know how one can make that conclusion. But, you mentioned they had an axe to grind. In what sense was this in their own best interests, especially the earliest manuscripts?
Frank Zindler: Well, they had their own theories, you see, as to what was going on. And some of them thought that Jesus had to be of the line of David, some who had more infection from the mystery religions thought he had to be born of a virgin, and so the stories get changed.
Al Kresta: What I want - but what I want to know is if you're so certain about the historical setting, surrounding the composition of the gospels, you're imputing a degree of certainty to that historical period, about the setting of the gospels, which you're unwilling to attribute to the gospels themselves. And -there's something - there's - and you're speaking out of both sides of your mouth. [52]
Frank Zindler: Well, "certainty" is not the right word. "Probability," "probability" is the best - [53]
John Koster: Let me give you another example from your attempt to get manuscripts. Arminius, did he ever leave anything in writing? [54]
Frank Zindler: Well, I don't really know.
John Koster: Could he write?
Frank Zindler: I'm sorry?
John Koster: Could he write? Did he know how to write?
Frank Zindler: I really don't recall.
John Koster: Did he leave anything in writing?
Frank Zindler: He is reported by eyewitnesses, however.
John Koster: Who?
Frank Zindler: I'm sorry?
John Koster: Whoever saw Arminius face-to-face and lived to tell about it? [55]
Frank Zindler: Well, I think some of the church fathers mentioned him. [56]
John Koster: Arminius? Arminius was before Jesus, Frank? We're talking about Arminius from the Teutoburger Forest?
Frank Zindler: Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about the other -
John Koster: You were thinking about Arius. Okay. Arminius.
Frank Zindler: Okay. Arius, excuse me. [57 ]
John Koster: How many - how many people wrote about Arminius?
Frank Zindler: Well, I don't know. It's not something that I've investigated.
John Koster: He's described by one Roman historian, Tacitus, the same one that describes Jesus. [58] And yet he was a reality.
Frank Zindler: Well, how do you know he was a reality?
John Koster: Because when you go to Germany, you can find tombstones that say "slain in the defeat of Varus." Varus was the Roman general who was killed fighting Arminius. [59]
Frank Zindler: Well, we're getting a little bit far afield. We still have no evidence that god exists or even a definition of god.
John Koster: Let's -let's talk about Arminius and then let's talk about Jesus. Quinctilius Varus was the Roman governor who was the governor of the province of Syria at the time of Herod the Great. He put down a revolution there that supposedly crucified something like two thousand people. Is that a historical fact?
Frank Zindler: Well, I haven't really looked into it to be able to determine one way or the other. I'd have to look at what evidence survives, and then pass judgment on it.
John Koster: Okay, so we have the same man who may or may not have existed in Syria. Then he gets killed in Germany. He's mentioned by Tacitus, and tombstones of his soldiers are found all over the landscape saying, occidit ... {Latin very slurred and apparently not a literal translation of the English given next} "Killed in the Wars of Varus." Did he really exist?
Frank Zindler: Well, you know. This is quite irrelevant. This is something that I'd have to look into. It's completely irrelevant to what we are debating here. I simply have shown that there is no eyewitness evidence that Jesus ever existed. He -
John Koster: Well, you've got no eyewitness existence [ sic] that Arminius or Varus ever existed. All you've got is tombstones and writing and, you know, the fact that they changed history, or at least Arminius did. [60]
Frank Zindler: Well, whether they did or did not, I really don't have an opinion, and I don't see how that is relevant to this particular situation.
Al Kresta, host: I think what he has to do -
John Koster: - Cleopatra?
Frank Zindler: I'm sorry?
John Koster: Do we have anything in Cleopatra's own handwriting?
Frank Zindler: Well, we do have inscriptions that were made in her time. In fact, the famous Rosetta Stone, one of the cartouches, has Cleopatra's name in it. And various other things from that period in time from which we can reconstruct a biography of Cleopatra.
John Koster: Well, that's a different Cleopatra, though.
Frank Zindler: I'm sorry?
John Koster: That's a different Cleopatra. That's not the same one. [61]
Frank Zindler: Okay. There's two, there's several.
Al Kresta, host: Let me -
John Koster: There were a number and they were all named Cleopatra and all the boys were named Ptolemy. And he was a -and Ptolemy was a general of Alexander the Great. And all his daughters were named Cleopatra, [62] and all his sons Ptolemy, and so forth and so on and -
Frank Zindler: Okay.
John Koster: - for about two hundred and fifty years.
Al Kresta: Gentlemen, I think - let me bring us back. The discussion here has to do with the - John's perception, and mine as well, Frank, and that is that you're applying a degree of historical rigor, you know, to the gospel accounts, that - and to evidence regarding the existence of Jesus - that you're unwilling to apply to other figures of ancient history. [63]
Frank Zindler: Well, on the contrary. I certainly am willing to apply it to other figures. But the point we have to realize is the question of whether a god-man ever marched around in Palestine is of far greater importance than whether Arminius [64 ] ever marched from Syria to Germany.
Al Kresta: I understand the stakes get higher -
Frank Zindler: Certainly.
Al Kresta: - given the claims of Jesus himself.
Frank Zindler: Certainly.
Al Kresta: I understand that, and I think that's a fair point.
We're gonna continue our conversation with Frank Zindler, director of the Ohio Division of the American Atheists, and John Koster, author of the book The Atheist Syndrome.
{Commercials}
Assuming Jesus did exist, was he a god-man? What causes so-called religious feelings and experiences? Is religious belief dangerous? Who invented eternal torment?
Al Kresta, host: It's 1:55 in the afternoon. We're talking about the existence of God. And recently, in the last few segments, we've taken a look at some of the evidence, or from Frank's perspective lack of evidence, regarding the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth. I guess Frank has raised an important point here, John, and that is: fine, even under the best of conditions, the historical existence of Jesus is established, [65 ] we still have the difficulty of demonstrating that he is the unique god-man that the scripture portrays him as.
John Koster: Okay. The historical argument I can make in that favor is that by all intents and purposes, Jesus came from a very obscure part of the world. He came from a very obscure family, at least in his immediate line. And yet, we find him becoming the major figure of the first century and the whole human history ever since. I think he must have had something going for him that the average person does not, even the average Roman emperor does not.
Frank Zindler: Well, you can say the same thing about Isis and Osiris. They came from very obscure regions of Egypt and yet they guided Egyptian culture and life for nearly three thousand years.
John Koster: Oh, I wasn't aware that Isis and Osiris actually existed. [66]
Frank Zindler: Well, I'm not either. {Laughs.} I'm just using that as an analogy. You're claiming that because these characters have an effect that they must have existed historically as real people. And I'm simply showing that the worship of Isis and Osiris was a very important thing for three millennia and we certainly wouldn't suppose that that means that Isis and Osiris existed. And by the same logic, whether Christianity was an important force for two thousand years is irrelevant to whether Jesus existed. [67]
You know, I'm wondering how you might perhaps operationally define your god. What can your god do? I mean, is there something that your god can do that would allow us to detect whether he, she, or it exists? [68]
John Koster: I would say that the feeling of the presence of God is so entirely subjective that you really can't explain it in verbal terms. But I would say that that influence is obvious in the life of anyone who's ever felt him.
Frank Zindler: Now, you know when I was -
John Koster: I can't actually explain that to you in a logical way.
Frank Zindler: Well, I do understand, I think though, what you are driving at.
John Koster: But -
Frank Zindler: When I was young -
John Koster: {Unintelligible}
Frank Zindler: - excuse me - when I was young, I was a church organist.
John Koster: Okay.
Frank Zindler: And I had a number of experiences that were very moving and very, I thought, profound. And I identified them as religious experiences. I felt that I was communing with something eternal, with - something greater than I, and so forth. And, it was a number of years after I had become an Atheist, that, upon hearing a very moving performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, I had that same experience. And I suddenly realized that what I was calling a religious experience was actually a musical, aesthetic experience. There was absolutely no difference subjectively between the experiences that I had had as a child in the midst of an organ and choir and moving performance, and that which I had experienced later as an Atheist. The question is not whether these subjective experiences exist (I certainly wouldn't call you a liar about something like that). The question is what, if anything, do they refer to? Do they refer to anything outside the individual brain in which they are occurring, or not? And I'm simply saying that despite the intensity of these feelings, there is really no external referent, that this is the result of various inputs through the nervous system and the brain acting upon them, and then at some point these experiences occur. [69]
John Koster: How do you deal with these experiences when they occur to people unexpectedly, without any outside reference, without the stimulus of listening to music or playing the organ or anything like that? [70]
Frank Zindler: Well, there are a lot of variables and there are probably as many answers as there are instances of the experience that you're talking about. In some cases, fatigue will cause this sort of thing to happen. Low blood sugar may cause this to happen. Sensory deprivation may cause these things to occur. There are various drugs that may be deliberately consumed, or accidently consumed, can cause these things to happen. Again, this is not to deny the reality of the experiences. It's simply to say that these experiences cannot be taken as being evidence of anything supernatural.
John Koster: Well, you say you're not a Freudian. But isn't this what Freud said? He said that ev - it was all internal, and it was all a delusion, and that projecting religious experiences were an extension of someone's neurosis. They were an attempt to deal with inadequacy and things like that?
Frank Zindler: Well, I'm not sure how that Freudian interpretation relates to what I have just said.
John Koster: Well, he said that it wasn't real. He said that it was a delusion. That -
Frank Zindler: Oh well, yeah. I mean, in a sense, these are delusions. Yes, but -
John Koster: They are delusions!?
Frank Zindler: - but you don't have to be a Freudian to say that. People have delusions all the time.
John Koster: Well, people do have delusions. But isn't it also a delusion to reject the evidence of eight different writers for Jesus when you accept one or two for some other historical figure? Or if it's not a delusion, isn't it an extreme form of subjectivity? [71]
Frank Zindler: No, not at all. Because in the one case we're talking about something of immense importance. In other cases, we're talking about things which are not very important one way or the other. If those other characters had the implications that the existence or non-existence of Jesus has, then most assuredly we would apply the same rigorous canons to their examination that we do with the Jesus thing. But most of these other things are just mildly interesting historical questions, and it makes no difference to my survival one way or the other, whether Arminius existed or didn't. [72]
John Koster: In other words, the more important something is, the stronger the mechanism is that we should deny it. [73 ]
Frank Zindler: Oh no, not that we should deny, but that the stronger the mechanism that should be used in examining it, because there's much greater danger in us being wrong - that is, the consequence of our being wrong - is much greater in that case, than in the other situation.
John Koster: What danger do you see if we accept Jesus as a historical figure? [74]
Frank Zindler: Well, the future of the world, I think. You know, for eight years the United States and the human species was [sic] in grave danger because the President of the United States was a man who believed literally in the reality of the prophecies of Armageddon. He believed that Armageddon (a) was inevitable and that it would be a nuclear war, and (b) that it was god's will that that should happen. And consequently we were always in danger, that whenever a situation might arise, we could not count on our Evangelist-in-Chief to do everything possible to preserve peace in the world. If, I mean, after all, who is he to contradict the will of god, if he thinks that god really wants nuclear holocaust to fulfill the prophecy? And so we were -
John Koster: How many - how many different historical sources can you cite [75] for this analysis in politics?
Frank Zindler: I'm sorry?
John Koster: How many different people wrote about this?
Frank Zindler: Wrote about what?
John Koster: That our Commander-in-Chief, et cetera, et cetera, believed in Armageddon literally?
Frank Zindler: Oh, I have tape recordings of him himself saying that.
John Koster: Oh, okay. Well, that's pretty irrefutable evidence. I mean it's not a forgery.
Frank Zindler: {Laughs.}
John Koster: Okay, what I'm trying to say is that you say the experience is subjective. Isn't your urge to deny also somewhat subjective? [76]
Frank Zindler: Well -
John Koster: I mean we've heard several reasons not to believe in something. Why do you apply a much stricter form of scrutiny, and a much stricter form of evidence, to Jesus than some figure who is less important but also possibly less benign?
Frank Zindler: Well - did you say less benign?
John Koster: Yes.
Frank Zindler: Well, why do you think Jesus was benign?
John Koster: Yeah, okay. Well, now we're getting to the root of it.
Frank Zindler: {Laughs.}
John Koster: {Few words unintelligible} dangerous, right?
Frank Zindler: What?
John Koster: You see Jesus as dangerous? [77 ]
Frank Zindler: Well, Jesus, at least according to the gospels, is the person who invented eternal torment.
John Koster: I haven't seen that written in the Bible.
Frank Zindler: I'm sorry?
John Koster: I've never seen that written in the Bible.
Frank Zindler: Well -
John Koster: Invented eternal torment? I know he spoke about eternal torment, but I don't think that he invented it.
Frank Zindler: Well, I don't know of anybody before him who said that.
John Koster: {Few words unintelligible} me chapter and verse and tell me where he invented eternal torment.
Frank Zindler: Well, what about all of the worm that dieth not and the fire that quencheth not and so forth? [78 ]
John Koster: He didn't claim he invented that. [79 ]
Frank Zindler: Well, where did the Christian church get these ideas then, if they aren't in the Bible?
John Koster: Yeah but, Jesus did not say that he invented eternal torment. He said he came to save and not to condemn too, didn't he?
Frank Zindler: Yeah, but I don't know of any character before the character of Jesus in the gospels who believed that there was eternal torment.
John Koster: No, I think the ancients in general believed that the afterlife was rather unpleasant, whether they were Greek or Jewish. Certainly you can find that in the Iliad by Homer.
{For a few seconds at this point, both Mr. Koster and Mr. Zindler spoke simultaneously, none of which was intelligible on the air.}
Frank Zindler: Well, no, you can't. No, you can't. Because the Shades -
John Koster: Yes you can.
Frank Zindler: - the Shades did not exist for eternity. They existed for a short while after death, around the grave and gradually they dissolved, as breath would be expected to do. They did not have eternal torment.
But again, what can your god do, that would allow us to -
John Koster: Well, I'm curious as to where you - I'm curious as to where you derive that. When I read in Homer, it didn't seem to me like these people were dissolving. It seemed to me they spent a lot of time moaning and sucking blood and things like that, but they were certainly very unhappy.
Frank Zindler: Well, I don't see any evidence that they existed for eternity. [80]
Al Kresta, host: Okay, hang on. Well this is - seems like both of you gentlemen want to go in different directions. Frank, you want to press the issue of what this God can do so you can establish some tests for his reality or non-existence. And, John, it looks like the direction you want to go here is to talk about the mechanism of denial, which you believe causes Frank to reject what on the face of it seems to be some good historical evidence. [81]
You're listening to "Talk From the Heart" on WMUZ. We're going to be taking your calls at about 2:15. And we're gonna continue conversation now between Frank Zindler, the director of the Ohio Division of American Atheists, and John Koster, who's written a book called The Atheist Syndrome. I'm Al Kresta. This is "Talk From the Heart."
{Commercials}
Trying to deal with a caller who knew absolutely nothing about science.
Al Kresta, host: We're at 2:08 on a Tuesday afternoon. My guests, again, Frank Zindler, from the American Atheists -he's director of the Ohio Division there - and John Koster, The Atheist Syndrome, his book.
I said we're gonna go 2:15 to calls. I think what we'll do is we'll go to calls now because we are running out of time, and I did want to allow some discussion with our audience. Let's go right now to Joe in Auburn Hills. Hello, Joe.
CALLER: Hi. Speaking of Frank, I would like you to explain the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Law of Biogenesis.
Frank Zindler: Well, the Second Law of Thermodynamics simply says that in a closed system, entropy increases, or basically, every time energy is converted from one form to another, some energy is lost in the form of heat. The Law of Biogenesis is not a law. It is a statement that in the present day world, life comes from previously existing life. But of course, that cannot be taken as a statement for all time, because, certainly, once upon a time, life did originate on the earth, when the situation was quite different than it is now.
CALLER: Okay, well.
John Koster: I think it's interesting - oh, excuse me.
Al Kresta, host: Joe, are you done?
CALLER: No, I was gonna add - well, the Law of Thermodynamics, would, like you say, heat is lost. Sounds more to me like it's a matter of going from order to disorder, and nothing in the present day right now, if you allow it to set for any period of time, is going to go from disorder to order. Science has not been able to create life on its - that can live on its own and reproduce more of its species, from non-life, from just the raw - the raw - particles or whatever - I'm sorry can't - I'm not thinking of the right words. Also, another thing I want to ask about is where - where - has the col - the, - gen - ge - genealogy column [sic ] - the fossil bed column that is talked about, where is that ever found? It doesn't seem to me that in any of the fossil remains, the lone bed fossil remains, the basal plate things, the Keny - the one in Kenya, Africa, nowhere is anywhere is this record of fossils of rock layer ever found.
Frank Zindler: Well, you've got a lot of questions there. You would have had to have taken all the college courses I ever taught to get full answers to all of this. With regard to the fossil record, we have large sequences in different parts of the world that give us pieces of the geologic history of the world. And in some of these we see very nice transitions from one form of life to another. For example, in the Tertiary fossil beds out in the Great Plains and in the Western states, we see the evolution of the horse and the various types of rhinoceroses, where one form blends into the next one higher up in the strata. We do not have the entire geological column -
CALLER: You say "blends in."
Frank Zindler: - but we have parts of it. The process by which geologists piece together the entirety of the geological column, is, of course, a fairly complicated thing and we really don't have time here to go into all of that. I'm trying to remember now what your other questions were besides that.
John Koster: Abiogenesis and how life originated.
Frank Zindler: And how life originated? Well, I just published three articles on that. [82] This is a real growth industry now, the origin of life studies. There are many journals that are devoted exclusively to this subject. The science, of course, only began in 1925. We had a real problem because Louis Pasteur pretty much put the kibosh on that for over fifty years. Everybody was afraid to go against his authority. But in the twenties, people sort of recovered from Louis Pasteur and enormous amounts of research are being published now on that. We're at the point where we pretty well understand how all of the different chemical forms - the forms of chemicals needed for life - originated spontaneously, in fact, even in the solar nebula before the earth was formed. And we are closing in very rapidly in an understanding of how these chemicals associated into the dynamic pattern that we call metabolism. The last word isn't in on that, of course, but it's getting there. We're very, very encouraged by the research.
John Koster: Now it's interesting that you can go on research as superficial as that for abiogenesis which has never successfully been done in a lab as far as I know, [83] and yet you can reject scripture when you have eight [84 ] different authorities [85].
Frank Zindler: Well, in the one case, we have concrete evidence, don't we? We have the chemicals. They do spontaneously form: amino acids, nucleic acids, sugars, lipids. Membranes do spontaneously form, which are capable of imitating certain little parts of metabolism and photosynthesis and so on. This is all fact. This is reported in the journals every week. This is not anything tenuous at all. There remain, of course, some things that have to be worked out. But, you see, your god, apparently, John, rules only the unknown. As the unknown becomes known, your god progressively goes out of business. This is why Darwin was so important. Darwin showed that we didn't need a god to create human beings.
Darwin and Wallace: who really
discovered natural selection?
John Koster: Alfred Russell Wallace showed exactly the same thing before Darwin did, and he became a spiritualist. [ 86]
Frank Zindler: Well, he didn't -
{For a few seconds at this point, both Mr. Koster and Mr. Zindler spoke simultaneously, none of which was intelligible on the air.}
Frank Zindler: No, he didn't show it before Darwin. Your book is wrong on that. That section has some serious errors in it. Darwin received the manuscript from Wallace. Wallace did not publish it before sending it to Darwin. And their papers were read jointly in the Linnaean Society. Darwin had nearly twenty years' priority with regard to natural selection.
John Koster: Not s - no, he didn't publish. He may have been talking about it. He may have been thinking -
Frank Zindler: He wrote to his friends, and as a matter of fact at the Linnaean Society, Lyell and Hooker, and a letter from Asa Gray, showed by the dates as to when Darwin had written to them about his theory of natural selection, quite clearly establishing his priority. Wallace never questioned it, never took exception to it.
John Koster: Never questioned that Darwin had derived the theory independently.
Frank Zindler: And had preceded him. And had done it before he had.
John Koster: But independently. Isn't it true that -
Frank Zindler: Of course independently.
John Koster: Independently, didn't Wallace use the terms "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest"? [87]
Frank Zindler: In that - in the manuscript -
John Koster: Without ever - having heard it from Darwin?
Frank Zindler: In the manuscript he sent to Darwin?
John Koster: Right. Exactly.
Frank Zindler: And Darwin did not use -
{For a few seconds at this point, both Mr. Koster and Mr. Zindler spoke simultaneously, none of which was intelligible on the air.}
Frank Zindler: I'm sorry?
John Koster: Which arrived before Darwin reported to the Linnaean Society.
Frank Zindler: That's right. They were reported simultaneously to the Linnaean Society by Lyell and Hooker.
John Koster: Right. Isn't it true that Lyell and Hooker put Darwin's material first and Wallace's last to make it - [ 88]
Frank Zindler: Well, yes, because Darwin had priority. Darwin had come up with it twenty years earlier. And they had -
John Koster: I would - I would suggest that - I would suggest either Darwin hadn't come up with it twenty years earlier. I would suggest either that Lyell and Hooker were Darwin's friends and not Wallace's. [89]
Frank Zindler: Well, {laughs} well, they had the letters . And Asa Gray at the University of Michigan [90 ] also had several letters from Darwin discussing this. And, you know, I mean -
{For a few seconds at this point, both Mr. Koster and Mr. Zindler spoke simultaneously, none of which was intelligible on the air.}
Frank Zindler: - this is simple, simply known fact.
John Koster: Let me state this. Darwin would definitely have come up with the theory of evolution by natural selection without Wallace. Wallace would definitely have come up with the theory of natural selection without Darwin. [91 ]
Frank Zindler: That's right. And you should take that as being indicative, as being something that's real in nature. [ 92]
John Koster: Yes, it is real in nature. But, when Wallace asked Darwin to investigate any possible evidence for spiritualism, Darwin was frankly not interested.
Frank Zindler: Well, of course he was uninterested, because the frumpery and trumpery of spiritualism by that time was very well known. And as you know it turned out that the spirit rapping and so on was a fraud. The sisters were - clicking their toes. [93]
John Koster: You're talking about the Fox sisters. You're not talking about the same people that Wallace investigated. [ 94]
Frank Zindler: Sure. Well. But the thing is, spiritualism was quite well recognized as a fraud even in Darwin's day. And why would anybody waste time on it? All of the studies since then have further shown that this spiritualist stuff is fraud -
John Koster: But why did Darwin refuse to investigate? Why wouldn't he -
Frank Zindler: Well, why would he waste his time? He was in ill health. He was suffering from Chagas' disease. He was in pain all the time. Why would he waste his time on something which is so palpably fraudulent?
John Koster: How can you say that he was definitely suffering from Chagas' Disease?
Frank Zindler: Well, again, you have errors in your book about that. This has been debated in the pages of the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association. Recently a series of letters in the New York Times have [sic] chewed this over. There doesn't seem to be any question about it. Darwin reported in his journals about being attacked by these vicious reduviid bugs, which we now know carry the Chagas organism, and the symptoms that he had are completely consistent with it. [95]
John Koster: I would maintain that any person who doesn't make Darwin as an object of worship [96] would have to say that at least some of his symptoms were psychogenic.
Frank Zindler: Well, that may very well be, but you see, your whole book is a fallacy of ad hominem abusive species. You - instead of trying to disprove any particular fact that Darwin came up with, you simply say that Darwin was mentally ill, and that somehow this proves the existence of god.
John Koster: No. What I tried to say was that even a brilliant man like Darwin can be - have such a subjective bias because of some tragic event in his past -
Frank Zindler: Of course, the more brilliant -
John Koster: - that he overlooks the whole range of evidence.
Frank Zindler: The more brilliant a person is, the more sensitive his or her nervous system is.
John Koster: Absolutely. And also, the more apt he is to be totally subjective and to not recognize evidence which is put in front of him if he doesn't choose to believe it. [ 97]
Frank Zindler: Well, you would have to show that Darwin ignored some important evidence in coming up with his theory of natural selection. In fact, he went to great lengths to come up with the most difficult things that would seem to argue against his theory. In his day, for example, the subject of genetics was not known. He -
John Koster: Right, it wasn't until Mendel that people understood -
Frank Zindler: Yeah, well, Mendel sent him his paper, but Darwin apparently never read it, which is really an irony, because if Darwin had read Mendel's paper he would have been able to really solidly support his theory. As it was he had a completely incorrect theory of genetics, the pangenes and so on, and his theory managed to survive despite that. And he would have had a really solid theory in his own lifetime if he had incorporated Mendel. But these are one of the - that's one of the many ironies of the history of science.
John Koster: Well, perhaps he was psychic as his father claimed to be. [98]
Frank Zindler: Well, again, you -
John Koster: You're aware that his father used - you're aware that his father, Dr. - Robert Darwin apparently used psychic diagnostic -
Frank Zindler: Well, you have to understand that Darwin, despite his pain and everything, did have a sense of humor, also. And -
John Koster: He wasn't being humorous when he wrote about his father.
{For a few seconds at this point, both Mr. Koster and Mr. Zindler spoke simultaneously, none of which was intelligible on the air.}
John Koster: - people, without interesting them, just look at them, and say, you have this, you have six months to live.
Frank Zindler: Well, Darwin certainly did not believe in psychic phenomena.
John Koster: Have you read his autobiography?
Frank Zindler: Yes, many, many years ago.
John Koster: Well, you should read the first part of it where he talks about his father. I think you'd find - [99 ]
Koster's repeated use of the ad hominem fallacy.
Frank Zindler: Well, I read your quotations of it. And, again, you simply are misunderstanding what he is saying. You're putting great weight on casual statements. If you say that somebody had an uncanny knack to do this or that, does that mean that he has extrasensory abilities?
John Koster: This was not a casual statement, Frank. He went on for this for four or five pages.
Frank Zindler: Well -
John Koster: And he described a number of specific examples.
Frank Zindler: Well, again, it's all ad hominem, you see. And this is a simple fallacy of logic.
John Koster: Well, it's not ad hominem.
Al Kresta, host: Well -
John Koster: He could only look at a very limited spectrum. He could look at the plants and the lower animals and -
Frank Zindler: Okay. Okay, John. But prove one thing that was necessary to support natural selection that Darwin said that was wrong.
Al Kresta: Okay, we'll come back and, John, we'll let you respond to that.
John Koster: Okay.
{Commercials}
Al Kresta, host: We're discussing the question of "Does God Exist?" John Koster, author of The Atheist Syndrome , and Frank Zindler, the director of the Ohio Division of American Atheists with me. The, Frank has said, a number of times, through the discussion today, John, that your book, The Atheist Syndrome, is really a gigantic argumentum ad hominem, and that is, that it just, in a sense, doesn't deal with the arguments of Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud. It doesn't deal with their arguments. It tries to discount their arguments by disqualifying the men. Was that the intention of your book? [100]
John Koster: The intention of my book was to show how even a brilliant mind can become so subjective and so biased that it will only look at a very small quadrant of the evidence in favor of human spirituality, and therefore, of the existence of God. It will also attempt to screen out, or mutilate, or mutate any fact that doesn't fit that argument. [101] I think that's what Darwin did. I know that's what Huxley did. [102] And I think even Frank would have a lot of trouble with Huxley's version of neurophysiology - I certainly hope so - which he invented as an antidote to the idea that there might be a human spirit or soul. Frank has disagreed with Freud, so I won't approach him. With Nietzsche we can deal with a person who raved against God because he was a syphilitic and had a latent homosexual tendency. [103] But he was not really a scientist. He was a philosopher. What I am trying to show, and what I did try to show in The Atheist Syndrome, and I think I did successfully, was that all perception is subjective. And if a person for reasons he may - he himself may not understand, sets out to deny god, that it may be impossible to get through to him with any factual evidence. [104 ]
Frank Zindler: Well, again, I would simply say that his book is completely irrelevant with regard to question, "Do any gods exist?" And it is irrelevant with the question -with regard to the question - "Has evolution occurred?" It is a personal attack on a number of historical figures, some of whom are a little bit nicer than others -
{Laughter from all three individuals.}
John Koster: Darwin was a very nice man. And you know, I was very heavily criticized for saying all those terrible things about him by people that admired him because he was a good husband and a good father - [105]
Frank Zindler: Well -
John Koster: Fact is that he was a good scientist, but only when dealing with lower animals. He was a disaster when dealing with people.
Frank Zindler: Well, you have to understand, that at that point in time, dealing with the human species even quasi-objectively was a very novel thing.
John Koster: No, I don't think it was.
Frank Zindler: Things are often much more clear when you're looking at worms and mice and so forth than when you're trying to look at yourself. [106]
John Koster: All right. Wallace and before him, Humboldt, had lived with the same or similar Indians that Darwin did. They considered them to be humans. Darwin considered them to be much closer to the apes than ordinary people.
Frank Zindler: Well, they weren't even British!
John Koster: He completely brutalized their culture. He believed that they spoke in grunts and grimaces [107 ] when they had a vocabulary of thirty-eight thousand words.
Frank Zindler: Yeah?
John Koster: He believed they were cannibals when they weren't.
Frank Zindler: Well, again -
John Koster: He's not being objective.
Frank Zindler: -these people were obviously sub-human, they weren't even British, you know. {Laughs.}
John Koster: Yeah, - Therefore, their opinions didn't matter because they too believed in a life after death. [108 ]
Frank Zindler: Well look, there is no one who says that you have to take everything that Darwin or Huxley said as being gospel. [109] Science is a self-correcting system. And the things that they said that were not correct are being corrected. And the corrections will be corrected.
John Koster: Yes.
Al Kresta, host: Okay.
Frank Zindler: And that's not true of religion. Religion -
Al Kresta: I'll tell you what. Gentlemen -
John Koster: I think before we try to correct Louis Pasteur too thoroughly we should continue to Pasteurize milk and to wash our hands before performing surgery. [110]
Frank Zindler: That's fine, but -
John Koster: Because he spent twenty years trying to convince the scientists - quote scientists - of his time that germs could cause disease. [111]
Frank Zindler: Yeah.
John Koster: And a large number of the medical profession refused to believe him, and went on butchering people with dirty operations because they just didn't believe that a germ could kill people.
Frank Zindler: In his narrow area of expertise, Pasteur did very fine work. You just can't extend Pasteur into all of the areas in which he made claims, that's all I'm saying.
John Koster: I see. In other words, because he was a believing Catholic we have to discount his views on religion. [112 ]
Frank Zindler: Well, that would be a good reason I would think, yeah.
John Koster: Yeah, {laughs} I guess you would, Frank.
Al Kresta, host: Gentlemen, listen. I want to thank you both for joining me today on "Talk From The Heart."
John Koster: Thank you. I enjoyed it.
Al Kresta: And, John Koster, author of The Atheist Syndrome , thank you for joining me. Frank Zindler, director of the Ohio Division of American Atheists, I enjoyed the conversation with you. And I wish you the best, sir.
Frank Zindler: Okay, and have everybody dial the Dial-an-Atheist line up there, at two seven two, nineteen eight-one.
John Koster: And buy my book The Atheist Syndrome and read my ad hominem attack.
Frank Zindler: Right! (Laughs.}
Al Kresta: Thank you, gentlemen.
Frank Zindler: Okay.
Al Kresta: We're going to be going open line right now at two-seven-two, forty-one eleven. Two-seven-two, forty-one eleven. I decided to stay rather than go do the phone lines. I took one call and decided that the repartee between the two gentlemen and the conversation was so lively, that I probably would do no better than allowing them to do out the hour and a half. However, we can go open line right now and if you're interested in continuing this conversation in some measure, reacting, responding to either of our guests, John Koster or Frank Zindler, we can do that. We've got a half an hour together here on "Talk From The Heart." I'm Al Kresta.
{Commercials}
Calls after the debate.
Al Kresta, host: You're listening to "Talk From The Heart" on WMUZ. Let's go to open line right now. I imagine there's gonna be quite a bit of conversation regarding the debate between John Koster and Frank Zindler. And let's talk with Larry in Sterling Heights. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Al.
Al Kresta: Yes, Larry.
An attempt to define god.
CALLER: I was hoping I could get through and talk to Frank before he got off the air, but it was really - I dialed for about an hour and I couldn't get through. But anyway, I think there is a way to define God. And, John said that you can't really do that. I have a way that I think there's a medium that can show exactly how science and spiritual relate to each other.
Al Kresta: Why don't you - why don't you define God before you give me the whole rationale, or the methodology.
CALLER: Well, God is the Center. [113 ]
Al Kresta: Yeah. Center of what?
CALLER: The Center of All.
{Pause}
Al Kresta: Now, what does that mean?
CALLER: It means that there was something that was in existence that created everything out of it.
Al Kresta: Right.
CALLER: And that all of the things that create - were created out of it, including the language [114] that we use, the way we look at things, the way we understand things, can be defined by a medium that explains the whole of all of it.
Al Kresta: Okay. Let me see. When you say that God created out of himself, [115] are you saying that the physical universe in - is an extension of the essence of God?
CALLER: No. It is the Sonship of - the God.
Al Kresta: What does that mean?
CALLER: It means that all things that were created, all life that is created, the existence of everything that is other than God, is created through the Son, which is one of the spirits in the God-person, and that that creation is that Sonship. [116] That all of the existence of everything outside of -
Al Kresta: Is the Creation the Son of God? Is that what you're saying?
CALLER: The Son of God is Life.
Al Kresta: Well, that's not a biblical - that's not a biblical concept of - Creation.
CALLER: But it is biblical. It's just in how it's interpreted.
Al Kresta: Well, I certainly don't know any biblical concept which identifies the Creation as the Son.
CALLER: I'm not saying the Creation. I'm saying Life.
Al Kresta: Well, okay. When you say Life, I'm maybe missing something here. When you say Life, what are you referring to? Are you referring to consciousness, emotion?
CALLER: Okay, I'm referring to a spiritual existence, in relationship to a physical existence, and that both of them are related, but one is the real life, and the other one is the realm of the - it's like where there was no life would be considered darkness, and where the light went, it went into a darkness, and that light went into darkness, and the reaction, the creation, of the what was created from the lack of light with light, is the medium by which these things compare to each other, and by which one is - reality is - sacrificed so that - for a physical reality is sacrificed so that its spirituality can exist through eternity without - [117]
Al Kresta: Yeah, okay. Well, let me just say that this is one of the reasons why I think John was unwilling to do the hard work of definition. It's obviously a very awkward and clumsy attempt.
CALLER: But see, I can - I have a medium that I can prove all of this.
Al Kresta: Nah. I don't - I find that hard to believe, and we don't have time to do it on the air. It usually makes for bad radio to do that.
CALLER: Well, no -
Al Kresta: But if you want to send me something - if you want to send me something in the mail, I'll be glad to look it over.
CALLER: Well, see, I can't really send you anything. I called you once before and told you that I would like to get together with you and spend an hour with you and show you some things.
Al Kresta: I don't ha - I just don't have the time to do that. If you want to send me something in the mail -
CALLER: Well I've heard you say to those people before when they've talked to you on the air that you'd get together with them and have lunch and discuss some things.
Al Kresta: Nah. If they - I've gotten together with people who need, you know, who need special ki - who have special kinds of needs. But, even, I haven't even had time to do, you know, counseling outside the work of my own church, never mind meet with people for stimulating intellectual conversations.
CALLER: This isn't a stimulating intellectual conversation. [118]
Al Kresta: Well, then, if it's not stimulating I guess I'm - that makes me a little more UNinterested in getting together. What I - if you want to send me something, you know, jot it down, and if it catches my interest, we can talk about it. That's the best I can offer you.
CALLER: But if I sent you anything, you would not be able to understand it. Without me talking to you, and going deeper, I mean, you could not - I could not just put something down on paper that will explain it well enough that you will be able to understand what I am talking about.
Al Kresta: Well, then the best thing you can do is outline what the conver - how the conversation would go, and what you expect to do, if you expect to show me something or give me a shift of consciousness or introduce me to a technique by which I can become illumined [sic], jot that down and maybe I'll be interested.
I gotta move on, Larry. Thanks for the call.
Rick in Detroit, we'll be talking with you in just one moment. I'm Al Kresta. This is "Talk From The Heart."
{Commercials}
How tragic to be an Atheist! Wouldn't it be better to be a Christian? Do Atheists strive for immortality?
Al Kresta, host: Well, let's go and talk with Rick in Farmington Hills, or no, Rick in Detroit. Hi, Rick.
CALLER: How you doing, Al?
Al Kresta: Ah, I'm excellent, thank you.
CALLER: Sounds like you need a better screening process. [119]
Al Kresta: Ah, well, you never know.
CALLER: Yeah, I know what you mean. I was kind of - well the - discussion certainly was stimulating, at least for the two participants involved. I was kind of hoping, though, that John would maybe take a little different tack, but he was - going at it from the viewpoint of his book I understand. And it - I think it just demonstrates how difficult it is to approach an atheist strictly from a historical and scientific apology when they've certainly done their homework.
Al Kresta: Go ahead. Keep going.
CALLER: And I was kind of interested, especially with having Frankie Schaefer on yesterday, that I was hoping we could kind of maybe pursue some of his father's avenues in dealing with people.
Al Kresta: Yeah.
CALLER: I would have liked to have asked Frank how he justifies his own existence, justifies any moral view that he might have.
Al Kresta: Yes.
CALLER: Somewhere in a conflict -
Al Kresta: Certainly that - certainly that approach to the problem was missing. Francis Schaefer, as you know, obviously you've read Francis Schaefer, would have appealed to this man - this man's sense of intrinsic dignity, significance in life, how can an atheist believe that his life has any lasting significance, and if he aspires to immortality, then isn't he the most tragic of all men -
CALLER: Yes, absolutely.
Al Kresta: - because it's an aspiration which can never be fulfilled. And so the universe is cruel, there's nobody at home there, and like Charlie Chaplin, he just has to say, I'm lonely. There's nobody there. [120]
CALLER: The thing that prompted me to pick up the phone and dial as I was being entertained by the conversation - more so than having my thoughts provoked - was he made an allusion somewhere to a holocaust and, you know, an Armageddon or nuclear thing, probably in reference to Reagan I believe. And I was gonna ask him, from his point of view, why would that be such a bad thing?
Al Kresta: Well, I think, let me say, having approached many people like that, I think his response would have been that he just likes to survive, and that this attempt to drive him to despair about his own existence is a futile effort. Because, since God doesn't exist, he doesn't care, frankly. But he likes life. And he wants to enjoy life. And, you know, he doesn't - it doesn't really - he doesn't really have to have any ultimate answers. He has learned to live with the ambiguity, [121 ] and so he's not, you know, it's not an issue.
CALLER: So if - the meaning and significance of his own life is not an issue, then I'm free to develop my own meaning and significance which is diametrically opposed to his, and have it be equally valid.
Al Kresta: Yes, and that's - the problem here, of course, is that somebody is going to have to settle some of these issues, 'cause if you develop your meaning and significance in the area of violence towards me, you develop a certain type of revolutionary philosophy which permits you bomb the American Humanist Association or the State University of New York, or the American Atheist Union, [122] then, of course, he can only appeal to The State, to put pressure on you, and to, in a sense, protect him from you. He can't really appeal to any sense of fairness or morality or justice. [123]
CALLER: Right. And that's - that's kind of like I - where I would have liked to see him pushed - to see how he would react to that.
Al Kresta: Yeah, it would have been-
CALLER: I've never had the opportunity to take that tack with a hard-core atheist, to see how they [sic] would react.
Al Kresta: Yeah, I again, doing a debate like that, I usually agree up front with both parties that I'll seek to be a moderator, and rather than do a two-on-one kind of thing. But I was surprised myself that John didn't move in that direction. But he had something else he was trying to do and, yeah, he - he's a competent man, and I let him go.
CALLER: I did enjoy the show, though. Thanks, Al.
Does Zindler make leaps in logic?
Al Kresta: Thank you, Rick. Our number is two seven two, forty-one eleven. Mike in Redford, you're on "Talk From The Heart."
CALLER: Hi, Al. How're ya doin'?
Al Kresta: Great.
CALLER: The guy, whose name escapes me, the one who was the atheist -
Al Kresta: Frank. Frank Zindler.
CALLER: Okay, he used a common sophism about the - to defend the existence and the - his ability to believe in evolution in the first place, the one where he said that we have - we know that amino acids exist and that they do - we have been able to demonstrate that they can spontaneously combine. And from there he made the gigantic leap to humanity.
Al Kresta: Right.
CALLER: And I would just like to say that, you know, there is copper in the ground. There is silicone [124 ] in the ground. And under certain conditions you can have a computer.
Al Kresta: That's right.
CALLER: But I would love to see it happen.
Al Kresta: Yeah.
CALLER: And it's a - it's a foolish and silly argument and why isn't it - it cannot be defended on any logical grounds and I don't understand why it is so easily relied on.
Al Kresta: Well, I'll tell you why. There's a certain prima facie appeal to it. And that is that you can come up with amino acids and handle them. You can write formulas for them and how they do coalesce together and all that. Whereas it's - God does not permit of that kind of manipulation. He's not an object in quite the same sense that amino acids, copper in the ground, Larry Stroh sitting in the studio here, God is not that kind of object, that permits us to walk over, shake his hand, dig him out of the ground, unite him with certain chemicals.
CALLER: True.
Al Kresta: So that puts the theist at somewhat of a disadvantage on this argument. It's-
CALLER: But, except, if you're allowed -
Al Kresta: Go ahead.
CALLER: - if you're allowed a little liberality in the argument, you can say that all of these, the house you live in, is made out of wood. However, the trees don't get to be that way without -there's one element in all of these other demonstrations of natural elements combining to form some useful and recognizable thing, and that is an intelligent -
Al Kresta: Sure.
CALLER: - being- [125]
Al Kresta: Yes.
CALLER: -manipulates those elements -
Al Kresta: That is true.
CALLER: into that final form -
Al Kresta: That is true.
CALLER: - in every case and - except in this case, that - and - they get away with relying - the rest of his arguments, the - that the geological column - sure, his explanation is widespread, but it is definitely not the only explanation available. [126] So, there you go.
Al Kresta: Thank you, Mike. Take it easy.
CALLER: Okay.
Al Kresta: Bye, bye. We're at 2:44 in the afternoon. We have one open line at two seven two, forty-one eleven.
{Commercials}
Caller alleges Christians shouldn't try to prove what they can't prove anyway. Christians should just admit it's all based on faith and let Atheists go on their merry way.
Al Kresta, host: Derek in Detroit, welcome to "Talk From The Heart."
CALLER: Yes, how ya doin'? This is Eric.
Al Kresta: Eric.
CALLER: Eric from Detroit. Isn't Frank Zindler the perfect example of not committing intellectual suicide?
Al Kresta: I don't think so. Because I don't think that we really didn't get to this during the debate. But quite honestly, he does commit intellectual suicide because he, when all is said and done, he cannot justify his own existence or the continuity of personal identity from moment to moment. [127 ]
CALLER: But, okay, what I'm referring to is, the debate was to prove the existence of God.
Al Kresta: Well, the question asked was "Does God Exist?" Yeah.
CALLER: Right. And we can't prove that. That's why throughout the entire conversation, Frank had the upper hand. And if you review the tapes, he talked for most of the program, because - what was his name, John? -
Al Kresta: Yes.
CALLER: - he could not prove - he couldn't even give a definition! And we can't define God. We can't -
Al Kresta: Well, we certainly can. God is the Center of Personal Consciousness, [128] who acts, and wills, and has emotion. I think John made a mistake at the beginning by not being more forthright in a definition.
CALLER: Okay, what I'm referring to is, we can't subject God to a laboratory and -
Al Kresta: Ah, now that's certainly more true. I mean, God does not - it's like on the scale of existence, what you have are rocks, okay? You can go to rocks, pick up rocks, stick 'em under microscopes. You can do anything you want with rocks. Rocks don't respond to you. You can go up the scale of existence to, say, to the animal kingdom. And in the animal kingdom it's a little more difficult. There's a little more give and take between the object of study and yourself. You can't just grab an animal anytime you want. You, like a deer, you gotta kinda sneak up on it. They have a chance to run away from you. It's not like a rock that you can just approach. You come up to a human being. If you wanna study human beings, there's even more give and take here. The object of study can flatly refuse to be studied by you. I can't - Larry Stroh - I just cannot pick up - even though he's my engineer today - I can't pick Larry up and do an autopsy on him until he's dead. [129] You see?
CALLER: But you can define him. You can state what a Larry looks like.
Al Kresta: Hold on.
CALLER: You can define Larry, but you can't define a definite God.
Al Kresta: Hold on. Let me finish. Yes you can. Hold on. Let me go up to the next scale -
CALLER: Okay -
Al Kresta: Hold - let me finish. You go up to the next scale of existence, which is God himself. There you have almost no give-and-take again. God will only - God will not submit to us as an object of study. We are his subjects. [130 ] He will reveal himself to us according to his own will. And so, in that sense, one who wants to, quote, prove the existence of God, is at a decided disadvantage. [131]
CALLER: No, because all of it hinges, again, on faith. Faith meaning whether or not I choose to believe the Bible. [ 132]
Al Kresta: No, no. [133]
CALLER: He doesn't, therefore you are operating out of a totally different arena.
Al Kresta: No. Because now - now you got - you're back to the old problems, why should I believe the Bible?
CALLER: Exactly! And it's faith. That's why I believe it!
Al Kresta: Why - well, okay, let's do - let me play devil's advocate with you. I don't believe the Bible. I believe in the Bhagavad-gita. Why should I believe your Bible?
CALLER: That's what you choose to believe. And to have a debate between you and I [sic] would be fruitless because we're operating on two different planes. [134 ]
Al Kresta: Nah, nah. You're reducing everything to a matter of opinion as though there's [sic] no external criteria on which to judge truth or falsity. [135]
CALLER: No. No. Okay. No. If I read the Bible, I choose whether or not I want to read it. But take for instance the virgin birth. There has never been an instance before nor after of a virgin birth. [136] Yet it happened. I can't physically prove it. I can only go by what I read. And I believe it because I choose to believe the Bible . This Frank, he doesn't . But, he - has the right to do that because his intellect , which is at {word unintelligible} with god, won't - let him believe this. So if he choo -
Al Kresta: I understand, Eric, I understand what you're saying.
CALLER: Right.
Al Kresta: But if you reduce everything to presuppositions and prejudice, [137] if you reduce everybody to the point of just their choice to believe in whatever they want, [ 138] then you end discussion [139 ] between the believer and the unbeliever. There is a common ground between the believer and the unbeliever. It's the world that God created. [140]
CALLER: Exactly.
Al Kresta: And we can argue, we can argue from that world -
CALLER: But the unbeliever beli`eves that evolution created it. What I'm trying to say is, Frank is the perfect example of not committing intellectual suicide, because intellectually, you cannot get a scholar to believe that a virgin birth occurred. Anyone who believes in evolution, they cannot accept, physically, a virgin birth. It's impossible.
Al Kresta: Let me, let me, yeah. Let me take it - I - you believe in the doctrine of virgin birth because you have good testimony [141] that such a thing occurred.
CALLER: Well, no, see, we all - well, how come this wasn't brought up to Frank? During - the course of the conversation that came up. Yet, you're gonna argue with me? But it was stone silence to Frank, because he knew what he was talking about.
Al Kresta: Because I was acting as a moderator with two guests.
CALLER: But, no. If you listen, you were - you could tell that you were for John by the comments you made.
Al Kresta: I didn't say I was unbiased.
CALLER: Right.
Al Kresta: I said I was acting as a moderator, for heaven's sakes. There's a world of difference.
CALLER: Right, right, but the way you moderated let me know that you were on the side of Frank. [142 ]
Al Kresta: Everybody - that's not a secret. This is a Christian talk show.
CALLER: I know that. I know that. So the problem, or the rationale that you've given me, why wasn't it given to Frank?
Al Kresta: It wasn't my place to bring up the best arguments that I thought should be explored. That was between John and Frank.
CALLER: If he's hitting at the foundation of Christianity, and then there's [sic] people out in the audience who may not be as strong as you or I or a lot of people who've been in the faith a while, they deserve that, because intellectually what Frank was saying made a lot of sense!
Al Kresta: They can - Eric, they can tune in here every day between one and three and hear a biblical world view. [143 ] This was a case of just plain fairness to two guests who deserve to be treated as human beings made in the image and likeness of God. It was grossly unfair for me to put a two-on-one situation on Frank Zindler. That was agreed before we went on the air. [144]
CALLER: I understand that. But, Frank had total run of the conversation: one, because he had concrete facts, and two, John didn't. And what I'm trying to say: Christianity is based on faith. We're all looking for something that has never happened before. We're looking for that. But you can't explain that to someone who's operating off of a totally different plane. And that's what you have with an atheist and a Christian. They are - worlds apart. So basically, the debate really was for nil, because it served no purpose; but it was more confusing to the weaker brethren than it was edifying, because Frank had his stuff together. I'm sorry .
Al Kresta: If, listen. Eric, if we were to take your approach, then evangelism and the Defense of the Faith has absolutely no value. Because what you're saying, then, is that the unbeliever -
CALLER: Evangelism is done one-on-one. [145 ]
Al Kresta: Nah, no.
CALLER: If someone asks me, then I can defend my faith. But I shouldn't get on a public forum where there are weaker people who may be converted, but they hear this man making so much sense till they say, well, wait a minute, this guy can't even defend what he believes.
Al Kresta: Well, it's about time -
CALLER: So why should I accept his beliefs when this other guy is making so much sense? [146]
Al Kresta: Well, first of all, John did an adequate job of demonstrating why he believes. I think the problem here is that, again, Christians by and large, it sounds like yourself included, are just somehow threatened by an atheist who puts in a good performance.
CALLER: No, I'm not threatened. I am not threatened because I've talked to atheists, and I already know that we are worlds apart. And I'll explain to him what I believe and why I believe it. But I couldn't go into a laboratory and put it to some test. [147] And trying to prove everything eliminates faith. We're supposed to operate along faith, not things that we can test and prove. [148]
Al Kresta: I - just think that - we are so far apart on this. I think you're mystifying faith. I think you're mystifying knowledge. And, unfortunately, I've got to move on. On another "open line" [149] why don't you call me back? Let's go into this in a little more depth, because faith and knowledge are not pitted against one another. Jesus not only proclaimed the Kingdom, he demonstrated it to those around him empirically. [150] And he talks in the gospel of Luke about proof. [151] In the book of Acts, we learn about many infallible proofs as well. [ 152] You're listening to "Talk From The Heart" on WMUZ.
{Commercials}
Caller alleges god evidences himself
through miracles.
The case of the empty gas tank
Al Kresta, host: Let's talk now with Nuñé in Milford. Hello, Nuñé?
CALLER: I just wanted to give you a real quick example of -what the Lord does for people, because Frank kept saying, well, what does the Lord do for you? And also -
Al Kresta: "What can your god do?" I think is what he said.
CALLER: Okay, what does he do?
Al Kresta: Yup, what can - what does your God do, Nuñé?
CALLER: Well, he takes care of us. He's concerned about us. He loves us. [153] And, what he did was - I'll try to make this quick 'cause I may get cut off -
Al Kresta: That's okay. We've only got about sixty seconds, so.
CALLER: Oh gosh! Well, anyhow, I'm - my car was empty this particular day, and it didn't have any gas. And evening came. My husband came home. It was Sunday. I needed gas for the morning, so I says [ sic] "Give me some money. I'll get gas." Well, all he has [sic] was a gas card. So, I went to the Marathon station five miles from here on an empty tank. [154 ] The station was closed. I drove to Pontiac on an empty tank. I - went to four stations in Pontiac, all closed. I to - I started out toward home. I thought I would never make it. I got back to Milford, this is over sixty miles now, got back to Milford. I ran out of gas, [155] on the top of Crystal Street. I went downhill, turned a corner, got out of the car, and a car's coming toward me. And, he sto - he passed me by. He turned around and came back. He says, it was bitter cold. He says, do you want a ride? I says yes. It was two miles from here. So I jumped in the car. And he started to bring me home. And, this man, he was telling me, he said, he lives just about fifty [ 156 ] miles from here.
Al Kresta: You've got about ten seconds.
CALLER: Okay, well anyhow. The thing was that he - we came to a stoplight and he - he says - I hit a little boy here once. I says, it was my son. [157] And all these years he had been worried about this, my - son. It was twenty-five years later, this was.
Al Kresta: Isn't that something? [158 ]
CALLER: And the - Lord - and he says, "Is he all right, is he all right?" He had worried about that all that time! And the Lord did all this driving on an empty tank just to let this guy know that John was okay.
Al Kresta: Fascinating stuff, Nuñé. [159 ]
CALLER: Praise the Lord!
Al Kresta: God bless you.
CALLER: You too.
Al Kresta: Bye bye. And I'll see you tomorrow on "Talk From The Heart." And I enjoyed being with you today. Wish we had had more time for our calls, and perhaps on another open line we can do that. Right now Robin Sullivan's coming up, at 3:00 here. And she'll be with you till seven, and then Barbara Star on with "Reflections." I'll see you tomorrow when we talk again "From The Heart."
{Closing Theme Song}
Voice: "Talk From The Heart" is a presentation of WMUZ and the Crawford Broadcasting Company. The views expressed on "Talk From The Heart" are not necessarily those of the staff, management or advertisers of WMUZ. Today's program has been produced by Cathy Schiffrin and Michael Jason. [160 ]
Voice: With 50,000 watts of "Praise Power," this is WMUZ Detroit.
[1] The main thesis of Koster's book is that Atheists are mentally ill, having rejected "god" because of unhappy childhood relations with their fathers. A subsidiary theme of the book is the idea that Atheists are biased against evidence for religion. In reality, of course, it is the believers who are playing with less than a full deck. The thesis that religious thought is delusional and that religiosity is a pathological condition is dealt with in my article, "Religiosity as a Mental Disorder," which appeared in the April, 1988, issue of American Atheist. Readers desiring a copy of this article may obtain it by writing to either the Michigan or Ohio Division of American Atheists.
[2] Since considerable to-do was made about Koster's ability to read seven languages, I might as well note for the record that the list of language specialists published by my employer lists me as a consultant for chemical literature written in twenty-five modern languages. The fact that Koster claims to be able to read "New Testament Greek" is little short of underwhelming.
[3] This is the closest John Koster ever came in this debate to offering a definition of his god. "God is the Ultimate Being in existence." What does that mean? What is an "ultimate being" anyway? Saying that god is an ultimate being is like saying that a car is an automobile or that Santa Claus is St. Nicholas. It tells us nothing new. It merely passes off a synonym for a definition. A thinking person would not be fooled by this debater's trick. Koster also said that "God is there whether we want him to be there or not." This is not a definition either; it is a description. Cancer, tapeworms, and hurricanes fit this description nicely. They are there whether we want them to be or not! But whether Koster's god is "there" is something he must prove, not just allege. Notice that throughout this debate Koster repeatedly refuses to give a real definition of his god - although I try many times to force him to do so. In later notes I discuss his probable reasons for changing the subject every time the host or I asked him to define his god.
[4] Koster's argument here must remind us of the old adage that "God rules only the unknown," and that as the unknown becomes known, god goes into the ranks of the unemployed. Thus, prescientific people, whether they be the ancients such as Cicero or our contemporaries who have been cheated of a knowledge of history and science, can do no better than ascribe to supernatural forces that which they are unable to explain naturally. They are forced into the fallacy of trying to explain the unknown in terms of the even less known.
[5] Although Kresta did not cut me off very often, this particular case was most disturbing because I was about to explain the "verifiability principle of meaning," a principle which would show that Koster's inability to define his god puts his statements about his god into the ranks of scientifically meaningless sentences. For a proposition to be scientifically "meaningful," one must be able at least to imagine a way to test it. Thus, the statement that "the moon is made of green cheese" was meaningful even a hundred years before rockets were invented, since people could easily imagine tests to perform that would be able to resolve the issue. When the proposition was tested in our time, by astronauts who found that moon dust makes lousy salad dressing, it was found to be meaningful but false.
By contrast, the statement that "undetectable gremlins inhabit the rings of Saturn" is scientifically meaningless, since there is no concei