On May 21-24, I debated Jerry Moffitt in conjunction with the Gulf Coast Lectures at the Portland, Texas, Church of Christ. At Moffitt's request, the issue was changed from biblical inerrancy to the resurrection and finally to the existence of God. Perhaps the most accurate way to describe this debate would be to call it the blind, staggering, falling-down-drunk luck debate, because this was an expression that Moffitt used repeatedly to bolster the design argument that he focused on throughout the debate.
Subscribers to The Skeptical Review are already familiar with Moffitt's views through several of his articles that we have published. His latest contribution was a response to my article "Letter From a Dead Man" (Autumn 1993, pp. 4-6). In his attempt to explain how the prophet Elijah could have written a letter after he was dead, Moffitt began by declaring that God is "self-concealing," then went on to say, "He refuses to reveal Himself in the Scriptures in a way that is *psychologically compelling*" (p. 4). Oddly enough, Moffitt began the Portland debate the same way. In his first speech, he declared his belief that God will not reveal himself to man in any "compelling way," because "good and honest hearts" will always be willing to accept the evidence he has presented. By way of evidence, Moffitt then proceeded to extol the wonders of the human body, which he of course presented as intelligent design that had to prove the existence of God. His tactic was to discuss the orderly function of a body organ and then to ask the audience if anyone could believe that all of this happened by just "blind, staggering, falling-down-drunk luck."
My response consisted of three points: (1) the Bible is filled with examples of where God appeared personally to men like Adam, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, etc., so if God does not reveal himself today in "compelling" ways that makes him a respecter of persons in direct contradiction to biblical statements like Acts 10:34, (2) the postulation of a God to explain the mystery of existence explains nothing and only presents a bigger mystery, and (3) nothing in Moffitt's design argument would require the creator to be Yahweh the god of the Hebrews.
This third point was important, because, Moffitt and I had signed an agreement that required us to define "God" in both of our propositions as "the Deity who is described in the Bible in all His characteristics or attributes." I asked Moffitt to explain how anything that he had said would require the deity behind intelligent design to be Yahweh of the Hebrews. In what was undoubtedly Moffitt's biggest blunder in the debate, he tried to prove that Yahweh was the god of intelligent design by simply asserting that the odds against just 11 of the hundreds of biblical prophecies being fulfilled were so astronomically high as to be impossible without intelligent direction. Therefore, he asserted, the God of the Bible had to be the creator.
My response to this was to point out that Moffitt had only asserted the fulfillment of prophecies but had not specifically identified even one prophecy fulfillment. In answer to my demand that he identify *and* prove these prophecy fulfillments, he responded that we didn't have time to discuss them in this debate. I refused to let the issue drop and pointed out that such an assertion as this was a resort to question begging. This matter came to a head in the final session when I challenged Moffitt to debate the prophecy issue in a separate debate. He stood up and accepted the challenge, so an on-the-spot decision was made to have a written debate on the subject. Whether this was a sincere gesture on Moffitt's part or just a play to the gallery remains to be seen, because he and I already have a written debate in progress to which he has not contributed a manuscript in almost three years. My hope is that he will keep the commitment, because prophecy-fulfillment arguments are very easy to refute. In addition to the design argument, Moffitt used probability arguments and peppered his speeches with quotations from "scientists" who claimed to believe in creation. His probability arguments were the typically silly, after-the-fact stuff that we hear from creationists. Most readers have probably heard them before: the chances of a tornado going through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled Boeing 707 are greater than the probability that life could develop from nonlife and such like. To present one "argument," he showed a chart that had a trillion written on it twenty-seven times and said that if one would multiply a trillion by itself 27 times, he would have the odds against hemoglobin developing by chance. In my response to this and other probability arguments, I pointed out that no evolutionist believes that any parts of the human body or any other organism happened by chance or wave-of-the-hand means that suddenly brought it into existence. I further pointed out that Moffitt had not explained any of the factors or criteria that he had begun with to arrive at his probability figures. In the flipping of a coin, for example, one knows exactly what factors he is dealing with to determine the probability of getting heads twice in succession, but Moffitt never explained the factors he was working with. He didn't, of course, because he doesn't understand how to figure probability and even acknowledged in the debate that he was using figures that had been calculated for him by someone else. I specifically challenged him to explain what factors he had used to arrive at his astronomical odds against the formation of hemoglobin, but he never addressed the issue.
In this part of the debate, I turned Moffitt's probability argument back on him and demonstrated that his own methods will prove that it is impossible for him to exist. I thought I saw some looks of displeasure in the audience, but I used the fact that a male ejaculates about 250 million individual sperm cells in an act of sexual intercourse. This means that the female ovum has the chance of being fertilized by 250 million different sperm cells; hence, the probability of any person being the individual he/she is was about 250 million to one. I pointed out that this takes into consideration only the factors present during conception and not the many factors that could have kept any given human being's parents from having met so that the act of conception could take place. When we consider that these factors would have been involved not just in the conception of Moffitt but also in the conception of each of his parents and their parents and their parents and their parents, etc., etc., etc., Moffitt's own line of argument would prove that it is impossible for him or any other specific individual to exist.
Not having my personal library with me, I was unable to respond as I would have liked to the numerous quotations that Moffitt read out of context to try to prove that most scientists believe in the existence of a personal creator. Albert Einstein, Roger Penrose, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Hawking were among those that Moffitt tried to present as creationists. I asked him under cross-examination if he had the gall to say that these scientists believed that the universe was created by his god Yahweh, at which time he hedged a bit and said that he was claiming only that they believed in a creator. He evaded my challenge to let the audience know how many of the scientists he had quoted were believers in evolution.
In assessing the debate, I personally believe that my first negative speech outlined a problem that Moffitt was never able to resolve. I grouped the design, order, and cause-effect arguments together and showed that rather than solving the mystery of existence, they merely created a greater mystery. I argued that if apparent design, order, and cause in nature can be explained only by postulating a designer, orderer, and causer, then it would necessarily be true that the greater the design, order, and cause, the greater the need to explain them. Since a being who could design and cause a complex universe would necessarily be more complex than the universe that he designed and caused, then this being himself would require explanation. Thereafter, my response to Moffitt's endless comments about the marvels of the human body was simply to admit that the human body is wonderfully adapted to its environment and then to ask him to explain the existence of the deity who had created it. He could only manage a question-begging response to this: time and space began with the Big Bang, according to scientists like Einstein and Hawking, so God had to exist before time began.
Despite the silliness of his probability arguments and his constant resorts to question begging, Moffitt was easily the best debating opponent I have faced. He speaks rapidly, so he was able to overwhelm the audience with a constant volley of scripture quotations, probability arguments, and out-of-context quotations. He knows exactly what his audience wants to hear, so he is very good at playing to the gallery. Fundamentalists who watch the tapes of this debate will find much to applaud. Atheists and skeptics will undoubtedly roll their eyes in disbelief at many of the things they hear in Moffitt's speeches, especially his probability arguments and frequent praise of Dr. Hugh Ross the creationist physicist whose book The Creator and the Cosmos played second fiddle only to the Bible when Moffitt needed a proof text.
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