Nightline Atheist "Debate"

I just watched the stream of last night's "debate" on Nightline. I cringed. Just a little background is warranted here. ABC News decided to host a debate on the existence of God and the parties involved were to be Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort of Way of the Master ministries and Brian Sapient and "Kelly" (no last name given) of the Rational Response Squad.

The first hole that the Kirk and Ray stepped into was in agreeing to debate on a scientific basis with no appeal to Scripture or faith...purely reason. I'm not saying that arguments from reason can't be made, I'm saying that, based on what I saw, these two were not up to the task at hand. While Ray did a great job in presenting the gospel, that's exactly where he lost credibility. Kirk didn't help much when he used his entire time allotment to give his personal testimony. Again, while I applaud their evangelistic efforts it was rather disingenuous of them to make an evengelistic gospel presentation under the guise of a scientific argument on the existence of God. Later, during the session where the moderator asked questions of both sides in an informal manner, there were statements made by the atheists and when asked by the moderator if they would like to respond, Cameron and Comfort appeared as if they had used all their best stuff and had nothing else to say, even responding to the direct question of "Do you have a response?" with what amounted to an "...uhh....no." They looked totally unprepared and it would appear that the atheists ate their lunch (to a certain extent). This made all Christians look like what Brian and Kelly were trying to make them out to be...brainless robots acting strictly on dogmatic doctrine with no reason to back it up. They should have debated on a philosophical level instead.

But there's always the other side. As far as atheist side went, while they looked much more prepared and serious about the debate (they actually took notes on what Ray and Kirk were saying and could be seen discussing rebuttals) their arguments were not arguments. Most of the presentation time, particularly that by Kelly, was spent in belittling theists and making unsupported claims about theism in particular and Christianity in specific (they were unsupported claims because there is not support for them...e.g.: Jesus never existed). But I have to give them this: they took the upper hand and never gave it up.

For another point of view on debate, check out the Stand to Reason blog.