I Won A Debate With An Athiest

I have been going out into the vulgar areas of the web since a little before Ash Wednesday this year. I have had a lot of humilitation and exposure to things that are difficutl to hear. I learned that people outside the Church have a lot of legitimate grievances. But I have had a lot of headway, too.

This debate was a good experience for me. I won in a landslide. There are more coming in the future. I have a friendship that I built with my opponent prior to the debate, and I actually was replacing a Christian that disappeared shortly after accepting the challenge.  Below you will find my opening argument. I hope to link the recording of it. It has not been posted yet. You can reach out to me if you would like to see it. Here is a discussion I had with the same man months prior.

It is only very recently that anyone might try to call the Christian God incoherent. That is because for two thousand years it has always been the whole goal of people evangelizing Christianity to teach what their God is, what all the other gods are, and even any small details related to these. This is the whole reason there is a Church.

The height of these teachings are carefully protected. In the book of Acts, there is the first Church Council. After that, there were seven before 1054 which explained things like Christ’s divinity (that He is God), the Trinity (that there are three Persons and one God), that Christ is also human and has two natures. These councils specifically tell you what the Christian God is not. Does He have one will? No, that’s called monothelitism. Christ has two wills, the human and the divine. Then, for more coherence, there were fourteen councils which explain exhaustively how to worship God, what transubstantiation is (that the bread at Mass becomes God), and what papal infallibility (which strictly protects coherence by preventing change). These councils explain almost anything you could ever want to know about God if you had time to read them all, and there will be more councils in the future just to reaffirm these ones.

But why are people like my friend Tom now tempted to say that the Christian God is incoherent? It is because we live in an age of confusion. All churches are full of leaders that are afraid of teaching precise truths. Most of them are ignorant, almost all of them are in debt. There is an endless amount of information that bombards us every minute, and people are overworked and underpaid, and even if there are a million pages explaining precisely what God is, they do not have time to find them and read them.

It was not always like this. I am a Roman Catholic. My people like to say that all the different denominations are the reason for this confusion, but that’s not actually true. For every new church, the founders have felt the need to precisely define what they think God is and how He works. Even little ones! I will give you two big examples: the Augsburg Confession of the Lutherans says: “Of God: That there is one divine essence, eternal, without a body, without parts, of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, the Maker and Preserver of all things visible and invisible.” The Heidelberg Catechism of the Calvinists says: “But if his human nature is not present wherever his Godhead is, are not then these two natures in Christ separated from one another? Answer. Not at all, for since the Godhead is illimitable and omnipresent, it must necessarily follow that the same is beyond the limits of the human nature he assumed, and yet is nevertheless in this human nature, and remains personally united to it.”

We don’t have enough time to give every example. The point is that in the West, in Christianity, we have a history and culture of making precise definitions on paper. People like Tom come around to argue against Christianity, and the Church responds by lovingly dispelling the confusion. This is the origin of the University System. The claim that the Christian God is incoherent is an incoherent claim.

Now, all this is an argument to win a debate for your entertainment and the glory of God. Separately, I want to acknowledge the fact that Tom is my friend, that I look for an opportunity to convert him to my religion because I sincerely believe it is good for him, out of charity alone, and that if this resolution was that the Christian God was incoherent to him, then I would submit it to be true, and that the reason he has not converted is the sins of the Church. The division and confusion among Christians is to blame, and it has become nearly perfectly incoherent. I am happy to lose this debate and embarrass myself publicly for the salvation of Tom’s soul and anyone else’s, so help me God, in imitation of Jesus and Mary.