 "Photo: Dustin Glendinning / The Daily Gamecock")
Christians, atheists and those in between gathered Thursday night to debate the existence of the Christian God. Over 500 people packed into the Russell House ballroom to witness the event sponsored by USC's Pastafarians and the Secular Student Alliance.
Atheist activist Dan Barker debated Kyle Butt of Apologetics Press, a non-profit organization that defends the New Testament.
Barker is a former evangelical preacher who is now atheist. He is co-president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, which aims to educate the public on nontheism and promote separation of church and state.
"I was a true believer. I felt the Holy Spirit. I preached. I saw converts. I was a missionary, an evangelist, a Christian songwriter. If I was not a true Christian, nobody is a true Christian," Barker said. "It was true within my heart. I changed my mind because I learned that Christianity is not true."
Barker then went on to produce a lengthy list of contradictions in the Bible.
After citing the statistic that those who believe in God are in the overwhelming majority, Barker acknowledged that "you cannot come to truth based on majority rule." Instead, he argued that something as complex as the human brain demands an intelligent designer by comparing it to a laptop.
"Suppose you're walking on the beach. You see something in the sand and you move the sand away and you pick up a laptop computer. You press the on button, it comes on. You see that this laptop computing device will compute numbers the likes of which hundreds of billions of bits per second. It's got all the latest gadgets and gizmos. It is the most advanced technologic computing system, which you have ever seen,"Butt said.
"You have a question to ask yourself: where did this laptop computer come from? Number one, it origination by purely naturalistic chances and processes over millions of years by random chances working with some kind of selection. Or, number two, it was constructed and built by some intelligent designer."
The crowd responded to Butt's arguments with "amens" and similar sentiment.
Kyle Williams, a fourth-year finance student, said this was the first formal debate on religion he has attended.
"When I talk to other Christians, people who are kind of Christians and people that aren't Christian at all and they ask questions and want to talk about things, you have to have talking points," he said. "To do that, you have to hear both sides of it. As Christians, some of us shy away from debates like this, but I think that's the opposite of what we should be doing."
Autumn Richards drove from Seneca to attend the debate.
"I thought it was very important that we support Christianity and having as big of a showing as we could," she said.
Pastafarian member and third-year international business student Randy Barrineau said he enjoyed hearing both sides.
"We're really lucky to have such high-caliber speakers," he said.
Andrew Cederhal, a second-year political science student, is president of the Pastafarians
at USC. He co-founded the organization with fourth-year advertising student Matt Sulem, who is vice president.
"It's important to make sure comfort, convenience and tradition don't prevail over meaningful and critical dialogue, which challenges us to find the truth," Cederhal. "We want to make people reflect on what they believe, look for answers themselves. Don't just rely on a certain dogma that's based on tradition; rationally examine religious beliefs."
"It's always healthy to question their beliefs," Sulem said. "We're not out to change people's beliefs."
Confronting traditions and long-held beliefs is especially important in the Bible Belt, where Christian beliefs are sometimes intertwined with the law.
"It's become so engrained with our culture that it's not even an option to not believe in God for people here in the Bible Belt," Cederhal said. "It's definitely a viable option, a rational choice not to believe in God. People who do not believe in God are good people as well as Christians are."
Pastafarianism is basically "a parody of religions," Cederal said, in which believers worship the flying spaghetti monster. More seriously, he said, they are a secular student group.
Despite being a parody, Pastafarians take their beliefs seriously.
"Humorous name, serious business," Cederhal said. "What we're doing is very important work. Before we co-founded this organization, there was not a single voice, officially, on this campus for secular students and secular faculty."
The event took place on Darwin Day, the celebration of Charles Darwin's birth. This year was the 200th anniversary of the scientist's birth and is celebrated globally.
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