Last night (3/17/2007) the Philosophy Club hosted a debate on the Problem of Evil. The participants were Professor Corabi (moderator), and senior philosophy majors Tim Cox, Marisa Donelson, Ernest Cronin, and Vince Jackson. The video shows highlights of their opening statements. Unfortunately, Tim Cox got short-changed because my little videocam ran out of memory, but at least you get a sample of what everyone had to say. The discussion following the position statements was spirited and, I thought, pretty insightful.
Note that one of the nifty features of video hosted by Viddler is that you can comment right on the video timeline itself by clicking on the little green (+) icon as it moves along the progress bar at the bottom of the video screen.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
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3 comments:
I thought the debate went well and was a great way to get more people involved in philosophy on the campus. Even when people are dragged in for extra credit, exposing them to philosophical ideas presented and discussed by their peers must leave a strong impression. It saddens me that this forum is just getting started as I'm leaving.
Shameless self promotion perhaps, but I jotted down a few of my thoughts on the debate and the discussion that followed...
http://presremi.blogspot.com/
Mike, one of the reasons for starting this blog is so that people like you can stay in touch even after graduating.
I actually think it would've been good to have a flat-out atheist on the panel, to focus the arguments more on the question of whether evil is or isn't a problem for the existence of God. I thought the very first question asked (which I regrettably didn't get on the video) was very interesting. The student (was his name Chris?) asked, in effect, how a world like ours, with the humans like us in it, but without God would be different from this world (assuming for argument's sake that God exists in this world). That question requires us to set aside the concept of God as a necessary being, thus existing in every possible world. It asks us to consider whether the actual world, with its distribution of happiness and suffering, is what we'd expect to find if God didn't exist at all. That would have been worth pursuing, I think.
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