On September 7th, 2010, Christopher Hitchens and David Berlinski squared off at the Fixed Point Foundation in Birmingham, Alabama before a capacity crowd of 1,200. The question being debated was whether or not a purely atheistic society is preferable to a religious one. Overshadowing the debate was Hitchens' recent cancer diagnosis (as you can see from the above picture, Hitchens has lost his hair due to chemotherapy). The debate was filmed and will be released on DVD in November, just in time to make it on to your philosophically-inclined Christmas wishlist.
I'm especially interested in listening to this debate because, while many debate opponents are mismatched, I think Berlinski and Hitchens are well suited to debate each other. Both men are rhetorical, witty, iconoclastic public figures. This decreases the chance that the debate will be won or lost based on one debater out-talking another.
Click
here to read an overview of each debater's main points, as well as some issues raised by the debate. Click
here to read a newspaper review and see some pictures of the debate. Finally, click
here to read Fixed Point Foundation executive director Larry Taunton's reflections on the evening.
Os Guinness speaks on truth in a 14 minute video titled Why Truth Matters. Christian Week editor Doug Koop reacts negatively to Os Guinness's "tough words...". For some clarification of the concept of truth look at H. vander Something-or-other's "What is truth?" - Dr. V
