http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6WD_l1Ud6g
Can you answer this question in 16 minutes? Indeed you can: the answer's "no."
Maybe you think that's too glib, and some effort ought to be expended assessing the evidence. But in this discussion the evidence is not in evidence — that is, no-one actually presents any. The person who gets first go (Mohammed Hatehit, from
Didsbury Mosque) simply assumes the existence of the
soul, and uses its separateness from the body as definite proof of life after death: you bury the body, but where does the soul go? It must go somewhere. However, if the soul doesn't exist then obviously it doesn't go anywhere as it wasn't there to begin with. (He doesn't suggest why the soul, if it exists,
couldn't be buried with the body....)
Spiritualists such as
Steven Upton like to cite anecdotal evidence of communication with "the other side" — but as
Michael Marshall of
Merseyside Skeptics ably points out, such parlour tricks can be convincingly replicated by stage magicians.
Anglican bishop
Stephen Lowe demonstrated a shade of tentativeness — so typical of the Church of England — that threatens to subsume Anglicanism beneath a welter of uncertainty. At least Penny Mawdsley from
Sea of Faith was prepared to concede that there are Christians who don't believe in God.
Jewish Chronicle columnist Angela Epstein's comment that she sees this world as "
almost a waiting room for the world to come" is symptomatic of faith that casts reality as something inferior to unreality. This is the kind of thinking that leads to notions of the
Rapture. Why bother doing anything at all, if we're simply enduring this life while waiting for eternal bliss?
Naturally this 16-minute discussion couldn't conclude without someone (it was
Ajmal Masroor) proposing
Pascal's Wager — an argument so bad that anyone using it should be automatically disqualified from participating.
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