God Debate: Sam Harris vs. Rick Warren

Newsweek setup a sit-down debate between Sam Harris, outspoken atheist and author of Letter to a Christian Nation, and Rick Warren, evangelist and pastor at the Saddleback Church. As Bruce Godfrey pointed out, Harris can be quite a jerk sometimes, but there's little of that in evidence here.

Excerpt:

JON MEACHAM: Rick, since you're the home team, we'll start with Sam. Sam, is there a God in the sense that most Americans think of him?
SAM HARRIS: There's no evidence for such a God, and it's instructive to notice that we're all atheists with respect to Zeus and the thousands of other dead gods whom now nobody worships.

Rick, what is the evidence of the existence of the God of Abraham?
RICK WARREN: I see the fingerprints of God everywhere. I see them in culture. I see them in law. I see them in literature. I see them in nature. I see them in my own life. Trying to understand where God came from is like an ant trying to understand the Internet. Even the most brilliant scientist would agree that we only know a fraction of a percent of the knowledge of the universe.

HARRIS: Any scientist must concede that we don't fully understand the universe. But neither the Bible nor the Qur'an represents our best understanding of the universe. That is exquisitely clear.

WARREN: To you.

HARRIS: There is so much about us that is not in the Bible. Every specific science from cosmology to psychology to economics has surpassed and superseded what the Bible tells us is true about our world.

Read the whole thing and feel free to opine as to who won in the comments.

Something to Ponder

Question: If a Muslim father makes one a Muslim (a claim falsely made by Debbie Schlussel to smear Barack Obama) and a Jewish mother makes one a Jew, if a Muslim man marries a Jewish woman and they have a kid, is the child both Muslim and Jewish?

If so, can we fix the whole Middle Eastern situation through intermarriage?

Richard Dawkins would argue against the frame of the question. In his latest book, The God Delusion, he posits that children can't truly hold religious beliefs, so a child is a "child of Jewish parents" rather than a "Jewish child."

UPDATE: As I thought, being a Muslim requires one to submit to Allah. So much for that idea.

Profound Atheist Quote

"I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours." -Stephen Roberts