Discussion about belief in God can be put in three categories: the good, the bad and the Dawkins. Mercifully, the debate at the Union can be broadly put into the ‘good’ box, avoiding, for the most part, the tiresome, muscular and almost uniformly, white, male and middle-class argument that has typified the theism debate in the twenty-first century.

Unlike many more high-profile debates that feature on termcards, this in the main was focussed, not on a clash of personalities, but rather the issue at hand, particularly impressive considering Drs William Lane Craig and Arif Ahmed have clashed on this issue previously. Nevertheless, terms were not always properly defined (what kind of ‘God’ were we talking about?), but there did seem to be a genuine attempt on both sides to engage fully and frankly with the arguments for the existence of the belief in God. The proposition, however, made their task harder than it need have been: first speaker, Peter Williams chose the moral, cosmological and ontological arguments as his chief defences. They each rest on rather dubious premises, namely that ‘if God does not exist, then objective moral values do not exist’, ‘the universe exists’ and ‘if it is possible that God exists, then God exists’ respectively. A far better approach would have been focussing on the argument from design, which has an immediate intuitive appeal and a number of analogies perfect for a spoken debate.  The use of the moral argument lead Lane Craig to disappointingly suggest that those opposed to the motion had no fundamental disagreement to the Holocaust or child rape. When atrocities and obviously repellent acts are being used as a rhetorical tool, it often says more about the speaker’s weak position than it does the morality of his audience.

The opposition, too, at times had a rather scrappy argument. They seemed unsure whether or not to demonstrate to the theists that all presentations of God or gods are suspiciously anthropomorphic, or else to rebut the three arguments presented to them. Andrew Copson and Dr Ahmed were nonetheless worth listening to, as wias the preceding emergency debate featuring two particularly entertaining speeches by Dan Eisenberg and Matt Cummins arguing that the arts are more beautiful than the sciences.

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