Page ee March 4, 2009

‘No God’ debate brings in packed house,

By Jarrod Yeo

Panther Post

Does God exist? The ques- tion mankind has grappled with since the earliest of times took centre stage as UPEI professors Joe Ve- laidum and Malcolm Murray

CAMPUS

engaged in an hour-long de- bate before a packed house at McMillan Hall Feb. 27. The highly anticipated de- bate, organized by UPEI’s political studies society, pit- ted Velaidum, UPEI’s reli- gious. studies buff against Malcolm, an atheist and phi- losopher . Each candidate de-

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He said his strictness was something his co-workers didn’t respect.

“They started noticing I wasn’t hiring their friends, I wouldn’t let them get drunk on the job, I wouldn’t iet their underage friends in and I didn’t favour members of sports teams.”

MacDonald claims the problem is that staff mem- bers generally form a clique, and often colluded to over- ride his decisions.

“T needed time off once due to an injury. By the time I got back, I noticed the guy who had replaced me had re- moved all of his friends off my barred list.”

The barred list became a contentious issue for Mac- Donald. | One night, he said he barred a “hockey player” for as- saulting one of his co-work- ers, and wanted to bar him for life.

“TI wanted to bar him for.

good, but my _ supervisor [Kirk] Dingwell, to bar him for a month because of fa- vours he had done for him.

“Tf they were good for busi- .

ness, profits came before regulations.”

MacDonald was eventually let go as tensions grew be- tween him and co-workers, after he allegedly roughed up a patron.

So why does this problem exist in the first place? Mac- Donald think it’s because UPEI’s campus is too small and there are too few. stu- dents applying for the jobs.

“There is a constant flow of students coming in and out so they cannot be prop- erly trained. The jobs are poorly advertised so. it usu- ally means the only people

who hear about the jobs are |

friends of people who work there. Then there are issues with the hiring board.”

livered an opening statement and wrangled a few surprise questions submitted by stu- dents and faculty members. Velaidum said while the idea of God as an “old man with a gray beard” is out- dated and not accepted by Christian theologist but that we owe it to ourselves to un-

In order to work for the stu- dent union, one policy states you must be a full-time stu- dent.

That is something the hir- ing board works very hard to ensure, Douglas said.

“If there are staff [who aren’t] they’d fall under an exceptional category that there is work that needs to be filled. Certainly, if comes to the process where we have enough applications to fill all the jobs with full-time stu- dents, the full-time student will always be hired ahead of the non-student.”

Douglas prefers to let the record speak for itself.

“Given our ability to have

wet/dry events with 700

people, when there’s alcohol involved, things will happen, just like any other bar.

“But I think the PEILCC re- cords have only been glow- ing and they speak for them- selves.”

derstand we are not merely a product of evolution.

“We are not solely a prod- uct of slime that crawled out of the water.

“We are endowed with the capacity for sacrificial love that goes well beyond our biological necessities.”

Murray’s argument com- pared proving the existence of God to the challenge courts face when prosecut- ing someone.

“People are generally con- sidered innocent until prov- en guilty.

“The challenge is to prove —

guilt. Absent that, the default

position is innocent. Ditto

with belief in any kind of ex- istence.” :

One predetermined ques- tion, frequently posed in the God debate, asked how evo- lution could possibly explain incredibly complex organic

‘structures such as the eye,

flagellum .and human brain without the help of a design- er. Murray said evolution easily debunked the design argument.

“What we know is that 99 per cent known fossils are

extinct. Just think of that in

terms of the probabilities, so evolution explains that lack of very well, it’s exactly what we predicted: Things that don’t fit die off.

PANTHER POST

questions

A submitted question from UPEI philosophy professor Neb Kujundzic asked both men to define their idea of existence, resulting in two very different answers.

Malcolm compared the ex- istence of God to the concept of a unicorn. .

“The question is whether or not anything satisfies that concept in the world. Ditto with God. There’s nothing that actually satisfies the concept of a unicorn, but the concept exists which is per- fectly fine.”

Velaidum was critical of Murray’s answer, saying he missed the point he made earlier in the debate about God not being an old man with a gray beard

“The very first thing I said when I got up here is God does not exist like other ob- jects exist. It’s as simple as that.

“A unicorn is something you can kind of picture. I don’t know what God looks like, nobody knows what_ God looks like.

“There’s a fundamental dif- ference between that and try- ing to prove the existence of something that doesn’t have existence because existence only exists for things in

_ space and time.”

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