Does God Exist? A Debate between John Koster & Frank Zindler 1989 WMUZ

[Osama S Qatrani]

My Recent Research on the 1989 WMUZ Debate

Dear ,

I recently completed a research paper analyzing the 1989 WMUZ Detroit debate between John P. Koster (Christian apologist) and Frank R. Zindler (atheist). In this study, I not only reviewed the arguments but also commented on the specific questions posed during the exchange.

Although I am a believer in God — and one might expect me to align with John Koster — I deliberately maintained neutrality in my analysis. To me, it was clear that Frank Zindler appeared stronger in this debate. The reason is simple: Koster relied on the Bible as evidence, but this was a weak strategy against an opponent who neither believes in God nor accepts scripture as authoritative. From the start, this deprived him of common ground.

What Koster could have done, instead, was to appeal to shared foundations: science, reason, logic, and empirical evidence. Even without going too deep into technical details, a non-specialist can still use scientific reasoning to highlight explanatory strength. That would have provided a more solid ground for dialogue.

My full paper is available here:
From Rhetoric to Explanatory Power: A 2025 Re-Assessment of the Koster–Zindler 1989 Debate

https://www.researchgate.net/public...Id=68d1e829220a341aa14e5e57&showFulltext=true

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18232.20486

I would greatly value your thoughts and feedback.

With respect,
Osama S. Qatrani

 

[steve_bank]

What does Osama actually believe?

Is this you?

https://www.authorea.com/users/939174-osama-s-qatrani

 

[NoHolyCows]

My Recent Research on the 1989 WMUZ Debate

Dear ,

I recently completed a research paper analyzing the 1989 WMUZ Detroit debate between John P. Koster (Christian apologist) and Frank R. Zindler (atheist). In this study, I not only reviewed the arguments but also commented on the specific questions posed during the exchange.

Although I am a believer in God — and one might expect me to align with John Koster — I deliberately maintained neutrality in my analysis. To me, it was clear that Frank Zindler appeared stronger in this debate. The reason is simple: Koster relied on the Bible as evidence, but this was a weak strategy against an opponent who neither believes in God nor accepts scripture as authoritative. From the start, this deprived him of common ground.

What Koster could have done, instead, was to appeal to shared foundations: science, reason, logic, and empirical evidence. Even without going too deep into technical details, a non-specialist can still use scientific reasoning to highlight explanatory strength. That would have provided a more solid ground for dialogue.

My full paper is available here:
From Rhetoric to Explanatory Power: A 2025 Re-Assessment of the Koster–Zindler 1989 Debate

https://www.researchgate.net/public...Id=68d1e829220a341aa14e5e57&showFulltext=true

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.18232.20486

I would greatly value your thoughts and feedback.

With respect,
Osama S. Qatrani

As written, your comparison is circular. You characterize the naturalist option as a set of disconnected stories for laws, fine-tuning, and consciousness, then you adopt a decision rule that favors whichever view unifies those domains with fewer assumptions. If one side is framed as fragmented and the other is defined by unification, your rule guarantees the outcome. That is a feature of the setup, not a result of the evidence.

Calling unified naturalist contenders “speculative” doesn’t fix the asymmetry unless you apply the same standard to your “organizing Mind.” Both are high-level posits. Either you permit both onto the field and compare them under a common metric, or you exclude both. Anything else is special pleading. Likewise, pointing to the explanatory gap about consciousness does not by itself raise the probability of your hypothesis over a live naturalist model; it only shows that some naturalist accounts are incomplete. To claim “best explanation,” you have to show that your hypothesis makes the total evidence more likely than a well-specified rival, not merely that the rival is unfinished.

“Fewer assumptions” has to be cashed out, not asserted. What counts as an assumption? How are you measuring parsimony? What priors or penalties are you using? Without an explicit scoring rule, “simplicity” is rhetoric. And a unifier that accommodates everything after the fact but forbids nothing in advance is not an explanation; it is a re-label. If your view genuinely earns its keep, state at least one novel, risky expectation that would come out differently under a unified naturalist alternative, constraints on parameter distributions, structure in the space of possible laws, or differentiating neural-dynamic signatures not post hoc gloss.

Finally, please correct the basic historical errors about the debate’s date and host. They don’t bear on the philosophy, but they do indicate whether the piece is disciplined about matters of fact.

If you revise so that both sides are given their strongest unified formulations, you quantify the simplicity claim, and you add a discriminating prediction, the paper becomes a test instead of a foregone conclusion. If you choose not to do that, the honest label for the piece is a perspective, not an argument for “best explanation.”

NHC

 

[Wiploc]

I would greatly value your thoughts and feedback.

You hint about having arguments, but you never actually make one.

You want us to believe that you can somehow use the fine tuning argument (and two others) to support your conclusion that god exists, but you never step up and show how that would be done. In the end, your hint of an argument is no stronger than, "If god doesn't support the Broncos, why are sunsets orange?"

I'm available if you want to discuss your arguments further. If you have good arguments, I may be able to help you articulate them more persuasively.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

I would greatly value your thoughts and feedback.

You hint about having arguments, but you never actually make one.

You want us to believe that you can somehow use the fine tuning argument (and two others) to support your conclusion that god exists, but you never step up and show how that would be done. In the end, your hint of an argument is no stronger than, "If god doesn't support the Broncos, why are sunsets orange?"

I'm available if you want to discuss your arguments further. If you have good arguments, I may be able to help you articulate them more persuasively.

Fine tuning is easily refuted by the fact that 99.9999999999999999% of the Universe is completely inhospitable (even more than that obviously). That's not even counting the numerous mass extinctions thst occurred on Earth- it cant even be said Earth is the perfect place for life to exist.

 

[Jarhyn]

No, God does not exist, depending on what definition you use for the term.

Any proposed Omniscient Creator God ends up in the same bucket, is the same thing, owing to "omniscience". In fact the word "omniscience" itself or even the word "necessary" injected in the wrong part of a sentence or without qualifiers can result in the same outcome: a premise that allows reaching any conclusion you wish, including contradictory ones.

In math, though, generally we accept this disproves premises as invalid.

So, we can see from the get-go that certain concepts are just non-starters, as is demonstrated by Russel's Paradox: any attempt to define The Set of All Sets ends in presenting a contradiction.

The intelligent logician might conclude then that The Set of All Sets is a nonsense idea, and I present some intuitions in other threads (primarily in the threads on free will) which seem to support this idea as well.

It's not a matter of belief, either.

I could just as easily point to the actual possibility of creator gods with powers LIKE but not quite exactly traditional omniscience and omnipotence, limited in particular ways to make them logically possible?

While I think that belief without reason is unreasonable, I do not think it nonsensical to believe in a creator god (note the switch to small g here) with "Obniscience" and "Obnipotence" (I replaced the M with B to imply certain limits that un-fuck them and make them logically possible).

The problem is that such classes of entities as "TzimTzum" do not deserve worship; I am a creator god with these powers with relation to my creations, and this does not give me the power to invoke contradictions or change logic by FIAT. It doesn't give me magic super powers. It does not make me instantaneously capable of knowing anything beyond the fact that I can appear to within my simulation because I have a pause button there... And that is limited to the simulation.

The result is that we can make the strong claim that God does not exist, and is in fact one of the first things we must accept if we are to accept logic and reason instead because God is the very definition of not-possible, of not-capable-of-existing: contradictory.

In some other threads, I even point out the fact that "God" isn't the only way people invoke this set-of-all-sets self-own: many "atheists" invoke the idea through references to "necessitation", and expose themselves rather as "abstract theists".

Of course, these are reasons which, I suppose, are unfair insofar as that depressingly few theists have the background to understand the nature of Russel's Paradox or form intuitions as to why Russel's Paradox comes up.

 

[Wiploc]

I would greatly value your thoughts and feedback.

You hint about having arguments, but you never actually make one.

You want us to believe that you can somehow use the fine tuning argument (and two others) to support your conclusion that god exists, but you never step up and show how that would be done. In the end, your hint of an argument is no stronger than, "If god doesn't support the Broncos, why are sunsets orange?"

I'm available if you want to discuss your arguments further. If you have good arguments, I may be able to help you articulate them more persuasively.

Fine tuning is easily refuted by the fact that 99.9999999999999999% of the Universe is completely inhospitable (even more than that obviously). That's not even counting the numerous mass extinctions thst occurred on Earth- it cant even be said Earth is the perfect place for life to exist.

Also, the same creationists (the ones assert that fine tuning is real) often claim that life requires miracles, that life is implausible without magic. Which is another way of saying that fine tuning--if it existed at all, would be beside the point. If the universe is so hostile to life that life cannot exist without miracles, then the so-called "fine tuning" stupidly flawed.