Whether they had atheist, theist or curious minds, hundreds of students filled Chumash Auditorium last week for a religious forum.
SLO Cru, formerly known as SLO Crusade, sponsored the Veritas discussion forum. According to Cru, the forum is part of a national program to bring a Christian perspective to some of life’s deepest questions.
“It’s to bring in people to address important issues in life,” SLO Cru director Jamey Pappas said. “It could be existence of God, it could be morality (or) it could be human origins.”
The event took place over two days, beginning with an art show Tuesday morning. It culminated the following night when an Ivy League Christian and a Cal Poly atheist discussed objective morality and its origins. The forum also featured Mary Poplin, a professor in the school of educational studies at Claremont Graduate University.
Each year Cal Poly’s Veritas forum has a different theme. Generally, it is consistent with the translation of its Latin name, meaning “truth.” This year the theme took the form of a question: “Good without a God?”
Art show organizer and art and design junior Kaori Funahashi said a lot of people might have not thought about religion before. She asked artists to submit works revolving around the idea of “truth.”
“The art show is a prelude to the forum itself,” she said. “It gets people thinking about truth before the actual forum.”
Poplin’s talk Tuesday night centered on her experience working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. Poplin said after having visions of Jesus speaking with her, she decided to travel to help Mother Teresa with her work.
“God calls everyone to a Calcutta,” Poplin said during her speech. “You have to find yours.”
In answer to the question of how to be good without God, Poplin said everyone can find their Calcutta whether they are Christian or not. But she said morality is greatly increased for those who are religious.
“Moral codes are best determined by religion,” she said.
The next night, philosophy professors Greg Ganssle and Keith Abney picked up where Poplin left off, discussing the origins of morality. Abney, a Cal Poly professor, claimed morality comes from rational thought.
“The fact that the biggest bully in the universe tells me what to do doesn’t make it right,” Abney said in his presentation. “Rationality makes it right.”
In his rebuttals, Ganssle, a part-time lecturer at Yale, said God exemplifies a perfect morality and humans strive to emulate this.
“I’m going to hold that rationality itself is the reflection of God,” he said. “It’s not completely independent.”
Atheist and Christian audience members were given the chance to challenge the speakers during a question and answer session following the presentations.
“It’s a forum. It’s dialogue. We want to pursue these things,” Pappas said. “Hopefully, our students will go on and still talk about these things.”
Despite Cru’s goal to make the forum a dialogue on the question of God, Veritas came under attack for promoting what some say is a strictly Christian worldview.
An article published this month by the Cal Poly Alliance of Happy Atheists titled “Veritas Slipping into Irrelevance” said the forum only addressed questions long since proven by science. The article specifically addressed the “Good without God?” theme of the forum.
“The answer to this question, from an ethical and sociological perspective is obvious,” the article said. “Numerous studies have shown that the non-religious live moral lives. Some such studies found that the non-religious end up in prison at lower rates than their religious neighbors and at a disproportionate rate compared to their percentage of society as a whole.”
But not everyone thinks Veritas’ alleged bias is a bad thing. Despite his atheistic views, Abney said he was fine with the forum’s “theistic agenda.”
“I think (differing) viewpoints deserve an airing,” he said. “And if they’re wrong, you should have an argument as to why it’s wrong. I think there’s way too many prejudices held by both theists and atheists.”