My last post did not come out of the blue. I had been rummaging in a box full of old university papers and documents when I came across a faded sheet of point form notes about a debate I had been in in my second year at UNSW. This was my last formal debate as I recall and I was a ring-in. I had been attending a weekly bible study at the chaplains office and somehow, though I can’t exactly remember how, a vacancy had occurred in the team. I may have mentioned, however, that I had once debated at high school. Cue second speaker.

This was a kind of lunchtime inter-faculty debate of no real consequence. The topic “That there can be no absolute law without a deity” might have been one better suited to a theological college, but here we were anyway, a patched up team of Arts students taking on another from across the way in the Philosophy Department. Of course this put us at a distinct disadvantage, philosophy undergrads being in their element on this hallowed ground, in addition to having recourse to a couple of thousand years of philosophical debate. I think that we expected to be whacked.

Good debaters, however, can sometimes work a kind of rhetorical magic if their opponents don’t rise to the challenge. I am a pretty average debater but my teammates were first class and we won. The funny thing is is that I do think that the affirmative on this topic ( which we were) is true and that without religious faith, what’s right and what’s wrong are located on shifting sand.

As always, happy to be proven wrong.

The venue: