This weekend, I spoke at the University of North Dakota, courtesy of an invitation from FUND, the local SSA affiliate. Yes, there are atheists in North Dakota! For those who weren't there, I wanted to write a quick recap and talk about some of the lessons learned.

My talk was given on Friday night at the university's Lecture Bowl, and drew somewhere between 70 and 80 people, by far the largest audience I've ever had. From what the organizers told me, this was more people than were at a Campus Crusade for Christ event the previous week, which was much more heavily promoted and had free pizza!

Granted, some of these people may just have been attracted by the novelty of an atheist speaking on campus. From what I understand, FUND is a relatively new group and I was their first invited speaker, which was an honor. And not everyone who came was there to support me - but more on that in a minute.

I was invited as part of UND's school-wide "Seven Dimensions of Wellness" program, so to fit the occasion, I decided to speak on "The Goodness of Godlessness" - the argument for why atheism is a positive, beneficial worldview. My talk was drawn from material in the Ebon Musings essay "Life of Wonder", as well as several posts from Daylight Atheism. (Sorry, no video this time, although some people did take still photographs. I'll post some of them if I get the chance. If you want to hear it, you can always invite me to your school.)

The talk took about 40 minutes, with Q&A afterwards. Some of the FUND organizers told me that members of the religious groups on campus might show up, so while I was forewarned, the actual Q&A session was a lot more lively than I was expecting: it lasted over an hour, and many of the questions came from religious believers who came to challenge me (although, to their credit, all of them were unfailingly polite and civil).

There were questions about why we should be good to each other if the laws of nature don't differentiate between good and evil; about how I could excuse all the evil done in the world by atheists; and all the other standard evangelist tropes. One questioner demanded to know how I could account for the existence of the Shroud of Turin, asserting that 95% of the scientists who studied it had converted. I explained that the cloth was carbon-dated to the 14th century, the same time when the shroud was first mentioned in historical records, and that a medieval bishop wrote a letter to the pope saying that the shroud was a forgery and that the forger had confessed.

I also got a question about the miracles of Christianity, with particular reference to a story about a medieval saint who was said to levitate when in prayer. I answered that by referencing the conflicting miracle stories in other religions, the way that rumors mutate and grow over time, and the fact that these miracles consistently prove to be unreplicable under scientific investigation, and asked what that story would prove even if it were true. (If one in every billion human beings was a mutant who could levitate at will, would that prove the correctness of all his theological beliefs?)