I think the debate lost its direction right in the start and the focus was lost. Brother Hamza treated the guy like an atheist and he seemed Hoodbhoy seemed uninterested in defending the atheistic perspective. The issues on which Br Hamza should have pressed him would be the limitations of science and the concept of properly basic beliefs. The bubble of evidentialism of Mr Hoodbhoy would have blasted if he were asked some simple questions. On the empiricist point of view , the out world which the sciences inquire through our empirical senses breaks down to elector-chemical waves. What a person calls the outer world is infact naming a process incitement of rods and cones in the retina of the eyes which result in the origination of an elector-chemical wave (no different from the normal electric current but with a low magnitude ) and this ECV travels to the optic center of the brain through the optic nerve and thats it.If asked , it would have been more scientific for Mr Hoodbhoy to claim that the room was inside him and he was not inside the room. There is no scientific evidence for any existence in the outer world but still no one questions its existence. Similarly there is no scientific proof to assert that there are other minds in this world. There is no evidence for the reality of the past as well. It will be scientifically impossible to refute the person who claims that the present world was created some 10 seconds back including our memory. No matter how radical this claim may sound but on such reductionist scientific perspective of proof and evidence , its impossible to prove the past. However , one sees that these "skeptics" almost never get skeptic about these issues and they digest these issues like the rest of us on pure belief. This is known as the "concept of properly basic belief" and same is true for God. Belief in God is a part of the properly basic belief so Hoodbhoy sahib was doing "special pleading" all the way in this discussion when he was talking about the necessity of proof and evidence. The present Newtonian model of science is based on observation , prediction and experimentation (though these foundations are under threat these days due to the approach of physicists like Brian green and Jimmy gates etc towards the string theory .The famous theoretical physicist Lee Smolin has recently published a book "The trouble with physics" which shall be a good read on this issue) However the very notion which is the starting point of scientific method that is "1 Observe some part of the universe 2. Make some predictions about your observations 3. Run experiments over the predictions 4. Those which qualify , take them as scientific facts" can not be proved scientifically. How on earth can a person prove in a lab that this particular method of inquiry is "science" . This base of science is belief as it can not be verified by the very same scientific rules. Along with these lines , another question to ponder for Hoodbhoy will be that what scientific or experiment based evidence is there to conclude that only this method of inquiry is the "correct" method? I am sure there is none. What about Maths then? Mathematics happen to be all internal and has absolutely nothing to do with laboratory. Where do the numbers exists and what experiment was carried out to conclude 2+2=4? Its all this internal (or apriori) of maths which corresponds so well to the natural world though the numbers have never traveled in the natural world. Kurt Godel had the right words for it. He said " What we call nature is not nature but an aspect of nature exposed to our method of questioning".