In his latest undignified rant, Dawkins claims that it is because Craig is “an apologist for genocide” that he won’t share a platform with him. Dawkins is referring to Craig’s defence of God’s commandment in Deuteronomy 20: 15-17 to wipe out the Canannites. Here is Craig’s offending passage:
“[If] God’s grace is extended to those who die in infancy or as small children, the death of [the Canannite] children was actually their salvation. We are so wedded to an earthly, naturalistic perspective that we forget that those who die are happy to quit this earth for heaven’s incomparable joy. Therefore, God does these children no wrong in taking their lives.”
I am disinclined to defend the God of the Old Testament’s infanticide policy. But as a matter of logic, Craig is probably right: if an infinite good is made possible by a finite evil, then it might reasonably be said that that evil has been offset. However, I doubt whether Craig would be guided by logic himself in this regard and conduct infanticide. I doubt, that is, that he would wish it to be adopted as a general moral principle that we should massacre children because they will receive immediate salvation.
But whatever you make of Craig’s view on this issue, it is irrelevant to the question of whether or not God exists. Hence it is quite obvious that Dawkins is opportunistically using these remarks as a smokescreen to hide the real reasons for his refusal to debate with Craig – which has a history that long predates Craig’s comments on the Canaanites.
There is a lot more in the article that is worth reading, including a quick review of Dawkin’s “The God Delusion” that echoes Craig’s own comments. I don’t mind that atheists think atheism is true, and that theism is irrational. That’s their view, and they are entitled to hold it and speak it and teach it. But I think that Came is right to say that they should also be willing to defend it in public. Dawkins is clearly not willing to defend his views, and that tells me that he has no reasons to believe them.
Please read my earlier post about Dawkins’ editorial in the UK Guardian. It contains a response to Dawkins’ attack on Craig, an analysis of Craig’s qualifications, an assessment of Dawkins’ ability to debate, and a previous debate between Craig and prominent atheist Christopher Hitchens.
Atheist Richard Dawkins explained why he wouldn’t debate Craig in this UK Guardian column. This is his latest excuse for not debating Craig, (see the full list of excuses here). I guess this is Dawkins’ way of striking at Craig without giving Craig a chance to respond. If he wanted to hear a response, he would have attended the debate at Oxford, and put his arguments on the table to be answered.
Defeating the column
His entire column is easily dispatched using Dawkins’ own words against him, because he contradicts himself.
Dawkins has previously written this:
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
(“God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, November, 1995, p. 85)
Meanwhile, in his column, Dawkins claimed that God’s command to destroy the Canaanites was an instance of evil:
Most churchmen these days wisely disown the horrific genocides ordered by the God of the Old Testament. Anyone who criticises the divine bloodlust is loudly accused of unfairly ignoring the historical context, and of naive literalism towards what was never more than metaphor or myth. You would search far to find a modern preacher willing to defend God’s commandment, in Deuteronomy 20: 13-15, to kill all the men in a conquered city and to seize the women, children and livestock as plunder.
So, in one statement, there’s no good or evil, and in the next statement, there’s evil. That’s a contradiction, and it undermines his entire column, Q.E.D. You can’t claim that there is no standard of good and evil in one breath, and then make judgments of good and evil in the next. It’s self-refuting. Dawkins didn’t even try to respond to any of Craig’s standard arguments for God’s existence in the editorial, he just went off on a tangent about a few Bible verses that, even if true, might only defeat Judaism and Christianity in particular, but not the existence of God in general. And the debate “Does God Exist?” is about the latter.
Responding to the argument
If we ignore Dawkins’ first statement denying that morality is real, and just respond to the verses he is complaining about, then we can look at this response online by William Lane Craig, or we can watch a lecture in two parts featuring Christian philosopher Paul Copan (part 1, part 2). So, a response to this objection is not hard to find. We have entire books written to answer this challenge – to say nothing of academic papers.
It’s troubling to me that Dawkins would not reference any responses to his argument in his editorial, since they clearly exist, and can easily be found just by searching the world wide web. Dawkins’ failure to interact with his critics is not surprising, though, given the fact that he didn’t reference any opposing scholars in his latest book. Moreover, Dawkins has cited a professor of German language as an authority on the historical Jesus and suggested that unobservable aliens could explain the origin of life. These are not actions of a genuine scholar, and the refusal to debate William Lane Craig in public is part of that same pattern.
But the main point to realize is that Richard Dawkins refuses to debate William Lane Craig, and that means that nothing Richard Dawkins says can be taken seriously. He isn’t willing to take the stage with an opponent and defend his views. He prefers to take pot shots at peripheral matters, (disputing particular Bible passages has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of whether a Creator of the universe exists or not), from the safety of the UK Guardian’s editorial page. I cited responses to the passages from Craig and Copan above, but Craig could even just reject the passages as mistaken and Dawkins’ argument would be neutralized – the debate is about the existence of God – the bare philosopher’s God who creates and designs the universe. The debate is not about the Christian God in particular, or even about the inerrancy of the Bible. Evidence against inerrancy is not evidence against a Creator and Designer of the universe.
Finally, it’s important to note that Richard Dawkins has peculiar views on morality himself. Not only does he support abortion, which resulted in the death of over 50 million unborn babies since 1973 in the United States alone, but he actually has no problem with infanticide.
That’s why it’s important to make these arguments in a debate – instead of preaching them in an editorial to the UK Guardian choir. Theists do have responses to these and other objections, and it would be nice to be able to give those responses in public. If truth is the goal, then hearing both sides is the best way to reach the goal. It’s part of the scientific method that we should be open to being disproved by the evidence.
William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California.
Dr. Craig pursued his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College (B.A. 1971) and graduate studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (M.A. 1974; M.A. 1975), the University of Birmingham (England) (Ph.D. 1977), and the University of Munich (Germany) (D.Theol. 1984). From 1980-86 he taught Philosophy of Religion at Trinity… In 1987 they moved to Brussels, Belgium, where Dr. Craig pursued research at the University of Louvain until assuming his position at Talbot in 1994.
He has authored or edited over thirty books, including The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom; Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology; and God, Time and Eternity, as well as over a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology, including The Journal of Philosophy, New Testament Studies, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, and British Journal for Philosophy of Science.
Here are some of Craig’s recent publications: (it’s a little out of date, now)
From 2007:
Ed. with Quentin Smith. Einstein, Relativity, and Absolute Simultaneity. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2007, 302 pp.
“Theistic Critiques of Atheism.” In The CambridgeCompanion to Atheism, pp. 69-85.Ed. M. Martin. Cambridge Companions to Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
“The Metaphysics of Special Relativity: Three Views.” In Einstein, Relativity, and Absolute Simultaneity, pp. 11-49. Ed. Wm. L. Craig and Quentin Smith. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. London: Routledge, 2007.
“Creation and Divine Action.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion, pp. 318-28. Ed. Chad Meister and Paul Copan. London: Routledge, 2007.
From 2008:
God and Ethics: A Contemporary Debate. With Paul Kurtz. Ed. Nathan King and Robert Garcia. With responses by Louise Antony, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, John Hare, Donald Hubin, Stephen Layman, Mark Murphy, and Richard Swinburne. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
“Time, Eternity, and Eschatology.” In The Oxford Handbook on Eschatology, pp. 596-613. Ed. J. Walls. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
From 2009:
Ed. with J. P. Moreland. Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Oxford: Blackwell.
“The Kalam Cosmological Argument.” With James Sinclair. In Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Ed. Wm. L. Craig and J. P. Moreland. Oxford: Blackwell.
“In Defense of Theistic Arguments.” In The Future of Atheism: Alister McGrath and Daniel Dennett in Dialogue. Ed. Robert Stewart. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
Forthcoming:
“The Cosmological Argument.” In Philosophy of Religion: Classic and Contemporary Issues. Ed. Paul Copan and Chad Meister. Cambridge: Blackwell.
“Cosmological Argument”; “Middle Knowledge.” In The Cambridge Dictionary of Christian Theology. Ed. G. Fergusson et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
“Divine Eternity.” In Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Theology. Ed. Thomas Flint and Michael Rea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
He seems eminently qualified to debate the existence of God, doesn’t he? And he’s done it dozens of times, against the top atheist scholars.
What is Richard Dawkins is afraid of?
Here’s an example of William Lane Craig debating the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens, arguably the top popular atheist in the world today.
Here’s a review of that debate from Common Sense Atheism, a popular and respected atheist web site.
Excerpt:
I just returned from the debate between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens at Biola University. It was a bigger deal than I realized. Over 3,000 people were there, and groups from dozens of countries – including Sri Lanka, apparently – had purchased a live feed.
[…]The debate went exactly as I expected. Craig was flawless and unstoppable. Hitchens was rambling and incoherent, with the occasional rhetorical jab. Frankly, Craig spanked Hitchens like a foolish child. Perhaps Hitchens realized how bad things were for him after Craig’s opening speech, as even Hitchens’ rhetorical flourishes were not as confident as usual. Hitchens wasted his cross-examination time with questions like, “If a baby was born in Palestine, would you rather it be a Muslim baby or an atheist baby?” He did not even bother to give his concluding remarks, ceding the time instead to Q&A.
The atheist web site “Debunking Christianity” called it a “landslide” victory for Craig. And I want to suggest that this outcome is exactly what Richard Dawkins was afraid of.
Craig has also debated other prominent atheists like Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Bart Ehrman, Peter Atkins, Victor Stenger, and so on. And many of these can be seen for free on Youtube.
What William Lane Craig offers in his debates is a set of deductive arguments that are logically valid, and supported by 1) the latest scientific evidence (which he has published in peer-reviewed scientific journals), and 2) the consensus of academic historians of all persuasions, using standard historical methods. Dawkins should have no trouble debating empirical arguments from science and history, if his beliefs were testable against objective evidence. The debate is about scientific and historical evidence, and we can investigate that evidence.
Finally, I want to note that Craig is not the only person who Dawkins refuses to debate. He was challenged to debate Stephen C. Meyer, whose Ph.D is from Cambridge, and again declined to have his ideas debated in a public forum. Meyer’s book was as a Times Literary Supplement Best Book of 2009 – and it was nominated by the respected atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel.
For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.
With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.
That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.
Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne’er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders’ expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.
During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.
Since this question comes up in apologetics, and even William Lane Craig screws it up by calling the Crusades evil, I thought it might be a good idea for us to have some background so that we would be able to set the record straight if it’s called into question. It’s important to know this because a lot of people appeal to the Crusades to take shots at Christianity and introduce a kind of moral equivalence that excuses real wars of aggression and real terrorism.
The article also includes some of the real mistakes made by some of the Crusaders, so be ready to own up to those.
WINTERY KNIGHT 