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Why does Richard Dawkins refuse to debate William Lane Craig?

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Because Richard Dawkins doesn’t understand basic logic:

That’s the latest video from Peter Byrom, aka BirdieUpon. (H/T Peter S. Williams)

And don’t take my word for it, look at what sensible atheist Jeffrey Jay Lowder has to say about it:

I find myself in an odd situation. I agree with Dawkins’ decision not to debate Craig, but not for the reasons he has given (more on that in a moment). With all due respect to Dawkins, I don’t think he should debate Craig because he simply isn’t qualified to do so. If The God Delusion is any indication, Dawkins clearly isn’t familiar with contemporary philosophy of religion, whereas Craig is an expert on the philosophy of religion.

The idea of Dawkins debating Craig would would be like a championship bodybuilder, who just happens to have a green belt in Taekwondo, agreeing to a fight with an eigth-degree black belt. Bodybuilding is not completely irrelevant to Taekwondo and the bodybuilder may be the best bodybuilder in the world, but bodybuilding and Taekwondo are clearly not the same thing. The black belt would easily and decisivelybeat the bodybuilder.

There is no shame or dishonor in declining a mismatch. If the black belt challenged the green belt (bodybuilder) to a fight, the bodybuilder would be rational–indeed, wise–to decline the invitation. The bodybuilder needs to clearly acknowledge, however, that he is declining because it would be a mismatch.

And if Dawkins did decline the invitation on the grounds it was a mismatch, theists shouldn’t act as if they’ve scored some major victory, just as, say, Billy Graham’s refusal to debate an atheist philosopher of religion shouldn’t be viewed as a victory for atheism.

Billy Graham shouldn’t debate Peter Millican the same way that Richard Dawkins shouldn’t debate William Lane Craig. Exactly!

But I don’t even agree with Mr. Lowder that Dawkins can do biology, either.

Drawings of Haeckel’s embryos were discredited in the 19th century, according to research published in the peer-reviewed journal Science.

But Dawkins cites the faked the 19th century embryo drawings as evidence of evolution. He’s not good at biology, either.

Dawkins’ recent book doesn’t even interact with recent scientific discoveries and publications.

Excerpt:

Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, is being touted as a scathing rebuttal to intelligent design (ID), yet an actual response to mainstream ID thinking can hardly be found in the book. Though the book makes passing mention of “irreducible complexity” in a couple places, there are zero mentions of leading ID proponents like Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Phillip Johnson, Stephen Meyer, or any other well-known ID proponent. Instead, Dawkins refers extensively to “creationists,” repeatedly attacking young earth creationism, while also making heavy use of fallacious (and dubious) “poor design” examples that rebut no argument made by a leading advocate of design since perhaps the 19th century. It seems that Dawkins didn’t have the stomach to tackle the actual modern theory of intelligent design in his new book.

Mr. Dawkins, when he isn’t busy pushing for infanticide and adultery and aliens causing the origin of life, hasn’t bothered to engage at all with recent criticisms of evolution  – he is still stuck in the 19th century. This is not a person who is credible about anything related to evolution and biology. He cites professors of German language as an authority on the historical Jesus, for goodness’ sake.

The reason why atheists like him is because he is rude, crude and insulting. And that’s what popular atheism is all about. Blindly believing in eternal universes, unseen aliens and untestable multiverses, and being insulting to real scientists, real historians and real philosophers. If you are a science-respecting person, then you are reading Stephen C. Meyer’s “Signature in the Cell” and “Darwin’s Doubt”. That’s where the real science is being done – not using faked embryo drawings from the 19th century.

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MUST-READ: How good are the arguments in the new book by Richard Dawkins?

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Brian Auten of Apologetics 315 has written a nice review of Dawkins’ new book. He is very polite in this review, but also very effective.  He also posted the audio for the recent debate between John Lennox and Richard Dawkins.

Brian starts his review by explaining Dawkins’ plan for the book:

Dawkins seems to place all doubters into the young-earth category, while the illustrations he employs put them on par with “well-financed and politically muscular groups of Holocaust-deniers.”

That’s right. He is not refuting the work of intelligent design theorists – he is refuting young earth creationists. He spends an entire chapter on the age of the earth. The names of intelligent design scholars hardly even appear in the index of his book! This book is not a refutation of the likes of William A. Demsbki, PhD, PhD or Jonathan Wells, PhD, PhD. (That is not a typo, they each have two PhDs, and from top-tier schools)

And then it goes from bad to worse.  He uses intelligent selection by human dog-breeders as proof of the efficacy of random mutation and natural selection. Intelligent design that produces micro-evolution is used as evidence for unguided macro-evolution.

[…]”The difference between any two breeds of dog gives us a rough idea of the quantity of evolutionary change that can be achieved in less than a millennium. The next question we should ask is, how many millennia do we have available to us in accounting for the whole history of life? If we imagine the sheer quantity of differences that separate a pye-dog from a peke, which took only a few centuries of evolution, how much longer is the time that separates us from the beginning of evolution or, say, from the beginning of mammals? … Can you imagine two million centuries, laid end to end?”

Actually, this “can you imagine” argument is a lot better than his fraudulent drawings of embryos argument. Neither of them works, but at least he isn’t using fraudulent evidence with this “can you imagine” argument.

Oh, but here’s the “you’re stupid and evil” argument, which taken together with the “can you imagine” argument and the fraudulent embryos, forms the beginning of a very persuasive case for macro-evolution.

“If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worse than ignorant, they are deluded to the point of perversity.”

Did you know that human pregnancy is actually evidence for macro-evolution? Yes – babies evolve in a Darwinian fashion from a fertilized egg until their birth! That’s macro-evolution!

Chapter eight is entitled You Did It Yourself in Nine Months. Here Dawkins cites an interaction between J.B.S. Haldane, a leading architect of neo-Darwinism, and an evolution skeptic. The skeptic poses a complex question of how, even given billions of years, a single cell could develop into a complicated human body that thinks and feels. Haldane’s one-liner response was, “But madam, you did it yourself. And it only took you nine months.”

Brilliant! Sheer brilliance! Let’s call this one the “pregnancy is macro-evolution in action” argument. Put that with the rest.

Dawkins says that scientists don’t even need to observe any fossils in order to know that evolution happened, even on distant planets.

“I love speculating on how weirdly different we should expect life to be elsewhere in the universe, but one or two things I suspect are universal, wherever life might be found. All life will turn out to have evolved by a process related to Darwinian natural selection of genes.”

He knows that aliens evolved because what else could have happened? Evidence is irrelevant when you have blind faith. Let’s call this the “fossil record? we don’t need no stinking fossil record!” argument. And of course you know that Dawkins thinks that these aliens who evolved unobserved may have seeded the Earth with life – that’s his solution to the origin of life problem.

OK, one more quote from Brian’s review before I really have to stop. It’s Christopher Hitchens’ “I wouldn’t have done it that way” argument!

“…the overwhelming impression you get from surveying any part of the innards of a large animal is that it is a mess! Not only would a designer never have made a mistake like that nervous detour; a decent designer would never have perpetuated anything of the shambles that is the criss-crossing maze of arteries, veins, intestines, wads of fat and muscle, mesenteries and more.”

Oh, just one more! This is the “origin of life? what’s that? (nervous titter)” argument.

“We don’t actually need a plausible theory of the origin of life…”

OK, I really have to stop. You will all go to Brian’s site and read his review. It is awesome. It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims to believe that Dawkins is NOT a lazy-brained ignoramus, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).

Note to Darwinist commenters. If you want to defend Dawkins here, then pick one of his arguments that I cited here, and go for it. For everything else, comment on Brian’s site.

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Richard Dawkins cites fraudulent research, runs from public debate

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Before discussing Dawkins’ latest antics, I want you to recall that he cites a professor of who teaches German as an authority on the historical Jesus, and that he believes that a plausible scenario to explain the origin of life is that unobservable aliens evolved on an unobservable planet and (unobserved) seeded the earth with life. So we’re dealing with a real first class intellect, here. Not a brain-damaged ideologue on the order of Kent Hovind.

Dawkins cites Haekel’s embryo drawings as evidence for Darwinism

Darwinian fundamentalist Ernst Haeckel’s embryo drawings were discredited as a fraud in the 19th century.

So why is Dawkins using discredited hoaxes to preach to the faithful?

What does scientific progress matter? Just keep clinging to that old-time religion.

Dawkins trips on his yellow belly while running away from debate with Stephen Meyer

Here is the transcript of Dawkins on the Michael Medved radio show.

Excerpt:

Bruce Chapman: …Your new book apparently doesn’t really deal with intelligent design. But it seems to me, that in your previous book, you said that it’s a question of science, that it is a scientific argument – I congratulate you for that — But if it is, how about having a debate with Stephen Meyer, who is the author of another new book, Signature in the Cell, which deals with this question, and have this in a respectful, civilized, scholarly fashion where you look at the scientific arguments, pro and con?

[…]Put that scientific argument to the test, not with somebody who’s a straw man that you bring up, but have somebody like Meyer, who has written a very scholarly book, to actually debate this topic with you…

Michael Medved: All right, the proposal’s on the table, response from Professor Dawkins, thank you, Bruce.

Richard Dawkins: I will have a discussion with somebody who has a genuinely different scientific point of view. I have never come across any kind of creationism, whether you call it intelligent design or not, which has a serious scientific case to put.

The objection to having debates with people like that is that it gives them a kind of respectability. If a real scientist goes onto a debating platform with a creationist, it gives them a respectability, which I do not think your people have earned.

Dawkin’s new policy is only to debate with people who agree with him. You see, he’s looked and looked for qualified opponents in his echo chamber, and there just aren’t any.

Dawkins’ new book features no credible intelligent scholars

You’d think that his new book would encounter the work of ID scholars. But you’d be wrong.

Excerpt:

Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, is being touted as a scathing rebuttal to intelligent design (ID), yet an actual response to mainstream ID thinking can hardly be found in the book. Though the book makes passing mention of “irreducible complexity” in a couple places, there are zero mentions of leading ID proponents like Michael Behe, William Dembski, Jonathan Wells, Phillip Johnson, Stephen Meyer, or any other well-known ID proponent. Instead, Dawkins refers extensively to “creationists,” repeatedly attacking young earth creationism, while also making heavy use of fallacious (and dubious) “poor design” examples that rebut no argument made by a leading advocate of design since perhaps the 19th century. It seems that Dawkins didn’t have the stomach to tackle the actual modern theory of intelligent design in his new book.

His popular brand of invincible ignorance coupled with foam-flecked fanaticism sells a lot of hymnals written for the kool-aid drinking choir. It’s not about science, it’s about creating your own private world where everyone is stupid except you. Dawkins is a self-help author for those raised by fundamentalist parents. It’s escapism. And if anyone asks them to debate, they can just deploy some insults and call it a day. Whatever sells books, right?

UPDATE: I note that the pro-intelligent design team have organized a debate with their critics. Speakers include Stephen Meyer, Rick Sternberg, Michael Shermer and Don Prothero. Say what you want about Michael Shermer, he is not a coward.

UPDATE: (from the comments) “Just for the record, Dawkins turned down ANOTHER request to debate Dr. William Lane Craig a couple of weeks ago.”

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