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MUST-SEE: Cowardly Richard Dawkins explains why he won’t debate William Lane Craig

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Richard Dawkins explains why he will not debate William Lane Craig. (Posted by ChristianJR4, H/T Brian Auten of Apologetics 315)

Let’s re-cap Dawkins’ reasons in point form: (with my comments in parentheses)

  • Dawkins claims that he is willing to debate high-ranking clergymen (but Craig is a scholar, not a clergyman)
  • Dawkins claims that Craig is a creationist (but Craig supports his kalam cosmological argument with the Big Bang)
  • Dawkins claims that Craig’s only claim to fame is that he is a professional debater (but see Craig’s CV and publications below, which is far more prestigious than Dawkins)
  • Dawkins claims that he’s too busy (busy cowering in fear hugging his Darwin doll for comfort)

Let’s review William Lane Craig’s qualifications:

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.

Craig’s CV is here.

Craig’s list of publications is here.

Here are some of Craig’s most recent publications:

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 Cambridge Companion 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.

Richard Dawkins is eminently qualified to debate uninformed clergymen, but he has too much at stake (in terms of book royalties) to disappoint his loyal horde of foam-flecked fundies by debating a professional scholar who has debated hundreds of times, against the top non-Christian scholars, in hundreds of universities, including Harvard, Cambridge and Oxford.

See that debate up there with Daniel Dennett? You can listen to Craig’s response to Daniel Dennett here. Or you can watch Craig’s debate with Christopher Hitchens. Then you’ll know why Dawkins soils his knickers at the thought of facing Craig in a public debate.

What are the real reasons why he won’t debate Craig?

I can think of three reasons why Dawkins would avoid a debate with Craig:

  1. He doesn’t know how to defend atheism and disprove theism in public
  2. He doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand logic and study evidence
  3. He doesn’t want to debate a real scholar and be humiliated in public, like Hitchens and Dennett

My opinion is that he is guilty of all 3 of these.

If you are an atheist, you should be ashamed to be represented by a LAZY, IGNORANT COWARD like Richard Dawkins.

Previous posts on Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists

Podcasts

Audio from the Meyer-Sternberg vs Shermer-Prothero debate

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Posted by Brian Auten at Apologetics 315.

Full MP3 is here

Please bookmark Brian’s blog, and follow him on Twitter.

Details of the debate:

A public debate about the origins of life hosted by the American Freedom Alliance and featuring: Stephen Meyer, Rick Sternberg, Michael Shermer and Don Prothero

Admission: $20.00 Students: $10.00
RSVP: Saban Theater Box Office (323) 655-0111

Monday, November 30th, 7pm,

Saban Theater, Beverly Hills

You can see other debates with Meyer and Shermer:

These two men have met several times before, most recently at Freedomfest in Las Vegas in 2008 (click here for video)… and appeared together on Lee Strobel’s Faith Under Fire program (video here).

And here are some reviews from people who actually attended the debate.

Learn more about intelligent design

And it’s very important to understand how the origin of the universe out of nothing (the Big Bang theory) disproves the philosophy of naturalism, which is the pre-supposition that causes so many people to rule the possibility that an intelligence may have played a role in the development of life on Earth.

Commentary

Review of the Meyer-Sternberg vs Shermer-Prothero debate

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UPDATE: The audio is here.

This review was e-mailed to me by a friend who attended the debate. I’ve posted it anonymously below.

Recall that two pieces of evidence were up for debate on Monday night: 1) the origin of life and 2) the origin of diverse body plans. The ID advocates had to argue that only intelligent causes can account for new biological information in the origin of life and in the origin of diverse body plans. The naturalists had to argue that there was a naturalistic explanation for both of the origin of life and the origin of diverse body plans. So how did they do?

My friend wrote:

In all fairness, Shermer and Prothero were given an impossible task: to defend the spontaneous generation of life and the sufficiency of neo-Darwinian mechanisms to account for its diversity and disparity.

It is no wonder that Shermer avoided the issue. Having said nothing positive about neo-Darwinian mechanisms, he said all there was to say. What was surprising was Dr, Prothero’s smokescreen of irrelevant and/or obsolete high school textbook arguments that were presented as timeless truths in a changing world of science. Their emotionally charged presentation gave the audience all the evidence it needed to conclude that their arguments were being driven by something other than empirical data.

Discussion of the empirical data would have to wait for Dr. Sternberg who gave a compelling argument against the sufficiency of neo-Darwinian mechanisms to even account for a limited number of evolutionary changes within mammals. Using one of the best series of evolutionary change known to paleontologists (wolf-like mammal to whale) Dr. Sternberg enumerated a substantial list of differences between the beginning and ending species in the series and went on to explain why neo-Darwinian mechanisms did not have sufficient time in the 9 million year window to generate the necessary changes. His presentation alone was worth the price of admission.

Dr. Sternberg identified himself as a “structuralist” rather than an ID advocate. While he will have to unpack the meaning and implications of that view, I would encourage him to enrich our understanding of why nature’s structures (e.g. everything from DNA replication systems to animal body plans) have remained fundamentally unchanged since their first appearance. Stasis and conservation are purely natural and are subject to the natural sciences. Their evolution or sudden appearance in the history of life, on the other hand, may or may not have been natural.

“How many times did God intervene?” was a question asked repeatedly by Michael Shermer. The simple answer is “at least once …  when he created everything in the physical universe.” After 1 rather major miracle is there any reason for rejecting the possibility that subsequent minor miracles did not take place?

“Who created God?” was another one of his favorites. The simple answer to this one is that “either the physical universe or its non-physical creator has always existed .. and it’s not the universe.

The “textbook” examples of evolution used by Prothero were things like the Miller-Urey experiment, where they sparked the wrong gasses to make amino acids, but did nothing to solve the problem of how the amino acids can be chirality-filtered, properly-sequenced, and peptide-bonded into a functional biological sequence. Not to even mention things like the sugar chirality or the interfering cross-reactions or ultraviolet radiation, etc. etc. etc.

I think that if these naturalists cannot understand the difference between an intelligent cause and a miracle, then they shouldn’t be debating. Maybe Shemer and Prothero need to read books written by their opponents. Shermer thinks science is a game you play where you aren’t really after the truth but just trying to explain things without God. So, he has no explanation for things like the big bang or the fine-tuning, for example, and probably tries very hard not to think about it. As for the origin of life and the origin of biological diversity, he had no explanation.

One bad thing about Meyer and Sternberg is that their slides were very hard to read – small print.

I’ll let you know if I get any more reviews of the debate. I’m also watching to see when the video comes out.

You can see other debates with Meyer and Shermer:

These two men have met several times before, most recently at Freedomfest in Las Vegas in 2008 (click here for video)… and appeared together on Lee Strobel’s Faith Under Fire program (video here).