Recently, I’ve been posting blog comments saying that atheists shouldn’t debate William Lane Craig, given his track record of dishonesty, especially his track record of misrepresenting his opponents’ views. Now, Richard Dawkins has written a blog post on why he won’t debate Craig giving another reason: Craig is an apologist for genocide. (HT: PZ)
This is a good point. Stephen Law recently debate Craig, and while my first reaction was that the debate didn’t go so badly, now I think Law really screwed the pooch on this one. Even if Law won the argument, sharing a stage with Craig and not calling him out on the many evil things he believes gives him credibility he doesn’t deserve.
One other thing: Dawkins opens his article by saying, “Don’t feel embarrassed if you’ve never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either.” I know Craig’s fans are going to pounce on this by saying, “Well Craig is obviously great, and the fact that Dawkins thinks otherwise shows Dawkins’ incompetence.”
Reality check: philosophy of religion is mostly not taken seriously in mainstream philosophy. If your name isn’t Alvin Plantinga, philosophers who don’t specialize in philosophy of religion mostly do not care about you. And even as someone who’s spent a lot of time reading about philosophy of religion, I suspect I would only have a vague idea of who Craig is if not for his career as a “rhetorical gunslinger” (as PZ puts it).
Look at the people Craig is ranked with on the list I linked to yesterday. Do you know who Trenton Merricks is? What about Linda Zagzebski? If not, why think that Craig’s academic qualifications establish him as an important figure?
Good for Dawkins. It’s nice to see hi respond to all the accusations of cowardice.
I think I am mainly responsible for Dawkins refusing to debate Craig as it was I who first drew Dawkins attention to Craig’s views on killing children , pardon, sending them straight to Heaven, as he read a post of mine about it.
I’ve always suspected that this was the case. Craig is persistently annoying at best and disingenuously misleading at worst. I wrote a bit about his debate with Kagan here and here. I think Kagan nailed Craig on this occasion, and it introduced me to the idea of “the social moral contract”, which I love.
@Steven Carr,
Craig has been bugging Dawkins to debate him for a long time, so I doubt it unless your blog post is very old. But you may well be able to claim indirect responsibility for this particular column. It’s not as if Dawkins was going to waste his time digging through Craig’s Q&A archives on his own.
I don’t get it. If a large number of people are bamboozled by Craig’s defense of genocide, and if Craig’s stance on genocide is so obviously wrong, then why wouldn’t Dawkins leap at the opportunity to eviscerate him?
He just did, JSA. Article in the Guardian and all that? The only reason to do so on Craig’s own terms is if you respect him, or if you think its tactically worth your time.
In my experience, though, if you put an atheist on one side of a stage and a Christian with good Christian street cred on the other, and you have the Christian defend a Holocaust, the only thing you’ll actually accomplish is getting a bunch of Christians to support Holocausts. So… probably not worth the time or energy.
Yeah JSA, this is something I used to not get. I used to hope Dawkins would debate Craig on evolution and spank him on that. Problem is, even if you win a debate, agreeing to debate someone accords them a certain amount of respectability, and you have to be careful about that.
‘Craig has been bugging Dawkins to debate him for a long time, so I doubt it unless your blog post is very old.’
Here are Dawkins exact words
‘One of our commenters on another thread, stevencarrwork, posted a link to this article by the American theologian and Christian apologist William Lane Craig. I read it and found it so dumbfoundingly, staggeringly awful that I wanted to post it again. It is a stunning example of the theological mind at work. And remember, this is NOT an ‘extremist’, ‘fundamentalist’, ‘picking on the worst case’ example. My understanding is that William Lane Craig is a widely respected apologist for the Christian religion.
Read his article and rub your eyes to make sure you are not having a bad dream.’
From http://randalrauser.com/2011/10/why-dawkins-says-he-wont-debate-craig/
“I think Dawkins would be better off to look at Craig’s CV which includes thirty books and a hundred peer reviewed articles in fields ranging from the historical Jesus to the philosophy of time. He might also consider the fact that Craig has two earned doctorates at two of Europe’s leading research universities. Perhaps most importantly he might consider that a who’s who of academic atheists over the last twenty years from Peter Atkins to Sam Harris have considered Craig worthy of debate. By insisting that he won’t debate Craig because he and his friends hadn’t heard of him, Dawkins just makes himself look ridiculous.”
@Robert
I’m reminded of a quote by Hitchens, (paraphrased):
“It may be that Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam succeeds in getting young black people off the street and off drugs. But that doesn’t change the fact that NOI is a racist, crackpot organization.”
The same thing applies to Craig. So he has two Ph.Ds, and has published a bunch of books (most of which are just transcripts of his debates). That doesn’t change the fact that he is a dishonest PR man for Christianity.
As Bob Price said,
“Evangelicals think they’ve got the truth in their back pocket, so they can’t be trying to find what they think they’ve already got. They’re just trying to attack everybody else.”
Also, Robert, you’re illustrating my point about how it can be a BAD idea to debate someone because debating them gives a certain amount of respectability.
Take the debates of Craig’s CV, and he’s just a B-list philosopher of religion with a history of saying absurd and morally appalling things. Seriously, racking up a lot of publications isn’t especially difficult, nor is getting two PhDs. If you can get one PhD, you can probably get a second one, it’s just that most people don’t because it doesn’t make sense as a career path.
I hesitate to say that Sam Harris shouldn’t have debated him, because Harris did such a good job, but for the most part people agreeing to debate Craig have only given him undeserved respectability.
Notice that Dawkins also refuses to debate creationists, because he doesn’t want to give them any undeserved respectability. Would you argue that Dawkins ought to break that rule because Duane Gish has debated a lot of scientists?
OK, I can see this, and I agree it’s a legitimate concern. I don’t buy the concern that Dawkins would further legitimize Craig, though.
DAWKINS
So, apparently it was the Canaanites’ own fault for not running away.
CARR
This is typical of Dawkins misrepresentation of Craig.
Craig knows that some of the Canaanites would have had to toddle away, not run.
Mind you, a 2 year old can toddle quite quickly, if Craig’s god has sent soldiers to kill him and his family. I know I would have toddled as fast as my diapers would have let me.
I remember Craig’s response to the problem of evil:
“The world wasn’t designed to be for pleasure- but for finding God”
So, how is infanticide supposed to bring us closer to God?
@ Andy
Additionally, it means God simply created a world so it could worship him. Talk about narcissism!
Well, Steven, interestingly I have been using that comment of RD’s from 21 April 2008 about your link to WLC’s site.
Then I had to find Galactor’s and blitz442′s reiterations from 21 October 2011 in an attempt to right a misconception that was published in Private Eye 30 October 2011 getting salient time lines out or order and interpretations further muddied.
It was confusing but, I take it to mean that RD hadn’t realised what WLC was like until you gave him that link and after reading it he was appalled.
April 2008 was when I was in transit to Scotland if you recall so I missed that forum anyway.
BTW – Hi!
Thank you for all that gibberish.
Could you translate it into English please as none of it made any sense.
By the way, why does your imaginary god allegedly order whole tribes of men, women and children to be killed?
Does your god have a poster of Hitler on his bedroom wall?