Tag Archives: William Lane Craig

Atheists running scared

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From here:

Polly Toynbee, the Guardian columnist and president of the British Humanist Association, had agreed to debate the existence of God with the Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology, California, Dr William Lane Craig, at Westminster Central Hall in October, during Professor Craig’s “Reasonable Faith” tour.

[.…]

The humanist philosopher Pro­fessor A. C. Grayling also refused to debate with Professor Craig

[….]

Professor Richard Dawkins has been invited to debate with Professor Craig in Oxford, on 25 October. If Professor Dawkins refuses, the organisers say that Professor Craig “will lecture on the weakness of Dawkins’s argu­ments in his book The God Delusion”.

Why don’t atheists like debating William Lane Craig? Because he uses logic and, as Polly Toynbee noted, that is not her kind of forum.

Peter Atkins, Pro­fessor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, must have more guts than the others because he is going to debate Craig. If this 1998 exchange is anything to go by, it should be a rout.

Where have all the atheists gone?

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Received via email:

The President of the British Humanist Association has pulled out of debating renowned Christian apologist William Lane Craig.  Polly Toynbee, Guardian columnist and prominent critic of religion, initially readily agreed to a debate on the Existence of God with Craig in April but withdrew her involvement last week saying “I hadn’t realised the nature of Mr Lane Craig’s debating style, and having now looked at his previous performances, this is not my kind of forum”.

Dawkins and Grayling (who have also refused to debate with Craig on his forthcoming UK Tour) are both Vice-Presidents of the British Humanist Association which describes one of its core values as “engaging in debate rationally, intelligently and with attention to evidence”.

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, California.  He has debated leading atheists the world over including Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, who described him as “the one Christian apologist who has put the fear of God into my fellow atheists.”

More information can be found at the Reasonable Faith Tour 2011.

The press release goes on to note this comment from Richard Dawkins:

Richard Dawkins, who has been publicly accused of cowardice for refusing to debate the arguments he presents in The God Delusion, recently described Craig as a “deeply unimpressive…ponderous buffoon”, who uses logic for “bamboozling his faith-head audience.” Yet he still has not responded to the actual content of the arguments presented by Craig.

Dawkins, the self proclaimed champion of reason, doesn’t want to expose himself to logic for fear of being bamboozled. What does that remind me of? Oh, I know:

 

 

Richard Dawkins is troubled by the fine tuning of the universe

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From here:

Outspoken evangelical geneticist Francis Collins revealed that combative atheist Richard Dawkins admitted to him during a conversation that the most troubling argument for nonbelievers to counter is the fine-tuning of the universe.

“If they (constants in the universe) were set at a value that was just a tiny bit different, one part in a billion, the whole thing wouldn’t work anymore,” said Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, during the 31st Annual Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.

These constants regarding the behavior of matter and energy – such as strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and the speed of light – have to be precisely right during the Big Bang for life as we know it to exist.

“To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability,” said the world renowned scientist.

“That forces a conclusion. If you are an atheist, either it is just a lucky break and the odds are so remote, or you have to go to this multiverse hypothesis, which says that there must be almost an infinite number of parallel universes that have different values of those constants,” explained Collins to Christian scholars of various disciplines in the audience. “And of course we are here and so we must have won the lottery, we must be in the one where everything worked.”

Ironically, employing the multiverse theory to explain the fine tuning of the universe requires more blind faith than belief in a Creator; yet it’s a faith that eminent scientists like Dawkins and Hawking are willing to embrace in their eagerness to avoid acknowledging that there really is a God.  The fact that the multiverse theory lacks empirical testability and is unfalsifiable, places it in the same category as  belief in fairies, a belief which Dawkins compares to religious faith and frequently enjoys deriding: such is the measure of his desperation to flee from God.

In other atheist news, Polly Toynbee will go where Dawkins fears to tread: into a debate with William Lane Craig. Toynbee doesn’t possess the intellectual equipment to avoid being trounced; it should be fun.

From here:

The President of the British Humanist Association (BHA), Polly Toynbee, is to debate the existence of God with eminent Christian philosopher William Lane Craig, when he visits the UK for a tour of speaking engagements in October.

Leading British atheists Richard Dawkins and A C Grayling have both declined the invitation to debate with Craig.

Who’s a cowardy custard?

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Richard Dawkins is because he won’t debate William Lane Craig.

From here:

Richard Dawkins has made his name as the scourge of organised religion who branded the Roman Catholic Church “evil” and once called the Pope “a leering old villain in a frock”.

But he now stands accused of “cowardice” after refusing four invitations to debate the existence of God with a renowned Christian philosopher.

A war of words has broken out between the best selling author of The God Delusion, and his critics, who see his refusal to take on the American academic, William Lane Craig, as a “glaring” failure and a sign that he may be losing his nerve.

Prof Dawkins maintains that Prof Craig is not a figure worthy of his attention and has reportedly said that such a contest would “look good” on his opponent’s CV but not on his own.

[…..]

“I have no intention of assisting Craig in his relentless drive for self-promotion,” he said.

Self-promotion is a completely alien concept to Dawkins, of course; that’s why his web site is not just a shrine to atheism but to the Great Man himself: richarddawkins.net, the “Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science – a Clear Thinking Oasis”.

Not sufficiently clear thinking to take on William Lane Craig, though.

The foundation for objective moral values

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A debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig on where moral values come from and whether atheists have grounds for believing in objective moral values.
The whole series is well worth watching. I am, of course, biased but it seems fairly clear that Sam Harris didn’t fare too well. He never came to grips with the problem of his tautological definitions of “good” and “evil”, preferring, instead, to eschew logic and employ the decoy of making emotionally indignant appeals to examples of our or God’s – the God he claims isn’t there – moral failures, along with other randomly selected red-herrings.
William Lane Craig, on the other hand, pounds his points home with remorseless logic.