Dawkins' failure to debate Bill Craig

In any event, Dawkins' failure to debate Craig is not something I have a problem with per se.

However, I find the charge of "defending genocide" to be somewhat misstated. Could an omniscient being ever be justified in ordering a genocide if he thought that the overall balance of good over bad would be enhanced by so doing? Regardless of what you think the answer is on this, I don't think you could use that as a basis of supposing that your opponent was an evil person, or that you shouldn't be seen on stage with someone like that. Unless you thought this person could end up advocating a present-day genocide, I don't see that such a position would render someone dangerous. And if you really thought someone might end up justifying a real genocide, wouldn't you want to debate them to make sure that such ideas were effectively refuted? I certainly would.

But the fact is, I have no trouble with Dawkins not debating Craig, except that I consider it to be symptomatic of an overall unwillingness to be responsive to critics of his atheistic programme. An atheist might think that a public debate format is a bad setup for that person to engage the points at issue betwee Craig and himself, which is fine. What he has not done is shown either the ability or the willingness to engage, say, Craig's Kalam Cosmological argument, beginning with an effort to state the argument clearly enough so that his audience can be sure he knows how to distinguish that argument from other versions of the cosmological argument. To take a page from Jesse Parrish's book, anyone who writes about the credibility of belief in God should be able to pass this Simple Test For Understanding. Otherwise....

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Propaganda, Mockery, and Following the Argument

An important distinction has to be made about the whole mockery issue. If we are talking about mockery in and of itself, I don't see the harm in that. When I watch Life of Brian, for example, I see things within Christianity that no doubt deserve to be mocked. However, I don't think people should be making decisions about something as serious as religion based on mockery. You can mock, for example the theory of evolution with no trouble. And you can certainly mock people who have a quasi-religious devotion to the theory of evolution. The trouble is that perfectly good ideas can be made to look ridiculous.

Usually when I hear people mocking what I believe, it makes it seem less likely that they understand what they are mocking. I could be wrong, the could be capable of taking the time and effort to engage in a serious critique. But evidence of mockery points the other way. Of course, the mocker can come back with the Courtier's Reply: Your position is so ridiculous that I don't even have to understand it to critique it." I think there are difficulties inherent in the situation when you want to criticize something, but you don't want to give it a place at them table of dialogue. If atheists want real dialogue with believers, they have to treat them with respect at least in the interests of the discussion. If they just want to engage in propaganda, they can do that, but they should at least have the honest to call it what it is.

In philosophy we do have a argument method called reductio ad absurdum. But if absurdum doesn't involve an actual contradiction, then it's always possible to just say "So? Not that there's anything wrong with that!," and just reject the reductio. That's just life in the world of thought.

But I have a real problem with mockery as a strategy of persuasion. It functions pretty much like peer pressure, which is always a lousy way to decide what to do. I also think it undercuts dialogue and drags discussion down. It is tempting to think that what we believe is so important that whether someone comes to believe it for good reasons or bad, the important thing is that they believe what we agree with. But that is a huge mistake.

Real dialogue just follows the argument where it leads. What someone does with the argument once you are done is up to them. I think Lewis had a point when he separated apologetics from evangelism. These are two different operations, whether you are on the theist side or the atheist side.

I think Dawkins' strategy also leads to something else--people treating the person with whom they are engaging the discussion almost as if they weren't there, and shouting over them to possible "fence-sitters" who will be somehow peer-pressured into accepting atheism through the display of naked contempt. The message is "You're a hopeless faith-head who won't listen to reason. But maybe if I express enough contempt for what you believe, people who are thinking of agreeing with you will tip my way instead, since they don't want to be laughed at." The process matters, and if we are engaged intellectual dialogue, we have to respect that process. Propaganda is essentially anti-intellectual, regardless of what propositions are being supported by it.

C. S. Lewis was the first president of the Oxford Socratic Club, dedicated to following the argument where it leads. His time there led to two things that might be regarded as setbacks: his exchange with Elizabeth Anscombe, and the launching of Antony Flew's career as an atheist philosopher. But, in neither case was the setback the end of the story.

I think we have to face the fact that the most intelligent people in the world are divided on these religious issues, for whatever reason.

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Dawkins and evidence: Obama, Clinton, and Lincoln were probably atheists

Does anyone find it just a tiny bit ironic that Dawkins is trying to get everyone to hold beliefs based on evidence and only on evidence--and then makes assertion after assertion with no evidence for them whatsoever?

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Understanding, Critique and Ridicule

I had made the claim that while you don't need to understand something in order to reject it, you do need to understand something in order to critique it.

From an exchange on Debunking Christianity.

Robert Corfield: If someone took seriously the flying spaghetti monster and claimed it existed, do you think you would need to study The Gospel of the FSM and make a thorough study of pastafarian theology to make sure you understand the position in order to critique it?

VR: The FSM was invented as a concept that could not be taken seriously by people attacking, in this case, intelligent design (though it does make for a good reply to fideism). Understanding is needed for critique because we need to get inside the intellectual tempation to believe something in order to provide a response that shows that this apparent justification is illusory. No one I know claims to be rationally justified in believing that the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. If someone did, we would have to understand why someone thought that--otherwise our critical response is not going to get at what is supporting the belief.
Let's take an example from theistic arguments: various forms of the cosmological argument. People like Dawkins, and Russell before him, presume that you can refute all forms of the cosmological argument by presuming that you can just answer it by asking "Who made God." In other words, they presume that the argument is based on a principle that everything has a cause. The "naive" cosmological argument was attributed to Aquinas as late as 1998, as going as follows, by Theodore Schick.
http://www.infidels.org/librar...

1. Everything is caused by something other than itself2. Therefore the universe was caused by something other than itself.3. The string of causes cannot be infinitely long.4. If the string of causes cannot be infinitely long, there must be a first cause.5. Therefore, there must be a first cause, namely god.
The most telling criticism of this argument is that it is self-refuting. If everything has a cause other than itself, then god must have a cause other than himself. But if god has a cause other than himself, he cannot be the first cause. So if the first premise is true, the conclusion must be false.

But Aquinas never said that, he said that whatever exists contingently needs a cause of its existence. God, by definition, isn't a contingent being, and therefore needs no cause. Now, there could be all sorts of things wrong with this argument, but that isn't it, and making this mistake signals to readers who do know something about this argument that the critic doesn't know what he's talking about. This is particularly of interest because Russell, for example goes on to say that this reply should be so obvious that the fact that people are persuaded by this kind of an argument requires a psychological explanation. Perhaps we need a psychological explanation for why Russell didn't do his homework.

Remember what I pointed out earlier, that it is easy to ridicule evolution. The evolutionist can rightly respond by saying that such ridicule is based on a lack fo understanding. But Christians and defenders of natural theology will say the same thing about misguided attacks.
Creationists, whatever else you might want to say about them, are armed to respond to the tactics of the New Atheists.
http://creation.com/ridicule-t...

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Does Chesterton Refute Dawkins

Compare these two quotes and see what you think.

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This is what Dawkins says about child abuse

A redated post.

It's my contention that these statements go well beyond the sensible things you might say about religious education, and implies that all religious education is abusive because it subverts the mind (from the "proper" view of atheism). Gosh, what if Duane Gish compared teachers of evolution to pedophiles? Well, he might actually have. I'm not a great reader of Gish.

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Why Atheists Care about Defending Atheism

Bob: A lot of academic atheists, when I was involved with secular philosophy departments, took relatively little interest in their position. They were dismissive of religious belief, but they sometimes complained about having to cover the problem of God in classes. 

But some atheists blame religious belief for 9/11, and they think President Bush's unfortunate response to it (in particular, invading a country in no way responsible for the attacks), was the work of a "praying President" who wore his religious beliefs on his sleeve, and so they see the conflict over terrorism essentially the effect of the damaging effects of religion on the minds of its followers. They also see the rearguard action of religious believers against biological evolution as of a piece with the failure to accept the scientific consensus in the area of global warming, and these are also intellectual tendencies that are damaging to our society. Joe Sheffer once told me that all evolutionary biologists receive a lot of hate mail from Christian fundamentalists. Whether we go forward in civilization, or backwards, according to people like Dawkins, depends on whether we are willing to chuck our antiquated religious beliefs and embrace science as the measure of all things. So I can see why some atheists care about sharing the Four Atheist Laws with believers.

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