William Lane Craig will be coming to the UK this October for a speaking and debating tour. The last time he was here I went to one of the debates. The programme for the upcoming tour can be seen here. Looking at it, the Bethinking conference looks particularly interesting. I don’t think I’ll be going to any of the debates, mainly because I’m all debated out. I can think of at least one person who will definitely want to, though, if only to have something to write about!.
Two people whom Craig apparently won’t be debating are A.C. Grayling and Richard Dawkins, both of whom have written aggressive anti-God books in the last five yeas and both of whom come off the worse for refusing to debate Craig and defend their arguments. Reading their feeble excuses for not taking part, I am reminded of what Quentin Smith has written about what justification there is for ‘the typical attitude of the contemporary naturalist’:
If each naturalist who does not specialize in the philosophy of religion (i.e., over ninety-nine percent of naturalists) were locked in a room with theists who do specialize in the philosophy of religion, and if the ensuing debates were refereed by a naturalist who had a specialization in the philosophy of religion, the naturalist referee could at most hope the outcome would be that “no definite conclusion can be drawn regarding the rationality of faith,” although I expect the most probable outcome is that the naturalist, wanting to be a fair and objective referee, would have to conclude that the theists definitely had the upper hand in every single argument or debate.
That was certainly my experience of the Craig/Wolpert debate. For what Craig himself thinks about the whole thing, go here.
1 comments:
Dawkins would lose, he doesn't have the philosophy background for it. I'm a bit more surprised about Grayling.
Of the people on the programme, I think Atkins and Toynbee are lost causes. The only one that's going to be interesting is Peter Millican: I haven't seen WLC going up against Hume before. Shame Cambridge only gets Craig talking on his own, rather than someone like Simon Blackburn or a rematch with Arif Ahmed, who did remarkably well for someone outside his field (shame he doesn't know the standard problems with Craig's sceptical theism, but there you go).
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