william l. craig

[CapnAwesome]

Richard Dawkins doesn't look great in debates sometimes because he is not a professional debater. I think too much importance is put on debate. Maybe a horrible debater has the correct position. My main experience with viewing him come from his debate with Hitchens about the existence God and his debate with Bart Ehrman on the resurrection of Jesus. While he is undoubtedly a good debater when appealing to a common (and in both instances, priorly favorable to his position) audience I noticed that in both debates his basically argued against something that he personally believed in order to get a better debate position.

In the debate with Ehrham he basically admitted to contradictions in the bible in trying to make the case for certain books being of greater historical value, this is despite the fact that he actually believes (as was pointed out by Dr. Ehrham) that the bible is an inerrant document. In the Hitchens debate he basically made the argument for a Deistic God, even though this isn't in fact the type of God that he believes in. It strikes me that you have a philosophically weak position when you have to debate against it just in order to win. Perhaps he realizes the contradiction in his beliefs and it's just too late in life for him to change. Maybe he just doesn't want to let go of his cash cow. Either way it's a major glaring flaw for those of us who like consistency in our philosophy.