April 8, 2011

• Reactions to Harris vs. Craig on Morality

  So I did a google reader search on Sam Harris and William Lane Craig and I thought I'd run through some of the reactions (find all my coverage with my Harris vs. Craig tag).

  Before the debate, Theodore Beale (Vox Day) had this to say:

  It should be interesting to see if Craig elects to make his own positive arguments and challenge Harris to refute them or if he takes a cue from TIA and shreds the arguments that Harris puts forth.

  Not withstanding that Beale agrees with the new atheists on the argument from evil and simply proposes a less awesome, not that moral god to fix the problem...  Whatever dude.

  Wintery Knight Blog decides to play up the "I don't like Yahweh" angle to the extreme and ignore the arbitrariness of defining "good" as Yahweh's nature with his summary here.  Good job.

  An atheist, "Reasonably Aaron," says:

  The problem is [Harris] was all over the place in terms of answering Craig's objections and never refuted Craig's knock-down argument that he presented in the 1st reply.

  Which "knock down argument" was that again?  Um...no, Harris just pretty much ignored Craig's irrelevant points and had the debate he wanted to have.  That's not being all over the place. Aaron then proceeds to make basically the same point that Harris did which is that Craig is secretly using the same basis to bridge the value/fact divide. 

  Uncommon Descent tries to unconvincingly squeeze the debate into their categories and says:

  How can one scientifically examine if an intelligent agent exists or is causative, if one a priori excludes intelligent agents from possible causes?

  What did that have to do with their debate again?  When did Harris exclude the possibility of intelligent causes?  Where did all these thoughts come from?!?!  Who knows...

  So, good job everyone!  Keep up the lame work.  This really inspires my confidence in humanity.

  Ben

  • 11:32 am
  • 4 Comments