Rex Kerr
2 min readMay 21, 2022

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I think you misunderstand Dawkins. I don't think he relishes debate. He relishes destroying nonsensical viewpoints. That's the main difference between him and, say, Hitchens. Hitchens always seemed to me to love the argument.

You could be right that Craig is a good debater. I have no idea. I've discussed religious and philosophical issues with a Wesleyan apologist before, and they were pretty good at making reasonable-sounding arguments. If Craig is in the same vein, sure, maybe he's hard to debate. But I don't think that's primarily what Dawkins would care about. If Craig says something very hard to defend--like the passages Dawkins quoted in the article I linked--Dawkins would, I expect, gleefully use the same arguments again, and Craig would come off looking very bad indeed in the debate. If you don't think there's something wrong with Craig's defense of Old Testament genocide, then I think there is something wrong with your moral instinct, too.

Craig would have to be rather foolish to allow Dawkins to focus on that, though--with Dawkins' warning, no less--and so he'd naturally try to steer the debate into esoteric matters of the nature of logic and epistemology, where Dawkins is perhaps less well read than he, where apologists have spent centuries crafting persuasive (though fundamentally unsound and occasionally invalid) arguments, and, basically, Dawkins doesn't care very much about any of that stuff as far as I can tell. Would Craig be able to successfully steer things in that direction? Hard to say. Dawkins is hard to lead around rhetorically--he will quickly grant points that one thinks might be a "gotcha" and then swiftly return to his main line of attack before they can be exploited. But there's not really anything in it for Dawkins unless Craig is driving hordes of people to believe malicious nonsense.

So I don't think "afraid" is the right emotion. It's just not very interesting to Dawkins.

Anyway, there are plenty of people who Craig can debate with. I wager that Stephen Woodford would, with a little prep time, put forth a very solid performance against Craig. Woodford is a wonderfully clear thinker, with an amazing ability to see through flaws in arguments, and he's argued against Craig's points before on his channel. I bet Stephen would be willing, too. But who is higher profile--Craig or Woodford? It's of no benefit to Craig to beat some random moderate-subscriber-count YouTuber in a debate. It's of great benefit to some random moderate-subscriber-count YouTuber to beat someone who has got a bunch of people on his side thinking he's equal to Dawkins.

Finally, though I don't think it's a major point here, I completely reject the idea that every type of intellectual dishonesty is equally bad. As with nearly everything, quantitative differences are important; not everything is simply qualitative. If you would like to discuss why this is the case, let me know--but maybe upon reflection you'll see the point? (Note: "not particularly bad" does not mean "not bad at all". I am charging you with gross exaggeration w.r.t. Super Mrs. C's attitude, not saying that you have no point whatsoever.)

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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