Atheists, creationists and the pitfalls of public debate

[rug]

27 October 2011
Damon Young

Like a heavyweight champion, Richard Dawkins has to keep defending his title against fresh contenders – or risk being called a 'coward'.

The best-selling standard-bearer for atheism and science recently took to The Guardian's pages to defend his decision not to debate the American Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. The column began with an insult:

"Don't feel embarrassed if you've never heard of William Lane Craig. He parades himself as a philosopher, but none of the professors of philosophy whom I consulted had heard his name either."

In short: Craig is not as well-respected and famous as Dawkins is. It's like something in a Mohammed Ali documentary: the prize-fighter telling the world how great he is. Perhaps Ali's incantations helped to convince the boxer of his own greatness, as Normal Mailer argued. But in the pages of a national broadsheet, it's the audiences who need persuading. And intelligent readers know that fame is no guarantee of truth – for all the importance of scientific consensus, scientific progress is not achieved by popularity. Dawkins can be an internationally-recognised, widely-feted authority, and still make mistakes of logic and fact.

Nonetheless, I sympathise with Dawkins. He has worked tirelessly to pass the torch of science to lay folk – what his fellow populariser Carl Sagan called 'the candle in the darkness'. Essays, books, documentaries, television and radio interviews, and debates – even with a team of assistants, they are a slog, and Dawkins has kept this up for years.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3601936.html

[demosincebirth]

1. +1

[struggle4progress]

2. Craig seems to be at Biola, which pretty much tells me everything I'll ever need to know about him.

I can't understand why any proponents of evolution ever bother to "debate" these folk, since the "debates" are invariably exercises in futility

[laconicsax]

3. Several don't do the debates as doing so only legitimizes the creationists. n/t

[struggle4progress]

4. Fruitful conversation depends on at least some minimal agreement about the topic

under discussion: if one has spent years studying something particular in detail, say, trilobyte fossils, or the apparent Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction, then there is very little productive conversation possible with someone who is sure his religious texts have already provided a final decisive word on all such matters

So, yes, I should think anyone interested, in promoting public understanding of evolutionary theory, would do well to steer clear of idiotic "debates" with fundamentalists who are ideologically opposed to such scientific projects

[Humanist_Activist]

5. Not to mention that the format is wrong for debating scientific or falsifiable claims...

Even roundtable discussions are just incompatible with how science works. In science, arguments aren't won or lost based on the persuasiveness of the argument, instead claims are tested, experiments repeated, theories presented, and the strength in those theories isn't how persuasive they are on paper, but whether they are verifiable and consensus can be tentatively reached that a particular theory best explains an observed phenomenon at this time.

Creationism(ID or whatever they call it today) is a falsifiable claim that, while not scientific itself, falls under a category that can be tested using science. This is why creationists don't publish in scientific journals about their creationist claims, and instead prefer the public debate format, because there, facts don't matter.

Indeed, I would view the public debate format as only useful in presenting positions that are much more subjective and less verifiable, it has much more limited utility than people give it credit for. For example, I only find public debates between politicians as useful in determining what their positions are, not whether I agree with those positions. That is what research is for.

[struggle4progress]

6. At least that's true for evolution, I think, which can only be considered as a unifying

scheme for a vast collection of facts from physics, biochemistry, geology, paleontology, and other fields: the entire body of evidence, supporting the scheme, is probably now entirely beyond survey by a single mind -- much as, in mathematics, the proof of the classification of finite simple groups is really beyond survey by a single mind

The case for your POV is less clear to me if one is dealing with the interpretation of a much simpler fact or body of facts: I think one might convincingly defend the existence and significance (say) of Planck's constant in a debate setting with a properly prepared audience

[Humanist_Activist]

7. That would be a very specific circumstance, and would probably resemble...

A presentation more than a debate, with whiteboards, projectors, computers, etc.

[edhopper]

8. Dawkins made the right decision

and I don't except Young's interpretation of what Dawkins said. He is talking to an educated public and telling them that even though he has not heard of Craig, he actually checked with professors in the field he claims. They did not hear of him. So he is apparently a marginal character who believes in a completely disproven and bankrupt idea. What would be the point of a debate?