Why Richard Dawkins Doesn’t Do Debates

I love god debates! First of all, when the Christians show up to the god debate, it’s like they’re admitting that their god belief is debatable. That’s a concession, in my humble opinion.

I also think that our side can play to the audience with skill as well as the other side can. Playing for emotions is also within our realm of strategies, as there can be a lot of emotion to consider when thinking about how non-religious people are surrounded by religious people. Inside almost every Christian is someone who can understand the perspective of the underdog, just because they’ve all been trained to, when bemoaning and celebrating Jesus’ execution.

One thing I don’t think we need at god debates however, is the same old names and faces we see at conventions every year. We need new people with creative ideas and bold approaches on that stage, who don’t help prepare the other side by being so well known in the first place. It’d be easy for us to debate Ray Comfort effectively, but if we don’t even know the point person for the other side, we’re at a disadvantage in that particular debate. Well that will work in the other direction too. 

This is the kind of “sport” I like. 🙂

anyone interested in the “debate” between believers and us has likely 1)already made up their mind or are already moving in the direction of changing their identity and 2)gets up off their butts to go to one of these on purpose and because they want to. let have ’em! free speech and stuff. i agree with joe, too. it’s nice to see them, en masse and in public, seemingly agree that the intellectual & scientific sides of the debate valids one.

there is, as dawkins notes, a difference between entertainment/competition and education. that’s a whole different animal and i don’t think most debaters on any topic believe the latter is their goal. 

Well since God only exists in peoples’ minds, it is possible to debate the God belief into existance (or out of existance).  It isn’t a battle for or against the existance of God, it is a battle for and against the God-belief in peoples’s minds.

The problem with such debates is that usually/often the theist argument is simple and makes an emotional appeal, while the scientific argument is more nuanced. Take the “evolution = a hurricane through a junk yard producing an airplane = impossible” argument made by many theists. At the surface, this seems to make sense — it appeals to our emotion/intuition right away. But in order understand why that is a fallacious argument, the opposing speaker has to explain (and the audience has to understand) many things like chemistry, biology, genetics, statistics, etc. It is easy to make the evolution = junk yard argument in 5 seconds, but harder to debunk it in the same amount of time.

Too, if you’re willing to stonewall with stupidity so egregious it’s a kind of defiant, bullying challenge, that can work.

Cap Weinberger in an Oxford debate on Vietnam answered an objection that the fate of Vietnam posed no threat to America at all, let alone to its survival, with the assertion that there was no nation so small or so remote that the US did not have a vital interest in it.

An assertion so numbingly stupid and appallingly, self-evidently false that the place went completely silent, utterly flabbergasted.

 ” Inside almost every Christian is someone who can understand the perspective of the underdog…”

They’ve been trained to think of themselves and Christianity as the underdog. They react badly when the actual underdog is someone else, as it usually is.

 He is in his 70s now, so I am no sure how active he is as a scientist any more; nowdays I think he carries the title of Emeritus Professor which implies at least partial retirement.

This is why I can’t stand William L. Craig. He tosses a LOT if arguments that have been boiled down to the bare minimum, and they take longer to debunk than to state.

So by that, you are saying that when atheists are showing up for a debate, they are conceding that there might be a god, and there might be valid ways of approaching the question outside of the typical parameters as usually defined by atheists? 

This is where I miss Hitchens. He could match theist debaters soundbite for soundbite, emotional appeal for emotional appeal, rhetoric for rhetoric, and cliche for cliche. He wasn’t bound by inconveniences like scientific merit or nuance either.

It’s really important to take into consideration the experience gap between most atheist speakers and christian speakers.
Christians tend to have way more hours standing in front of the crowd with the intention of evoking emotional response. They are practiced and have refined their onstage presence and style. Comfort and flow does a lot for you in these types of debates when considering the crowd.I never liked watching Dawkins debate because I don’t think he is very good at it, and that’s probably due to his relative inexperience in comparison to someone that preaches weekly. He just isn’t very polished or quick on his feet. Whenever he stumbles it makes him seem unsure. Perhaps this is because this topic isn’t actually his area of expertise.His written work, specifically scientific oriented, is much more convincing. That’s where he shines. He can take his time and build his case from the ground up in the field he is clasically trained to handle.  Although, from what I can tell, his Selfish Gene theory isn’t favoured like it used to be the book is incredibly well constructed to support his viewpoint.