Richard Dawkins vs Karen Armstrong debate on God and Dawkins' objection to skeptic Michael Shermer's Last Law. Who's the greatest and brilliantest atheistic thinker?

Michael Shermer is a well-known skeptical writer. One of the reasons why he so well-known is by being debunked in his own TV debunking program by master of Eastern Wisdom and vedic astrologer Jeffrey Armstrong, who passed sucessfully Shermer's skeptical test, as you can watch here:

The results of Shermer's test with Armstrong implies one of the following possibilities:

-Armstrong is a fake psychic/astrologer/paranormalist, and he passed Shermer's test because he fooled Shermer. In this hypothesis, Shermer is an incompetent scientist and skeptic, who is unable to design correctly a scientific test in which no fraud can be made. This incompetence is even more objectionable, since his Tv program was designed to promote skepticism and exemplify proper controls while testing paranormal claims.

-Armstrong is a true astrologer with paranormal knowledge, in whose case Shermer's skepticism regarding the paranormal has been refuted. In this case, Shermer is not being intelelctually honest in admitting this, and he's misleading the public about  the paranormal.

-Armstrong is fake but he passed the test just because he had luck. In this case, intellectual honesty demands that Shermer tests Armstrong again, something which Shermer didn't dared to do. Moreover, if a single test is inconclusive, then the same can be said of the other single tests made by Shermer in which negative results for paranormal claims were gotten (otherwise, an unscientific double standard would be being applied in order to favor the skeptical position).

By the purpose of this post is not to evaluate Shermer's pseudoskepticism. Rather, I'm interested in Shermer as a thinker or intellectual. I've commented before that, in my humble opinion, Shermer is the less sophisticated and most crude thinker among  professional"skeptics". He tries to look like an expert in everything (from spiritualism, to UFOs, to alternative medicine, to parapsychology, to biblical criticisms and New Testament scholarship, to religion, etc.), but he deals with them in a very superficial level. 

For example, in a previous post, I discussed about the so-called Shermer's Last Law, which states "Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God"

Shermer's law is amazingly inept, and it is telling of the point I'm making about him. Even the crudest atheists will realize this.

One of such atheists is Richard Dawkins. In his written debate with religious pluralist Karen Armstrong, Dawkins wrote this:

But, however god-like the aliens might seem, they would not be gods, and for one very important reason. They did not create the universe; it created them, just as it created us. Making the universe is the one thing no intelligence, however superhuman, could do, because an intelligence is complex—statistically improbable —and therefore had to emerge, by gradual degrees, from simpler beginnings: from a lifeless universe—the miracle-free zone that is physics.

Even such an crude thinker like Dawkins realizes that whichever other properties we posit to "God", one of such essential properties is being the CREATOR of the material universe. In fact, the most sophisticated and discussed philosophical argument for God's existence is precisely the kalam cosmological argument for the universe's beginning and putative creation:

Since an essential property of God, if He exists, is that He is the creator of the material universe; and since it is NOT essential to the concept of advanced aliens to be the creators of the material universe (because, among other things and presumibly atheists will agree, aliens are material beings who are the product and effect of a material universe), it follows that that, contrary to Shermer's Law, God is conceptually distinguishable from advanced aliens.

So, Dawkins' point, despite of its intellectual crudity, is correct: Shermer's Law is false.

The above point underlies my initial contention about Shermer: Intellectually, he is even below crude atheists like Richard Dawkins. What is obvious to even intellectually unsophisticated thinkers is far beyond the reach of Shermer.

You can watch Shermer's crudity at its best in his debate about God's existence with John Lennox:

Regarding the debate between Dawkins and Armstrong, I was dissapointed by Armstrong's arguments (some of which were self-refuting) and not much need to be added to the exchange between them.