The late atheist and journalist Christopher Hitchens was a very influential author among atheists and people sympathetic to the politcal left. He was also a well versed polemicist and debater, having won several debating matches against intellectuals who defend positions different to his.
But in 2009, he faced philosopher William Lane Craig in a debate about God's existence. As you can watchg for yourself, Hitchens' performance was painfully embarassing. He simply hadn't the level to refute any of Craig's arguments. Hitchens seemed that he couldn't even understand such arguments.
A careful evaluation of this debate reveals that Hitchens' arguments are the popular, village atheist-kind of complains against the Church, Christians institutions, the Inquisition and so forth, all of which are objections irrelevant to the philosophical problem of the existence of God. (It reminds me of the college professors in USA to whom I've asked about their opinion of parapsychology, and they almost always reply with an attack against Uri Geller and magazine horoscopes... WTF).
Hitchens simply had the intellectual preparation nor the technical knowledge to understand, let alone refute, the arguments presented by Craig. The consequence is that he was badly beaten in this debate.
It tells us a lot about the (pseudo) intellectual level of contemporary atheism.
0 comments:
Post a Comment