I have written about and pointed to various things Michael Egnor has written on this blog over the past several years. I love his writing for its content, but it appeals to me even more because he seems to capture my sentiments about the topics on which he writes better than I could myself. His latest article at Evolution News and Views is titled The Rowe-Grayling Debate. It is about a debate, “The God Debate,” between a brilliant Jewish Rabbi named Daniel Rowe who did a stint in the IDF and a very much less brilliant (at least with respect to the topic of the debate), Oxford educated Philosophy professor named A. C. Grayling. You can see a video of the debate here. It was an interesting debate and well worth the watch.
The reason I write this post about Egnor’s article rather than the debate itself is because debates that feature a competent debater on the God side of this issue follow a common trajectory no matter how competent, qualified or learned the atheist or non-theist debater. There might be some rational way to argue for agnosticism, but after watching a lot of these types of debates and studying this topic off and on for several decades, I have come to the conclusion there are really no rational arguments for atheism. Equivocation is a de rigueur feature of the atheist arsenal in these debates, but that is just the tip of the incompetence/disingenuousness iceberg.
A.C. Grayling has been described as the “Fifth Horseman” of New Atheism Apocalypse. The other four horsemen are not much better–some are worse. Here is a video of a debate where William Lane Craig does the same thing to Sam Harris, one of the original four horsemen, that Rowe does to Grayling. I really appreciate Egnor’s “enough already” analysis of these kinds of debates. I am glad the debates happen because that is what got me interested enough in the topic to take a deeper dive into it, but it is very tiring to listen to the same tired atheist arguments time after time after time. It would not be so bad if the arguments were delivered with humility and good will, but they almost never are. Read Egnor’s article. It is cathartic.
Update: Another post about the debate just appeared on Evolution News and Views that discusses a fellow radical atheist’s disappoint with Grayling’s performance. If you know anything about the particular atheist making the complaint and his utter incompetence at arguing these topics, you will marvel at the advice he gives about how to argue about the Physics (not his background) discussed by Rabbi Rowe.