From Tom Bethell of The Spectator:
There’s something unsatisfactory about the Tim Stanley article. I don’t blame Dawkins for not debating Craig. Dawkins must have huge demands on his time, and he and Craig would simply end up talking past each other. The people I would like to see RD debate would be those who want to have it both ways — people like Kenneth Miller and Francis Collins. I think Dawkins has called them appeasers. (Who would qualify for admission into Top Ten list in this category? Any suggestions?)
Dawkins and the fundamentalist Darwinians believe that all life was brought into existence by the random collision of particles. (Dawkins would immediately say “don’t forget natural selection!” but to get that you first have to self replicating organisms and I don’t think trial and error could ever produce such complex structures.) Anyway, if you do believe in the ability of chance to produce self-replicating life — and that really is a belief system — then a debate with someone who responds with a very different faith: (“Well, I don’t believe in that; I believe in God, in the Bible, in Allah,”) etc. is just not going to get us very far.
No, the evolutionist dogma needs to be challenged at source — as bad science, fake science, something that masquerades as a science with few or no facts to back it up. It’s no good saying, “you have your science and I have my faith.” We need to say, “Your science is non-existent.”
Miller, Collins and many others have swallowed the evolutionist mumbo-jumbo, mainly I suspect because they don’t want to be excommunicated by their academic peers. And that is why I would like to see Dawkins or some other funda-materialists debate them. (Maybe such debates have already occurred?)
In many cases, to be sure, many people in the “bit of both” camp just don’t realize how weak the scientific case for evolution is. They hear over and over that it “is a fact” and they assume that it must have been demonstrated. Otherwise the evolutionists wouldn’t be so confident and insistent about it.So they keep their mouths shut. They dare not oppose those who seem to be so knowledgeable and intelligent and went to the best schools — lest they be exposed as country bumpkins. I think this deference was particularly strong in the latter part of the 19th century, when even well educated people were often disposed to believe almost any “scientific” claim. That’s less true today, I suspect, despite the ever more clamorous and insistent public propaganda for evolution.
In my view, Dawkins is totally wrong about evolution but he does have a certain integrity. I like to think that one could have an argument with him that actually might get somewhere. But I don’t feel that would be true of Miller, Collins et al. I might be wrong. If anyone has an alternative view that he feels strongly about, I would like to hear it.
[Who would qualify in the Top Ten Appeasers? And otherwise, thoughts? – UD News]