Craig v. Harris Debate.

My spot analysis:

Harris doesn't reply to Craig's arguments. Of course, Craig doesn't reply to Harris's arguments. The difference is that Craig is making philosphical arguments against Harris' philosophical arguments and Harris is just playing to the atheist base by villifying the Bible.

A much more in-depth analysis from Randy Everist:

Harris’ rebuttal was a strange, 12-minute diatribe where he offered literally zero arguments for his position. I do not mean he offered zero arguments which I found compelling or good. Just zero arguments altogether. He spent the time presenting the problem of evil and criticizing Christian particularism, both of which were irrelevant to the debate. Harris started to look angry during this portion of the debate. He also seemed to have given up the actual debate topic from here on out.


Craig pointed out that not only were no arguments offered for the naturalistic hypothesis, but that no criticisms of any of his arguments were offered as well! Craig did refer the audience to look into the critiques of Harris through Paul Copan’s book, Is God a Moral Monster?. Craig contended the point of Christianity was not eternal well-being, as Harris alleged earlier. Rather, the point is to worship God on account of who he is! Harris had mentioned in his diatribe that Christians are lunatics, and Craig dismissed this as “stupid and insulting.” I don’t know that I would have said it was “stupid,” but Craig did not come off very mean-spirited (but rather annoyed).

In Harris’ second rebuttal, he accused Craig of misrepresenting him, but did not offer any explanation. Harris defaulted to claiming that if you grant him certain axioms, then his account of morality is true, in much the same way as logic or math. The problem is that people generally don’t view morality to be transcendently true based on “nothing;” further note what this is asking the audience to do: just take his word for it. Take it on faith. He relies on objective morality’s being true, but then his argument just begs the question!

In Craig’s closing, he pointed out that none of his arguments had been addressed throughout the entire debate (which is truly astounding). He also mentioned that taking objective morality on faith doesn’t get us atheistic objective grounding of morality, it just gets us morality itself! We literally have no reason to believe naturalism can account for morality’s being objective.

In Harris’ closing, he again attacks Christian particularism. He states that Craig’s arguments could be given to any God. At this point, however, he’s virtually conceded the topic (and by extension, that a morally good God exists); he’s just demanding to know which one. Both Krauss and now Harris seemingly admit to deistic views in implication; it’s just the Christian God they don’t like (along with others, no doubt).

What we see time and time again is how vacuous the new atheists are in actually defending their position.  They are great at attacking and ridiculing the target rich environment offered by a fallen world, and comparing that to the fantasy world of atheism where all men are short and all women are beautiful, but actually defending their claims, not so much.