Richard Dawkins accused of cowardice for refusing to debate existence of God

Richard Dawkins has made his name as the scourge of organised religion who branded the Roman Catholic Church “evil” and once called the Pope “a leering old villain in a frock”.

But he now stands accused of “cowardice” after refusing four invitations to debate the existence of God with a renowned Christian philosopher.

A war of words has broken out between the best selling author of The God Delusion, and his critics, who see his refusal to take on the American academic, William Lane Craig, as a “glaring” failure and a sign that he may be losing his nerve.

The funny part about that is "any reasonable secular standard" in the Western world inevitably is borrowed from Judeo-Christian teachings about what is good and what is not good. :)

IMHO..

Brings up a nice fundamental concept: the revealed word of God. Judeo-Christian doctrine relies on the revealed word, not anything that comes out of the mind of man. So when Judeo-Christian teachings are borrowed from, the Western world is maintaining that it is not so arrogant as to believe that humans can correctly design morality, or what is right and what is wrong.

It's remarkable that the secular posit that mankind can perfectly or even adequately determine what is right and wrong. Of course, they must deny the divine inspiration of Scripture. I have thought about that quite a bit and done some studying, and it gets very difficult to explain away the elegant logical, historical, symbolic and ethical harmony contained in the Bible considering the circumstances and time span of it's writing and transmission down through history. Especially when we have such a fantastic example of a document with similar very high and worthy goals, the U.S. Constitution, constructed by a group of very highly capable men, working together, with all sorts of alleged conspiracy theories about their desires to "control", etc., and it is getting all contorted out of shape in it's interpretation. And it's only been around for the last two hundred years and we have plenty of contemporaneous writings to assist us in interpreting it. It makes it seem highly unlikely that a group of men conspired to write the Bible over hundreds of years and have it all theologically agree all for some purpose, either good or bad, depending on the particular conspiracy theorist's view, and get transmitted and analyzed by thousands of highly educated people for thousands of years, and one can still dig a little and get right to the original meanings, which, again, are all internally harmonized. The claim of divine inspiration is made within the text of the Bible: so those who say that the Bible is not divinely inspired are actually proposing that all of the men who wrote it were either knowingly or unknowingly lying.

It's simply amazing that a well-trained pastor can point to a Biblical viewpoint on any literally difficulty one could possibly have in one's life - I know of no other text which provides this capability all the while being largely historical in nature.

If one patiently and honestly studies the Bible, it's quite difficult to miss the magnitude of it's beauty, even the design of the system of ethics and morality it describes.

"God knows the future, He knows what you’re free-will choices will be. He creates you knowing you will choose to do something that will send you to hell for eternity. Yet He loves you. Please explain this logically."

You changed subjects from the existence of God to the accuracy of what the Bible tells us about God. Whether God exists is a different question from what all his attributes are, once we establish he does exist. Particularly when those attributes involve his motives, design and purpose. Since God is, by definition, infinite it is impossible for finite creatures such as us to criticize God on the basis of contradictions. We don't know a fraction of what God knows and thus we can never know all the variables which may explain a seeming inconsistency. It is certainly logical that God, in the form of the Holy Spirit, could have very good reasons for not giving us the information to resolve what appear as contradictions. It is interesting that the seeming contradiction you try to point out, moral accountability versus providence, involve the two variables absolutely necessary to provide objective meaning and ethics in life.

God knows the future, He knows what you’re free-will choices will be. He creates you knowing you will choose to do something that will send you to hell for eternity. Yet He loves you. Please explain this logically.

Why does this seem illogical to you? Aquinas defined "love" as the decision to pursue the authentic good of another. God certainly wills the authentic good of each one of us. Part of that "authentic good" is the freedom of each of us to pursue that which is not authentically good for us, even up to and including the ultimate "un-good" of hell.

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