Richard Dawkins Skewered as a Coward

Here’s the headline in the Guardian–

Richard Dawkins’s refusal to debate is cynical and anti-intellectualist

And here’s the byline-

Using William Lane Craig’s remarks as an excuse not to engage in reasoned debate is typical of New Atheist polemic

And then the fun begins-

Given that there isn’t much in the way of serious argumentation in the New Atheists’ dialectical arsenal, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Dawkins and Grayling aren’t exactly queuing up to enter a public forum with an intellectually rigorous theist like Craig to have their views dissected and the inadequacy of their arguments exposed.

Ironically, there is nothing substantively new about the New Atheists either. Despite its self-congratulatory tone, The God Delusion contains no original arguments for atheism. Summarising what he calls “the central argument of my book”, Dawkins insists that even without an entirely convincing explanation for the fine-tuning in physics, the “relatively weak” explanations we have at present are clearly better than “the self-defeating … hypothesis of an intelligent designer”.

And then the central theme-

What is new is the belittling posture toward religious believers and the fury of the polemics. The New Atheism is certainly a far cry from the model of civilised interlocution between “old atheist” Bertrand Russell and Father Copleston that took place and was broadcast on BBC Radio in 1948. The New Atheists could learn a lot from the likes of Russell, whose altogether more powerful approach was at once respectful and a model of philosophical precision.

It’s too bad the new atheists (or better, and more accurately, the angry atheists) are so cowardly.  Maybe they could learn something if they weren’t so afraid.