Celebrity atheist Lawrence Krauss will face off against Christian apologist William Craig, but will they meet the appropriate standard of proof.
"He is claiming that scientific knowledge is the only important knowledge."
Religion has had five thousand years to come up with some form of 'knowledge' which is a) generally recognised to be true and b) non-empirical. But no dice. I'd say scientific knowledge wins this one by default, wouldn't you?
"Why should the existence and nature of God be immediately obvious on human scientific terms? What if God deliberately left not proofs, but only clues? What if God deliberately revealed only enough evidence of his existence for the interested observer to pursue, but not enough to pander to the demands of a sceptic?"
Then he's deliberately being a pain in the arse, and we should ignore him, like any petulant child, until he's ready to make himself known and state his position like an mature person. But I won't hold my breath.
If God -- assuming he exists -- wants to play silly buggers that's HIS problem: as responsible adults we should treat this kind of behaviour with the contempt it deserves.
take the big bang..=let there be light..[god created the HEAVENS and the creation..created hell.
if you cant do it..
Debating Craig is always a mistake. William Lane Craig is a professional debater, so he doesn't have to be right - or even belief himself that he is right - in order to appear to have won the debate.
Craig employs the Gish Gallop as his main debating tactic. He uses this to overwhelm his opponents, and waste their allocated time by requiring them to address more points than they possibly could and, worse still, correct his misrepresentations of what they've said in the past or point out his fallacies. A classic example was his debate with Sam Harris on morality (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vg7p1BjP2dA). Harris had to spend so much of his allocated time correcting Craig's misquotes from, and misrepresentations of passages from his book, The Moral Landscape, that he didn't have enough time to clarify his own stance sufficiently.
Craig uses repetitively debunked arguments; you'd never suspect this watching his debates, yet a simple Google search of each one will reveal a tonne of fallacies. It doesn't matter how wrong he is, or who he's debating, he'll make anyone look like a goose because, again, he's a professional debater. He doesn't have to be right to "win".
Jon J is correct, too, regarding God playing silly buggers. A God that is hiding everywhere is inconsistent with Christian theology and, therefore, not a defence for his apparent non-existence.
Then your theology is wrong and you should find another religion.
I am grateful to the author for informing also me, living outside Australia, about the Krauss-Craig debate. I hope it will be available online.
From what I know about both the debaters' positions on the relation science-philosophy or science-religion, I cannot identify with either of them. So I shall follow the debate like I would a football match between two teams without a prior barracking for either of them: and just enjoying the game, if it turns out to be enjoyable.
On the other hand, I think this is a very interesting article. In particular, I can agree with the view, which I see as going beyond the philosophically naive, theist as well as anti-theist, positions: If God is relevant to the physical world, it has to be through personal encounter with Him. The carrier of this possible encounter is consciousness, where "the objective meets the subjective". And consciousness (in distinction to the concept of God) is what science has access to, although as for now, it cannot explain it satisfactorily (and perhaps never will).
I don't get it...There is a person called Jesus Christ who claimed to be God (no-one else has), yet proved his claim by a multitude of miracles, raising himself from the dead, (500+ people witnessed to that, and many died for it), not to mention a multitude of proofs fulfilling Old Testament Jewish prophecies as such. He founds the largest and most influential world religion in history, and multitude of Saints, Miracles, and billions of good people have lived by its tenants for 2000 years and still today, and our entire Western civilisation is fundamentally based on its tenants, despite the larger immoral exploits of many in the last 150 years. (Nothing new about that either). I mean what more empirical and personal proof do you want? I think its a little more than just a few clues. I mean get a grip people. The more interesting debate is whether atheists can accept passed on empirical knowledge? (i.e. human scientific or witnessed tradition). If they cannot personally empirically validate their own high school scientific texts, perhaps they should not believe them either?