--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "John" <jr_esq@...> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <authfriend@> wrote: (snip) > > Dennett's incoherence is legendary among those who > > know what they're talking about (including atheists). > > Judy, > > I'm not impressed with Dennett either. I saw a video of him > debating the Kalam Cosmological Argument against Dr. William > Lane Craig. Dennett looked foolish arguing against the > reasoning of philosophical giants like Aquinas, St. > Bonaventure, and Al-Ghazali. If he had known the pitfalls of > his arguments, he would have declined to enter the debate > against Craig.
I'm not a big fan of Craig, but he's a brilliant philosopher and theologian and one *hell* of a debater. The Kalam Cosmological Argument appears to be his big specialty. > To illustrate the point, Richard Dawkins, another atheist, > declined to enter a separate debate on the same topic with > Craig. Dawkins knew that he would look silly arguing > against the KCA. Not only that, when it was mentioned on a Catholic radio program not too long ago that he refused to debate Craig, he wrote an angry letter saying it wasn't true and demanding the statement be corrected on the air. Turned out he'd just recently written an article for some big journal entitled "Why I Refuse to Debate William Lane Craig." Asked why he had contradicted his own article, he claimed he had debated Craig a year or so ago in Mexico. But it wasn't a debate, it was a panel discussion among six people, and apparently neither he nor Craig had known the other was going to be on the panel. There are more details of this, which I've forgotten; but it's just one more indication of Dawkins's fraudulence. > Unfortunately for Dennett, he could not understand or > see the strength of KCA and the intelligence of his > formidable opponent in Dr. Craig. Neither Dennett nor Dawkins know what the Cosmological Argument (in any version) *is*. Anyway...philosopher Edward Feser, whose blog I've been immersed in lately, has written a lot on the Cosmological Argument (the Aristotle-Aquinas version, not the Kalam version). I'm just beginning to work my way through his posts on the subject. Here's a post with a roundup: http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/cosmological-argument-roundup.html http://tinyurl.com/mfclp3u And here's a video of a lecture Feser gave that discusses the Aristotle-Aquinas version of the Cosmological Argument vs. the Kalam version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgVh8aJPPN8
