William Lane Craig's Post-Harris Debate Impressions on Facebook

Here are his comments from Facebook:
It was wonderful being back on the Notre Dame campus again. Even though I am not a Catholic, I felt very much on the home court here and sensed the support of the Christian community. Many have remarked on the terribly low quality of the questions following the debate. What you need to understand is that the audience was loaded with people from the community who are part of the local sceptics group. Last year they also dominated the mikes, with the same intellectually dampening effect. Here's an amusing anecdote we received prior to the debate:

"I found out too late about the debate, it having already sold out, and had to search Craigslist for anyone selling spare tickets. I did find a gentleman who was selling them at the regular $10 price and we agreed that I would meet him before the debate at a local deli in South Bend. After all the arrangements were made, he mentioned, to my surprise, that the occasion at the deli would be a Pre-Debate Skeptics Gathering, after which the tickets -- 42 of them! -- would be handed out. Apparently, the Skeptics Club, of which he is a part, had taken the liberty of buying up a large portion of the tickets, I'm assuming in order to pack the house in favor of Harris. . . . I was never asked if I was a skeptic, and it was never mentioned that being a skeptic was a prerequisite for acquiring the ticket, so I never had to lie. He just assumed I was one."

The Q & A was thus not representative of the Notre Dame community, which is considerably more sophisticated.

I wonder is something culturally significant is going on here. Several years ago, I asked the Warden at Tyndale House in Cambridge why it is that British society is so secular when Britain has such a rich legacy of great Christian scholars. He replied, "Oh, Christianity is not underrepresented among the intelligentsia. It's the working classes which are so secular." He explained that these folks are never exposed to Christian scholarship because of their lack of education. As a result there is a sort of pervasive, uninformed, village atheism among them. I wonder if something like this could be happening in the States. I was surprised to see the number of blue collar folks from the community buying Harris' book and thanking him for all he has done. They didn't seem to have any inkling that his views had just been systematically exposed as logically incoherent. The intelligentsia have almost universally panned Harris' recent book (read the reviews!). Yet it is lapped up in popular culture. Wouldn't it be amazing if unbelief became the possession mainly of the uneducated?
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Three brief comments. One) Bill knows I want to debate him but said "it just wouldn't be appropriate for me to debate a former student." That cannot possibly be a good reason not to do so. Bill really wants to ignore me as if he can sweep me under the rug or something. He thinks that ignoring me is in the best interests of Christianity. Why is he afraid? Why characterize the skeptics there when he knew I was in the audience?

Two) The questions asked weren't that bad at all mostly coming from the students. And the really bad ones came from believers.

Three) I was at that Deli and there was no attempt to "pack the house in favor of Harris." Imagine the idiocy of this statement. There were perhaps a thousand people there, or more. We just wanted to attend the debate. And I can picture who that old guy was, sitting there all alone never saying a thing. Idiot.

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