Craig v Harris on Morality 2011

This debate ( audio | video | 2hrs ) occurred in 2011 between one of the four horsemen Sam Harris and Apologist Debate Missile WL Craig. It got a lot of blog attention and thus you'll see a lot of reviews below.

2.75 stars LAP

CSA review 1, 2 & 3 
APF review: 4.5/5
Hallq's review and more discussion
TGS review
WK review: Xians always win

I just think that Sam Harris is an alright speaker. He seems bland to me, but he is one of the folks that Luke M. expressed a wish to see debate WL Craig AND after pestering Chris Hallquist about his favorite debates and learning that Craig's debate against Harris was one of them I decided to give Harris a chance.

Le sigh. The debate a bummer. Both Craig and Harris don't fair too well. The difference is that Harris came off as being off-topic, so it looked like he was just rehashing all the normal New Atheist topics while Craig - even on an off debate - still knows that calling out his opponent for not responding to his arguments and claiming that he is talking about irrelevant things, makes you look slick and puts you in the lead.

In Hallq's review you'll see that some have argued Harris wasn't off-topic, and I can see that, but he certainly didn't do a great job of explaining why his points were relevant. Honestly, it just sounded like he wanted to criticize religion which isn't a bad thing, but morality is a big issue, and Harris wrote a book called The Moral Landscape! Craig also apparently made a lot of rules about the debate that biased the topic in his favor, which if true, is pretty lame (though not surprising, I mean, Craig won't talk about whether the bible is free of errors because he thinks bringing it up is a "debate tactic") so Harris purposely decided not to play by Craig's rules. This would have been nice if he actually mentioned that he was doing this and why in the debate.

The questions were kind of bleh but the mod did a good job of stopping people from hogging the mic.

If you want to see a debate where someone doesn't play by Craig's rules but still throws down then I would suggest you check out Craig's debate with Stephen Law.

Technical: Good AQ and VQ.

A list of mini-reviews of Craig's debates can be found here! 


RE: 7-23-2013; There were a lot of mistakes I needed to fix....at one point I said the word "people" instead of "bible"...augh.