In recent years, debates between atheists and Christians on the Internet have often focused upon the work of William Lane Craig. Craig, a popular Christian philosopher and apologist, has frustrated many in the atheist community with his decisive debate victories over many of the best known representatives of the New Atheist movement. Adding insult to injury, Richard Dawkins, the best known defender of the New Atheism, refused to debate Craig despite his claims he would debate any Christian on the topic of religion and his past debates against far less formidable opponents. Dawkins supplied a rather lame excuse for his reversal that even other atheists of note equated with cowardice.

With Craig defanging many of their erstwhile heroes, the amateur New Atheists populating Youtube and BlogTV have responded in their usual fashion: they have launched a series of attacks against Craig that are often loaded with personal insults and rabid fanaticism. This should come as no surprise as their heroes such as Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens specialized in this sort of childish invective and it only becomes more hysterical in the hands of the ham-handed denizens of Youtube atheism. It is exactly this sort of anti-intellectualism that makes such exchanges on Youtube a useless chore rather than an opportunity for intelligent dialogue.

Nor is this letting Christians off the hook. Certainly many Christians of the fundamentalist variety are every bit as obnoxious and often more so but their anti-intellectualism is often worn as a badge of honor. There is no pretense of appealing to science, logic, and reason. Their counterparts among internet atheists, on the other hand, usually claim to be defenders of rationality but their arguments often display ignorance similar to that of the most backwater fundamentalist on the Christian side. In fact, experience show s they are often former Christian fundamentalists who have “switched teams” without changing their methodology. You can take the boy out of the fundies, but you can’t always take the fundie out of the boy.

The real root of their discontent is that the New Atheists have produced various defenders of their cause who have faced Craig in debates and have lost handily. This has occurred despite the fact that Craig has barely changed his presentation in well over a decade. In various videos you can find him making the same points and asking the same questions and, one by one, his atheist challengers have fallen. After each repeat of this affair, fans of the defeated atheist will claim their hero missed making a certain key point and this will be discussed in internet forums as a death blow that somehow magically negates all of Craig’s previous victories. This point is raised in a future debate and then exposed as complete nonsense and the process is repeated anew. While some of Craig’s opponents have done better or worse in such debates, none has made the knockdown predicted by the atheists who populate internet forums.

Perhaps the oddest thing in the whole process is that, even had one of Craig’s opponents wiped the floor with him, it would prove nothing. Questions of God’s existence will not be settled in such an arena as they merely demonstrate the participants’ relative skill in debating and their own individual grasp of the subject matter. Such debates do nothing to settle the question one way or the other. However, they do demonstrate whether a case can be made for respective positions.

This last point is essential to the whole issue since their assertion was that a rational case could not be made of the existence of God. Yet in debate after debate, Craig and other apologists of note have done just that and opinions on the victor have often been congruent with the viewers’ own opinions when the debate began. There certainly has not been any great occurrence of Christians being led to the logical slaughter one would have expected if many in the atheist community were consulted prior to these debates taking place.

Watching the post-mortem discussions of such exchanges is itself an education into the mental gymnastics of many among the “New Atheists” as they go through the seven stages of grief in a period of a few weeks. First, there is the initial shock or disbelief that the theist not only held his own in the debate, but (gasp!) might have carried the day. Then denial kicks in and there is an insistence their side was the clear winner despite the obvious evidence against it. Next there comes the bargaining as they insist they have victory because of some supposed technical flaw in Craig’s presentation. Then there is the guilt that comes with the shame of having once more bragged about the coming slaughter that never materializes. This is followed by anger at their recent hero for not taking advantage of the “obvious” flaws in the Christian’s arguments. Finally, at the end, there is some level of acceptance with new hope as a new hero has arisen who will surely put those Christians in their place come the next debate.

Having failed so miserably at displaying Christianity to be foolish in an arena governed by the logic they hold as a talisman, they have more recently fallen back on the main weapon in the New Atheist handbook: insult. Unlike the more rational atheists one would have encountered in the past, the arguments of the New Atheists as expressed in their “magisterial writings” (Dawkins, Hitchens, et al) are quite often built upon angry rhetoric, misrepresentations, and intellectually shallow arguments that would have been dismissed by atheists of the past as representative of the mindset of the “village atheist”: the angry old sod in every town who railed against God and the Church and was viewed by all with pity and a bit of amusement.

I noticed the first assault on Craig some months ago with a series of videos titled “William Lane Craig is not a …” with various endings such as logician, philosopher, etc. The videos were themselves rather empty of any real argument or evidence and illustrated the growing frustration at being unable to pin Craig down through any other means. One seemed to argue Craig was not a scholar not because of anything he had published in scholarly journals but because of something that was supposedly found in his Master’s thesis. That this supposed revelation, upon inspection, itself turned out to be an empty claim only shed further light into the growing desperation.

Now we have another Youtube user who goes by the moniker Thunderf00t adding his own brand of silliness to the mix. Thunderf00t is popular with Youtube atheists and appears to work for a university in some capacity relating to scientific research although what capacity is not clear and it has no real bearing on anything that follows. His main claim to fame is a series “Why People Laugh at Creationists” that was primarily aimed at Young Earth Creationism in general and the inviting target of Kent Hovind in particular. He also aimed at a Youtube user who went by VenomFangX and made videos that were largely taken verbatim from Hovind’s material.

Of course, most Christians outside of fundamentalism think Kent Hovind is an embarrassment and so this is hardly an impressive victory. As with most of his interactions with religion, Thunderf00t chose to highlight that which would hold it up in the worst possible light. When challenged by another Youtube Christian who was a far more formidable counter to his claims to engage in a dialogue, Thunderf00t declined.

Moreover, when Thunderf00t left the world of science and discussed topics relating to religion or history, he was at least as foolish as those he had earlier lampooned. For example, he condemned Jesus for supposedly condemning the children of Jezebel in the Book of Revelation without realizing the whole passage was metaphorical: Jezebel was the Queen of Ahab many centuries earlier whose name was being used figuratively for a woman who was leading God’s people astray and her “children” were those who chose to follow her. He also butchered the understanding of metaphors in the 23rd Psalm and defended his idiocy on dismissing Biblical metaphor by recalling a metaphor used by Abraham Lincoln that stated “a house divided against itself cannot stand.” Apparently, Thunderf00t did not know Lincoln commonly used Biblical language in his speeches and the metaphor he used was originally uttered by Jesus.

Thunderf00t’s most recent entrance into the Christian/Atheist debate was a few videos attacking William Lane Craig. The first was another in his series on “Why People Laugh at Creationists” – despite the fact that William Lane Craig is not a creationists in the sense that had been covered in the rest of the series. Thunderf00t labeled him such because Craig believes in a God who created the world but this would simply reduce just about any Jew, Christian, or Muslim to a creationist. Craig himself believes the universe came into existence about 14 billion years ago, so placing him in a category with Kent Hovind is not only absurd but dishonest.

In that first video, it is not even certain what point Thunderf00t was trying to make. He is aiming at the Kalaam Cosmological Argument that Craig frequently employs but he fails to do anything that even resembles a counterargument. Craig’s argument is relatively simple:

Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

Premise 2: The universe began to exist.

Conclusion: The universe has a cause.

Thunderf00t supplies an example using the speed of light where he reaches a clearly erroneous result. There are two possible interpretations of his “refutation.”

The first is that he is trying to question the use of logical deduction by modus ponens. However, the counterexample Thunderf00t gave has a false first premise and hence the conclusion would not be considered true and Thunderf00t would come out looking quite foolish. The other interpretation is that he is claiming an analogy and believes one of Craig’s premises to be true and hence his conclusion false. However, Craig himself admits his premises must be true for the conclusion to follow but insists they have never been effectively refuted and seem quite like to hold.

Perhaps Thunderf00t has a reason to think one or both premises are false. However, he never supplied any reason with his counterexample. Without getting into whether Craig’s premises are refutable, one certainly cannot demonstrate they have been refuted by merely claiming they can be refuted. Despite the obvious emptiness of Thunderf00t’s assertions, his legions of fanboys rushed to praise his supposed victory over the hated Craig even though he had once more only succeeded in making a fool of himself.

Thunderf00t followed up this video with another whose title declared Craig an academic midget. First he starts off with Craig speaking of the type of debates he engages in and he speaks of them as an academic forum wherein the ideas are engaged and ad hominem attacks are avoided. He then alleges Craig contradicts this claim by showing an excerpt of an interview where he points out that the books of the New Atheists are philosophically unsophisticated. Thunderf00t then claims this dismissal of Dawkins, et al, was the whole of Craig’s argument against them.

The misrepresentation here by Thunderf00t is enormous. First of all, the claim of a pure academic engagement was in the context of a formal debate whereas the latter excerpt was from a television interview program. Craig has been asked to give his opinion of the books by the New Atheists and in the time allotted expressed his view. He was not intending to give a full refutation of any of their arguments but was merely pointing their general lack of academic rigor – a point on which many atheist philosophers agree. Moreover, this was not the whole of his argument against their positions as Craig has illustrated in many talks and writings since the New Atheist movement first began. Has Thunderf00t read any of this? If he has, did he attempt to understand the points made? His failure to do so certainly wouldn’t stop him as he has frequently spoken on Christianity and Islam without having a clue what they claim as well.

Thunderf00t then applies the Herfindahl Index to “test” Craig’s influence with other scholars and claims Craig has only two citations per article. Besides the documented issues with the index, Thunderf00t seems quite unaware that not every academic discipline works the way science does. In the hard sciences, the results of earlier papers may be confirmed (or contradicted) by later independent experiments and hence would be cited. Once confirmed, these results can be called upon as a basis for further results. Thus papers in the sciences are often called upon by other scientists in their own work. Given the often insular nature of work done in particular scientific subdisciplines, such results are often widely disseminated among those working in that particular area.

Philosophy, as with many other areas of the humanities, works on an entirely different paradigm. First of all, there is far less emphasis placed on individual papers – the lifeblood of the sciences – and far more emphasis on books. While certain references may be made to other philosophers’ opinions, specific references to papers, because of the nature of the discipline, are not be as central as with the sciences. At no point did Thunderf00t compare Craig to other philosophers. This apples and oranges comparison is as clumsy as most of his forays outside his specific discipline.

Other responses to Craig are even worse. These often are little more than claiming Craig is a bad scholar despite their obvious ignorance of his discipline, the rejection of anything outside the discipline of the natural sciences as knowledge, and personal insults. Unable to have secured victory on the battlefield of ideas, they have resorted to personal attacks on his reputation. The hope is they can convince others by the sheer number of such videos or comments despite none of them being Craig’s fellow scholars. It is all quite sad and absurd but, given the general demeanor of the New Atheism, very predictable.