It is an interesting debate and I think they both make some good points. But Dawkins wins overall. Collins just cannot bring any evidence that Christianity is correct. His whole position seems to be “you cannot explain everything and you cannnot prove me wrong.” Collins also appears to misuse Occam’s razor.
To my mind the terms of the argument are immediately invalidated.
What irritates me about these debates is that the structure of the debate is almost always arguing for/against the monotheistic point-of-view (and more often the Judaeo-Christian God).
It’s my opinion that for any given general religious vs atheist debate, the religious side must take into account all faiths to argue against the atheistic argument. Add to the starting point “God”, the more religiously representative terms “gods”, “avatars”, “demons”, “spirits of the ancestors”, etc. and then try to advance it. Otherwise it’s a totally limited argument, even for the atheist.
(Also, Dawkins’s anti-religious persona irritates me.)
The religious side of this debate must support one specific brand of religion. If one could find a polytheist to debate, then that would be the subject.
But I don’t see why the religious side needs to cover all types of religions. In fact, a religious debater needs to put a stake into the ground about the definition of god he supports. The arguments must then support that definition. One common fallacy, which Collins seems to fall into, is having a generic argument from design or wonder used to support Christianity. If Dawkins can show that this argument fails, it fails for all religions involving a designer/creator god.
Apparently you have to be a Time subscriber to read the linked article. But I did see a couple of points quoted in the OP that I wanted to comment on.
Another reason why the existence of God is not one that can be resolved by science could be that, apparently, God doesn’t want it to be. The kinds of things science is used to studying don’t typically have the option of either cooperating with or trying (perhaps very deviously) to elude our efforts to detect them. A God who is as intelligent and powerful as many religions assume would be perfectly capable of controlling whether, how, and by whom he could be known. A lack of evidence for God could mean no God, or it could mean that God never intended for us to have that kind of evidence.
I wish Dawkins had defined what he means by “miracles.” If he meant “things that are unexplainable under our current understanding of natural laws,” they’re only contradictory to science if we think we know everything. If he meant “things that are fundamentally incompatible with the laws of nature,” it would be more accurate to say that miracles are contradictory to the axioms of science than to the facts of science. That everything in the universe happens according to laws of nature is not something that science has proved; rather, it’s something science takes as a working assumption.
And, as an assumption, it does work very well. The fact that it works so well suggests that it is true, but doesn’t prove that it’s universally true. That science has never yet observed a “miracle” may mean that miracles can’t occur, or that they haven’t ever occured even though they could, or that they’re very rare, or that science is unequipped to detect them, or that the entity/entities causing them is deliberately hiding them from science.
And if you say, “Miracles can’t occur because everything happens in accordance with the laws of nature,” you’re just saying “Miracles can’t occur because miracles can’t occur,” which is circular reasoning.
But it’s not the religious side of the debate, it’s the theistic side.
The difference is important. E.g., the famous skeptic and debunker-of-bullshit Martin Gardner describes himself as a “philosophical theist,” meaning he rejects all religious revelations and traditions but still believes in a personal God, to whom one might usefully pray and who is capable of providing a personal afterlife. You can read his defenses of this in his classic The WHYS of a Philosophical Scrivener.
The point is, any argument for the existence of such a philosopher’s God, that fails to hold water, will be equally useless WRT the Lord God of Israel or any other traditional divinity or divinities.
The problem with that approach is that pretty much all deities in religions want to be known (assuming that what their worshippers ascribe to them is accurate). This is actually a more specific point; it could mean that there’s no scientific evidence for a god, or that a god doesn’t want to be known through science. And that in turn poses some interesting questions; in the abstract, certainly it’s possible for a god to not want to be known through science. However, gods have other attributes which could potentially be contradictory to that - that they are good springs to mind as something one could argue on.
Look at it from the other side. If the existence of miracles, contradictory to the axioms of science, do exist, that certainly suggests that we may not know all there is to know about science. However, there is also the existence of science, of which some things run in contradiction to the axioms of religion; surely that in turn suggests there are things about religion we do not know, either? If miracles are proof that we don’t know everything about science, then science is proof we don’t know everything about god(s).
And there’s also the “good” aspect to bring in again; if miracles are indeed simply very rare, why are they very rare?
So Gardner is slightly more theistic than deism, but does not actually practice a religion. I agree, and that is why my point was based on religious belief, which makes specific claims about deities interactions with us, not deism - even Gardner’s stronger variety.
Gardner’s belief is inherently unfalsifiable, not unfalsfiable through the apologetics and special pleading we see from mainstream religion.
I doubt there would be much of a debate outside of philosophy departments if all god believers took up Gardner’s belief.
This means that God leaves no footprint upon the world. First of all, it is unBiblical. Assuming you think all of God’s direct interventions are fables, then we have either a god who does not interact with us in a measurable way, or one who does and who “lies” by covering up his tracks. In either case, we have a situation where by definition no one without a direct revelation has any rational reason to either believe in god or to follow god’s laws. If the direct intervention as described in the Bible did happen, God must again by lying, since the lack of evidence meant that he has covered up his tracks - wiped his fingerprints from the murder weapon, as it were.
Actually, the answer is both. Based on billions and billions of experiments, we have every reason to believe very strongly that miracles don’t happen. As in the case of everything in science, this is a theory, and isn’t proven, nor can it be. However, we have enough data so that if a miracle does happen, it would have to be a very strong one, with lots of good evidence - no Mary’s picture on a grilled cheese sandwich. Miracles can happen and pigs can fly - but I’d want some real strong support to turn this “can” into a “has happened.” Again, if God is hiding the miracles, God is lying., and God clearly doesn’t want us to believe. I’m happy to go along with his wishes in this matter.
I usually see these debates, pointless as they are, founded for Dawkins’ part on the assumption that what’s being debated is a more-or-less traditional understanding of God, being the worshipful creature of the Abrahamic religions. It is indeed too narrow in a global sense, but I think if one is to debate anything at all, there must be some limit to the way the debators can state their terms. This is precisely why Collins’ point is so maddening. God is so ill-defined it could mean and do quite simply anything, including make the workings of the world look precisely to us as if it weren’t designed just to fool skeptics. You can’t possibly even have an intelligent conversation on such a subject, so why bother? This is where Dawkins’ really makes the big mistake. It’s just absurd and self-defeating to engage the wooly-headed theists. Collins’ latest book is another load of anthropic nonsense meant to rationalize his own epiphany and help him embrace the vacuous notion of Theistic Evolution, which states effectively that God must at least appear to be optional, except (in Francis’ case, at least) in the dubious realm of “morality”, a realm Mr. Francis seems somehow to believe is only explicable in terms of a supernatural force.
Dawkins’ diminishes himself in these efforts. He’s not a professional philosopher, and rather than live the virtuous life that such a status provides, he instead wades into the mire to take on his adversaries on their own fetid turf. It’s completely self-defeating, because the philosphers can catch him up on his scholarly sloppyness in that realm, and treat not being fully educated in a discipline of little or no value to the current practice of science as an intellectual deficiency. The audience just sees the blows landed by either side in what is essentially a chess match of no greater practical importance, and concludes both have a useful point to make.
I don’t think science was trying to prove that everything in the universe happens according to the laws of nature. Science is trying to discover what the laws of nature are. If science observed a “miracle” it wouldn’t call it a miracle, it would admit to an incomplete understanding of the laws of nature.
Miracles can happen and pigs can fly - but I’d want some real strong support to turn this “can” into a “has happened.” Again, if God is hiding the miracles, God is lying., and God clearly doesn’t want us to believe. I’m happy to go along with his wishes in this matter.