Posted: May 07, 2012 3:14 pm
I found this quote, from Stephen Law, interesting:
Notice that when pressed by Brierley, Craig actually admitted at the end of the debate in the QandA that his repeated insistence during the debate that I had conceded there was a God by not going after the cosmological argument was just “debate tactics”. He didn’t actually believe it.
I would never give an argument I believed not to be good just to win a debate. Craig and I go into these debates with very different attitudes. I am interested in truth. He’s interested in making believers of you, by any means necessary.
That confirms a point that I have made a few times here: Craig's reputation as a great debator largely rests on the fact that his "opponents" usually are not approaching the encounter as a debate, in terms of being a contest where the main goal is to win or lose. Rather, the other speaker is usually mainly interested in explaining there own point of view as lucidly and persuasively as possible, and would not deliberately say something he does not believe to be true. Craig, OTOH, is only concerned with "winning", so if there is an argument he himself does not believe is sound, but he suspects his opponent or the audience will think it is sound and have difficulty answering it, he will use it.