"The Great God Debate"

MOJ friend and Notre Dame philosopher John O'Callaghan has posted some thoughts, at the website of (the excellent) Notre Dame Magazine, on the latest installment of the "God Debate" at the University of Notre Dame.  (This time, it was Sam Harris v. William Lane Craig.)  A bit:

On April 7, a sold-out audience in Notre Dame’s Leighton Concert Hall watched this year’s edition of “The God Debate.”Before a packed house, “New Atheist” Sam Harris and philosopher of religion William Lane Craig argued whether God is the source of morality.

Oddly, whenever I think of Harris in this debate, I think of St. Augustine’s Confessions. Specifically this passage comes to mind: "I was glad, if also ashamed, to discover that I had been barking for years not against the Catholic faith but against mental figments of physical images. My rashness and impiety lay in the fact that what I ought to have verified by investigation I had simply asserted as an accusation.”

St. Augustine wrote those words in midlife, reflecting on that time in his youth just before he entered fully into the Catholic faith of his mother, St. Monica. I won’t suggest that Harris is at a similar point in his life. But someone so obsessed with religion, even if negatively, is surely wrestling with the angel of God.

Still, my first and less-than-charitable thought involving Harris is ad hominem abusive. He is so uncomprehending of Catholicism that for a Christian to debate him at Notre Dame is like a physicist debating a Flat Earth theorist at Cal Tech. . . .

As the blogfather might say:  "Heh."