http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UigeMSZ-KQ
A review found at the following link neatly encapsulates the result: "How William Lane Craig thrashed Sam Harris like a naughty puppy":
http://thinkingmatters.org.nz/2011/04/how-william-lane-craig-thrashed-sam-harris-like-a-naughty-puppy/
Having seen atheists debate Craig before, I made several predictions to myself before starting to watch it:
1. Craig would be well prepared, having read his opponents works on the subject of the debate
2. His opponent would not worry about the debate topic itself, but would spend most of his time raising how religion is bad.
And that is exactly what happened. Interestingly, Harris said at the start of the debate that he had received emails from atheists asking him (in Harris' words) "Brother, don't mess this up!" But that is exactly what he did. Harris was woefully unprepared, and seemed little interested in debating points raised by Craig.
As the reviewer above writes, it isn't that Harris' points didn't have value, it was just that they were irrelevant to the topic. This happens time after time. This was a subject I was interested in, and I would have loved to hear Harris try to counter Craig's points. You could tell that Craig was increasingly bemused by Harris' meandering responses, though given that this happens whenever Craig debates one of the leading atheists, I wonder how much of that bemusement was feigned. Surely he could hardly be surprised by now.
I'll quote from the reviewer above:
Getting further and further off topic, as if he knew he had nothing to contribute and just wanted to get his talking points off for the benefit of the village atheists in the audience, Harris went over various topics, saying, in Wintery Knight’s summary:
When I make a scientific case for morality, I don’t really mean that it is scientific; You just have to assume that misery is morally evil, and happiness is morally good, even if that can’t be proved scientifically; I’m a scientist; Science is great; Dr Craig is stupid; Dr Craig is not a scientist; Science is better than religion; You can ground an objective standard of morality and objective moral duties and moral responsibility on arbitrary brain states of accidentally evolved biologically determined monkeys; Dr Craig’s question for me about my unproven assumptions is a stupid question; I prayed to the Monkey God in a cave and he told me about objective morality; I have spent a lot of time studying meditation with wise yogis and lamas; I consider some people to be spiritual Jesus; I can imagine that Jesus was very spiritual and charismatic; We don’t have to use logic and reason to debate about morality, we can meditate on the Monkey God; I don’t like the Taliban.
It doesn’t seem worth summarizing the final rebuttals separately; Craig noted that Harris had conceded his point about psychopaths occupying “peaks” on the moral continuum, and had thus thrown in the towel as far as his contention that goodness is identical to wellbeing—and for the debate as a whole. Harris continued to make off-topic remarks and generally display his inability to charitably represent and seriously grapple with the issues at hand, all in his earnest, sing-song way, as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world.
Craig is not the most natural speaker, but he comes to these debates well-prepared. From what I've seen, most of his atheist opponents seem to think that they just have to turn up, say how silly religion is -- regardless of the debate topic -- and that's all they need to do. A very disappointing performance by Harris.
