Craig, Ayala and the Intelligent Design Debate

Hi Folks,

I recently saw a debate between William Lane Craig and Francisco J. Ayala called " Is Intelligent Design Viable? "

See the video on youtube here: 

I think that this debate was quite significant as Ayala is considered to be, in some sense, the God-father of evolutionary biology today. So Craig was facing a "Big Shot" as you may call it. After watching the whole thing, I can conclude that Craig by far won the debate.  On the one hand, he managed refute everything that was thrown at him (like the the Malaria virus mutation argument), on the other hand, he managed to pose challenges to Ayala which completely baffled him and set him to rant about things that had nothing to do with the debate.

Now I think that Ayala could have done much better if he had actually been more prepared. However, a consistent problem with the anti-ID movement (ID = Intelligent Design) is that they think ID is a joke so they don't actually bother to read their arguments (which can be quite compelling as its various theories are extracted from current scientific journals). An example of this has been Ayala's so-called review of Stephen Meyer's book Signature in the Cell

Anyone who has read Meyer's book will immediately notice that Ayala didn't read more than 3-4 pages from the book and as such, he just gobbled up a non-sense critique. This is something Meyer picked up on as you can see in his rebuttal against Ayala's review: http://www.stephencmeyer.org/news/2010/03/on_not_reading_the_signature_i.html

Unfortunately, not reading the arguments of the other side (theists) seems to be a common characteristic of this new atheism. Although Ayala is a Catholic, his views on ID, evolution etc. fall right into the side of the atheist camp.