This isn't going to be a response from a different perspective from Peter Smith's, but I have a little information to add. First of all, William Lane Craig has debated a lot of philosophers over the last fifteen or so years, including a couple of the contributors to Philosophers Without Gods (Edwin Curley, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, and myself). I won't try to give the roster for fear of offending someone I've left out -- but you can find some transcripts of some of the debates on Craig's website: http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/debates.html (Mine didn't make the cut! If you're interested, you can watch it through the Veritas Forum: http://www.veritas.org/media/talks/639 ) . Craig's debate with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong became a book: God? A Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist (Oxford University Press) and Sinnott-Armstrong has another book on the relation between religion and ethics: Morality Without God (also Oxford). Robert Garcia and Nathan King...

You ask an excellent question. I think that your suspicion is correct; that an argument that shows merely that the universe had a designer does not show enough about the nature of the designer to warrant belief in any particular theological system. But I don’t think that many theologians would rely on the Argument from Design to justify the particulars of their respective religious systems. Most major religions derive the details from some body of authorized texts or testimony. It is, as you notice, a serious and quite open question what justifies the assumption that any of these authorized texts or testimonies embodies the word of the Creator – that is, that they accurately represent the mind of the Being whose existence is (let us concede) supported by the Argument from Design. Still, let’s see how far the Argument from Design could take us in learning the attributes of the Creator. In its strongest form, the Argument from Design is an “inference to best explanation.” It begins with...

I think yours is an excellent -- but too infrequently asked -- question. It's not at all obvious, once you start to think about it, what is supposed to give God the right to legislate for anyone, much less for everyone. Would it be because He is as powerful as it is possible to be? Well, might is not supposed to make right – just because someone can beat you up doesn’t mean he has the right to do so. How about the fact that He created us? Well, human parents create children – that is, they take deliberate steps to bring it about that a child comes into existence – all the time. Do they have the right to make rules for their children? Yes and no. Yes, while the children are young, vulnerable, and dependent on their parents for their material existence. (And even here there are limits – the government ought to step in and terminate parental authority if the parents are negligent or abusive.) But no, once the children are mature – we do not (at least not in my society, not at this point in time...

I have to add a bit to Richard Heck's explanation of the "problem of evil. " There are actually two different problems that go by this name. One is the "logical" problem of evil: here the challenge to the believer is to show how the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly benevolent being is consistent with the existence of suffering in our world. I think this challenge can be met rather easily. all that must be done is to deny that suffering is a bad thing. This can be done in a number of ways: one can argue, for example, that we only regard suffering as bad because we fail to understand God's larger purpose in allowing suffering -- really, it's quite good, because it leads to greater wisdom than we'd obtain otherwise, or something. Or it can be argued that "suffering" is only a relative notion, and that if there is any variation at all in the amount of pleasure we experience, we will always regard the least amount as "suffering." I don't think either of these illustrative...

There's a common misconception about "proof" -- that if a statement cannot be "proven," then it's equally rational to believe either it or its contradictory. If "prove" means "establish with logical certainty from self-evident first principles", then nothing outside mathematics, logic, and semantics can be proven. Indeed, it's even a matter of controversy whether anything within mathematics, logic, and semantics can be proven. So the class of statements that cannot be proven is very, very big, and includes all of the following: "There is no Santa Claus," "Dogs are animals," "Washington, D.C. is the capital of the United States," and "Salt is soluble in water." But surely you believe all of these things, and would find foolish anyone who withheld judgment about them just because they could not be proven . So the real issue, for any proposition, is what the arguments are. There are certainly many arguments for the existence of God, and many against, most of which are quite...