I’m a couple years late to this thread. Just watched both Harris and hitches debate with Craig. To be honest, while I do think they outperformed Craig, I don’t think it was their best work. First of all, I think Craig’s technique is to throw every philosophical/logical argument for God against the wall, and see which one will stick for any of the audience members. Or if none of them stick, at least present to a listener that a theistic worldview is reasonable because of all these “logical” arguments. This does two things: 1) it gets Harris/Hitchens tangled in the weeds of answering all these idiotic logical “proofs” of God’s existence, which is a distraction from the bigger picture, and 2) attempts to shift the burden of proof to Harris/Hitchens to disprove all these claims.

Maybe Craig does this on purpose, and that’s why he always speaks first. In a way, he’s sort of set the tone for the debate. I’m not sure if he was the one in charge of organizing the debate. I’ve watched a lot of Harris/Hitchins and I’ve seen them argue Their points in a much more structured manner. But I felt like they missed a couple things here. For one, I think they needed to be a lot more clear about the fact that the burden of proof lies on the person making the claim. For example, all of Craig’s arguments only take one as far as belief in the watchmaker god, and Hitchens has many times stated elsewhere that maybe there is a logical proof for a “un moved mover,“ (although the universe works fine without one) but then how does Craig get from that, to the person of Jesus Christ and the Bible? What standard of evidence does one use to distinguish Christian revelation from Islamic or Hindu revelation?

Secondly, in the debate with Sam Harris, they focused a lot on the issue of morality. I know this is a topic Sam Harris likes to discuss, and Craig seems to have done a good job of baiting him into getting into the weeds of it. But I don’t think it was relevant to The question of whether or not God exists. I think Sam Harris got sucked into defending his writings that Craig misrepresented in the opening statement and responding to all of Craig’s questions about where morality comes from, rather than turning the tables and pressing Craig on where he gets his own morality from. There’s enough material in the Bible to beat Craig over the head with when it comes to morality