Your entire long article is ad hominem, you know. Who cares whether Dawkins is a hypocrite? The more interesting question is whether new atheism is somehow deficient.
Craig is a good debater, but he's a charlatan. The ancient Sophists were good debaters, too, but they used rhetoric to obscure the truth. Just look where Craig works as a professor of "philosophy."
Dawkins is old now, so he's likely not as sharp as he used to be. In his prime, he'd have been able to handle Craig, or at least it wouldn't have been a one-sided debate. He could probably still handle him.
In any case, like I said, I criticize new atheism, too, but on very different grounds. Challenging the new atheist's commitment to science and to empirical truth is asinine. New atheism is science-centered. That's where I disagree with it, since they don't add enough philosophical and moral truth to their scientism.
Yes, there can be a revolution in science, but there are lots of cranks and charlatans out there. Perhaps some will prove correct in the long run and be vindicated. Most will not. And every crank and charlatan will think of himself as a visionary of a new paradigm rather than as a pseudoscientist. The scientific methods will separate the sheep from the goats, as it were. Until Sheldrake's hypotheses are tested by experiments, they won't be taken seriously by scientists.
If Sheldrake's ideas contradict natural selection or other principles of biology, he'll need an overwhelming amount of evidence, and he'll have to win support not so much from Dawkins (who's essentially retired), but from the vast majority of biologists all around the world.
My point about quantum mechanics was that the personal opinions of quantum physicists about consciousness aren't the same as the contents of quantum mechanics. To attribute the authority of the latter to the former is fallacious. Quantum physicists aren't biologists, so why should their spiritual speculations carry much weight?
In any case, QM is operationally precise, but it's not supported by a theory that enables us to understand why the equations work. So indeed a new paradigm might be in the offing, to unite QM and relativity.
By "proper venues," I was referring to the preference to do scientific work in journals and in the lab, not on TV. So there's no questionable bias there.
