Dawkins on the canvas?

There's a view out there that says Richard Dawkins fell for a couple of sucker punches in his recent debate on the existence of God with Irish Independent's David Quinn.

Having read the transcript I'd say that Dawkins still came through on points, but dropped his guard myseriously on tricky issues like the origin of matter and the nature of free will, which he didn't seem prepared to debate from an empiricist perspective.

Dawkins took a hit unnecessarily on two occasions in particular:

• Quinn argued that it was 'reasonable' to speculate on the existence of an uncaused cause. Dawkins failed to address this except to say that it was "improbable" and missed his chance to ask Quinn whether the rest of Catholic dogma was all equally 'reasonable'. (It is one thing to give the hole in our knowledge of first causes a name, it is entirely another to give Him offspring.)
  
  
• He allowed Quinn to suggest that atheism has been equally if not more murderous in its effects at a geopolitical level than religion. He could easily have pointed out that Pol Pot et al. are examples of atheism functioning more like alternative, systematic belief rather than genuine un-belief...but then this is a known defect in Dawkins's own technique, which has itself often been tagged as "fundamentalist", and not without justification.