Curtain call

(Article: “God Is Not Dead Yet,” by William Lane Craig, published in July 2008  in the online edition of Christianity Today.)

I was planning to start a new series today, but as I mentioned in my other blog, I came across a fascinating quote by William Lane Craig, as reported by The Uncredible Hallq, and today I want to look at the whole article, because there’s some really juicy stuff in there. [Caveat: The discussion that follows is based on a casual/superficial understanding of what Craig meant by "verificationism." Thanks to some informed commenters at my other blog, I now know that verificationism is a highly specific and somewhat esoteric technical term within philosophy, and that Craig's discussion of its implications are somewhat misleading. My remarks below should be understood as addressing the more general principle of verification and its implications for Christianity.]

Craig begins, as usual, with the declaration that atheism is losing and Christianity winning in the intellectual battles of the late 20th century and beyond.

You might think from the recent spate of atheist best-sellers that belief in God has become intellectually indefensible for thinking people today. But a look at these books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, among others, quickly reveals that the so-called New Atheism lacks intellectual muscle. It is blissfully ignorant of the revolution that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy. It reflects the scientism of a bygone generation rather than the contemporary intellectual scene…

The face of Anglo-American philosophy has been transformed as a result. Atheism, though perhaps still the dominant viewpoint at the American university, is a philosophy in retreat.

Sounds optimistic, but can he back up those claims? What is this “revolution” that has taken place in Anglo-American philosophy—and why has it only influenced philosophy that happens to be Anglo-American?

Christian monopoly

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 10: “Is Jesus the Only Way to God?”)

We’ve come to the end of William Lane Craig’s big arguments for God, but there’s still a few loose ends to tidy up. The first problem he tackles is pluralism, i.e. the idea that other religions might also be valid. The trouble with with most of Craig’s arguments (i.e. all but the last) is that they’re non-specific. The kalam argument, the fine-tuning argument, the moral law argument, etc, all boil down to what you might call “superstition with an expanded vocabulary.” If you’re just looking at things you haven’t got a simple answer for, and are arbitrarily attributing them to whatever deity or deities suit your preferences, there’s really no reason to claim that Christianity’s superstitions are any better than anyone else’s.

That will never do, of course, so the first item on Craig’s agenda is to try and disprove pluralism, so that Christians can have a monopoly on the One True Path to God.

XFiles: Retroactive miracles

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 7¹/₂: “A Philosopher’s Journey of Faith, Part Two”)

It’s testimony time! Before we get to William Lane Craig and his story of how God uniquely blessed him, I’d like to tell a joke. It seems a hunter was out in the woods one day and came across a bullseye painted on a tree, with a single arrow dead center in the middle of it. The bullseye was rather small, and even the tree itself was not too large, so the hunter was impressed. As he continued through the woods, he found more and more of these small bullseyes, each with a single arrow in the dead center. “Clearly,” he thought, “I’ve stumbled onto the domain of a master archer. I must find him and see if he can teach me to shoot as well as he.”

After some searching, he came upon a young man with a bow, a quiver of arrows, small pail of red paint, and a brush. “Are you the one that’s been shooting all those bullseyes?” asked the hunter. “I am,” replied the youth. “Such skill in one so young!” declared the hunter, “Will you teach me?” “Surely,” the youth replied. And with that he set down his paint and brush, pulled out an arrow, drew back his bow, and shot it into a thickly-wooded part of the forest, where it struck a tree. He then took his paint and brush and painted a neat bullseye all around where the arrow had landed.

And now, at the risk of incurring some serious déjà vu, let’s look at how God’s answers to Craig’s prayers have been so remarkably on target.

XFiles: The Problem of Honesty

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 7: “What About Suffering?”)

One of the biggest problems for Christian apologetics is what to do with the problem of evil. God is supposedly all-good, all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving. What’s more, He is also supposed to be the only truly self-existent Being. Everything else that exists was either created directly by God, or by a chain of cause-and-effect whose First Cause is ultimately God.

That’s a problem, because the world abounds in what Christians refer to as sin and evil, which should not be there. If the only self-existent Being is a perfectly good and loving Almighty God, then only good things should result from His deliberate and sovereign actions, even indirectly. No necessity can constrain God except those which are inherent in His nature, and thus if God’s nature does not require evil, then there can be no necessity that evil exist. As an almighty God He should be capable of creating a world without evil, and as a loving God He should want to do so. Thus, the existence of such a God necessarily implies the absence of evil, which contradicts what we see in real life.

William Lane Craig attempts to address this problem with an approach that is both subtle and profoundly deceptive: instead of directly confronting the contradictions raised by the existence of evil, he re-frames the debate into one where the only question is whether God’s existence is incompatible with human suffering. Since there are at least some circumstances where “no pain, no gain” is a valid observation, this re-definition stacks the deck in his favor, and leaves him with an easy out. The uncritical reader is then left with the feeling that Craig has dealt with the ancient Problem of Evil, when in fact all he’s done is a simple bait-and-switch.

XFiles: WL Craig on “Objective Moral Duties”

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 6: “Can We Be Good Without God?”)

Last week, Dr. Craig ended on an exceptionally misanthropic note, declaring that if we take away God, humanity is nothing more than “an apelike creature on a speck of solar dust beset with delusions of moral grandeur.” Our intrinsic moral value—the value we have in and of ourselves, with or without 3rd parties like God—simply does not exist, in Dr. Craig’s view. (Wow.) Having settled that question, he moves on to moral duties.

Traditionally our moral duties were thought to spring from God’s commandments, such as the Ten Commandments. But if there is no God, what basis remains for objective moral duties? On the atheistic view, human beings are just animals, and animals have no moral obligations to one another.

Already he has “forgotten” what he himself wrote on the preceding page of his book:

Just as a troop of baboons exhibit cooperative and even self-sacrificial behavior because natural selection has determined it to be advantageous in the struggle for survival, so their primate cousins Homo sapiens exhibit similar behavior for the same reason. As a result of sociobiological pressures there has evolved among Homo sapiens a sort of “herd morality,” which functions well in the perpetuation of our species.

He originally conceded this point only because he thought it would be useful to him in dehumanizing mankind so that he could claim we have no “moral grandeur” without God. Now that he wants to talk about duty, however, he forgets all about this fact, even though it applies much more directly to moral behavior (i.e. “duties”) than it does to moral values. There’s a very clear sociobiological basis for the kinds of behavior we perceive as “duties,” and even though Dr. Craig himself alluded to it just one page ago, he now claims that no such thing exists.

Looks like we’re off to a good start, eh?

XFiles: Objective moral values

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 6: “Can We Be Good Without God?”)

We’re up to Chapter 6 already? Cool! And it looks like Dr. Craig is all fired up and ready to serve us a heaping helping of his Argument from Morality. Here it is, as a syllogism.

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

As we’ve seen before, Dr. Craig is hopelessly confused about what objective values are. By failing to recognize that moral values are a combination of subjective preferences and real-world constraints, he convinces himself that there exists, in some spiritual dimension, a Platonic absolute ideal morality from which all human moral values are derived. No doubt you’ll be shocked to discover that—by total coincidence—this absolute moral standard just happens to be identical to traditional Judeo-Christian teachings on morality.

That, however, is not Dr. Craig’s main point in this chapter. As summarized by the syllogism above, the point he’s trying to make is that because we say that some things are good and other things are bad, therefore God exists. Hoo boy.

XFiles: Constant superstition

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 5: “Why is the universe fine-tuned for life?”)

Chapter 5 starts the “Intelligent Design” portion of Dr. Craig’s apologetic, though he does not call it that. In fact, he puts in a sidebar that explicitly points out that “fine-tuned” does not mean designed. Fine tuning, he explains, “just means that the range of life-permitting values for the constants and quantities is extremely narrow.” But don’t let that mislead you, this is his ID argument, which he presents in the form of another syllogism.

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore it is due to design.

There are several significant flaws in this argument. First of all, as we saw last week, time itself has its origin, along with the rest of the universe, at the Big Bang. That means there has never been a time when the physical constants of the universe did not exist with their current values, which prevents any Designer from having the opportunity to design them. They’re already here, they already have the correct values, and the Designer himself could not have existed prior to the constants (since time itself does not go back that far), so we can eliminate design right off the bat.

XFiles Weekend: Back to square one.

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 4: “Why did the universe begin?”)

Between Chapters 3 and 4, Dr. Craig shares a “personal interlude” in which he tells his readers all about how, at Wheaton College, he was skeptical when his conservative Christian theology professor told him that there were “no good arguments for God’s existence”. Such a view would have been perfectly consistent with the New Testament’s declaration that believers “walk by faith, not by sight,” but that prospect apparently wasn’t satisfying for the intelligent young man. As we saw before, he converted for social reasons, without ever finding (or seeking) solid, intellectually robust evidence for God, and now that he’d bought into Christianity, he seems to have been uncomfortable with his lack of a good justification for what he’d committed himself to.

Fortunately for his faith, he happened to pick up a book entitled The Resurrection of Theism by Stuart Hackett, in which Hackett laid out a number of arguments, the “centerpiece” of which became the core of Dr. Craig’s famous kalam argument. With his wife’s encouragement, he applied and was accepted as a doctoral student at the University of Birmingham (UK) under Dr. John Hicks. Lacking sufficient funds to pay for it, however, they began to pray, and eventually, through his wife’s family connections, they got a grant from a non-Christian businessman, which Dr. Craig attributes entirely to the Lord. (Apparently, God does not have any compunctions about tampering with people’s free will to get money out of them, as long as it doesn’t save their souls from eternal torment.)

During his doctoral studies, Dr. Craig unearthed the writings of a medieval Islamic philosopher named Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad Al Ghazali. A twelfth-century Persian, Al Ghazali disputed the claims of some philosophers who said that “the universe flows necessarily out of God and therefore is beginningless.” Some of this may sound vaguely familiar after Leibniz, but not to worry, there’s a lot that’s new and different here.

XFiles Weekend: Straw men and animists

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 3: “Why does anything at all exist?”)

Here’s a map of where we are in Dr. Craig’s rendition of Leibniz’s philosophical argument for God:

1. Whatever exists has an explanation.
2. If the universe has an explanation, that explanation is God. [ <== We are here]
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore the universe has an explanation.
5. Therefore the explanation of the universe is God.

As we’ve seen, Premise #1 fails because a genuine explanation needs to be more than just a vacuous paraphrase of the observation we’re trying to explain—it must, in addition, specify a cause that would reasonably produce the given results. Since cause and effect require the existence of time, and since the material universe has existed for literally all of time, there has never been a time when the material universe could have been caused. It is meaningless to speak of “explaining” it, and thus right off the bat, Dr. Craig (and Leibniz) are barking up the wrong tree.

[EDIT: tweaked from here through the break---wasn't quite happy with the original analysis]

Premise #2, remarkably, leads Dr. Craig even further astray. “If the universe has an explanation, that explanation is God.” OK, sure, provided we assume the following:

• God exists.
• God is capable of creating the universe.
• God is willing to create the universe.
• God had the opportunity to create the universe.
• Nothing else is capable of creating the universe.
• God actually did create the universe.

Take away any of those first four assumptions, and Premise #2 fails. If God does not exist, He obviously cannot create any universes. If He exists, but is incapable, then He still is not the explanation. If He can, but is not willing, likewise. If He is willing and able, but has no opportunity (e.g. if there has never been a time when the universe did not already exist), same thing. And even if He existed, and were willing and able, and had the opportunity, He still might not be the cause if there were something else that could have created it first. If, for example, some n-dimensional metaverse were about to bubble up a Big Bang just like what He wanted, He might just wait wait and let it happen instead of intervening personally. Or perhaps some other gods/fairies/unicorns/pasta dishes might beat Him to it. But the point is, He’s still not the explanation for the universe unless He actually created it.

Premise #2, in short, is simply Leibniz’s conclusion, phrased in the form of a premise. I find it simply astonishing that Dr. Craig’s religious beliefs have so fogged his philosophical perceptions that he would fail to recognize such a blatant tautology. He is clearly an accomplished scholar, but his faith is just as clearly an impediment to his reason. And it shows in his attempts to defend this conclusion-disguised-as-a-premise.

Explanation versus superstition

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 3: “Why does anything at all exist?”)

We’ve made it to chapter 3 (finally), and things are going to get just a bit meatier. Dr. Craig starts us off with Leibniz.

G. W. Leibniz, codiscoverer of calculus and a towering intellect of eighteenth-century Europe, wrote: “The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?“

In other words, why does anything exist at all? This, for Leibniz, is the most basic question that anyone can ask. Like me, Leibniz came to the conclusion that the answer is to be found, not in the universe of created things, but in God. God exists necessarily and is the explanation why anything else exists.

Dr. Craig breaks Leibniz’ argument down into a simple, easily-understood syllogism.

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. [Therefore:] The universe has an explanation of its existence.
5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe is God.

Dr. Craig assures us that “this is a logically airtight argument,” but I daresay he’s being overly optimistic. There is an obvious fallacy in point 2 (which he is going to try and address later in the chapter). Before we get to that, though, we need to look at the somewhat less obvious fallacy in point 1.