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?

Is human sacrifice morally justified?

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

When you’ve dug yourself into a hole that you can’t climb out of, step one is to stop digging. Unfortunately, if you stop digging, people might think you’re admitting that you’ve dug yourself into a hole you can’t get out of. In theological contexts, the way to handle that dilemma is to dig yourself in deeper.

But we can push the argument a notch further. We can show positively that it’s entirely possible that God is all-powerful and all-loving and that many persons never hear the gospel and are lost.

As a good and loving God, God wants as many people as possible to be saved and as few as possible to be lost. His goal, then, is to achieve an optimal balance between these, to create no more of the lost than is necessary to attain a certain number of the saved. But it’s possible that the actual world (which includes the future as well as the present and past) has such a balance. It’s possible that in order to create this many people who will be saved, God also had to create this many people who will be lost… It’s possible that in order to achieve a multitude of saints, God had to accept a multitude of sinners.

What Craig is arguing (without realizing it) is that it’s possible that there is some greater power than God, some power that forces God to do things He would prefer not to do. There’s no logical necessity that requires one or more souls to be damned in order to save someone else’s soul, even given free will. You might think that free will would reduce the chances of everybody being saved, but there’s no logical necessity that says the salvation of one soul requires the damnation of another. (Plus, an all-loving, all-powerful deity would not leave such an important matter to mere chance.) There must be some other power, then, that forces God to do what He would not wish to do. And if there’s some greater power than God, then God by definition is not all-powerful.

And Craig is only starting to dig himself in.

Spoilers and the weakness of the Almighty

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

Normally I hate it when people give away the plot, but today I’m going to make an exception. I’m going to give away the plot behind the “Christian exclusivism” argument that William Lane Craig is making. When Craig says that Jesus is the only way to heaven, he’s not being as humble and pious as he’d like everyone (including himself) to think. He’s not exalting God and abasing man. The whole point of Christian exclusivism (or “particularism,” as he calls it) is to put Christians in the position of having a unique monopoly on what people are supposed to believe and how they must behave. Religious pluralism is anathema to him precisely because it allows people to believe and obey things Christians haven’t approved.

The problem with Christian exclusivism is that, from God’s perspective, there’s no reason for it. If, as the Gospel claims, God were a loving heavenly Father Who earnestly wanted all of His children to be saved, the last thing He would want to do is to tack on some arbitrary and often impossible requirements that severely limit the number of salvations. Craig expends a fair amount of effort trying to defend his exclusivist position against the obvious charge of injustice, but he can’t really explain why God ought to limit salvations in the first place. Shh, don’t tell anyone: the real reason is first and foremost to establish the dominion of Christians like himself.

The Hell with Christianity

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

There are times when a Christian apologist’s chief task is to so corrupt our reason and morals that we are no longer able to tell the difference between truth and falsehood, right and wrong. Last week wasn’t too bad; Craig was standing up for Christian particularism as versus religious pluralism, and that would be fine if there were, in fact, one true religion. But to be true, a thing has to be consistent both with itself and with objective reality, and Christianity fails to meet those criteria, as we’ll see in today’s installment.

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.

Not with a bang

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 9: “Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?”)

For as much energy as he has put into dissecting certain critical theories of the Gospel, William Lane Craig ends his defense of the resurrection on a decidedly flat note: just under 3 and a half pages attempting to defend his so-called “resurrection hypothesis,” and even those consist mostly of just saying, “Yep, I win here too.” I think in the interests of academic honesty, I should go over some of the important factors Craig is leaving out.

Seeing is believing

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 9: “Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?”)

William Lane Craig is trying to convince us that the “resurrection hypothesis” is the best explanation for what he calls the “three historical facts” about the origin of Christianity: the empty tomb, the (perceived) appearances to the disciples, and their subsequent faith. Last week he tried (without much success) to eliminate the “disciples stole the body” alternative. Granted, a conspiracy to hide the body and then lie about the resurrection is pretty unlikely, but it’s extremely possible that some small group of disciples might have removed it without the knowledge or consent of the others, resulting in a major misunderstanding on the part of the others.

The next two alternatives Craig deals with are the “apparent death” hypothesis and the “misplaced body” hypothesis. I’m basically going to skip those two because Craig is mostly correct in dismissing them due to their inherent implausibility. The main argument we want to look at is what Craig calls the “hallucination hypothesis,” i.e. idea that the disciples were just having hallucinations about seeing Jesus.

The devil in the details

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 9: “Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?”)

Before we start this week’s main topic, I want to pick up one loose end from last time, about a point Craig made that I didn’t have time to cover. Craig’s historical argument centers around three points: the empty tomb, the (perceived) post-resurrection appearances, and the origin of the Christian faith. Regarding that last point, he says this:

A Messiah who failed to deliver and to reign, who was defeated, humiliated and slain by His enemies, is a contradiction in terms. Nowhere do Jewish texts speak of such a “Messiah.” Therefore, it’s difficult to overemphasize what a disaster the crucifixion was for the disciples’ faith. Jesus’ death on the cross spelled the humiliating end for any hopes they had entertained that He was the Messiah.

In other contexts, of course, Craig would argue that Jesus did fulfill the Messianic prophecies, and that the cross was not “the humiliating end for any hopes” of Jesus being the true Messiah. But just here, just now, he’s denying any Biblical connection between the Old Testament Messiah and Jesus. And that’s the great thing about apologetics: you don’t have to tell a consistent story from one point to the next. All you have to do is come up with a plausible answer for the question of the moment.

Body of evidence

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 9: “Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?”)

The big problem with the story of the resurrection is that it’s not consistent with what we see in real life. The Gospels require a God with a certain set of characteristics, motives, and abilities, such as would be unmistakably obvious if they were actually present in the real world—and they’re simply not there. It is this fact, more than any other, that justifies interpreting the New Testament in a skeptical light.

William Lane Craig, however, is determined to make the best case he can for the resurrection. And that’s just awesome. Once we’ve seen this, we’ve seen the best Christianity has to offer.

Deceived by appearances

(Book: On Guard, by William Lane Craig. Chapter 9: “Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?”)

In John 7:24, Jesus cautions his disciples, “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge [with] righteous judgment.” Appearances can be deceiving—especially when they’re the “appearances” of a recently-deceased loved one.

In the next section of Chapter 9, William Lane Craig takes us through the so-called “appearances” of Jesus. His intention is to prove that Jesus really did rise from the dead, but if we take care to “judge with correct judgment” (as more modern translations put it), then I think we’ll see that the postmortem “appearances” of Jesus are indeed a (self-)deception.