william l. craig

[CapnAwesome]

I think he's a debater who argues to win, rather than argues his own position. A fairly intelligent person who is trying to back up what he has believed since he was a child, rather than actually follow the evidence. He's only impressive when you consider his peers.

[jstrodel]

I think he's a debater who argues to win, rather than argues his own position. A fairly intelligent person who is trying to back up what he has believed since he was a child, rather than actually follow the evidence. He's only impressive when you consider his peers.

One person challenges William Lane Craig's low aim, while another person challenge his pretension to be able to discuss the philosophy of time, a subject he has spent many years studying. The video posted was laughably absent from any serious discussion of Craig's views, and the point centered around a cult around Albert Einstein and the price of Craig's book, comparable to the cost of the average textbook. How scientific. I wonder if the people that made the video actually understand Craig's views on time or the theory of relativity. Probably not.

There is nothing wrong with people in academia appealing to a popular audience and there is nothing wrong with them attempting difficult technical tasks. The average atheist on the internet is just going to be opposed to Craig because they are doctrinaire and they lack any capacity for critical thinking, they do not know how to do real philosophical logic but they will talk about logic all the time as if the word "logic" is an argument from authority to atheistic philosophy and they are under 25.

Craig is not the most brilliant Christian philosopher in history, he would have to beat Descartes, Aquinas, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Pascal, Leibniz, Kant (sort of), Locke (sort of), Berkeley and many other more distinctively theistic philosophers that are probably even more gifted but have chosen not to appeal to secular sensibilities. Though he not the most brilliant, he is certainly a competent philosopher.

Why not attack Craig's beliefs instead of attacking Craig?

I think the atheist hostility to William Lane Craig is probably mostly due to the fact that he wins more debates than he loses, and atheists like Dawkins, who realize the technical and idiosyncratic nature of their work lacks confirmations in the public and wider human experience of knowledge realize they will lose against Craig. They try and pigeonhole him as being some how tainted by a sense of obligation to common people but their elitism is really what shows instead of their sense of intellectual integrity. Why should philosophy belong to technical journals devoted to industrial funding rather than to concerns that are common to all people?

[CapnAwesome]

Richard Dawkins doesn't look great in debates sometimes because he is not a professional debater. I think too much importance is put on debate. Maybe a horrible debater has the correct position. My main experience with viewing him come from his debate with Hitchens about the existence God and his debate with Bart Ehrman on the resurrection of Jesus. While he is undoubtedly a good debater when appealing to a common (and in both instances, priorly favorable to his position) audience I noticed that in both debates his basically argued against something that he personally believed in order to get a better debate position.

In the debate with Ehrham he basically admitted to contradictions in the bible in trying to make the case for certain books being of greater historical value, this is despite the fact that he actually believes (as was pointed out by Dr. Ehrham) that the bible is an inerrant document. In the Hitchens debate he basically made the argument for a Deistic God, even though this isn't in fact the type of God that he believes in. It strikes me that you have a philosophically weak position when you have to debate against it just in order to win. Perhaps he realizes the contradiction in his beliefs and it's just too late in life for him to change. Maybe he just doesn't want to let go of his cash cow. Either way it's a major glaring flaw for those of us who like consistency in our philosophy.