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RE: What logical fallacies are William Lane Craig's favorite?
November 5, 2013 at 1:51 am
(This post was last modified: November 5, 2013 at 1:51 am by max-greece.)
Just picking up from what Deist said. Faith denies evidence. God demands faith. Finding evidence would therefore prove a somewhat incompetent God. I've never managed to understand what apologetics think they are doing with this.
Also notable that every one of Craig's arguments can be shot down merely by browsing through some of the posts on this site over the last 2 weeks or so:
The argument from design, the moral argument, the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the historical argument and the argument from personal experience.
Basically - not a new argument in the whole thing, all disguised by the machine gun like presentation.
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RE: What logical fallacies are William Lane Craig's favorite?
November 5, 2013 at 4:54 am
(November 5, 2013 at 1:38 am)Lemonvariable72 Wrote: Still why the fuck does he state that he is a professional philosopher, in what seems like every public engagement?
Because "snake oil salesman," has a bad rap, for some reason.
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RE: What logical fallacies are William Lane Craig's favorite?
November 5, 2013 at 12:06 pm
I found this a couple months ago and it sums up pretty much every debate I've ever seen with WLC:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ozos1_rxDxs
What I would like is for someone debating WLC (or any apologist for that matter) to spend a few minutes of their opening statement talking about the tactics apologists like him use (the big words, the non-evidential or untrue premises, the claiming of victory when one of their arguments is not addressed because they rattled off 50 of them in 5 minutes, etc.) and then spend a portion of their closing arguments revisiting these tactics and pointing out how and where the apologist just used them.
It's a shame that this person would have to spend their time educating the audience like that, but at the same time I think it would really valuable, and maybe the only take-away from the debate for most.
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RE: What logical fallacies are William Lane Craig's favorite?
November 5, 2013 at 2:09 pm
(November 4, 2013 at 10:26 pm)pineapplebunnybounce Wrote: His tactic is to use lots of big words, say them very quickly, so no one kknows what he means and somehow people fall for that and think he's right.
I only listened to him once and I couldn't even finish listening, he just kept using philosophical terms and pretty soon it's all meaningless to me.
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RE: What logical fallacies are William Lane Craig's favorite?
November 5, 2013 at 2:17 pm
(November 4, 2013 at 10:26 pm)pineapplebunnybounce Wrote: I only listened to him once and I couldn't even finish listening, he just kept using philosophical terms and pretty soon it's all meaningless to me.
Philosophers really don't like him, I hear. He's basically to philosophy what "Creation Science" is to science.
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RE: What logical fallacies are William Lane Craig's favorite?
November 5, 2013 at 2:21 pm
(November 5, 2013 at 2:17 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: (November 4, 2013 at 10:26 pm)pineapplebunnybounce Wrote: I only listened to him once and I couldn't even finish listening, he just kept using philosophical terms and pretty soon it's all meaningless to me.
Philosophers really don't like him, I hear. He's basically to philosophy what "Creation Science" is to science.
I can see why. Funny thing is that I thought that being a philosopher was something where if you have to tell people you are, your not.
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RE: What logical fallacies are William Lane Craig's favorite?
November 5, 2013 at 3:03 pm
(This post was last modified: November 5, 2013 at 3:08 pm by Simon Moon.)
His favorite argument, the Cosmological Argument contains the fallacies of equivocation, composition and question begging.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
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RE: What logical fallacies are William Lane Craig's favorite?
November 5, 2013 at 4:29 pm
(This post was last modified: November 5, 2013 at 4:40 pm by MindForgedManacle.)
Hitchens got steamrolled in that debate. Craig was pathetic as far as arguments go, but he does present his case well in structured debate formats (which is noticeable in extended Q&As, as his performance dips noticeably against actual philosophers). He really likes him some Special Pleading, straw man and the fallacy of oversimplification.
And Hitchens did numerous fallacies actually.
(November 5, 2013 at 2:17 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: Philosophers really don't like him, I hear. He's basically to philosophy what "Creation Science" is to science.
Indeed. He's seen, by the philosophers I've seen assess him like Stephen Law, as a sort of C-list, okay philosopher, with a minor standout in the philosophy of time (and even then only from a theological perspective if I remember correctly).
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RE: What logical fallacies are William Lane Craig's favorite?
November 5, 2013 at 7:33 pm
I don't know why they bother engaging creationists in debates like this. If I had to do one of these debates, I'd let the creationist do all the talking. I'd literally let them talk for the entire duration without saying a word myself.
Would I would do however, is have 3 buttons, each connected to a different alarm. One would be for logical fallacies, one for misrepresenting science and the other for outright lies. I'd basically just spend the entire debate playing whack-a-mole.
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RE: What logical fallacies are William Lane Craig's favorite?
November 5, 2013 at 10:58 pm
(November 5, 2013 at 7:33 pm)Optimistic Mysanthrope Wrote: I don't know why they bother engaging creationists in debates like this. If I had to do one of these debates, I'd let the creationist do all the talking. I'd literally let them talk for the entire duration without saying a word myself.
Would I would do however, is have 3 buttons, each connected to a different alarm. One would be for logical fallacies, one for misrepresenting science and the other for outright lies. I'd basically just spend the entire debate playing whack-a-mole.
That would be fantastic, but eventually, as a viewer of the debacle, I'd want them all explained. "This is the fallacy he used" "He said X but the evidence says Y and Z."
It would be amazing fun to watch, though.
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