Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Craig would go with what he KNOWS to be true rather than with what simply appears to be true.

That is an absolutely stunning admission.  How much more presuppositionalist can you get?

Boru

[Cato]

IOW, Craig would go with what he KNOWS to be true rather than with what simply appears to be true.

Ridiculous. This is the same as the following:

Cato: WLC, your wife is fucking another man.
WLC: Not true, I KNOW otherwise.
Cato: See...(opens a door and WLC witnesses another man putting his dick into her vagina with significant ass RPM).
WLC: This proves nothing, I KNOW my wife is not being fucked by another man.

Being resolute in a belief does not make the belief true. Admitting a belief given evidence to the contrary is delusional.

[Minimalist]

Being resolute in a belief does not make the belief true.

Fucking god-buggerers are living proof of that, eh?

[Esquilax]

That's a pretty big claim you're making, Esq. I own the book, but I'm not doing your homework for you. If such a passage exists, I'd be interested in reading it in context. Let me know if you find it.

Actually, I was wrong there: it's not in his book, though multiple sources attest that Craig, when given the exact same hypothetical I mentioned, responds consistently with the claim that witnessing the resurrection not happening personally, would not dissuade him that it did happen.

FWIW, other evidentialists (such as J. Warner Wallace) would be quick to say that if it could be proved that Jesus did NOT rise from the dead, they would cease to be Christians.

Which is good for them, in that they're halfway toward a fully rational position on that claim- the other half would be not shifting the burden of proof by expecting everyone else to prove them wrong- but we're talking about Craig, whose position is somewhat different, according to every source I can find.

That would be true for HIM (in his own faith journey), but not for apologetics purposes. IOW, if you met Jesus personally (as Paul did), no amount of "evidence" from the outside would be greater then your own personal knowledge.

Ha ha, what? No. If I'd met Jesus and yet outside evidence could be presented to me that he wasn't who he claimed to be- someone shows me how he faked his miracles while they were in progress, and his corpse, for example- then I would indeed have evidence greater than my personal assessment of the issue. Hidden within this claim to the superiority of personal experience that christians so often make is the unvoiced premise that one cannot be fooled by their subjective experiences, that they cannot come to incorrect conclusions based on either incomplete knowledge, that there's no possible way that personal experience could ever be wrong, and I'm simply baffled why anyone would think that. The entire field of psychiatry, our entire apparatus for diagnosing mental illness, depends on our recognition that subjective views do not equate to objective reality. We know enough about the brain now that we can see that auditory and visual hallucinations are relatively common, and that's just discounting all the other ways our senses can be fooled. Hell, the entire history of people being wrong, ever, is based on one or more people coming to a conclusion based upon personal experiences, and those conclusions being incorrect once additional information comes to light.

Craig asserts that his personal experience, his witness of the holy spirit, contravenes every possible piece of evidence and argument that could ever be brought to bear, and this is extraordinarily myopic and arrogant, in the sense that he's closing himself off to every new piece of information he could ever be exposed to, and is asserting that it's impossible that he could be wrong on this issue, which is a claim he has no hope of justifying in any sense.

Most amusingly, have you ever heard Craig speak on what he would do if confronted by someone of another religion that claims the same self authenticating witness that he does? Do you know how he proposes one differentiates between a real self authenticating witness and a fake one? Well, a fake self authenticating witnesser will be swayed by arguments and evidence, they'll change their mind given enough conflicting data. A real self authenticating witnesser will never change his mind on anything, no matter how much new evidence is given to them.

Craig conflates stubborn pig-headedness with some kind of epistemic proof positive of the position he's being stubborn over, and will not consider evidence and argument that contradicts what he already believes. If that's not a presupposition, I don't know what is.

Please. I'm interested in learning more from Craig.

Weirdly enough, for someone who keeps going on about Reasonable Faith, that's where you can find this magisterial/ministerial crap. He brings it up in the occasional talk or debate too, but it's there in print. There's a reference for it in the link I gave above.

So, just to be clear, it is your opinion that Cato, a self-described "anti-theist", does not have any presuppositions about God?

I don't know whether he does or doesn't, and my point is, neither do you. You do not have enough evidence to dictate to him what's inside of his own head, you've got nothing to base that accusation on aside from the fact that he doesn't agree with you, which is evidence of disagreement, not motivation for it. Anti-theism pits one against religion and, in some definitions, god, but that in itself doesn't denote a presupposition against god; Satan is against god in the most negative sense you have, he's a textbook anti-theist, but he still believes in god.

Opposing god is not tied to one's belief in him. One can be against god and religion and be an atheist, and one can be against god and religion while believing in him. In fact, the argument could be made that, were one to be convinced that god exists as an anti-theist, that would only confirm the position of anti-theism for that person, as now there's a real being responsible for all the ills that motivated it in the first place.

Perhaps, but I'm still interested in knowing just how familiar you actually are with the man you take such great exception to.

I've seen plenty of his talks and debates. Actually, that sort of thing is good for me to listen to while working, so I've heard plenty of apologists talk in my time; you can see me go in depth on a few of his debates in other threads here. My favorite is his thing with Sean Carroll, because that was such a complete rout.

Esq-

Have you actually read Reasonable Faith?

Partially. I don't own the whole book, but I've read the relevant pieces. Are you going to discount my views on Craig entirely, no matter how much else of his work I've been exposed to, because I haven't read that one book?

[Randy Carson]

To be clear, Craig may not label himself as a presuppositionalist, but in his words and deeds, his position surely is presuppositional in nature, though he flees from the label as hard as he can.

I believe it's actually in Reasonable Faith itself that Craig asserts that, were he to go back in time and confirm that the resurrection of Christ never occurred, he would still believe that it did. He's on record, both on his website and in talks, as saying that his feeling that god exists, his "self authenticating witness of the holy spirit," beats out all evidence and argument that it is possible to bring to bear; his subjective opinion that god exists is apparently better than all of that. Have you ever heard him speak on reason?

I'm not aware that WLC as refuted this...

Guys-

I'm not aware of any direct "refutation" (why would he post a refutation of something he believes?), but there is an indirect explanation here.

[Randy Carson]

Partially. I don't own the whole book, but I've read the relevant pieces. Are you going to discount my views on Craig entirely, no matter how much else of his work I've been exposed to, because I haven't read that one book?

No, not at all. I was just curious to know how much of Craig you have actually read.

My own opinion is that not one person in this forum could last five minutes on stage in front of a live audience with him.

Consequently, it's amusing to see people trying to explain why he's wrong when he would mop the floor with their silly objections in person.

[Mr.wizard]

Partially. I don't own the whole book, but I've read the relevant pieces. Are you going to discount my views on Craig entirely, no matter how much else of his work I've been exposed to, because I haven't read that one book?

No, not at all. I was just curious to know how much of Craig you have actually read.

My own opinion is that not one person in this forum could last five minutes on stage in front of a live audience with him.

Consequently, it's amusing to see people trying to explain why he's wrong when he would mop the floor with their silly objections in person.

Randy, the person presenting the argument adds no validity to the argument, the arguments stand and fall on their own merit. William Lane Craig has never once argued god into existence nor has he ever provided evidence for the biblical jesus or creation.

[Esquilax]

My own opinion is that not one person in this forum could last five minutes on stage in front of a live audience with him.

Oh, no doubt! I suck at public speaking!

Consequently, it's amusing to see people trying to explain why he's wrong when he would mop the floor with their silly objections in person.

See, I dunno that this actually means anything: I fully accept that Craig could probably beat me in a live debate, but I don't think for a second that he could do so in a prepared back and forth. Craig is an excellent orator, and he's very good at obscuring the problems with what he's saying by turning simple, intellectually dishonest premises into twisting labyrinths of twenty dollar words, but the actual content of his arguments is trivial to rebut. Hell, I've done it myself countless times here, even with you; do you remember citing the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem in support of Kalam? That's a William Lane Craig argument too, and you retracted it when I pointed out that the theorem doesn't actually say anything in support of Kalam; this is something that Craig himself refused to do even when actually told, point blank, by one of the writers of the paper, that no, it does not say what he asserted that it says. It's one of the few times that I've ever seen Craig put off his game on stage, but the point is that you can hardly tell me that Craig would "mop the floor" with me based on the content of his arguments, when the one interaction we've had over WLC's arguments in the past had you admitting that the argument Craig used was wrong.

Craig is nothing special. He's just another in a long line of preachers, albeit one of the few who has managed to cloak his rhetoric in intellectualism rather that religious fervor. I've seen his arguments, I've watched him present them. They're nothing more than assertions, in the main.

[IATIA]

My own opinion is that not one person in this forum could last five minutes on stage in front of a live audience with him.

Not!

[Randy Carson]

My own opinion is that not one person in this forum could last five minutes on stage in front of a live audience with him.

Oh, no doubt! I suck at public speaking!

Consequently, it's amusing to see people trying to explain why he's wrong when he would mop the floor with their silly objections in person.

See, I dunno that this actually means anything: I fully accept that Craig could probably beat me in a live debate, but I don't think for a second that he could do so in a prepared back and forth. Craig is an excellent orator, and he's very good at obscuring the problems with what he's saying by turning simple, intellectually dishonest premises into twisting labyrinths of twenty dollar words, but the actual content of his arguments is trivial to rebut. Hell, I've done it myself countless times here, even with you; do you remember citing the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem in support of Kalam? That's a William Lane Craig argument too, and you retracted it when I pointed out that the theorem doesn't actually say anything in support of Kalam; this is something that Craig himself refused to do even when actually told, point blank, by one of the writers of the paper, that no, it does not say what he asserted that it says. It's one of the few times that I've ever seen Craig put off his game on stage, but the point is that you can hardly tell me that Craig would "mop the floor" with me based on the content of his arguments, when the one interaction we've had over WLC's arguments in the past had you admitting that the argument Craig used was wrong.

Craig is nothing special. He's just another in a long line of preachers, albeit one of the few who has managed to cloak his rhetoric in intellectualism rather that religious fervor. I've seen his arguments, I've watched him present them. They're nothing more than assertions, in the main.

Okay. So, based on one retraction by me (since I was out of my own depth in that discussion), you assume that Craig would not have a better response than I did?

BTW- You do know he's not a preacher, right? He's a philosophy professor at the Talbot School of Theology in Los Angeles.