Dr. Craig is a liar.

[wiploc]

Hate to be debbie downer, but I doubt anyone is going to transition away from their religious beliefs on account of any of this...lol.   Been here too long, know better.   

It happens often enough.  I once commented (at talk freethought) that somebody was out of reach, not worth talking to.  People came back and said things like, "A year ago, I was just like him.  Let him keep working with us.  He'll come around." 

It's a long slow process. 

At first the theist expects us to be bowled over by his logic. 

Then he thinks there is something wrong with him.  He isn't a good enough Christian, doesn't have enough faith, hasn't done his homework, or something.  So he goes back and studies, modifies his arguments. 

The presumption is that there's something wrong with him.  It takes a long time for him to entertain the idea that there is something wrong with the arguments. 

His people have armed him with stupid arguments, and told him that they were smart.  This realization, when it finally does come, cracks the foundations of his belief.  He'll still come around, still test arguments in the proving ground, but now with some willingness to conclude that the argument is where the flaw is. 

And, finally, maybe, he gets to wonder whether, if the argument is so bad, the belief supported by the argument isn't bad too. 

This process takes time.  You could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times in your life you'll see somebody sit down with one opinion and get up with another.  So what you're doing is planting seeds.  They may not sprout for twenty years.  You will presumably not see them sprout. 

And you don't know where they will sprout.  There are people reading over our shoulders as we debate, people who wonder about the same arguments we are discussing, people who are likely to be affected far sooner than the debaters will. 

So our job, really, is first to be personable, principled, and good-willed, to let people see that we would be good neighbors, to show that we don't have horns and tails like they've been told.  And second, we want to show that we care about right and wrong for reasons at least as good as those the theists offer. 

In third place is the goal of refuting specific arguments like the KCA.  It's a stupid argument, indefensible.  The people who arm you with the KCA, and send you out to do battle with it, those people are lying to you.  Maybe not individually, but as a group they know better.  They wouldn't keep the KCA in circulation if they had anything better. 

But they know they don't have anything good, so they keep sending people out with bad arguments. 

This is our proof that Christians don't have any good arguments.  If they had good ones, they wouldn't rely on bad ones. 

So, yeah, people come across all the time.  People cross the other way all the time too.  Discussions like this are a significant part of people are now coming to us a lot faster than they are leaving us. 

When I was a kid, we had no internet.  There was nobody to talk to.  Madalyn Murray was the only other atheist that I knew of in the United States.  Christian kids could be told that atheists just wanted to be evil, and that atheists had no logical arguments, and they pretty much had to believe what they were told because they never heard the other side. 

Now, because of forums like this, Christians can test out theist arguments, and learn that they just don't work.  And then they can wonder why.

[wiploc]

I've never seen anyone giving a reason for this.... Usually just general hand waving, and appeal to very small things or vague references.   Thought maybe by the way you where talking, you knew something that I didn't.

I'll take a stab. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that we cannot simultaneously know the position and velocity of a particle. A nonexistent particle would have a position and velocity of (0,0). We can't even know that, so when we use our instruments to detect the effect of an absence of particles on an incredibly tiny scale, we find effects that can be explained by particle pairs 'popping into existence' and immediately annihilating each other. It's like someone squeezed on zero and made it divide into +1 and -1 for a nanosecond. A variety of 'forces' seem to be mediated by virtual particles.

I am not a physicist, I hope one comes along and gives a better explanation and shows where I'm wrong.

I totally get that we can't know.  That's what is always explained.  But then the explainer jumps to the assumption that what we do know is all that's real.  We don't know the position of the electron because looking at it would move it--but also the electron doesn't even have a position.  There's no reality for us to know. 

The closest thing I've heard to an explanation of that is this:  If an electron had an actual position, if it was a thing rather than a statistical smudge, then it would be on one side of the semi-conductor or the other.  It would never make it to the other side.  Computers would never work.  The cat has to be considered alive and dead at the same time because there is no reality until we open the box. 

I believe it.  I believe it all.  But I don't understand how we get from "we don't know the location of the electron," to, "The electron doesn't have a location."

[wiploc]

What gets me is the idea that a timeless, immaterial, omnipotent, spaceless being is somehow a less ludicrous supposition than an infinite past or something coming from nothing.  You don't solve an absurdity by proposing an even greater absurdity.  The chosen solution, this 'God', is more extreme than the alternatives.

That is a good point. However, no one is using the KCA alone to prove God's existence. There are additional reasons to think that God exists. 

Natural Theology:

• Cosmological Argument from Contingency
  
• Basis for Moral Absolutes
  
• Teleological Argument from Fine Tuning
  
• The Ontological Argument
  

Revealed Theology:

• The OT
  
• The NT
  
• Miracles
  

Individual's personal experience

While you may debate as to how much evidence each gives, they mostly stand or fall together so if someone wants to say there is no proof for God, you would have to dismantle all of them to support that statement. I am sure there are some people here who think they can do that, but what it really comes down to is that it takes an extremely high level of skepticism to deny all of them. [Emphasis added] At that level of skepticism, you have to start asking if it possible to believe in anything.

OR, is it more often the case that non-belief  is a result of an emotional response...perhaps because suffering exists or some related objection?

That calls for the Parable of the Gold Chains:

I was a pawnbroker… This guy came into my store, drew a chain out of his right-side pocket, and said, “How much will you give me for this fine gold necklace?”
…I politely looked at his necklace. It was fake. I pointed out to him the chintzy clasp, totally unlike what would be on a necklace of value. But he still insisted that it was real; so I cut the chain with a file, ready to test it with acid. But I didn’t need the acid: the inside was brown, not even gold in color.
The guy dropped the chain in his left pocket. He drew another chain out of his right pocket, and said, “This one’s the real thing.” This one’s the real thing? That was like admitting he’d known all along that the first one was fake.
I showed him that this one didn’t say, “14K,” like real gold would. It said, “14KEP,” meaning it was electroplate. It wasn’t even pretending to be real. But the guy still insisted it was real. So I cut it with my file, and showed him it was another fake.
Can you guess what he did then? He dropped it into his left pocket, pulled a third chain from his right, and told me that this one was real. I was happy to file this one too, ruin it, so he couldn’t try to fool anyone else.
He pulled out a fourth chain. He said it was real. I showed him that it wasn’t.
…First pattern: When this guy said a chain was real, that didn’t carry any weight. His apparent sincerity was an act or a pathology, not an indication of actual truthfulness. His saying something was legitimate didn’t make it legitimate, didn’t even increase the likelihood that it was legitimate.
Second pattern: This guy’s chains were fake. I had yet to examine his [next] chain, but I already believed it was fake.
I was willing to be surprised; if the chain turned out to be real, I would have accepted that. But I believed it was fake. And that was a justified belief, reasonable in the circumstances.
This story is analogous with my experience with Christianity. Somebody will tell me that the ontological argument is solid gold proof of the existence of Jehovah. I point out that it is patently absurd, and he pulls out another argument.
He doesn’t blush or backpedal. He makes no apology for having indiscriminately swallowed a lie and repeated it as a truth. He doesn’t tell his friends, “Hey, don’t be using thiss argument anymore.” No, he just tells me that the modal argument for necessary greatness is absolute proof of god’s existence. When I point out that this argument is no stronger than its opposite, the modal argument for the nonexistence of necessary greatness, what does he do? Is he taken aback? Does he say he’d better rethink whether his god really exists? Of course not. He pulls out another argument, and says, with all the sincerity of a seller of fake chains, “This one’s the real thing.”

I grabbed that from another web site, but I am the original author.

It didn't take "an extremely high level of skepticism" to believe all of the chains were fake.  In fact, if he'd pulled an eighth chain from his pocket, I'd have assumed that that one was fake too. 

I wrote that parable to illustrate the fact that atheism is a reasonable response to the arguments of William Lane Craig.  He keeps using bad arguments; it's not likely that his next argument will be good.

[Time Traveler]

Here is the Merriam-Webster definition of the word "Previous"...

1 : existing or happening before the present time
2 : earlier in time or order
3 : immediately before in time or order

William Lane Craig has you are locked in a temporal hell. The word "previous" is synonymous with "prior." Every time you attempt to define God existing "timelessly" prior to/previous to (take your pick) creating the universe, you fail... by definition!

It is only because you cannot defend a past infinite regression that you must defend such obvious absurdities! But you are really only trading one paradox for another. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.

There is an event that marks the change from one state to another--therefore establishing the difference between previous and the next states and therefore a "timeline". There is nothing incoherent about that.

You are correct, there is nothing incoherent about a "timeline," UNLESS you are idiotic enough to insist that one of those states on the timeline is... timeless!

EDIT: And it is equally ridiculous to assert that one of those elements on the timeline is actually prior to the beginning of the timeline itself.

[LadyForCamus]

There is an event that marks the change from one state to another--therefore establishing the difference between previous and the next states and therefore a "timeline". There is nothing incoherent about that.

You are correct, there is nothing incoherent about a "timeline," UNLESS you are idiotic enough to insist that one of those states on the timeline is... timeless!

EDIT: And it is equally ridiculous to assert that one of those elements on the timeline is actually prior to the beginning of the timeline itself.

Lol, exactly. How the hell do you have a point of timelessness marked on a TIMEline of events?! It seems rather than just admit it doesn't make any sense, Steve is just going to defend his absurd notion all the way to the gallows.

[robvalue]

It doesn't even make sense with the theist being allowed to make up whatever they want, let alone how you could possibly know any of this is actually real.

[The Grand Nudger]

It might be that for some believers who are interested in these arguments....acknowledging that they are insufficient is somehow tantamount to denouncing ones faith.  That clearly can't be the case in actuality (their faiths -always- predate these arguments),....... but the way we see people go down with their burning ships time and time again on these forums seems to suggest that some perceive it that way.

[The Reality Salesman01]

It might be that for some believers who are interested in these arguments....acknowledging that they are insufficient is somehow tantamount to denouncing ones faith.  That clearly can't be the case in actuality (their faiths -always- predate these arguments),....... but the way we see people go down with their burning ships time and time again on these forums seems to suggest that some perceive it that way.

I think their faith is like a house of cards. In the beginning, the first few cards are easy to stack...two of them straight up, one accross...(have faith, pray...etc.) If you spend enough time balancing it, the house gets bigger, it also gets less stable and these pseudo-arguments are a stiff breeze away from reducing it all to a game of 52 card pick-up! True, it's just a house of cards, but who wants to spend this much time building something only for some bully on the beach to put his fat foot through it. I've seen kids throw ridiculous fits over things like that. They're trivial and otherwise meaningless, but there's so much personal investment. Denial and confirmation bias keeps the house stacked on the table. What's that quote from Dan Dennett? The one about dedicating your life to a folly?...that.

[Huggy Bear]

There is an event that marks the change from one state to another--therefore establishing the difference between previous and the next states and therefore a "timeline". There is nothing incoherent about that.

You are correct, there is nothing incoherent about a "timeline," UNLESS you are idiotic enough to insist that one of those states on the timeline is... timeless!

EDIT: And it is equally ridiculous to assert that one of those elements on the timeline is actually prior to the beginning of the timeline itself.

It seems someone never received the memo that time is relative...

[LadyForCamus]

Meaning...?