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The Chronicle Review
July 1, 2013
The New Theist
How William Lane Craig became Christian philosophy'sboldest apostle
By Nathan Schneider
hen, during a conversation in a swank hotel lobby in
Manhattan, I mentioned to Richard Dawkins that I was
working on a story about William Lane Craig, the muscles in his
face clenched.
"Why are you publicizing him?" Dawkins demanded, twice. Thebest-selling "New Atheist" professor went on to assure me that I
shouldn't bother, that he'd met Craig in Mexico—they opposed
each other in a prime-time, three-on-three debate staged in a
boxing ring—and found him "very unimpressive."
"I mean, whose side are you on?" Dawkins said. "Are you
religious?"
Several months later, in April 2011, Craig debated another New
Atheist author, Sam Harris, in a large, sold-out auditorium at the
University of Notre Dame. In a sequence of carefully timed
speeches and rejoinders, the two men clashed over whether we
need God for there to be moral laws. Harris delivered most of the
better one-liners that night, while Craig, in suit and tie, fired off
his volleys of argumentation with the father-knows-best
composure of Mitt Romney, plus a dash of Schwarzenegger.
Something Harris said during the debate might help explain how Dawkins reacted: He called Craig "the one Christian apologist who
seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow
atheists."
In the lobby afterward, the remarks of students seemed to confirm
this. "The apologist won because his structure was perfect," one
said. "Craig had already won by the first rebuttal!" A Harris
partisan lamented, "Sam kinda blew it."
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T
Well-publicized atheists like Dawkins and Harris are closer to
being household names than William Lane Craig is, but within the
subculture of evangelical Christians interested in defending their
faith rationally, he has had a devoted following for decades. Many
professional philosophers know about him only vaguely, but in
the field of philosophy of religion, his books and articles are
among the most cited. And though he works mainly from hishome, in suburban Marietta, Ga., he holds a faculty appointment
at Biola University, an evangelical stronghold on the southeastern
edge of Los Angeles County and home to one of the largest
philosophy graduate programs in the world.
Surveys suggest that the philosophy professoriate is among the
most atheistic subpopulations in the United States; even those
philosophers who specialize in religion believe in God at a
somewhat lower rate than the general public does. Philosophers
have also lately been in a habit of humility, as their profession's
scope seems to shrink before the advance of science and the
modern university's preference for research that wins corporate
contracts. But it is partly because of William Lane Craig that one
can hear certain stripes of evangelicals whispering to one another
lately that "God is working something" in the discipline. And
through the discipline, they see a way of working something in
society as a whole.
he enormous kinds of questions that speculative-minded
college students obsess over—life, death, the universe—are
taken unusually seriously by philosophers who also happen to be
evangelical Christians. To them, after all, what one believes
matters infinitely for one's eternal soul. They therefore tend to
care less about disciplinary minutiae and terms of art than about
big-picture "worldviews," every aspect of which should be
compatible with a particular way of thinking about the fraught
love affair between God and humanity—or else.
The debates for which Craig is most famous live on long after the
crowds are gone from the campus auditoriums or megachurch
sanctuaries where they take place. On YouTube, they garner tens
or hundreds of thousands of views as they're dissected and fact-
checked by bloggers and hobbyists and apologists-in-training.
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Such debates have an appealing absence of gray area: There are
only two sides, and one or the other has to win. By the time it's
over, you have the impression that your intelligence has been
respected—you get to hear both sides make their cases, after all.
The winner? You decide.
"I believe that debate is the forum for sharing the gospel on
college campuses," Craig told an audience of several thousand at a
seminar about "Unpacking Atheism" in a suburban Denver church
last October, simulcast at other churches around the country.
Compared with the rancorous presidential debates happening at
the time, he added, "these are respectable academic events
conducted with civility and Christian charity."
Openly Christian
faculty are perched inmany of the major
departments in the
discipline.
Craig generally insists on the same format: opening statements,
then two rounds of rebuttals, then closing statements, then
audience. He prepares extensively beforehand, sometimes for
months at a time, with research assistants poring over the writings
of the opponent in search of objections that Craig should
anticipate. He amasses a well-organized file of notes that he can
draw on during the debate for a choice quotation or a statistic.
In the opening statement he pummels the opponent with five or
so concise arguments—for instance, the origins of the universe,
the basis of morality, the testimony of religious experience, and
perhaps an addendum of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.
Over the course of the rebuttals he makes sure to respond to every
point that the opponent has brought up, which usually sends the
opponent off on a series of tangents. Then, at the end, he reminds
the audience how many of his arguments stated at the outset the
opponent couldn't manage to address, much less refute. He
declares himself and his message the winner. Onlookers can't help
agreeing.
Craig comes by his mastery of the formal debate honestly; he
worked at it on debating squads all through high school and all
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through college, with uncommon determination.
From birth he has suffered from Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome,
a neuromuscular disease that causes atrophy in the extremities.
He walks with a slight limp, and his hands often look as if they're
gripping an invisible object. Growing up, he couldn't run
normally.
"My boyhood was difficult," he says. "Children can be very cruel."
Since varsity sports weren't an option, he discovered debate.
High-school competitions took him all over Illinois. The subject
matter was never religion—rather, the usual debate-team fodder
of public-policy questions—but religion was meanwhile starting
to matter more and more to him personally.
"My folks sort of believed in the man upstairs," he says. "He's sort
of up there watching out for you, and that's sort of it." In high-
school German class, an especially radiant girl sitting near him
told him about what Jesus Christ had done in her life. That got
him reading the Bible, and the Jesus he found there took hold of
him. "For me it was a question of personal, existential
commitment: Was I prepared to become this man's follower?"
He went on to attend Wheaton College, a well-regarded
evangelical institution in Illinois, where he continued debating
and searching for his calling. Not until years later, though, after
establishing himself as a philosopher, did he begin to be asked to
debate publicly in defense of his faith. It came as a surprise, but a
welcome one.
"I was just thrilled to be able to do it again as a means of fulfilling
this vision of sharing the gospel," he says.
By then, Craig had come under the influence of the theologian
Francis Schaeffer, who from his refuge in Switzerland called on
American evangelicals to reclaim Western culture's Christian
heritage, and who helped orchestrate the rise of the religious right
during the Reagan years. Debate, then, served as both a
philosophical exercise and a part of a growing movement.
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I
Paul Draper, of Purdue University, is one of the leading nontheist
philosophers of religion today, and though he has debated Craig,
he doesn't see these debates as having much philosophical merit
in and of themselves. He does see value, however, in studying
them closely with students in a classroom: "It helps them learn to
distinguish persuasive arguments from good arguments." Draper
has recently co-written a paper, "Diagnosing Bias in Philosophy of Religion" in The Monist , alleging that the work of Craig and his ilk
exhibits "a variety of cognitive biases operating at the
nonconscious level, combined with an unhealthy dose of group
influence."
This line of questioning—about whether William Lane Craig is
merely persuasive or actually correct, an honest philosopher or a
snake-oil evangelist—arises every time another one of his bouts
hits the Internet. Anyone can see that he is good, but is he for real?
n the mid-1970s, Craig was looking for a place to do his Ph.D.,
on the cosmological argument for the existence of God. He was
finishing master's degrees in church history and philosophy of
religion at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, near Chicago,
where he argued against Kant and Hume that observation and
reason could form a valid basis for religious belief. With the
cosmological argument—which deduces God's existence from what we know about the nature of the universe as a whole—he
hoped to put that groundwork to use.
At the time, this was a rather unpopular kind of project in
philosophy departments, which were still recovering from the
positivists' doctrine that religious concepts are too incoherent to
be worth even meddling with. It couldn't have helped that Craig
was a seminary graduate who'd worked for Campus Crusade for
Christ.
"I couldn't find anybody in the United States who would supervise
such a dissertation," Craig recalls.
So he and his wife, Jan, packed their bags for the University of
Birmingham, in England. Craig's proposal was welcomed there by
John Hick—one of the best-known philosophers of religion of his
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generation and also one of the most liberal-minded. Hick, who
died last year, counts Craig in his memoir as among the top three
students of his teaching career, even while describing Craig's
"extreme theological conservatism" as in at least one respect
"horrific" and generally indicative of "a startling lack of
connection with the modern world."
Yes and no. On the one hand, the dissertation Craig produced in
Birmingham was a retrieval of the "Kalam cosmological
argument"—a way of reasoning about the cause of the universe
developed by Muslims and Jews between the fall of the Roman
Empire and the Renaissance. On the other, he updated the
argument with more recent scientific notions, such as the Big
Bang and the laws of thermodynamics. The dissertation was soon
published in the form of not one but two books, which went on to
become influential and widely discussed in the philosophical
literature.
Hick, a pioneer of religious pluralism and nonexclusivist
approaches to Christianity, was taken aback by this brilliant
student's single-minded ambition: to persuade more people
everywhere to make professions of faith in Jesus Christ.
Any given debate about the existence of God or some related topicreveals the tremendous intellectual labor Craig has undertaken to
that end. In addition to his two master's degrees and philosophy
Ph.D. under Hick, he spent the early 1980s acquiring a further
doctorate in theology at the University of Munich, where he
studied the reliability of the source texts about the resurrection of
Jesus. He has published more than 100 articles in philosophy and
theology journals. The result is a person (verging on machine)
who cannot only hold his own against fellow analytic
philosophers on matters such as the possibility of an infinite
regress and the nature of time, but who can also spar with
physicists on the first milliseconds of the universe and with
biblical scholars on the provenance of particular passages in New
Testament Greek.
Craig thinks of the course of his studies as having been more
improvised than deliberate. "I pursue research topics that are of
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interest to me," he avers. He has spent the past decade or so, for
instance, pondering the subject of abstract objects—numbers,
concepts, ideas—which has little obvious apologetic value. His
inquiries have even led him into minor unorthodoxies, including a
disagreement with the Nicene Creed on the details of the Trinity.
Yet these serve as exceptions that prove the rule: His
investigations might thus seem all the more rigorous, together with his commitment to the bulk of old-time religion. Just
following his curiosity has made Craig an ever-abler defender of
the faith.
"The funny thing," he says, "is that I have found over and over
again that the area I'm doing research on comes up." When people
at his lectures and debates try to stump him with questions, "I
hear these, and I think, 'Thank you, Lord, I'm working on this! I
never would have thought that this would be relevant!'"
Craig's oeuvre of philosophical arguments for Christian faith is
available in many forms, each tailored for a different audience and
promoted—online, with a mobile app, and through local chapters
on several continents—by his Reasonable Faith ministry. At the
top tier, for those undaunted by more than 600 pages of heavy
groundwork, is Philosophical Foundations for a Christian
Worldview. Somewhat more concise is Reasonable Faith, whichcan be purchased with a companion study guide. Church groups
might prefer the illustrations and sidebars in On Guard, while
Sunday schoolers can go straight to The Defense Never Rests: A
Workbook for Budding Apologists. Now even small children can
benefit from the "Dr. Craig's" What Is God Like? picture-book
series—originally written for his own children—in which various
divine attributes are explained by Brown Bear and Red Goose.
The Reasonable Faith ministry has been growing rapidly in recent
years, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars annually from
donors who attend Holy Land tours and Mediterranean cruises.
But Craig isn't satisfied with just more books and more campus
debates. He has recently appeared as a commentator, for instance,
discussing the spread of atheism on The Washington Post 's Web
site and CNN.
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I
"I have become convinced that we need to be more active in using
the media," he told me in April. "I need to work smarter, not
harder, by leveraging these media opportunities."
t's clear that the Evangelical Philosophical Society is meant to
be more than solely an academic organization by what its
members do with their evenings. At the society's annual meeting
—which is part of the much larger Evangelical Theological Society
conference—the EPS's leading figures bus out from the downtown
convention center after the daytime panel sessions are over to a
large-enough church somewhere in the suburbs of whatever city
they're in. A thousand or so rank-and-file believers, from
teenagers to grandparents, await them in the pews. People travel
from around the country and the world to attend. There, the
philosophers are stars; wearing TED Talk-like clear headsets, with
slide shows glowing overhead, they present the latest deliverances
of analytic philosophy as they pertain to defending the Christian
faith in the vernacular world—by the water cooler, at the dinner
table, in the locker room.
There are lectures about the relationship between science and
religion, about countering the latest New Atheist claims, about the
foundations of morality. Gary Habermas, of Jerry Falwell's Liberty
University, tells the story of his years-long correspondence withthe British philosopher Antony Flew, during which the outspoken
atheist drifted, shortly before his death, toward some kind of
deism. One session sets out to justify God's harsher commands in
the Hebrew Bible, while another exposes the dangers of so-called
tolerance of other religions. Craig himself speaks on whatever
seems fitting—maybe the cosmological argument one year, or
abstract objects another year. Whatever it is, he draws a large,
attentive crowd, and afterward budding young apologists ply him
with questions about one intricacy or another of his position.
The speakers are mainly men, but there are women, too: Mary Jo
Sharp representing her "lean in"-style ministry, Confident
Christianity, and Holly Ordway, an English Ph.D. who underwent a
relatively recent conversion through the works of John Donne and
J.R.R. Tolkien.
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Between sessions, speakers and audience members mingle over
coffee near the sprawling book sale, where attendees snatch up as
many copies of the speakers' books as they can carry, along with
DVDs of Craig's debates and subscriptions to the society's
academic journal, Philosophia Christi. ("I am amazed at how low
the prices are!" exclaims one speaker from the stage.) A handful of
distractible audience members tweet to one another on theconference hashtag.
Craig is more than his
students' teacher; for
many, this is the man
who saved their faith.
This kind of philosophy and these most-conservative kinds of
churches were never supposed to mix. In the early part of the 20th
century, figures like Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer made it theirbusiness to ensure that the analytic style of philosophy emerging
in the Anglophone world would be a stronghold of unbelief.
Questions that had animated the whole history of philosophy in
Europe and the Americas about whether God exists, or whether
there is an afterlife worth anticipating, were suddenly deemed
more or less finished—the answer was no.
Significant cracks in this consensus didn't begin appearing until
the 1960s and 1970s, especially thanks to the work of Alvin
Plantinga, a young philosopher who leveraged the cutting-edge
modal logic and epistemology of the time to argue that Christian
belief wasn't so manifestly unreasonable as his predecessors had
claimed. Along with his lifelong friend Nicholas Wolterstorff, who
has spent much of his career writing and teaching at Yale,
Plantinga engineered a stunning revival of philosophy in a
Christian key, largely through the vehicle of the Society of
Christian Philosophers. Following his lead, many morephilosophers became braver about articulating Christian faith in
arguments, and together they've amassed an arsenal more
formidable than many outsiders, whether professional
philosophers or laypeople, realize.
The Evangelical Philosophical Society was founded in 1974, four
years before the SCP. It didn't really take off, however, until the
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A
SCP membership's insistence on including Mormons compelled
William Lane Craig to redirect his energy to the more narrowly
defined EPS in the 1990s.
"I thought, let's kick this organization into high gear," Craig
remembers.
He held the presidency from 1996 to 2005. It was during that time,
in the early 2000s, that the society began holding an "apologetics
conference" alongside the annual scholarly meeting—starting at
Craig's own church, in Marietta. The EPS grew rapidly as both an
academic society and a publicity platform for the most culture-
warring flavors of Christian philosophy.
Norman Geisler, one of the founders of the EPS, watched in
amazement. "The term 'Christian' took on a positive connotationthat people actually wanted to claim," he told me. "When I started
in philosophy, in the late 1960s, it was a term of reproach." Now
openly Christian faculty are perched in many of the major
departments in the discipline.
"It's such a privilege to be alive and working in this field during
this era," says Craig.
long the narrow basement hallway that was home to the
Biola philosophy master's program when I sat in on Craig's
class in 2011, there was a map of the United States on the wall. On
it were labels with the names of universities you've heard of—
Notre Dame, Cornell, Rutgers—and some you probably haven't.
The labels were fastened by pins in three colors. Blue signified
alumni enrolled in doctoral programs. Red meant programs where
alums had been accepted, and yellow meant where they held full-
time teaching jobs. There were several more pins in the AtlanticOcean: Oxford, King's College, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
This is a not-unusual sight in the hallway of any placement-
minded graduate program. But at Biola—a name derived from
"Bible Institute of Los Angeles"—the map had particular
significance.
"My goal is for Christian theism as a worldview to be articulated
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cogently and persuasively in the academy," says Scott Rae, an
ethicist who co-founded the master's program in the early 1990s.
The purpose of the program was not simply to train evangelical
Christian students for evangelical Christian schools, but to send
those students off to doctoral programs, and eventually
professorships, at leading secular universities. "We figured if we
ended up with 30 or 40 students, and maybe we sent 20 of them toPh.D.'s before we retired, that'd be awesome," Rae added. "The
thing just snowballed."
The program's other founder, J.P. Moreland, was already in high
demand as an author and speaker on apologetics, in addition to
being a philosopher of mind. Rae and Moreland invited William
Lane Craig to join their team, though he comes to the campus
only for brief, intensive courses in the fall and winter. Before long
they were attracting more than 100 master's students at a time
(including women, generally, in only single digits); as many as 150
have continued on to further graduate work. Despite having only a
handful of faculty, perhaps no philosophy master's program in the
English-speaking world enrolls so many students and, even if by
that measure alone, few can claim to be so influential in shaping
the next generation of analytic philosophers.
Still, many in the profession aren't even aware of it. ThePhilosophical Gourmet Report, which ranks philosophy
departments by the reputation of their faculty members, doesn't
mention Biola on its Web page about master's programs. "No one
has ever called to my attention that Biola's M.A. program should
be included," says Brian Leiter, of the University of Chicago, who
edits the report.
Among philosophers—Christian or otherwise—who have worked
with the Biola program's alums, the impressions tend to be
positive. According to Laurence Bonjour, a philosopher at the
University of Washington who has supervised the Ph.D. work of
program graduates, "Biola students, especially those interested in
epistemology, are often very well trained."
"But," he is careful to add, "I doubt if the Christian aspect of the
program has much to do with that."
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For the program's architects, however, the "Christian aspect" is
everything. "What makes this program different from other
philosophy programs is the distinctively Christian setting," says
Rae. Students take courses in the Bible and theology as well as in
logic, ethics, and metaphysics. On their application forms, they're
asked to sign Biola's century-old, page-long doctrinal statement
and note any points of disagreement; on the campus, alcohol,tobacco, and gambling are prohibited. Craig begins each day's
lecture in his classes with a personal reflection on integrating the
life of scholarship with the life of a Christian—covering such
topics as marriage, prayer, and regular exercise. Everyone basically
agrees on where, in the end, all the flights of argument and inquiry
need to land.
Gail Neal, a retired administrative coordinator for the program,
says she always noticed a culture of mutual support and
encouragement, rather than competition, among the students.
"Their whole purpose is to help people know Christ and to make a
difference in the world for him, and to bring people into his
kingdom," she told me. "They just empty themselves of
themselves, like Christ did for us."
In a now-decade-old lecture, "Advice to Christian Apologists,"
Craig outlined his view of the university as "the single mostimportant institution shaping Western culture." He argued that
it's a lot easier for people throughout the society to accept Christ
as their savior if Christianity appears reasonable in higher
education, if the academic conversation takes it seriously, and if
there are Christian professors to serve as role models. The Biola
master's program is thus a strategic intervention designed to
resound everywhere.
"In order to change the university, we must do scholarly
apologetics," he reasoned. "In order to do scholarly apologetics,
we must earn doctorates. It's that simple."
Jonathan LaSalle, a doctoral student in philosophy at the
University of California at Santa Barbara who took master's-level
classes while an undergraduate at Biola, says that, for Craig and
his colleagues, "philosophy is sort of the beachhead." From it, all
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M
else is meant to follow.
Craig's version of the cosmological argument, or his case for the
Resurrection, could appeal to believers of just about any
denomination or party; the arguments themselves have no inborn
political persuasion. But the crowd they run in does. When I heard
J.P. Moreland speak at a lunchtime mixer in a Congressional office
building in Washington, he argued for a "minimalist conception of
the state"; Scott Rae's business ethics extol "the virtues of
capitalism." The current-events podcasts available on Craig's Web
site and mobile app broadcast his reflections against homosexual
parenting, secularism, and global Islam, along with patriotic
exhortations on behalf of U.S. invasions abroad.
Since Jonathan LaSalle left Biola, his evangelical faith has wavered.
But what has started to concern him most are the political
messages being tucked into the metaphysics at his alma mater. "It
should worry Christians, too," he says.
ost outsiders are familiar with the caricatures of
evangelical anti-intellectualism, from the Scopes "Monkey
Trial" in 1925 to televangelists and the faux-folksiness of George
W. Bush. So are evangelicals themselves. Almost 20 years ago, the
evangelical historian (and historian of evangelicals) Mark Noll warned, at book length, about The Scandal of the Evangelical
Mind. This, as much as secularism itself, is an ill that Craig and
others at Biola have set out to cure.
"Biblical Christianity retreated into the intellectual closet of
Fundamentalism," he writes in the introduction to Reasonable
Faith. "Satan deceives us into voluntarily laying aside our best
weapons of logic and evidence, thereby ensuring unawares
modernism's triumph over us."
Craig Hazen, who directs the apologetics department at Biola,
calls the problem "blind-leaping." He told me, "The idea that
we're blind-leaping into faith is actually reinforced by evangelical
churches all the time."
With close ties to the philosophy master's program, the
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apologetics program teaches a couple of hundred students at a
time how to defend their faith with reasons. There are master's
and certificate tracks, and about half the students take courses
online from around the world. The program also organizes high-
profile events, such as Craig's 2009 debate with Christopher
Hitchens, and seminars at churches around the country. Part of
the purpose of these is recruiting students, and part of it isadvocacy; Hazen and his team have to convince fellow Christians
that reason is not merely a dead end for faith, and that a grown-up
faith in modern society requires grown-up reasons.
"Frankly, I find it hard to understand how people today can risk
parenthood without having studied apologetics," Craig has
written. "We've got to train our kids for war."
The students in Craig's classes at Biola, it's true, bear a kind of
battle scar. A common story among them goes something like this:
When they were teenage boys, growing up in evangelical
households, their childhood faith began to buckle. Their classes in
school and their classmates and the Internet posed questions they
didn't know how to answer. Their parents and pastors couldn't
help; they only recommended more prayer and faith, more blind-
leaping. It didn't work.
Then someone would lend them a book by William Lane Craig or
J.P. Moreland, or send them a link to a debate on YouTube. All of a
sudden, their questions were being taken seriously. They could
chew on the latest science and philosophy while still going to
church with their friends and families. They went to Biola to study
philosophy or apologetics because they knew it would be a safe
place to ask any question they needed to, with whatever rigor and
detail they craved. Afterward they take the answers they get there
back to their friends and to the Internet, and the entrepreneurs
among them start apologetics ministries of their own.
They're born again: rebaptized in philosophy.
In class, Craig is more than his students' teacher; for many, this is
the man who saved their faith. Standing before them he projects a
paternal bearing, a seriousness broken only when he throws
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himself into imitations of past debate opponents, especially those
with British accents. For the brief weeks each year when he's on
campus at Biola, he eats lunch with his students in the cafeteria.
But he won't tell them his e-mail address, for fear of the onslaught
of correspondence that could bring him. If they have any more
questions, he recommends that they ask through
ReasonableFaith.org, like everybody else.
"My calling is not the classroom," he admits. The rest of the year,
he spends most of his time at home in Marietta with Jan, where he
can study, write, build his ministry, and prepare for his next
debate without interruption.
The story one tends to hear among older people drawn to Craig is
a bit different from that of the younger ones; fathers, in fact, often
go to him at first at the urging of their Internet-savvy sons. (In
April, for a bachelor party, one man from Pennsylvania brought
his father and grandfather to Georgia for Craig's seminar on the
Resurrection.) While Craig's philosophy enables the young to hold
on, it gives the elders license to let loose a bit, to think more freely
in a faith that for decades may have satisfied their hearts more
than their minds. Craig's muscular arguments lend them the
confidence to delve into areas of inquiry that might have
previously seemed closed, from historical criticism of the Bible totheistic interpretations of evolution. One middle-aged devotee I
met had recently self-published a book on the scientific evidence
for Christianity in near-death experiences.
"A person doesn't feel like they have to be a six-day creationist
anymore," says Philip Murray, a late-career computer specialist
who directs the Reasonable Faith chapter in New York City.
There's a prophecy in the Book of Joel, paraphrased later in the
New Testament: "Your young men will see visions, and your old
men will dream dreams." Maybe something of that is being
fulfilled in the simultaneously tightening and loosening effect of
Craig's presence. One on one, the younger students err on the side
of acting holier-than-thou, while the older ones let a mild curse
word or two slip. For both, this philosophy is changing their lives.
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Craig's "debate" technique sounds very much like the "Gish gallop", perfected by dead but
not lamented creationist Duane Gish. Throw out a serious of specious objections to
evolution, relying of the fact you can throw out more arguments in a given time than your
opponent can make counterarguments. Then claim you won any point he didn't respond
to.
I suppose it make sense that theists might use the more tried and tested techniques of
creationists. Problem is, Gish may have turned in a few bravura performances, but
creationism is still wrong.
And the technique itself if profoundly intellectually dishonest. Th e 8th/9th commandment
seems to be the one Christians seem to honor most in the breach than the observance.
60 people liked this. LIKE
What are Christians stealing? I get the false-witness part, but where's the theft?
Philosophy was never supposed to be a narrow discipline, fortified
from the argumentative swells of the agora by specialization and
merely professional ambitions. That was for the Sophists whom
Socrates regaled against. Philosophy was supposed to serve the
polis, to educate and embolden its young, to raise up leaders.
Whether one likes their preconceived conclusions or not, today it
is evangelical Christians, with William Lane Craig in the lead, whoare doing so better than just about anyone else.
Nathan Schneider is the author of God in Proof: The Story of a
Search From the Ancients to the Internet (University of California
Press). This article was written with support from a Knight Grant
for Reporting on Religion and American Public Life from the
University of Southern California.
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gerard_harbison 1 week ago
dank48 1 week ago
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12 people liked this. LIKE
People's right to self-determination, for one.
10 people liked this. LIKE
People's right to self-determination? Is there a law th at requires you to
determine yourself as a Christian? Stop th e nonsense!
49 people liked this. LIKE
No. You have the right to determine which religious beliefs you hold or
reject. You have the right to determine your primary mode of living,
what makes you happy, how you dispose of your own time and
property. I'm not sure why the freedom to pursue happiness is
nonsense to you.
6 people liked this. LIKE
I really get tired of the disingenuous nature of people like you. You
said that "Christians" are stealing your rights. Go find your courage,
and repost a coherent, adult-like post.
41 people liked this. LIKE
Although I am an atheist, I tend to agree with you on this
particular point. Christians aren't stealing our happiness.Some of them are merely promoting their worldview in the
marketplace of ideas, even though most of their ideas are
simply mistaken. When some of them insist that their
positions be favored by government or incorporated into
government, that's where I draw the line.
21 people liked this. LIKE
minnesotan 1 week ago
mbaker1973 6 days ago
minnesotan 5 days ago
mbaker1973 5 days ago
TallySkeptic 4 days ago
pseudotriton 4 days ago
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Non-believers get burned in a lake of fire for eternity...
sounds much more than mere promotion to me. And
yeah, don't get me started on how they try to shape all
legislatures in th eir beliefs, or th at entire "you have no
morals unless you base it on Christianity/religion"
nonsense.
10 people liked this. LIKE
I think your points here are red herrings. For
example, believers do not burn non-believers in a
lake of fire for eternity. They just believe that their
hypoth etical God does this. I don't have a problem
with their expressing this belief to me or to others in
the open marketplace of ideas. We allow people to
speak irrational ideas in this country. It is our
responsibility to point out why these kinds of ideas
are mistaken.
9 people liked this. LIKE
Which one of my points is red herring? They
wouldn't actually burn any non-believers (at
least not any more, but they used to), but that
notion is a representation of their contempt and
disregard for anyone holding a belief (or non-
belief) different from theirs. And you said
yourself that its the responsibility of others topoint out the absurdity of such notions, and
that's what I'm doing here.
3 people liked this. LIKE
Your point "Non-believers get burned in a
lake of fire for eternity... " is a red herring.
You automatically assume that when
believers claim th at you will be burned in a
lake of fire for eternity, they are feeling
contempt for you. Some of them, or
perhaps even most of them, are just stating
what they believe to be true with respect to
you. These persons probably feel pity for
you rather than contempt for you. You are
just one of millions of person they think
will go to Hell. This belief is part of their
worldview. Now if a theist or even
nontheist says to you "Go to Hell, you
bastard," then that is probably a sign of
TallySkeptic 4 days ago
pseudotriton 3 days ago
TallySkeptic 3 days ago
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contempt.
You should point out the absurdity of their
notion that nonbelievers will go to hell, but
don't look at their merely expressing this
belief as an act of mistreatment of you. If
you do, then you really dilute the idea of
mistreatment.
10 people liked this. LIKE
For a self-proclaimed atheist, you sure are very
apologetic for the religious. Don't know about
you, but when I feel pity for someone, I certainly
do not wish them to be burnt, or tortured in any
other format, for eternity. Heck, I don't even feel
that way for most of the people that I'm
contemptuous of. So to me, the message is
pretty clear when C hristians tell non-believerthat th ey'll be burnt in h ell for eternity.
2 people liked this. LIKE
I defend the religious when I think they are
correct, and I criticize them when I think
they are incorrect (as you will clearly see
from the rest of my posts). Don't
automatically assume that when religious
persons feel pity for you, they WIS H for you
to be burnt or tortured for eternity. Many of
them WIS H for you to be saved from being
burnt or otherwise tortured for eternity. On
the other hand, there are some who do
actually WISH for you to be eternally
punished. I'm just suggesting that you be
more discerning about this issue without
overgeneralizing.
3 people liked this. LIKE
I'm not sure which laws you say are based on a religious
belief. Do you also draw the line when the government
takes any measure that will result in the prohibition to
freely exercise religion?
1 person liked this. LIKE
pseudotriton 2 days ago
TallySkeptic 1 day ago
mbaker1973 4 days ago
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The law requiring money to carry the ph rase "In God
We Trust" is based on a religious belief. This phrase
shouldn't be on our money. Ok, your turn. Give an
example of a measure "that will result in the
prohibition to freely exercise religion." You say
"will." Do you mean there are no such measures
already in existence, but there will be?
6 people liked this. LIKE
With it being on money doesn't force anyone to
exercise a religion. Try again, this time with
substance.
LIKE
It's th e endorsement of a particular religion
by the gov't, which is prohibited by the
constitution. One of the biggest nonsense
is when Christians play the victim card in a
de facto Christian country.
4 people liked this. LIKE
There is no law that is in place that
endorses a particular religion, but it's not
"endorsing". It's respecting an
establishment of religion. Why is it always
up to the conservative to explain
something so simple?
This is what the framers meant by
respecting.
1
: a relation or reference to a p articular thing
or situation <<< FIND ONE
1 person liked this. LIKE
The law requiring "In God We Trust" on our
money is a law based on religion, so I
TallySkeptic 4 days ago
mbaker1973 3 days ago
pseudotriton 3 days ago
mbaker1973 3 days ago
TallySkeptic 3 days ago
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adequately responded to your request.
Now, try again and respond to mine. Give
an example of a measure "that will result in
the prohibition to freely exercise religion."
You have made the claim that there are
such things or there WILL be such things,
so support your claim with one or more
specific examples.
3 people liked this. LIKE
Obamacare, any and every law that bars
politicians from exercising their religion freely or
the people that they represent by barring
nativity scenes on city/county property(even
when the people that place it have a permit for
it), and barring any mention of religion in a
court such as the ten commandments, etc.
None of those things, when allowed, force
anyone to adhere to a religion but it does
prohibit th e free exercise thereof.
But you still need to try again and give an
example of any law that respects a particular
establishment of religion. Let's use the actual
words in the Constitution for context, because it
is the context, right? I didn't even owe you this,
but you owe an HONEST answer.
LIKE
How is Obamacare an example supporting
your conclusion? Please don't talk in
generalities.
Issuing permits to place nativity scenes on
government property and the actual
placement of those scenes on government
property are both violations of the
establishment clause of the First
Amendment. The establishment clauseimposes a limitation on the free exercise
clause which follows it. As a matter of fact,
there are some limits on ALL of our
specified freedoms in the Constitution. A
classic one: you can't yell "fire" in a
theatre.
The erection of a permanent Ten
Commandments monument on
government property is a violation of the
establishment clause which limits the free
exercise clause.
mbaker1973 2 days ago
TallySkeptic 1 day ago
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Yes, let's use the actual words in the
Constitution: "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion..."
For the complete context, read the entire
Constitution, including the amendments,
and all the relevant Supreme Court cases.
To give you an honest answer again: The
law which Congress made to place the
motto "In God We Trust" on our money IS a
law respecting an establishment of
religion! It isn't a law respecting an
establishment of business, politics, or
recreation; it is a law respecting an
establishment of religion. It is an act of
proselytizing, and an act setting up a
generalized religion which appeals to a
majority of the people. I don't understand
how you cannot see this.
3 people liked this. LIKE
Here is what the Constitution says,
"Congress shall pass no law respecting an
ESTABLISHMENT of religion, or prohibit the free exercise
thereof"
What establishment of religion is respected by, "In God
We Trust"?
LIKE
I think you are incorrectly interpreting the word
"respecting," as it appears in the First Amendment.
Here, it does not mean "having admiration for,
revering, or h ighly valuing," but means "related to."
Understood in this way the first part of th e
Amendment could be phrased "Congress shall make
no law related to the establishment of a religion... "
As I understand it, Congress passed a law which put"In God We Trust" on our money. By this act,
Congress is taking one step in establishing a religion
of the national government. The dogma of this
religion includes the following beliefs: 1) A super
person exists. 2) This super person is reliable in
causing desired outcomes for the American people.
and 3) It is desirable and even morally obligatory that
we American people trust this super person. And
thus, Congress has violated the First Amendment.
This act of Congress is very unfortunate since our
forefathers fled from a state-established religion in
Great Britain, and fought a war of independence from
mbaker1973 2 days ago
TallySkeptic 1 day ago
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that nation.
2 people liked this. LIKE
And, how did "under God" get put into the
Pledge of Allegiance? I know that it happened
under Eisenhower, but I don't know if it was by
Executive Order or a Congressional legislative
act. I suppose that I'll have to look that one up.
I'm just curious. I worry about the attempt to
have Christianity influence the government.
Christianity is not a single religion. There are
many sects within Christianity, called
denominations. Which one of those is the
average Christian thinking about when he says
America is a Christian nation? I recently read an
article about how the First Amendment came to
be written. The Framers wanted a secular
government for a reason. Government has no
business preferring one religion over another.
And it certainly cannot force religion on
anyone, either.
2 people liked this. LIKE
I mostly agree with you here. By the way,
the courts have interpreted the ph rase
"Congress shall make no law..." as "No partof government shall implement any law,
rule, or procedure..." The Fourteenth
Amendment extended the full force of the
US Constitution to the states.
Just because a Christian majority lives in
our country does not mean that we are a
Christian nation. "Nation" describes the
government of our country. Our nation is a
secular one.
2 people liked this. LIKE
So, only *your* positions should be favored by the
government? There is no such thing as an ideologically
neutral government. Someone's moral position is
favored, it's just a question of whose.
LIKE
sheila0405 1 day ago
TallySkeptic 1 day ago
J_CAS 1 day ago
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The establishment clause of the First Amendment
does not speak about ideological positions or moral
positions. I don't know where you got that. It
speaks of religion. Religion is a worldview containing
some supernatural elements.
Our forefathers did not want a repeat of wh at they
experienced in Great Britain which had established astate religion. That's why they came up with the
establishment clause.
2 people liked this. LIKE
I was responding to your statement "When
some of them [Christians] insist that their
positions be favored by government or
incorporated into government, that's where I
draw the line." But my response showed up
later in the thread. It wasn't a response to the
First Amendment post. So what I'm saying is
that you don't want Christians to insist
their positions be favored by the government,
but you do want *your* secular position to be
favored by the government; th us proving that it
is impossible for a government to be
ideologically neutral. Secular humanism is also
a worldview. You just want your worldview to
take precedence in government over some other
worldview.
1 person liked this. LIKE
You are confusing "secular' with
"antitheist" or "antireligious." They just
aren't the same thing.
Read the First Amendment again and
carefully reflect on it. It does not say
Congress shall make no law respecting the
establishment of a worldview. It
specifically says Congress shall make no
law respecting the establishment of
religion. What is a religion? It is a
worldview or lifestance containing beliefs
in the supernatural. You are trying to
"rewrite" the constitution the way you'd
like it to read rather than accepting it as it
is.
TallySkeptic 1 day ago
J_CAS 1 day ago
TallySkeptic 11 minutes ago
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LIKE
Oh, you mean like the right to drive a car that uses something oth er
than say, ethanol? The right to own a business without being
persecuted? The right to a person's own wealth, to pass on to
his/her own heirs without taxing it a final time after a person is
deceased? You mean those kinds of things?
The right to love someone? The right to own a gun(if that makes
someone happy?). The right to exercise one's religion, even if it's a
store open to the public? The right to, say, not participate in the
contraception mandate or Obamacare?(Yeah, think about what you
say before you say it). The right to defend one's self without being
called a, Creepy Ass Cracker, by a w itness called by the p rosecution
who wasn't even at the scene?
Here are the ones th at are most lacking, and the ones th at because
they are lacking are injustices committed against masses of people.
1. The right to be judged by one's character? 2. The right not to be
accused of being a racist because you aren't aligned with Barack
Obama politically? 3. The right to disagree with gay marriage? 4.
The right to being defended from the economic consequences of
people wh o make poor choices(and that because of political
correctness never get to see the consequences so th ey keeping
making the mistake over again and never become happy as a
result)?
How about the right be left alone, to not have your nose or the
government's nose up in their business? How about the right to be
born(YOU WERE)? How about the right to stand in front of a
government building and pray? How about the right to choose
where to send one's kids to primary and secondary school without
forcing them to pay via property tax something they don't want to
use? How about the right to not have one's business be vandalizedby OWS protesters, ie broken windows, graffiti, etc.? A business is
property isn't it?
Here is the last one. How about the right to be secure that the
voting process is fair by having a requirement to prove that they are
legally eligible to vote through voter ID?
23 people liked this. LIKE
How about the right to differ with Republicans? You
conveniently forgot that one.
Your argument is idiotic. You want to give people the right to
love, but you neglect to mention that this only applies to some
people. You want to give people the right to exercise their
religion, but, again, you only mean PEOPLE LIKE YOU!
You wonder why people call you a racist, yet every argument
you make is exclusionary in some way. I'm sure there's a good
reason you keep getting accused of that particular brand of
bigotry, seeing as you openly endorse quite a few different
kinds within your rant.
mbaker1973 5 days ago
minnesotan 5 days ago
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Finally, and I cannot even believe the arrogance in your
statement, but you want Christians to have the right to be left
alone? Really? After crusades, after witch h unts, after the
Inquisition, after Catholics burning Protestants burning
Catholics, and everyone burning the atheists and Jews!!! You
want to be left alone, huh? You don't want to impose your
morality on the world, one little bit, right? So other people
getting an abortion is okay with you? Equality for gay people is
fine by you? You don't mind a mosque near Ground Zero?
Contraception should be available to those who need it?
Right. An d you call my argument disingenuous. Coward.
19 people liked this. LIKE
Be careful now. You are bordering on an ad hominem
attack.
7 people liked this. LIKE
No, I didn't forget that one. Love isn't illegal any where in
the United States. This is another example of how your
side of this debate is disingenuous.
After the crusades that happ ened in another country, in
another era of history, and not in the United States under
our Constitution? You call me disingenuous and you
accuse us of living in the past?
No, every argument I make includes YOUR RIGHT to be
left alone. I don't get where you're coming from.
You have an opportunity to show where I said I only
mean, "People like me". You'll have to really stretch your
imagination to try to prove your assertion. You might
want to look at yourself and admit you're a bigot.
6 people liked this. LIKE
Comment removed.
That's a threat of contingent violence, totally out of
line on a forum like this. Please express your
disagreement with Minnesotan without doing that.
TallySkeptic 4 days ago
mbaker1973 4 days ago
Guest 4 days ago
TallySkeptic 3 days ago
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1 person liked this. LIKE
Didn't take long for the Christians to start
making violent threats, did it? That officially
ends my participation in this debate. Good day.
3 people liked this. LIKE
You were never trying to debate.
LIKE
Contraception is available to every adult that needs it, and
the government sh ould NOT be playing mommy/daddy.
The PARENTS ARE THE MOMMIES AND THE DADDIES.
You are seriously out of line and dishonest.
3 people liked this. LIKE
The government should be facilitating the common
good of the people and th at would include making
contraception free and easily accessible to all adult
persons in the country. This action would not
prohibit the free exercise of religion.
This brings up the topic of what constitutes the "free
exercise of religion"? Requiring people to pay for
blood transfusions for others is no more a
prohibition of th e free exercise of religion than
requiring people to pay for th e contraception used by others. Outlawing churches would be a prohibition
of the free exercise of religion.
1 person liked this. LIKE
I don't think gerard_harbison is talking about theft at all. When he says "the
8th/9th commandment," he means that some people number the
commandment against false witness as the 8th, while others number it as the 9th.
minnesotan 2 days ago
mbaker1973 2 days ago
mbaker1973 2 days ago
TallySkeptic 1 day ago
22238751 1 week ago
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