This editorial from William Lane Craig has been making the rounds. Almost every substantive claim it makes it wrong.
1. God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe
If you want to try to explain the origins of the universe, you want to talk to cosmologists and physicists, not theologians and apologists. For example, you could read this book or watch this video which covers much of the core material. In doing so, you will find that modern physics has nothing to say about a “transcendent, unembodied mind” but much to say about how a universe might possibly come about.
If you want to know whether it is valid to generalize to all time and space as a whole, from the operations of the individual components therein, talk to a logician. Craig should know much better than to do this, but he needs to be able to equivocate on causation to get this argument off the ground, as if causing a ball to roll downhill (a process which occurs by acting on matter within space over time) is truly akin to “causing” all of matter/energy along with space/time to exist in the first place.
2. God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe.
This is completely backwards. On the premises of theism, there is no need for any fine-tuning whatsoever, because minds can exist as immaterial entities completely independently of physical bodies. On atheism, minds cannot possibly exist except in the sort of finely-tuned universes which allows for the process of biological evolution to build them. Put another way, if metaphysical naturalism is true, minds may come to exist, naturally, in universes which are massively complex and mind-buggeringly large in terms of both temporal and spatial extent, so we should not be remotely surprised to find ourselves in just such a universe.
3. God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties.
When you define objective morality to mean rules laid down by a cosmic authority whose “commandments constitute our moral duties,” from the get go, then of course you have to conclude that such an authority must exist in order to maintain that objective morality exists. If you were to define objectivity in terms of truths about the world that exist independently of any particular subject’s point-of-view, you would no doubt obtain a different result. In a wholly godless universe, it would still be objectively true that feeding your babies breast-milk is a better idea, in terms of promoting their personal development and health, than feeding them Clark Stanley’s Snake Oil. That sort of objective truth is all we need to get on with the business of being moral people.
Moreover, if you are going to pick out one moral exemplar to hold up as the source for objective truth, and a set of scriptures to base your morality upon, surely you should try to find someone who unambiguously condemns genocide, slavery, and rape.
4. God provides the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
Certainly that would be true, if you knew that the stories penned by the evangelists were accurate depictions of what took place. Given the willingness of second century Christians to confabulate fictional accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, you are on incredibly shaky ground to place such certainty in the earlier ones. There is an entire section dedicated to the literary genre called “Devotional Fiction” at my local Christian bookshop, and I’ve no way to be confident that this genre was invented in the second century rather than the first.
5. God can be personally known and experienced.
People of every religious stripe (and even many of those who are “spiritual but not religious”) claim to personally experience a supernatural entity who (by a happy coincidence) agrees with their own moral system, personal prejudices, and general worldview. This is not evidence for anything more than our innate mental ability to model other minds.
