If you, like me, were at the Stephen Law vs William Lane Craig debate, your jaw will have dropped when Craig, in defence of God vis-a-vis animal suffering and the problem of evil, claimed that animals don’t suffer pain.
He claimed that most animals didn’t have the conscious awareness of pain that humans and other primates do. He was solely relying on the work of Michael Murray in Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering. This book sets out that there are, broadly speaking, three levels of pain suffering and related awareness, amoebas in the first, humans in the last, and most higher animals in the middle. They feel pain but are not consciously aware of it in the same way as humans are.
And apparently, this lets God off the hook for having them die horribly in their billions over millions of years.
But it doesn’t. Because he is wrong. He was called out on it in an excellent video by Skydivephil. To which Craig responded in a podcast. And got it wrong again. and was called out again in an even more excellent video by Skydivephil. BOOM!
Craig’s reply is linked on the second SDP video.
Craig’s accusations (and the host of the podcast) are so erroneous as to be, er, slanderous! You HAVE to watch these. But if you only have a short time, watch the second one.
H/T to John over at Debunking Christianity.
