Well, it depends on your definition of highbrow, of course. But please check out the video of myself, Counter Apologist and Justin Schieber from Reasonable Doubts discussing the Evidential Problem of Evil, going through a ton of arguments and interesting points. It was really enjoyable and we hope you get out as much enjoyment as we did! Hopefully it won’t be the last.
Tag William Lane Craig
Craig has been involved in a series of discussions in Australia with Laurence Krauss regarding philosophy and science. Unfortunately, Krauss is no great philosopher which is what most of this discussion revolved around. However, both Craig and the annoying moderator claimed the “consequentialism is a terrible ethic” and that utilitarianism and consequentialism had been “renounced” by the Abrahamic faiths.
I love Skydivephil. He/She/They have had some properly good ding-dongs with our favourite apologist, William Lane Craig, most recently on…
Over at the website Closer To Truth, which is a site about an agnostic who goes around interviewing philosophers and scientists to try to find answers to the biggest and deepest mysteries of the meaning of existence and the universe, there is a profile of William Lane Craig. In it, they summarize his arguments against the tenseless theory of time. I want to quickly address them here.
Craig’s done his homework to try to put this theory to rest, but I think he ultimately fails. I’m not going to go into detail here, but I will add a few thoughts how I think each of his refutations are ultimately baseless.
So in my post, the Part 2 of why Vincent Torley is a Christian, Vincent called into question some of Counter Apologist’s work undermining William Lane Craig’s use of science and metaphysics to try to show that the A-Theory of time is true or that the B-Theory is false.
Craig’s case is this:
[This is a post I created last year, but I screwed up embedding the video. So viola un autre fois.]
Here is a video I did some time ago which I think sums up the Problem of Evil is one fell swoop. The question sidesteps free will theodicies, especially as it applies to the rest of the animal world. See what you think.
Just in case you haven’t seen this old chestnut, or in case you had forgotten its supremely annoying rational defeater,…
Two episodes of Skepticule have become available with my counter-apologetics segment, called Pearced Off.
The first episode (44) features my piece on free will as an incoherent gift from God, which can be found here. My segment starts at 29.10.
Chris Hallquist’s blog The Incredible Halq is the first reputable blog that I have seen which has so seriously gone to…
So having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions meant. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will go down the questions in order. I will explain the terms and the question, whilst also giving some context within the discipline of Philosophy of Religion.
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.
Thinking about the tomb, in the context of the last post, it is incredibly suspect that the place of the greatest spiritual and religious significance in the whole world seems not to have been venerated at least not until the 4th century CE onwards). This then prompts these questions:
William Lane Craig, as we all know, is an apologist with a predilection for the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which goes like this:
1) Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence;
2) The universe has a beginning of its existence;
C) Therefore: The universe has a cause of its existence.
The point I want to make today is about quantum indeterminacy. This is the notion that, at the quantum, microscopic level, things could be indeterminate, or ‘uncaused’. This potentially invalidates the first premise.
In this post, I am going to look at the resurrection account given by Matthew, in particular his addition found in no other Gospel account, that there were guards stationed at the tomb.
According to Matthew, the chief priests were worried that the disciples might steal Jesus’ body to fake a resurrection, so they went to Pilate and got permission to post a guard on the tomb. When Jesus rose from the dead, the guards reported it to the priests, and the priests bribed them to claim that disciples stole the body while they were asleep. Matthew claims that “to this day” Jews report the body as stolen (as opposed to resurrected).
That’s true. You heard it right here. An exclusive.
William Lane Craig is something of a knight in shining armour to the Christian fraternity. He is ubiquitous – whenever there is an event, he has something to say about it (the Sandy Hook massacre, for example), and whenever there is a philosophical argument, Christians reference him and his apologetics. It seems that he says “jump” and Christians say “how high?”
Oh my cosmos, he does it again. William Lane Craig has moved from the Slaughter of the Canaanites to trying to make sense of the massacre in Connecticut in the context of Christmas. Get ready to scream at the computer screen.
So, on to the rebuttals. Craig pointed out in several of his rebuttals that Law has not, and did not seem to want to, critique the cosmological argument. Craig does have some beef here as Law seemed to want to debate Craig’s version of God rather than the more fundamental argument over A God’s existence. Thus in true debate point-scoring, Law would take a hit here. However, as Law plainly stated, and I think this was a wise move, this would have broadened the scope too far and wasn’t important for discussing the moral character of Craig’s version of God (thus allowing Law to wedge in his evil God thesis).
What was one of my favourite moments, and it met with a good round of applause from the secularists in the audience (a clear minority), was when Law, whilst talking about his non-answering of Craig’s first (cosmological) argument, declared himself not to be an expert, and to say something like, “I don’t know, I mean I don’t know the answer to the question why the universe exist.”
So, on to Law’s opening statements. It’s probably better to get this from the horse’s mouth -http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2011/10/opening-speech-craig-debate.html. However, I will duly sum up. Law, much to his credit, claimed he was only interested in defending his position using only one argument, based on the Evidential Problem of Evil. That being, if God is omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, then he is able, knows how and is loving enough to want to do something about all the evil in the world. Law went on to talk about some of this evil by pointing out the sheer quantity:
1) all the animal deaths resulting from carnivorousness from the beginning of animal history
2) all the human death, particularly the frequency of child death before the age of five – somewhere between 40% and 60%, historically, of all children born.
Back in October 2011 I posted this review (and a couple of follow-ons) on my old-old site covering the debate between Stephen Law and William Lane Craig. Due to the fact that Stephen is now a co-SINner here with us, I would like to resurrect this review. It was a great debate, and Stephen, against a formidable opponent, did very well indeed, as you will see. There is now updated video of the debate.
Enjoy:
Last night, two friends and I went to the Stephen Law vs William Lane Craig debate at Westminster where the two philosophers were debating ‘Does God Exist?’ Craig’s Reasonable Faith tour has been hotly anticipated by Christians and non-Christians alike, and with the relative unknown of Stephen Law (in debating terms), there was a feeling of unpredictability thrown in to the usual wager that Craig would win.
This is taken from an old post of mine. I still find it a real defeater for the concept of…