William Lane Craig

Tautology

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=9229

.........Organisms which are not sentient, that is, have no mental life, display at most Level 1 reactions. Insects, worms, and other invertebrates react to noxious stimuli but lack the neurological capacity to feel pain. Their avoidance behavior obviously has a selective advantage in the struggle for survival and so is built into them by natural selection .......

rephrase: Their avoidance behavior obviously has a selective advantage in the struggle for survival and so is built into them by natural selection .

rephrase: Their behavior has an *obvious* selective advantage .... and so is built into them by natural selection .......

rephrase: Their behavior has an *obvious* preservation(selective) advantage .... and so is built into them by natural selection .......

rephrase: Their behavior has an *obvious* advantage .... and so is built into them by a coo-coo-clock .......

finally: Their behavior has an *obvious* advantage .... and so is built into them .......

'has an *obvious* advantage' and 'built into them' allude to the same fact , saying the same thing twice and thus guarantees the truth of the argument wedged between premise and conclusion, making it a rhetorical tautology. Especially the term *obvious*, facts such as what happens, happens are obvious, so are the tautological fact A or not-A. Explanations which are *obvious* aren't therefore falsifiable theories. Newtons inverse square law isn't obvious, it isn't a fact, but a falsifiable theory .

Absence of evidence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBx4vvlbZ8&feature=g-vrec&context=G22b5617RVAAAAAAAAAw

.... absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence... says Craig. Hitchens disagrees with this. Craig is correct on this point.

William Lane Craig

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KBx4vvlbZ8&feature=g-vrec&context=G22b5617RVAAAAAAAAAw

Hitchens.: 1:25 .... when you say excorcisms do mean belief in devils too..? -

Craig replies: 1:26 ....Most historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth practiced miracle working and exorcisms . I am not committing myself, nor do historians commit themselves to the reality of demons ....

Hitchens: 1:26 .... Do you believe that Jesus drove devils out of the pigs .....

Craig: 1:26 ... that's historical , yes .....

Hitchens: 1:27..... the graves opened and raising of the dead took place, with these people walking in Jerusalem ....

Craig: 1:28 ....That's in the gospel of Matthew and it is actually attached to a crucifixion narrative...... I don't know whether this is apocalyptic imagery by Matthew or to be taken literally......... I haven't studied it in any depth and am open minded about it and willing to be convinced one way or the other ...

1:28-29: ..... He (Jesus) would cast out the devils in his own authority .....

KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUEMENT:

WLC's favorite argument is what he calls the Kalam Cosmological Argument. This argument is perhaps the worst in all of apologetics, but only because it sounds so deceptively reasonable. The argument goes like this:

1. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause of its beginning.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its beginning.

Which is loosely followed by:

• 4. This cause is a personal creator God

He concludes: "Ghazali’s cosmological argument thus gives us powerful grounds for believing in the existence of a beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, changeless, immaterial, enormously powerful, Personal Creator of the universe."

While the conclusion of a personal God obviously does not follow from the premises, on its face this may seem like an appealing argument for God's existence.

But it is not. It is beholden to materialism, as are many of WLC's arguments and much of contemporary apologetics. Fortunately for him, the Atheists he typically debates are also beholden to materialism and so it goes unchallenged.

So as soon as we grant (and George Berkeley tells us why we should not) the unstated premise that the universe does, in fact, exist as an independent entity, the battle is already lost.

There is an unstated premise in the Kalam Cosmological Argument:

• 0. The universe Exists as a Material entity, independent of God.

This is horrifically unbiblical, for we read: "And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together." (Colossians 1:17)

Not only that, but such a premise cedes the entire argument to the Atheist. We do not grant that things exist apart from God. If we do, the Atheists are right in deducing that a universe which exists apart from God may as well exist without any God.

Fortunately, we have no "cause" to believe in such a thing. See George Berkeley informs us that "mind", not object, is all that exists. Supposed material objects can only ever be observed through our sense-experiences, and it is intuitive, due to our experience of dreams, that our sense-experiences do not imply the existence of any material objects, only the idea of such objects.

NOTES

• Craig affirms his belief that the Lord Jesus was born of a virgin and was raised from the dead during section 1:25-30
• Craig says he ... hasn't studied it in depth ....(opening of the graves by Matthew) which is remarkable , since he claims to be an apologist and is thus supposed to have studied it in depth.
• Does he believe demons or devils exist in actual reality? If they don't exist then Jesus of Nazareth drove out something which doesn't exist, how could we then believe his claim to be God.

Links

http://www.freeratio.org/thearchives/showthread.php?t=135497&page=52 dzim77 . Lane's reply that hte best explanation does not need an explanation deals with dzim77 question. Infallibility does not need an explanation or we induce infinite regress. See Perry Marshall and dissimilar.