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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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chronicle.com/article/The-New-Theist/140019/ 2

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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.





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





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.





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





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





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.





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.





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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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





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."





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





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





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





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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People's right to self-determination, for one.


People's right to self-determination? Is there a law th at requires you to

determine yourself as a Christian? Stop th e nonsense!


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.


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.


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.


minnesotan 1 week ago

mbaker1973 6 days ago

minnesotan 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.


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.


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.


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














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.


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.


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.


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


TallySkeptic 1 day ago












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?


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.


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


The law requiring "In God We Trust" on our

money is a law based on religion, so I




















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.


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.











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.


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











that nation.


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.


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.


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


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.


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.


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.


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?


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.











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.


Be careful now. You are bordering on an ad hominem

attack.


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.


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.



Guest 4 days ago







http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Theist/140019/undefined








Didn't take long for the Christians to start

making violent threats, did it? That officially

ends my participation in this debate. Good day.


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.


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.


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.





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