This week at Evangelical Realism I give away the plot behind William Lane Craig’s argument for Christian exclusivism, and begin to look at the argument he uses to try and explain why an all-powerful God has no power to save most of His own children from Hell. Craig packs so much fail into such a small space that this one’s going to be a two-parter. Check it out if you’re interested.
Good gravy, did he really write that?! Really? The man makes more on a single speaking tour than I would in two years of working my crappy retail job, and he says that junk?
I am beginning to see another technique of his, which I hereby dub “drive-by assertionation.” In this technique, he drops small, seemingly innocuous remarks while whizzing merrily along at high speed from (badly-argued) point A to (badly-argued) point B. A good example is the weasel-worded “no explicit contradiction” he threw out in there.
He blithely zooms past all the issues you brought up, chief among them the question of how an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving being would even create a place of infinite torment in the first place, let along send any of its creations to it.
I noticed something else, too: apologists need their God to be a loser. They drop a lot of omni- words, but in the end their God is a powerless, lying loser (and since Gods are made by men…). Do they realize this? Does it ever occur to them that we unbelievers take Yahweh a lot more seriously than they do?
Here’s what I’d love to see someone like Craig address:
In this day and age, we’re told that gawd wants us to accept his existence on pure faith. If he were to directly communicate with us and thus reveal his existence, that would negate faith.
But, in Old Testament, Yahweh is portrayed as constantly communicating directly with his follows and even physically manifesting himself in one form or another.
When did he change his mind about faith alone and why?
d cwilson, I’d like to read an attempt at reconciling an eternal, unchanging God with one who evolves over time and changes what he demands of his creations. I heard some theologian once talking about how God matured from killing everybody in the flood to making Abraham kill his son (and then saying, “Oh, Blackadder, I love saying that to you; the look on your face is so fun!”) to only requiring his own son as a sacrifice. The point he was trying to make was far less interesting than the point Rowan Atkinson made.
I think the response would be something like that he is eternal and unchanging, but what we demand of him changes. In the sense of how we’ve changed by acting on our free will means that he has to interact with us differently now than he did in the OT.
Of course, he knew about all this, and was prepared to act differently because of changes in us, the things he made.
Now I’ve confused myself again.