William Lane Craig Cherry Picks His Standards for Christian Belief

There's been a bit of a dustup on philosophy of religion YouTube thanks to Dr. William Lane Craig's comments on a recent podcast about lowering the epistemic bar for belief in his form of Christianity and raising the bar for defeaters for Christianity. He then went on Capturing Christianity's channel to defend himself from numerous detractors and after seeing the hole he dug for himself on that show I decided to put out a detailed critique of his cherry picked standards.  

Sorry for a lack of a transcript, I wanted to do this one live, so you'll just have to watch the video.

Can testimony be the basis for a ‘properly basic belief?’

Christian apologist and theologian Randal Rauser has an idea regarding warranted Christian belief that I find particularly interesting, but ultimately wrong.  Randal’s idea is to take the Reformed Epistemology of Alvin Plantinga a little bit further, he wants to use testimony as a foundation for a properly basic belief in something like Christian theism.

This is something he has written on in his book with Justin Schieber “An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar” and a bit about on his blog. 

I should point out that Randal prefers using testimony as a basis for properly basic belief in Christianity compared to the traditional appeals to a Sensus Divinitatus, because he considers appealing to a SD to place the theist at a rhetorical disadvantage.

I think Randal’s intuition about being at a rhetorical disadvantage with the Sensus Divinitatus is correct. A mysterious Sensus Divinitatus providing justification for Christian belief in a pre-evidential way is going to sound outlandish to non-believers, and likely would come as a shock to many lay believers in the pews. It’s akin to saying that one’s “Jesus senses are tingling”

In short, I don’t think that this kind of appeal to testimony as a foundation for a properly basic belief in god is going to work.  I think if he is going to go this kind of Reformed Epistemology route, he’s going to have to appeal to a Sensus Divinitatus, ala Alvin Plantinga.

Missing the Point on Randal's Sermon?

As these tend to go, I had a response post by Randal regarding my critique of his sermon on faith and evidence.

Randal believes I've missed his points and was vitriolic.

Let me begin the reply by going through his three major points, and we'll touch on the last part at the end.

Randal Rauser convinces me on the rationality of specific religious belief

I've done a bit of posting on whether or not there is rational justification for belief in a specific religion.

David Marshall tried to get "inside" the argument and state that one could justify belief in specifically Christian miracles. My last post was a long reply about why that isn't at all convincing.

Randal however took the opposite approach, going "outside" the argument to reject my overall approach.

After some back and forth in his comment section, he's convinced me that the argument I'm going after isn't going to undermine rational belief in a specific religion. Here's the relevant text from his comment that really brought the point home:

David Marshall & The Oppressed Faithless Disciples

A few days ago I put up a post questioning whether or not belief in specific religions could be rationally justified. I'm not completely sure that this argument works yet, and so I specifically requested rebuttals.


The first response I got comes from Christian apologist David Marshall.


Unfortunately for David, his response had quite the opposite effect - I'm now more convinced there's some teeth in the argument. Lets get into a number of misconceptions and problems with David's rebuttal.

Are there rational justifications for belief in a specific religion?

I’ve had this idea percolating in my head for some time, and a Twitter interaction with Randal Rauser has forced me to finally put words down in support of it.

My thoughts are fairly ambitious as far as Counter Apologetics goes, though I’m not yet certain the argument will work.  So consider this a request for rebuttals. 

The idea is that jumping from mere theism to belief in a specific religion is not rationally justifiable. This concept isn’t necessarily new.  

Is Natural Theology Self Defeating?

Suffice it to say, if you're familiar with my blog, you'll know that I find natural theology to be a failure. I'm pretty dedicated to showing exactly how and why such arguments are false.

However, on thinking about the topic last night I was struck by a line of argument I've had on the periphery for a while.

Consider the definition of natural theology: "Natural theology is a program of inquiry into the existence and attributes of God without referring or appealing to any divine revelation."

Lets assume for a moment that if natural theology actually worked, that it was gods intention that it work. So it's not say, incidental to Christian theism being true.

Next, consider the direct implications of Christian focused natural theology: There is a god, and this god wants you to believe he both exists and has a specific set of properties.  This god wants you to be a Christian. More specifically wants there to be evidence for his existence, and for belief in him to be achievable through reason.

Lets also consider a less direct implication of being a Christian: This god wants you to believe the bible is his divinely inspired word which is, liberally interpreted, "true in all things it teaches".

Proving the Negative?

Like many of my latest (sporadic) blog posts this is spawned by Twitter.  Specifically I saw this amusing picture on twitter:

This was in a tweet which was a response to this article by internet Christian apologist WinteryKnight, who is largely citing William Lane Craig.

This is a topic that comes up every so often in atheism, about whether or not we can “prove” god does not exist.

I’ve personally gone back and forth on my views on this question, and I currently find myself putting a foot in both camps.  Lately, it’s become a position among a good number of people I greatly respect and converse with to say that “of course we can prove god does not exist”, which is usually followed with a sensible amount of words that go on to qualify that with something to the effect of “for any reasonable definition of prove”.  This typically involves pointing out that we don’t need something incoherent like “absolute certainty” in order to say “we know there is no god”.

In many respects, I find this kind of argument by my fellow atheists compelling.  On the other hand, I feel this kind of discussion is misused by many apologists, and it glosses over the very real problem underlying the argument behind the idea that we can’t prove a universal negative like “god does not exist”. 

Let me first state that the very simply “you can’t prove a universal negative” is strictly false.  Universal statements like this are very hard to get correct, which is a precursor into this sort of problem.  Let's look at exactly why this is the case, per the article.

Peter Boghossian, Faith, and Religious Epistemology

I've recently finished Peter Boghossian's book "A Manual for Creating Atheists".  I listened to it on Audiobook, which helped immensely with being able to get through the book with the way my life is going right now between my work levels and trying to be a father and husband at home.  I can listen while doing mundane tasks at work and while doing chores/exercise/commuting.  If anyone can recommend good intellectual atheist books on Audible I'd be appreciative.

If you've been following my blog, you'll have seen my last post on Faith as "Belief without Evidence" where I engaged Tom Gilson of ThinkingChristian.net and his argument about that not being a valid definition of the word as Christians understand it.

I realize now that my post and approach was a mistake. There's no point in trying to show how the the Christian bible could be read to support Boghossian's definition.  You're playing the interpretation game which is going to be subjective and the Christians will almost always have a way to interpret their way out of hairy passages.

Eventually though, as I got through A Manual for Creating Atheists and thinking on the common thread of responses to it from Christian Apologists Tom and Phil Vischer, I realized something rather important.

The Definition of Faith is A Giant Red Herring

Naturalism, Falsifiability, and Hiddenness

This post is a bit off the cuff, as it’s mainly in response to a Twitter conversation to elaborate on something you can’t put into a series of tweets.  This was born of a conversation with Alex and Elijiah, and the topic was meaty enough that I wanted to write about it.

The question is whether or not a-priori Naturalism is “reasonable” or at least “not scary”.  That’s basically the starting position in philosophy that: no matter what we observe, we would never accept evidence of something supernatural existing.   It’s rejecting the supernatural a-priori.

Personally, I kind of abhor this line of reasoning, or at least I find it terrible to be in a position where I’d say that there can never be evidence of any kind to prove the existence of a god or other supernatural entities.  

To me, this reeks of a sort of fundamentalism that I’d normally chastise certain religious people for practicing. 

The Münchhausen trilemma entails Secularism

Not too long ago I had a nice discussion with Jonathan Pearce that lead to his posting about the Münchhausen trilemma.

This is an interesting thing I picked up on while debating with a (surprisingly nice) Presuppositional Apologist. 

The interesting thing that came about was that once both theists and atheists come to accept the Münchhausen trilemma as the major issue in epistemology that it is, I think that secularism in terms of governance follows as a result.  This post is to explain why I think that to be the case.

It should be said that if you haven't read up on the Münchhausen trilemma, follow the links above to check it out before continuing with this article.