Friday, December 28, 2012

William Lane Craig is a deceitful liar

When an apologist is presented with a counterargument that he or she cannot refute, there are a few tactics that are usually used (instead of, you know, just outright admitting that yes, that's a good and valid counterargument.) Some start outright avoiding the counterargument, others move the goalposts. Others start playing dumb. A fourth tactic is to distort what the other person said or clearly meant, and attack that.

A perfect example of this fourth tactic is William Lane Craig's response to one of Richard Dawkins' counterarguments to the so-called cosmological argument. Dawkins writes:

Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.
How does Craig respond to this objection? He says:
Dawkins doesn't deny that the argument successfully demonstrates the existence of an uncaused, beginless, changeless, immaterial, spaceless, timeless and unimaginably powerful personal creator of the Universe.
No, that's not at all what Dawkins is saying. "Even if we allow..." and so on does not mean "I accept the proof as valid." It means "even if we assumed it to be valid" which is a completely different thing. What Dawkins is doing here is pointing out the huge and completely unjustified leap in logic that happens at the end of the argument (which even itself is very much questionable.)

What Craig is doing here is blatantly distorting what Dawkins is saying, in order to try to win. Why does he do that instead of actually addressing the objection? The only possible conclusion is that Craig does not have an actual response to the objection and therefore must resort to distortion.

And this is coming from someone who loves to emphasize the correct use of rigorous logic and philosophy, and who belittles anyone who he sees as not being in par with his own knowledge and education on these subjects.

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