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Edmundus1581
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Christopher Hitchens on William Lane Craig (1:25)…nuff said…and, Christopher, kudos for giving credit where its due.
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Perplexity
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I just wanted to say real fast, WLC’s opening 4 argument-buck shot shouldn’t phase the atheist at all. His atheist opponents could use their opening statement to enlist several arguments for atheism. WLC’s arguments could effectively be responded to in a few min. each (they’re not that good 
). If you stated your objections to them succinctly, there’s no reason why WLC should be able to control the clock.
). If you stated your objections to them succinctly, there’s no reason why WLC should be able to control the clock.
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InJesusItrust
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I saw a video by WLC and he’s correct when he says Dawkins does not know philosophy well. From a math background in logic Dawkins makes a huge blunder when he attempts to refute first cause arguments by asking what caused the cause. If there is a first cause it makes no sense to ask what caused the first cause. Logically speaking we argue for a first cause and then claim that cause is God. It makes no sense to ask what caused the first cause, otherwise it wouldn’t be defined as the first cause. It’s like when you say that P
has a minimum n from which its true, then you ask what k smaller than n for which P(k) is true. By definition of n there is no such k, because n is defined to be the minimum.
Learning mathematics and logic has helped me seen the fallacies of scientism, but others of my generation that have no such background cannot perceive these fallacies.
has a minimum n from which its true, then you ask what k smaller than n for which P(k) is true. By definition of n there is no such k, because n is defined to be the minimum.Learning mathematics and logic has helped me seen the fallacies of scientism, but others of my generation that have no such background cannot perceive these fallacies.
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punkforchrist
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In addition, Craig and other theists never claim that everything has a cause. Rather, the argument states that whatever begins to exist has a cause, or every contingent thing has a cause.I saw a video by WLC and he’s correct when he says Dawkins does not know philosophy well. From a math background in logic Dawkins makes a huge blunder when he attempts to refute first cause arguments by asking what caused the cause. If there is a first cause it makes no sense to ask what caused the first cause. Logically speaking we argue for a first cause and then claim that cause is God. It makes no sense to ask what caused the first cause, otherwise it wouldn’t be defined as the first cause. It’s like when you say that P
Learning mathematics and logic has helped me seen the fallacies of scientism, but others of my generation that have no such background cannot perceive these fallacies.
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Arizona_Mike
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If that’s the case, atheist opponents should have no problem refuting his arguments. It is no secret what arguments he will make, he openly admits that he uses the same revolving set of arguments, depending on what the question of the debate will be.
I have listened to most of Prof. Craig’s debates that are available on-line, and while I am not in agreement with all his theology, he does well because he is a skilled debater - and by this, I don’t mean that he uses some kind of arcane debating tricks to twist his opponents’s words, or that he is using style over substance or whatever. Instead he always stays on topic on the issue under debate, he comes well prepared by having read his opponents’ published writing and their previous debates, and he presents a series of arguments that are relevant to the issue at hand. This is often not true of his opponents, who will begin scattershot attacks on Christianity in general that are not relevant to the issue, or ad hominem attacks, or try to make the debate about an issue other than the declared question under debate - which is unethical and makes them look bad - or will declare that the field of study relevant to the question is “unscientfic” and thus irrelevant, as Prof. Larry Krause tried to do with the relevance of “Philosophy.” (Bizarrely, for someone whose academic credential describes him as a Ph.D) I have never heard Professor Craig treat his opponent discourteously, which earns him points with the audience.
He also does well because while his academic field is philosophy, he is very well read in other fields, such as textual analysis of the Bible and physics and cosmology, that may be the academic specialties of his debate opponents. They are rarely as well prepared to challenge Prof. Craig on his own specialty.
While Prof. Craig usually opens with 5 arguments in support of his stance, that’s not considered “shotgunning” or too broad for an opponent to respond to - that’s common in a debate and many of his opponents do the same thing. They have more than enough time to try to refute them under the agreed-upon terms on the debate.
Professor Craig’s podcasts usually have an after-action analysis of each debate, and he goes into extensive detail on the side-issues that didn’t get addressed during the debates. I suspect most of his opponents don’t take the time to read Prof. Craig’s many books, academic articles, or his two podcasts because they consider it “beneath” them.
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markeverett49
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There are two kinds of “first.” Dawkins is thinking of first in time. That’s one kind of first, and the way to deal with this question is to distinguish between things that begin to exist and things that do not have a beginning. God has no beginning and thus requires no cause. Things that begin to exist require a cause, but not things that don’t.
But there is another kind of “first” and it deals with things happening now. The first kind of sequence is what theologians would call “accidentally ordered.” (You are a child of your parents, who are children of their parents, and backwards runs onward the series. Dawkins is thinking of a series like this and that is why he would want to know the cause of the first parents because in this kind of series the first cause needs a cause too.) But there is another kind of series, the “essentially ordered” kind. Think of a child holding a wand that she uses to push a hoop. She never touches the hoop but she is the cause of its movement. The wand, which does touch the hoop, is not the cause of its movement but rather an instrument of the cause.) In THIS kind of series, the first cause is necessary for there to be motion at all, and that means NOW.
The argument from motion works now. It is not just an argument about a cause Way Back When. Deists could think that way, but we are not Deists. The world is not a watch wound up; it is held in existence by God, the first cause, continuously.
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punkforchrist
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Mark, another example I like is this: imagine a watch that has existed from all eternity, but is without a spring. No matter how many mechanical gears it has, even infinitely-many, none of them will be able to move. The argument from motion, by analogy, posits a first mover of all intermediate movers that continue to be in motion, regardless of whether their motion (or existence in general) had a beginning.
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James224
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I’m sure we have many in the Catholic Universities and we need a few to come forward to debate these atheists. Tim Staples is a good Thomist as well as Edward Feser. William Lane Craig, although a protestant, does use Thomistic Philosophy. Patrick Madrid does some debating in this area. What we need are some Thomisitic Philosophers to do the job.
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markeverett49
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This, I find less appealing than you do. One reason that atheists love to talk about Paley (-and Catholics such as Aquinas would not find him useful at all) is that his view is utterly mechanistic. The parts of a watch are inorganic but many parts of nature–flowers, trees, animals small and large, and human beings–are organic. To explain nature as if it were a watch is to a) ignore life and b) it leads to a misunderstanding of INorganic nature. For Aristotle and Aquinas, the rock cycle and the water cycle exhibit final causality, not just a man making a statue or an acorn growing into an oak.
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itullian
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yes,not just apologists but brilliant minds with qualifications to enter the fray.
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punkforchrist
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markeverett:
It’s just an analogy, and not to be taken as an exact representation of nature as a whole. If you want to include organic things, Thomas himself refers to a stone, moved by a staff, which is itself moved by a person’s arm.
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markeverett49
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Yes, it is just an analogy but it is an analogy that misses something Aristotle and Aquinas both thought central to the argument: the first (or prime) mover must itself be UNmoved. A spring is not an unmoved mover, even in an analogy.
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asd72
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Yes that is correct. I’ve not read it myself, but is sounds interesting. For some deism is a first step, and some stop there.
It’s good though to study arguments against atheism, to challenge yourself. I alternated between religious and atheist books while trying to find out if there was a God. I sort of felt I had to beable to withstand the challenges to my beliefs before I could commit, although my ultimate conversion experience came no so much as a choice but as a epiphany of sorts.
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markeverett49
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I have read the book and enjoyed it. Be warned, however, that it is more an account of how his thinking changed than a full account of all the arguments. For example, he gives a lot of credit to David Conway"s book “The Rediscovery of Wisdom”. Conway gives a great explication of Aristotle’s “prime mover” argument and maintains that it is a sound argument. Flew doesn’t go into that much detail.
Also, Flew includes an interview with Anglican bishop and biblical scholar N. T. Wright that talks about how one might make sense of the Gospels today. Flew, at any rate, finds Wright’s answers compelling. He doesn’t ask to be baptized, but he’s clearly sympathetic.
I recommend the book, but again, it is more an outline of Flew"s journey than the details of the arguments that won him over. (But he gives sources, so it is easy for anyone who wants to follow up. That’s how I found myself reading Conway’s book, which is a solid philosophical work.)
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punkforchrist
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That’s why it’s an analogy, and not an exact representation. We could then ask: why is the spring in motion? It’s here that arguments against an infinite regress of movers are key. The advantage of using the watch as an analogy is that it enables us to explain that the Unmoved Mover is not necessarily first in time, but first with respect to source. Even if a watch is eternal, its continuous motion must be moved by another. So, even if the universe is eternal, we can still ask why it continues to be in motion.
Make sense?
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