William Lane Craig's dishonesty

Christian Apologist William Lane Craig in 2015 posted to youtube an excerpt from one of his lectures wherein he defends as morally good the ancient Israelites carrying out their belief that God wanted them to slaughter the children of the pagans who were originally living in that land.

As might be expected, comments are disabled for this video, so the reader will have to ask whether the uploader left this alone as the default position solely by accident, or intended to preempt comments.  One this is for sure, whoever posted this surely knew that the biblical commands of God that the Hebrews should slaughter children have horrified many Christians and not just the average unbeliever.

The video at time code 11:55 ff has an audience member ask a 2-part question, 1) if the bible is correct that God is not a respecter of persons, then why did God treat ancient Israelite children better than God treated the Canaanite children, and 2) at time code 12:07 ff, what is Dr. Craig's response to other Christian scholars who have interpreted the genocide texts as non-literal.

Unfortunately, this audience member could not finish the second part of the question after he said "genocide" because at 12:08 ff, Dr. Craig, in screeching voice indicating worry, interrupts him and from there until the end of the video, gives his reasons for saying God did not intend his "slaughter the Canaanite" commands to be taken by the Israelites as permission to subject the Canaanites to "genocide".

Dr. Craig's interruption of this audience member was dishonest, since the video ends after Craig ends his speech about how calling it genocide is incorrect, thus indicating either a) he intentionally avoided explaining why his explanation is rejected by other Christian scholars, or b) he answered that part too, but chose to avoid including it in the portion he chose to upload, which still smacks of dishonesty, since the fact that other Christian scholars of the evangelical persuasion reject Craig's "apologetics" on this issue, indicates that those atheists who likewise reject his apologetics, are not doing so merely because they are spiritually blind and rebellious, but the option remains on the table that they have solid objective reasons to reject Craig's thesis.

Craig's reply was also dishonest because whether ancient Hebrews slaughtering children technically justifies being characterized as "genocide" or something different, is useless semantics.  The biblical texts showing God commanded his people to slaughter children are not a problem merely due to the average person thinking these actions fulfill the definition of "genocide".  We have a problem with them for the same reason we'd have a problem with anybody asserting that God told them to slaughter children.  The problem would exist whether you characterize such divine commands as genocide or Gong Show.

It is clear the audience member had a legitimate question as to how Craig answers other Christian scholars who disagree with Craig, who say these kinds of divine commands were never intended to be fulfilled in an absolute literal sense of exterminating all pagan men woman and children.  Two such scholars the audience member likely had in mind are Paul Copan and Matthew Flanagan, who jointly authored a book in which they make explicit how wrong they think Dr. Craig is to take these slaughter-passages literally.

The fact that Craig has publicly acknowledged elsewhere why he thinks Christian scholars like Copan and Flanagan get this wrong, does not erase the fact that whoever posted the video conveniently ended it with Craig avoiding answering this rather important concern with the fallacious red-herring of "it's not genocide!".

Now beyond the issue of Dr. Craig's dishonest attempt to avoid having to publicly acknowledge that other people equally spiritually alive as himself, do not find his apologetic argument at this point very convincing...

a - The problem of biblical genocide cannot be solved by appeal to a technical definition of "genocide".  It is the average person on the street, whether unbeliever, atheist bible critic, or Christian, not merely the liberal college professor, who finds immoral the general idea that God would ever tell his followers to kill children. So a technical discussion of what genocide is and is not, is nothing but dishonest distraction.

b - at 5:10 ff, Craig absurdly argues that by bringing about the deaths of these Canaanite children, God ensured their eternal salvation.  However this does nothing but rip the door of Pandora's Box off the hinges:

If God likes the idea of giving people a shortcut to heaven (i.e., killing them before they reach the age of accountability) then we have to wonder why God thinks allowing most of mankind to grow past this age and thus endure the horrible risk of eternal hell fire, is supposed to be better than the guarantee of heaven that results from all infanticide.  Some would argue that if we can do anything at all that will motivate God to grant salvation to a person, we should dedicate our lives to doing exactly this, and our motive is the fear of hell that God himself placed in our hearts.  Salvation can never possibly cost too much.

If Craig's theology is correct, every "baby" that is aborted goes directly to heaven, a good result.  This creates another problem because the vast majority of people naturally adopt consequentialism (i.e., whether an act is morally good or bad depends on what kind of effect it produces).  If abortion sends the baby directly to eternal salvation, that is an effect of abortion too, and it is improper for Christians to ignore the higher spiritual reality involved here and simplemindedly focus solely on the fact that abortion is a violation of God's prohibition on murder.

Worse, God himself takes personal responsibility for all murder in general anyway, and for forced abortion-by-sword and infanticide in particular:

 39 'See now that I, I am He, And there is no god besides Me; It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal, And there is no one who can deliver from My hand. (Deut. 32:39 NAU) 

 15 Though he flourishes among the reeds, An east wind will come, The wind of the LORD coming up from the wilderness; And his fountain will become dry And his spring will be dried up; It will plunder his treasury of every precious article.
 16 Samaria will be held guilty, For she has rebelled against her God. They will fall by the sword, Their little ones will be dashed in pieces, And their pregnant women will be ripped open. (Hos. 13:15-16 NAU)

So Craig's theology confronts us with the classical conundrum of why God wants us to believe murder and abortion are immoral, when in fact on biblical grounds that logically necessitates the conclusion that what God does is immoral.  How can our murders and abortions be immoral for us, if the biblical truth is that God is causing us to commit these acts?  Isn't that rather like the puppeteer condemning the puppet for doing what the puppeteer wanted?

Craig admits he adopts divine-command theory (i.e., if God commanded it, it is good by definition, end of discussion) and if that is true, then the acts of the pagans in subjecting the Israelites to infanticide and forced abortion-by sword (Hosea 13, supra) is morally good, end of discussion.

Here is my reply to Dr. Craig's article on the subject of atheists, Christian scholars and  the issue of the divine command to slaughter pagan children.

Cold Case Christianity: J. Warner Wallace's errors on the problem of evil

This is my reply to J. Warner Wallace's article

Why Would a Good God Allow Moral Evil?

Posted: 09 Jun 2017 01:18 AM PDT

For many, the presence of moral evil is evidence against the existence of an all-powerful, all loving God.

This is illogical.  God's being an asshole doesn't mean he doesn't exist. 

The problem of evil is perhaps the single most frequent objection I hear when speaking to unbelievers, and it has been uttered by thousands across the span of history.

 It has also been a serious problem for serious Christians, and has caused plenty of them to leave the faith.

Epicurus (the ancient Greek philosopher, 341-270BC) expressed the problem clearly:  “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing?”  There you have it: If a good, all-powerful, all loving God does exist, and we, as humans, are allegedly created in His “image”, why are people be so inclined to do immoral things? 

The bible says God takes personal responsibility for all murder (Deut. 32:39), and that he not only causes the worst of evils, such as rape and parental cannibalism, but gets a thrill or "delight" out of watching people commit such horrific atrocities, Deut. 28:30, 53, 63.

And why doesn’t this all-powerful God do something to stop evil, immoral behavior? 

 Why would he stop himself? 

A God such as this is either too impotent to stop evil, doesn’t care enough to act, or simply doesn’t exist in the first place.  But think about it for a minute. Which is more loving: a God who creates a world in which love is possible, or a God who creates a world in which love is impossible?

 It is more loving to protect your loved ones from evil to the extent that you have ability and opportunity to do so.

 It seems reasonable that a loving God (if He exists at all), would create a world where love is possible.

Then you cannot have any problem with atheists whose arguments proceed under the same "seems reasonable" criteria.

 A good God would create a world where love can be experienced and expressed by creatures designed “in His image”. 

 And a perfect god would have been perfectly content with the way things were before anything was created, in which case this god would have had no motive or desire to change up this happy equilibrium.  If God was perfectly content with the pre-creation state of affairs, he would not have created anything.

But this kind of “love-possible” a world is, by necessity, a dangerous place. Love requires freedom. True love requires that humans have the ability to freely choose; love cannot be forced if it is to be heartfelt and real. I cannot force my children, for example, to love me. Instead, I must demonstrate my love for them, provide them with the knowledge and moral wisdom necessary to make safe and loving choices, and then allow them the personal freedom to love one another and do the right thing.

 No, you think the people that have already died and gone to heaven, cannot chose to sin, yet you believe they still authentically love and worship god.  So freedom to sin and the possibility of evil are not necessary to get creatures to authentically love god.  If God can impose that state of affairs in heaven, he could have imposed it on Adam and Eve, in which case they would never have chosen to sin, and God would have avoided all the future situations that made him so angry at mankind.  God has only himself to blame for giving us freewill and the mess it created, when freewill was not necessary to successfully creating loving creatures.

 Eventually, as a parent, I have to let go, and this process of letting go is dangerous.

 Strawman; you believe your god is omnipresent, so he never "lets go" of anybody the way parents let go of teenagers.

 In order for my kids to have the freedom to love, they also need the freedom to hate.  Freedom of this nature is often costly. A world in which people have the freedom to love and perform great acts of kindness is also a world in which people have the freedom to hate and commit great acts of evil. You cannot have one without the other, and we understand this intuitively. Let’s consider an example.  Every year, millions of scissors are manufactured and sold in countries across the world. Everyone knows how valuable and useful scissors can be. No one is arguing for laws to prevent the manufacturing or sale of scissors; we understand how beneficial they are. Yet every year, hundreds of homicides and assaults are committed with scissors (I’ve actually investigated some of these). While scissors were designed for a good and useful purpose, they are often used to commit great evil. In a similar way, our personal “free agency” is a beautiful gift that allows us to love. It was intended to provide us the means through which we can love one another and even love God. But this freedom, like a pair of scissors, can be used for great evil as well if we choose to reject its original purpose. 

Irrelevant, creatures can authentically love god without having any ability to sin.  See above.

As Christians, we believe that God created us in His image.

 There were no other words the Hebrew author could have chosen to express the idea that we physically resemble god.  This whole business of the image of god being "freewill" is total bullshit.  The god of the early parts of the OT was physical even if also invisible.  Christians only insist that "divine image =  freewill/conscience" for no other reason than because they wish to harmonize Genesis 1:26-27 with the rest of the bible, which says god cannot be likened to anything on earth.  But a more objective approach is to ask what the original biblical words for "image" and "likeness" meant in their own limited contexts.  Jehovah Witnesses also like to use scripture to interpret scripture, but that obviously doesn't benefit them in the least, as all they end up doing is justifying their own heretical theology thereby,  so its pretty safe to say that grammar and immediate context are paramount, while biblical inerrancy (i.e., scripture interprets scripture) does not deserve to be exalted in our mind to the status of governing hermeneutic, given that Christians are disagreed about whether it is biblical, and if so, what version is correct.  

 We have the freedom to love and we are eternal creatures who will live beyond our short existence on earth. Our free agency allows us to love and perform acts of kindness, and our eternal life provides the context for God to deal justly with those who choose to hate and perform acts of evil. God will do something to stop evil, immoral behavior, He is powerful enough to stop evil completely, and He does care about justice. But as an Eternal Being, He has the ability to address the issue on an eternal timeline.

 The modern Christian notion about God being "eternal" is contradicted by every biblical description of heaven, which asserts things going on there, with God, in a way that necessarily presupposes the same degree of temporal progression of events that exists on earth.  This idea that your god lives in some eternal "now" that is fundamentally different than the "time" dimension we live in, is not biblical.

It’s not that God has failed to act; it’s simply that He has not chosen to act yet.

 The more biblical answer is that horrific evils occur because God causes them to happen, see Deut. 28:63.  Read everything between vv. 15-63, then you tell me that anybody who causes parents to eat their own kids, is "good". 

  1 John 4:7-8 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

 This biblical logic is faulty, because according to the bible many of those who do not love, lack that love precisely because God wanted it that way:  David hates idoloters themselves, not just their idolatry, in Psalm 31:6, and god forbids the Israelites from doing anything nice for certain other people in Deut.23:6.

Compared to eternity, this temporal, earthly existence is but a vapor, created by good God to be a wonderful place where love is possible for those who choose it.

 Again, all biblical descriptions of heaven assert that events take place there with no less temporal progression than they do on earth.  Again, if God was perfect, he'd have been perfectly content to exist without creatures, and thus would never have become motivated to think that changing the original solitary perfection-state was "better".