Dr. William Lane Craig

Regarding the KCA, I have no idea what you are talking about in the first post, but to clarify and repeat, no, this post is not about the KCA (unless/until you choose to make a claim on it, thus entering the arena). As I hold the same conclusion as you, I see no reason to expand or consider this any more than a misunderstanding somewhere.

Daniel Dennett has a remarkably similar view on WLC to the one I hold (and talk about). Dennett sometimes talks absolute rubbish sometimes, but is generally very good in his areas. He seems to have respect for WLC and claims not to be able to rebut him.

Graham Oppy and Dan’s friend/colleague, Alex thingy are both considered by Craig as very good adversaries and have (I think) both debated him.

As for the scientists, WLC is not one, so this is an unfair comparison and there are corresponding scientists who can put up opposition to them, like for like.

Personal books by authors (as opposed to peer reviewed work) are common place. Richard Dawkins has one theist author who has no less than three books with Dawkins' name in the title, rebutting him. To write a rebuting book or response does not mean an argument is rebutted. If it did, Dawkins and evolution and a whole host of things are invalid.

I will let you locate the many peer reviewed articles by WLC and do a quota count on how often thewy are cited compareed to other philosophers in his area. This will ensure you don't selectively withold them to incite readers to think he is less than he is, as you claim.

BrachioPEP said:

I will let you locate the many peer reviewed articles by WLC and do a quota count on how often thewy are cited compareed to other philosophers in his area. This will ensure you don't selectively withold them to incite readers to think he is less than he is, as you claim.

Click to expand...

I think what you mean is that you will go and locate the many peer-reviewed articles by WLC and do a quota count on how often they are cited compared to others philosophers in his area as that is *your* claim, and consequently the onus would be on you.

BrachioPEP said:

Dr. Craig is almost 71 as of writing and I hope he continues to have a long and fruitful life. But if things do not change in debates, he will go down as a foremost believer who successfully held his own and the flag with little if any challengers.

Click to expand...

My underlining.

So I wrote a quick post showing a trove of resources both amateur and professional debunking his central argument that represents a significant chunk of his life's work, and then you've kind of waved them away...

BrachioPEP said:

Daniel Dennett has a remarkably similar view on WLC to the one I hold (and talk about). Dennett sometimes talks absolute rubbish sometimes, but is generally very good in his areas. He seems to have respect for WLC and claims not to be able to rebut him.

Graham Oppy and Dan’s friend/colleague, Alex thingy are both considered by Craig as very good adversaries and have (I think) both debated him.

As for the scientists, WLC is not one, so this is an unfair comparison and there are corresponding scientists who can put up opposition to them, like for like.

Personal books by authors (as opposed to peer reviewed work) are common place. Richard Dawkins has one theist author who has no less than three books with Dawkins' name in the title, rebutting him. To write a rebuting book or response does not mean an argument is rebutted. If it did, Dawkins and evolution and a whole host of things are invalid.

Click to expand...

Dennett sometimes talks rubbish (and?), and even though there's a video cited of him dismantling WLC's claims, supposedly Dennett doesn't believe he can rebut WLC?

It's not fair to look at scientists defeating WLC, even though his metaphysical claims clearly overlap their areas of explicit expertise.

Published books (written, I note, by relevant professionals in the fields) are also not indicative of WLC's arguments being rebutted because... titles of books can be misleading (?)


The point is that, despite what you wrote in the OP, WLC's central arguments have been taken to task many, many times by many different people and he hasn't fared well at all. The only place WLC does well is in oral debates because rhetoric =/= substance.

So if you're going to simply dismiss all these critiques of WLC's work, then how does your original statement contain any semantic significance? There have been plenty of challenges to his arguments and he has not 'held his own' unless that means he has adamantly refused to amend any of his positions regardless of criticism.

he_who_is_nobody said:

I just happened to watch this video recently and feel it is relevant to this thread.

​

Click to expand...

This is much closer to accurately describing WLC: a presuppositionalist who holds other people to vastly higher standards than he's prepared to meet himself, and who admits (trumpets) his close-mindedness to his fellow believers that scripture/Holy Spirit etc. is all the evidence he needs regardless of anything contrary, while claiming that other people either lack the ability, lack the originality, or lack the qualifications to debate him.

I don’t see any reason to respect William Lane Craig’s work, and I‘m not sure I respect the man himself either, at least beyond the base level of respect I give any other human being whether I like them or not. He represents everything wrong with philosophy today, as far as I’m concerned.

Just to add some levity to the thread Selective editing is always fun

BrachioPEP said:

I also think that WLC would, if pushed, accept a debate with John Loftus and would win, due to his oratory skills.

Click to expand...

Loftus has been pushing for a debate with Craig for over a decade now. So, it appears you are wrong on your former belief and I think that is due to you being wrong on the latter one too.

I cannot stand Craig and his smug way of talking. Seriously, he explains things like we are 5 years old, however, his entire Kalaam argument is based on assumed premises. So it has no value. Not to mention he then shoes in his mythical creatures into the conclusion, because...why the hell not.
And then he talks to Christians and he shows his true color. There he is dead sure his god is real and he is almost as dogmatic as Frank Turek and any other batshit pastor.

The nicest thing I can say about Craig is that the Kalam is a valid argument (which is to say that it contains no formal fallacies; it's riddled with informal ones, but that's a different matter, and it certainly isn't sound*). Oh, that and his time-keeping in debate is excellent. That latter is the real reason for his perceived success.

I've approached the Kalam from many different angles over the years, but that's largely a function of my enjoyment of the picking apart of things. In reality, a single, scientifically-rooted and factually correct statement is sufficient to entirely blow the Kalam out of the water in only seven words.

Special relativity destroys all prime mover arguments.

Yes, that's it. Kalam is bullshit, because it's an argument for a prime mover. All prime mover arguments are contingent on a preferred inertial frame, and special relativity tells us that there can be no preferred inertial frame; that all frames are entirely equivalent. All motion is relative. Every observer has equal claim to being at rest.

There's another that people have tried to address (Sean Carroll was the most successful at this), namely that the first premise is a factually incorrect statement. It's is absolutely not the case that everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence

I have yet to see a debate that Craig won. To the extent that he's enjoyed the appearance of success, it's rooted in a couple of factors:

1. Gish Gallop: remember what I said about his time-keeping? He crams five arguments, all complete bullshit and trivial to defeat, into a very short time span, so that his opponent will struggle to debunk them all in the allotted time, unless they're really well-prepared.

2. Opponent selection: Craig very carefully chooses his opponents. One might think that his tactic of only debating people with a doctorate might seem like a strategy for lifting the standard of discourse, but it's much more subtle and pernicious than that. His opponents are chosen for their expertise in dealing with maybe one or two at most of his arguments, so that his three other stock arguments stand unopposed, meaning the audience thinks he's won. It also means he has a go-to excuse for people with real expertise in counter-apologetics will struggle.

I know oodles of people who'd take him to pieces without breaking a sweat. Indeed, I can take all five stock arguments apart in the time it takes to bake a pizza, let alone the huge amount of time usually allotted for opening and response in a debate.

You'll notice that he almost always takes the affirmative, which is again a tactical decision on his part. Usually, the one taking the affirmative has the hardest job, but Craig treats it like a tactical advantage by piling so much bullshit into his opening that his opponent will often feel compelled to drop any opening they might have prepared so that they have as much time as possible to deal with them. I'd choose a topic question in debate with him that guaranteed my taking the affirmative, and I'd spend the first 7 or 8 minutes demolishing his stock arguments, and then move on to things he can't answer. Not that I'd have any trouble taking the negative, of course. It would just be fun to see him floundering after his entire spiel was laid waste.

But he won't debate me. There are empty chairs in venues the world over that he's left abandoned. He's a coward.

I've seen a lot of people go into debate with him underprepared, but I've never seen him actually land an argument non anybody other than those who have no idea of what he's talking about but declare his victory because it sounded good. It's all flim-flam of the worst order.

Ultimately, Craig is a liar. He knows full well that his arguments are bullshit, not least because he's done some study of some relevant topics, including philosophy of time which, of necessity, involves at least some study of relativity, and certainly enough to know that he's talking bollocks about first causes.

If you're interested, I've done a little work on my blog. Click on the link in my sig, and look for the first post in the counter-apologetics section 'In The Beginning'.

*Fallacy of composition, fallacy of equivocation, appeal to intuition, fallacy of bare assertion (twice; both premises of the Kalam in it's simplest form commit the same fallacy. It's even worse when the argument is extended to book length), to name but a few of the egregious fallacies Craig makes in

BrachioPEP said:

I personally think that semantics are being used in the KCA.

Click to expand...

I felt compelled to address this in isolation, because it betrays a quite deep misunderstanding of something critical, and it's one of my oldest pet peeves.


You can't use semantics in an argument of this nature. To think otherwise is to misunderstand what semantics is and how it works. In particular, people seem to think that semantics is a problem. It isn't.

Let's start with what semantics is. Semantics is about what we mean when we say a thing. In fact, it's one of the most important disciplines in philosophy, particularly in science. Semantics is a discipline aimed at removing ambiguity by ensuring that all potentially ambiguous terms, especially where a vernacular term is being co-opted for purpose, have clear definitions so that when I say something, you understand it, and so on.

Most often, the semantic portion of any tract will take the form of a glossary of terms, so that it's clear what the author is saying.

Now, there are situations in which semantics can be a problem, but it's very specific. If, for example, an argument on any topic devolves into who's right based on some definition of a word, it tends to get bogged down there. This is the time to shout 'that's just semantics!'

However, there's an important counter to that. Let's set up a hypothetical that never happens (yeah, right; it happens all the time):

I'm in a debate with somebody about evolutionary theory, and specifically macroevolution. I detail observed instances of macroevolution in the literature. My opponent comes back with, "yeah, but you can't show me a dog giving birth to a cat". I correctly point out that that's not what macroevolution means, and that macroevolution means variation in frequencies of alleles at or above species level. He comes back with "that's just semantics!" which is a true statement and entirely justified. What's not justified is dismissing what I've said because we disagree on the definitions, not least because those definitions are the beating heart of the theory that details macroevolution. If that's not how you're defining macroevolution, then you're not talking about any feature of evolutionary theory. My argument is entirely semantic at this point, and entirely justified, and entirely correct. I have employed a semantic argument in debate and the simple fact is that the semantics doesn't make my argument weak, it makes it strong.

Dismissing an argument on the basis of semantics isn't something we should glibly do. If the entire argument is about whose preferred definition of a word is better, that's a problem, but it isn't with semantics, it's with the arguer's failure to understand the role of semantics.

BrachioPEP said:

Premise one of WLC’s KCA may seem or even be a slight of hand, but you can’t just dismiss it and expect to be seriously heard.

Click to expand...

It's not even sleight of hand. Premise one is quite simply a factually incorrect blind assertion that bears no resemblance to reality. it is false that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Bell Inequality violations comprehensively demolish the notion, as do virtual particles and, once again, special relativity.

The only word in the Kalam that bears any resemblance to anything real is 'therefore'. Everything that precedes or follows it is arse-gravy.

My apologies for absence (e.g. as a mod). I have no excuse.

Example one.

I was born deaf, had operations from aged 4 to correct it, it deteriorated over the years and I had further operations. Recently, I have been almost entirely deaf in one ear for a couple of years and so I went to see an ENT specialist about my almost deaf ear.

The result was that no deafness or problem could be detected.

This guy was a specialist in this precise field. He's dealt with thousands of people.
I know very little about medicine or ENT.

Who is right?


Example two.


99.9% of the world’s scientists agree that climate change is a real thing and a similarly high proportion of research says the same as opposed to not.

But I recently spoke to a guy called Callum on a group, who said a friend of his said that climate change was not real.

So, I guess there really are two sides to every story.

Example three.

Worker walks into company store and asks for a replacement O ring. Stores staff looks and finds that there is no stock but one will arrive tomorrow. Workman spots one on the shelf. Stores staff says that everything is now digital and manual things have been superseded and any crossover or interference will seriously mess up the system.

Who was right?



In all these cases, BOTH sides were right from their perspective, they just failed to get the other perspective or missed the point. E.g.

Why do ships float?

Answer one: Because if they sank, they wouldn’t be very useful, based on the definition of a ship.

Answer two: Explanation of why they float and don’t sink. More of a, ‘how’ response.


WLC has published a book on the KCA. It will go down as his legacy. It was his PhD thesis, accepted as sound enough to earn him his doctorate. His PhD (and his theology PhD) is no doubt available to peruse and a PhD can always be retracted if found to be too poor or involves poor or deceptive research or was biasedly supported by the thesis monitor. In fact his other PhD follows the same lines (on the existence of Jesus) and could be challenged on a similar basis. He discusses and debates it regularly in front of people and puts it on Youtube. He debates with critical peer philosophers who somehow fail to grasp the very quick, simple gottcha that you appear to present. I’m wondering what I am missing or if you are disguising as a far more intellectual force than all those that went before. I am wondering what you think about the abysmal performance of peers to fail to spot your simple rebuttal.

My explanation (of it being semantics) is just that, but semantics on the issue, not a word. The debate stage has a different purpose to a written explanation or response and allows for semantics and personality and side stepping and dubious other sleight of hand manoeuvres.

I think I know what the response to your claimed rebuttal would be and it would involve the same sort of attempt by creationists who reject and intermediate forms until all intermediate forms between all other intermediate forms ad infinitum are provided.

I can point you to a recent one on one, friendly discussion on the KCA which involves WLC where you can see how he operates if required. It is not a debate, seeks no point scoring, merely trying to get to his argument.

BrachioPEP said:

It was his PhD thesis, accepted as sound enough to earn him his doctorate. His PhD (and his theology PhD) is no doubt available to peruse and a PhD can always be retracted if found to be too poor or involves poor or deceptive research or was biasedly supported by the thesis monitor.

Click to expand...

I don't believe this is a very accurate way of representing it.

Theology degrees are very different in most respects from even the other humanities, and divinity schools have massively different criteria than standard secular academic institutions, not least because they're actively training their students to be ordained and serve as clergy. A good example here would be marking criteria and boards responsible for those criteria are often part of the institution itself. The academic atmosphere is substantively different to the expectations of other programs. Theology degrees are hardly held in high regard, even among the humanities.

• Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

The first question that immediately springs to mind is what does 'begin to exist' mean? It's such clunky wording, and so obviously intentionally clunky.

For example, if I take a piece of wood and fashion it into a chair, does the chair then 'begin to exist' at a certain point in the process?

Or should we not recognize that the chair is just an assemblage of things (wood) that already existed, and all we really did was rearrange those already existing things?

So what things specifically are we talking about here?

Even setting that aside, there's the much more destructive problem of the hasty generalization which forms the main thrust of this argument. Even if we could observe and record a cause producing the beginning of existence of every single atom within the universe, that cannot hope to tell us whether it's true of the universe itself. It's actually exceedingly poor reasoning effectively equivalent to saying that 'everything in this box is red, therefore the box is red too'. That's just not a valid conclusion we can arrive at from the premise.

Perhaps Craig is a big fish in theologian circles, but it's not the 12th century anymore. His arguments are not well conceived and don't stand up to scrutiny, whether that be through formal logic (philosophy), or with respect to empirical evidence (science).

I'll bet you that Craig's name is forgotten within a generation of his death.

BrachioPEP said:

My apologies for absence (e.g. as a mod). I have no excuse.

Example one.

I was born deaf, had operations from aged 4 to correct it, it deteriorated over the years and I had further operations. Recently, I have been almost entirely deaf in one ear for a couple of years and so I went to see an ENT specialist about my almost deaf ear.

The result was that no deafness or problem could be detected.

This guy was a specialist in this precise field. He's dealt with thousands of people.
I know very little about medicine or ENT.

Who is right?

Click to expand...

That's the wrong kind of question. The expert is right, but that doesn't explain your deafness, which is real.

Here's the thing; did the specialist actually say 'you're not deaf'? I doubt it. Clearly you can't hear anything in that ear, which is a true story. Equally clearly, the expert can find no physiological reason within his expertise that explains it, which is also a true story.

What this tells me is that the problem is almost certainly elsewhere. There's an issue with medicine the way it's practiced in the real world, known as 'specialismitis'. it's a pretty common phenomenon that isn't restricted to medicine, but finds its most obvious manifestation there. An ENT special will look at the things he's an expert in. My recommendation would be to seek a referral to a neurologist.

BrachioPEP said:

Example two.


99.9% of the world’s scientists agree that climate change is a real thing and a similarly high proportion of research says the same as opposed to not.

But I recently spoke to a guy called Callum on a group, who said a friend of his said that climate change was not real.

So, I guess there really are two sides to every story.

Click to expand...

That's not two sides to a story, it's two different stories.

The first is that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing (I have a nice piece on the blog talking about the physics of climate and energy budgets, if you're interested). What the world's scientists have to say about it is irrelevant, because it isn't a matter of opinion, scientific or otherwise. What matters is what the data say, and that's what the statement about 99.9% of the world's scientists is about (though I'm pretty confident that the figure isn't that high).

The second is that Callum's purported friend has an opinion. Based on what, we have no insight into. Is he a climate scientist? Would it matter if he was? No, because it isn't a matter of opinion. The ONLY valid authorities on any scientific topic are the data.

BrachioPEP said:

Example three.

Worker walks into company store and asks for a replacement O ring. Stores staff looks and finds that there is no stock but one will arrive tomorrow. Workman spots one on the shelf. Stores staff says that everything is now digital and manual things have been superseded and any crossover or interference will seriously mess up the system.

Who was right?

Click to expand...

Both were right, although I'd say the customer was more right in this instance, for the simple reason that serving the customer should always be the first priority, and any problems arising from providing good customer service are not the customer's problem. Were I the manager, I'd be scheduling some customer service training for the member of staff (actually, I'd deliver the training myself, because I have a pretty broad experience of delivering training in this very area). To my mind, what the member of staff was saying is that serving him would generate more work than the member of staff was willing to put up with.

That said, from an operational perspective, the member of staff was correct. Maybe they've been told not to do things that generate extra work. No system, however, can be so messed up by such an event that it isn't incumbent on the business to do business, and this is the sort of thing that can really damage a business, whether the business owners know that or not.

BrachioPEP said:

WLC has published a book on the KCA. It will go down as his legacy. It was his PhD thesis, accepted as sound enough to earn him his doctorate. His PhD (and his theology PhD) is no doubt available to peruse and a PhD can always be retracted if found to be too poor or involves poor or deceptive research or was biasedly supported by the thesis monitor. In fact his other PhD follows the same lines (on the existence of Jesus) and could be challenged on a similar basis. He discusses and debates it regularly in front of people and puts it on Youtube. He debates with critical peer philosophers who somehow fail to grasp the very quick, simple gottcha that you appear to present. I’m wondering what I am missing or if you are disguising as a far more intellectual force than all those that went before. I am wondering what you think about the abysmal performance of peers to fail to spot your simple rebuttal.

Click to expand...

This entire paragraph is argumentum ad verecundiam elevated to an art form. All you've said there is that he's an expert. He's an expert in gulling the credulous, and in making people think that syllogisms are these magical entities that can do all your logical heavy lifting. I use syllogisms, too, but I use them as a teaching tool, which is pretty much the only time teyr

Thing is, he HAS spotted the simple rebuttal, because I'm not the only one to have delivered it. That tells us the key thing you need to know about Craig: he's a liar.

it's also worth noting that he's one of the world's premier science-deniers, despite the fact that he leans on science that he thinks supports his guff extremely heavily, in a beautiful and long-running iteration of the fallacy of stolen concept. He massively misrepresents science and, better yet, is on record as saying that science SHOULD be rejected if it doesn't fit your faith. He only accepts the science he does because he's wrong or lying about it. The most telling thing he's ever said, and this should give you serious pause, is this: Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter.

That alone is sufficient to dismiss anything he says about reality. That is the admission that, to him, science is nothing more than a branch of apologetics.

BrachioPEP said:

My explanation (of it being semantics) is just that, but semantics on the issue, not a word. The debate stage has a different purpose to a written explanation or response and allows for semantics and personality and side stepping and dubious other sleight of hand manoeuvres.

Click to expand...

That tells me you didn't actually pay any attention to what I said there. There is no presentation of the Kalam to which an accusation of semantics can be applied. You don't understand semantics. That's not a criticism. I don't understand shitloads of things.

BrachioPEP said:

I think I know what the response to your claimed rebuttal would be and it would involve the same sort of attempt by creationists who reject and intermediate forms until all intermediate forms between all other intermediate forms ad infinitum are provided.

Click to expand...

I know what his response would be.

BrachioPEP said:

I can point you to a recent one on one, friendly discussion on the KCA which involves WLC where you can see how he operates if required. It is not a debate, seeks no point scoring, merely trying to get to his argument.

Click to expand...

That's OK. I'm fairly confident that I know more about how Craig operates than he does, for several reasons. My experience of Craig is enormous.

When I first started getting interested in the horrendous ways that religious apologists misrepresent science, the vast majority of the field were misrepresenting evolution. I actually had to do some serious learning on evolution just to participate, with the exception of Kalamity Kraig and his dreck. My interest was always cosmology and theoretical physics, but few apologists were willing to tackle it. I made him my mission, and often my bitch.

Craig is a competent apologist, and world-class guller of the gullible, but he isn't a match for somebody who knows where all the cracks in his schtick are, and I know them better than I know my own children.

He's an inveterate liar, and in fact probably the most competent liar in apologetics, because his ability with faux sincerity is probably his second-greatest skill after timekeeping. The problem is that, because of my professional history, I'm an expert reader of people, and I can see his tells. Also, I know a good deal more than he does about any of the topics he addresses.

Honestly, there are few people more deserving of loathing in the world. He's right up there with Trump, and he's probably done more damage.

Sparhafoc said:

I don't believe this is a very accurate way of representing it.

Theology degrees are very different in most respects from even the other humanities, and divinity schools have massively different criteria than standard secular academic institutions, not least because they're actively training their students to be ordained and serve as clergy. A good example here would be marking criteria and boards responsible for those criteria are often part of the institution itself. The academic atmosphere is substantively different to the expectations of other programs. Theology degrees are hardly held in high regard, even among the humanities.

Click to expand...

Let's face it, getting a degree in theology isn't hard. Theology is, for the most part, making shit up about made-up shit.

That's not to say that there are no respectable academics in theology, but few of them are believers. None of the respectable ones actually engage in making shit up about made-up shit, they learn about the made-up shit of the past to learn about it, mostly with a view to working out how people think and why.

The evil part of me wants to assess Craig's doctorate as being worth little more than Kent Hovind's.

Sparhafoc said:

• Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

The first question that immediately springs to mind is what does 'begin to exist' mean? It's such clunky wording, and so obviously intentionally clunky.

For example, if I take a piece of wood and fashion it into a chair, does the chair then 'begin to exist' at a certain point in the process?

Or should we not recognize that the chair is just an assemblage of things (wood) that already existed, and all we really did was rearrange those already existing things?

So what things specifically are we talking about here?

Even setting that aside, there's the much more destructive problem of the hasty generalization which forms the main thrust of this argument. Even if we could observe and record a cause producing the beginning of existence of every single atom within the universe, that cannot hope to tell us whether it's true of the universe itself. It's actually exceedingly poor reasoning effectively equivalent to saying that 'everything in this box is red, therefore the box is red too'. That's just not a valid conclusion we can arrive at from the premise.

Perhaps Craig is a big fish in theologian circles, but it's not the 12th century anymore. His arguments are not well conceived and don't stand up to scrutiny, whether that be through formal logic (philosophy), or with respect to empirical evidence (science).

I'll bet you that Craig's name is forgotten within a generation of his death.

Click to expand...

Indeed, and a lovely exposition of a couple of those fallacies I highlighted. The fallacy of equivocation, in switching between ex materia and ex nihilo between the premises, and the fallacy of composition overall.

Nicely expressed.

Sparhafoc said:

I don't believe this is a very accurate way of representing it.

Theology degrees are very different in most respects from even the other humanities, and divinity schools have massively different criteria than standard secular academic institutions, not least because they're actively training their students to be ordained and serve as clergy. A good example here would be marking criteria and boards responsible for those criteria are often part of the institution itself. The academic atmosphere is substantively different to the expectations of other programs. Theology degrees are hardly held in high regard, even among the humanities.

Click to expand...

You are totally right there, yet there it is in peer review, and there he remains, decades on, debating his peers, successfully in almost all cases on the topic. Whilst not relevant (what I or anyone believes), I do not buy the argumenmt at all, and I know why. But explaining why and dealing with responses or getting confirmation that he accepts he is wrong or the argument is fatally or even mildly flawed would be beyond my (and seemingly anyone's) capacity, to date. Unless youb have a debate or correspondence that shows this. You could, I suppose counter this with flat earthers being equally adamant.

hackenslash said:

Let's face it, getting a degree in theology isn't hard. Theology is, for the most part, making shit up about made-up shit.

Click to expand...

Well, you do have to make up the right shit about made up shit; it's not so long ago that making up the wrong shit would have netted some loving attention from Church torturers, and I am sure that instinct sits just below the surface even in the gentlest appearing fundamentalist.

But yeah, it's basically the worst kind of course: learn this, repeat accurately, pass.

hackenslash said:

That's not to say that there are no respectable academics in theology, but few of them are believers. None of the respectable ones actually engage in making shit up about made-up shit, they learn about the made-up shit of the past to learn about it, mostly with a view to working out how people think and why.

Click to expand...

I rarely actually feel disdain towards any area of study, and that includes theology. I found anthropology of religion classes quite enlightening, I happily read religious texts or the work of past theologians. But if I were frank, then I can't say I hold much theology in high regard - at best it might train some basic academic skills like textual analysis and hermeneutics that have a value in other areas of discovery, such as history. There's just a huge gulf of academic credibility between, say, religious studies which teaches about religious belief, and theology that teaches what to believe.

hackenslash said:

The evil part of me wants to assess Craig's doctorate as being worth little more than Kent Hovind's.

Click to expand...

Now, I do genuinely believe that Craig's thesis was unarguably superior to Hovind's, but then Craig probably didn't start with 'Hi, my name's William, but you can call me Bill!'

Hovind's thesis 'passed' too! Bit problematic if the idea is that theses production itself is suggestive of legitimacy.

Tee hee

Introduction

Hello, my name is Kent Hovind. I am a creation/science evangelist. I live in Pensacola, Florida. I have been a high school science teacher since 1976. I've been very active in the creation/evolution controversy for quite some time.

Click to expand...