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Dr. William Lane Craig

arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
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.
The thing you need to realise about peer-review is that it isn't valuable in and of itself. Talking about peer-review in this context is just another way of gulling the gullible. Peer review has no value if all your peers are... I'll leave it there, just to be charitable.

Regardless of what his peers have said, the people who understand his bullshit and whose work has been peer-reviewed by experts with expertise that isn't worthless have reviewed it and found it to be complete and utter bullshit.

And no, nobody will ever convince him that his arguments are flawed in any way, because he doesn't care. being right isn't something that interests him. He wants your money, and that's it.

You've been conned. I get it. You don't want to let go of the con. People rarely do. There's an old aphorism that it's much easier to con people than to convince them they've been conned.

That's OK, though. You've come to the right place to have the con exposed, but you have to open your mind to it. Craig won't, but you can be more intellectually honest than him, and I'd bet you are, because there are few people alive more dishonest.
 
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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!' :D
Indeed. I was being slightly hyperbolic for comedic effect. Craig's dissertation was far superior, and precisely as worthless.
Hovind's thesis 'passed' too! Bit problematic if the idea is that theses production itself is suggestive of legitimacy.
Yep. There's peer-review for you. of no value or utility when your peers are as dumb as you are.
 
arg-fallbackName="We are Borg"/>
Hovind’s thesis is not what you think it is, he wrote it after he became aware that he needed one to even get a PhD. Also he had no clue how to write one and that is apparent how its written. BrachioPEP knows more about it.
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Hovind’s thesis is not what you think it is, he wrote it after he became aware that he needed one to even get a PhD. Also he had no clue how to write one and that is apparent how its written. BrachioPEP knows more about it.
That's pretty much the point. You can't do a genuine accredited doctorate outside a diploma mill and not know how to write a proper academic paper, whether it be an essay, a thesis or a dissertation.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Hovind’s thesis is not what you think it is, he wrote it after he became aware that he needed one to even get a PhD. Also he had no clue how to write one and that is apparent how its written. BrachioPEP knows more about it.

I followed the story throughout, and enjoyed every minute of it.

People like Hovind and Harun Yahya just crop up in all the wrong places - places they have no reason to be, and it's hilarious how widely despised they are for it outside of their manicured circles. Thais are infallibly non-confontational, particularly in what they call 'hi so' circles, but I've met Thai professors who have an impressive range of epithets for Adnan Oktar, Ken Ham and the likes.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Who is Harun Yahya?

It's the pseudonym of Adnan Oktar, who's a Turkish Muslim evangelist / con artist of quite magnificent scope!

I can't even begin to list ALL the loony escapades here, like having these beautiful women surround him on his tv channel all the time and read out 'news' also praising him, all in the.... name of... Allah?

But the event that brought him to the worldwide attention of university professors, particularly those in the biological sciences, was when he sent out copies of this massive (800+ pages) of high quality glossy paged book called The Atlas of Creation.


Essentially, he believed that his book was the curriculum to replace the teaching of evolution; that universities world-wide would feature his book in their curricula.

For all its production value, it might as well have been scrawled in crayon. From a biologist's perspective, it didn't even amount to a child's understanding of science. There's so much wrong with it, it's beyond description, honestly. Some of the favourites are his use of photographs of fishing lures in place of photographs of the species he's talking about (all his images are stolen off the net).

Aside from painful stomachs from all the laughing, the only thing his book provoked was a wider awareness of what modern Creationism was teaching people to dismiss science. It helped weaponize many Biologist's specialist knowledge.
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
I remember when that book hit the forum when Dick received a copy.

Those were the days. highfuckenlarious.
 
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I'd meant to add that what Dawkins actually said about debating Craig was that there was no good reason for him to do so. The simple fact is that it would look good on Craig's CV but it was a no-win for Dick. If Dawkins bested him (and I have little doubt he would), he'd be the guy who beat up on the weaker kid.

That's straight from the horse's mouth. Bear in mind that both @Sparhafoc and I were among the most active members on Dick's forum at the time. We were there when it all went down. The earlier reference to empty chairs was a direct reference to Craig's challenge, because he said he was going to do what Clint Eastwood had done and leave an empty chair on the stage to symbolise Dick's cowardice.
 
arg-fallbackName="he_who_is_nobody"/>
I'll bet you that Craig's name is forgotten within a generation of his death.
As Matt Dillahunty loves to point out, Craig is not well known in Christian circles today, so pointing out that we will forget him in a generation is not saying much. That is because his argument (KCA) is not the argument that most Christians would point to for their belief in Jesus. Most Christians in the US are not Christians for any intellectual reason.
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.
Don Corona appointed three young Justices to the bench. The damage he has done has barely started.
Who is Harun Yahya?
Harun Yahya and Craig make a bigger splash in atheist/skeptic circles than their own communities because we pass them around as oddities to gawk at.
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Counter-apologetic rubbernecking...

Not inapt, now I think about it. Their crap is usually a complete car crash.
 
arg-fallbackName="Deleted member 619"/>
Sophist is correct. From my piece on the Kalam:

There's a famous, ancient argument for the existence of god. It stems from Islamic theology, specifically the Ilm al-Kalam, or 'science of discourse'. Today, we know it simply as the Kalam Cosmological Argument, and its main modern proponent is William Lane 'Kalamity' Craig, whom we met earlier.

Craig has gone to book length in laying out this argument and justifying his premises and has, despite having had it eviscerated from every conceivable angle, continued to give voice to it in public debate. Here, in this post about beginnings and having laid out the beginnings of what it means to be a scientific skeptic, I wish to use it as an example of how not to do philosophy. One might think that I, as a non-philosopher, attacking an argument formulated at great length by somebody with a double doctorate in the discipline, am overstepping the mark, but what I'm really demonstrating is that collecting ISBN numbers is not doing philosophy. Some professional philosophers have described Craig's formulation of the Kalam as one of the most sophisticated theological arguments of the modern era. I describe it simply as sophistic.


Great minds and fools... :cool:
 
arg-fallbackName="Led Zeppelin"/>
Once a Christian rejects the Bible and accepts the false premise of an old earth, he is easily devoured.
 
arg-fallbackName="Led Zeppelin"/>
This is always the case considering Christianity hasn't met its burden of proof, even slightly.
Or it could be that God does exist and that your ideas about Christianity and burden of proof just aren't particularly useful.

I guess if I'm right we'll all know soon enough.
 
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