Craig's self-contradiction

I have been listening today to the mp3 of Craig's debate with Arif Ahmed. I wasn't surprised to hear Craig trot out his pat list of empty proofs. But he scored a peach of an own goal, more than once, in his responses to Ahmed's clear and incisive rebuttals.

As in every one of his debates, Craig 'proved' the existence of a transcendent, timeless, spaceless, personal being of unimaginable power; a being about which he claims to know a great deal. In the fifth of his 'arguments', the one he always says is not an argument at all but he gets it in anyway, he described his own directly experiential loving relationship with this being.

Later, when Ahmed challenged him to justify god's lack of intervention to mitigate atrocities such as the gruesome gassing of countless young men in the trenches of the Somme, Craig argued that we mere humans cannot know the complexities of the divine purpose, and that the suffering that goes on in this life may well be necessary to enhance the experience of the next. The own goal is this: Craig is prepared to sweep the problem of theodicy under the carpet of god's mysterious inscrutability, a most convenient hiding place for debating points you've no answer to. Yet, when it suits him, Craig goes into great detail about god's actions and rationale, creating the universe out of nothing, waiting fifteen billion years or so and then sending his only begotten son to absolve fallen man of his sins.

Dr Craig, you cannot have it both ways. If, as you say, we cannot determine god's rationale in presiding over obscene suffering on a global scale, then neither can we comment on any of his other alleged actions, such as creating the world or establishing lovingly dictatorial relationships with individuals.

At one point in the debate Craig rose in my estimation, albeit slightly. In his closing address he gave an account of his path to Christianity, a credible and genuine tale culminating in a decisive encounter with a female fellow student. Thus was Craig's position honestly displayed: he is a theist for his own private reasons, and his so-called proofs of god are nothing more than affirmations of his own faith. They prove nothing that is external to him. Those among Craig's supporters with whom I've so far been privileged to interact appear to share that position, i.e. they have already made up their minds that god exists during some prior chapter in their lives, and they now go around bolstering their confidence by trotting out 'proofs'.