A response to William Lane Craig's thirty pages of nothing new

William Lane Craig has just published Five Arguments for God, which will no doubt impress his loyally unquestioning followers to the same degree that his earlier iterations of the same tired old arguments seem to have done.
I was alerted to the document’s existence by one such, who wowed on Twitter that it contained 30 whole pages! Formidable indeed. I’m not as clever as Dr Craig (I wouldn’t be an atheist if I were, surely) so I might not be able to match his score (and ten). Theist readers, some of whom might even have read Dr Craig’s piece, may as well start proclaiming their triumphant hero’s victory straight away.

William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. Such an august title promises erudition and wisdom of inarguable proportions; I may as well give up now. But let’s see what’s on offer.
Overall the essay turns out to be little more than a sustained strawman attack on Richard Dawkins, although Daniel Dennett receives a share of peevish misrepresentation too. Craig’s attempted criticism of Dennett is particularly duplicitous, and as such must be aimed primarily at readers who already support Craig, to bolster their extant impression that he can defeat the arguments of those awful ‘New Atheists’. Craig appears unconcerned that informed readers will spot the cynical deception at once. Cheers and whoops from his adoring home crowd are all he’s after.
The gymnastics around truth begin in the first paragraph on the first page. Craig implies that, when critics point out the harmful effects of religious belief upon society, they are thus attempting to argue against the truth value of religious dogmas. On the contrary, as Craig well knows, such commentators are exploring the potential damage to society resulting from belief in patently false assertions. Harmful effects of religious observance are not being held up as refutations of self-evidently false religious ‘truths’.
Craig is right insofar as his arguments for the existence of God are passé. Contrary to his next claim, however, those old arguments do still merit refutation lest they be assumed (by the ignorant) to have proved their case by default. That said, the arguments have such little merit that there is practically nothing there to refute.

After a couple of paragraphs recounting a thirty-year-old piece in Time magazine heralding a major comeback by God, Craig jumps onto his well-worn soapbox of logical ‘proofs’ with numbered steps. He outlines his case thus: each premise in an argument need not be proven true in order for the proof to work. Each premise need only, he claims, be more plausibly true than false, for the argument to be a ‘good’ argument.

Well that’s rubbish for a start. Every time we allow the grey area of mere plausibility to supplant demonstrable truth, we introduce a degree of uncertainty into our argument. The more merely ‘plausible’ steps we have, the more this uncertainty is multiplied as we proceed through the series of steps. So what do we end up proving, if our premises are not reliable to start with? Nothing worthwhile, if truth be the object of the exercise. If, on the other hand, pseudo-intellectual exhibitionism for the delight of admiring fans is what we’re after, this kind of stuff will serve quite nicely.

Cosmological Argument from Contingency

We have all heard Dr Craig trot out his favourite arguments time and again. This time he departs slightly from his yellowed script, opening with the so-called Cosmological Argument from Contingency. It runs like this.

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1, 3).
5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is God (from 2, 4).

Premise 1 is trivially true, although it is worth adding that we can’t always know which of its two categories any given entity might fall into. In some cases the classification is easy. The mug of tea in front of me has a chain of explanatory causes ending in its delivery to my desk a short time ago by my daughter. But what of an imaginary number, such as i, the square root of -1? Has it always existed by necessity, or was it called into existence by an otherwise unfillable gap in a human-made mathematical proof? As far as the universe is concerned, we have no information about its cause that could help us categorise it one way or the other. It may have an external cause, about which we know absolutely nothing (and neither does Dr Craig, whether or not he is honest enough to admit it) or it may be necessary for some equally unknown reason.

Premise 2 is a bald assertion with no rational justification whatsoever. I could just as well say, if the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is the Great Green Arkleseizure, as imagined by the great Douglas Adams. I am reminded of a video clip I saw recently, of Dr Craig dismissing a similar candidate for the universal cause, the wonderful Flying Spaghetti Monster. The FSM, he argued, cannot be the cause of the universe because it is a material object extended in space and time within the universe. What a shame he did not realise that FSM adherents are not referring to a physical FSM at all, but to the non-physical, immaterial, transcendent, timeless FSM that exists eternally outside the universe.

Recognising that premise 2 is unsupportable, Craig attempts to create a diversion. His assertion A, attributed to a strawman atheist, that if atheism be true then the universe has no explanation, is extremely silly. To begin with, atheism is a lack of religious belief. Even if there were evidence for the existence of a god or gods, it would be possible to ignore it (or be ignorant of it) and remain an atheist. But now Craig is substituting the word atheism for ‘actual non-existence of a god’. Craig spent the first of his thirty pages making a distinction between things that are true, and things that we know are true. It seems ironic, then, that he now seeks to equate atheism with reality. His next trick is to reverse his strawman assertion, creating a false dichotomy. He asserts that if the universe has an explanation then atheism must be untrue, i.e. God must exist. But this is nonsense. If the universe does have a cause, the one fact we can be certain of is that we know absolutely nothing about that cause. Even given that the cause exists or existed, there is nothing to suggest that it is or was God.

Premise 3 is of course trivially true. No, I don’t mean that the existence of the universe is a trivial matter, at least not from my perspective. I mean that the premise is obviously true to the point that it need hardly be stated. All black and white cows have at least two colours. All men are male.

Conclusion 4 is trivially true because it is defined as true by premise 1. It takes the argument no further forward. Conclusion 5, however, is baseless, because it depends on the ludicrous premise 2. So much for the Cosmological Argument from Contingency, and for the list of ‘philosophers’ (in fact known religious apologists) whom Craig cites as its defenders.

Kalam Cosmological Argument

Craig now moves on to his oldest favourite, the Kalam Cosmological Argument. This is almost identical to the contingency argument dealt with above. It claims to prove, trivially, that the universe must have a cause, but it says nothing at all about the nature of that cause. It is at this point that Craig misrepresents Dennett, twisting his words beyond recognition. In fact, on page 185 of Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett suggests that the universe ‘created itself out of something that is well nigh indistinguishable from nothing at all’. It’s clear that Dennett is referring to the singularity that gave rise to the Big Bang, which is believed to have contained all the universe’s matter and energy in a dimensionless point of infinite density. What caused the unpacking of that singularity we do not know, any more than we know what causes a particular uranium nucleus to decay at a particular moment, and Dennett does not claim to know either. Craig, however, claims to know a great deal about the cause. Believing (or expecting his audience to believe) that he has refuted Dennett, Craig goes on thus:

‘Dennett’s view is thus logically incoherent. The cause of the universe must therefore be a transcendent cause beyond the universe.’

What? How is this anything other than a blatant non-sequitur? We have no idea how the singularity behaved prior to the Big Bang, or what may have affected it, internally or externally. No idea at all. There is nothing on which to base claims about transcendent anything. As usual, Craig is bending the argument toward his preconception of a personal god.

Following his old script, within three paragraphs Craig gets from ‘The universe had a cause’ to a ‘personal, timeless, transcendent being’. Particularly rich is his conclusion that the ‘personhood of the first cause of the universe is implied by its timelessness and immateriality’. Yeah, right. We all know people who are timeless and immaterial, don’t we. Both those qualities just have ‘person’ written all over them. I hesitate to resort to such sarcasm, but this really is the most transparent gibberish, delivered with the full authority of the Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. It is hardly surprising that in his next sentence Craig asserts that minds are immaterial, and therefore the cause of the universe must be a mind without a body. Dr Craig, when you show me someone who can think without a brain, I will take your assertion of the immaterial nature of mind seriously.

Craig continues to act as though the three brief sentences of his cosmological argument had proved his timeless, spaceless, personal creator. Moreover, he claims, blatantly and falsely, that Richard Dawkins accepts the same silly ‘conclusions’ of the cosmological argument. Quoting a passage from Dawkins, Craig dramatically appears incredulous that Dawkins accepts those conclusions. But of course Dawkins accepts no such thing. Even out of context, the quoted passage makes Dawkins’s point crystal clear. He is simply saying that, even if the universe did have a cause, we can infer nothing whatsoever about that cause from the mere supposition of its existence. Dr Craig, your misrepresentation of Professor Dawkins is intellectually dishonest and morally reprehensible. (More about morality in the next section.) Before leaving the cosmological argument, Craig attempts one further sideswipe at Dawkins, asserting that ‘there can be no physical cause of any sort of the Big Bang singularity.’ How on Earth does he know that? Asserting that the cause must therefore be – yes, you’ve guessed – his personal, transcendent, etc., he then pretends that it is only the name God that Dawkins objects to. Again this is wilfully misleading and highly misrepresentative of what Dawkins actually said. Craig could not care less about the transparent fraudulence of his position. Detection by rationalists does not deter him in the slightest, so long as he continues to hold sway over his faithful flock, awed as they are by this latest in a long line of watertight rebuttals of specious atheist propaganda.

Moral Argument

This is another of Craig’s old favourites. First he explains the distinction between ‘right’ and ‘good’, before going on to quote the three succinct steps of the proof:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Before tackling premise 1 we must confront premise 2, since premise 2 appears within premise 1. Do objective moral values exist? That is to say, are there moral truths which are independent of what people might think? Obviously we cannot know, because the only means of experiencing any candidate for a moral ‘truth’ is to think about it. We have to use our minds so we cannot examine moral claims that are external to our minds. Therefore premise 2 is baseless. But is premise 2 even plausible? Let’s put it to the test. Recently I heard a podcast in which a religious apologist defended the moral argument by stating that it is wrong to torture a child. That wrongness, he said, is universal and unalterable, regardless of personal opinion. If he is right, then I must admit to having transgressed unalterable moral rules, for I have tortured my defenceless, screaming eight-year-old daughter, forcibly restraining her as a nurse stitched together the torn triangular flaps of her recently injured chin. Light anaesthaesia had been administered but my daughter, no doubt having inherited her mother’s cast iron will power, simply would not be sedated. I have no doubt that the procedure caused her immense pain and anguish at the time, but after accidentally falling and splitting her chin she was in no mood for calm reasoning. (Quick stitching was necessary, the doctor said, to avoid subsequent unsightly scarring, and I’m glad to report, three years on, that the nurse did an excellent job.)

There is no evidence whatsoever that absolute moral values, external to minds, exist. When deciding whether or not to subject someone to pain and anguish, we can imagine the situation from their point of view, and act accordingly. That is the basis of the so-called golden rule – act toward others in a way that you would have others act unto you. No overarching authority is required for this simple principle to be upheld by reasonable people. It’s worth commenting, however, that plenty of perfectly atrocious acts have been committed solely on God’s allegedly delegated authority. Apologists such as Craig routinely concede that theists are not necessarily any more moral than atheists, thinking that such a concession exempts them from having to explain the buckets of blood that have stained theistic hands down the centuries. No such exemption has been or will be granted. Those who defend religious belief must justify the filthy brutality carried out daily, solely on account of their faith, by God’s faithful.

Craig’s suggestion – that Richard Dawkins accepts the validity of the moral argument – is false and therefore does not deserve a response.

Craig’s next banana skin comprises a complete misunderstanding of the Euthyphro Dilemma, which says: either good and bad exist because God decreed them (in which case it is meaningless to say that God is good, because there exists no higher standard to which God must answer), or God’s actions are good, rather than bad, independently of the mere fact that he performed them (in which case goodness and badness do not need God in order to exist). Craig asserts that we can escape from the dilemma by taking a third route, i.e. that God wills something because he is good. I am perfectly certain that the Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California is fully aware that his ‘third route’ is identical to the second choice of the Euthyphro dilemma. If it is meaningful to say that God is good rather than bad, then goodness and badness are logically anterior to God. Craig attempts to build upon his logical fallacy to perform a superficially impressive mirror trick. God, he says, has a morally good character, which makes him good. (Presumably his omnipotence is insufficiently potent to overcome the constraints of his character, should he choose so to do.) Guided by that good character he then decrees what is right and what is wrong. It is transparently obvious that this catapults us straight back into Euthyphro’s Dilemma: against what standard is the ‘goodness’ of God’s moral character judged, if it be anterior to any of his actions or decrees, and he himself is the absolute standard of everything? Really, anyone persuaded by Craig’s verbal prestidigitation is either too lazy or too brainless to think the matter through. I do not think for one moment that Craig himself is either lazy or brainless. Let’s use the last two premises to create a neat logical proof.

1. Anyone seriously propounding the moral argument is lazy, brainless or seeking wilfully to mislead their audience.
2. Articulate proponents of the moral argument are neither lazy nor brainless.
3. Therefore….

Argument from Fine Tuning

Craig cites the apparently fine-tuned nature of the physical constants, together with evidence that if any one of those constants were even slightly different then the development of life would be impossible. He spends several paragraphs distinguishing ‘fine-tuned’ from ‘designed’, obviously in an attempt to deflect the charge of circular reasoning. But we do not need to apply such a charge in order to demonstrate the speciousness of the fine tuning argument; it has more holes than an Emmental cheese. Here is the argument:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

It is immediately obvious that premise 1 is a false trichotomy. We know exactly nothing of how the physical constants came to have their values. For all we know, there may be no other possible values, or there may indeed by so incredibly many universes that a tiny proportion of them happen to be life-supporting. Craig invokes personal incredulity, claiming that no-one can grasp the stupendous improbabilities involved. But he fails to apply that same objection to the stupendous numbers of conceivably possible universes. If we cannot grasp one big number, neither can we grasp the other, so it is not reasonable to disallow one ungraspable number (the improbability of a chance occurrence of the right physical constants) by comparing it with another ungraspable number (the number of potential universes). The mere fact that we are here considering the question proves that our universe is able to support life. It serves no purpose to comment upon the improbability of what we in fact see. When the lottery numbers are drawn, perhaps the organisers should decline to pay the winner, reasoning thus: “This particular unique combination of balls is far less probable than the alternative, i.e. not getting that particular combination, so its occurrence cannot be due to chance. It must be due to design, so you have won unfairly.”

Besides, if the universe is designed, what is the purpose of designing a knife-edge existence for life? Why did God restrict the physical constants to such narrow values? Is there something inherently good about knife-edges? If he is using such an esoteric parlour trick to advertise his existence, then what of the millions who lived and died before science advanced to the point where his handiwork may be detected?

The breathtaking arrogance of Craig’s know-all position is encapsulated in the following sentence: ‘It follows [from the fine-tuning argument] that the fine-tuning is therefore due to design unless the design hypothesis can be shown to be even more implausible than its competitors.’ See how Craig assumes that the ‘competitors’, together with the design alternative, constitute all the possibilities that there are. Nowhere does he acknowledge how vanishingly little we (including he) actually know about the origins of the universe. Nowhere does he admit of possibilities that we (including he) have not even begun to imagine. How boringly, parochially, complacently typical of the theist stance.

Craig quotes others who accuse atheists of unreasonably rejecting the God hypothesis on account of an irrational desire to maintain a different world view. This is simply putting the cart before the horse. There is no reason at all to assert God without evidence, and none of Dr Craig’s arguments provides the slightest evidence in God’s favour. I shall not allow Craig to get away with assuming God and challenging others to disprove him, and then pretending that God wins by default. That is all he is doing.

Several pages follow, misdefining the word ‘simple’ in a lame attempt to claim that God is a simple explanation for the universe. Starting from one’s preferred conclusion, and trying to bludgeon words into fitting it, is not admissible to rational inquiry.

Ontological Argument

The popular version of this ‘argument’ involves imagining a perfect being, and then asserting that its perfection would be greater if it existed than if it did not. From that, proponents claim, it follows that if God can be imagined, then he must exist. This amounts to no more than a claim that imagining something makes it real, a notion popular in early childhood but out of which most of us have grown before reaching double figures. Doubtless aware of this, Craig seeks to obscure the staggeringly weak nature of the argument by dressing it up in some rags borrowed from Alvin Plantinga. The thinly-veiled version thus espoused postulates a gigantic number of possible worlds, each described by a series of logical statements. In some of those imagined worlds, the argument goes, there will exist a maximally perfect being, with (conveniently) a set of attributes that just happen to match those of God. From that, we are expected to accept that the imagined existence of a maximally perfect being in some imaginary world forces the actual existence of a maximally perfect being in all possible worlds. That illegal move, completely unsupported by logic or common sense, occurs between steps 2 and 3 of the following silly word game:

1. It is possible that a maximally great being exists.
2. If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.
3. If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.
4. If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.
5. If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.
6. Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

Craig’s essay discusses only premise 1, falling silent on the other premises, most notably on the conjuring trick that takes place between steps 2 and 3. Without an evidence-based explanation of why an imaginary being in some imagined worlds can give rise to such an imaginary being in every possible world, including worlds whose descriptions explicitly state that no such being exists, the argument is worthless to anyone prepared to give it a moment’s thought. Nothing in Plantinga’s argument renders it any more worthy of attention than the semi-coherent ramblings of his that I’ve endured on YouTube.

So, nothing new in Craig’s thirty pages.