I think it is commonly accepted that William Craig is one of the most educated and sophisticated Christian apologist. It is impossible to deny his intelligence and his rhetoric skills. However, I used to think that, despite his rhetoric skills, he couldn’t convince anybody of the truth of his position, except for reinforcing the beliefs which people already hold. I also thought his arguments didn’t impress anybody who is not a theist and specifically from certain Christian denominations. But, in one of our conversations with Original Position he told me:

which surprised me because Original Position is an atheist (albeit very different than the majority of the atheists), which means he must find the arguments for the existence of God not convincing (even though he defends Christian beliefs, he doesn’t think they are true).
Also, many Christians seem to take William Craig as one of their best representatives who can defend Christianity from the attacks of atheists. In my opinion, he is the only one who managed not to look silly against Christopher Hitchens, and at some moments was even outplaying him with his word play techniques.
Given all that, I decided to watch more debates with him and to identify what those rhetoric skills really are. As one blogger, whom I am following, once asked (regarding William Craig), “Why is it every time I hear this guy talk, he is invoking a fallacy?”, I was curious to find out if indeed most of his rhetorical skills actually come from successfully masking the weakness of his argument with logical fallacies. And that is what I found. After watching more than 6 hours of debates, I was able to extract the basic fallacies he uses, since he really has standard arguments which he invokes in every debate, despite the constant criticism he receives (which should, under normal circumstances, destroy those arguments).

I am sure I am not saying almost anything new for a lot of people here, but still I made a somewhat detailed analysis of one of his debates, namely the one with John Shook. I think it could be considered a good representative of the arguments he uses in other debates. You can watch the two parts here:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wf9-vwnzqOo
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVjUlSvtgtw

I am presenting the analysis in parts, since I don’t want to make this post huge.

Returning to the title of the post: what is the case for William Craig? He is a very intelligent philosopher, so he must know all the fallacies he is invoking (see below). He must be aware that he is using them… right? If he is aware, then why is he using those fallacies? Does he think that his arguments are weak and would be unconvincing without them? If that is the case, why is he a theist in the first place? Why is he presenting all those arguments, which have been completely destroyed a long time ago, with almost no adjustment? I am curious about what both theists and atheists think about this. Is Dr. Craig:

1. In a huge denial and not seeing the fallacies he is constantly invoking?
2. Aware of the fallacies and
A- Doesn’t truly believe in God but defends his existence for unknown to us reasons (e.g., thinking we’re better off with Christianity for moral reasons, even if it is false)?
B- Believes in God anyway but doesn’t have any arguments and decides to invoke fallacies in order to not appear as believing in something without any reasons to do so (being intellectually dishonest)?
3. Something else?

For those of you who are already familiar with his arguments and fallacies, feel free to skip the next few posts and just respond to my last question. I think I really need this discussion to develop an idea about people like William Craig and their belief systems. Original Position seems to be impressed by his skills; I’m wondering if anybody else is impressed as well and if so, why (namely among atheists).

The analysis follows the temporal order of the arguments, but it is not exhaustive. At some point I got tired and didn’t take notes on all of the fallacies (most of them were repeating). The non-bolded text is Craig’s arguments, whereas the bolded text is my comments and remarks.

Part 1: First speech

William Craig gives the following arguments for supernaturalism:

Argument #1: The origin of the universe points to the existence of a transcendent creator.

- The idea of an infinite past seems absurd. It seems absurd to Craig, but that doesn’t mean it really is absurd, that it is untrue. To many people the idea of a personal god seems absurd. Fallacy 1: argument from personal incredulity. It leads to contradictions. Example: what is infinity minus infinity?
- Alternative theories to the Big Bang theory have been proposed, but none of them have gained acceptance by the scientific community. – Fallacy 2: argument from authority.
- Out of nothing, nothing comes. Philosophers and scientists have criticized this as well. It is very far from obvious that it is true.

Summary:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

He goes on: The being which created the universe must be… personal. Why? Because this cause must be beyond space and time and cannot be physical or material. There are only two kinds of things that fit that description: abstract objects (e.g., numbers) or else an intelligent mind. – False choice fallacy. Why are these two things the only kinds of things that fit the description? Does he think it is necessary to give any support for that claim at all? This fallacy is in a combination with the argument from personal incredulity.
Abstract objects can’t cause anything!

Did Craig ever present an argument for why God doesn’t need an explanation for his existence? Why doesn’t he need a cause? Does he win the “First Cause” prize by default?

Argument #2: The fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life points to a designer of the cosmos.

There are only three possible explanations of this fine tuning: here, again, we are witnesses to the “false choice – argument from personal incredulity” combo.
A) Physical necessity – the constants are independent of the laws of nature
B) Chance – it’s very unlikely. Solution: Multiverse. But, there is no evidence that a world ensemble exists.
C) Design
So even if we accept that these are the only three possibilities (which is anything but obvious), this argument is still extremely fallacious. He rejects option B because he claims there is no evidence for it. And then… declares option C the winner by default, even though there is no evidence for it either. A remarkable dishonesty.

Not to mention that the idea of a fine-tuned universe itself has met huge amounts of criticism (which would render the whole argument pointless).

Argument #3: Objective moral values are plausibly grounded in God.
Naturalism has no grounds for normative action. Does he imply that naturalism necessarily suggests moral relativism? Straw man
1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist. Wrong. Absolute moral values do not exist, but objective moral values could be made conventional. Also, there are plenty of evolutionary explanations of objective moral values (like altruism, helping others, etc.)
2. Objective moral values do exist. Wrong. Just a minute earlier he had mentioned that for certain people those moral values do not exist (e.g., psychopaths)! How dishonest is that!
3. Therefore, God exists.

All the arguments presented so far were deistic, not theistic. And now, as you will see, he suddenly jump to Jesus, a very concrete God. The first three arguments cannot be used to support Jesus’ divinity, since they are compatible with all kinds of other gods.

How do we know that even if a god created the universe, he’s still around? Maybe he created the universe, set all its constants, and then disappeared? How do we know God’s gender (Craig keeps calling him “he”)? And a rarely asked but important question: How do we know that the universe wasn’t created, fine-tuned, etc. by more than one god? Maybe they were two, three, four, and collaborated. Are there any arguments to refute that?

Argument #4: The historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus imply God’s existence.

Historians have reached a consensus that he had a divine authority… Surely not as big of a consensus as he thinks. Many historians aren’t even sure that such a historical figure even existed! Plus, this is again the argument from authority.
To prove that he was divine he carried out miracles. How do we know that he really did? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If turning water into wine is an example of a miracle that proves somebody is a god, what could we say about David Copperfield?
If Jesus really rose from the dead, then we have a divine miracle in our hands. Not necessarily! Nobody can see the logical conclusion from somebody being resurrected to him being divine.

Three historical facts about Jesus:

1. On the Sunday after his crucifixion, his tomb was found empty by a group his women followers.
2. On separate occasions, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive after his death.
3. The original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus, despite having every predisposition to the contrary. (…) People were willing to die for Jesus, therefore he must have really been resurrected. How about people willing to die for Mohammad? A historian says: “…that is why I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity in any other way…” He mentions this many times in many different forms like “I cannot think of any better explanation…” For the nth time, the argument from personal incredulity.

Attempts to explain away these three facts have been rejected by contemporary scholars. Argument from authority. There is no plausible naturalistic explanation of these facts. What! There are in fact so many, I am sure even a theist can come up with at least 15.

1. There are three established facts about Jesus.
2. The hypothesis God raised Jesus from the dead is the best explanation of those facts. Best? I would say that it is the worst explanation, as far as Occam’s razor is concerned.
3. Number 2 entails that the God revealed by Jesus exists.
4. Therefore God exists.

Argument #5: You can experience God personally.

Wow. Representatives of every single religion in the world “experience” their own gods. How is that an argument for anything at all? There are so many naturalistic explanations of these religious experiences, that I don’t know how Craig can give this as an argument and not feel uncomfortable in a company of intelligent people.

Part 2: Second speech: response to John Shook

Bits and pieces of his speech:

- Dr Craig says his opponent didn’t present any arguments supporting the claim that naturalism is true. Says “Naturalism is the view that physical reality is all there is, and that there is nothing beyond the physical world.” Quotes his opponent “It is impossible to prove that nothing supernatural exists” and says “But that is what naturalism affirms!” Wrong. Naturalism simply affirms that we don’t have any evidence for the supernatural, nor any reasons to believe in it. Most naturalists adhere to that position. Again, this is straw man. He completely ignored everything his opponent had said in his first presentation of the position. Quotes some encyclopedical definition of atheism/naturalism (again, argument from authority) and claims that this is the real atheism, ignoring the fact that the majority of atheists do not adhere to that definition. Why does he ignore his opponent’s real position, but chooses to attack a position which he doesn’t hold? Is this again straw man?

- Craig goes on to mention agnosticism, completely ignoring the fact that the two concepts (atheism and agnosticism) are orthogonal to each other. Most atheists are agnostic atheists.

- Claims that showing how the arguments for the existence of God are invalid doesn’t prove God does not exist. True. But that is not what an atheist is trying to prove.

- In response to his opponent saying we shouldn’t consult mathematicians about what exists. “That surprised me, because that’s my point, that’s what I’m saying!” Except, he did use what mathematicians say as an argument for why infinity is impossible. Again, he is being very dishonest.

- A timeless person is a changeless self-conscious being who exists outside of our four dimensional space-time continuum. The fact that that being is self-conscious implies that it is not changeless!

- Objective moral values are values we can all agree on. No! They are values MOST people would agree on. And again, even if his definition of objective moral values is true, he contradicts himself, because there are no values on which every single person in the world agrees.

- If naturalism is true, there is no way to have objective moral values. What? There have been so many evolutionary explanations of morality, God isn’t the only explanation.
If you agree with me that loving a child is better than raping the child, you have to admit there is a God. What about the psychopath who would not agree with you?

- How do you explain the three historical facts about Jesus? I can’t give any better explanation than him being God. Argument from ignorance.

(regarding his opponents argument about Hindus experiencing Krishna the same way Christians experience Jesus) They have the right to believe what they experience, unless they have a reason to think he is deluded. Nobody said they don’t have the right to believe what they experience, but that their experiences have no truth validity. He did not answer his opponent’s criticism at all, completely dodging the difficult question. Why is the experience of Jesus any more valid than the experience of Krishna?

In the concluding remarks of the debate
It is silly to claim that we can’t prove the nonexistence of something. We have positive evidence that Santa Clause does not exist. The positive evidence is: we have been to the North Pole and we haven’t seen Santa Clause. Is that positive evidence? Sounds a lot more like absence of evidence (we went to the North Pole and couldn’t find evidence for Santa Clause). Does the fact that we couldn’t see him rule out the possibility that he is living there but is invisible/undetectable in any other way? How is this different from not being able to see God when we look for him? And he says this right after claiming that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. How ironic is that.

Craig is practical - "good" arguments aren't necessarily convincing arguments. His focus is on influencing people and not on being logically correct. I find this frustrating at times, and I do think he's oblivious to some of the mistakes he makes, but I think he's well aware that much of this comes down to basic assumptions that can't be reasoned away.

He focuses on psychology and not on logic, because human beings respond to psychology but not to logic.

Thanks for the write up.

I always thought that in debates such as this of a religious person versus none-religious that the reason the religious person wins is not so much the soundness of their argument but the speed at which they can shovel dirt on the other guy being faster than he can dig himself out.

In other words with time a lot of people could decimate him in a debate pointing out various fallacies and contradictions, such as you showed, but doing so in the moment is several order of magnitude harder.

tl but I did r. Good post.

Which of course does not mean he is either of those things. I don't know enough about him to have an opinion either way, but any spokesman with pop icon status has one strike against him already, in my view.

1. The idea of an infinite past seems absurd.
2. Therefore, the origin of the universe points to the existence of a transcendent creator.

Ah, it's not an argument from ignorance unless it's a formally valid argument to begin with. There's a missing premise and unless you understand that part and come up with the missing conditional premise that formalizes and validates the argument and refute that premise, then you really have no chance against Craig. And, no, a retreat into skepticism with, "it seems absurd to Craig, but that doesn’t mean it really is absurd," isn't really a refutation.

So, what's the missing premise? I guarantee that Craig knows what it is along with having a handful of ready rebuttals lest you get that far and challenge it.

With this note I was attacking only the specific premise, not the argument as a whole. An infinite past may or may not be true (and may or may not be possible), and we do not know this yet. Neither does Craig. Neither does he provide any arguments for his claim other than "It seems absurd". If what seems to somebody always corresponded to reality, then God doesn't exist either, because the idea of God seems absurd to most scientists and philosophers.

By the way, one other thing that I noticed Craig does a lot is, he tries to push the burden of proof to his opponent. He does it in every single debate by demanding proofs that "atheism is true", "naturalism is true", "the universe has no purpose", etc. These demands are ridiculous themselves (although they would apply to positive atheists). This dishonesty is yet another thing that baffles me. He knows very well that negative atheism doesn't require proofs, the same way the nonexistence of elfs doesn't require proofs.

I think it's time somebody directly asked him to give proofs that the invisible pink unicorn doesn't exist and see what he can come up with.

Good post(s).

I am not sure I agree with the criticism of the arguments from authority though.
For example "Scientists agree that evolution is the best explanation for life on earth as we see it today" is a argument from authority but given the time constraints in these debates I don't think debaters should be compelled to provide detailed proofs for every single point they make.

I think the appeal of fallacious arguments is that they mask the implausibility of the premises necessary to actually establish a conclusion. When listing to a debate there's no time to think an argument through so people have to rely on an unreliable reliable method for evaluating the arguments, intuition.

If you want to argue against the conclusion of a deductive argument, you can either point out that the conclusion doesn't follow from the premises or that at least one premise is false. Since it's easy to make any deductive argument logically valid by adding premises, criticizing premises can qualify as a "refutation" as well.

But you don't have to "really refute" the argument anyway. If this argument is the only support offered for Craig's conclusion and if this particular premise is necessary to derive it, then if this premise isn't particularly plausible (though not refuted), neither is the conclusion.

I didn't read the whole of your refutations (and didn't even read it all that carefully), but what I saw seems to indicate that you're not really well grounded in how this type of debate works.

This is the establishment of his premises. As with many such arguments, he is basing this premise on intuitive plausibility. That is because there is nothing that can be done to prove or disprove his claim. The success of this claim rests on whether the listener believes this claim to be sufficiently plausible. In any such debate, one can *ALWAYS* play the skepticism card and reject the opening statement.

I find this juxtaposition to be interesting. In one sentence, you say that he cannot use the scientific community to support his position. Then in the very next sentence, you use the scientific and philosophical communities to support your position.

The problem here is that an appeal to authority is not necessarily wrong. In a formal deductive argument in which all the details are being presented, this is not acceptable. But in this type of debate format (and in many informal arguments) leaning on authorities is valid as long as it's in the right domain. For example, you would not necessarily listen to a scientist's perspective on philosophical matters, but you should defer to a philosopher's perspective on philosophical matters.

First, notice again that you are making an argument from authority (on the authority of those who reject the existence of Jesus). But more importantly, I think you over-estimate the size of that debate. This one has been hashed out here many times. The academic consensus on Jesus' existence is there, and the Jesus myth people are a fringe group. That's simply the reality of the situation.

I will set aside the "divine authority" part because I'm not so sure what Craig actually means by that. It can be said that he was VIEWED to be of divine authority, and I think that would be sufficiently supportable by the historical evidence. But it doesn't seem to me that the claim that Jesus *HAS* a divine authority is one that historians would even contemplate.

I don't see the premise as being all that difficult to defend.

1. Whatever seems impossible seems absurd.
2. An infinite regress seems impossible.
3. Therefore, an infinite regress seems absurd.

That's great, but you've refuted your representation of Craig's argument, not Craig's argument.

1. If an infinite regress seems impossible, then an infinite regress seems absurd.
2. If an infinite regress seems absurd, then the origin of the universe points to a first-cause.
3. If the origin of the universe points to a first-cause, then the origin of the universe points to the existence of a transcendent cause.
4. If the origin of the universe points to the existence of a transcendent cause, then the origin of the universe points to the existence of a transcendent creator.
5. An infinite regress seems impossible.
6. Therefore, the origin of the universe points to the existence of a transcendent creator.

Craig isn't arguing that an infinite regress "is impossible," just that it, "seems impossible," and thus, it "points to," not, "necessitates" a first-cause… Countering that Craig can't prove it's impossible or prove that it points to a first-cause isn't a refutation because that's not what he's arguing. He's asserting it, "seems to point to," and your retreat to skepticism doesn't make it, "not seem to point to."

Especially if you can't refute it. I think what trips-up some atheists when debating Craig is that they're reluctant to really admit to themselves that God is a plausible explanation for things and that some of these arguments are somewhat solid, however unlikely it may seem to them. So instead of spending their time establishing what they consider to be a more plausible explanation for things, they spend it all trying to whittle away at Craig's arguments.

An infinite universe and a infinite God seem about as implausible as each other. Well the universe thing seems more plausible because your not adding on extra stuff.

You need to differentiate between and infinite amount of something, and an eternal duration of something. You are confusing the two here.

And for those that are saying Craig's view is an infinite regress "seems" absurd, I would like to see where he says that. As far as I have ever seen (which is many debates and many articles and many podcasts) Craig argues that infinite regresses in the real world leads to absurdities. He demonstrates this using the famous Hilbert Hotel.

There is quite a big difference between saying something seems/appears absurd and that something actually leads to absurdities.

A eternal universe and eternal God are also about as equally implausible to me.

I disagree. If you want to support your last claim a little bit, it would be nice to give other examples. One useful thing would be to say how you would play the skepticism card for an argument given in the opening statement of Shook, for example. Try it and we can discuss it here.

As for the argument of Craig itself - his whole argument is based on the notion that an actual infinite past is impossible. That is, this is the most important premise of his argument. And then, when everybody expects him to support his most important premise with something serious, he merely says "It seems absurd to me..." Doesn't this sound a little weak?

I didn't use the scientific community to support my position. I am simply saying that he claims "out of nothing nothing comes" as if it's the most obvious thing, while it's not. Since there are people who question the truth of that statement, he can't just throw it out there without supporting it with some evidence.

I would be using the argument from authority if he was giving actual arguments to support the statement and I am merely saying "your arguments aren't good because there are lots of scientists and philosophers who think this statement is false".

You can appeal to authority, as long as it is not the only thing you're appealing to. For many of his claims he presented no evidence, no arguments but the views of certain philosophers and scientists.



I am not using any argument here (let alone from authority). I am criticizing him for using the argument from authority and showing that even if we are to accept his argument, the authority he quotes is not as unanimous on the issue as he is trying to present it.

If you listen to the actual debate carefully (I have provided the links), you will see that this is not what he's saying. He argues that an actual infinity IS impossible and to support this he says that it SEEMS impossible. Where is the logical connection between seems and is? He doesn't say.

The only other argument he gives is something I also wrote in the OP and I will extend it here:

"Mathematicians recognize that the existence of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions. For example, what is infinity minus infinity?"

What mathematicians actually say is that the operation *infinity minus infinity* is undefined. That doesn't mean that an actual infinity is impossible. He is misrepresenting many mathematician's positions here and I am sure that a lot of the authorities whose reasoning he is invoking would actually disagree with him.

Can you summarise this argument? People often declare an infinite regress absurd, but I've never understood exactly what the problem is.

Is this an actual quote from Craig? It's pretty careless if it is.