DIO ESISTE? - William Lane Craig (ITA/ENG). PARTE 1.
Channel: Francis Metal
Date: 2021-08-22

Hello everyone.



This is the third time I have tried to make this video.



I realized that I can't improvise it and so I decided to write it.



Since this type of video is difficult to make, this is roughly an introductory video. If you want more on the subject, I will only do them if this video reaches at least several likes, otherwise I won't do them.



Today I would like to talk to you about a person who is perhaps little known in Italy. I'm talking about William Lane Craig.



Among other things, I learned that he has received two honors: one as the tenth most influential philosopher in the world and the other as the third most influential theologian in the world.



In fact in the English language on the web he is a very famous character.



For those unfamiliar with him, Craig is an analytical philosopher and Baptist evangelical theologian, with two PhDs, one in philosophy and the other in theology.



This is not a "debunking" video but a constructive critique video. That is, debunking claims to definitively refute something, I am not capable of it and I do not even think it is possible



I would like to say both what I like about Craig and what I don't like.



In this regard, in my opinion, a first distinction should be made in Craig's thinking. But I specify that it is my opinion.



One thing is how he argues about natural theology, another thing is how he argues about Christianity, especially about the fundamentalist evangelical faith.



Another distinction to be made concerns the arguments in natural theology: some arguments are based on the stopgap God and others are not. But I'll explain it better later.



I respect Craig as a philosopher, because he is not only analytically trained and uses logic as the basis of all his arguments, at least about natural theology,



but he is not like the analytical philosophers of 50 years ago who ignored or hated continental philosophy and the history of philosophy.



On the other hand, however, I do not agree that he is not based on the methodical doubt, on the "I know I don't know" of Socrates, he provides answers, he does not ask questions, as in theory a philosopher should do.



In fact, he is basically concerned with apologetics, he defends his opinions, he doesn't question them.



Yet he knows very well that his arguments are not irrefutable.



In fact, he specifies that good arguments do not necessarily start from certain premises but from premises that are at least more plausible than his negations.



This means that his is inductive logic and not deductive logic, in practice new information can weaken or even invalidate the argument.



This is another aspect that I like, he admits that his are not absolute certainties. But at the same time he defends his arguments with the sword in various debates.



Another problematic aspect is that he is roughly a fundamentalist, even though he is not one of those fanatical creationists, he tries as much as possible to harmonize the Bible with science.



For example, he believes that evolution has been guided by God, something that the neo-Darwinian model obviously does not foresee. In this regard, he held a discussion with the Catholic biologist Francisco Ayala, a supporter of the neo-Darwinist model.



Or about the genesis at all costs he has to talk about a creation of the world from nothing and in time and put it in agreement with the Big Bang.



Or again, he also takes into consideration the idea of ​​the historical existence of Adam and Eve.







Galileo, however, said that science is concerned with how the world works, while faith is concerned with the salvation of souls. But of course you can't tell from this that God exists. but we will return to Galileo briefly later.





And then this fundamentalism of him is much more evident when it comes to interpreting other passages of the Bible, such as regarding the genocide of the Canaanites, which has embarrassed him for years, or regarding the question of homosexuals and sexual morality.



There the historical context of the author who wrote the piece goes to be fried.



But just as well the fact that the Bible is written by human hand (even if inspired by God) comes back when it comes to talking about the testimonies of the four gospels.



It is clear that there are four different authors who did not agree with each other and not even that God dictated the words to all four.



So about the Bible, his thinking is full of contradictions.





This is why I made a distinction between how he argues about the existence of God and how he argues his evangelical Christian faith..

#god #atheism #jesus #christ #religion