March 19, 2024

I came across a tweet by Randal Rauser, a Canadian philosopher and theologian, who recently debated Paul Copan on Unbelievable? on the alleged genocide commands in the O.T. That subject was the theme for The Defenders Conference 2018. Here, Rauser accuses Reasonable Faith of intellectual dishonesty between the tweet’s description and a link to a video Q&A that William Lane Craig participated in.

In response to Rauser, let me say say it’s unlikely that William Lane Craig is tweeting himself, probably someone working in his ministry. Does that mean the tweeter of the account is being dishonest? I still don’t think so, and let me explain why. For those of you who follow William Lane Craig, you know that he’s been in multiple debates, some of which were debates over morality and how to ground morality (i.e. what makes morals true). Craig has come to the conclusion that alternative ways of grounding objective morality on atheism fails. For example, one attempt outside of naturalism, is the view that objective morals exist like the Platonic forms in the ether. They’re out there … somewhere. And they exist immaterially, but we don’t know exactly how. This theory could make sense of objective morals without requiring that God exists. And so for Rauser, he sees the tweet and thinks there is intellectual dishonesty because Craig’s video response was geared toward naturalism; Craig’s answer focused on naturalism, but it’s not clear to me that it was exclusively on naturalism. Even still, Craig thinks ultimately, at the end of the day, given atheism, there are no objective moral values. So the Tweet as written is a conclusion that Bill Craig would hold to, and for which the video could be understood as an example of how that is the case. I don’t think that Craig would be dishonest, if he, himself, were to tweet that very phrase. While I respect Rauser’s attempt to protect the conversation of possible ways of grounding morality, I don’t think there is a problem in Craig stating his conclusion that on atheism, there are no objective moral values.

Not at this time
Not at this time

Kurt Jaros

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