Let’s focus on the point where Craig, after enumerating the charges of adultery and pornography addiction, concludes:“And it’s for those reasons that he fell away from the faith. It was primarily moral and relational problems. And these intellectual excuses come later because, after all, if you have ‘intellectual’ reasons for your unbelief that’s socially acceptable, that’s impressive. But if your reasons for your unbelief are moral like pornography use and so forth, well that’s not credible, that doesn’t give you any prestige or cachet.”While I’m not particularly interested in defending Loftus, I think that Craig has done himself no favors. In this portion of the interview he seems to suggest reasoning like this:If there are non-rational factors behind a person’s conversion from one belief system to another then subsequent arguments in support of that conversion are merely “excuses” to ensure the social prestige or cache of one’s earlier decision.
I’m often critical of W. L.
Craig, so I don’t have a vested interest in defending him, but Rauser is wrong.
(Yes, I know…that’s redundant.)
As is well-known (or ought to
be), Craig distinguishes between knowing that Christianity is true and proving
it. On his religious epistemology, you can know Christianity is true before you
prove it true. These are independent considerations. Indeed, you can know it’s
true even if you never take the additional step of proving it’s true.
Likewise, Craig thinks that
Christianity is demonstrably true. So it scores on both counts.
But the principle is not
reversible. Since Craig thinks atheism is false, he doesn’t think you can
either know that it’s true or prove it true.
So Craig’s position is
perfectly consistent, given his religious epistemology. Rauser is free to
challenge Craig’s epistemology, but that’s a different issue. You can’t turn
tables on Craig–not on his own grounds. You can challenge his grounds, but
given his model of religious knowledge, the argument doesn’t work in reverse.
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