Please Tell William Lane Craig...

My RSS feed tells me that William Lane Craig will be debating a philosopher named Alexander Rosenberg. WLC is a Christian apologist whose debates are like car accidents: horrible to see, hard to look away. I had never heard of Rosenberg, but after a little background surfing I am looking forward to seeing him and his ideas (one of which is "good nihilism") go up against WLC.

WLC will ride the Gish Gallop all over Rosenberg, of course. He will quote many things Rosenberg has written and said, completely out of context. He will quote other learned people, especially scientists, completely out of context. And he will conclude by gloating over Rosenberg's failure to refute any of the "proofs" he's trotted out for the evening. 

I felt compelled to write Prof Rosenberg in advance of the debate, and here's why: William Lane Craig makes a point in every single one of his debates that is so offensive to me that I want his next opponent to be on guard for it and ready to tear it down when it appears.

The point comes up in WLC's assertion that God exists because objective morality exists. He starts from the position that, on atheism, there is no objective morality.  I understand the philosophical point he is trying to make, distorted as it may be. 

But then he personalizes the attack, saying things like, "The atheist believes humans are just animals," and "An atheist can't know whether rape is moral or not." That is, he takes the philosophical argument and twists it to demean an entire class of real people.  

The things he says to make his point are as insulting as "The Jew is motivated entirely by money. A Jew can have no spiritual aspirations." Or "The Negro has a child-like mental disposition and therefore needs a master. A Negro cannot appreciate freedom."

If I were debating WLC, I'd nail him on three counts: First, a defender of Christianity can't know what atheists think any more than Nazis could know what Jews thought. Or than white slavers could know what Negroes thought.

Second, he's using a theoretical point as a smokescreen while lobbing the equivalent of ethnic slurs. Sure, there is a philosophical connection between atheism and nihilism. But that does not make it okay to assert that actual atheists can't tell whether rape is right or wrong.

Third, there is a moral consequence of maligning atheists the way he does. What William Lane Craig says finds its way into church sermons, and from church sermons into bar arguments. More Americans own guns than ever before, and more Americans hate atheists than ever before. Just how much of WLC's rhetoric will it take to push America's theist vs. atheist antipathy to the level of Ireland's Catholic vs. Protestant, or Rwanda's Hutu vs. Tutsi?

I did get a reply from Prof Rosenberg, but it was succinct to the point that I couldn't tell whether he'd actually read my email or not. In any case, I'll have to watch the debate (probably on YouTube, after the fact) to see whether he gives WLC any pushback on his slurs about atheists and rape.