The Sad Confusions in William Lane Craig’s Case for Christianity

Alex O’Connor, the popular agnostic YouTuber, gave a masterclass recently in how not to argue with the Christian apologist and debater William Lane Craig.

Craig did O’Connor the service of putting forward his standard arguments for theism, the ones he’s defended for decades in numerous debates with atheists and critics of Christianity. But rather than dealing with the heart of theism’s absurdity and exoteric Christianity’s obnoxiousness, O’Connor, the Oxford-trained philosopher, got bogged down with quibbles and technicalities.

Craig summarizes his case for Christian theism well. He says there are “exterior” philosophical arguments for believing that God exists. He lists six of these arguments:

• God is “the best explanation” of why “anything at all,” rather than nothing, exists.

• God is “the best explanation” of the “absolute beginning of the universe at a point in the finite past.”

• God is “the best explanation” of “the uncanny applicability of mathematics” to physical nature.

• God is “the best explanation” of “the incomprehensible fine-tuning” of nature to include life.

• God is “the best explanation” of “the objectivity of moral values and duties.”

• Lastly, there’s the ontological argument, which is that God’s very possibility implies his existence.

Notice the pattern? Five out of six of those arguments take theism as an explanation of some mystery, and indeed as the best available explanation.

Then Craig goes beyond those arguments to defend Christianity specifically. He says Jesus claimed to be the Jewish messiah and the unique son of God and man as prophesied by Daniel. Moreover, God vindicated those claims by raising Jesus from the dead.

As to why we should believe Jesus was resurrected, Craig lists four basic facts that most New Testament scholars are supposed to accept:

• Jesus was honourably interred by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb.

• Jesus’s female followers found the tomb to be empty.

• Jesus’s followers experienced Jesus as being alive after he was crucified.

• Jesus’s followers came to sincerely believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead.

How, then, should an atheist, naturalist, secular humanist, or other critic of Christianity respond to such an opening statement?

As I said, O’Connor dropped the ball by getting lost in quibbles and giving far too much credit to those arguments. For instance, O’Connor spent his time talking about conceptions of time and potential and actual infinities, which had to do with a single premise of just one of Craig’s listed arguments (the cosmological one about God being the best explanation of the universe’s origin).

Presumably, the reason O’Connor got so lost is because of the downside of his academic training. Both analytic and continental philosophy departments foist technicalities on their students, so they’re liable to miss the forest for the trees.

Instead of fixating on mere details, a critic ought to have pointed out that theism doesn’t explain anything, and therefore theism can’t be the best explanation. With that point made, five out of six of Craig’s arguments would collapse in one fell swoop.

To see how that would work, we need merely to ponder what it means to explain something. Merriam-Webster lists several relevant senses of “explain”:

(1)(a) to make known: expound (as in “Explain to us the secret of your success.”)

(b) to make plain or understandable (as in “footnotes that explain the terms”)

(2) to give the reason for or cause of (as in “unable to explain his strange conduct”)

Now, the most important of these senses in the context of this debate is the second one, (1)(b). The first and third senses assume that the explanans, the thing you’re appealing to in your explanation of that which is to be explained (the explanandum), is already understood.

This is why the dictionary elaborates on the first sense by linking to a sense of the word “expound,” which is “to explain by setting forth in careful and often elaborate detail.” That is, the emphasis here isn’t on increasing your understanding by solving a mystery, but on providing information by adding to your knowledge rather than your understanding.

Suppose you’re explaining the secret of your success, and the reason you succeeded is that you followed the advice given in a self-help book. In that case, your listeners wouldn’t yet know the reason until you provide that information, but unless that book provides miraculous advice that isn’t widely understood, you wouldn’t increase your listeners’ understanding of the world by informing them about how you succeeded. You’d merely be filling in some information that they already understand.

For instance, the book might have advised that you carefully set out your goals in a chart. By supplying that information, you’d provide reasons for your success that your listeners wouldn’t have known, but not reasons that expand their understanding by solving some grand mystery.

In other words, this kind of explanation isn’t about expanding anyone’s mind since the notion that some people succeed in life is hardly revelatory. Everyone already knows that various folks succeed by this or that method, and your explanation here would merely elaborate on how exactly you succeeded.

Yet the second sense of “explain” isn’t like that. Here, the explanation does address a mystery, so its goal is to clarify by making that which is obscure “plain or understandable.”

Now, the five philosophical subjects in Craig’s appeals to the best explanation are all profound mysteries. Indeed, they must be to be philosophical in the first place since that’s what philosophy is: the posing of deep, perplexing questions. Why is there something rather than nothing? What caused the whole universe? Why does math work? Why does the universe seem fine-tuned to include life? Why do we feel strongly obliged to be moral?

The answer to any of those questions isn’t just a matter of supplying some missing bit of information we happen to lack at the time, like the information on how you happened to succeed in some business venture. Thus, to say that theism is the “best explanation” of those mysteries is to appeal to the second sense of “explain.” That means that appealing to God’s existence as the solution to those five mysteries must make the matters “plain or understandable.”

And that’s precisely what theism doesn’t and can’t ever do. Saying that “God” is responsible for any of those five things only adds to the mystery in the world. Theism doesn’t clarify anything. Indeed, theists often define God explicitly as the most profound mystery. The ancient Western theological tradition is “apophatic,” meaning that the theologians never claimed to have a positive understanding of God since human comprehension is too limited and God is infinitely vast. For that reason, they claimed only to have negative knowledge of God, to know what God is not.

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Christians appeal to divine revelation to address the mystery of God’s supernatural existence. For instance, they say we can have a partial understanding of God by reading the Bible or acquainting ourselves with Jesus, the protagonist of the New Testament. But theology only ever adds mystery, and thus never, ever supplies us with a genuine explanation in the second sense of “explain.”

How can we be so sure of that? We can because theology isn’t scientific. Scientific explanations are what increase our understanding, and they do so precisely by naturalizing mysteries. Science expands our understanding by showing how mysteries are familiar after all, since science shows how they’re part of nature, how they arise from physical elements, forces, and processes.

If you attempt to explain nature by appealing to the supernatural, you’re doing the opposite of explaining in the second sense. You’re enchanting nature, showing that what we take to be familiar is really infinitely unfamiliar, since you’re associating nature with God, the biggest mystery of all.

Why, though, are many fooled by this apologetic trick? How do apologists manage to pass off theism as a genuine explanation, despite their explicit appeal to miracles and other supernatural mysteries?

There are numerous reasons, including superficial ones, such as that Craig’s radio-style voice lends gravitas to whatever he says, and the big philosophical words he uses make his theism sound complex and impressive.

But there are more substantive reasons. Religions appeal on mythic grounds by addressing spiritual or existential fears and needs. They appeal by telling profound stories, known as myths. And myths have never been genuine explanations. Initially, myths might have served as explanations of why, for instance, snakes have no legs. (Supposedly, in the West, it was because snakes were cursed for tricking Adam and Eve in Eden.) Myths would have provided that function in the absence of scientific methods of inquiry. Obviously, making stuff up and gullibly trusting in authorities isn’t a reliable way of explaining or understanding anything.

No, in effect, at least, the main purpose of myth has always been phenomenological: myths express the existential mystery of what it means and what it feels like to live as a person in nature. This is why myths personify everything, such as by positing gods and demonizing natural forces, and why they employ a dream logic that speaks more to our unconscious mind than our critical intelligence.

For instance, the Bible’s creation myth says God created everything in six days, yet some “days” passed before he made the planets whose revolutions define what it means to be a day. However, this incoherence doesn’t tarnish the story’s mythic power because the story isn’t properly read as an empirical explanation. Instead, the myth is meant to mitigate existential fear of profound mysteries by taking an anthropocentric standpoint that naively imposes familiar human categories onto cosmic or existential mysteries.

Notice the difference between myths and scientific theories. While science likewise is supposed to expand our understanding by familiarizing ourselves with the unfamiliar, science doesn’t do this with childlike personifications. Scientists resort to artificial, formal languages in their theories precisely to minimize such naïve mental projections. Science genuinely expands our understanding by replacing intuitive prejudices with rigorous insights.

By contrast, religious myths cater to our intuitions because their aim isn’t merely to increase our understanding, but to provide existential reassurance.

Now, if that’s how religions work, Craig is practically forced to concede that Christianity isn’t a religion. After all, his second main argument, dealing specifically with Christianity, doesn’t read the New Testament as myth. Instead, he treats the Gospels and Epistles as historically reliable reports. This is why he says we can be confident that Christianity specifically is true: Jesus rose miraculously from the dead, as recorded in the New Testament.

Alas, modern history is methodologically naturalistic, so no such theological conclusion can follow strictly from professional historical reasoning.

Craig is crafty in dodging this implication since he says only that most historians who focus on early Christianity and the New Testament (NT) accept the four facts pertaining to the empty tomb and resurrection appearances, which he listed. What Craig doesn’t say is that modern history as a whole concludes that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. The reason he can’t say that is that the genuine, modern telling of history is, as I said, methodologically naturalistic, so the theological talk of miracles and resurrections is barred at the outset.

Now, the reason most NT scholars accept some such facts is that they happen to be Christians, so they accept those facts on religious rather than historical grounds. There’s much blurring of those borders in that field, as many NT specialists pass themselves off as historians even as they function like propagandists and apologists. For instance, many of them work at religious institutions in the United States that require the teachers to sign statements of religious faith, banning skeptical doubts.

In any case, as Paulogia shows on YouTube, there’s no systematic study of what exactly most historians in general believe about Jesus. Most likely don’t accept that Joseph of Arimathea, for instance, was a historical person. Mark likely invented the empty tomb story to make the resurrection more dramatic and plausible since the probability that Jesus’s body would have been left to rot in a common grave would have been narratively awkward.

But even if we accept all of Craig’s four facts, they hardly entail that Christianity is true. There are many simpler, naturalistic explanations of how Christianity originated.

The most obvious one is that some of Jesus’s earliest followers hallucinated a risen Jesus, due to grief, love of their charismatic leader, and hatred for Rome. Gossip then spread the word that preserved Christians’ dignity after the humiliation of Jesus’s crucifixion: miraculously, Jesus survived death, proving his divinity and that he was right all along!

These ancient followers affirmed twelve miracles before breakfast. They mistook dreams for divine visions, and they thought nature was full of demons and angels. They had no rigorous scientific conception of a cosmos, so they were ripe for theological gossip.

As to why such gossip withstood Roman opposition for three centuries and spread around the Mediterranean, it was for the very same reason that Hellenistic dying-and-rising-godman cults had already been spreading for centuries before Jesus lived. There was a spiritual hunger, arising from the Axial Age’s critiques and reforms in the middle of the first millennium BCE, a hunger that the transactional Roman state religion didn’t fulfill. For just that reason, Rome eventually reformed itself by adopting Christianity as its official religion in the fourth century.

Again, religion deals properly with existential concerns, such as the fear of death and the hatred of injustice (as in Jesus’s crucifixion). People have died for their religious beliefs all around the world for thousands of years because their religion gave their lives meaning in the face of apparent horror and absurdity. Christians doubled down on their charismatic founder, rather than abandoning him and confessing that the spiritual sustenance they got from his teachings was fraudulent. Early Christianity would hardly have been the first cult to have been reluctant to admit that it was wrongheaded from the get-go.

Indeed, the most absurd cults have often been the most successful because the absurdity serves the social function of testing the adherents’ loyalty to the group. If you can convince your followers to accept contradictions or preposterous nonsense, you bypass their critical faculties and appeal to them on an unconscious, existential level. In that case, they identify emotionally with the group and would rather die than renounce their religion. The religion becomes an extension of themselves, so in protecting the religion, they feel they’re protecting themselves.

Basic psychological and sociological lessons like these account for the rise of Christianity in purely naturalistic terms, with no need to appeal to miracles or the supernatural, or to share the apologist’s confusion of mythic/existential reassurance with literal, historical truth.

At any rate, this is how a proper critic of Christianity should deal with apologetics like William Lane Craig’s. You don’t fixate on trivialities and technicalities, as though Christian theism weren’t outlandish in educated twenty-first-century circles, or as though Christian apologetics were an honourable discipline. No, you get to the heart of the matter and explain why this theism is a nonstarter for those who haven’t been brainwashed to accept the religion when they were gullible children.