Stephen Law: are unbelievers without excuse?

[nameandnature]

Stephen Law read a bunch of stuff by top apologist William Lane Craig and noted that Craig believes a bunch of odd things (apart from the odd things you'd already know about from Craig's debates, I mean). There was some discussion in the comments over this one:

"Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God."

[William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), pp. 35-36.]

This is all very Biblical: Craig's "loves darkness rather than light" is a reference to the verse following that famous verse in John 3:16: "And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed."

As a good inerrantist, Craig apparently believes this and other passages like Romans 1 (see my old blog post about this) where the Apostle Paul writes that unbelievers are "without excuse". Atheists know there's a God really but don't worship him because to do so we'd have to acknowledge how bad we are, or something. This is a culpable error, not a mistake, too.

The pathologising of non-belief based on knowing what people think better than they do is itself pathological, as Thrasymachus says, at least if it's used to dismiss atheist arguments without engaging with them (note that Craig does not do this in debates, though he seems to do it personally, and to advocate other Christians doing it, which is bad).

In the comments, wombat suggests that the evangelical claim is that atheists are in the situation "where one accepts something intellectually but not at a more basic emotional level e.g cigarette smokers who continue in spite of acknowledging its dangers. The Christian apologists here are claiming that the "knowledge" is at that deeper visceral level." wombat also linked to Jamie Whyte's observation that religious believers don't really act like they believe what they say they believe.

On that subject, there's also Georges Rey's "Meta-atheism: religious avowal as self-deception", where he argues that Christians generally don't act as if they believe what they say they believe. I've discussed Rey's paper before.

There's a folk psychology where "thoughts" are propositional sentences that occur to us, and "beliefs" are the ones we hold on to as true over time and use to guide our actions. But the way the phenomenon we call "belief" really works doesn't seem much like that. This doesn't just apply to religion: see The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist.

If the evangelical claim is just to know that atheists are secretly lying, it's bizarre, as Thrasymachus says. On the other hand, if the evangelical claim is that atheists anticipate-as-if there's a God while avowing-as-if there isn't, I don't think that works. What are the things that atheists are doing which give away the fact that they are anticipating that way? And why does this make them culpable and deserving of Hell?

I don't think the atheist version (i.e. Rey's or Whyte's) has the same problem, because there are plenty of examples of Christians who don't act like there's a God.

Comments

[wmconnolley.livejournal.com]

I followed your link to Thrasymachus, and found something rather odd.

He says (talking about college stuff):

> Here’s a few snippets from the Leader’s guide:
> "The reason why so many reject the Gospel is that the devil is at work
> preventing people people from recognizing who Jesus is..."
> One explanation is absent: that non-believers don’t believe because, after
> some enquiry, they think it is false. This sort of considered rejection is
> never mooted. The story, instead, is something like this:
> "The evangelical tale – Epistemic Pathology: People do not disbelieve for
> good reasons. Rather, the motivation for their disbelief can be located in
> some defective belief-forming practice..."

So that is all totally weird. The college Christians have come right out at the top with their explanation: its the Divil, guv. And T then totally ignores that. Why?

[naath.livejournal.com]

Supposing that atheists were acting as if there's a God... why does this booger think it's *his* God that we're anticipating exists? There are lots of gods I don't believe in.

[mattghg (from livejournal.com)]

What are the things that atheists are doing which give away the fact that they are anticipating that way?

Basically, not being nihilists.