Yazata
Valued Senior Member
William Craig is a very prominent writer and intellectual in evangelical/fundamentalist Christian circles. I'm not sure if he's a philosopher or a theologian, exactly. (He teaches philosophy at a theological seminary.)
The seminary itself is kind of telling. Talbot School of Theology is the religious seminary of Biola University in suburban Los Angeles. The name 'Biola' was originally an acronym, which stood for 'Bible Institute of Los Angeles'. It was (and is) prominent in the evangelical/fundamentalist movement, originally offering Bible classes with an emphasis on training evangelists. It grew, put in university degree programs and eventually became accredited. But the emphasis on evangelism remained and today Biola is a leader in things like missions and apologetics.
That's where William Lane Craig comes in. This thread called him a "professional debater", and although that was disputed in some posts, it's accurate. He's an unabashed "apologist". (Even this thread's subject line calls him that.) He sees his mission as spreading God's Word and he's trained, and he trains others, to do that as effectively as possible. He's a rhetorician as much as he's a theologian or a philosopher.
In the fundamentalist world of apologetics, Craig's probably as famous as Dawkins is among atheists. (Of course, Dawkins was a leading evolutionary biologist before he got sidetracked, and Craig has nothing to compare to that.)
As far as religion goes, Craig really does have an excellent educational background. Dawkins doesn't seem to have any educational background in religion or philosophy at all. So I suspect that Craig probably could make Dawkins look foolish if the debate turned to theological technicalities or to religious history.
Of course Craig would be defending doctrinal positions whose epistemological justification is doubtful simply by their nature. So he would have to keep Dawkins on the defensive and not let Dawkins concentrate on challenging the basis of his own beliefs.
For that matter, why is Craig avoiding Sciforums?
I think that we could probably hold our own with him on a discussion board like this, where we would have time to think about what we want to say and to compose our answers.
We could pick his posts apart at leisure line by line, examining the logic, presuppositions and justification of each individual step. It would be far more difficult to snow us with a torrent of jargon concealing what might be any number of unjustified assumptions and non-sequiturs. We wouldn't be put into the position of having to produce a cogent response in seconds off the top of our heads.
