Stephen Law is a philosopher and author. Currently Director of Philosophy and Cert HE at Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. Stephen has also published many popular books including The Philosophy Gym, The Complete Philosophy Files, and Believing Bullshit.
For school talks/ media: stephenlaw4schools.blogspot.co.uk
Email: think-AT-royalinstitutephilosophy.org
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William Lane Craig's silly comments on animal pain further debunked
This brand new video exposes in some detail the absurdity of William Lane Craig's ongoing attempt to defend his silly, unscientific views regarding animal pain (his view is that animals other than higher primates are unaware they have it - which is a great comfort to animal lovers like himself).
This video responds to Craig's response to the original video exposing the sheer ridiculousness of the argument he used against me in our debate:
At 1:25-- “Even if an animal has higher-order access to 1st-order pain, it would lack any moral disvalue if the animal didn’t find the state undesirable. Such a mental state might bear some similarity to the conscious experience of persons with a damaged or absent PF cortex.”
Is this why Craig defends yhwh’s orders to slaughter infants (1SA 15:3-8, PS 137:9) & unborn babies (HO 9:11-16) & rip up ‘women with child’ (HO 13:14-16)? Because inflicting pain on those with underdeveloped or absent PFCs “lacks any moral disvalue”?
According to Craig, atheists secretly know that his xian god exists, & we willfully reject it out of emotion, not intellect. It is one of his many statements of sophistry that poisons any good-faith effort to give the benefit of the doubt to one's interlocutor.
And yet, I can't help but feel the same way about Craig the more I read painstakingly detailed rebuttals to his disingenuousness, like this video. He is simply not an honest man.
Unfortunately Craig has not stopped using this argument. He recently re-proposed it(with insignificant changes) in a recent lecture of his on Creation and Evolution.
On another blog, FideCogitActio, some theists of a "classical" stripe (that's to say, like Brian Davies, Edward Feser) are criticisng the Evil God Challenge (or I suppose, trying to show how it can be met, or sidestepped). The main post includes this: In book I, chapter 39 , Aquinas argues that “there cannot be evil in God” (in Deo non potest esse malum). Atheists like Law must face the fact that, if the words are to retain any sense, “God” simply cannot be “evil”. As my comments in the thread at Feser’s blog aimed to show, despite how much he mocks “the privation theory of evil,” Law himself cannot escape its logic: his entire argument requires that the world ought to appear less evil if it is to be taken as evidence of a good God. Even though he spurns the idea that evil is a privation of good, his account of an evil world is parasitic on a good ideal; this is no surprise, though, since all evil is parasitic on good ( SCG I, 11 ). Based on the conclusions of se...
(Published in Faith and Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011. Stephen Law. Pages 129-151) EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS Stephen Law Abstract The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of indepen...
Here's my central criticism of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). It's novel and was published in Analysis last year. Here's the gist. Plantinga argues that if naturalism and evolution are true, then semantic epiphenomenalism is very probably true - that's to say, the content of our beliefs does not causally impinge on our behaviour. And if semantic properties such as having such-and-such content or being true cannot causally impinge on behaviour, then they cannot be selected for by unguided evolution. Plantinga's argument requires, crucially, that there be no conceptual links between belief content and behaviour of a sort that it's actually very plausible to suppose exist (note that to suppose there are such conceptual links is not necessarily to suppose that content can be exhaustively captured in terms of behaviour or functional role, etc. in the way logical behaviourists or functionalists suppose). It turns o...
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Is this why Craig defends yhwh’s orders to slaughter infants (1SA 15:3-8, PS 137:9) & unborn babies (HO 9:11-16) & rip up ‘women with child’ (HO 13:14-16)? Because inflicting pain on those with underdeveloped or absent PFCs “lacks any moral disvalue”?
According to Craig, atheists secretly know that his xian god exists, & we willfully reject it out of emotion, not intellect. It is one of his many statements of sophistry that poisons any good-faith effort to give the benefit of the doubt to one's interlocutor.
And yet, I can't help but feel the same way about Craig the more I read painstakingly detailed rebuttals to his disingenuousness, like this video. He is simply not an honest man.