{"author":"William Lane Craig","author_id":"William+Lane+Craig","total_quotes":10,"quotes":[{"text":"Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a 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 fails to become a Christian because of a lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with god.","author":"William Lane Craig","tags":["apologetics","aronra","atheism","atheist","bill","craig","david","davidjohnwellman","debate","dogma","dumbfuck","faith","idiot","lane","liar","reasonable","religion","smalley","theism","theist","william"],"id":30632,"author_id":"William+Lane+Craig"},{"text":"‎'If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.","author":"William Lane Craig","tags":["atheism","christianity","god","life","purpose","purpose-of-life","religion"],"id":32597,"author_id":"William+Lane+Craig"},{"text":"So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing.","author":"William Lane Craig","tags":["apologetics","bible","canaanites","god","immorality","israel","real-victims"],"id":54197,"author_id":"William+Lane+Craig"},{"text":"Now how does all this relate to Islamic jihad? Islam sees violence as a means of propagating the Muslim faith. Islam divides the world into two camps: the dar al-Islam (House of Submission) and the dar al-harb (House of War). The former are those lands which have been brought into submission to Islam; the latter are those nations which have not yet been brought into submission. This is how Islam actually views the world!By contrast, the conquest of Canaan represented God’s just judgement upon those peoples. The purpose was not at all to get them to convert to Judaism! War was not being used as an instrument of propagating the Jewish faith. Moreover, the slaughter of the Canaanites represented an unusual historical circumstance, not a regular means of behavior.The problem with Islam, then, is not that it has got the wrong moral theory; it’s that it has got the wrong God. If the Muslim thinks that our moral duties are constituted by God’s commands, then I agree with him. But Muslims and Christians differ radically over God’s nature. Muslims believe that God loves only Muslims. Allah has no love for unbelievers and sinners. Therefore, they can be killed indiscriminately. Moreover, in Islam God’s omnipotence trumps everything, even His own nature. He is therefore utterly arbitrary in His dealing with mankind.","author":"William Lane Craig","tags":["allah","arbitrary","christianity-and-islam","christianity-versus-islam","christianity-vs-islam","divine-command-theory","division","islam","islamic-jihad","islamic-terrorism","jihad","judgement","murder","muslim","muslim-faith","nature-of-allah","omnipotence","religion-of-violence","submission","submission-to-islam","terrorism","unbelievers","violence"],"id":75395,"author_id":"William+Lane+Craig"},{"text":"To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, is to say that the holocaust was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still have been wrong, even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them, so that everyone in the world thought that the holocaust was right and good. To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, means that it's wrong regardless of the outcome of World War II. The premise is that if there is no God, then moral values or duties are not objective in that sense.","author":"William Lane Craig","tags":["ethics","morality","philosophy"],"id":82987,"author_id":"William+Lane+Craig"},{"text":"By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel’s spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel’s being set exclusively apart for God.","author":"William Lane Craig","tags":["biblical-morality","canaanite-genocide","christian-morality","christian-morals","dichotomy","divine-command-theory","ethics","genocide-in-the-bible","killing-of-children","murder","paganism","yahweh"],"id":87108,"author_id":"William+Lane+Craig"},{"text":"I think that a good start at this problem is to enunciate our ethical theory that underlies our moral judgements. According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses. We all recognize this when we accuse some authority who presumes to take life as “playing God.” Human authorities arrogate to themselves rights which belong only to God. God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative.What that implies is that God has the right to take the lives of the Canaanites when He sees fit. How long they live and when they die is up to Him.","author":"William Lane Craig","tags":["biblical-morality","canaanite-genocide","christian-morality","christian-morals","divine-command-theory","ethics","genocide-in-the-bible","murder","yahweh"],"id":163221,"author_id":"William+Lane+Craig"},{"text":"I have found that the more I reflect philosophically on the attributes of God the more overwhelmed I become at his greatness and the more excited I become about Bible doctrine. Whereas easy appeals to mystery prematurely shut off reflection about God, rigorous and earnest effort to understand him is richly rewarded with deeper appreciation of who he is, more confidence in his reality and care, and a more intelligent and profound worship of his person.","author":"William Lane Craig","tags":["christianity","philosophy","philosophy-of-religion","theology"],"id":240616,"author_id":"William+Lane+Craig"},{"text":"Something is objective if it is independent of people’s opinions. If it holds or is true independently of what anybody thinks then it is objective. It is subjective if it is dependent upon people’s opinions.","author":"William Lane Craig","tags":["ethics","morality","philosophy"],"id":318409,"author_id":"William+Lane+Craig"},{"text":"The most popular form of atheism is a philosophy called naturalism. Naturalism is the view that science and science alone determines what exists. What exists is what our best scientific theories of the world require. If something is not required by our best scientific theories of the world, then it does not exist. But this is devastating for ethics because moral values are not required by science. Science is morally neutral. You cannot find moral values in a test tube. So it follows immediately, from the perspective of naturalism, that moral values do not really exist. They are just subjective illusions of human beings.","author":"William Lane Craig","tags":["ethics","morality","philosophy"],"id":362223,"author_id":"William+Lane+Craig"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":10,"pages":1}}