My previous post was about one of my favourite philosophers, Stephen Law, and my post today is about one of my least favourite philosophers, William Lane Craig (WLC from here on). WLC is usually regarded as one of Christianity’s premiere debaters. I could not disagree with this sentiment more. He is an excellent performer, but not much more to me. His arguments have all been easily refuted and he tends to repeat them with each new debate despite being educated otherwise, never actually bringing anything new or innovative to the discussion. He has a twisted sense of “objective morality” where he has stated that killing children that belong to a depraved culture is better then letting them continue living in said culture because they will be admitted into heaven (in reference to the God-ordained genocides of the Hebrew Scriptures). In this clip of his debate with Shelly Kagan, who is a Clark Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, WLC is caught red-handed engaging in “armchair philosophizing”, that is, merely theorizing ethics without actually applying them in real life. He argues that theism provides him a responsibility to act ethically towards nature in general and animals specifically. The question and response from Shelly could not have been better. Admittedly, WLC is not the only one who theorizes ethics and usually does not necessarily apply them in real life scenarios, I think this is something we all do and it’s inescapable. Shelly is correct though, on a naturalistic worldview informed by scientific knowledge, simply knowing that animals can experience pain and suffering should be enough of a motivator to see that we do as little as possible to harm them without having to appeal to some cosmic significance to our actions. In stating that in theism we have a cosmic responsibility to care for the natural world, but, deciding that animals can be eaten and even worn (WLC appears to be wearing leather shoes), WLC becomes the arbiter of what this cosmic responsibility to “tend” to nature actually is. Admittedly also, like WLC, I am not a vegetarian and do see those who live a vegetarian lifestyle as absolutely more ethically commendable than I. The clip I am referring to starts at the 1:15:45 mark and ends at the 1:19:00 mark.
