fleetmouse wrote:Maybe this will partly address that:
http://www.jcnot4me.com/Items/contra_cr ... le%20FaithIn my twenty minute discussion with Craig, in the process of getting his signature, I asked him about his views on evidence (which to me seem very close to self-induced insanity). In short, I set up the following scenario:
Dr. Craig, for the sake of argument let's pretend that a time machine gets built. You and I hop in it, and travel back to the day before Easter, 33 AD. We park it outside the tomb of Jesus. We wait. Easter morning rolls around, and nothing happens. We continue to wait. After several weeks of waiting, still nothing happens. There is no resurrection- Jesus is quietly rotting away in the tomb.
I asked him, given this scenario, would he then give up his Christianity? Having seen with his own eyes that there was no resurrection of Jesus, having been an eyewitness to the fact that Christianity has been based upon a fraud and a lie, would he NOW renounce Christianity? His answer was shocking, and quite unexpected.
He told me, face to face, that he would STILL believe in Jesus, he would STILL believe in the resurrection, and he would STILL remain a Christian. When asked, in light of his being a personal eyewitness to the fact that there WAS no resurrection, he replied that due to the witness of the "holy spirit" within him, he would assume a trick of some sort had been played on him while watching Jesus' tomb. This self-induced blindness astounded me.
Craig studied with a major student of Baultmann, Kasemann. He's well aware of the liberal trdition. The kind of liberal that Bulatmann was, hold over from Von Harnack and the 19th century, they didn't give a damn about the resureection. Baultmann didn't believe in the resurrection. Kasseman did but I'm sure he probalby reserved in the back of his mind the possibility that the Von Hanarnack kind of thing might be true and would be worth perusing if he didn't have faith in the resurrection.
If you weren't hung up on "beating Christianity" it shouldn't really matter. It's the fundie mentality that say there has to one thing it has to be literal and anything that departs form it is not Christianity. There's no reason why they get to define what Christianity is.
you are willing to play this game to believe in God the majority has to be right. you couldn't consider joining a group of religious believers that's 3%of the population. but you are willing to be part of the group of anti-believers that's 3%. that is crazy.