This week at ER: Back to Square One

Over at the Evangelical Realism blog, we’re taking an in-depth look at premise 1 of Dr. William Lane Craig’s famous Kalam Cosmological argument, in the first of a series of posts on Chapter four of his book On Guard. The gist of it is that Dr. Craig is playing a bit of a word game: when we say that nothing created the universe, we’re not saying that “nothing” is a “something” that exists in a cause-and-effect relationship with the cosmos. We’re just saying the universe is uncaused, just like Christians are doing when they say “nothing created God.”

Click the link for the full post.

 

This week on Evangelical Realism: Dr. Craig against himself

In this week’s installment of William Lane Craig’s book On Guard, he wraps up Chapter 3 by inadvertently exposing the fatal flaw in Leibniz’s Cosmological Argument. If you’re going to argue that some things exist “by a necessity of their own nature,” you need to make sure they really exist first. If that explanation can’t work for a universe that we all can see and examine and verify, it damn sure ain’t gonna fly for concepts of God that only exist in the minds and imaginations of fallible and self-deluding believers.

This is going to take some getting used to

Back at my old blog, I’ve always had a policy of “first time moderation,” meaning if you’ve never commented before, I have to approve you first before your comments get posted. It’s a great way to cut down on spam, but I’m beginning to wonder how well it’s going to work here. My apologies to everyone who had to wait in line.

It’s great to have so many people commenting, though—thanks everyone! If the first time moderation rule gets to be too much of a bother (read: if there’s more new comments than my laziness will conveniently allow me to process) I may bite the bullet and turn off the filter. I really do hate spam, though, so it’s likely to be a brief hiatus until the spammers notice we’re here.

I do, however, have a few favorite pieces of spam that I will always treasure. Here’s the subject line from one of them, word-for-word as it was delivered to me:

Having erection problems, Jenny?

Offered as partial atonement for having made you guys wait. Cheers.