Mary sent me this question and answer from William Lane Craig’s Question of the Week.

Here are the questions:

Hi there, I’m writting in regards to your “Q&A 170: So many athiests, so little time” answer. First of all, your two simple questions have very simple answers, and an athiest who can’t answer them isn’t a true athiest.

1)
Q. What do you mean by (you don’t believe in God)
A. I mean that I have a lack of belief the the existance of a deity, your christian God or any other.

2)
Q. What reasons do you have to think that (there is no God)
A. The Earth shows no proof of creation, every single thing on this Earth has a natural explanation, simply becasue modern science has not yet solved every problem, does not mean it never will. I’d go in to detail, but no need to bore you with the science of it all.
So, I’ve given my proof and will give far more if you ask it of me, and any wel linformed athiest will be able to answer those questions in a flash and have the burden of proof back in your hands.
In regards to scholarly work, may I point out Charles Darwin’s “The Origins of Species”, the works of Gregor Mendel, father of Genetics, William “Strata” Smith, father of Geology, Alfred Wegener “The Origin of Continents and Oceans”, Issac Newton, Galileo, On and on I go, where I stop, nobody knows!
Now, if I may turn to the real point of this e-mail besides to point out that you havent really told anyone how to argue christianity other than asking easy questions and throwing names at them. Your God is Omnicient so you say, operating on this assumption, here is how morality plays out in the bible…
1) God creates heaven and Earth and then he creates Humans.
2) God KNOWS that humans will sin
3) God puts the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden KNOWING it will drive Adam to sin.
4) God Determines that Adams sin is transmutable down to every single person that will ever exist. (Moral objection 1: The sins of the father are logically not related to the son in any way shape or form)
5) God decides that to punish people for this one sin they had nothing to do with or anything else he deams bad, they shall be sentenced to an eternity of burning hellfire. Infinite punishment for a finite crime? That sounds like Moral objection #2 to me!
6) When God sees that his creations have really gone bad, he drowns the world, killing millions of innocent people.
7) only 1600 years after the mass murder of his creations(following biblical chronology) they’ve already fallen back in to sin. So God, in his infinite wisdom, determines the best course of action, is to sacrafice his Son, who is part of himself, TO HIMSELF, to make up for the sins of the creations he made knowing they would sin!

How in the world do you rectify this!?

Cheers,

Luke

I think that Bill is doing a great thing to come down to the level of village atheist once in a while and reply, and if you read his answer, he’s actually pretty mean. And it’s a good thing, in this case, because the worldview of village atheists is a lot like the worldview of Islamic terrorists. They are so insulated from outside criticism that you really have to thrash them around a little bit in order to get them to see that they have been involved with a cult their whole lives. That’s not going to be the case with some of the better atheists like Austin Dacey and Paul Draper, but it is going to be the case with many rank and file atheists, and we need to know how to answer them, too.