Posted: Apr 25, 2011 11:47 am
And yet is it not the personage for which Dr Craig is arguing - unless he, and other religious sophists, are to argue for that which they acknowledged they do not or cannot know?
One might say, as indeed you do, that this is not really relevant, that we all know what we mean when we are talking about the entity that is being argued for, the one ascribed to the role of deity in classical theism, and so lets just get on with the important business of demonstrating the logical necessity of his/its existence. But the arguments for God in this respect can be applied to all gods and/or any declared or conceivable all-powerful metaphysical entity, can it not? So the Kalam program is only really half an argument, at best, and running it, and even accepting it for the sake of argument, still leaves us no closer to demonstrating the veracity of the claim that God exists such that He necessarily fulfils the ascribed role of all-knowing, regression terminating, personal creator of all that is etc,.
If theistic philosophers must know what God is such that He/it can fit the deitific role ascribed to him then surely they cannot argue for His apparent logical necessity without first demonstrating that He has to be exactly the kind of entity that He is claimed to be - unless, that is, God is just to be 'all things to all men' as the saying goes?
When Dr Craig is pressed on this matter of demonstrating his knowledge of God he relies on the tabernacular syllogism that fundamentally he just knows that God exists and that Christianity if therefore true by the witness of the holy spirit in his heart. And so all his declarations amount to a plea that 'you simply must believe me because I am totally sincere about the veracity of my declarations,' or more broadly to his religious inclined constituency the plea that 'Faith is justified even if it is not justifiable, so stick with it guys.'