In “The Aura of Infallibility“, I mentioned William Lane Craig’s belief in something he calls the “self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit”, which he considers to be the most persuasive, crowning argument for Christianity. Basically, all it boils down to is that Craig has a really strong feeling that Christianity is true, and he believes that that feeling should be privileged above any and all evidence.
As Craig himself puts it, in question #136:
For not only should I continue to have faith in God on the basis of the Spirit’s witness even if all the arguments for His existence were refuted, but I should continue to have faith in God even in the face of objections which I cannot at that time answer…
What I’m claiming is that even in the face of evidence against God which we cannot refute, we ought to believe in God on the basis of His Spirit’s witness.
In essence, Craig is claiming infallibility for himself. On the basis of some warm and fuzzy feelings he’s had, he declares himself an inerrant judge presiding over all the cosmos, deciding the truth of every factual proposition his warm feelings tell him about and refusing to admit even the possibility of error. This is a laughable and ridiculously arrogant self-exaltation, although he’s by no means alone among religious people in making it; he just does it more explicitly than most of them. (As another example, take this from the official statement of faith of Answers in Genesis: “No apparent, perceived or claimed evidence in any field… can be valid if it contradicts the Scriptural record”).
But it doesn’t stop there. Craig also insists on believing that everyone else has these feelings too, which leads him to draw a morally outrageous conclusion that insults all non-Christians:
When a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God. (source)
In other words, Craig’s position requires him to believe that everyone – everyone – in the world who’s not an evangelical Christian – every atheist, Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Baha’i, Sikh and Shintoist, every pagan past and present, every member of every indigenous tribe – is fully aware of the truth of evangelical Christianity and refuses to admit this out of a stubborn desire to sin. It forces him to believe in a worldwide conspiracy involving sustained, lifelong deception practiced on a daily basis by billions of people throughout history.
This contorted position arises from the four-part contradiction that all believers like Craig are forced to confront as a result of their theology:
(1) It’s immoral to punish people for making an honest mistake.
(2) At least some non-members of my religion are honestly mistaken in what they believe.
(3) God will eternally punish all non-members of my religion.
(4) God never acts immorally.
Logically, all four of these statements can’t be true; at least one has to be false. But believers like Craig refuse to surrender any of the theological points, and instead he jettisons the one empirical statement in the tetrad: that at least some nonbelievers are honestly mistaken. He thus ends up with a bizarre, massive conspiracy theory which holds that everyone in the world who doesn’t believe as he does is being deliberately deceptive.
This is a paradigm example of how compensating for logical flaws in a belief system lead to immoral views of one’s fellow humans. “God wouldn’t damn people for making an honest mistake,” the thought process goes, “and therefore, no one is making an honest mistake! Everyone who’s not in my religion really knows I’m right and is just lying.” Not only does this soothe the believer’s troubled conscience, it gives them a convenient excuse to avoid having to deal with any nonbeliever’s argument on the merits: all such arguments can be waved away because the believer “knows” that they’re not being offered in good faith. Bizarre and ridiculous as it is, the evangelical conspiracy theory is one of the more effective means by which religious fundamentalists cocoon their minds away from the world.
Other posts in this series: