Sophisticated Philosophical Arguments

I recently watched a video on YouTube featuring William Lane Craig. His assertion was that the “new atheists” were rather not intellectually bright, and that they present no sophisticated philosophical arguments. The new atheists, he claims, are doing little more than rehashing arguments from the intellectual giants (my words) who were their predecessors, such as Bertrand Russell.

Presenting Russell’s arguments, for example, is hard not to do. The man, right or wrong, truly was an intellectual giant. A behemoth of a beast of a philosophical machine. You cannot, I think, blame the new atheists, such as Dawkins and Hitchens, for carrying on with Russell’s arguments, as far as they go.

But I am much more interested in WL Craig’s statement, that the new atheists aren’t producing any new sophisticated arguments against god or religion—which I think is a false statement to begin with, but that is perhaps for a future post.

Sophisticated. That is the kind of argument that Craig wants.

I was trained as a philosopher in undergrad.
I was trained as a rhetorician in grad school.
I was trained as a lawyer in professional school.

If there is one thing I know how to do, that is to argue.

Sophistication Obfuscates Fallacy & Error

If there is one thing that only a professional pseudo-philosopher theologian like William Lane Craig could want, and that would be a sophisticated argument. An a priori, self-indulgent, circular, sophisticated argument. That’s what he gives us, time and again.

Let us refer to good old Merriam-Webster for a moment.

Sophisticated. An adjective. Meaning:

1. deprived of native or original simplicity: as a) highly complicated or developed; or b) having a refined knowledge of the ways of the world cultivated especially through wide experience.
2. devoid of grossness: as a) finely experienced and aware; or b) intellectually appealing.

We might be tempted to think that Craig means the latter definition, as in devoid of grossness. That is not what he means. Philosophers would use the word sophisticated to mean refined. Theologians, when they use the word sophisticated, mean the former definition, as in deprived of native or original simplicity and highly complicated or developed. (Refined knowledge of the ways of the world? Not applicable.)

Many pseudo-philosophers, especially those of intellectually-suspect fields such as Craig’s, drive for highly-obtuse, highly-complex, and highly-unintelligible arguments that require such semantic trickery as possible-worlds modal logic¹ and extensive use of subtly appealing fallacies such as circular reasoning even to lay down a first premise.

Only to a psuedo-philosopher theologian like Craig would a sophisticated argument be superior to a parsimonious, clear, and operative argument, such as Aristotle would recommend. In fact, anyone who studies Aristotle, arguably the master of rhetoric and poetics, should spot Craig’s language usage and arguments for the semantic and syntactic pseudo-philosophical trash that they are.

Pot, meet Kettle?

For example, Craig almost inexplicably thinks that the Kalam cosmological argument is a sophisticated argument for the existence of god. A sophomoric high-schooler can refute that nonsense. Craig, who claims the new atheists are not intellectually bright because they are using the mighty arguments of their predecessors, is using this hundreds-of-years-old beaten down, broken First-Cause argument, and he complains that the new atheists are unsophisticated?

A good argument is a compelling and parsimonious argument. However, that argument must be logically valid . One that goes something like—

there must be a god; therefore, there is a god

—is not a valid argument. That fallaciously circular argument is the type of “sophisticated” argument Craig offers. Sophisticated, as in, to produce such tripe in a way that it looks unlike tripe, one must adopt an utterly inane pre-supposed worldview and a convoluted set of improbable (if not impossible) propositions, and bind them together with a tortuous system of logic.

The final product of such faulty reasoning leaves the theologians with something that looks impressive, but still sinks like the tripe that it is. To even a moderately-trained eye and a reasonably well-founded philosophical education, one can see through the nonsensical “sophistication” to the cold, hard reality below.

The reality is that for all of Craig’s torsion, he is unable to convince even the mildest of skeptics and fails to produce the slightest hint of a shred of an inkling of evidence that his beliefs are accurate.

His faith, by the way, in his own words, “trumps all other evidence.” Does that sound like a philosopher? No. That does sound like a pseudo-philosophical theologian apologist. Which he is. Craig is a man who wants to sound like a philosopher, and who may have a job that looks like a philosopher, and who may write essays and books that read like philosophy, but Craig is a trickster who wants only arguments with sophistication so as to fool the unwary into accepting Craig’s faith and theology as sound philosophy or testable evidence. Actual evidence, and lack thereof, be damned.

Note: On the YouTube video that set me off on this topic, I do not have the link handy on this computer. I may go back to find it and post it. If anyone is terribly interested in viewing it, then I’m sure you can search for William Lane Craig on YouTube and it’ll come up in reference to Craig and commentary on the new atheists.

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1. For probably obvious reasons, I do not discount all modal logic as illegitimate, but I do think the type of possible-worlds semantics modal logic that Craig and his type employ is patently unsupportable outside of hyper-formalism and, at best, borderline irrationalism. Possible worlds semantics is a faith-type logic. As a general rule, anything that cannot be stated with base propositional logic should be treated as highly suspect.

Tags: atheism, chris hitchen, junk philosophy, new atheism, pseudo-philosophy, richard dawkins, theology, william lane craig

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 at 9:34 am and is filed under philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment below, or trackback from your own site.