What could make morality objective?

[Veritas Aequitas]

Thanks to Veritas Aequitas for this survey of the book Mr Can has mentioned:

THE BLACKWELL COMPANION TO NATURAL THEOLOGY
Edited by William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland

Contents:
2 The Leibnizian cosmological argument
3 The kalam cosmological argument
4 The teleological argument: an exploration of the fine-tuning of the universe
5 The argument from consciousness
6 The argument from reason
7 The moral argument
8 The argument from evil
9 The argument from religious experience
10 The ontological argument
11 The argument from miracles: a cumulative case for the resurrection
of Jesus of Nazareth

The first thing to note is that each chapter is an argument - there is no claim that the book will present any actual evidence. The problem with every one of those arguments is that there is at least one premise which is unsound. For example the Kalam cosmological argument, which the editor William Lane Craig presents as a syllogism with two out of two unsound premises:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

Craig cannot prove the soundness of 1. In the first instance he simply claims it is self-evident. Whatever your views on that, it doesn't follow that it is therefore true. So he tries to ridicule the idea that it may not be by claiming that we should see things popping into existence with no apparent cause. Craig insists we do not see such events, therefore things must always have a cause. Critics point out that there are certain quantum phenomena that can be interpreted as being uncaused. Craig counters that, Bell's Theorem notwithstanding, no one knows what is really going on at the quantum level. That is true, but Craig makes the unjustifiable leap that because what he would like to be true can't be ruled out, it must therefore be the case.
As for the second premise, it is certainly true that the observable universe appears to have begun at the big bang; but we simply don't know what the conditions, if any, were.
As I said, all the other arguments are similarly flawed. It doesn't follow that they are all wrong, but whether you believe them is based on aesthetic and emotional decisions, rather than rational ones; and anyone who tells you otherwise can go fuck themselves.

Premise 1 is not sound, note Hume's counter to Causation, thus it is fundamentally psychological, i.e. of constant conjunction, habit, customs and conventions.
Premise 2 relied 100% on Science, but scientific theories are at best, polished conjectures [Popper].
Therefore the conclusion is psychologically loaded with polished conjectures.
Even then with the above limitation, how the hell the psychological-cause is a God.
The fact is the inferred psychological caused as God is a psychological invention.

Re his Book, If Craig has intellectual integrity, he should present the best counter arguments along with each of the arguments in the book. However Craig is intellectually dishonest and commit the fallacy of confirmation bias.

According to Kant, ALL arguments for God's existence, in principle is reducible to the Ontological Argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontological_argument

What is presented in the Wiki article above reflect intellectual integrity which provided a balanced view with Counter and Criticisms of the argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontologic ... objections

Immanuel Can is intellectually dishonest as well when he merely threw the book at us and insisting it represent the truth without any discussion of the materials in the book.

[Immanuel Can]

Having put in the extraordinary effort [relative to myself] I consider myself a reasonable expert on Kant.

Good. That may help.

Take something Kant talked about: the Categorical Imperative. The CI indicates duties to real objects. For example, to say, "it is wrong to use a person as a means not an end" is to say that "persons" are actually-existent things. You can't have a duty to a mere subjectivity, to an imagining, to a nothing. So already, objective reality is bundled into the idea of the CI.

There are two different types of claim. You're not distinguishing right now between ontology and epistemology. To say that human beings don't know absolute-X is not to say "X does not exist." See the difference?

To illustrate, you probably don't know Madagascar. At best, you probably know OF it, and maybe can locate it on a map. But nobody, including the person who lives in Madagascar, knows the absolute fullness of the reality of Madagascar, even in a given moment. That does not imply Madagascar doesn't exist. All it tells us is that human knowledge of Madagascar is subjective and limited.

Simple enough?

So to say, "reality is subjective" is false. Ones knowledge about reality is subjective and partial. That comes well short of suggesting one's knowledge of reality is false, unreal or useless...which it would be, if there were not reality to which the subjective knowing could refer.

[Immanuel Can]

Immanuel Can is intellectually dishonest as well when he merely threw the book at us and insisting it represent the truth without any discussion of the materials in the book.

Heh. Ad hominem.

Pete asked for the arguments. I gave them to him. What he didn't like was that I didn't just try to paraphrase them for him. But the arguments in the Blackwell Companion are actually much better than I can fairly paraphrase, because the authors of the articles are top-level experts. So any fair assessing of the question of what evidence actually is possible means tackling the best form of the argument. And Peter now has those.

What I can't do is tackle them for him, since he has to do his own grappling with the evidence. I can't make him do that.

However, what should be clear right now is that there ARE such evidences, that they have been articulated in a sophisticated and thoughtful philosophical way, and that a serious investigator can access them through the book. So the claim "there are no evidences" is just evidently wrong.

Beyond that, I don't owe Pete a precis, nor do I have any interest in rehearsing the Kalaam Argument (which WLC does much better than I do) or to explain why so many people get Anselm wrong, or to do my own version of String Theory. He's got the evidence, if he cares to look at it.

[uwot]

...I guess outsourcing your reasoning to an apologist is like outsourcing your moral conscience to a god - similar psycho-crutchery going on.

I think we are in danger of getting back on topic. William Lane Craig's way out of the Euthyphro dilemma (is it good because god says so, or does god say so because it's good?) is to argue that god says so because he is good. In itself it seems harmless enough, and if god gives some comfort to those too old for a Teddy Bear there is nothing intrinsically objectionable. However, nutjobs like Craig and Mr Can can't leave it at that and insist that the god of the old testament, the petty control freak that endorses slavery, rape, genocide, racism, misogyny and pretty well anything any sane person would brand immoral, is the very essence of goodness. And seriously, did everyone slaughtered in the flood deserve to die before their hope of salvation, human scapegoat Jesus Christ, was even born?

I wanted IC to cite one piece of evidence or favourite argument.

It's not his style. When Mr Can joined this forum his tactics were to hint at some amazing conclusion, which he lacked the courage to present outright until he could persuade us to accept his premises. It's a common enough approach and most people who try it give up once they realise it isn't going to work. It goes some way to explain why out of the, as of now, 9829 members only a few dozen ever post anything. Another factor, no doubt, is the number of genuinely curious or actually qualified people who are put off by the amount of utter bollocks submitted by members who are quite clearly batshit crazy.

And Craig - pathetic as he is - has become a go-to excuse for not doing the hard work yourself. But you're right: no evidence that stands up to scrutiny, and unsound abductive arguments. For information - Reasonable Faith Debunked is an online group dedicated to exposing Craig's and others' apologetics.

Googled it. All I got was WLC's links. Must be divine intervention.

Unsurprisingly though, Craig has said that, if all of his ropey and repeatedly refuted arguments turn out to be rubbish (?!), he'll still believe, because he has the inner witness of the holy proof spirit. Heads I win, tails I win.

To my mind that's the best evidence there is. It isn't very compelling to anyone who hasn't had such an experience, but it is conceivable that some god exists and I imagine if I were to feel something which I could only ascribe to a god or madness, I would opt for the soft landing, but it's still a crash. Heads I lose, tails I lose.

[uwot]

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

Premise 1 is not sound, note Hume's counter to Causation, thus it is fundamentally psychological, i.e. of constant conjunction, habit, customs and conventions.

It's a long time since I read Hume, but my understanding is not that he was saying there's no such thing as causation, rather that we simply cannot predict what effect a cause will have. The example that springs to mind is the billiard balls. It happens that one billiard ball colliding with another imparts some of its kinetic energy, rather than the balls turning to dust. Then again, you might be right, Hume was pretty strident. Even so, I don't think it is abusing language too much to say the collision caused the second ball to move.

Premise 2 relied 100% on Science, but scientific theories are at best, polished conjectures [Popper].

Well yes, and Craig is very clearly cherry picking the science to suit his argument.

Therefore the conclusion is psychologically loaded with polished conjectures.
Even then with the above limitation, how the hell the psychological-cause is a God.
The fact is the inferred psychological caused as God is a psychological invention.

I think that is almost certainly true, but you never know.

Re his Book, If Craig has intellectual integrity, he should present the best counter arguments along with each of the arguments in the book. However Craig is intellectually dishonest and commit the fallacy of confirmation bias.

That's Popper again, but to be fair, anyone should be allowed to make a conjecture (I'm more for Feyerabend, but respect to Popper) and I don't think it's the authors responsibility to do the critics' job for them.

According to Kant, ALL arguments for God's existence, in principle is reducible to the Ontological Argument.

I haven't read that but, yeah, makes sense.

[uwot]

Immanuel Can is intellectually dishonest as well when he merely threw the book at us and insisting it represent the truth without any discussion of the materials in the book.

Heh. Ad hominem.

Not really, Mr Can. Veritas Aequitas objected that you didn't present an argument, rather than dismiss an argument of yours because you are intellectually dishonest.

[Veritas Aequitas]

Having put in the extraordinary effort [relative to myself] I consider myself a reasonable expert on Kant.

Good. That may help.

Take something Kant talked about: the Categorical Imperative. The CI indicates duties to real objects. For example, to say, "it is wrong to use a person as a means not an end" is to say that "persons" are actually-existent things. You can't have a duty to a mere subjectivity, to an imagining, to a nothing. So already, objective reality is bundled into the idea of the CI.

Don't try to pull a fast one without understanding Kant thoroughly and fully.

I gave you some quotes from Kant's CPR and you obviously do not have a clue what they represent.
To Kant the thing-in-itself is an "assumption" to denote a limit and to reify this "limit" is to generate something illusory, e.g. God or the independent soul.

Where did Kant state "persons" are actually-existing things which in your case is having an independent soul that survives physical death.
As far as Kant is concern what is the real person is merely the empirical person and the empirical "I".

Kant's central Copernican Revolution is to have a 180 degree shift in paradigm in focusing from the GIVEN object and understand knowledge of it from what is experienced rather than speculate what is the thing-in-itself without any grounds.

There are two different types of claim. You're not distinguishing right now between ontology and epistemology. To say that human beings don't know absolute-X is not to say "X does not exist." See the difference?

To illustrate, you probably don't know Madagascar. At best, you probably know OF it, and maybe can locate it on a map. But nobody, including the person who lives in Madagascar, knows the absolute fullness of the reality of Madagascar, even in a given moment. That does not imply Madagascar doesn't exist. All it tells us is that human knowledge of Madagascar is subjective and limited.

Simple enough?

So to say, "reality is subjective" is false. Ones knowledge about reality is subjective and partial. That comes well short of suggesting one's knowledge of reality is false, unreal or useless...which it would be, if there were not reality to which the subjective knowing could refer.

Kant presented the following;

1. Given justified empirical objects or things that can be experienced.
2. Empirically based objects or things that are POSSIBLE to be justified and experienced.

I have not experienced Madagascar but I know of Madagacar from the experiences of other people and Madagascar is POSSIBLE to be experienced if I should attempt at it.

The thing-in-itself is merely an assumption which is reified illusory as God, the Soul, the WHOLE Universe are never possible to be experienced as demonstrated by Kant, where he wrote [I quoted earlier but you can't apprehend at all];

Kant in CPR wrote:
The Transcendental (Subjective) Reality of the Pure Concepts of Reason depends on our having been led to such Ideas by a necessary Syllogism.

There will therefore be Syllogisms which contain no Empirical premisses, and by means of which we conclude from something which we know
to something else of which we have no Concept, and
to which, owing to an inevitable Illusion, we yet ascribe Objective Reality.

These conclusions are, then, rather to be called pseudo-Rational 2 than Rational, although in view of their Origin they may well lay claim to the latter title, since they are not fictitious and have not arisen fortuitously, but have sprung from the very Nature of Reason.

They [ideas - thing-in-itself] are sophistications not of men but of Pure Reason itself. Even the wisest of men cannot free himself from them. After long effort he perhaps succeeds in guarding himself against actual error; but he will never be able to free himself from the Illusion, which unceasingly mocks and torments him.
B397

Note this;

• There will therefore be [pseudo] Syllogisms
  which contain no Empirical premisses, and
  by means of which we conclude from something which we know
  to something else of which we have no Concept, and
  to which, owing to an inevitable Illusion, we yet ascribe Objective Reality.

What Kant demonstrated is;
your mind generated an illusion from pseudo syllogism,
but due to psychological desperation, reified [ascribed] Objective Reality to that illusion, thus is delusional.

The above is due to desperation in form pseudo arguments;

• 1. Relying from what is known empirically [concept based],
  2. then generate a premise without concept.
  3. conclude there is Objective Reality out an illusion.

The above is an equivocation of P1 and P2 with different senses;

This is what Craig and many theists did,

• P1 -they relied on Science - polished conjectures [Popper],
  P2 - then create a transcendent Premise of God,
  C1 then conclude God exists as an objective reality.

Objective Reality [independent] [God, Soul] do not follow from polished conjectures!

It is critical that you confirm you understand [not necessary agree with] the above?
If you understand and do not agree, Why?

The basis of the above is all due to your and the theists' internal desperate psychology and they instantly equivocate and claimed what is actually an illusion into an independent Objective Reality.

[Veritas Aequitas]

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

Premise 1 is not sound, note Hume's counter to Causation, thus it is fundamentally psychological, i.e. of constant conjunction, habit, customs and conventions.

It's a long time since I read Hume, but my understanding is not that he was saying there's no such thing as causation, rather that we simply cannot predict what effect a cause will have. The example that springs to mind is the billiard balls. It happens that one billiard ball colliding with another imparts some of its kinetic energy, rather than the balls turning to dust. Then again, you might be right, Hume was pretty strident. Even so, I don't think it is abusing language too much to say the collision caused the second ball to move.

Yes, it is acceptable within common sense [the vulgar], conventional and even within the scientific sense that X caused Y.

But to do philosophy in the more refined sense, there is a need for rigor, especially to put a limit to theists insisting there is a final cause - the personal creator God. I believe it is Hume's anti-theism stance that prompted him to think deeper on 'causation'.

Therefore the conclusion is psychologically loaded with polished conjectures.
Even then with the above limitation, how the hell the psychological-cause is a God.
The fact is the inferred psychological caused as God is a psychological invention.

I think that is almost certainly true, but you never know.

After extensive research, I cannot see other reasons, other than it is psychological.
One clue is a lot of mental cases experienced and see God, but for some after treatment their claim of a real God disappear.
See my often referenced video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIiIsDIkDtg
Many people experienced God when they take drugs, meditate, etc. when not when they are not doing those activities.

Buddhism understood the idea of God is psychological in dealing with an existential issue and they use psychological means to replace theism in dealing with that same existential issue thus avoiding all the negative baggage that come with theism.

The above are evidence, the idea of God emerged from psychological reasons.

According to Kant, ALL arguments for God's existence, in principle is reducible to the Ontological Argument.

I haven't read that but, yeah, makes sense.

I provided some explanation in the above post.
viewtopic.php?p=454706#p454706

[Peter Holmes]

Immanuel Can is intellectually dishonest as well when he merely threw the book at us and insisting it represent the truth without any discussion of the materials in the book.

Heh. Ad hominem.

Pete asked for the arguments. I gave them to him. What he didn't like was that I didn't just try to paraphrase them for him. But the arguments in the Blackwell Companion are actually much better than I can fairly paraphrase, because the authors of the articles are top-level experts. So any fair assessing of the question of what evidence actually is possible means tackling the best form of the argument. And Peter now has those.

What I can't do is tackle them for him, since he has to do his own grappling with the evidence. I can't make him do that.

However, what should be clear right now is that there ARE such evidences, that they have been articulated in a sophisticated and thoughtful philosophical way, and that a serious investigator can access them through the book. So the claim "there are no evidences" is just evidently wrong.

Beyond that, I don't owe Pete a precis, nor do I have any interest in rehearsing the Kalaam Argument (which WLC does much better than I do) or to explain why so many people get Anselm wrong, or to do my own version of String Theory. He's got the evidence, if he cares to look at it.

More dishonesty.

IC has not given us the arguments for the existence of a god, but merely said there's a book that presents the arguments. Challenged to set one of them out clearly, she ducks and dodges yet again.

She then, with a sleight-of-hand, equates arguments with evidence, saying that, since there are arguments, then there is evidence. Claims and arguments, of course, are not themselves evidence. An argument has premises (factual claims) requiring justification in the form of evidence. And, no doubt, IC knows this, but chooses to misrepresent the situation.

Agreed, IC doesn't owe anyone anything here. But since the whole of her argument for moral objectivity - fallacious as it is - rests on the existence of a creator god with a certain nature, her unwillingness or inability to justify that existence-claim renders her case incoherent.

[Immanuel Can]

I have not experienced Madagascar but I know of Madagacar from the experiences of other people and Madagascar is POSSIBLE to be experienced if I should attempt at it.

No, that does not follow.

What you would have to think, if reality is subjective, is that these people imagined they went to a place called Madagascar, and if you attempted it, you might have a similar delusion to the one they experienced. But you'd have to insist that there is no real Madagascar to go to, nothing "objectively there" for you to find...only a subjective delusion that there was.

Then you'd have the problem of why their delusion was so similar to yours, given that there was no objective Madagascar "out there" to induce that delusion in you and them equally. So you'd have to say that it was not only a delusion that Madagascar existed, but also that it was the most unexpected coincidence of delusion that you just happened to see a Madagascar of the same sort they saw.

If all this isn't too much for you to swallow, it should be. Subjectivity allows for no objective reality, and thus there is no objective Madagascar, and no explanation for the similarity in your impression, and the impressions of millions of others, that there is.

[Immanuel Can]

IC has not given us the arguments for the existence of a god, but merely said there's a book that presents the arguments.

Right. You have the arguments. You know where they are. So that means that you have the choice to deal with them or not.

The one thing you know for certain is that your line about "there is no evidence" was not true; what you do about that is up to you. I said earlier that natural arguments do not convince people. This is because you have no terms on which you would regard the existence of God as demonstrated.

There are two reasons for this: the first, you discovered when I asked you what standard of evidence you would accept. As soon as you thought about it, you realized that there actually was nothing that a) you could rationally expect me to be able to arrange for you, since I am not God, and b) if I provided you with anything at all, you'd have an alternate possibility for explanation that would make the proof indecisive.

In fact, I suspect that if I could arrange that "Peter" would appear tonight in the pattern of stars above your head, you would think, "What a stunning coincidence -- and what a perfect demonstration that an infinite number of monkeys working on an infinite number of typewriters...etc." You might even go on to think, "Finally we have confirmation that purely random forces in the universe can spontaneously generate the appearance of order -- and thus that Evolutionism is vindicated."

But the one thing you would not do is say, "God is addressing me."

The second reason it would not work is this: God has ordained that it will not work. You will scoff at that, I'm certain. But Kierkegaard pointed this out, long ago; so the point certainly doesn't originate with me. In fact, it originates with the Bible itself, which says, "Without faith, it is impossible to please God; for he who comes to God must believe that He exists, and that He is the Rewarder of those who seek Him."

What this means is that God Himself has chosen to put a solid gate between skeptical naturalism and knowledge of Him -- for the reason that His goal is relationship with us, and if we want to come coldly, indifferently, on our own terms, relying purely on our cynicism to take us there, we will not arrive. Before we get to knowledge of God, we have to make a decision about what we want to do with the knowledge we get, what kind of a relationship we're seeking, and what the relative position of ourselves to God actually is going to be, by our choice. Are we going to come sneering? Then we will hit the gate and bounce back -- God does not reward such an attitude, even if skeptics think He should. Are we coming to know Him personally? Then the gates open, and we go forward.

With God, it is as Anselm said: credo ut intellegam -- "I believe in order to know." Not "I believe that which is against reason," or "I believe that which I know not to be true," but that "I pick my attitude before I'm allowed any further information."

Now, really, this principle is not all that foreign to ordinary experience. Much of what becomes knowledge for us depends on a preliminary step in which we choose our mental disposition to the subject, or we go no further. Take a scientist, who has to decide without having yet done an experiment, whether the experiment he is contemplating is worth doing at all. If he decides to be contemptuous of his own idea before he starts, if he dismisses his intuition about that and disregards the indications that an experiment might produce something interesting, he will not think further about it or set up any experiment, and thus he gets no more information, even if there really is a good experiment to be done there. If there is, he'll never know. Likewise, the case of a young man contemplating relationship with a woman. He can let fear of her rejection cause him not to try; or he can approach her in such a skeptical, self-protecting, failure-anticipating way that he destroys any possibility of his own success. But he will never know if the girl can love him, unless he musters enough faith to think that maybe, just possibly, she will, and to act accordingly.

God is interested in whether or not we want a relationship with Him. He is utterly unconcerned about being known as a "naturalistic fact" or by cynical and self-confident others. He is not interested in being mathematically calculated, popped into a test tube, called upon to do magic tricks, or otherwise subjected to the manipulations and calculations of those human beings who remain cynically-disposed. So He has left enough natural evidences to make men "without excuse," as the Bible puts it, and even to lead somebody to the gate of knowledge, and to the intimation that something lies beyond...but farther, they are not allowed to go by relying strictly on their own mere cynicism or natural craft. They must decide what kind of relationship they plan to have, before they get through the gates.

Agreed, IC doesn't owe anyone anything here.

That is true, of course. Nevertheless, if natural theology type arguments would do more than they can do, I might try. But natural law arguments, mathematical proofs, rational disputations, for all the good they do, cannot by themselves produce knowledge of God. They go as far as the gate, no farther. So my case from natural theology beings and ends with showing whomever I can how to get the very best information available anywhere, which, if one wants to take it seriously, could lead one so far as that gate itself. But I am under no illusions that anyone but Peter can take Peter beyond that point.

The gate is there: knock earnestly, or stay outside the gate. The choice is not mine.

[Peter Holmes]

IC has not given us the arguments for the existence of a god, but merely said there's a book that presents the arguments.

Right. You have the arguments. You know where they are. So that means that you have the choice to deal with them or not.

I'm very familiar with all the arguments, so I know how unsound they are and can refute every single one with ease. That you won't champion even one of them and try to defend it demonstrates your lack of confidence - which is entirely understandable.

The one thing you know for certain is that your line about "there is no evidence" was not true; what you do about that is up to you. I said earlier that natural arguments do not convince people. This is because you have no terms on which you would regard the existence of God as demonstrated.

No. As I've explained, an argument is not evidence. And I find your obtuseness here newly incredible. It's like talking to a robot with a script from which deviation is impossible. Your mind has been rotten by your strain of the god-virus, with which there can be no reasoning. I accept any claim for which there is credible evidence. But you can't produce any evidence, so you have to keep deflecting. It's embarrassing. You are shameless.

Btw, preaching your nonsense is pointless. You can't even show your tribal god exists, so what you pretend to know about what it's like, does and wants is idle speculation.

[Immanuel Can]

I'm very familiar with all the arguments, so I know how unsound they are and can refute every single one with ease.

Then I'm pretty sure you haven't actually understood them. For whatever your estimation is of me personally, I suspect that the many intelligent people who have debated and continue to debate these issues, and certainly the scholars who compiled all the essays in the book, are hardly likely to be your inferiors, even if happen to you suppose I am. But you may propose that they are, if you are very confident. I'm not sure that's likely to be believed by anyone....and I'm pretty sure that even includes you, despite all gestures to the contrary.

[Peter Holmes]

I'm very familiar with all the arguments, so I know how unsound they are and can refute every single one with ease.

Then I'm pretty sure you haven't actually understood them. For whatever your estimation is of me personally, I suspect that the many intelligent people who have debated and continue to debate these issues, and certainly the scholars who compiled all the essays in the book, are hardly likely to be your inferiors, even if happen to you suppose I am. But you may propose that they are, if you are very confident. I'm not sure that's likely to be believed by anyone....and I'm pretty sure that even includes you, despite all gestures to the contrary.

I'm very confident that all the apologetic arguments peddled by Craig - which amounts to all the standard ones - are unsound. I've seen them in different forms many times. And if you do just a little research, you'll easily find refutations. But I'd guess that wouldn't fit your bill.

And meantime, there's not one iota of credible evidence for the existence of your god - to my knowledge - which is why you don't offer any.

[uwot]

I'm very familiar with all the arguments, so I know how unsound they are and can refute every single one with ease.

Then I'm pretty sure you haven't actually understood them.

There ya go again Mr Can. Why is it always the fault of the person you fail to impress, never the weakness of your case?

For whatever your estimation is of me personally, I suspect that the many intelligent people who have debated and continue to debate these issues, and certainly the scholars who compiled all the essays in the book, are hardly likely to be your inferiors, even if happen to you suppose I am.

Oh please. Is an argument from authority the best that you have?

But you may propose that they are, if you are very confident. I'm not sure that's likely to be believed by anyone....

I believe it. Have you seen the Mickey Mouse establishments these boneheads are attached to?
W.L.Craig himself is at Houston Baptist University and Talbot School of Theology (Biola University)
C. Taliaferro - St. Olaf College
A. Pruss - Baylor University in Waco, Texas
R. Collins - Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania
J. P. Moreland - Talbot School of Theology
Enough. The thing they have in common is that they are privately funded religious institutions. I'm sure they're lovely people, but none of them would get anywhere near a proper university.