Biola University is a private Christian university located in Southern California. For over 100 years, Biola — a community where all faculty, staff and students are professing Christians — has been committed to biblically centered education, intentional spiritual development and vocational preparation.
http://www.biola.edu/about/An index of why William Lane Craig is a dishonest genocide-defending creepy homophobe
As bad as all of this is, none of it, as far as I’m concerned, qualifies as “the worst thing about William Lane Craig.” Craig has become notorious as
defender of (Biblical) genocide, who disturbingly engages in some rhetorical hair-splitting similar to that of defenders of things like the Armenian Genocide. He insists that no one ever really rejects Christianity for intellectual reasons, a
delusion which I find incredibly creepy.
And while he’s best-known for his arguments for the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus, he’s proven willing to traffic in just about any kind of fundamentalist pseudo-intellectual garbage when it’s convenient for him. That includes anti-evolutionism, just not young-earthism, which he
says he’s embarrassed by. It includes
using pseudoscience to defend Todd Akin’s infamous comments about “legitimate rape.”
And it includes
promoting anti-gay pseudoscience and other lies about gay people. That was the topic of my last post about Craig, and the thing that finally may have exhausted my patience for him. As I say in that post, Craig isn’t just a bigot, “he’s a bigot who, when he’s clearly losing the argument, instead of putting his energy into pretending his position isn’t bigoted, doubles down on spreading lies about a minority that is just now gaining full legal equality.”
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/hallq/2013/05/an-index-of-why-william-lane-craig-is-a-dishonest-genocide-defending-creepy-homophobe/So even if Copan is right, I’m still willing to bite the bullet and tackle the tougher question of how an all-good, all-loving God could issue such horrendous commands. My argument in Question of the Week #16 is that God has the moral right to issue such commands and that He wronged no one in doing so. I want to challenge those who decry my answer to explain whom God wronged and why we should think so. As I explained, the most plausible candidate is, ironically, the soldiers themselves, but I think that morally sufficient reasons can be provided for giving them so gruesome a task.
There is one important aspect of my answer that I would change, however. I have come to appreciate as a result of a closer reading of the biblical text that God’s command to Israel was not primarily to exterminate the Canaanites but to drive them out of the land. It was the land that was (and remains today!) paramount in the minds of these Ancient Near Eastern peoples. The Canaanite tribal kingdoms which occupied the land were to be destroyed as nation states, not as individuals. The judgment of God upon these tribal groups, which had become so incredibly debauched by that time, is that they were being divested of their land. Canaan was being given over to Israel, whom God had now brought out of Egypt. If the Canaanite tribes, seeing the armies of Israel, had simply chosen to flee, no one would have been killed at all. There was no command to pursue and hunt down the Canaanite peoples.
It is therefore completely misleading to characterize God’s command to Israel as a command to commit genocide. Rather it was first and foremost a command to drive the tribes out of the land and to occupy it. Only those who remained behind were to be utterly exterminated. There may have been no non-combatants killed at all. That makes sense of why there is no record of the killing of women and children, such as I had vividly imagined. Such scenes may have never taken place, since it was the soldiers who remained to fight. It is also why there were plenty of Canaanite people around after the conquest of the land, as the biblical record attests.
No one had to die in this whole affair. Of course, that fact doesn’t affect the moral question concerning the command that God gave, as explained above. But I stand by my previous answer of how God could have commanded the killing of any Canaanites who attempted to remain behind in the land.
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-slaughter-of-the-canaanites-re-visitedCraig supports ethnic cleansing and genocide, if God tells the perpetrators to do it. He teaches philosophy, presumably including ethics. Biola is happy for him to teach this.
= new reply since forum marked as read
