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Posted by on Feb 11, 2013 in Consciousness, Philosophy of Religion, Problem of Evil | 7 comments

BOOM! – Craig is, um, owned on animal suffering. Twice.

If you, like me, were at the Stephen Law vs William Lane Craig debate, your jaw will have dropped when Craig, in defence of God vis-a-vis animal suffering and the problem of evil, claimed that animals don’t suffer pain.

He claimed that most animals didn’t have the conscious awareness of pain that humans and other primates do. He was solely relying on the work of Michael Murray in Nature Red in Tooth and Claw: Theism and the Problem of Animal Suffering. This book sets out that there are, broadly speaking, three levels of pain suffering and related awareness, amoebas in the first, humans in the last, and most higher animals in the middle. They feel pain but are not consciously aware of it in the same way as humans are.

And apparently, this lets God off the hook for having them die horribly in their billions over millions of years.

But it doesn’t. Because he is wrong. He was called out on it in an excellent video by Skydivephil. To which Craig responded in a podcast. And got it wrong again. and was called out again in an even more excellent video by Skydivephil. BOOM!

 

Craig’s reply is linked on the second SDP video.

 

Craig’s accusations (and the host of the podcast) are so erroneous as to be, er, slanderous! You HAVE to watch these. But if you only have a short time, watch the second one.

 

H/T to John over at Debunking Christianity.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_NZMJ7JRYKH7WR6YTXJGG3PU65E John Grove

    You KNOW why Christians say this don’t you? To offset or to minimize the fact that the argument from evil is a powerful argument against God. So, to lessen the the blow, they pull this out of their ass which is just bullshit.

  • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

    It’s great when the bullshitter who calls out the supposed bullshit is themselves bullshitted and found to be empirically, verifiably, provably full of bullshit.
    Or something.

  • Andy_Schueler

    That was indeed some serious pwnage . 
    WLC´s statement that a “scientifically informed philosopher” (by which he presumably means himself) is more qualified to address questions such as animal suffering, is laughable given that he is by no means “scientifically informed”. As demonstrated in those videos, he is just as “scientifically informed” about neuroscience as he is about Big Bang Cosmology. 

  • Daydreamer1

    This surely must show why theologically based ideas about morality are rotten. Every single one of them has some weird, un-evidenced, corrupt notion like this.

    It seems to me fairly obvious that a good absolute and objective grounding for morality is pain and an individuals suffering. Basing ‘absolute’ grounding on the guesses of what some imagined thing would think is just about as nuts as you can get – and is surely the reason for the massive moral relativism seen throughout the worlds religions. They just succeed in blinding themselves to this fact by ignoring each others religions…

    It is an irony that we are accused of moral relativism by groups that obviously have very high relativism between them, when we actually have a real material underpinning that can act as as much of an objective and absolute definition as you can get.

  • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

    I think it is fairly obvious that most people have a basic, and often faulty, personal morality, and use religion (or codify it within religion) in order to bolster their own personal relativistic beliefs. That is why there are so many denominations of christianity.

  • Daydreamer1

    Thanks Jonathan,

      Have you seen much argument regarding moral absolutism/relativism that tries to twist around the standard convention of theism that it holds a more absolute ground – to point out that actually materialism can be looked at as having a more solid absolute grounding?
      You cannot get more relative than having story based morality using guesses of what story characters might wish. We can state as evidence the high degree of relativity between denominations and religions for this.
      For materialists real world objective absolutes like cell metabolism, heat, pain reception etc along with other real world subjective facts such as desire etc form a solid base that we cannot interpret and change so simply – that in a changing universe are as absolute as we get from the short geological perspective of species.

      So for example we would attempt to minimise pain, but we can appreciate that the BDSM community is not being immoral since it is consensual and desired. Sportspeople are not committing moral harm by performing activities that result in pain since it is consensual etc.
      These are material and measurable realities – and even the contemplation of the subjective is not too great a complexity that it overwhelms the moralities implied by the objective.
      That is the sort of reality I can ascribe to, and one I believe can fit the human condition without calling us all sinners for enjoying ourselves. But more than that it is actually more absolute than any religious morality. They should not be allowed to get away with simply winning an argument that they are absolute by repeating it often enough, when, if people actually value absolutism in a morality, our ‘relative’ morality (which is actually only relative in the sense that we learn new things – and often change the historic morality when we deem it lacks equality and fairness or is proven to have consequences that affect people negatively) is in reality built on more absolute standards than their story based moralities.

  • http://www.www.skepticink.com/tippling/ Jonathan MS Pearce

    Hi there

    Have you read my God is a Consequentilaist essay above? It is also a blog post if you search for it. This pretty much concludes that Go’s morality is defined by the consequences to the actions, and thus contextualised. It is clearly not absolute in a Kantian Categorical Imperative sense (he ordered genocides, after all).

    I would be interested in what you think if you comment on the blog post version!

    Also worth a look is the nonsatmpcollector video called CONTEXT!!!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK7P7uZFf5o