Is William Lane Craig open to the possibility of evolutionary creationism?

Would someone help me answer this question?
Craig is partnered with Grad Resources, a grad student ministry here in Dallas, and I don’t want to spend my time and energy arguing with supporters of Craig if he is openly hostile to EC.

His Kalam is bunk. As is his Molinism, divine eternity (God is bigger than that, hence Kalam is bunk), arguing against metaphysical naturalism, for Reformed epistemology, for ID. He is homophobic and a divine command theorist, therefore if God says butcher babies, it’s good.

But yes, he ’ maintains that the theory of evolution is compatible with Christianity’ - Craig, William Lane (February 20, 2012). “Evolutionary Theory and Theism”. Reasonable Faith . Archived from the original on October 2, 2017. Retrieved September 28, 2018.

I tried it. It was pointless. There is no give and take, just unrelenting indoctrination.

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Interesting. Does anyone who thinks that homosexual behaviour is a sin is a homophobic according to you Klax?

@Klax, and @NickolaosPappas please take that question to PM if you would like to discuss it. It’s off-topic and outside the bounds for the public forums.

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Yeah, he’s quite at home in the C11th-C16th (AD as well as BCE), with one C19th idea tolerated; it’s a start.

Would you explain how you tried to engage WLCraig or his group?

I just joined the forum and participated in conversations. Being an open non-believer who didn’t identify as a seeker drew a lot of hostility and soon enough a ban. The depth of the discussions was not satisfying. So much emphasis on logic based on farfetched hypotheticals. I found no one I would identify as a friend or kindred spirit.

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That is so typically sad Mark. Rationality, intellectual honesty is marginal in nominally Christian cyberspace, culture, at all. I’m too new to it too old. And don’t have the skills for this environment. But who does? Especially your civility and that of @T_aquaticus. You are both at least primus inter pares here, with very few Christian peers. If any to be honest. Ah well, it’s the sick who need doctoring.

Oh I can’t agree. Seems like the majority here, yourself included, are gracious, friendly and kindred spirits in my book.

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See, you Sir, are a gentleman and a sane one. And no, that’s not projection, but I know one when I see one.

Aren’t you the kind one? Careful or you’ll get a reputation!

I was just listening to this recent two hour talk on Youtube titled Matter and Consciousness given by Iain McGilchrist where he was dropping a number of names of physicists stating similar things on the question of primacy between the two. Like you, I think, I’ve always been of the mind that matter is first but apparently many of the most reknown physicists are skeptical about this. I especially liked this one from Sir Arthur Eddington which comes around the 33 minute mark:

We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origins. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own.

Good stuff.

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But you are a seeker Mark. A seeker after truth. An open, rational, honest man. Virtuous. You’ll burn in Hell forever and ever for that of course. You sum up WLC perfectly, he uses his savant gifts before the horse on the cartload of at best Thomist medieval Islamic suppositions. I feel that McGrath does little better and the cleverest, but still specious, is Platinga.

Yes but there they define seeker as one on his way to affirming Christianity in the form they themselves affirm. My bias is that Christianity is ‘true’ by virtue of its capacity to connect a person to a greater truth and not based on history or any of its more specific claims. But it does not hold an exclusive patent on that capacity. It occurred to me today while hiking on an old favorite trail for the first time since surgery on my new, state of the art knee, that God is in one sense the personification of the Tao with a more fleshed out backstory. I wonder if its being personified simply makes it a better fit for a western (Haidt’s W.E.I.R.D.) sensibility? The thing is I’d like to better appreciate is how both can be true.

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It can be Mark. You just did it: it doesn’t matter if Christianity is true, rhetorically let alone rationally, in fact it certainly isn’t true by any apologetic. At its only pure best it is rhetorically true, in pathos, ethos and logos, whether it is true in its first premiss of Incarnation. All apologetics ignore the gospel and therefore pathetically and even ethically fail to be logical. A prime candidate is bannered on this site. Whether Jesus was real or not, the gospel is. Isn’t that what you are saying? Which is in the finest Jesuist humanist tradition.

I’ve seen him argue for ID in one or two debates, although he does say ultimately there is no incompatibility. I think he should have read more biology before trying to suggest that it’s hard to establish universal ancestry of life. Across literally all life, there are more than 60 genes hat are completely ubiquitous. What’s more, over 200 gene families are truly ubiquitous across life. You’ll notice that truly all of life has, at its base, cells, and all cells have DNA, RNA, and proteins to propagate their functions and reproduction. The machinery used by cells to propagate themselves (DNA → RNA → proteins) is conserved across all of life. Thus, there is plenty of evidence for the universal ancestry that Craig finds hard to accept. I don’t think Craig had to do much looking to find this kind of information. Eventually, you get to deal with the people who want to attribute all of these similarities to common design rather than common ancestry. And while this succeeds in making itself as the only viable creationist pathway to evade all of this, a closer look at the data will demonstrate how extremely short this proposition falls. This article goes into a solid amount of detail why:

Ultimately, Craig is not a biologist. He’s a philosopher and theologian. I think he does quite great in the fields he specializes in and I find him highly compelling.

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As a philosopher he can’t cope with uniformitarianism at all.

Uniformitarianism as in this stuff? I personally have not seen Craig discuss this. Can you point me further as to what you’re talking about?

Exactly. It’s passed him by. Beneath him I’m sure. It’s mere nature, like evolution, human sexuality, nature itself. His Kalam is specious nonsense because of it. His Molinism is even more absurd. All Walrus and Carpenter. Both and all the rest are predicated on his complete ignorance of the gospel of course.

Do you think that we need to give some gospel forbearance and mercy to those who do not yet apprehend it? What would you say is the gospel?
Pax vobis cum.

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