William Lane Craig

William Lane Craig is one of the leading and most prominent apologists of the western world. Many Christians regard him as a highly-educated scholar who has a strong grasp of philosophy and logic, and who has strong, irrefutable arguments that do not rely on emotion and unfounded claims.

Or that's how he sounds to the untrained hear, to someone who doesn't really understand what he's saying. Craig really is a master of making himself sound scholarly, academic and highly educated, someone who really knows what he's talking about, and who can mop the floor with any atheist and skeptic in a debate. He uses fancy terminology, and he is really good at speaking in a clear and academic manner. Yet to a more trained skeptic he's nothing but a showman and a hypocrite.

He constantly accuses his opponents of committing all kinds of deductive and logical fallacies, yet commits those very fallacies himself with almost every single argument he makes. For example, he's a great proponent of the so-called cosmological argument for the existence of God, yet seemingly can't understand the most basic problems with it (and this is just one of the many, many fallacies he constantly commits.) Moreover, when those problems are pointed out to him, he either chooses those objections that are the easiest to counter (not all objections are all that good, after all), distorts what the objection is actually saying, or just starts playing with words rather than understanding and answering the actual objection.

What's worse, he often proclaims how great and educated of a philosopher he is (and often belittles his opponents for not having an "education in philosophy" and thus not being at the same level as him) yet he miserably fails to understand some of the most basic properties of existence and function of reality (or, alternatively, deliberately interprets them in a manner more favorable to his apologetics.) For example, he has absolutely no understanding of things like emergent behavior, or the simple fact that a phenomenon may simply be a function of simple material elements interacting, instead claiming such phenomena to be "immaterial" and to exist "independent of physical matter." (One of the most common examples of this is that he considers the "mind" as being immaterial and existing completely independently of physical matter, without understanding that the human mind can be, and most probably is, just the interaction between brain cells and electricity. A very complex interaction yes, but still fully material and naturalistic. He cannot comprehend that the phenomenon we call "mind", for the lack of a better term, simply cannot exist without physical matter because it's a function of the interaction between physical elements. It's like saying that sound is "immaterial" and can exist without any space and matter, simply because sound is a phenomenon that's not, strictly speaking, matter itself. It's a phenomenon of matter interacting with itself. I'm sure even Craig wouldn't claim that sound can exist without matter.)

The most difficult thing about Craig is making his followers understand that he's just a charlatan, a showman. As said, he might sound really educated and scholarly to the untrained ear, but when one actually understands what he's saying, and all the theory behind those arguments, one quickly realizes that he is just full of it.