Dr. Craig: All Other Religious Claims to the Witness of the Spirit are False

I wonder if the question Bill attempts to answer was prompted by what I wrote in the introduction to The Christian Delusion, which can be read here. A perceptive Christian asks him:

[H]ow can a Christian and a Mormon gain any ground one way or another? Both would believe their Spiritual Witness to be authentic, and both would claim that since we only see in part, evidence cannot possibly rule their experience out. [Earlier] you gave an analogy of bottles labeled as water. You said that if only one of the bottles is water, and the rest is poison, that the truth of the correctly labeled bottle is in no way lessened because of the mislabeling of the others. But how can the person with the poison (false witness) know what he has isn’t water if he won’t listen to evidence based on his experience? In turn how can the person with the H2O (Real Holy Spirit) know they don’t have a mislabeled Bottle?...Can’t this argument also be used by the Mormon against a Christian who is certain of their own experience of the correctly labeled bottle or water?

Craig's answer lies in his distinction between "knowing" Christianity is true and "showing" it's true. He knows it's true and that's all there is to it:

My knowledge of Christianity’s truth, while supported by strong arguments, is not ultimately based on those arguments but on the witness of God Himself. If, therefore, I find myself confronted with a well-prepared and articulate Mormon who blows away my arguments and presents a case for Mormonism that I can’t answer, I should not apostatize, since I have the witness of the Holy Spirit to Christianity’s truth and so realize that although I’ve lost the argument, Christianity is nonetheless the truth (and I need to be better prepared next time!)...he [the Mormon] can’t justifiably remain Mormon by appealing to his experience, since he doesn’t really have a genuine witness of the Holy Spirit, but only a counterfeit experience.

Reasonable Faith: Q & A with Dr. William Lane Craig

Well, well, isn't that convenient? Now let's see what a Mormon could say in response,okay?

My knowledge of Mormonism’s truth, while supported by strong arguments, is not ultimately based on those arguments but on the witness of God Himself. If, therefore, I find myself confronted with a well-prepared and articulate Christian who blows away my arguments and presents a case for Christianity that I can’t answer, I should not apostatize, since I have the witness of God to Mormonism’s truth and so realize that although I’ve lost the argument, Mormonism is nonetheless the truth (and I need to be better prepared next time!)...he [the Christian] can’t justifiably remain Christian by appealing to his experience, since he doesn’t really have a genuine witness of the Spirit, but only a counterfeit experience.

Now let's consider what's going on here. Bill's discussion of this question depends on a one time debate between a Christian and a Mormon, being the preeminent Christian debater of our era that he is. But what if instead we're talking about a long protracted discussion between these two believers with the corresponding books they would mutually read? Then what? Would anything change in Bill's answer no matter what the Christian would discover in this longer discussion? NO. Nothing would change about Bill's answer. He knows that he knows that he knows. End of story for him. And what if the Mormon thought the same thing, that he knows that he knows that he knows? What then? I'll tell ya what. They are both deluded, that's what. The evidence will never be able to settle their debates. After all, they know that they know that they know. This is absolutely ridiculous. No intelligent person should lock himself into such a box where the evidence does not matter, and it doesn't, not for Craig, not ultimately. This is a clear sign of a deluded person and the reason why I edited the book I did in the first place.

I can just imagine a Christian with Craig's mindset reading my books and others and saying to himself, "Hmmm, I cannot answer this argument nor that one or much of anything. But hey, I don't need to. The arguments do not matter. I don't need to offer any counter-arguments at all. I have the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. That's all I need. Hey, I don't even need to argue on behalf of the witness of the Holy Spirit, and neither does Craig, because arguments do not matter!"

Such tomfoolery knows no bounds. With such a view a believer has insulated himself from the world and ends up being an Epistemological Solipsist. Why bother talking to such a brainwashed person as that?

Sheesh

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I liked what Martin said below:

What Craig essentially argued was: "We can't distinguish the water from the poison without evidence or arguments, but *I have* the pure water because it says so right on the bottle (even though all the other bottles say the same thing, and I just happened to pick this one up as a child), so I know this is the water, no matter what evidence you have that it is poison."