Why Faith is a Delusion, Case in Point: William Lane Craig

Craig said:
Plantinga talks about intrinsic defeater-defeaters. That is to say, a belief which is so powerfully warranted for me that it intrinsically defeats any defeater brought against it. You don't need another extrinsic defeater to defeat the defeater. You have an intrinsic defeater-defeater in the witness of the Holy Spirit which allows you to retain faith rationally even in the face of unanswered objections.
The context of this quote is as follows:
If somebody gave me an argument against Christianity that I couldn't answer, I couldn't apostatize; I couldn't walk away from Christ. He was too real to me. I knew it was true even if I couldn't answer the argument. So my dilemma was, “How do you put this together? How can you be a rational person and yet hold to the truth of the Gospel even though you don't have an answer to the defeaters that are brought against it?” It was only years later that I hit upon this scheme of the difference between knowing and showing, and that the primary and fundamental way in which we know that Christianity is true is through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. If you are presented arguments and evidence to the contrary that you can't answer, that is only due to your lack of education or perceptiveness or learning that you haven't yet found the answer. But that doesn't mean that you should apostatize until you find the answer. You should look into it and try to find the answer but you continue to believe on the basis of the Spirit's witness until you do find the answer. And the answer is out there. I think that is the difference between me and Penner. I recognize that in my historical contextualized situation, I may not yet have the answer. I may not have the insight or the philosophical acumen to know how to answer this problem, but the answer is out there. The truth is out there. How do you know? Because the Holy Spirit witnesses to me that these are true and that therefore if I continue my inquiry long enough I may find the answer. LINK.
Would someone please tell me why faith is NOT the problem here, why a Scientologist or a Mormon or a Hindu or a Muslim doesn't have this same kind of faith, why faith doesn't stunt one's intellectual growth? Believers continue to believe whatever they were raised to believe without truly examining their faith. Faith is NOT a virtue if one desires to know the truth about reality. Faith is a pretend game leading to a fantasy-based life. Faith is a delusion.

0 comments: