Dawkins v Craig.

Andrew Brown from The Guardian:

William Lane Craig was last month's story, but I am still puzzled by one of the attacks on him. Let's suppose for a moment that Richard Dawkins was telling the truth when he said that it was Craig's attitude to genocide which meant he would not debate with him. Let's further move the debate away from the revenge fantasies of the book of Joshua – because I don't believe the stories there and can't see why I should. The world is full of real acts of genocide or ethnic cleansing without worrying about the probably fictional bits of the Old Testament. The question is whether it is morally outrageous to suppose that the innocent victims of such crimes go to heaven.

The attack on Lane Craig does not just maintain that he is wrong to believe in heaven, but that his belief renders him so morally repulsive that no decent person should share a platform or shake hands with him. And I don't see why.

In all the fuss about Craig there are two things mixed up. The first is whether God commands genocide. The second is whether he is able to take innocents to heaven. It is possible, and perhaps necessary, to get morally outraged about the first question. That's the Euthyphro problem. But I think there is a transference of outrage to the second question, too.

The first thing to say is that there is genocide in our world. More generally, innocents suffer, and injustice is rewarded. If God does not exist, he is not to blame for this. If he does exist, he is in some sense responsible, and there is some mechanism, clearly not of this world, by which he can be forgiven. I don't accept that our present state of comfort somehow justifies the sufferings of people who were sacrificed for it. We can't, I think, forgive God or the universe for the horrors of the world that other people suffer. That would be precisely the sin of the Pharisees, or, as Swift put it, "When we are lashed, they kiss the rod, obedient to the will of God."

There are two possibilities. Either the suffering of the innocent is meaningless, and goes unredeemed. Or it is eventually understood – and accepted – by them as meaningful, and so redeemed. It seems obvious that the second of these two possibilities would be better. That, on its own, is not grounds for believing it is true. But it is clearly more desirable.