1) Is Craig saying that all humans prior to Christianity should have thrown themselves off cliffs in despair over the meaninglessness of their lives? Because that would be a clearly false thing to say.
2) In response, Craig might say something to the effect of "Humans prior to the revelation to the Jews or prior to the Gospels could have believed in God as revealed by creation."
But this would be a bad response for the following reasons:
A) Craig himself says that you need God and an afterlife for reality to be ultimately meaningful.[*1] But Orthodox Judaism doesn't teach an afterlife, and no clear teaching of the afterlife can be found in the Old Testament. So really, even belief in the God of the Old Testament, the true God, is not enough on Craig's view for life to be meaningful. I'll say that again: Even believing in the true God is not enough to live a meaningful life on Craig's view! So all the figures of the Old Testament were living meaningless lives, including Joseph, Abraham, and Moses? Really?
B) The God revealed by creation is, like Hume points out, not clearly good nor evil, as life is rife with both good and evil. But if the God of creation is not clearly good nor evil, and is apparently indifferent to both our suffering and our joy, then there's no reason to think there will be an afterlife for our sakes.
More importantly, if there is no report of an afterlife revealed by God in a credible way, then there is no reason to think there is an afterlife. It would be pure speculation. So...
3) ...would Craig say it's okay to live a life that might be meaningful on speculation? Does life have to be absolutely certainly known to be meaningful (i.e. does God’s existence and an afterlife have to be known with certainty) for a person to rationally live it?
Surely Craig would not set the standard that high. Indeed Craig is infamous for saying that when it comes to pragmatic reasoning, the standard can be extremely low.[*2] As long as there is some chance that there is a god out there and an afterlife out there, then it's reasonable to live according to that chance. So as long as atheists aren't absolutely certain that there is no god and no universalist afterlife, as long as they believe there is a non-zero chance of these things, then they can live on the same kind of leap of faith that Craig champions when he says Christianity is worth believing in even if there were only a one in a million chance of it being true. And many atheists would admit that there is some chance of such a universal salvation, however small.
4) Is a naturalistic worldview unlivable? No! And shouldn't Craig know better, having debated however many naturalists at this point, who all clearly do not find naturalism to be unlivable? Is Graham Oppy, a “scary smart” atheist scholar, somehow irrational for living as a naturalist?
Craig claims that naturalists live as if their lives have meaning, but have no basis for this meaning. But that's not only mistaken, but I'd claim certainly mistaken. The basis for meaning that naturalists have is the same basis that all humans prior to Christianity had, and it’s the same basis that, ironically, even Christians have for meaning.
Why do Christians live their lives? Do Christians receive a letter from God in the mail that details their purpose on earth? Or do Christians receive a vision or a dream, or an auditory message from God that details their purpose on earth? Nope. Christians are left to figure things out on their own, the same as everyone else.
And so inevitably Christians end up living for: their jobs, hobbies, entertainment, family, friends, exploring the world, because their biology generates an internal pressure to survive, and so on, exactly the same reasons humans have always had for living.
You might say that Christians have uniquely Christian jobs like pastor, missionary, and Christian philosopher, but that's only very few Christians. Most Christians are like everyone else: Working some miscellaneous job that puts food on the table for the family. (Why is God so okay with his followers working mundane jobs for decades and decades, knowing what that does to the soul, I have no idea.)
We are told in Revelation that in heaven there will be no more death or suffering. We are told that hell is a place of torment. This is a strikingly hedonistic system of value. If Christianity were anti-hedonism, then we could imagine heaven being filled with pain and hell being filled with happiness. After all, if it's things other than pain and happiness that form the basis of value, then heaven could be filled with those intrinsically good things (whatever they are) along with pain, and hell could be filled with those intrinsically bad things (whatever they are) along with happiness.
As it stands, we don't find that description of heaven and hell in the Bible or in Christian tradition. So we're left with a hedonistic picture of Christian value. But if hedonism is true, then happiness forms the basis of meaning. That which is meaningful is that which makes life worth living, and vice versa (this is the meaning in life sense of meaning). Happiness makes life worth living. So that which imparts happiness imparts meaning. And this is exactly what we find in the world: all human motivation can be understood in terms of pursuing certain kinds of happiness and avoiding certain kinds of pain.
The reason why I say that it's certainly the case that life is meaningful is because not only is it certain that we experience happiness, but because it is certainly the case that our actions make a difference (this is the difference-making sense of meaning). Craig claims that our lives make no ultimate difference if death is the permanent end. But there is a difference, and a certain one at that, between happiness and pain. The real moments of real flourishing that real people really have—that's the difference-maker, and it's a difference that we have direct access to via immediate experience.[*3]
5) So a naturalistic worldview is certainly livable for the same reasons that life in general is livable, including Christian life. But is a Christian worldview livable? A person can find Christian worldviews to be unlivable for the following reasons:
A) To be a Christian you must select a denomination but it can seem like there are no good reasons to select one over the others.
B) When you try to do theology to discover which denomination is best, you discover that there are severe challenges to the coherence of all Christian doctrines, including the doctrines of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, Salvation, Sin, Eschatology, Heaven, Hell, Creation, Faith, Ecclesiology, etc.
B) There are moral horrors in the Old Testament, horrors that Craig happily defends.[*4]
C) Jesus says things that are arguably straight up false, including His teachings on divorce (Mt. 19:9), that the "meek shall inherit the earth" (Mt. 5:5), that "whoever is not with me is against me" (Luke 11:23), "how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him" (Mt. 7:7), and "the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father." (John 14:12).
On that last one you might try to wriggle out of it by saying that it refers to only the disciples, but a) it specifies "the one who believes in me", not just the disciples, and b) the disciples did not go on to perform greater works than that of Jesus.
You might respond by saying "works" refers to spreading the gospel, and "greater works" refers to how greater numbers of people will be reached by the gospel than what Jesus reached during His earthly ministry. But the term for works, τὰ ἔργα, found in John 14:11, refers to miracles.
D) If someone is committed to a pragmatic theory of truth, and if being a Christian is pragmatically false, then Christianity is false for that person. Some people have found being a Christian to be detrimental to their mental health (religious trauma, hell anxiety, etc.) and success in life. (Why would God give us this heuristic of looking to what works for guidance on what to believe and what to do with one’s life and then allow for Christianity to not work for so many people, I have no idea.)
E) Christianity commits one to unbelievable supernatural elements, including:
E.1 - Figures in the Old Testament living to hundreds of years;
E.2 - The Nephilim;
E.3 - The Divine Council;
E.4 - Angels;
E.5 - Demons;
E.6 - Satan as a demonic ruler of the world;
E.7 - Hell as a literal, physical place;
E.8 - Heaven as a literal, physical place;
E.9 - The bread and wine of the Eucharist being the literal body and blood of Jesus, if the Catholics are right about transubstantiation;
E.10 - Various miracle stories like talking animals, the flood, the plagues, Jonah and the Fish, pillars of fire, the miracles of Jesus, John's Revelation, etc.
F) Many folks who are LGBT report experiencing Christianity to be unlivable, and even non-LGBT folks find Christian ethics to be impractical and naive.
G) Infernalistic versions of Christianity are seen as unlivable because a) it's impossible to socialize with people you believe are going to hell; b) it's impossible to believe that the large majority of humanity is going to hell, including close family and friends; c) it's impossible to envision one being happy in heaven knowing so many people, or even a single person, is in hell.
6) Speaking of hell, life in hell is, if the accounts of the Bible and tradition accurate, not worth living. A life not worth living is a meaningless life. So life in hell is a never-ending meaningless life! So Infernalistic Christianity is far more guilty—infinitely more guilty—than naturalism of producing years of meaningless existence. If God as a perfect being entails that all existence is meaningful, and if life in hell is not meaningful, then God's existence entails that infernalism is false and there is no hell, an indictment of orthodox Christianity.
7) Not only does naturalism not entail a meaningless life, but Christianity does not entail a meaningful life. Christian belief can cause the believer to
develop a sense that this life is pointless, because life doesn't truly begin until the end of the world and the new heaven and new earth come. This can cause the Christian to develop a lifestyle of passivity, of waiting for the end of the world. This is exacerbated by the pain of effort and risk of injury. Ambition and achievement go out the window, and the Christian lives an empty life waiting for God to do something or waiting for the Rapture – for life to really start. How tragic!
If Christianity ends up false, then these Christians will have wasted their one chance to fight for meaningful experiences in this life. Even if Christianity ends up true, it's still the case that these Christians failed to live well in this life. God, sensitive to these things, should encourage Christians to live for this world, say, by granting special protections to the Christian, allowing them to live more fearlessly. Instead, God allows Christians to be persecuted, martyred, and ridiculed for their beliefs.
8) Craig worries about atheists living an inauthentic life. Surely Craig can appreciate the fact that there are Christians and even pastors who live inauthentically? There are testimonies of pastors and seminary teachers who lose faith but keep the Christian mask on to keep their employment. That’s an inauthentic life, not because it’s inwardly atheistic, but because it’s inwardly atheistic in combination with being outwardly Christian!
If the concern is strictly with authentic living, then you would demand many people to leave Christianity, because their Christian life is not authentic. It is exactly because of problems of authenticity that many people stop going to church and leave religion altogether. How many of us have experienced the inauthenticity of Christians, who preach one thing but practice another? It is exactly because of the above problems of the livability of Christianity that results in these hypocrisies. The falsity of Christianity causes a clash between reality and the Christian's beliefs, and these clashes often manifest in contradictions in the Christian's attitudes and behaviors.
Living authentically includes living according to what you believe to be true, and not according to what you want to be true or according to what people around you pressure you into believing. The echo chambers of church life can produce intellectual dishonesty. The desire to be with God, for heaven to be real, for there to be ultimate justice, and the desire for one's devotion to a religion to have not been a waste, can each produce bias that encourages someone to dishonestly stay in their worldview. If Christians were honest, they would realize that 1) They want Christianity to be true more than anything, and 2) This produces a deep bias that seriously compromises the intellectual honesty of the Christian. Do you truly actually believe that Christianity is true, or are you just in it out of fear of death, or desire to see a loved one again?
*1 - See Reasonable Faith, Third Edition, pg. 74: "So it's not just immortality man needs if life is to be ultimately significant; he needs God and immortality. And if God does not exist, then he has neither."
*2 - See: Reasonable Faith Question of the Week #800. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/raising-and-lowering-the-epistemic-bar
*3 - You might think of flourishing and suffering as more sophisticated and involved notions of happiness and pain, and it's really flourishing, not happiness per se, that we should maximize, and it's really suffering, not pain per se, that we should minimize. A very rough approximation of flourishing might be like the following:
A human is flourishing when:
1) Their basic needs are met, such as food, clothing, shelter, and medical care.
2) Their more advanced psychological needs are met, including feeling accepted by and well-integrated into a community.
3) They experience happiness on a regular basis.
4) They do not experience pain on a regular basis.
5)
The pains they do experience are instrumentally good, such as the
natural pains that accompany self-improvement and the establishing and
maintaining of a eudaimonic system. The instrumental goodness easily
outweighs the intrinsic badness of these pains. In other words, they do
not experience higher-order pain, only lower-order pain.
6)
The happiness experienced is instrumentally good and not instrumentally
bad. In other words, they experience higher-order happiness, not just
lower-order happiness.
Ditto, mutatis mutandis, for suffering. Note: I'd claim that we have direct access to whether we are happy or in pain, but we don't necessarily have direct access to whether we are flourishing or suffering.
*4 - See "W.L. Craig Defends the Slaughter of Canaanite Children" on the @CosmicSkeptic YouTube channel.
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