Q&A with William Lane Craig: Is an All-Loving God Better?

Hi Dr. Craig,

I have to say that I extremely love your work which made my interest in Christianity grow

My question has to do with one of your main arguments against Islam which is your claim that in Islam God is morally imperfect because he is not all loving.

So as I understand it your argument is:

1. A morally perfect being must be all loving (He loves everyone )
2. There are several verses in the Quran which says that Allah does not love certain people (Thus not all loving )
3. therefore Allah is not a morally perfect being

Now my question is:
What justification would you provide for believing the first premise . In your debates with Muslims you just seem to take it for granted without giving a good case for it's truth. For me it's far from obvious that loving people like Hitler or Stalin is morally good. I don't think that we would commend a person for saying that he loves all people including Hitler or Stalin etc. Why is it not possible that moral perfection implies loving people who deserve love but not all people?

Thank you

Raef
Jordan

 

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Thanks for your question, Raef! I don’t think I’ve ever taken a question from Jordan before!

In determining what sort of being a morally perfect being would be, we must consult our moral intuitions. Is it better to be fair rather than prejudiced? Is it better to be a caring person rather than indifferent? Is it better to regard other persons as ends in themselves rather than as mere means to be used for one’s own ends? Usually, we can answer such questions by thinking about how people ought to treat one another or how we think others ought to treat us.

So the question in this case is whether it is better to give unconditional love rather than demand that one’s love be earned. Here I fear that your moral intuitions have been distorted precisely by the Muslim concept of God which I indict. A person raised in a Muslim culture in which the view of God is of a person whose love is conditional and must be earned is apt to have his moral intuitions skewed by such a culturally dominant view of God.

But a person can overcome his cultural prejudices by trying to step back and examine them objectively. I sometimes ask students what they would think of a parent who says to his children, “If you measure up and do as I say, THEN I will love you!” Some students have had parents like that, and they know the terrible emotional damage such a pseudo-love wreaks upon children. This is not love, but abuse. The God of the Qur’an is just like that. If you say the prayers and pay the alms and do righteous deeds, THEN he will love you.

The God of Islam is thus just as morally defective as a parent who withholds love from his children unless they deserve it. Love that is undeserved and gratuitously given is a far greater love than love that is extended to a person simply as his due. The person who has earned love has no reason to be grateful, since he has merited it. It is precisely love that is undeserved that issues in thanksgiving and praise.

Don’t confuse loving Hitler and Stalin as persons with condoning their evil acts. We can love evil persons as persons and therefore hope and pray that they will turn away from the evil they have chosen.

So I think that the first premiss of the argument is quite secure and so gives good reason to reject the Islamic conception of God.

A country, not merely an idea: Americans are rooted in shared experience that others lack

By Robert C. Koons

In his June 16 column in The New York Times, Bret Stephens suggested (with his tongue in cheek) that we deport all native-born Americans and replace them with immigrants, who are (he argues) smarter, harder working, more patriotic, more religious on average than those born here.

Of course, Mr. Stephens’ proposal is satirical, but the very fact that he considered the idea a plausible satire suggests that, were it practical, both liberals and neoconservatives like Mr. Stephens would be hard pressed to explain why we shouldn’t embrace his Great Exchange. For many in the American elite, their loyalty is primarily to a set of abstract ideas (equality, liberty, economic opportunity and the like) and not to an actual country, mired as it is in the mere contingencies of history and geography. Indeed, it is a commonplace belief among our elite that America is not a normal country at all but rather a kind of cause, almost a religion, based on a creed (the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and so on). To think otherwise is to be guilty of the heresy of “ethnonationalism.”

But this flies in the face of an obvious, undeniable reality: America is a normal country, a people occupying continuously a well-defined piece of land on the Earth’s surface. This country didn’t come into existence with affirmations of 1776 or 1789: It began in the early 1600s with the settlements of Jamestown and Plymouth. Both the Declaration and the Constitution presuppose that we were already “a people.” We shared a common experience of self-government, perched on the edge of the wilderness, a people “very similar in their manners and customs,” as John Jay put it in Federalist No. 2. Of course, America was never a single family or a tribe. It has always comprised a patchwork quilt of distinct heritages, European, Native American, African and eventually Asian, but in this respect America is far from unique. This same could be said of many other normal countries, like Spain, France or Great Britain. As the English philosopher Sir Roger Scruton has argued, what unites us is what unites every country: a shared history, grounded in participation in a political community within a set of geographical boundaries (shifting gradually over time).

Aren’t we a uniquely propositional nation, “conceived in liberty” and “dedicated” to a certain “proposition” (as Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg address)? I would be the last to deny that our common history has bequeathed to us certain truths, including those in the preamble of the Declaration, but, again, this is far from unique to America and does not reduce America to a mere creed. What makes us all Americans is something that cannot be put into words nor reduced to an affirmation of abstract ideas. We share what the Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge,” a visceral understanding of what it is to be, to feel and to act as an American. This tacit knowledge takes the form of noncognitive traditions and practices, including how to run a Little League, how to participate in a town hall and how to feel about the flag and the national anthem.

What’s the harm in indulging in the myth that America is an idea and not a country? My answer: The myth has pernicious consequences in our thinking about immigration and citizenship and in our foreign policy.

If America were merely a creedal association, then it would be immoral for us to deny citizenship to anyone who sincerely affirms the same propositions. There would be no grounds for refusing citizenship to any right-thinking person simply on the basis of the accidents of parentage or birthplace. It is true that America wouldn’t be America with a steady influx of eager newcomers, but there is a limit to every good. No political community can survive the influx of too many immigrants in too short a time. As Aristotle long ago recognized, it is shared habits that matter, not merely common approval of abstract principles, and habits cannot survive if overwhelmed by the arrival of the unhabituated. According to the Census Bureau, immigrants comprise 13 percent of the population, with another 11 percent children of immigrants. In 2050, these figures will be 19 percent and 34 percent — nearly half the population, unprecedented levels.