Craig's List And The People Of The Law

Sometimes it's nice to start from a point of idle curiosity. In a previous installment I prepared a word cloud of the Twitter biographies of those who follow Stephen Law and William Lane Craig. I drew no conclusions from it; there really wasn't enough hard data.

Stephen Law was kind enough to take an interest and we had a brief Facebook chat. I showed him another post of mine on the Discovery Institute. For that one, I'd pulled a list of everyone who follows the Discovery Institute. They're an anti-evolution group with delusions of science, saying their belief in an Intelligent Designer is not motivated by prior theological conclusions. Taking this list of their followers I then found out what each Intelligent Design fan followed. I put the results into a matrix and found that the majority of Discovery Institute fans have a pronounced primary interest in Christian apologetics and no interest in science.

Much as I enjoyed writing that post I find it hard to approach Craig's followers in a similar manner. For one, it would be ludicrous of me to point out that their primary interest is in Christian apologetics and present it as some sort of unexpected finding. Secondly, having met a few fans of Craig I find they tend to be doing their best to work out this mystery called life and are in the main pleasant folk, willing to converse with those of different viewpoints and generally open-minded. That I do not share their conclusions does not mean I do not hold them in some respect.

Let's look at the top twenty for each. First we'll look at those accounts that are most popular with William Lane Craig followers:

Stephen Law Vs William Lane Craig

I quite enjoy Stephen Law. Reading his books helped rid me of an irrational prejudice against philosophy while teaching me something new and in sections giving me a good laugh - do check out the free chapter of Believing Bullshit. I've mentioned William Lane Craig a couple of times on this blog.

They debated some time ago. It was rather good, and at ten to midnight I can't give it a worthy summary but I encourage you to track it down on YouTube if you missed it. About an hour ago the mood struck me to pull a list of each of their followers, pull each person's Twitter biographies, and do a word cloud of the results. No commentary, it's past my bedtime. I'll leave you to guess which is which. Click for big, feel free to reuse the images elsewhere if you like.

Hamza Tzortzis and The God Delusion

As regular readers of  this blog are likely aware, some two years ago Hamza Tzortzis released what he described as his response to the God Delusion. Back in February I happened upon it and noticed it bore marked similarities to the work of William Lane Craig. After PZ Myers featured my article, Hamza updated his piece to indicate it was a pastiche of Christian authors, including Paul Copan, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Frank J. Tipler, John D. Barrow, Keith Ward and Roy Abraham Varghese.

Thanks to an anonymous commenter I'm only now realising the delicious irony in his opening line:

"What I read were rehashed, incoherent and outdated arguments that made me realize that Richard Dawkins is not very well read in philosophy"

Emphasis mine, but I digress. Hamza and I had a pleasant Twitter chat after the events, during which he suggested I respond to the content:

After two years his collage of Christian authors stands at version 0.3: I jokingly responded that I would await version 1.0. Dawkins is well able to defend himself; writing further on the matter seemed superfluous. Still, there seems to be appetite for this stuff.

Particularly avid readers of this blog - likely those who make notes - will recall I wrote another piece on Islam, months ago, where I described exemplary behaviour from Muslim apologists despite extreme provocation. You'll note that before the physical and verbal abuse of these fine gentlemen started I was discussing Halal fish oil supplements. Softgel capsules are generally made from porcine gelatin and a gym friend of mine was looking for a Muslim-friendly alternative.

Interfaith Dialogue Revisited - Hamza Tzortzis and the William Lane Craig influence

Back in February I mentioned that an article Hamza Tzortzis wrote seemed to rely heavily on the work of Christian apologist William Lane Craig. It was a reasonably unpopular article until PZ Myers featured it, earning me 1,800 hits in one day. If you're counting that's about 1,750 more than average.

Hamza initially denied that there were similarities between William Lane Craig's work and his own:

But I'm glad to report that within two days of the increased interest Hamza has updated his article, giving proper credit to Christian apologists Paul Copan, William Lane Craig, J. P. Moreland, Frank J. Tipler, John D. Barrow, Keith Ward and Roy Abraham Varghese as well as atheist philosopher Walter Sinnott-Armstrong as influencing his thinking on the matter. No Muslim authors were cited, though the Qur'an was quoted in several areas.

Interfaith Dialogue: Hamza Tzortzis and William Lane Craig

Hamza Tzortzis just tweeted about his response to The God Delusion. I'd missed it before now. While reading it some of the quotes and statistics he used seemed familiar. In this post I'll be comparing Hamza's article to one by William Lane Craig, entitled Does God Exist? (Free registration required.)

*Update June 2012: Two years after publication, Hamza has updated his article to reflect the sources and has modified the description to list it as a compilation. This is a positive step. A link to my followup article has been added to the end of this post.*

For copyright reasons I won't reproduce both articles in their entirety. Let's start after Hamza's preliminary note:

Hamza Tzortzis: "The existence of a life permitting universe is due to conditions that must have been fined-tuned to a degree that is literally incalculable. Take the following examples:"

William Lane Craig: "The existence of intelligent life depends upon a conspiracy of initial conditions which must be fine-tuned to a degree that is literally incomprehensible and incalculable."

Hamza Tzortzis: "The Strength of Gravity & the Atomic Weak Force: Physicist P. C. W. Davies has calculated that a change in the strength of gravity or of the atomic weak force by only one part in 10¹⁰⁰ would have prevented a life permitting universe."

William Lane Craig: "For example, the physicist P. C. W. Davies has calculated that a change in the strength of gravity or of the atomic weak force by only one part in 10¹⁰⁰ would have prevented a life-permitting universe."