Sorry, Billy; You're Living in a Dream World

Everyone's favorite and most annoying fideist, William Lane Craig, has once again trotted out one of his classically moronic and dishonest arguments.  He proclaims that atheism negates the existence of something which, in fact, doesn't exist, but according to him, is required to exist because it'd be really cool if it did.  Therefore, Christianity is true because it proclaims the existence of something really cool in his mind...  proving once again that his mind is something that he is clearly out of.

According to this insufferable clown, life has no meaning without the existence of a god because the absence of a god eliminates an everlasting reward which means that life has no meaning.  This is of course, argued on his part by defining "meaning" exactly as what he chooses it to be.  It's particularly interesting, because he's not just trying to make an argument against atheism, so much as he is trying to make an argument explicitly for the value of his flavor of Christianity as opposed to atheism.  A large part of this recent article rests on the notion that the immortal and eternal rewards (and likewise,  eternal consequences in the opposing condition) is the sole mechanism by which value can be ascribed to life.  Of course, he's wrong in every possible way, but more than any other reason, he's wrong because the Christian lens is the only lens through which he can peer.  His entire enterprise of Christian apologetics is incurably circular because all considerations he has any inclination to offer are couched exclusively in Christian terms.

So where to begin?

Transcendental Mental Masturbation

People who straddle their primitive belief system with all that science and engineering and logic have put forth have always put up a sort of wall between the reasoning skills that guide them towards acceptance of scientific facts and the shameless elimination of reason that guides them to believe in the supernatural.  Without some sort of barrier, you end up with a sort of universal cognitive dissonance.  Often times, it's the margins of scientific knowledge that give one room to erect a barrier, but this is also the route that creates a lot of dishonesty.  If your god exists in the margins of science, you end up with a need to make those margins appear wide, and whatever inane mental gymnastics you do to convince yourself of that only means you're sabotaging your capacity to think.

So another avenue you've probably all heard is this whole "transcendence" bollocks.  This tries to erect the mental barrier between brilliance and bullshit by creating this alternative context that is largely unexplored by any rational system of thought because it isn't rational in the first place.  This is exemplified by the quote posted here in the G+ Anti-theists community --
https://plus.google.com/118133718239295935706/posts/MYZaL8XTbtg

I should add that the original poster is merely quoting someone else and asking us how we'd respond to a thesis like that.  Below the jump is my response.