Do you believe in God?

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His intellect.

He articulates with a high degree of clarity and eloquence ideas and concepts that ring true given the totality of my experience up to that point when I first encountered him. As I have repeated many times during this thread, I was in a period where I was depressed and very seriously calling into question whether God really did exist. I began to listen to debates between theists and atheists and found that the theists were more compelling every time. I was completely shocked by that discovery. I had just assumed that because all of my friends in college and all of the professors were heavily secular and atheistic, materialistic, and scientistic the intellectually superior position would have to be naturalism. It was only a matter of time before I came across William Lane Craig. He is clearly a towering intellect. If you deny that, then you are merely kidding yourself, while simultaneously being extremely disrespectful.

You asked me what I found compelling. I told you the body of his work is what I find compelling. You are asking me to re-articulate what WLC says.

Please don't.
So far the fine-tuning argument is the best one going. But I wonder, if the constants are arbitrary and unrelated, which is an unsettled question in cosmology, are they also infinitely variable?

One thing I might add to this thread since it's still going...

There is one boiler-plate sense in which gods and goddesses absolutely do exist. When you can string together a set of virtues or attributes within a certain cluster of relationship, establish something of a hypothetical paragon point where those virtues or attributes are taken to their highest level of pure abstraction, you've essentially discovered a god or goddess. That god or goddess becomes a fulcrum from which you can leverage your own traits - whether it be levels of motivation, skill sets that you wish to develop, or perhaps fuzzier areas of human nature that you simply wish to explore further and get clarity on because having access to enough data in your outer life is not feasible.

To envision this god or goddess is to give birth within yourself to a coaching module in your brain. To work with them is to leverage a certain oddity about how our minds operate - that you can tell yourself things as yourself and only get so far, put a separate face and voice of authority on those words to mimic external social proof and your mind will react quite candidly as if its so. The power of that coaching and educational module is enhanced with repetitive prayer (rosaries and the like), novel paths are indeed opened up in your motivational structure that weren't there before, and particularly if you set that deity to work with you on certain problems in your existence you'll easily find yourself, with enough dedication, pouring through minutia that would have been unavailable to you without long periods of study that you quite likely would not have been able to gin up the motivation for aside from the aid given by your philosophic helper.

We've really lost touch with their value as logical operators in a big way, or at least our culture in the mainstream sense has. People still do figure this one out if their lives are in a bad enough bind that they need a seemingly superhuman level of resource to dig their way out if (whether they dug their own hole or not). For whatever reason our own minds are quite hesitant to cough up the keys to the subconscious and working with subconscious symbolism and god-making, god-naming, god-working is effectively that first and foremost. I'm not making any claim that some very odd and inexplicable things can't start happening in your external world in ways you simply didn't touch, just that if such synchronicities are real at all (generally they can never be corroborated past one's own subjective reasoning) they usually come about after and are a byproduct of this process.

A slightly side question
Are superheroes the newer mythology

Please mods move this if this is not the correct area.

Yes, I understand that now, but at that time in my life I was feeling heavily discouraged. As I say, at that point in my life I was the only "intelligent" theist I had ever met apart from "philosophers" and thinkers I had read from (old material.) Watching youtube videos of theist vs atheists gave me an education in theology and philosophy that I did not get from the university. Its actually kind of funny. In retrospect I would have loved this one particular philosophy class I had,metaphysics and epistemology PHI355. When I was in the class I had a hard time understanding the material. The entire class and professor were pronounced atheists... and I felt like the class was a trick... wherein the professor was merely playing with words in weird ways to confer meaning that she manufactured. After studying apologetics I actually learned how to use modal logic (which is what the PHI355 was all about). I could actually retroactively translate what that professor was talking about and what that class was in general. It turns out that the source material we were supposed to be reading (I did not... because I hated that class (heavily atheistic)) was the very philosophical works of the great Christian apologists. This atheistic professor was teaching a class in such a way as to present these philosophical arguments for the existence of God and Souls etc... so that she could have us write essays in which her "clutch" of atheistic students could attempt to tear apart someone like Alvin Plantinga's work.

I wish I could post this entire interview. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the closer to the truth series.... I highly recommend doing a youtube search for "closer to the truth." The interviewer is very good, and he converses with a broad range of thinkers.

Noah,

You might like this one. It's a depth psychology lecture, technically A.'.A.'. geared, but his series has a lot of applications.

I really like this lecture... I will definitely look into this lecture series. Thank you for the line.