60% of the electorate in South Carolina for the Republican presidential nomination are evangelical Christians. 40% of them voted for Newt Gingrich. Evangelical Christians generally claim to be social conservatives. They, supposedly, do not want to vote for a candidate who has no respect for the sanctity of life and traditional family values. However, many of them voted for Newt Gingrich, who is clearly a man who does not care for what evangelicals will consider as traditional family values. There are at least three possibilities: many of these socially conservative evangelicals are ignorant, irrational, or hypocritical. Some of them are probably uninformed about Gingrich’s personal life. So, they are ignorant. Some of them are probably incapable of thinking coherently, i.e. failure to perceive the incoherence in voting for someone who is clearly opposed to one’s values. So, they are irrational. Some of them probably do not really vote based on what they claim to believe. So, they are hypocritical. I have nothing against Gingrich. His marital life should be an irrelevant consideration, when voters decide on who can lead this country well. There is no necessary connection between a good spouse and a good president. My problem is that many of these socially conservative evangelicals are the ones who readily accuse politically liberal Christians of committing an unchristian act for voting for Obama, who has a pro-choice position on abortion. I’m assuming that some of these evangelical accusers are supporters of Gingrich.
Dr. William Lane Craig, a leading evangelical apologist, is featured in a major article in The Chronicle of Higher Education [see http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Theist/140019/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en ]. That should be a surprise, since CHE is not known for having a taste for people like Craig. I think that Craig is overrated by evangelicals, but underrated by academics. His triumphalism, I think, weakens the merits of his arguments, since it underrates what I consider to be persuasive cases for atheism. It tends to caricature his opponents’ arguments as unworthy of serious considerations. However, his skills as a debater are unparalleled. He is definitely a force to be reckoned with. Of course, winning a debate is not a sufficient condition for establishing the truth of one’s claim. But I think that his opponents, like Alexander Rosenberg (Duke philosopher) and Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist), are mistaken for downplaying the role of formal debates in
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