The other day, Cosmic Skeptic (Alex O’Connor) posted an interview with William Lane Craig discussing Craig’s views on the divinely commanded slaughter of the Canaanites. Paul Copan has argued in his more recent work that non-combatant Canaanites were (largely) sparred. I find Copan’s arguments to be unconvincing, but at least he seems a lot more squeamish when it comes to accepting the bald claim that God commanded the killing of children and infants.
By contrast, Craig provides a straight-up defense of killing children and infants. As he says in this interview, “If God wants to end the life of these Canaanite children early or prematurely, that’s his prerogative.” “These children go immediately to heaven. They go to be with God.”
Since O’Connor and Craig spend some time discussing my critiques of views like Craig’s, I decided to post a Twitter thread in response to the exchange. Then I provided a second Twitter thread. But there’s still a lot more I’d like to say.
In this article, I want to address one issue that came up in the debate: delusional child killing due to mental illness. At one point in the discussion, O’Connor notes that I refer to a woman who killed her child in 2004 in the belief that God commanded it. O’Connor notes I am posing the question, how do we know God didn’t command her to do this if one believes, as Craig does, that God commanded other instances of child killing? Here’s an audio clip of the exchange between O’Connor and Craig:
In his reply, Craig provides the following reply: Andrea Yates was “severely mentally disturbed” and so we can know God didn’t command her to kill her children.
There are three problems with Craig’s reply.
First, the case to which O’Connor was referring is not that of Andrea Yates but rather of Dena Schlosser which I discussed in a conference paper. Yates drowned her five children in 2001. Schlosser killed her infant by way of arm amputation in 2004 to give the child as an offering to God.
Why does this matter? Because Craig immediately opines on the mental state of the individual without even knowing which individual is under discussion. How can you opine on the mental state of a person if you don’t even know who the person is?
It seems to me that Craig shows his hand here. He is not judging the case based on an a posteriori investigation of a clinical diagnosis but rather a priori. In other words, he assumes that the parent must have been delusional. The problem is, he has no basis to assume this. After all, Craig believes he has an inerrant record (the Bible) of God issuing commands for child killing in the past. Further, that same record (the Bible) does not include any clear moratorium stating that such commands will never be issued in the future. Thus, for all Craig knows, some people (including, perhaps Yates or Schlosser) did receive such a command.
(Evangelical apologists often claim that the killing of children was for a special condition to clear the land of Canaan for God’s people and that God won’t command it again. That’s pure special pleading: the Bible never says God will never command child killing again. So if God had exceptional reasons to command it in the past, you simply have no clue whether he might have exceptional reasons to command it in the future.)
Second, one essential component in the diagnoses of people like Yates and Schlosser as psychotic is the assumption that the belief that God commanded them to kill their children is false and thus delusional. If you undercut that assumption, you substantially weaken the diagnosis.
To illustrate, if Dave says he saw a pink elephant in his yard, all things being equal we will believe Dave is delusional because we don’t believe as a matter of course that there are pink elephants in our environment. However, if we believe that Dave lives beside a circus known for its (occasionally colored) elephants, you will not assume he is delusional. For all we know, Dave may very well have seen the elephant.
If we believe, as Craig does, that God has intermittently issued commands to kill children, we will not be able to assume that when people like Yates and Schlosser make such claims, this is evidence of psychotic delusion. For all we know, they may be receiving a command just like Dave may be seeing an elephant.
Third, even if Yates or Schlosser had some mental break, it doesn’t follow that they didn’t also receive a divine command in the midst of their psychosis. Consider this analogy: Teresa of Avila had visions of Jesus. Yet, the phenomenology of those visions suggests Teresa experienced what is called ecstatic epilepsy. However, the Teresa devotee could argue that even if Teresa did experience ecstatic epilepsy, she could also have experienced a vision of Jesus through her epilepsy. Similarly, even if parents like Yates and Schlosser had some overriding mental condition, it is possible that God revealed a divine command in the midst of that mental condition. Craig, at least, cannot say otherwise. (Of course, you can say this runs afoul of Ockham’s razor: the simpler explanation is to be preferred. However, that only allows us to say it is more likely that the person is delusional. (After all, sometimes the more complex answer is right.) What we need to maintain moral knowledge is the stronger claim that the person is delusional.)
To conclude, I think Craig’s view, if consistently applied, has deeply skeptical implications for moral knowledge.
