Opus 2022-198: Scholars

I am starting to think that scholars should be banned from speaking to the general public and be forced to interact only with other scholars.  It isn’t a matter of vocabulary or knowledge.  It is a matter of attitude and ways of reasoning.

In the past I have listened to a scholar named William Lane Craig (WLC).  He is a Christian apologist who does research, writes books, records podcasts, debates and gives lectures.  His doctorates are in Philosophy and Theology but he seems to be a bit of a Renaissance man because he has also dabbled in physics and other areas of science.  He recently wrote a book, The Quest for the Historical Adam.  I listened to a forum at the Southern Evangelical Seminary which had scholars from four different disciplines react to his writing.  The four speakers weaved in and out of being interesting and being profound but I was generally able to follow them.  When Craig got up to respond I found I could understand what he was saying but it still didn’t make any sense to me as a common person.

When scholars get on their high horse they feel they have to put so many qualifications on anything they want to say that their statements become mush and fog.  Much of the bobbing and ducking focused around his statement that Genesis 1-11 was something he called “mytho-history”.  It seemed to me like he was focused on pleasing the scientific community more than actually making a clear statement.  

I don’t think I will bother with the book.  It fits into that genre of scholarship that is so inconclusive that the time would be better spent reading something else.  I hope it is just a hiccup in his career because he has a lot to say and usually says it well.  Meanwhile I hope he enjoys debating the other egg-heads.

homo unius libri