TaylorX04 posted a video entitled, ”  William Lane Craig’s Favorite Fallacy

in which he discusses Craig’s modo hoc fallacy:

“After all, if there is no God, then what’s so special about human beings? They’re just accidental by-products of nature…”

— William Lane Craig

The gist of it (per Craig) is that if this is all we are, then we have no value whatsoever … just a lump of cells and atoms.  And, as TaylorX04 points out, it is WE who determine our worth or value in this world, same as assigning higher value to a copper coin than to a bit of copper wire.

It’s a good video worth watching, if you’re into exploring logical fallacies of apologists, but I want to look at the initial question:  what’s so special about human beings?

And the answer is:  Nothing!   In all the world of animate and inanimate objects, we are just another collection of animate objects.  My issue here is that so many people think (or seem to act as if they think) that humans are the top of the line, superior to every other living thing.

We are valuable to each other as human beings, but we are not intrinsically superior to other living things.  As a race, we treat  the natural world as if it all here for US, for our benefit and exploitation.  And much of this (I believe) comes from the Genesis story in the Bible, when God made all the plants and animals and fish, and then created his Adam and told him the earth was made for Adam to subdue and have dominion over.

But we know for a fact that most of the resources humans have exploited are not without limits. We have destroyed, and continue to destroy and deplete, our natural resources under the misguided notion that there is more where this came from.  No, there isn’t.

WLC is right to say there is nothing special about humans above all the rest of the world’s living things, but he is wrong to say we are “just” a clump of cells without worth or value.  WE assign that value to ourselves far too much, and fail to assign proper value to the natural world around us.