Introduction
In my recent video assessment of the late Dr. Gordon Stein's opening statement in his debate with Greg Bahnsen on, "Does God Exist?", I described two possible ways of defending the non-existence of something. First, I said that one way to defend a universal negative is to use what I call an "impossibility argument." Second, I said that one way to defend a particular negative is to use what I call an "improbability argument."
As I explained in the video, there are two caveats. First, I do not claim that these two types of arguments are an exhaustive list of the various argument patterns which might be used to support universal or particular negatives. Second, my names for these argument patterns are not standard. For example, a standard name for one type of improbability argument is "evidential argument." The standard name for one type of impossibility argument is "logical argument." For example, J.L. Mackie's famous "logical argument from evil" argues that God is impossible because theism is logically inconsistent with evil. I don't like that name because it sounds funny to outsiders. Imagine an atheist saying, "I'm going to defend a logical argument for atheism." That invites the question, "As opposed to what? An illogical argument for atheism?" While my names are nonstandard, I think they are more intuitive than the standard argument names and so I prefer my names for that reason.
In this article, I will quickly sketch two impossibility arguments for a particular negative: the proposition, "Craigean Christianity is false," where "Craigean Christianity" means the version of Christianity defended by William Lane Craig.
