William Lane Craig is a little difficult: opinions differ about whether he should be taken seriously as a philosopher at all. On the one hand he certainly is a professional philosopher and I think his arguments for the Kalam cosmological proof are worth considering (though they don't work). On the other, he comes out with absurd arguments like this one. How can he be ignorant of metaethics? Well, I would guess that he isn't, but he thinks that the only plausible metaethical theory is divine command theory. That's certainly an eccentric position but not necessarily an ignorant one. Why don't his opponents take him to task on this? I imagine because they don't think it's worth the bother.
I don't know who or what you're referring to here or why this inference makes sense. Biblical higher criticism applies to both testaments, and it always has, from the late eighteenth century onwards.
I'm not sure this makes sense to me. In the absence of God's commands I could certainly performs actions that we would call torture (whether or not I would call them that in that situation). Why couldn't I think of doing that in the absence of God's commands? And if it were true that torture would be impossible and even unthinkable in the absence of God's commands, wouldn't it follow that it would be better for God not to command anything, thereby making immoral actions impossible?
Yes, and I think this is a more Catholic view of things: God determines morality not directly but indirectly through his deciding to create the world in a certain way, including his decisions about what's beneficial to us and harmful to us. So, for example, punching someone in the face is wrong because it's harmful, and feeding the poor is right because it's helpful. Nevertheless, the imperative that it's right to do beneficial things and wrong to do harmful things still needs to be explained. If it's not explained then God's will can ultimately be appealed to as the explanation for why this action is beneficial and that one is harmful, but not as the explanation for why this is a moral distinction rather than a purely descriptive one.
I don't see why there's a conflict here. If God decrees that torture is immoral, how does that conflict with his design decisions?
I think you're confusing original sin with original righteousness. "Original sin" at its simplest means the mere fact of everyone having sinned; or it refers to concupiscence, that is, the (possibly irresistible) tendency or urge to sin. There's no contradiction between this and evolution. On the contrary, evolution arguably makes it easier to understand why we might suffer from concupiscence, as many of our sinful urges could be explained as having served evolutionary beneficial purposes in the past. E.g. if our ancestors hadn't tended to get angry and violent at times, they wouldn't have survived.
No, the doctrine of original sin doesn't mean that no-one can be blameless even in principle. Orthodox Christianity holds that there have been people who have been blameless, most notably Jesus himself, and if you're Catholic, the Virgin Mary. And, perhaps, others such as Enoch. And yet they are human beings just as we are. The traditional doctrine states only that "fallen" humanity suffers from original sin, not humanity as whole; and even there it's a bit uncertain, given that some theologians have thought that Jesus's humanity was "fallen" though sinless.
And one can still talk about all of this without talking about Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve are, if you like, an explanation for why there is original sin. The story of the Fall is not identical with the doctrine of original sin. One could believe in original sin and believe in other explanations for why it's there. Most believers in evolution would probably do so. You don't have to believe in "original righteousness" or a Fall at all to believe in original sin.
However, it's still possible to believe in evolution and believe that there was a historical Fall. For example, some Christians think that the story of Adam and Eve in Eden is literally true, but that Adam and Eve were simply the first modern humans, having evolved from other creatures as science tells us. They may have been the first morally significant humans rather than the first anatomically modern ones.
Alternatively one can regard Adam and Eve as an allegory or metaphor or something, and still believe that there was a first sin. In fact any believer in evolution who accepts the notion of "sin" at all, and who thinks that non-human animals can't really be said to "sin" (as seems plausible), must think there was a first one. At some point in evolutionary history, some hominid with the first glimmerings of moral awareness did something that it thought to be wrong. I've even seen attempts to re-think the Fall along these terms. Perhaps this first sinner inspired others to do the same thing, and so primitive hominid society fell into a pattern of sin which it passed down through the centuries.
Because the theory of evolution is supported by vast amounts of evidence and explains the phenomena very well, while the claim that God exists is not supported by good evidence, and it doesn't explain very much.
But in any case, you're wrong to talk about the theory of evolution "replacing" God, because plenty of people believe in both.
