The fact that Craig finds it easier to deal with life if he assumes that there is a God does not prove that God actually exists, any more than a small child finds it easier to believe in Santa Claus proves that Santa Claus actually exists.
Leading atheist H.L. Mencken said, "Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats." And if life has no ultimate purpose, value, or meaning, why shouldn't we?
Because it is more desirable, for perfectly obvious and worldly reasons, to live in a civilization.
Certainly, belief that life has a purpose, a value, and a meaning has not prevented people from slitting throats. Quite a few throats were slit by people who believed that the purpose, value, and meaning of life were to be found in smiting the infidel, or in cleansing the world of untermenschen, or in paving the path to the paradise of the workers, or in any of a thousand different brand names for the same old thing.
You said:
Because it is more desirable, for perfectly obvious and worldly reasons, to live in a civilization.
Let me put it this way:
Who the hell do you think you are to foist your “civilization morality” on Somali pirates, Islamic terrorists, anarchists, any of the thousands of criminal gangs, drug smugglers, and pedophilia rings? Who are YOU to say what should be “moral” and what shouldn’t be? How - based on atheism - do you condemn any of these people? They are living according to the moral standards of their communities when they engage in behaviors that shock others. They are living according to their values. And of their behaviors - which clearly work against what we call “civilization” - based on WHAT moral tenant of atheism do you condemn them?
By WHAT scientific experiment did you conclude that there is something called “good” and “evil,” or that one particular behavior should be classified as “good” and another thing as “evil”? Did you see it under the slide of a microscope? How did you find it? Do you not realize that your own statement - “or in any of a thousand different brand names for the same old thing” - clearly implies that there ISN’T any “right” way or “good” way?
We are talking about survival of the fittest, here. The Chief tenant of evolution. Do you dispute that mankind has broken down into competitive groups struggling over natural resources? Why shouldn’t we kill all our enemies before they kill us? Why shouldn’t I steal whenever I think I can get away with it? Why should I - because maybe unlike you I’m not a herd animal but have individual awareness - give a DAMN about “civilization” or care about anything beyond myself? And if I don’t, then who the hell are YOU as an atheist to condemn me for it?
And Darwinism clearly implies social Darwinism. The rich SHOULD crush the poor; the powerful SHOULD stomp on the weak. Might DOES make right. Let us realize that every atheist government has been the most totalitarian and the most oppressive in the history of the world for damn good reason: they began to live out the moral implications of atheism. Communists murdered well over 100 million of their own people in peacetime simply because they weren’t good enough “communists.”
When Darwinism is defined as the survival of the fittest, where the “fittest” are defined as those individuals that leave the most offspring, RAPE is “moral.”
Please don’t be so smug as to take the morality that virtually everyone acknowledges derived from religious life, and then use the existence of that religion-based-morality to claim that we don’t need religion. That is simply asinine to the extreme.