Do Arguments Go Sour if Their Proponents are Bad People?

Dr. Craig's comments about pragmatic and epistemic justification for Christian belief have caused quite a stir online. In this video he responds to another clip from Rationality Rules, who claims that Dr. Craig's emotional connection to Christianity causes him to drop his epistemic standard for belief "down a well."

RATIONALITY RULES: It's clear – is it not? – that Craig is justifying an exception to a rule based explicitly on emotional appeal. Because he wants a proposition to be true, he's dropped his epistemic standard down a well. As long as there's a one in a million chance of Christianity being true, he's happy. This is the creme de la creme of theism. No wonder he finds just about every argument for God's existence bloody compelling. So long as they pass the bar of non-contradiction, he'll champion them, and if you can't join him in throwing your skepticism down that well and it turns out that he is correct, it's a miracle, then God will forever forsake you. This is so absurd. I cannot understand, I cannot understate, how intellectually bankrupt this is. I can't oversell this.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, so where do you begin to comment? He doesn't understand the difference between epistemic and pragmatic justification. Moreover, he seems to infer, Cameron . . . I'm asking myself, “What does he think he has proved here? What is he trying to prove?” And he seems to infer that if someone believes on the basis of pragmatic arguments that therefore any epistemic justification that person has for his belief evaporates. And that's clearly not true.

CAMERON BERTUZZI: Or that it's really low.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, or that it's very low. The arguments, like the kalam cosmological argument, the fine-tuning argument, the argument from the applicability of mathematics, the moral argument, these arguments are not the property uniquely of William Lane Craig. Even if I were a narcissist and irrational and so forth, that does absolutely nothing to affect the soundness of the arguments or the epistemic justification of their premises. So this whole attack has nothing to do with the epistemic value of the arguments of natural theology or Christian evidences. All it amounts to is just a personal attack upon me, and he says as much when he says earlier that it calls into question my character. He's questioning my personal character as a man that I am a narcissist, that I am selfish rather than a virtuous person. So there really is nothing to this, I think, other than just a very vicious ad hominem attack.