Podcast: How to Respond to Common Arguments against Christianity (William Lane Craig)

April 17, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Being Prepared to Explain Our Faith

In this episode, William Lane Craig discusses how to respond to common arguments against Christianity that we often hear but may not know how to respond to.

Reasonable Faith

Reasonable Faith

William Lane Craig

This updated edition by one of the world's leading apologists presents a systematic, positive case for Christianity that reflects the latest work in the contemporary hard sciences and humanities. Brilliant and accessible.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | RSS

Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:22 - What Is Apologetics?

Matt Tully
Dr. Craig, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

William Lane Craig
It’s good to be with you, Matt.

Matt Tully
I want to start very simply and take the ultimate question here that we want to start our conversation with: How would you define the task of apologetics?

William Lane Craig
The task of apologetics is to explain the rational justification for the Christian worldview.

Matt Tully
What do you mean by justification?

William Lane Craig
What would be the grounds, rationally, for believing the content of the Christian religion?

Matt Tully
In your book, you say something kind of surprising. You write, “In most cases, it will not be arguments or evidence that bring a seeker to faith in Christ.” That was surprising to me, to hear a world-renowned apologist saying, Most of the time, this isn’t going to actually lead someone to come to faith, directly at least. If that’s true, I think the natural question is, So what’s the point then of this rational defense that we’re offering in apologetics?

William Lane Craig
Well, I recognize that apologetic arguments will appeal only to a minority of people. And so that raises the question, Why bother with that minority? And I think it’s similar to the motivation of a missionary to some obscure people group that he feels burdened to reach with the gospel. Every human being is valuable to God, and so we want to reach every person with the message of the gospel. Secondly, this minority of people, though perhaps relatively small in numbers, is huge in influence. I find that the people that resonate most with my arguments are engineers, doctors, lawyers, and so forth, and these are some of the most influential people in society. Just think of the example of C. S. Lewis—he was one of these types. Think of the influence that Lewis has had since his death through his publications.
Clearly, winning this minority of people to Christ is going to have a huge impact for the kingdom of God.

Matt Tully
When you tell someone, Yeah, I’m an apologist, what are some of the initial misunderstandings or misconceptions people might have about what that means?

William Lane Craig
Well, in the first place, I don’t use that word because it does have such a negative connotation.

Matt Tully
How so?

William Lane Craig
It implies someone who is agenda-driven, biased, and can’t look at the evidence objectively.

Matt Tully
Like you’re always skewing it to your favor.

William Lane Craig
Yes, exactly. So someone might say, Well, Hillary Clinton was an apologetic for universal healthcare. That has a kind of negative ring to it. So I prefer to tell people that I’m a Christian philosopher and theologian.

Matt Tully
Do you remember your first introduction to apologetics as a discipline? What was that like? What was it that you first encountered that got you thinking along those lines?

William Lane Craig
Well, this is very ironic. It came very late in my college education. My senior year at Wheaton College I took a course from Alan Johnson called Conflicts in Biblical Christianity. In the context of that class, I read E. J. Carnell’s book, Introduction to Christian Apologetics. I had never encountered anything like this in my life. Carnell was asking and answering the questions that troubled me. Like, What is truth? How do you test for truth? Is the Christian worldview true? I was hooked! So my formal acquaintance with apologetics came somewhat late.

Matt Tully
Later than we might expect, knowing who you are today. Something you just said there, that you sort of had some of these questions even as a Christian at the time, how big a factor is that in your mind? Sometimes we think of apologetics as primarily aimed at or for the non-Christian, the skeptic, but how often do you find that apologetics is resonating and helpful for Christians?

William Lane Craig
Again, it is with that minority of Christians who are intellectually engaged with their faith. I meet people like this all the time in our Christian churches. They are wrestling with these intellectual questions about God and time and moral values and atonement and things of this sort. And these people typically feel very intellectually lonely. They feel like they’re the only ones.

Matt Tully
Is there something about our church cultures, perhaps, in the US where some of these questions are not maybe given the attention that they deserve?

William Lane Craig
Definitely. I think our youth groups are focused on emotional worship services and entertainment, and they rarely challenge students intellectually. And adults are even lazier. They’re worried about, properly so, how to deal with their rebellious teenager or their bad marriage, and they don’t have time to think about these intellectual questions.

Matt Tully
There is something about young people—high school and college—where maybe part of it is they have more time, they have more mental bandwidth even, but they do often seem like that’s the time when people wrestle deeply with some of these questions.

William Lane Craig
That’s right. I think that’s well spoken. And so I see my ministry largely targeting high school and university-age kids. When we look at the demographics of people who are coming to the Reasonable Faith website, watching our YouTube videos and so forth, they tend to be people in that 20 somethings range. But above that, it tails off.

07:33 - What I Have Learned from Debates with Skeptics

Matt Tully
You mentioned your YouTube videos, and I think one of the things that you’re most well known for and maybe something that people will see most often when they do a search for your name on YouTube is they’ll see some of these debates that you’ve done over the years. And you’ve debated so many different people—many of them very prominent skeptics or atheists. Some of them are Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Anthony Flew, Sir Roger Penrose, and Bart Ehrman, just to name a few of them. What would you say you’ve learned not just the task of apologetics but even your faith as a Christian through the experience of having to debate people in that kind of formal context?

William Lane Craig
C. S. Lewis once remarked that after being in a debate like this, he felt more uncertain of the truth of the Christian faith and felt the need to go back to that personal connection with God rather than the argument. And as I reflect on my experience, I think that must have been, because Lewis had really bad arguments. I come away from these debates shaking my head saying, These are really good arguments! These arguments really stand up!

Matt Tully
And you’re talking about your own arguments?

William Lane Craig
Yes. That’s right. Not his, but mine! And so I find my faith strengthened through these encounters with these non-believing philosophers and scientists, and I find myself often in disbelief at how superficial they are.

Matt Tully
I think sometimes for those of us who aren’t in this apologetic world that you live in and aren’t as educated as you are and don’t have a mastery of these topics like you do, it can feel intimidating. We look out and we see many of these figures have a certain public presence and platform and a respect given to them in the broader cultural world that we live in. It can feel a little bit like, I’m actually pretty scared to engage with those arguments because I’m not actually confident we have good answers to them. But you have not found that to be the case in your experience?

William Lane Craig
Not in my experience. And I think these folks just lack training is all. They’re ignorant. They’re not stupid, but they are ignorant, I think, of this area. For example, I have a lecture on YouTube that is very funny called “Objections So Bad I Couldn’t Have Made Them Up” or “The 10 World’s Worst Objections to the Cosmological Argument.” In it I review ten objections that are out there on the internet on these YouTube infidel sites. As I thought about them, I thought, You know, for the average layman, these probably come across as very powerful objections and difficult to answer. The layman wouldn’t know what to say. And yet they’re awful. They’re horrible objections! They’re so bad! And so in this video, I simply try to expose the errors in thinking of these objections so as to inspire more confidence in the Christian layperson that his faith really is rationally defensible and worth believing.

Matt Tully
In one of these debates that you’ve done, has there ever been a time that someone threw out an argument or a question to you that you would say, I did kind of struggle in that moment to have an answer for, and I had to go back and I had to work on that for a little while?

William Lane Craig
Yes. That rarely happens because I prepare so hard for these debates. But in my debate with Austin Dacey from the American Humanist Association at Purdue University, he threw some objections at me based on mind-body physicalism that I wasn’t prepared for. And as a result, I had to respond to them on the fly. And afterwards I was very dissatisfied and thought, I can do better than this. I want a second go at this. And so sometime later at Sacramento State, I got an invitation to debate Austin Dacey again, and this time I came loaded for bear, and it went much better.

Matt Tully
What’s the lesson in that for the average Christian who’s never going to be up on a formal debate stage but fears that moment of someone asking them a question and they don’t really have a good answer? What would you say to that Christian in that situation?

William Lane Craig
What I say is learn from these experiences—experiences where you’re defeated, where you’re dumbfounded, where you didn’t do a good job. Don’t just leave it there. Go and study it some more. Find out what a good answer is, and let these be an incentive and a spur to help you to do better next time.

12:33 - How Do You Know That God Exists?

Matt Tully
I wonder if we can now take some time to look at a variety of common skeptical questions that a person might ask a Christian. And so you’ll play the role of the Christian apologist who’s ready to answer some of these questions, and I’ll play the role of the skeptic who’s trying to challenge you in some ways on some of these questions. I hope that we can learn from how you would respond to someone asking those. First question: Christians believe in a personal, invisible God who they say created all things, but you’ve never seen him with your eyes, you’ve never heard him speak to you with your ears (presumably, and maybe you would say you have), and yet you say that you know he exists. How do you actually know that he exists?

William Lane Craig
I would say that there are good arguments that there is a transcendent creator and designer of the universe who is perfectly good and is the foundation of moral values. I have a list of about five or six arguments that I would offer to the skeptic, and then I would ask him, What do you think of these arguments? If you reject my conclusion, that implies that you must think that at least one premise of each argument is false. So which premise do you reject and why? I think that these are good arguments to show that there is a transcendent creator and designer of the universe. And one might also point out that this attitude that only what you can perceive with your five senses is real is just indefensible. That is such a crude theory of knowledge.

Matt Tully
How so? We live in the scientific age.

William Lane Craig
Because you can give counterexamples to it. For example, time. Do you believe time exists? You can’t feel it, you can’t touch it, but, clearly, time is real. So there are all kinds of these super sensible entities that are postulating even in physics itself. Modern physics is just full of theoretical entities and mathematical entities that can’t be perceived by the five senses, but they are the best explanation for the physical world around us. So the idea that you should only believe in what you can sense with your five senses is extremely crude.

Matt Tully
That’s helpful. So what would be the first, the main, or the most potent of those arguments that you might deploy in this context?

William Lane Craig
Well, let me give my favorite. I don’t know if it’s the most potent, but it’s the one I like. It goes like this: Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. And from the very concept of a cause of the universe you can deduce some of the properties that such an ultra mundane cause must have. This cause must be beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful, and, I would argue, personal. And I would present arguments for each of those attributes so that this is a theologically rich concept of a creator of the universe.

Matt Tully
And I think what you just laid out is the cosmological argument—something you’re very famous for and you’ve done a lot of work on that. But how would you respond to the person who comes back and says, Okay, you’ve just acknowledged that there is this concept of an uncreated being that you call God, but why couldn’t the universe itself be uncreated?

William Lane Craig
Why couldn't the universe be uncreated? Well, there are two ways the universe could be uncreated. One would be that it’s beginningless,
and therefore is eternal.

Matt Tully
Which is premise two, I believe.

William Lane Craig
But that’s premise two, and I give four arguments against the past eternity of the universe. The other way the universe could be uncreated would be to say it popped into being uncaused out of nothing. And that would deny the first premise, that whatever begins to exist has a cause, and I give three arguments in support of that premise. So I think we have very good reason to believe that the universe is not uncreated, either in the sense of being past eternal or in the sense of springing into being from nothing.

Matt Tully
One interesting facet of your approach to these kinds of arguments is that you do then draw on all kinds of different disciplines. When it goes to the eternality of the universe, or the fact that the universe had a beginning in your mind, you’ll point to some of the scientific evidence that we have that seems to support that.

William Lane Craig
Yes, that’s right. The traditional medieval proponents of this argument offered philosophical arguments against the infinity of the past, but they didn’t have any scientific evidence for it. But with the advent of the general theory of relativity and modern cosmology during the 20th century, dramatic scientific evidence has emerged that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning of finite time ago. So the argument is supported not only by philosophical argument but also by scientific evidence.

Matt Tully
How important is that idea to you in how you approach apologetics, that you’re willing to take from different types of arguments and apply them together in a synthesis? You kind of move fluidly from a philosophical argument to a historical argument to a scientific argument. You haven’t just picked a lane of apologetics like some may have.

William Lane Craig
No. For me, this is highly important and deeply valued. I want, as a Christian theologian, to have a synoptic worldview that takes into account our knowledge from all of the different human disciplines at the university, and this especially will include what modern science has to tell us about the world in which we live. And so I’ve made a real effort to try to understand the worldview of contemporary physics in order to understand how that is integrated with Christian theology.

18:54 - Isn’t the Idea of Divine Intervention in Our World Unnecessary?

Matt Tully
Let’s go to another question. Doesn’t the history of scientific progress support the idea that belief in some kind of creator-God is ultimately unnecessary? So many of the mysteries of the universe that were once attributed to some kind of divine action or being have been explained now via natural processes and things that are much more describable by science. So isn’t this idea of divine intervention and a god at work unnecessary in our world?

William Lane Craig
I think that view is obsolete. That might have been defensible in the 19th century, but not in the 20th century.

Matt Tully
Two hundred years late.

William Lane Craig
Yes, that’s exactly right. The evidence of astrophysical cosmology—that the universe is not past eternal but had an absolute beginning— the incomprehensible fine tuning of the initial conditions of our universe for intelligent life, and the applicability of elegant mathematics to the physical phenomena of the universe all cry out, I think, for a transcendent creator and designer of the universe. So I find, Matt, that contemporary physics is far more open to a transcendent creator and designer of the universe than it has been for centuries.

Matt Tully
Do you find that to be the case not just for like the contemporary ideas in physics but even people who are operating in physics? Do you see a shift in terms of people being open to this idea of a God?

William Lane Craig
Yes, I do. I’m not simply talking about the evidence and the arguments, though that is my primary emphasis, rather than people, but when you want to talk about people, yes, that’s also true. Take, for example, the argument from fine tuning that I just mentioned. This argument has won widespread respect among secular philosophers and scientists as an argument for God’s existence. It’s widely recognized today that this is really good evidence for the existence of a designer. Now, those who are agnostic or secular will add, But there’s countervailing evidence, say the problem of evil.

Matt Tully
We’ll get to that one.

William Lane Craig
Something of that sort. But nevertheless, taken on its own, they would say the argument from fine tuning does provide powerful evidence for the existence of a designer.

Matt Tully
That actually relates to one other thing that you emphasize in your book, Reasonable Faith. You note that these apologetic arguments are not often going to win the war in and of themselves, but they are often paving the way—they’re one small step—in bringing someone perhaps closer and making them more open to the truths of Christianity, just as you said with these physicists who are acknowledging there’s validity in that.

William Lane Craig
Yes. I don’t think that God has abandoned us to work out, by our own ingenuity and cleverness, whether or not he exists. As somebody has said, that would make getting into heaven like getting into Harvard. Rather, God, through his Holy Spirit, seeks us and wants to draw us to himself. And so the Holy Spirit is at work in people’s lives, convicting them and drawing them to him. And even if they do not come to believe because of the arguments, nevertheless, the arguments can give them the intellectual permission to believe when they sense their hearts are moved by the Holy Spirit.

22:49 - Why Would a Transcendent God Care about Humans?

Matt Tully
That’s good to remember in this conversation. All right, another argument: If God is as powerful and transcendent as you claim that he is, it just doesn’t make sense that he would care about humanity the way that you say he does. Why would that kind of God care what we do and what we say during our short lives here on this small little planet in this normal galaxy? Why would he care? It doesn’t make sense that he would care.

William Lane Craig
The answer to that is the things moral worth is not determined by its physical size. Physical size is irrelevant to the moral worth of something. The great philosopher Frederick Copleston made the striking comment that one single human being is worth more than the entire material universe put together, because that single human being has inherent moral worth. Therefore, of course God is concerned about him. And as a God of love and justice, God loves that precious individual and wants that individual to come to know God—and to know him (the Creator) is the very purpose of human existence.

Matt Tully
That’s so good. You push back against hidden assumptions that are at play there. Speak to that, too, because that seems like another important idea behind a lot of your responses to these is you’re uncovering assumptions that people have that they don’t even know they perhaps have.

William Lane Craig
I think that’s right, and I don’t know that I’m very good at this, but very often you need to excavate the presuppositions that lie beneath the argument that the person may not even realize he has. And the example that we just talked about might be an example where he seems to equate the worth of something with its physical size. And if we’re given our diminutive size in relation to the universe, we’re not worth bothering about. And that’s clearly a false assumption, I think.

24:56 - What Evidence Is There for the Resurrection?

Matt Tully
All right, another one. The whole Christian faith hinges on the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. I think you would affirm that as a Christian.

William Lane Craig
I would.

Matt Tully
If that didn’t happen, even the Bible acknowledges that Christianity falls apart. But how can you, 2,000 years after the fact, be confident that Jesus actually did bodily, literally rise from the dead? What evidence could you possibly have for that?

William Lane Craig
I think there are two ways to acknowledge Jesus’s resurrection. One would be through a personal encounter with the risen Lord himself. As the Easter hymnist says, “You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart.” I do not in any way depreciate or devalue that response. I think for the vast majority of Christians down through the centuries, the way in which they have known that Christ is risen is because they have a personal relationship with the risen Lord himself. But secondly, in our modern age, with the rise of modern historiography and historical consciousness, we’ve been able to explore the New Testament documents as historical documents and apply to them the same canons of his historiography that secular scholars would apply to other records of ancient history, like Suetonius’ works or Thucydides or Herodotus and so forth. And when you do this, the Gospels emerge as very credible historical sources for the life and teachings of this man, Jesus of Nazareth. With respect to what happened to Jesus, there are five facts that are recognized by the wide majority of New Testament historians today—secular or religious, Christian or non-Christian. These would be that Jesus of Nazareth was executed by Roman crucifixion under Pontius Pilate. Secondly, that his corpse was then interred in a tomb by a delegate of the Jewish Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea. Thirdly, that tomb was then discovered empty on the first day of the week after the crucifixion by a group of Jesus’s women followers. Fourthly, that various individuals and groups of people then experienced appearances of Jesus alive after his death. And finally, number five, that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead, despite every predisposition to the contrary. Now those are the facts. Really, the only question that remains is, How do you best explain them? And I’m persuaded that when you look at various naturalistic explanations of these facts, that what I call the “resurrection hypothesis”—namely, the original hypothesis the disciples proclaimed, that God raised him from the dead—emerges as the best explanation, in terms of its explanatory power, explanatory scope, plausibility, and so on and so forth.

28:30 - What Sets the Bible Apart from Other Religious Scriptures?

Matt Tully
This leads in nicely to my next question. You referenced the Bible and how all those facts that you would say are widely accepted, even among non-Christians, are drawn from primarily Scripture, I would say. Christians claim that the Bible—this ancient collection of documents written over the course of hundreds of years—is God’s word. It’s his revelation to us as his people. How do you know this? Other religious groups will claim that they have inspired scriptures. What makes their claims less believable than our claims?

William Lane Craig
Now, it’s important to understand, Matt, that the question you’ve just asked is an in-house question among Christians. We’re ready to believe in Jesus as the decisive self-revelation of God simply on the basis of the arguments for the existence of God and the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, showing that he was who he claimed to be. That’s sufficient to becoming a Christian. So then the question of the inspiration of the Bible is then a question that we as Christians face; it’s an in-house question. I would respond that we are justified in believing in the inspiration of Scripture on the basis of Jesus’s attitude toward the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament. Jesus regarded the Hebrew Bible as the word of God, absolutely authoritative in all that it teaches. Moreover, he thought of himself as invested with that same divine authority, and he would often oppose his own personal authority even to that of the Hebrew Bible. He thought his authority exceeded it. And Jesus, in turn, bestowed this authority upon his twelve apostles and gave them the command to go out and preach this gospel message throughout the world so that the apostolic proclamation, both in word and in writing, bears this same divine authority.
And this is exactly what Scripture teaches, that this is God’s word to us, with the authority of God, and, therefore, it is true and profitable for doctrine and correction of error and so forth. Now, that doesn’t settle the limits of the canon. How do you know which books belong in the canon of inspired literature and which ones fall outside of it? The ones that fall outside of it are pretty clear. There was never any dispute that some of these extra canonical books really should have been in the New Testament. The question is whether or not there are things in the New Testament that shouldn’t have been there. Second Peter and Jude, for example, might be disputed. And what I would say here is that there is no Christian doctrine that depends upon these doubtful books. The letters of the apostle Paul, the four Gospels, and Acts were universally recognized to stem out of the apostolic circle, and these are sufficient for the establishment of Christian doctrine. These other books confirm it. They teach the same thing, but they don’t teach anything new or unique to Christianity. And so we can be content with a canon that has somewhat blurry edges. But then my final point would be this: Down through the ages, Christians from every culture and every language have sensed that God speaks to us through the New Testament, including these other books that are somewhat more dubious. And I think that testimony should not be ignored. I think the universal testimony of the church—that the New Testament is God’s word and that we experience it as God’s word—makes it rational to believe in the full New Testament canon, as it was eventually established by the church.

32:53 - Is God a Megalomaniac?

Matt Tully
Here are a final two skeptical questions to ask you. Christians believe that the only way to be saved from their sins is to believe in God and worship him alone. But doesn’t that make God into some kind of megalomaniac? Doesn’t that paint a picture of a God who’s obsessed with worship? And what kind of God is that? How could that be the way that God would be?

William Lane Craig
Well, I think that would be true if God were merely a finite being. But I think those who object in this way don’t have an adequate grasp of who God is. God is the paradigm and locus of value. He is what Plato called “the Good.” Therefore, God’s own desire and orientation is toward himself as the ultimate good. And similarly for us, we ought to have as our orientation ultimate goodness, which is God himself. And any orientation that would deviate from God would be to put some lesser good in the place of the supreme good, and would therefore, in a sense, be idolatry. So God is worthy of worship. He is “the maximally great Being”, as Saint Anselm put it.

Matt Tully
If any Christian were to act like God does and were to demand worship like God does, that would be crazy. That would be megalomaniac maniacal. But because God is God, it’s not the same for him.

William Lane Craig
Not at all.

34:30 - In Light of the Existence of Evil, How Could God Be Both All-Powerful and All-Loving?

Matt Tully
Here is perhaps one of the hardest questions for Christians to know what to do with when they’re confronted with it, in part because it’s so powerful in how it affects us, and that’s the problem of evil. And I’ll just put it like this: the Bible teaches that God is both all-powerful and all-loving, and yet evil exists—evil that every day causes indescribable pain and suffering in this world. Many people listening might know what that feels like in their own lives. In light of the existence of evil, how could God be both all-powerful and all-loving? Only one of those things could be true, right?

William Lane Craig
No, I think that both can be true. I think in getting at this problem, it’s very helpful to distinguish between what I call the intellectual problem of evil and the emotional problem of evil. The intellectual problem of evil is how to give an intellectual account of the compatibility of God and evil. The emotional problem of evil is how to dissolve people’s dislike of a God who would allow them or others to suffer so terribly. And I’m convinced, Matt, that for most people the problem of evil is not an intellectual problem; it is an emotional problem.

Matt Tully
And you don’t use that word, emotional, disparagingly, right?

William Lane Craig
No, because it is emotionally difficult. But what I want to say is that as a purely intellectual problem, when I consider it as a philosopher, it is extraordinarily difficult to prove any kind of incompatibility between God and the evil and suffering in the world. Philosophers have tried to prove this for generations, and no one’s ever been able to do it. No one has ever been able to show that given the evil in the world, it is logically impossible or highly improbable that God exists. So I could go into this at great, great length, but I would simply say that when you consider it as a purely intellectual problem, it puts a burden of proof on the atheist shoulders that is really unsustainable.

Matt Tully
So then how would you shift over to that emotional side question?

William Lane Craig
Having said that this isn’t really an intellectual problem, I’d say, Does Christianity have anything to say about the emotional problem of evil? And I’d say, yes, it does, because it tells us that God is not a cool and distant creator, aloof from the world that he has made. Rather, he is a God who enters into human history in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. And what does he do? He suffers. He bears incomprehensible suffering, even though he was totally innocent, to bring us to a knowledge of himself. And so the problem of evil, really, at the end of the day is a problem of our evil—filled with sin, morally guilty before God. The question is not how God can justify himself to us; the question is how can we be justified before him? And there, I think the cross of Christ provides the answer. In the cross we see the amazing extent of God’s love, that to redeem us and bring us into fellowship with himself, he would bear incomprehensible suffering for us. And why? Because he loves us so much. How can we reject him who was willing to give up everything for us?

38:22 - Don’t Use These Christian Apologetic Arguments

Matt Tully
That’s good. What would be one or two Christian apologetic arguments that we should never use? Talking to Christians, Do not say this. Do not make this argument. It’s not good, it’s not helpful, it’s not accurate. What might fall into that category?

William Lane Craig
One would be that atheists and agnostics cannot live happily and decent lives.

Matt Tully
I think sometimes we wouldn’t maybe say that, but I think sometimes we do think that. We think they can’t really be happy. They can’t really have that fulfilling of a life, because we just know they’re not supposed to be able to have that as non-Christians.

William Lane Craig
And I think that’s a big mistake because those of us who’ve been raised in non-Christian homes have known people who live happy and decent and good lives, even though they may not be believers. So that’s a claim that we shouldn’t make. It’s a confusion. The claim we should make is that if God does not exist, then life is ultimately meaningless, valueless, and purposeless. That’s true, but that isn’t to say that just because a person doesn’t believe in God, that he doesn’t experience meaning, value, and purpose.

Matt Tully
There’s just no intellectual grounds for them to truly have that. Is that what you would say?

William Lane Craig
What I would say is that what’s necessary for meaning, value, and purpose is not the belief in God, but it’s God! God is necessary if life is to have meaning, value, and purpose, but not your subjective belief.

Matt Tully
Any other really terrible Christian arguments that you would warn us against?

William Lane Craig
Well, I would be cautious about arguments from contemporary miracles, which I think are often ill-evidenced and poorly founded. I don’t think that’s probably a really good apologetic either.

Matt Tully
What’s the best argument against Christianity that you’ve encountered? Even if you feel like you’ve come to a good response to it, what would you say is one of the strongest arguments that you think Christians would do well to study up on a little bit?

William Lane Craig
One might be the hiddenness of God. If God existed, he could make his existence a whole lot more obvious. And yet God seems to be silent when we need him most often. Philip Yancey has written about this and his book Disappointment with God. So the hiddenness of God and the silence of God, I think, is deeply troubling.

Matt Tully
And what would be your concise response to that?

William Lane Craig
Two things. One would be that through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, we can have a personal relationship with God that will enable us to get through those times when God seems distant or silent. And then secondly, that there are good arguments for the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus, and reviewing those arguments in your mind during times of doubt or struggle can be a real boost to your confidence.

41:37 - What If My Faith Doesn’t Stand Up to Being Challenged?

Matt Tully
Maybe as a final question, speak to the person listening right now—the Christian listening—who would say they’ve been helped by this and this has helped to bolster their confidence in some of these questions. Maybe they’ve struggled with some of them. But they would have to admit that they still feel a sense of trepidation when it comes to these challenges from unbelievers that they might face. They worry that their faith would not stand up to the challenge, that they would be perhaps led astray and they would give up their faith. What would you say to that Christian?

William Lane Craig
I used to think that giving training in apologetics would make people aware of the objections more, and so it might shake their faith so that they would be filled with doubts when they see all these objections that need to be answered. But what I’ve come to experience in dealing with folks over the years is that it’s actually the ignorant Christian who has no good reasons for his faith, who is most doubt-ridden, and really in danger of losing his faith and walking away, not the Christian who is informed and wrestling with these intellectual issues. So I think that a person who feels that way needs to be bold and he needs to get trained. He needs to work through a book like Reasonable Faith. And if he will do so, I can almost guarantee, on the basis of thirty plus years of experience, that he will be prepared to answer 99% of the objections that he will encounter. Now, Reasonable Faith is not a beginner’s book. It’s an intermediate level text, but if they begin with something like my book On Guard as a primer, that will set the foundation and then they can graduate to the next level, which would be Reasonable Faith.

Matt Tully
But the point is, take that next step and dig in.

William Lane Craig
Yeah.

Matt Tully
Thank you so much for taking the time today to talk with us. It’s so helpful, and you are such a pillar of Christian apologetics in so many of our minds. We just really appreciate it.

William Lane Craig
Thank you, Matt. I just want to express my deep appreciation, sincerely felt, for Crossway and the privilege of publishing Reasonable Faith and several other books with them. You are a masterful press, you do beautiful work aesthetically, and have been a dream to work with. One of the best presses that I have ever worked with is Crossway.

Matt Tully
Thank you very much. We appreciate that.

Popular Articles in This Series

View All

Podcast: Help! I Hate My Job (Jim Hamilton)

January 06, 2020

Jim Hamilton discusses what to do when you hate your job, offering encouragement for those frustrated in their work and explaining the difference between a job and a vocation.

Crossway is a not-for-profit Christian ministry that exists solely for the purpose of proclaiming the gospel through publishing gospel-centered, Bible-centered content. Learn more or donate today at crossway.org/about.