Is Christianity Credible? | Assembly Buildings - Belfast, Northern Ireland

good evening ladies and gentlemen on behalf of Christian Union Ireland I want to welcome you to this final event of the first week of reasons for hope featuring the world-renowned philosopher and apologist dr. William Lane Craig we're here hot on the heels of a truly remarkable series of events and Dublin including a debate last Thursday at Trinity College which attracted an excess of 600 people to hear dr. Craig to be it with the University of Hull atheist professor dr. Daniel Kim that to be it and a lot of other resources are of course available through dr. Craig's website reasonable faith org and I'm sure he'll be mentioning that later in the evening I'm dealer Montgomery direktor of cui and I want to thank you dr. Craig and welcome you to Belfast and thank you for coming to participate in this event dr. Craig likes a good proportion of the evening to be devoted to audience questions and so his lecture will be around 40 to 45 minutes after which you would hope to have time for about an hour of audience questions and I would explain how that will happen after the lecture so dr. William Lane Craig is research professor of philosophy at all-but School of Theology and has been voted one of the 50 most influential living philosophers he has probably done more than any other current thinker to demonstrate the intellectual credibility of the Christian faith he has debated many leading atheists and his books such as on guard and his one on the cosmological argument for the existence of God have been extremely widely read and well received and so it's my great pleasure this evening to welcome him to Belfast and to ask him to come now under JSR dr. William Yun keg [Applause] thank you very much it is a delight to be here with you and such a privilege to be speaking in so auguste an assembly hall as this tonight we have had a great tour over the last week which is taken Jan and me to cart' to Dublin and now to Belfast for this final public lecture it's been years since Jan and I were last in Ireland in fact we first came to speak during the mid-1980s at Queen's University here in Belfast and at that time the students publicize the event by distributing a flyer with my picture on it and the caption who is this man and the choices were taken IRA William Craig Ronald Reagan somebody else well the irony was at that time William Craig was apparently a firebrand right-wing Irish politician so students looking at this flyer said he's none of them will know who he is but I'm glad that you come out this evening and I look forward to our discussion tonight the great agnostic philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say if he found himself standing before God on the Judgment Day and God were to say to him why didn't you believe in me Russell replied I should say not enough evidence God not enough evidence well as I travel around the North American continent in Europe speaking on University campuses I find that most of the non-believing professors that I meet would say pretty much the same thing there's not enough evidence and this attitude is in turn communicated to their students and in all probability in an audience of this size they're probably those of you who are silently thinking in your mind exactly the same thing there's not enough evidence but I want to invite you to think with me a little bit about that this evening what do people mean when they say there's not enough evidence not enough for what not enough to coerce belief not enough to compel someone to become a Christian well I think a lot of people take it that way I find that most people are spiritually apathetic they're either too busy or too unconcerned to be bothered by looking into spiritual things or if they are into spirituality they may be pursuing some alternate spirituality as in the New Age movement and so I find that most people aren't even acquainted with the evidences for Christianity and this is true in particular for university professors one of the most interesting aspects of the work that I do is the debates in which I engage on university campuses often I'll be invited onto a campus where a local professor will have a reputation for being especially abusive to Christian students in his classes holding them up as objects of ridicule and will challenge him to a public debate on a topic like does God exist or humanism versus Christianity or what have you and you know what I find that while most of these chaps are pretty good at beating up intellectually on an eighteen-year-old in one of their classes they can't even go toe-to-toe when it comes to debating one of their peers in their opening speech they may trot out the traditional objections from their intro to philosophy class and after I answer these then they're pretty much left with not more to say and so they either start repeating themselves or pushing the emotional hot buttons of the students to get them on their side I find that they're especially ignorant of the evidence for the Gospels most of them I think have probably never even cracked a New Testament most of them turn out in fact to be just being inflated intellectual blowhards who have no good reason for rejecting Christianity or for ridiculing the Christian students in their classes now in one sense this isn't really surprising because all of us in academia have to specialize in a certain field and as a result we're ignorant of things in other fields so for example I know something about philosophy but I know nothing about Chemical Engineering or agriculture or business and thus it's possible to have a perfectly profound knowledge of one's area of specialization and yet to have little better than a sunday-school knowledge when it comes to Christianity to illustrate several years ago I had a debate at the University of South Carolina on the question of God's existence with a professor at USC now this man was a brilliant philosopher of quantum physics and the director of the graduate program in philosophy at USC and yet the first words out of his mouth when he got up to speak were these I don't really feel qualified to be debating in tonight's debate because I don't know anything about philosophy of religion and I thought to myself well then why in the world are you getting up in front of 800 students trying to convince them not to believe in God when you admit that you don't know anything about bobak I mean it just doesn't compute when you read the biographies of the world's great atheists what you discover is that they typically lost their faith around 11 or 12 years of age and they've never studied it again since now think of what that means that means that most of them reject Christianity based upon the objections of a 12 year old so when people say there's not enough evidence what they really mean is there's not enough evidence to coerce me out of my indifference and make me believe if I choose to ignore it the evidence isn't going to grab me by the lapels and force me to become a Christian to which I say well of course the evidence isn't coercive in that way but why should it be you see the knowledge of God is unique in that the knowledge of God is conditioned by moral and spiritual factors a spiritually indifferent person can have a perfectly profound knowledge of literature or history or sociology or economics or even of theology but a spiritually indifferent person cannot know God according to the Bible the knowledge of God is promised to those who diligently seek Him and thus the Prophet Jeremiah says you shall seek me and you shall find me if you seek for me with all your heart and Jesus said seek and you will find knock and the door shall be opened ask and it shall be given you for he who seeks finds and the him who knocks it shall be opened and to him who asks it shall be given in other words God doesn't force himself upon us he has given evidence of himself which is sufficiently clear for those with an open heart and an open mind but which is sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed the great French mathematical genius bless Pascal who came to know God through Jesus Christ at the age of 31 put it in the following way Pascal wrote willing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart and to be hidden from those who flee from him with all their heart God so regulates the knowledge of himself that he has given indications of himself which are visible to those who seek Him and not to those who do not seek Him there is enough light for those to see who only desire to see and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition in other words the evidence is there for those who have eyes to see so admittedly there's not enough evidence to coerce you if your heart and mind are closed but that's not the really interesting question is it the really interesting question is is there enough evidence to make faith rational and the answer to that question is yes there certainly is the traditional arguments for God's existence and the evidences of Christianity are not coercive but they are certainly sufficient to ground faith rationally if you're willing to look at them with an open mind and an open heart consider for example the question of the existence of God there has been literally a revolution concerning this question in anglo-american philosophy during the second half of the 20th century back in the 1940s and 50s it was widely believed among philosophers the questions of God's existence were literally meaningless they had no factual content whatsoever this movement reached its crescendo in the mid 1960s with the so-called death of God theology on April 8 1966 Time magazine carried a cover story for which the cover was completely black except for three words emblazoned in bright red letters against the dark background and the question read is God dead and the article described the movement among contemporary theologians to proclaim the death of God but to paraphrase Mark Twain it seems that the news of God's death was greatly exaggerated for at the same time that the theologians were writing God's obituary a new generation of young philosophers was rediscovering his vitality just a few years after its infamous death of God issue time ran a similar cover story only this time the question read is God coming back to life and that's how it must have seemed to those theological morticians of the 1960s during the 1970s interest in philosophy of religion continued to gather momentum and in 1980 time ran another major story entitled modernizing the case for God in which describe the movement among contemporary philosophers to refurbish and read offend all of the traditional arguments for God's existence Time Marvel and I quote in a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anybody could have foreseen only two decades ago God is making a comeback most intriguingly this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers but in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers where the consensus had long banished the almighty from fruitful discourse according to the article the noted American philosopher Roderick Chisholm believed that the reason that atheism was so influential a generation ago is because the brightest philosophers at that time were atheists but today he says many of the brightest philosophers are theists and they are using a tough-minded intellectualism in defense of that belief that was formerly lacking on their side of the debate in so in the year 2001 the journal Philo carried an article by a prominent atheist philosopher lamenting what he called the D secularization of academia that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s he complained natural ists passively watch as realist versions of theism began to sweep through the philosophical community until today perhaps one quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists with most being Orthodox Christians in philosophy it became almost overnight academically respectable to argue for Thea's making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today he concludes God is not dead in academia he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold philosophy departments and so I am very pleased to say this evening that today some of England and America's most prominent philosophers at our most prestigious universities are outspoken Christians I think for example of Richard Swinburne and Bryan left out at Oxford University Robert Adams and Dean Zimmerman at Rutgers Alvin Plantinga and peter van inwagen at Notre Dame Eleanor stump at st. Louis Alec spruce at Baylor I could go on and on the idea that Christians are intellectual losers and nincompoops is an idea that is simply rooted in ignorance and needs to be now once and for all decisively put behind us my own work as a philosopher has focused upon the implications of modern cosmology for theology I believe that as physical science pros the natural world we encounter as it were signposts of transcendence pointing beyond the physical world to its ground in a supernatural creator and designer of the universe for example the evidence for the big bang theory of the origin of the universe points to the creation of the universe out of nothing most laymen do not understand that according to the standard Big Bang Theory not just all matter and energy but physical space and time themselves came into existence at the Big Bang in the words of the British physicist pcw Davies the Big Bang represents the creation event the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe but also of space-time itself but this raises the inevitable question how can the universe come into being out of nothing notice that this is a philosophical not a scientific question the claim of certain scientists like Stephen Hawking or Lawrence Krauss that physics can explain the origin of the universe out of nothing treats the word nothing not as literally nothing but rather as referring to empty space filled with vacuum energy or to quantum physical fields which are obviously not nothing properly speaking out of nothing nothing comes so why did the universe come into being the atheist philosopher kind Nielsen gives the following illustration he says suppose you suddenly hear a loud bang and you asked me what made that bang and I reply nothing it just happened he says you wouldn't accept that in fact you would find my reply quite unintelligible well what's true of the little bang is also true of the Big Bang there must have been a cause which brought the universe into being and from the very nature of the case as the cause of space and time this cause would have to be uncaused in material change less time less and enormous ly powerful moreover and we come to the second signpost I wanted to mention the fine tuning of the universe for intelligent life points to this clauses being a personal intelligent mind during the last half century or so scientists have been stunned by the discovery that the initial conditions of the universe present in the Big Bang itself were fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a delicacy and complexity that literally defies human comprehension for example PC WDS is calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation without which of course planets could not exist is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes at least he also estimates that a change in the strength of gravity or of the subatomic weak force by only one part out of 10 to the 100th power would have prevented a life-permitting universe the cosmological constant which drives the early inflationary expansion of the universe must be fine-tuned to one part out of 10 to the power of 120 Roger Penrose of Oxford University is calculated that the odds of the Big Bang's initial low entropy condition existing by chance alone are on the order of one chance out of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 a number which is so incomprehensible that they call it astronomical would be a wild understatement the inference to an intelligent designer of the cosmos seems far more plausible than the atheistic hypothesis of chance now some people have tried to avoid this conclusion by claiming that we shouldn't really be surprised at the amazing fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life because after all if the universe were not buying tuned then we wouldn't be here to be surprised about it given that we are here we should expect the universe to be fine-tuned but I think that the fallacy of this objection can be made clear by means of a parallel illustration imagine that you were traveling abroad and were arrested on trumped-up drug charges and dragged in front of a firing squad of 100 trained marksman all with rifles aimed at your heart to be executed you hear the command given ready and fire and you hear the deafening roar of the guns and then and then and then you check that you're still alive that all of the 100 marksmen missed now what would you conclude well I guess I really shouldn't be surprised that they all missed after all they had not missed I wouldn't be here to be surprised about it given that I am here I should expect of all the miss well of course not you would immediately suspect that they all missed on purpose that the whole thing was a setup engineered for some reason by someone and in exactly the same way given the incomprehensible improbability of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life it is rational to believe that this is not the result of chance but of design now much more could and should be said about these matters but I think that this is sufficient to show that there is certainly enough evidence to make belief in God rational but what about believe in the Christian God is it rational to believe in Jesus as the Gospels portray him well Jesus of Nazareth has certainly become the storm center of controversy in our day hasn't he every Easter and Christmas you can count on the popular media to carry stories about some radical critic who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth was actually a leader of a hallucinogenic cult or a peasant cynic philosopher or a figment of the imagination derived from Egyptian mythology when you check out the evidence however a very different picture emerges than the one painted by the radical critics in fact did you know that today the majority of New Testament historians agree that the historical Jesus deliberately stood and spoke in the place of God himself that he claimed that in himself the kingdom of God had come and that he carried out a Ministry of miracle working and exorcisms in vindication of that claim according to the German theologian haast Georg Bowman today there is virtually a consensus that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority with the claim of the authority to stand in God's place and speak to us and bring us to salvation with regard to Jesus says poor man there are only two possible modes of behavior either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer karyam nun doctor there is no Third Way thus Jesus either wisely claimed to be or else he was able last famos megalomaniac which just seems utterly implausible but there's more for we have dramatic confirmation of the validity of Jesus radical claims about himself namely his resurrection from the dead and again during the second half of the 20th century there was a dramatic reversal of scholarship on this issue back in the 1930s and 40s it was widely believed the gospel events like the discovery of Jesus empty tomb were legends and even embarrassment for the Christian faith similarly Jesus appearances alive after his death were widely taken to be hallucinations brought on by the disciples fervent faith in Jesus this skepticism concerning the resurrection of Jesus also peaked somewhere in the late 1960s and then began very rapidly to recede today it still lingers on in liberal back waters but the majority of critics today agree number one that after his crucifixion Jesus of Nazareth was interred in a tomb by a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea two that the tomb of Jesus was then found empty by a group of his women followers on the Sunday morning after the crucifixion three that various individuals and groups of people on multiple occasions and under a variety of circumstances saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death and number four that the original disciples believed in Jesus resurrection was not the result of their faith in him or of wishful thinking but the quite the reverse their faith in him was the result of their having come to believe that God had raised him from the dead now these are the facts the only question is how to best explain them well here the skeptical Critic faces a somewhat awkward situation to illustrate several years ago I had a debate at the University of California Irvine on the resurrection of Jesus with a professor who had written his doctoral thesis on the evidence for the resurrection he was thoroughly familiar with the evidence and he could not deny the facts of Jesus interment in the tomb of the discovery of the empty tomb of the post-mortem appearances of Jesus and of the disciples believed in his resurrection and so his only recourse was to come up with some new theory to explain away these facts and so he argued the jesus of nazareth must have had an unknown identical twin brother who was separated from him as an infant who grew up independently came back to jerusalem just at the time of the crucifixion stole jesus' body out of the tomb and presented himself to the disciples who mistakenly thought that it was Jesus risen from the dead now I'm not going to go into how I went about refuting this theory but I think that the example is instructive because it shows to what desperate length scepticism must go in order to explain away the evidence for Jesus resurrection in fact did you know that one of the world's leading Jewish theologians Jewish theologians the late Pincus lapid who taught at Hebrew University in Israel declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead now again much more deserves to be said about this but again I think that enough has been shared to show that the Christian is certainly within his rational rights in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and therefore was who he claimed to be so while the evidence is not enough to coerce you if your heart and mind are closed it is certainly enough to ground faith rationally if you're just willing to look at it with an open heart and an open mind now our whole discussion up to this point this evening has just assumed that becoming a Christian is a matter of weighing the evidence pro and con and then making up your mind but if you think about it there's surely something wrong with this assumption the Danish philosopher søren kierkegaard gives the following illustration he imagines a young man who is trying to decide to become a Christian and so in order to make an informed decision he decides to study philosophy so that he can grasp the arguments for and against the existence of God he then turns to a study of comparative religion so that he can understand and contrast and compare the thought systems of the great religions of the world he studies Christian theology so that he can grasp the body of Christian doctrine he learns Aramaic Hebrew and Greek so that he can read the Old and New Testament documents in their original languages he studies Old Testament backgrounds and New Testament back so that he can read these documents in their cultural context and so on and on and on it goes until finally he is convinced that Christianity is true and so at the age of 70 he places his faith in Christ and becomes a Christian now Perigord says that such a scenario is insane faith cannot be expected to hold its breath indefinitely while Reason sips and resets through the evidence a loving God would not abandon us to our own devices to work out by our own cleverness and ingenuity whether or not he exists rather a loving God would himself pursue us and seek to draw us to himself and this is exactly what the Bible says God has done jesus said no man comes to me unless the father who sent me draws him and again jesus said when I am lifted up I will draw all men to myself so it wasn't quite accurate when I said earlier that in order to find God we must diligently seek Him from a human perspective that's true but from God's perspective it's really God who is seeking us and we must decide whether we will open our hearts to his love and forgiveness or whether we will shut our hearts up against his grace if I might conclude on a personal note I myself was not raised in a church-going family though it was a good and loving home but when I became a teenager I began to ask what I call the big questions in life Who am I why am I here what's the meaning of my existence and then the search for answers I began all on my own to attend a local church in our community the only problem was instead of answers what I found was a sort of social club in which the dues were a dollar week in the offering plate and the other high school students who pretended to be such good Christians on Sunday lived for their real God the rest of the week which was popularity and this really bothered me because I thought Here I am so spiritually empty inside and yet externally at least I'm leading a better life than they are and they claimed to be Christians they must be just as empty as I am but they're all putting up a false front pretending to be something they're not and so I grew very resentful toward the institutional church for the hypocrisy and the faux ninis that I saw there well soon this attitude began to spread toward other people in general everybody I said is a hypocrite everybody is really holding up a plastic mask to the world while the real person is cowering down inside afraid to come out and be real and so I shunned relations with other people I said I hate people I don't need them I don't want them and I threw myself into my studies and yet in moments of introspection and honesty as I looked into my own heart I knew that deep down inside I really did want to love and to be loved by others and I realized in that moment that I was just as much a phony as they were because here I was putting on this false front of not meeting other people when deep down inside I knew that I really did and so that anger turned in upon myself for my old foe ninis and hypocrisy and I don't know if you understand what this is like but this kind of inner anger just gnaws away at your insides day after day making every day miserable another day to get through well I remember one day I walked into my high school German class feeling particularly crummy and I sat down behind a girl who's one of these types you know that is always so happy it just makes you sick and I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around and I said to her Sandy what are you so happy about all the time anyway she said well bill it's because I know Jesus Christ is my personal Savior and I said well I go to church and she said that's not enough bill you got to have him really living in your heart and I said well what would he want to do a thing like that for and she said because he loves you bill and that just hit me like a ton of bricks here I was so filled with anger and hatred inside and she said there was someone who really loved me and who was it but the god of the universe and that thought just staggered me that the god of the universe could love that world named bill Craig down on that speck of dust called planet Earth I just couldn't take it in well I went home that night and I found a New Testament that had been given to me in the fifth grade by the Gideons when they visited our school and for the first time I opened it and began to read and as I did I was absolutely captivated by the person of Jesus of Nazareth there was a wisdom about this man's teaching that I had never encountered before and there was an authenticity about his life that wasn't characteristic of those people who claimed to be his followers in that local church that I was going to and I realized then I couldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater well as I read the New Testament I came to understand what my problem was my own moral failures and wrongdoing what the Bible calls sin had rendered me morally guilty before God and therefore alienated from him the relationship that I was created to have with God was ruptured and therefore God seemed so distant and unreal to me but the good news of the New Testament was that God had sent his son Jesus into the world to die for my sins so that I might find forgiveness and moral cleansing and new life and have that relationship with God that I was created to have well to make a long story short I went through about six months of the most intense soul-searching that I have ever been through and at the end of those six months one night I just cried out to God and released my life to him and I cried out all the anger the bitterness that was inside and at the same time I felt this tremendous infusion of july' like a balloon being blown up and blown up until it was ready to burst and I rushed outdoors it was a clear Midwestern September evening and as I looked up at the Stars I could see the Milky Way from Horizon to Horizon and I thought God I come to know God and that moment changed my whole life because you see I had thought enough about this message during those six months to realize that if this were really the truth if it were really the truth then I could do nothing less than devote my entire life to spreading this message among mankind and so that's basically why we're in Belfast this evening because I love to share the message with students who are about the same age that I was when my life was so radically changed and so if you're here tonight and you're seeking to find God as a reality in your life I would encourage you to look not only at the arguments and the evidence which are certainly sufficient to ground faith rationally but also to do what I did pick up a New Testament and begin to read it and ask yourself could this really be true could there really be a God who loves me and to a sent his son to die for me I believe that it could change your life in the same way that it changed mine [Applause] you

Channel: ReasonableFaithOrg

Views: 7,674

Keywords: William Lane Craig, Ireland, Existence of God, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Christianity, The Resurrection, Evidence for God, Atheism, Atheists, Apologetics, Christian Apologetics, Morality, Theism, Philosophy, Historicity of Jesus, Origin of the Universe, Christian Philosophy, Theology, Belfast, Queen's University, Northern Ireland, Assembly Buildings

Id: dxF0AqBcdxE

Length: 44min 45sec (2685 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2017