Live Q&A with Dr. Craig

[Music] all right are we ready to get started all right so thank you for uh a wonderful presentation hopefully I think there's already a whole bunch of questions coming coming in while those are rolling in I've got a couple primary questions here and I I was you could uh tell the audience how you actually became a Christian or what was your journey to Faith I'd like happy to say I was not raised in a Christian home as you were John uh but in a good loving home but not a churchgoing family but when I became a teenager I began to ask the big questions in life who am I why why am I here where am I going and in the search for answers I began to attend a large Church in our community the only problem was instead of answers what I found was a social Country Club where the dues were a dollar a week in the offering plate and the other high school kids who pretended to be such good Christians on Sunday live for their real God the rest of the week which was popularity and this really bothered me because I thought I feel so spiritually empty inside but I'm living externally at least a better life than they are and they claim to be Christians they must just be as empty as I but they're all putting on a false front they're all a pack of Hypocrites and so I began to become very alienated toward the institutional church and soon this attitude spread toward other people as well everybody I thought is a hypocrite and a fake um and not really authentic and so I shunned relations with other people I threw myself into my studies I said I don't need people I don't want people I I want nothing to do with them and yet uh in moments of honesty and introspection when I looked into my own heart I knew that deep down inside I really did want to love and to be loved uh and that therefore I was just as much a hypocrite as they were because here I was putting on this false front pretending not to need people when deep down inside I knew I really did and so that anger I felt toward them turned in on myself for my own hypocrisy and phoniness and I don't know if you understand what this is like but this kind of inner anger just eats away at your insides making every day miserable another day to get through and I remember one day I walked into my high school German class and I was feeling particularly crummy and I sat down behind a girl who is one of these types the was always so happy it just made me sick and I tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around and I said to her Sandy what are you always so happy about anyway and she said it's because I'm saved and I said you're what and she said I know Jesus Christ as my personal Savior and I said well I go to church and she said that's not enough Bill you've got to have him really living in your heart and I saidwell 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 bitterness 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 me that worm named Bill Craig down there 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 when The Gideons visited our elementary school and for the first time I opened it and began to read and as I read the gospels I was absolutely captivated by the person of Jesus of Nazareth there was a wisdom about this man's teaching that was undeniable and especially there was an authenticity about his life that wasn't characteristic of those people who claimed to be his followers in that local church I was attending and I realized that I couldn't throw the baby out with the bath water well to make a long story short I went through about six months of the most agonizing soul searching that I've ever been through and at the end of those six months I just came to the end of my rope and one night cried out to God and I just cried out all all the anger and the bitterness that had been building up inside of me and as I did I felt this tremendous infusion of Joy like a balloon being blown up and blown up until it was ready to burst and I rushed outside it was a warm Midwest September evening and you could see the Milky Way from The Horizon to Horizon and as I looked up at the stars I thought God I've come to know God and that moment changed my whole life because I had thought enough about this during those six months to realize that if Bill Craig ever became a Christian that I could do nothing less than devote my entire life to spreading this message among mankind because if this is really the truth if it's really the truth this is the greatest news ever announced and so for me my call to vocational Christian Ministry was simultaneous with my con version thank you that's a powerful story uh yeah uh here's the first question uh what would you say has been the most challenging topic you've ever had to discuss to defend the faith um probably honestly the origin of Life uh that I talked about tonight this is the result of some recent research that I've done and I don't have very good Training in chemistry I I had a high school chemistry and that about it so this really was a steep learning curve for me to study organic chemistry and the origin of life's uh scenarios I was helped in this by consultation with professional origin of life scientists at Rice University and at The vitman Institute in Israel um I wanted to develop a theological perspective on the origin of life and that was I think probably one of the most challenging areas that I've ever studied uh what about defending uh any any argument or something that has been the most challenging to defend well I think perhaps the so-called hiddenness of God is the best objection that the skeptic can raise and that is to say that God if he exists could have made his existence a whole lot pler right I mean he he could have written his name in the stars or uh put a neon cross in the sky saying Jesus saves or even in more subtle ways God could make his existence a lot less hidden and yet he's chosen to Crea us at a sort of arms length where his existence is not evident and somebody might say that the reason that God is hidden is because there's nobody there and so the challenge for the Christian would be to offer some sort of explanation for for God's hiddenness and I I would say several things about it number one I think on the basis of evidence such as we view tonight and that's only partial there's a lot more God's existence is not really all that hidden he has manifested himself in uh clear ways I think in the world that allows us to see that he is there um second it's important to keep in mind that God's purpose is not simply to get people to believe that he exists to add one more item to their inventory of what exists rather it is to bring people into a personal love relationship with himself and I think it is perfectly plausible that in a world in which there was a neon cross in the sky or God's name written on every atom that although people might believe that he exists there's no reason to think that this would lead to more people coming to know him and his salvation and find eternal life uh just the obviousness of God's existence doesn't produce Heart Change you see that over and over again in the Old Testament where the Israelites despite the pillar of fire and smoke The Parting of the Red Sea the various Miracles fell away time and time again from God uh so I think that God has created us at a kind of distance from himself to create a hunger in those whose Hearts want to know God so that they search for him and approach him with humility and an attitude of seeking that is conducive to finding this kind of personal love relationship with himself and so I trust in God's wisdom in the obviousness with which he's disclosed himself to us fantastic all right let's keep going um the piggybacking off the the lecture this evening how old do you think the Earth is 4.8 billion years uh any any one or two sentence reason why that's what the best evidence indicates uh and you know those kind of numbers used to seem big until I started thinking about the national debt and the infrastructure Bill and now you know the age of the universe it's 13 billion it sounds tiny and and 4.8 billion sounds small compared to the things like the debt and the US budget so I I'd say about that amount all right sounds good we have a we have an unclear upvoted question but I think I know what this is getting at um the the question or the the statement is Jonah and the whale versus science which I I think the question is how do you interpret or what what is your take on some of those more fantastic I have never studied in depth the Book of Jonah so my opinions on this are ignorant and not authoritative uh um but I would say that it keep in mind it doesn't say a whale it it's a a large fish and so there's no reason to think he couldn't have been swallowed by some kind of a marine animal and that he died when it talks about my soul went down to the pit in the Old Testament this is language for going to the realm of the Dead shaol which is the realm of The Departed and then he when he's vomited up on land he comes back to life so I think he may well have been dead in in the belly of the fish and then came back to life and so Jesus uses Jonah as a symbol for himself he says as Jonah was in the belly of the whale for three days and three nights so the son of man will be in the belly of the Earth for three days and three nights and that involved of course a literal death on jesus' part and then a resurrection and in Jonah's case it would be a literal death and then a reification to the Mortal life maybe broadening the question out a bit how how do you uh interpret or or navigate some of the more let's say miraculous stories in the Old Testament or things that you run across there versus you know kind of a naturalistic perspective well my attitude is that if God exists then Miracles are trivial for him to perform a miracle would be an event that doesn't have any naturalistic explanation but is immediately wrought by God and if there is a God who is able to create the entire universe out of nothing and design it with an incomprehensible Precision for life um well as Peter slazak an Australian philosopher put it in his debate with me the odd Resurrection would be Child's Play for such a God so I don't have any trouble believing miracles in the Bible fantastic all right a culturally relevant question here given all the recent things uh happening uh how do you respond to UFO questions uh given our wow you know I think that intellectually I don't have any theological objection to their being intelligent extra restrial life out there the Bible is written to human beings on the planet Earth detailing our Plan of Salvation And if God has created intelligent extraterrestrials elsewhere I'm sure he loves them and has an appropriate Plan of Salvation for them as well uh and so I don't have any problem intellectually or theologically with there being intelligent life forms that God has created elsewhere and I notice I say that God has created because we've already seen that the origin of Life anywhere in the universe by chance alone is astronomically improbable so it would need to be something that God has done elsewhere as he has done here now I say that intellectually but honestly I have to say John when I began to hear some of these recent news reports saying that they found the body of an extraterrestrial and that the Pentagon has got this you know and able to display it I must say it gave me chills because I thought you know if next Tuesday they really did Trot out the carcass of an extraterrestrial visitor to Earth I I think this would be humanly speaking the greatest event in human history not theologically speaking but humanly speaking what would be more incredible that we would find other intelligent life forms like ourselves in the cosmos so emotionally I think it would have an incredible impact if we were to actually discover such life forms okay uh fantastic a much more classical question here uh how does a loving God uh allow evil how would you answer this oh boy now this is such a huge question we could spend hours on it and anything I would say we got 45 seconds yeah and sound bite is just going to appear inadequate but let me just say a couple of things it's really important to distinguish between the intellectual question and the emotional question the intellectual question is how can an all loving and all powerful God permit evil and suffering in the world the emotional question is how do you dissolve people's emotional dislike of a God who would allow them to suffer so these are two entirely different questions and the answer to one is not a good answer to the other I think for most people it's really an emotional problem they've never really thought it through intellectually intellectually it is virtually impossible to prove that it is either impossible or highly improbable that an all loving all powerful God could not permit evil and suffering in the world that places a burden of proof on the atheist's shoulders that is unsustainable and so I don't think that intellectually there is a good statement of the problem of evil no one has been able to show that given God's existence the evil in the world is either impossible or highly improbable now if you want to see that laid out in detail take a look at a little book that I wrote called hard questions real answers where it has a couple of chapters on the problem of suffering and evil uh great so something it's also relevant is uh you know the the very invoke thing I think I've seen it on Tik Tok the deconstructing your faith movement whatever that means specifically but how would you respond to folks who say that they feel better after doing that or oh I think how you feel is irrelevant uh I could well imagine that some people who have been really struggling with Christian faith would feel real relieved about letting it go uh but that that doesn't determine truth feelings are very deceptive and misleading the question is what is the truth and I am not in the least interested in deconstructing someone's faith I'm interested in constructing a Christian world and Life View that is biblically coherent and uh in accord with the best philosophical scientific historical psychological facts that we know and so I think the whole project of building a Christian world and Life View is one of construction not deconstruction and these people who are are de deconstructing I suspect are just reacting emotionally to bad experiences they've had in the institutional Church yeah I mean given the the Prevail the pervasiveness of this on social media and other things I mean do you have any kind of ideas or thoughts on root causes or how how this has gain traction from what I've been told from people who do have more experience with this is that these folks tend to come out of very conservative Christian churches that have been authoritarian and they have often had negative emotional experiences in the church that have left them hurt and Dam damaged and they're reacting against that um and as I say following emotions is not the way to get it truth that is deceptive and misleading and so I guess what I would want to do is not so much criticize them I mean we can have compassion on them for what they're doing but I want to present an alternative more glorious Vision namely a vision of constructing a Christ Christian world and Life View that makes sense of reality and is biblically consistent I I think the that positive glorious project is one that can capture a person's imagination um and help to free him from these emotional things that would drag him back down thank you um we have a few questions about uh Evolution from your lecture tonight could you talk about um a couple things one could you talk a little bit about micro Evolution and do you think that that uh is supported or is that mutually exclusive with the Bible and then secondly just evolution in general do do you think that the Big Bang implies Evolution and is mutually exclusive with Christianity and and yeah what's some thoughts okay well let's start at the end The Big Bang Theory is about the origin of the universe so it says nothing about how life originated on this planet so you could believe in The Big Bang Theory of the origin of the universe and then believe that around 10 to 20,000 years ago in 6 24hour days God created life on this planet but I think that there is very very powerful evidence that there is a history of Life on this planet that life began some four billion years ago as single cell bacteria and for about uh two billion years or so that's all there was was this single cell bacteria you might think well why would God allow that to occur well all during that time this bacteria is UN is performing photosynthesis and as a result it is stocking the atmosphere with oxygen for two billion years so that the oxygen and the Earth is prepared then for air breathing animals terrestrial life to then come onto the life and that's exactly what we find then first primitive life and then more and more sophisticated life the age of the dinosaurs the mammals you know finally Humanity there is a history of Life on this planet that seems to be undenied deniable now the question would be how are these life forms related to each other or one another were there acts of God's creation along the way where he created out of nothing new animals without any kind of ancestors or did he in some way do act such that these animals were transformed into different creatures so that he used the stuff that was already there to produce new life forms and I think either one is possible but I find it very difficult to believe in this kind of creation out of nothing that doesn't take place at the beginning but takes place kind of like all the way along the line so for example I was talking to a young Earth creation once and I said on your view is it that there was a still prehistoric Pond and then all of a sudden out of nothing poof there was a duck swimming on the surface of the pond and he said yeah that's basically it except one duck wouldn't be enough you'd have to have a whole family of ducks right so they could breed right and to me that sounds more like magic than the god of the Bible um and especially when you think about the dinosaurs are we really to imagine that just poof a 50 ton Brachiosaurus came out of old family of them came out of nothing and appeared on the earth that just seems incredible so when I look at the Miracles in the Bible I don't see miracles of creation out of nothing except at the beginning even for example when Jesus turned water into wine do you notice he first had them fill the jars with water he didn't create the wine out of nothing in the jars they filled the jars with water and then the water was transformed into wine and so I am more inclined to the view that God has superintended the history of life so as to not do works of absolute creation out of nothing periodically but to bring new life forms out of previous life forms until we get to today I suspect as I said in my talk that apart from Divine providential supervision that this would never have happened uh one one push back that you know I've heard on this is that this is kind of straddling the line in a way yes how would you respond to that where it's like well I don't think that straddling the line is a Bad Thing uh um if if it's a moderate position that avoids extremes the extremes would be creation out of nothing The Other Extreme would be unguided unsupervised evolution by pure chance and the straddling the line would be to say evolutionary development supervised and providentially ordered by a Transcendent creator of the universe who intended this from the beginning and it seems to me that that's a plausible little way great thank you uh what would you say either through you know your speaking engagements that you do or you know through your different social media chall uh channels what's the most common question or argument you get from your average person yeah and and and how do you how do you answer it do you have any you know if I were to say probably the most common thing is there's no evidence for God people in our culture rarely meet Christian Christians who are able to give good reasons for why they believe in God and so the average non-believer thinks that we just believe by a blind leap of faith in the dark no matter what the evidence says and so it is very common for them to assume that atheism is the default position they just fold their arms and play the skeptic and say there's no good evidence for God and and most Christians have nothing to say at that point so I think that's the most common response and so if you've got a few good arguments under your belt you can look at that person with wide eyes and open mouth and say is that what you think well I can think of at least three good Arguments for God's existence and at that point they've got to say yeah like what and then you're off and running and You Begin sharing your apologetic arguments and every single person who's been at this class for the last eight weeks will be able to do that there's a test on your way out there's a test uh yeah you first you ask what do you mean by that that's right exactly um speaking of Genesis there's a question on uh why do you think the Genesis is ambiguous or do you think God was intentionally ambiguous with the Gen account can you that's a good question I don't think it's a matter of ambiguity I think it's a matter of the literary genre or the literary type the Bible is filled with different kinds of literature there's poetry in the Psalms there's history in the Acts of the Apostles there's biography in the gospels there is epistolary literature in the letters of Paul there is apocalyptic literature in the book Book of Revelation and the principles of literary interpretation of these different kinds of literature vary from genre to genre or type to type for example it would be an enormous mistake to interpret the Book of Revelation literally that there are going to be beasts and multi-headed monsters coming up out of the ocean and taking over the Earth everybody recognizes that these are symbols of uh nation states and political alliances and things or to interpret the Poetry of the Psalms literally would be a huge mistake when the psalmist says let the woods of the uh let the Trees of the wood clap their hands before the Lord he doesn't think that trees have got hands this is poetry now in exactly the same way I think that the first 11 chapters of Genesis belong to a type of literature that is figurative it's not that it's ambiguous it's that it's figurative it uses imagery um and metaphor to communicate these deep truths uh such as that God is the sole Creator uh of everything else the source of life and that all these other things are not Gods to be worship they're just stuff that God has made that that's the underlying message in these in the first chapter all right we've got time I think for for two more we'll ask two more questions uh how would you say you move or can move someone from a theistic position where they believe there's a Creator to Christianity what do you think that BRD we haven't talked about that at all tonight I did my doctoral work in Germany on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and I was shocked to discover that the facts under ging the resurrection of Jesus are held by the wide majority of New Testament historians today whether conservative or liberal or non-Christian uh and these would be principally three in number that after his crucifixion uh Jesus was buried by Joseph of ARA in a tomb and that that tomb was found empty by a group of Jesus women followers on the first day of the week after to the crucifixion secondly that thereafter various individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead and thirdly that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead despite having every predisposition to the contrary now those are the facts the only question is how do you best explain them and I would argue that when you assess different explanations by the standard criteria that historians use like explanatory power explanatory scope uh Simplicity and so forth that by far uh the resurrection hypothesis the explanation the original disciples gave comes out Head and Shoulders above the Alternatives and that means that the god whom Jesus had allegedly blasphemed has publicly and dramatically Vindicated those allegedly Blasphemous claims for which he was crucified and so I think on the basis of the historicity of Jesus resurrection we have very sound historical grounds for believing that Jesus was who he claimed to be and therefore that Christian theism is true and so you to move someone from theism to Christianity you would present them with the evidence for Jesus Jesus essentially yes I would Point them to the person of Jesus of Nazareth his personal claims and his resurrection from the dead in Vindication of those claims all right last question and to close out tonight um you mentioned there was this perceived split or this split that happened between Christianity and science or religion and science that that happened I think you mentioned 100 years ago it's still pretty strong today uh in in a way at least among the general population do you have a a thought on why that is and do you think that that Gap will close or what's your yeah what's your thesis on science and religion or science of Christianity F Well it certainly is true John that the so-called new atheists Like Richard Dawkins and his ilk did champion this sort of antiquated 19th century scientism that Andrew Dixon white Pro propagated and so it did come roaring back into popular culture through the efforts of the new atheists but that now seems to have passed I think that that is eclipsed uh the new atheist like Dawkins were roundly denounced by their scientific and philosophical colleagues at the University despite their popular cultural influence um their colleagues were were oh blistering in their their criticisms and so I think that is now beginning to fade well everyone that concludes and I want to get you out on time thank you Dr [Applause] [Music] Craig

Channel: ReasonableFaithOrg

Views: 10,094

Keywords: William Lane Craig, Apologetics, Christianity, Faith, God, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Philosophy, Theology, Science, History, Cosmology, Kalam, Reason, Logic, Existence of God

Id: onwRUPUHQVw

Length: 33min 55sec (2035 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023