Balancing Emotions and Rationality

People are made with intellectual and emotional tendencies. How should we balance these tendencies as we approach our beliefs?

QUESTION: We are emotional beings. We're intellectual beings. How do we balance that out? In an age when, frankly, we rely more on feelings, we confuse feelings for thinking often.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I think that's undoubtedly true, and that for many, many people that's quite right that they come to place their faith in Christ for spiritual or emotional reasons and not on the basis of a decision about the evidence. But I mean in all candor, John, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and I would say exactly the same thing about our secular and atheistic friends. I find that most of them, when challenged, are utterly incapable of defending their views or offering any sort of good arguments in favor of an atheistic or naturalistic view of the world. I find that for most atheists their disbelief is really rooted in emotions, often in emotional scars and hurts that they have sustained in the context perhaps of a church or a family that was religious and which left them bitter and angry. So this is a wash as far as I'm concerned; whatever psychological reasons there might be for becoming a Christian or an atheist, the bottom line is which view has the better support of the evidence? And here, as you know, I have been willing to debate any of the top proponents of atheistic or agnostic or non-Christian viewpoints on university campuses and defend the superior rationality of the Christian worldview.