A Dinner Conversation with Dr. Craig Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: Hello, and welcome to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I'm Kevin Harris. Today we're beginning a special series on a recent conversation Dr. Craig had with Dr. Michael McClymond of ReThink315 before a live audience. This was at one of their events, and you're going to hear some things from Dr. Craig that you may not have heard before as he talks about his history and his lifetime of work. In fact, I've known Dr. Craig a long time but had not heard some of the integral moments in his life that he reveals in this conversation. We've divided it up into a series of podcasts, so stay close and don't miss them. We also don't want you to miss an opportunity to double the impact of your giving to Reasonable Faith. It's that time of year when our matching grant goes into place. Some generous donors will match whatever you give to the ministry of Reasonable Faith up to $250,000. So any gift you give will be doubled from now to the end of the year. So don't let this impact opportunity pass you by. Thank you for blessing Reasonable Faith with your prayers and financial support. Give online at ReasonableFaith.org. Now, part one of “A Dinner Conversation with Dr. William Lane Craig.”

MODERATOR: Dr. Michael McClymond is Professor of Modern Christianity at St Louis University. Mike's written or edited a dozen volumes that [cover] Christian theology, North American religion, world Christianity, comparative religion and biblical studies. Dr. William Lane Craig is a Visiting Scholar of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and professor of philosophy at Houston Christian University. He has authored or edited over 30 books including the Kalam Cosmological Argument; Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus; Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology; God, Time and Eternity, as well as over a 100 articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology. We got this from your assistant. In 2016, Dr. Craig was named by The Best Schools as one of 50 most influential living philosophers. Give it up you guys for Dr. Mike McClymond and Dr. William Lane Craig.

DR. McCLYMOND: Thank you. The last time that we spoke was in Birmingham, England. This is when Dr. Craig was present to give the Cadbury Endowed Lectures. You know Cadbury the chocolate manufacturer? Yes. All those chocolates sold around the world endowed a lecture series. One of the things that really struck me was when Dr. Craig was giving his presentation that all of these philosophers who were not believers showed up en mass to hear him speak, not because they share his faith but because they respect his argumentation and his intellect.

DR. CRAIG: I thought you were going to say because they expected to get some chocolate! [laughter]

DR. McCLYMOND: That could be a question whether there was a cash remuneration or a chocolate repayment. Lifelong Cadbury? Let's go back to the beginning, and I don't mean the beginning of the universe. I mean the beginning of William Lane Craig. Was there a first point in your life – we heard of how you responded to the Gospel at age 16 – but can you recall a first moment when you were functioning as an apologist when there was a non-believer who was asking a question that you're responding to that? Describe that moment.

DR. CRAIG: Being from a non-Christian family I had to explain the reason for this radical change in my life. Particularly burdening to me was my younger brother. I wanted to be able to give him reasons for faith. So right from the beginning I was interested in that but it was not well-informed. It was when I went to Wheaton that I began to form the vision of having a ministry of sharing the Gospel in the context of giving an intellectual defense of the Christian worldview. I really owe it to those four years of intellectual and spiritual formation at Wheaton College.

DR. McCLYMOND: Were you presenting arguments for the faith to fellow Wheaton students who were questioning, or were there people not in that community?

DR. CRAIG: No. The emphasis at Wheaton was the integration of faith and learning; that you don't put your faith in one pocket and your brains in the other pocket and never let them see the light of day at the same time. Rather you try to develop a Christian Weltanschauung – a Christian world and life view – that would include a Christian perspective on philosophy, on the arts, on the sciences, on literature, and so forth. So it was my formation at Wheaton that gave me the vision and the burden of sharing the credibility of a Christian world and life view with non-Christians. I felt called to evangelism but it was at Wheaton that the particular shape of this evangelism took place.

DR. McCLYMOND: Was that the era of Dr. Holmes? Was he there? Arthur Holmes.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Arthur Holmes was one of my professors of philosophy, and also Stuart Hackett who wrote The Resurrection of Theism – the book that changed my life and the whole direction of my life by defending the kalam cosmological argument. I had been taught by my theology professors at Wheaton that there were no good arguments for God's existence, that they'd all been refuted. Even though that didn't seem right to me, I thought surely these highly educated professors know more than I do, and so when they say there are no good arguments for God's existence they may surely be correct. At Wheaton all we had in the late 60s and early 70s was a kind of negative apologetic inspired by Francis Schaeffer; that is to say, if God does not exist then you show the disastrous consequences for life, society, art, culture. Everything goes down the drain. Well, that kind of negative apologetic only shows how bad things are if Christianity isn't true but it doesn't give any positive reason to think that it is. But when I was about to graduate from Wheaton I was browsing the college bookstore and they had a clearance table. On the table was this book by Stuart Hackett called The Resurrection of Theism, and I bought it. Then after graduation that summer I began to read it, and it was an eye-opening experience because here Hackett was defending arguments for the existence of God and responding to every conceivable objection that I could possibly think of. The centerpiece of Hackett's case was what later came to be called the kalam cosmological argument. I was so gripped by this that I thought if I ever get a chance to do a doctorate I want to write my doctoral dissertation on this argument. I want to settle in my mind if this is a sound argument for the existence of God. And that's eventually what happened at the University of Birmingham under John Hick. Out of that came this argument that I dubbed the kalam cosmological argument, and which I've used now for decades in debates and lectures on university campuses across the world.

DR. McCLYMOND: You've answered one of the questions I was going to ask which was about how you became interested and involved in the cosmological argument. What about the other early focus on the resurrection of Jesus? What was the origin of that?

DR. CRAIG: You know, that's interesting, Mike. That actually came out of the years that Jan and I spent on Campus Crusade for Christ’s staff. When I graduated from Wheaton, we had a chapel speaker one day challenge us to take a couple of years out of our education and to ring out the sponge that had been soaking up all this knowledge during those four years in practical ministry. I thought that sounds like a good idea. What could I do? And the answer seemed obvious to me: Campus Crusade for Christ. So I joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ for two years, and it was there that I met Jan at Arrowhead Springs. We fell in love and were married and shared a common vision of helping to fulfill the Great Commission together. One of the principal speakers of Campus Crusade for Christ in those days was Josh McDowell. Josh in his Evidence That Demands of Verdict placed great emphasis on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection and the case that could be made for it. Well, none of my Bible professors at Wheaton had ever said anything like this – that there could actually be evidence for events like the resurrection. So under the influence of Josh's ministry I began to be interested in the credibility of Jesus’ resurrection. So after finishing at Birmingham we decided to go to Germany and study under Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich. Pannenberg had rocked liberal German theology by defending the resurrection of Jesus as a historical event – historically, not by authority but through ordinary cannons of historical research. I thought, wow, if I could study with Pannenberg, I could develop an argument for Jesus’ resurrection that would complement the kalam cosmological argument that I already had. And that's exactly what happened. Out of that study with Pannenberg at Munich came three books on the resurrection of Jesus and an argument, a case for the resurrection of Jesus, that again I have now for several decades presented on secular university campuses in debates and lectures and which holds up, I think, very well.

DR. McCLYMOND: Now with this double doctorate from England and Germany, you could have remained with your laptop in your home and your office writing. What's the genesis of the debates that you've been involved in? How did you decide to venture forth in such high-profile settings, debating the world's leading non-believers like Christopher Hitchens and many others?

DR. CRAIG: In high school I participated in four years of high school debate activities. For me it was a sport – an intellectual sport – and I could represent my school. I actually lettered in debate – you know where some guys letter in football or basketball, I lettered in debate. Then when I went on to Wheaton I continued for four more years of debating on the intercollegiate debate circuit all over the country. I loved debate. For me this was just a wonderful intellectual exercise. I thought that when I graduated from Wheaton that I had participated in my last debate – that I would never compete again. Then what happened was I started getting invitations from Canadian university ministries to debate in Canada on topics like “Humanism vs. Christianity” or “Does God Exist?” or “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” The very first debate I ever had was at the University of Calgary in 1982 with Kai Nielsen, the atheist philosopher. These debates – what I found out was whereas maybe a few score might come and hear me give a lecture, hundreds of students would come out to hear a debate, even thousands of students would pack these auditoriums to hear a debate. What I realized was that debate was the forum for evangelism today on the university campus because students are very skeptical of a one-sided presentation where all you hear is a Christian speaker. But when there's a level playing field and ardent advocates of each position are on the stage and given equal time and equal opportunity, students will come out in thousands to hear that kind of exchange. Just what inevitably happened is that these non-Christian philosophers and scientists and biblical scholars would just show up unprepared. They thought they're going to just make hamburger out of this Bible-pounding fundamentalist, and so they trot out their notes from their philosophy 101 intro course. And then after I'd answered them, they pretty much had nothing more to say and so they just start repeating themselves and then resorting to personal attacks and emotional appeals to the students. These debates normally turned out to be really one-sided. Sometimes the atheist groups on campus would complain. They'd say these things were a setup by the Christians – “They deliberately picked a weak opponent so that Craig could win!” I don't think I ever won a debate in the eyes of these atheist students. I only didn't lose because the other guy was even worse. But, in fact, in many cases it was the atheist club on campus that picked the opponent, and we always picked the top guy on campus or they would bring in a guest speaker. So, as you say, I have debated most of the principal atheistic and agnostic figures in our contemporary culture.

DR. McCLYMOND: If I can follow up on that, is there a kind of a high watermark in terms of your own personal experience that you look back at a particular debate?

DR. CRAIG: There have been several that have been really memorable. One of the most memorable was the debate that I had at the Cambridge Union at the University of Cambridge in England. This was a British style debate, not an American style debate. The Cambridge Union is the oldest debating society in the world. It's held in a room that is like the halls of Parliament. They have benches along the sides going up the sides where the students sit. Then there's a gallery around the top where more students are sitting. You stand down in the well and speak then to the crowd. So I would stand down in the well and walk back and forth in the well appealing to the students, and walking right up to my opponents who are seated across from us and addressing them directly. It was really wonderful. The audience was a really hostile audience, really skeptical. I just felt like my task was to slowly turn this huge ocean liner to just at least a point of neutrality where they would be willing to be open-minded. In a British style debate, the audience is allowed to interrupt the speaker by raising a point of order. And you have to call upon them at least two times during your speech. So students would say “point of order!” and interrupt. Then I have to stop and respond to them spontaneously. So it was really . . . it was exciting; it was challenging. It went just really well. As the students exited the building, the way they vote is they have two doors at the hall – one says “Aye” and the other says “Nay.” And you vote by exiting through the door that you think won the debate. Afterwards we retired to the student lounge upstairs which is a sort of bar area while the votes were counted. Then after a while the secretary of the debating society comes in ringing a brass bell and announcing the debate. She says, “The house has carried the motion this evening!” We were the house, so we actually won that debate that evening. It was one for the ages; really a wonderful memory.

DR. McCLYMOND: What about the no-show – Dawkins? That’s gotten a lot of press.

DR. CRAIG: Oh. That was at Oxford University by contrast. The first was at Cambridge. They rented the Sheldonian Theater at Oxford, this great old hall, and they challenged Richard Dawkins to a debate with me. He resolutely refused. Over and over again he would give different excuses for why he didn't do it. The Christian group rented banners on the sides of the public buses running around through Oxford. What did the banner say? It's something about, “Will Dawkins show up? Come and find out! September 8th at the Sheldonian Theater.” Something like that. “Maybe there's no Dawkins” I think that’s what one said. These buses even apparently went by and stopped in front of Dawkins’ house on the route. Well, of course he didn't come. They had a place set for him with his chair, and they had his nameplate on the desk. At the last minute, the moderator says, “Is Richard Dawkins in the house? He can still come down and take his place. Is he here?” Everyone was silent. He wasn't there. So they removed his nameplate, and then I presented. What they had then was a panel of three Oxford University professors who were atheists, and these three guys responded to me instead of Dawkins. So it was three against one now! But, as is usual, they were terrible! Again the evening just went really well. It was a great time.

DR. McCLYMOND: I read an article later that someone was interviewing Dawkins about something unrelated and just mentioned your name and they said, “I saw the muscles in his face tense up.”

DR. CRAIG: Oh, I talked to somebody, too, who interviewed him for a documentary they were doing. And they said during this documentary as they filmed him they said, “What do you think of William Lane Craig’s response to you?” And they said, “He said turn off the mic.” They turned it off, and they said he just laid into me. He was so angry. They said obviously it touched a raw nerve. Now, I have to say though, I may actually be on the stage with Dawkins at Pepperdine University in January.

DR. McCLYMOND: Oh, really?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, the Pepperdine University Christian group has got an event budget of $450,000. They're bringing in me, Bishop Robert Baron, Jordan Peterson, Alex O'Connor (The Cosmic Skeptic), they said that Neil DeGrasse Tyson has agreed to come, and that Richard Dawkins is also open to coming. So this would be, again, an incredible event if it happens.

DR. McCLYMOND: All together at the same time?

DR. CRAIG: Yes!

DR. McCLYMOND: Is it like a panel?

DR. CRAIG: A big panel of all of us.

DR. McCLYMOND: You're gonna have a hundred million hits on that.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. So keep your eyes out. I'm not holding my breath, but it could happen.

DR. McCLYMOND: Just before we leave the debates, have you gone outside of Europe and North America at all, have there been debates in other parts of the world, and were there different kinds of experiences there? I’m just wondering.

DR. CRAIG: A little bit. I would only debate in an English-speaking . . . well, actually I take that back now. I've done it in German. I've had debates in German in Germany. So I have done that. But other than that, in Australia I had a series of debates with Lawrence Krauss that were very memorable. Four debates in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Melbourne. Then also in South Africa at the University of Pretoria and Johannesburg. I had debates with a Muslim theologian there on Islam and Christianity, and another one as well. So I have done a smattering outside. I had one in Hong Kong of all places with a Buddhist. It was this woman Buddhist priest, and she had a shaved head, completely bald, and wore these saffron robes and things. We had a debate on Buddhism and Christianity. It was fantastic. Just so interesting the variety of opportunities I've had to debate colorful people.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, that's a good stopping point for today. We'll stop right there. Part two coming up next time on Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. Thanks for being here.^[1]