A Dinner Conversation with Dr. Craig Part Three

KEVIN HARRIS: Welcome back to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. We are concluding this series of podcasts today on a recent dinner conversation with Dr. Craig. Today the audience has some questions. You’ll hear some tough questions today and Dr. Craig’s answers. So stay close. And just a quick reminder that the matching grant campaign is in effect from now to the end of the year. Some gracious donors have gotten together and agreed to double whatever you give up to $250,000. So your giving and impact is doubled. Please bless Reasonable Faith with whatever you can and take advantage of the matching grant going on now. You can give and get more info right now at ReasonableFaith.org. Now let’s conclude “A Dinner Conversation with Dr. William Lane Craig.”

DR. McCLYMOND: For the college-educated layperson who is intrigued perhaps in hearing you speak tonight or seeing one of your videos online or reading one of your books, who wants to wade into the apologetics ocean but not end up in a region that is 5,000 fathoms deep, where would you recommend that they might start?

DR. CRAIG: I recommend my book On Guard. On Guard is meant to be a primer for people who are beginners in apologetics. It's kind of like a Swiss pocket knife. It's good for everything. It's got arguments for the existence of God. It's got responses to atheistic objections. It's got evidence for the claims of Jesus and his resurrection from the dead. And then a final chapter defending Christ as the only way of salvation. If you will master the contents of On Guard – and I want to underline the word “master.” It's not enough just to read a book. A lot of people say, “Oh, well, I read that.” I'm not talking about reading a book. I'm talking about memorizing the arguments and being able to share them with people from memory. If you digest and master the content of that book, you will be able to deal with 95% of the people that you encounter in your spiritual conversations. So I would start with On Guard. The next step beyond that would be then my book Reasonable Faith which is sort of On Guard on steroids and goes to a more intermediate level.

DR. McCLYMOND: Very good. Thank you. I think we're going to turn this over to questions.

QUESTIONER: On my podcast ... I've gone through a lot of events where you have Christians, and I think I polled about 100 Christians, and the question I would put to them was, “What is faith?” And the overwhelming answer that I got at these events (and different denominations are represented at a lot of different kinds of events), the overwhelming answer is, “It's a blind leap.” So when I ask, “Why did you leap this way towards the Christian faith?” – there are a lot of different faith options right? I often get a blank response. It's just an internal gut feeling. It's something I can't explain. Faith is a spiritual sixth sense. My read of 1 Corinthians 15 is that this is the thing of first importance: that Christ died, he was buried, he was risen again, seen by eyewitnesses and forseen by the prophets. I'm wondering: Have we stopped teaching the thing of first importance?

DR. CRAIG: I think you're absolutely right that this defective view of faith puts people in a very perilous position. There is actually a non-Christian philosopher who engages in what he calls Street Epistemology. He teaches these secular students to go out and ask this kind of question. Why did you leap one way rather than the other? And when the Christian students realize they don't have a good answer to that, they begin to deconstruct. Some of them lose their faith because of this defective concept of faith. So it's really important that we convey to people a New Testament concept of faith; that is, faith is placing your trust in what you have good reason to believe is true. Faith is placing your trust in what you have good reason to believe is true. That emphasizes the importance of giving these good reasons.

QUESTIONER: Hi, Dr. Craig. When I became a Christian 10, 15 years ago . . . you mentioned Dawkins and Dennett. For me, those are easy atheist responses even as somebody that did not have the education – I can respond to a lot of Dawkins’ just remedial arguments. Today, Graham Oppy is a name that is brought up so much. I think now as a pastor and an apologist (I'm 30), and I look back and I listen to some of Graham Oppy's arguments and I think, “Thank you, Jesus, that Graham Oppy was not alive or was not around when I became a Christian.” Because some of his arguments when I get them explained can be very convincing. Knowing Graham Oppy, and I know you've spoken to him, is there an Achilles heel? Is there a weakness that you found in discussing him and saying, “OK, well, here, Graham, is where your worldview falls apart, and this is why Christianity is more probable than what you are describing?”

DR. CRAIG: Graham Oppy is an Australian philosopher who I have said is scary smart. He is really brilliant, and yet atheistic and secular. What you have to do is simply read the scholarly literature in response to Oppy. It won't do to read popularizers to answer an Oppy. I've written several things. I think, just to point to a couple of weaknesses, he has a standard for success in argumentation that is so unrealistic that it would mean we have no successful arguments for virtually anything. It’s easy to say that there are no good arguments for God's existence if you set the bar so high that they have to compel belief in any rational person. His answer to the kalam cosmological argument I find to be absolutely bizarre myself. It is that the initial stages of the universe are metaphysically necessary and that they had to exist. That's contrary to everything we know about the contingency of the laws of nature and the models of the universe. Yet this, I think, is Oppy’s faith commitment – he believes that the metaphysically necessary being is the initial conditions of the universe. And so on and so forth. You've just got to see how professional Christian philosophers have responded to him, and then you'll be able to find, I think, good answers.

QUESTIONER: Hi, Dr. Craig. I know you recently revisited the literature on the fine-tuning argument in your systematic theology. My question concerns the initial low entropy condition of the universe. It seems like we use that as an example of fine-tuning. It's 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123. But then when the dialectic moves to the multiverse as a potential explanation for the fine-tuning of the constants and quantities, we as theists say, “Well, hey, we could actually have a whole lot more entropy in the universe for us to be around – embodied conscious agents. We could be in a pocket of order within a wider sea of equilibrium.” I've always wondered how to understand the use of the initial low entropy condition as an example of fine-tuning but then we say when we're evaluating the multiverse, actually we can have a lot more entropy and we could still be around.

DR. CRAIG: I'm not sure I see the inconsistency there. The idea of the initial low entropy position is that it's highly, highly improbable that the universe should have begun that way. That would be a condition that would characterize the very beginning. But then with respect to the multiverse, the argument there that Roger Penrose gives is the Boltzmann Brain problem. That's the argument that I think is relevant. If we were just a random member of a multiverse then there is no probability that we would be ordinary observers rather than Boltzmann Brains that have fluctuated into existence out of the vacuum. And that problem is really, really difficult for the multiverse proponents to answer. Even if you can't prove that it's probable that we are Boltzmann Brains, you are at least left with skepticism that there's no reason to think that our perceptions of the external world are veridical and that we are not just Boltzmann Brains. So that argument seems to be perfectly consistent, and I think goes through very well.

QUESTIONER: Is it merely a highly improbable event or truly fine-tuning such that if it were to take a slightly different value we embodied conscious agents wouldn't have existed anywhere throughout the universe?

DR. CRAIG: I didn't hear you quite as well without the microphone, but you said it's highly improbable. That is the thrust of the fine-tuning argument. The existence of embodied conscious life is much more probable given theism than given naturalism. So when you compare the two, the probability of theism wins out. I have to report that this argument from fine-tuning – of all the theistic arguments – I think this one is the most respected argument on the contemporary scene. Even non-Christian philosophers will say, “Yes, this is a good argument for God's existence.” Now they might think there's something else on the other side – maybe the problem of evil – that outbalances it. But in and of itself, it is widely recognized that the fine-tuning argument is a good argument for God's existence.

QUESTIONER: What about the origin of life as a design argument?

DR. CRAIG: I have recently worked on this. What I want to say there is that the origin of life on this planet remains a mystery. And this is not just the opinion of certain radical conservative people like James Tour at Rice University in Houston. No. I think that this represents the consensus view of the field – that we don't really know how life originated on this planet. In the first place, we don't know how the basic building blocks of life were synthesized. Those biomacromolecules that are essential to life – the nucleic acids, the carbohydrates, the proteins, and the lipids or fats – nobody knows where these came from. They're not found in meteorite or comet samples from outer space. We have no evidence that these are prebiotically possible through naturalistic means. Moreover, there have been no successful attempts to synthesize these macromolecules in the laboratory that don't involve investigator interference that would prevent these from being realistic prebiotic conditions on Earth. So you got those biomacromolecules that we don't know where they came from. And then, secondly, how do you assemble these into a living cell? A living cell is breathtakingly complex, and no one knows how to build a cell membrane or to have the inner structure of the cell to be alive. That's just a complete mystery. So I think there is kind of a consensus that the origin of life on this planet is a mystery and that we don't know where it came from. But I think by far most people would be very reluctant to therefore draw a god-of-the-gaps conclusion – that just because we don't understand the origin of life, therefore “God did it.” So even a James Tour, for example, who says that we're clueless about the origin of life is actually a methodological naturalist. He says, “I never talk about God in my scientific work. I never infer to an intelligent designer. All I say is that qua organic chemist, we are clueless as to how life originated on this planet.” Now, from a Christian point of view – no longer doing natural theology, but approaching this as a Christian theologian as I want to do – it seems to me I'm quite open to say, “What does the Bible teach about the origin of life?” And it's pretty clear that Genesis 1 teaches that God is the author of physical life on this planet. Genesis 1 is a description of how God transforms the desolate, uninhabitable waste that the Earth was – in Hebrew this is tohu wa-bohu, it is uninhabitable waste. And over the six days of creation God transforms this uninhabitable waste into a living biosphere fit for human habitation. As a Christian, I think that God is the one who's responsible for the origin of life on this planet. Now, how he did it, well, we don't know. Maybe he did synthesize biomacromolecules and put them together and somehow form a protocell or something. We don't know the means, but I think as Christians we stand very comfortably within mainstream prebiotic chemistry in saying that we believe that God is the ultimate author of life.

QUESTIONER: Hi, Dr. Craig. I'm a huge fan of Molinism. But I have had a question about it and I wonder if it should be an issue to be watchful for. I'm wondering when we say things like “God knows which persons he could create and what they would do in any given situation” and chooses which world to create which has those people, etc. I do wonder was there any work done into what exactly metaphysically makes up a person and are there any properties that would kind of inform what kind of will we have and what prevents God from creating persons with different properties that might inform what kind of will they have. What makes me choose Christ and not somebody else? You've talked about persons that in no possible world would choose Christ, but why exactly is that do you think?

DR. CRAIG: The doctrine of middle knowledge has revolutionized my theological thinking. I think it is the most fruitful theological concept I've ever encountered, and it informs all of my systematic philosophical theology that I'm doing. In fact, it occurred to me the other day that this is going to be the first Molinist systematic theology that's been written probably for centuries. With respect to your question, the Molinist doesn't have a peculiar concept of what a person is. There's nothing there that would be different from what we would normally mean by a person; namely, a person would be a rational, self-conscious being who is endowed with freedom of the will and with moral agency. Those are sufficient conditions for being a person. Now, that definition is broad enough to allow that there could be different kinds of persons. So there can be human persons on this planet but on some other planet maybe there are some Klingons who are persons. Josh and I have often talked about these other non-human persons. I think angels are non-human persons. They have those properties of intentionality, self-consciousness, rationality, and will just as we do, and so they're persons but they're not connected with a hominin body and so they're not human persons. Certainly God could have created persons which would have different natures and be different in the way I described.

QUESTIONER: Maybe more just straight to the point, do you think there's anything like substantive metaphysically about a person that . . . why do I have a will that chooses Christ and maybe not somebody else?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, that's just freedom of the will. That it is just that you are a free agent who has the freedom to either accept or reject God's grace. And that is distinctive of Molinism – a deep commitment to libertarian freedom and the fact that God gives sufficient grace for salvation to every person he creates. So our salvation literally lies in our own hands, and it's simply your free choice as to how you will respond to God's grace.

MODERATOR: We have another question over here. And, by the way, if you try to smuggle in two questions you will be ejected, [laughter] but it's your free choice!

QUESTIONER: Thank you, Dr. Craig, for being here. I'll go to the point. Recently you have been in your Reasonable Faith podcast talking about the Gospel of John and more particularly regarding the reliability of certain phrases Jesus may have said. You also, from your podcast, you mentioned a YouTuber which you were talking about his thoughts and such for which then later on it prompted an email conversation between you and Dr. Lydia McGrew. Bottom line, there seems to be in the Christian community different approaches regarding the passage-to-passage approach (I think it's what you kind of would argue for) and then McGrew’s argument for more of a holistic approach. The question is, I'm wondering, since you're an epistemologist just like them, do you think that their arguments are weighty and do they weigh into your thinking?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, I definitely think they're weighty, and I welcome arguments such as Lydia offers for the historical credibility of the Gospel of John. These approaches are not mutually exclusive by any means. To say that I can give good evidence that certain sayings of the historical Jesus are authentic doesn't do anything to say that therefore the whole Gospel is not historically credible. So these aren't mutually exclusive at all. My point was just simply that you don't have to prove the reliability of the whole Gospel in order to find what you call patches or authentic sayings and events in the life of Jesus. They can be proved even if the whole Gospel were not historically credible. So I think it's a both-and. Lydia recently sent me a copy of her new book on John: In The Eye of the Beholder. Since I'm so preoccupied with studying and writing for my systematic philosophical theology, I don't have time to read it during my normal study time. So I put it in the bathroom, and that's when I read it. I'll eventually get through it! [laughter]

MODERATOR: Dr. Craig, we're very close to 9pm. We do have a few other questions. Are you alright for . . .

DR. CRAIG: Oh, yes. I’m having a blast and would be happy to entertain any more.

QUESTIONER: Thank you. Hi, Dr. Craig. You are the expert on the kalam cosmological argument. I've had some students have a lot of resistance to it. Would you briefly explain it, and then perhaps give us an answer to what you think is the best objection to the argument?

DR. CRAIG: OK. Now, you say you find students are resistant to this? Really? Well, you tell me. Why are they resistant?

QUESTIONER: If I understand the argument, everything that begins to exist has a cause.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. That's the first premise.

QUESTIONER:  The universe began to exist.

DR. CRAIG: That's the second premise.

QUESTIONER: The universe must have a cause.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that's the conclusion.

QUESTIONER: Right. So they say as far as we know everything that begins to exist has a cause, and so they seek to draw doubt upon the premise that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Since the universe began to exist they say as far as we know, and before the Big Bang everything's up for grabs. How do you respond to that kind of skepticism?

DR. CRAIG: I think that is a problem that it's just – it's just ungrounded skepticism. Just saying “It could be wrong” or “We don't know,” that does nothing to undermine the evidence in support of the premises. You could say that about anything; that it could be otherwise. But I have given three arguments in support of the causal premise which I think are almost undeniable. The first one is that something cannot come out of nothing. So, honestly, I think anyone who denies the first premise is somehow intellectually compromised if he thinks that being can come from non-being. That’s just groundless. And as for the second one, the universe began to exist. How could anybody deny that the probable evidence is that the universe began to exist. Granted it's not certain. It could be overturned in the future. But how could anybody deny that in light of contemporary cosmology that's probable. Even Lawrence Krauss, the skeptical physicist, in our debate in Australia, he finally came to a point where he says, “Yes, I think it is probable that the universe began to exist.” Well, that's all that I'm claiming. And it’s not just the Big Bang that makes that probable. You've also got the thermodynamic properties of the universe that make it probable. So you've got dual scientific confirmation which makes it even more probable. And then, in addition to that, you've got the two philosophical arguments for the finitude of the past which have been now drawing increasing defenders like Alexander Pruss and Robert Koons. For me, it's those philosophical arguments that are the primary basis for affirming the universe began to exist, and the scientific confirmation is just like icing on the cake. So I think that these students are probably ill informed. I'll bet they've never really gotten down and dirty with the arguments and the evidence, but they're just sort of being the skeptic and just saying, “Well, you know, maybe it didn't happen.” That's not to provide a credible alternative explanation or to undermine the evidence that we do have. So that's how I guess I would respond. I’ll bet that wouldn't be adequate to them. I'm sure that wouldn't convince them, but I would take that to be a token of their irrationality rather than a deficiency in the argument.

QUESTIONER: Hi, Dr. Craig. I wanted to change gears and ask a different kind of question. A person through whom I found out about you is Dallas Willard. He admired you greatly and recommends your work and so forth. It made me wonder, what is the role of your own spiritual formation and your life of discipleship in doing this kind of work? Because I think there can be a stereotype of apologists – this sort of ruthless logic chopper or something like that. I'm just curious how that weaves into doing this as a ministry, even though you're doing intellectual work as a scholar.

DR. CRAIG: I think it's so important for those of us who are in this kind of ministry to mind our spiritual formation and our development. I try to do the spiritual practices that are conducive to a walk with the Lord like daily prayer, daily Bible devotions, daily devotions and prayer with my wife, corporate worship and singing, fellowship with other Christians, involvement in evangelism. I think that these are the kinds of things that can help you to maintain a vital Christian life. And then I also really take to heart what Paul says: Don't think too highly of yourself than what you ought to think, but think with sober judgment. The fact is I realize all too acutely my deficiencies. I feel so ignorant sometimes. In writing this systematic theology, I am so acutely aware of how inadequate I am to the task and how inadequate the job is that I'm doing. But I'm doing the best I can. I will say that I'm giving it my all, and I can't do any more than that. But I do think not to be full of yourself and to try to think properly about yourself is really, really important to maintaining  that correct spiritual walk.

QUESTIONER: Hey, Bill. First of all, I just want to thank you for your real humble giving service to the church for all these years. I've been really privileged to see that, and I really look up to you on that. I think a lot of us would really be glad if our lives were that faithful. So thank you. I do have this problem that I'm working through, and I wanted to get your take on it. I hear it from many of my non-Christian colleagues, too, but there is something that isn't actually very reasonable about it – there's evidence for it, but it still doesn't make sense. I agree with you that the evidence is that God created all things. I also agree with you that it really seems that Jesus rose from the dead, and there's evidence for that. But isn't it unreasonable to think that the creator of all things chose to allow his Son to die on a cross for us? We are just us. What is man that he's mindful? We're like the most insignificant of dust when you think about a being capable of creating everything. It seems that . . . I mean, I affirm these things to be true. But it seems to come to truly affirm them to be true, I have to recognize that these things are not what I would expect. They're even not reasonable. I mean, I can accept that it's true, but I don't have a good account for it. Do you have a good account for it?

DR. CRAIG: I think so, yes! I think, Josh, you're thinking like a naturalist there in saying this. The value of an object is not determined by the size of the object. We are indeed infinitesimal in comparison with the universe as a whole. But as the great Catholic philosopher Frederick Copleston said, one single human being is worth more than the entire material universe put together because we're made in the image of God and therefore we have intrinsic moral value. Therefore even though we're infinitesimal, diminished in size, we are enormously valuable and therefore worth redeeming. Seen in that light, why shouldn't the Creator of the universe assume a human nature, become like one of us so as to provide atonement for our sins, cleanse us of unrighteousness that separate us from him, and then draw us into this incommensurable good of fellowship with himself. To me, that's eminently reasonable, although it does involve this tremendous act of condescension on God's part, but that's exactly what the Christian affirms. God does condescend to take on a feeble, frail, mortal, human nature, but it is a mortal nature that is of inestimable value because of our being created in his image.

QUESTIONER: It says “image and likeness.” What's the difference there between image and likeness?

DR. CRAIG: Apparently from what Hebrew scholars tell us, there's no difference. The image and likeness of God are basically synonyms. The dirty little secret is that Genesis 1 doesn't tell us what it means. It does not define what the image and likeness of God is. But it does tell us that it is what differentiates humanity from the rest of the animal kingdom. It's why we are not mere animals. So I think there needs to be something constitutive about man that makes him resemble God and not resemble the rest of the animal kingdom. Then obviously it can't be our body because we have hominin bodies like the great apes, so it's got to be something else. So it seems to me the most plausible explanation is that: we are persons as God is personal. Therefore, being persons, we are in God's image and likeness. That would be the way I understand it. I wouldn't say that's what the Bible teaches because the Bible doesn't define what it means. But reflecting on it, that would seem to me to be the best theological account I could give of the image and likeness of God – that we are persons.

QUESTIONER: We talked a little bit about fine-tuning and the origin of life, the complications of the cell, and stuff. I've had some of these discussions online with skeptics. We keep breaking it down and they bring up the god-of-the-gaps theory. I say but when you really look at how complicated this is I know faith is what you believe and what you can't confirm in a laboratory. I said but then you guys are looking for space aliens and the multiverse and stuff you can't confirm. I say but I think this is evidence. This is not proof, the fine-tuning is evidence for God, not proof. I think this is a crumb trail to God. And I get kind of upset when they say they think science can find space aliens. Am I getting into a dangerous territory like trying to create a Tower of Babel, or is it reasonable for science to say, “Hey, we can look for God. We don't have to automatically rule a God or an intelligent Creator out” as they seem to suggest is necessary. . . . Christians or theology lives on vagueness and when you can't find an answer in a vagueness and that's where we live . . .

DR. CRAIG: I don't carry any brief for the claim that science can prove God. What I say is this. Science can establish a premise in a philosophical argument leading to a conclusion that has theological significance. Science can help to establish a premise in a philosophical argument leading to a conclusion having theological significance. So in the kalam cosmological argument, the scientific evidence supports the second premise that the universe began to exist. That's not a religious statement. That is a religiously neutral statement that can be found in almost any textbook on astronomy and astrophysics. In the fine-tuning argument, the claim that the fine-tuning of the universe is not due to physical necessity or chance is supported by the best scientific evidence. And, again, that's not a religious claim. Dawkins also agrees that the fine-tuning is not best explained by physical necessity. On the other hand, other scientists will say it's not best explained by chance. That's not a god-of-the-gaps reasoning because you're using the scientific evidence simply to establish a religiously neutral premise in an argument that leads to a conclusion that does have theological significance. That's not god-of-the-gaps reasoning at all.

QUESTIONER: I wanted to return to the topic of free will. You briefly made mention of Alvin Plantinga. I'm only vaguely familiar with his Free Will Defense, but if I remember correctly in that defense he essentially posits that God, though omnipotent, could not have created free creatures that freely never choose evil. I wanted to know your thoughts on that defense. Do you think that it's a sufficient response to the problem of evil? Do you think that God could have created creatures or human beings that freely always choose the good? Because after all that seems to, in the future at least, it seems that that would be the case in heaven at least where you have human beings that always choose the good.

DR. CRAIG: OK. There are a couple of questions going on here. It does seem to me that it's at least logically possible that everyone in any moral situation he's in would always choose the right thing. Otherwise you're sort of landed in determinism – that we're determined to do evil – and that wouldn't be right. So it does seem like there could be a logically possible world in which everybody always freely chose to do the right thing, and so there would be no moral evil in such a world. But it may be that such a world is not feasible for God to actualize. And here we make the appeal to divine middle knowledge to distinguish between worlds which are logically possible to actualize and worlds which are feasible to actualize. In order to be feasible, the right . . . this is going to get technical but . . . in order to be feasible the right counterfactuals of creaturely freedom need to be true in order for God to actualize that world. It might be that if God were to try to actualize one of these logically possible sinless worlds that the creatures in them wouldn't cooperate and would do the wrong thing. Therefore such a world may not be feasible for God because the wrong set of counterfactuals of creaturely freedom are true and so it's not feasible for him to do. Now, you say, but what about heaven? I think that it may well be the case that in heaven the freedom to sin will be removed. I think that when we see the beatific vision of Christ we will be so overwhelmed by his beauty and holiness that the freedom to do evil will be effectively removed. It would be like iron filings in the presence of a gigantic electromagnet. They would just stick to it, and they couldn't possibly fall away because it would be so attractive. I think similarly when we no longer see through a glass darkly but see God clearly in all his glory and beauty that the ability to sin will be removed. I see this life as a veil of decision-making. God has created us at a sort of epistemic arm’s distance as it were which allows us the freedom to resist his grace and refuse him if we so choose. But when we get to heaven, that epistemic distance will be removed, and we shall see him clearly. Then the freedom to sin will be gone, and therefore there would be no danger that sin might occur in heaven.

QUESTIONER: Hi, Dr. Craig. I live in a sea of people that feel that they're very rational, and I've tried to use over the years these rational arguments that you spoke about in your initial comments. You said the rational argument is the one that would work best. Right? To repeat the logical argument for why God exists. Yet, there's no openness to it because it becomes a rhetorical positional debate all the time. What I found was I've been really compelled by Keller's arguments that says that we should not challenge it but rather step alongside and gently show them why their belief is unreasonable. What do you think?

DR. CRAIG: This is a question of evangelistic strategy. It's not a question of the soundness of the arguments or the defense of them. I don't claim to be a specialist in evangelistic strategy – how's the best way to present these. I thought initially (I must say) that I would try to conceal the logical structure of the argument to make it more rhetorically pleasing, more of a narrative. But what I found over the years was that students loved hearing the premises articulated – one, two, three – and seeing how clearly the conclusion follows. Especially engineers. Engineers just love this stuff. Over and over again we find that engineers in whatever field of engineering just resonate with this material. So I no longer try to hide the logic and put it in like a pleasing narrative. I just make it explicit. But you can still try to be winsome and say, “Don't you think this makes good sense?” Try to be a winsome persuader, not to try to convince them they're irrational or anything like that. But just say, “Gosh, I really find these convincing. Don't you?” And see what they say.

QUESTIONER: That's actually a great segue to what I was kind of getting at here as the whole culture wars thing and everything. I actually disagree with you on a couple things that you just said a few minutes ago, but I just would love to talk for hours and hours and hours with no end to it. But I get frustrated with my Christian brothers and sisters just as much as I'm getting frustrated with my atheistic friends. When you're talking about life and people are bringing up Darwinism. I mean, Darwinism's old. I mean, we got neo-Darwinism. We got new things. We got all kinds of great stuff going on even though we still don't know anything about the origins of what happened. So, anyway, you seem like you're really enjoying talking to us. You have a winsome attitude. I mean, you're just super-enthusiastic. And I find myself getting to the point where, “What the hell is wrong with you?” The question is: Do you get frustrated? And when you do that, your style can overcome that.

DR. McCLYMOND: That was a backhanded compliment.

DR. CRAIG: So he wants to know what gets me frustrated?

DR. McCLYMOND: Why aren't you a cultural warrior? Why are you so winsome?

DR. CRAIG: Remember I told you when I became a Christian in high school I felt called to share the message of the Gospel to win people to Christ. And that remains my overall calling. I'm an evangelist. I want to win people to Christ. But I do it through philosophical argumentation, and so I better be winsome or I won't win the audience. I'll repel them, and I don't want to do that. I often feel like I fall so far short on that. I feel like, “Oh, I was too defensive in the way I answered that question” or “I let it get under my skin.” I'll talk to Jan about it afterwards, and she will encourage me and say “No, no, no. It's fine.” As those of you who have seen our Red Goose and Brown Bear books on What is God Like, I'm the Brown Bear in those story books. I'm the Papa Bear. So she says to me whenever I go out like this event tonight, she says, “Just be your fuzzy bear self.” [laughter], and that's what I try to keep in mind – to be my fuzzy bear self so that I get along great.

I want to thank all of you for coming tonight. This has really been an enjoyable evening.^[1]