A Dinner Conversation with Dr. Craig Part Two

DR. McCLYMOND: If I could just shift a bit and ask about your experience having done this now for decades – what are the changes that have taken place in terms of the issues that non-Christians are raising and the ways that you are responding to the issues that are brought to you? Talk about the changing environment.

DR. CRAIG: Let me say something about how things have not changed because I think that's important. So often we hear it said these apologetic arguments don't work anymore because we live in a postmodern culture in which logic and argumentation are no longer valued. I think this is a myth that is being perpetrated in our churches by misguided youth pastors. The fact is that I find that secular university students are very keenly interested in a rational approach to these issues and that if you approach the questions rationally by offering arguments for the existence of God, evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, then people respond on that level. I have virtually never had a student stand up in a Q&A time and say, “Your argument is based upon white male logocentric standards of argument, and therefore it’s worthless.” It just never happens. So I don't buy into the idea that our culture is awash in relativism that makes these arguments ineffective. On the contrary, I think that these arguments are extremely effective, and we mustn't surrender them to just sharing our narrative and inviting people to participate in it. Having said that, I do think that one of the burning issues of our day today would be religious pluralism. Students are open to the existence of God and hearing arguments for God, but when you get to Jesus Christ, the idea that Jesus Christ alone is the way to God is deeply offensive to people and therefore needs to be tackled head on. This question – religious pluralism and how can you say there is one real, one true way to God – that needs to be addressed.

DR. McCLYMOND: Having lived and studied in England and Germany and then lived in a French-speaking country in Belgium, is the European context different? Are there different issues there?

DR. CRAIG: I think the way in which the European context is different is that it's so deeply post-Christian there that apathy just reigns – apathy and skepticism. Boy, some of the experiences I've had in Europe. For example, when I was at the University of Porto in Portugal, nominally a Catholic country but awash in secularism, the students were so skeptical when I was introduced and presented these arguments, they thought this cannot be. There cannot be a bona fide intellectual who is actually a Bible-believing Christian. So they concluded I was an impostor, and they actually phoned the University of Louvain in Belgium to find out if I was in fact a visiting scholar at the university. They thought that I was a fraud pretending to be something I'm not. So that was a manifestation of the depth of the skepticism. When I was in Sweden, I was speaking at one of the universities there, and a student in the audience said to me during the Q&A time, “Why are you here?” And I said, “Well, the university has invited me to speak.” And they said, “No, no. I mean personally – why are you here? Don't you understand how unusual this is? What motivates you to do this?” And I shared my testimony then about how I had come to Christ in high school and wanted to share this good news with university students. Well, at that point one of the faculty members from the department that had invited me stood up and said, “Well, now, that's not why we invited Dr. Craig. We invited Dr. Craig because he is a world class scholar, philosopher, and theologian, and therefore we needed to hear from him.” I thought to myself, “Thank you, Lord.” But that kind of illustrates the skepticism and the apathy. It's hard to even get them to come to an event. By contrast, here in the U.S. we still do have the trappings of a Christian culture here, particularly a theistic culture. So it's easier to get an audience here, and they're more open than they are in Europe. I find in Canada you have what I would call a mid-Atlantic culture – that is, sort of in between Europe and the United States. Canada is rapidly moving in the direction of Europe, and I fear that the U.S. is following in that train as well which just underlines the importance of what you folks are doing in these Reasonable Faith chapters and local ministries – to be salt and light in our culture and to present the Gospel in an intellectually credible way that thinking men and women can believe in.

DR. McCLYMOND: I'd like to go back to natural theology, and particularly because this is the focus of your writing currently. There have been many critics in the 20th century and into the present time of natural theology. It seems that these criticisms come up again and again that it's a mistake to try to argue from “pure reason” or natural reason alone for God's existence. Either the arguments don't work or they give us a great mysterious X that has none of the qualities of the God of the Bible. So what is it that these critics of natural theology get wrong? And then a couple of other related questions. What is it that they get wrong? Why is the criticism repeated? And to push a little bit, could they be partially right? Are there forms of natural theology that are mistaken in some sense that give the wrong kind of impression?

DR. CRAIG: Notice that the criticism that you've described doesn't say anything about the soundness of the argument. It doesn't expose a logical fallacy in the argument. It doesn't call into question the truth of any of the premises. So it does nothing whatsoever to show that these are not sound and cogent arguments for God, and they do lead to conclusions that have great specificity; for example, the kalam cosmological argument gives us a first, beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, personal creator of tremendous power and intelligence. So this is a very striking theistic concept. But what these criticisms say is that these arguments, even if sound, are somehow inappropriate or counterproductive – that they don't bring people to faith in Christ. My colleague, J. P. Moreland out of Talbot, has taken to responding to when people say to him, “You can't bring anybody to Christ through argument.” J. P. says, “Oh! Yeah you can. I've done it.” And I can say the same. We constantly get emails and testimonies coming into Reasonable Faith from people who have come to Christ through seeing a debate or video or have come back to Christ after walking away from Christian faith through Reasonable Faith materials. Just here at St. Louis University, Michael Cevering, the organizer of the conference on natural theology, shared with us – he's from Utah, came out of a Mormon church, a Mormon background – he got interested in the medieval Muslim philosophers like al Ghazali. He went out to Biola and met some of the students in the department that I teach at out there. When they heard about his interest in al Ghazali they said, “Oh, you must love William Lane Craig and the kalam cosmological argument!” He said, “William who? What argument?” And this just lit a fire under him, he said. To make a long story short, Michael became then a monotheist and a trinitarian as a result of this, and is now reaching out to other Mormons to try to reach them with the Gospel. So this is just one very recent example in the last couple days of meeting someone who has, as a result of these arguments, come to a more biblical faith.

DR. McCLYMOND: You're very well known as an apologist, and there are a few others – C. S. Lewis is widely known, of course. Who are some of the – in your view – key figures in Christian apologetics. Let's say today or maybe over the last century that are not as well known that in your view have done important work. Please mention any who may have influenced you in your own approach.

DR. CRAIG: I mentioned already Stewart Hackett and his book The Resurrection of Theism. I think Stu is one of those unappreciated treasures. He was ahead of his time. He published The Resurrection of Theism in 1957. Unfortunately he published it with Moody Press. Well, you can imagine the readers of Moody books wouldn't appreciate the kalam cosmological argument. Like David Hume's treatise, it fell stillborn from the presses and was forgotten. I've often reflected that if Stu Hackett's Resurrection of Theism had been published by Cornell University Press, the revolution in Christian philosophy that began in 1967 with Alvin Plantinga's God and Other Minds would have begun 10 years earlier with Stu Hackett's book. So he is one of those unappreciated heroes. Then I would say that the best Christian apologists – and I say this with respect – are not the popularizers that we all know. These popularizers are very important for bringing this material down to the layman (or the person in the street), but they are not the intellectual powerhouses behind the movement.

DR. McCLYMOND: You mean like Lee Strobel, for example, who interviewed you, right?

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, I was reluctant to mention names. Yes, of course. Lee and I are good friends.

DR. McCLYMOND: And interviewed other people?

DR. CRAIG: And he put on the debate at Willow Creek that I had with Frank Zindler that was attended by 8,000 people. So, yeah. Lee and I are good friends. But some people – some Christians – think that the great Christian thinkers of today are Ravi Zacharias, Lee Strobel, and others. Well, that's not right. They are the popular voice of apologetics, but the key figures are people like Alvin Plantinga, N. T. Wright in New Testament studies, William Alston, and folks of that nature. These are the real powerhouses that are in the Ivory Tower and don't often get out in the street. So the popularizers helped to bring their work down out of the Ivory Tower and make it accessible to the layperson.

DR. McCLYMOND: You are in a unique position as an independent scholar and writer who also teaches at institutions, but not as a regular professor. But I want to talk about – what's the institutional home for Christian apologetics? Is it in the church context? Is it in Christian colleges and universities? What about people who are in university institutions that are more secular? Can they be functioning as Christian apologists and be a philosopher, let's say, in a private university that doesn't have a strong Christian affiliation.

DR. CRAIG: I was just talking with some of the folks at the conference at St. Louis University about this. The remarkable freedom that philosophers enjoy today at secular universities to do their philosophizing from a Christian point of view – the old modernist view that you can only appeal to public reason and not your particular perspective is gone. So now if you want to philosophize as a Marxist or as a Thomist or as an evangelical Christian, you're perfectly fine to do that as long as you do your work with rigor and care and logical reasoning and careful definitions and so forth. So this really has (at least in philosophy) opened up the field to Christian philosophers at secular universities. You would know better than I that in many other disciplines at the secular university there is a kind of political correctness that stifles freedom of speech and inquiry. But at least in the realm of philosophy, I do think that there is opportunity for free expression and free opinion. Once upon a time the place for apologetics may have been in the church when pastors like Jonathan Edwards were the intellectual champions, but that day seems to have passed now and our churches have largely abandoned the task of educating our laity. Instead they tend to provide meaningful worship experiences or entertainment or activities. But Christian education is a pretty low rung on the ladder, I think. This really has left it, I think, to Christian seminaries, divinity schools, and colleges to carry the water for educating people in the area of the defense of the faith. There are good programs in apologetics at schools like Biola and Houston Christian and other places where people can take degrees or just take courses and benefit from them.

DR. McCLYMOND: The Christian philosophers you mentioned in the secular universities – are they well acquainted with those that are working in the seminary context? You founded an organization – the Evangelical Philosophical Society, right? So I assume that would be a meeting place where people in Christian affiliated institutions and ones that are not can exchange ideas.

DR. CRAIG: There are at least three professional philosophical Christian organizations. There's the Society of Christian Philosophers. There is the American Catholic Philosophical Society. And then there's the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Obviously, the third is the one that is most evangelical; it would be the one that I would identify most with. But I'm a member of the first one as well. So Christian philosophers are well represented in the guild. People like Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, Philip Quinn have been elected as the president of the American Philosophical Association, which is the national secular professional organization – kind of like the American Medical Association. The APA is the one for philosophers. So Christians are well respected in the discipline.

DR. McCLYMOND: I teach as a Protestant faculty member in a Catholic university. St. Louis, as you may be aware, is a very Catholic city from its early history. Do you have any thoughts on the relationship between evangelical apologists and Catholic apologists? People like Peter Kreeft who are widely read. Of course, he was evangelical and became Catholic.

DR. CRAIG: He was! That’s right! Often the best Catholic thinkers are these Protestant converts like Eleanor Stump at St. Louis, or Peter Kreeft. My limited experience with Catholic apologists is that they are hungry and thirsty for Reasonable Faith materials and are using this Protestant material whereas most professional Catholic apologists seem to be geared toward converting Protestants to Catholicism. Do you see what I mean? The target audience is very different. They want to convince Protestants to convert.

DR. McCLYMOND: Catholic Answers was a well-known . . .

DR. CRAIG: I have not had any firsthand acquaintance with them. But others like Bishop Robert Baron with Word on Fire has a more general outlook to winning the culture, winning the world, and so his team just eats up Reasonable Faith material and disseminates it. So we are equipping these non-Protestant groups with our materials that they can use in propagating the Gospel as well. I've had Coptic Christians – these are folks from the ancient church in Egypt – show up at our events, even Coptic priests with long black beards and flowing robes saying how much the Coptic Church loves Reasonable Faith and the material that we supply. I was at one event where an Orthodox priest came and . . . I don't know if you've ever seen this monastery in Greece on Mount Athos. I saw a 60 Minute segment on it once. This is clinging to the side of a cliff and hardly anybody can get in and out of there. It is a totally closed monastery. There's only one monk who has a computer and has access to the outside world. He gets the prayer requests for the monks to pray for. They told me, “Bill, the monks at Mount Athos are praying for you.” Wow. It is wonderful to think of the ecumenical reach that Reasonable Faith has because we're carrying forward C. S. Lewis' vision of “mere Christianity” – those common core beliefs that are common property to all of the great Christian confessions.

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