Culture and Apologetics

KEVIN HARRIS: Thanks for joining us for Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. We have some good podcast topics coming up that I know you’ll want to be here for. Dr. Craig is concerned about the “woke” agenda that Disney has so blatantly announced to the world. And he has some thoughts on that in an upcoming podcast. So don’t miss it. Dr. Craig has also been a guest on lots of broadcasts, podcasts, and live events lately. Today we have some excerpts from some of those interviews. Even though Dr. Craig is a leader in philosophy and theology, it is not surprising how often he is asked to comment on current events and culture. You’ll hear some of that today. As we get rolling, please keep in mind that you can bless the ministry of Reasonable Faith with your prayers and financial support to keep us on the front lines of intelligently presenting and defending the claims of Christ to the whole world. You can always give online at ReasonableFaith.org. On a recent podcast Dr. Craig was asked how he as a philosopher became involved in apologetics.

DR. CRAIG: What I think really turned me on to apologetics was a class I took at Wheaton called “Conflicts in Biblical Christianity.” As part of that course I read a book by Edward John Carnell called Introduction to Christian Apologetics. I had never read a book like this before. Carnell was asking questions that troubled me like “What is truth?,” “How do you test for truth?,” and “How do you know that the Christian worldview is true?” I was just enamored with the questions he asked and the answers he gave. At Wheaton, Francis Schaeffer in the late 60s and early 70s was something of the darling of the Christian subculture. He spoke on campus in chapel. I heard him myself in person. But, you see, the problem is that Schaeffer only had a negative apologetic for Christianity. His apologetic consisted entirely of showing that if there is no God then it leads to despair and absurdity, and culture and society go down the drain into an unlivable worldview. So it was very, very effective in showing the negative consequences if Christianity is not true, but he never answered the question, “Well, how do we know that it really is true?” Maybe things really are this awful! Bertrand Russell once said that only when you understand that the world really is awful are you ready to come to terms with life, and Schaeffer never gave an answer to that problem. So it was only later then, beginning with Carnell and then later on, that I began to discover positive reasons for Christian belief.

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Craig was also asked to comment on the current cultural climate, particularly in the West.

DR. CRAIG: It's so interesting. What we are going through now in the West and particularly in the United States is so reminiscent of the late 1960s during the Vietnam war – the social unrest, the uprisings, the rioting, the looting, the rejection of traditional middle class values, and so forth. I have never seen a time that is so similar to the 1960s during my student days at college as our contemporary situation. It was very similar at that time – great deep divisions within American culture and hatred and vilification of the establishment. Very similar to today. It's really interesting. The United States seemed to get past the Vietnam war after Nixon developed the all-volunteer army and the draft ended which was bitterly resentful when it was in place. And then the Vietnam conflict ended, and slowly I think there was a rebirth of patriotism and love of country in the United States. The celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the founding of the United States, produced a great wave of patriotism. So there was great healing, I think, after Vietnam. That is one of the great differences today – it is that our military today on all sides is revered, spoken of respectively, admired. Even the liberal progressives don't dare to vilify the military in the way that they did in the late 1960s where our men and women in the armed services were hated and regarded as the enemy. They returned from Vietnam uncelebrated, in shame, hated. It's very, very different today. So there was great healing that took place. But obviously there is at the same time this deep undercurrent in the United States culture, probably mainly ensconced at the university, but also deeply infecting corporate culture and in the entertainment industry that has now just come bursting forth to the surface again using racism as the excuse for the protest and the rejection of establishment values, claiming that America is fundamentally a racist nation and that it's indelibly blotted with systemic racism. I think that's a change from the way it was before. I also see a change in that back in the 60s the radicalism was mainly at the universities, and that continues today. But today the corporate culture, the sports culture, and entertainment have been infected with this kind of progressivism and rejection of traditional values. I'm just really amazed at the degree to which enterprises have adopted and endorsed the sort of radical progressive movement that sees the United States as fundamentally racist. I think that what underlies this is a change in the definition of racism. Racism used to be understood as the view that discriminated against people based on their skin color. If you discriminated against people based on their skin color then that was racist. But that's not racism anymore. Today racism is an epithet that you simply use to bludgeon your political opponents. It basically means that your opponent is an SOB, far to the right of me and my enlightened friends (as Alvin Platiniga has said with respect to fundamentalism). So the meaning of racism has now become almost content-less except as an epithet that you use to brand those to whom you are opposed politically. Back when I was a student, as I said, about all we had at that time was Francis Schaeffer and that was just a negative apologetic. If you read apologetics maybe you could get Cornelius van Til or Gordon Clark who basically said you presuppose Christianity to be true and then you can prove it's true which is reasoning in a circle.That was about all there was. Now the renaissance in Christian philosophy has taken place since the late 1960s in Anglo-American philosophy. So now we are talking about Christian evidences, the historical Jesus, the evidence for the resurrection, arguments of natural theology like the design argument, the cosmological argument has been raised from the dead, the moral argument. Traditional arguments of natural theology have come back. When I was at Wheaton – and I'm not kidding – when I was at Wheaton my theology professors taught me that there are no good arguments for the existence of God. I thought surely there are! It seems to me there are good reasons to believe in God, but who was I to question these brilliant professors who surely knew more than I did? So when they said there are no good arguments for the existence of God, I just sort of accepted it. And that has completely changed. So in that sense we're in a much better place. And what baffles me, I would love some sociologists to address, is why hasn't this revolution in Christian philosophy and apologetics impacted our culture more than it has? Why is it that these other areas that I talked about have gone so far left, so anti-Christian in many ways? I think there is a religious component in this. It's not just political. There's a deep secularism, an anti-Christian element, to it. Why has that gone on and been so little affected by what's transpired in Christian philosophy and apologetics? It may be simply that there is a natural lag in the culture from when things happen in the academy and then it filters down to the man in the street. But it seems to be more than that, as well, and I'm puzzled by it. I believe that the best defense of the Christian faith is to show, as Carnell said, its logical consistency and that it fits all of the facts of experience whether these be scientific, historical, personal, or whatever. Now, in terms of where the culture is moving, I do think that there's a tremendous challenge from religious pluralism that we are having to deal with, namely the idea that all religions are equally valid approaches to God. And the idea that Jesus Christ could be the only avenue of approach to God is, for people today, deeply offensive. So I do think we need to be prepared to defend the biblical view that Christ and Christ alone is the means of salvation. I also think we're confronted with a real problem with respect to sexual ethics. It has become normative today that homosexual activity is perfectly acceptable, perfectly moral, and people who would say that a homosexual lifestyle is immoral are again regarded themselves as very immoral people, intolerant, unloving, bigoted. And this is a real problem because I don't think we can compromise on biblical sexual ethics. That's an area that I don't work in, but I do think we need people who are working in sexual ethics to be able to defend the biblical sexual ethic against the currents of our culture today. I think the example of Canada gives real cause for worry in this regard. In Canada, the speech police which have been so vigorously protested by people like Jordan Peterson are dictatorial and really do threaten Christian institutions and Christian freedom of speech to express your dissenting opinion even if you do so in a charitable way. I have actually been banned from speaking at a couple of Canadian university campuses because of my views on heterosexual marriage, even though I wasn't talking about that. I was going to give a lecture on the existence of God, and yet someone was aware that I had defended heterosexual marriage as God's plan for humanity and for that reason I was deemed unworthy to be able to speak at that university. So this is a kind of thing that could happen. And, as I said before, epithets like racism have really lost their content and anybody can be called a racist because of his conservative views that he might hold about sexual ethics or something of that sort, or he'll be called a homophobe. These kinds of labels serve useful political purposes even if they're not accurate. So, yeah, I do think that this is a danger that we need to be alert to, and we need to be absolutely adamant in defending freedom of speech, and that means defending the freedom of speech for those who disagree with us as well. We will be better served if we defend the freedom of speech of those on the far left – the radicals and the progressives – because that will then allow for our freedom to express dissenting opinions as well.^[1]