Dr. Craig Responds to YouTube Mentions

KEVIN HARRIS: It’s always good to have you for the Reasonable Faith podcast with Dr. William Lane Craig. I’m Kevin Harris. There is a lot packed into today’s podcast, so let’s get right to it. As we do, a reminder that the matching grant campaign is going on right now until the end of the year. Whatever you give will be doubled up to $250,000 by a group of very generous donors who want to encourage you to give. Any gift will help Reasonable Faith reach the entire world with intelligent, cutting edge information and a message of hope. Please give whatever you can on our website, ReasonableFaith.org, and it will be doubled – it will be matched – by a group of generous donors. Thank you so much.

Bill, there are more mentions of you and the work of Reasonable Faith on YouTube than we can ever get to, but let’s look at a few examples today and get your response. I think we ought to do this from time to time – just pick out a few and see what people are saying on YouTube. But first – this just in! – a new argument against atheism. Bill, I think you have the argument there if you’ll do the honors.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. My colleague, J. P. Moreland, sent me this. Here's the article:

A shocking report has revealed that there are still people clinging to atheism in spite of the well-documented existence of breakfast burritos.

“How could a rational being possibly deny the existence of a loving God after taking a bite of an egg and chorizo burrito?” questioned famed Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga as he poured on the salsa. “The evidence is simply overwhelming.”

While theologians and philosophers have long sought to logically prove God’s existence, the advent of the breakfast burrito has now rendered all previous argumentation moot. “I wasted decades defending the 'Five Ways' of Thomas Aquinas to prove God’s existence, when all along the answer was wrapped up in a warm tortilla,” said Plantinga. “The ontological argument simply cannot hold a candle to holding the essence of goodness in your hands, all wrapped in foil.”^[1]

So that is the new argument now for theism.

KEVIN HARRIS: I think The Babylon Bee has been watching our podcast.

DR. CRAIG: That was from The Babylon Bee. You're right.

KEVIN HARRIS: That's pretty good actually. I suspect that this article will be discussed at this month's ETS/EPS conference. You might want to give us some details on that.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. It will be interesting to see if anyone brings it up. We're meeting this year in Denver. The first pair of conferences will be the joint conventions of the Evangelical Theological and Evangelical Philosophical Societies. I'll be presenting a paper at the EPS conference on “Is God's Moral Perfection Reducible to His Love?” I'll be examining what has been called the “identity thesis” defended by some Christian philosophers that God's moral perfection is identical to God's love. During the EPS, we'll also have our annual Reasonable Faith local chapter directors meeting. Local Reasonable Faith chapter directors from all around the country and even from around the world will be joining us at the EPS, and we'll be getting together for mutual encouragement and update. I'm really looking forward to that dinner that evening. Then at the ETS I'll be participating in a panel discussion on Andrew Loke's new book, The Origin of Humanity and Evolution. This is the third book of significance I think on the question of the historical Adam and Eve to appear in recent years – the first being Josh Swamidass’, and then my In Quest of the Historical Adam, and now Andrew Loke's book on evolution and human origin. So I'll be participating in a panel discussion talking about Andrew's proposal. His proposal involves a defense of the so-called recent genealogical Adam and Eve according to which there were anatomically modern people outside the Garden with whom Adam and Eve's descendants interbred when they were expelled from the Garden. This is a view that I am not at all sympathetic with and so will be offering some criticisms of. Then following the ETS/EPS conference, we'll be having our annual EPS Apologetics Conference in a local church in the Denver area. I will be presenting on arguments for the existence of God using some of our wonderful Zangmeister animated videos to communicate these arguments to a lay audience. Finally, at the next set of conferences, the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature, I'll be participating in a panel discussion Saturday night with Andrew Loke and Josh Swamidass on our three books which will be discussed one after another respectively. Then a question thrown open to the audience for their discussion. So it's going to be a very full week indeed. I'm looking forward to it. It's always a great time of networking, fellowship, and intellectual exchange.

KEVIN HARRIS: A busy November for you, Bill. Let's get to the first YouTube clip. This is atheist journalist Adam Davidson. He writes for New Yorker magazine. I believe he's had articles in The Atlantic and other prominent periodicals. He interviewed Sean McDowell. You come up in this particular clip. Let's go to this first clip and get your comments.

ADAM DAVIDSON: It seems to me, with you in particular and with some of the historical claims you make, when you're making them in a sort of academic context – were there a large number of people who were martyred because they witnessed a risen Jesus? That's a big question. Bart Ehrman and others will have very, I think, compelling arguments that, yes, the Bible refers to 500 people but that's not 500. We don't have 500 different people submitting with their names and everything. To me the actual historical case, if I've had no emotional experience or Holy Spirit experience, to me it feels tentative and it feels like when you talk carefully in an academic context one could imagine a non-hidden God where there would be way less room for uncertainty, room for disagreement even among believers and certainly between believers and unbelievers. So I'm curious about that because it seems important to you, at least in my eyes, that you have a historically grounded faith. You could imagine somebody says, “Look, I just know it.” William Lane Craig has said if it's one in a million I'm going for it. Essentially a Pascal's Wager. “I'm not going to test this the way I would test any other logical question because I know in my heart because I've had that experience.” But it seems to me you really want to be able to ground it in history. I'm just wondering why that's important to you, how strong the case is, and if you really are open to a historical case that showed the evidence is just not that robust.

SEAN McDOWELL: Part of Craig's approach is apologetics. He'll say here's how we know Christianity is true, and then how we show that it's true. He would appeal to a direct experience he had of the Risen Lord that he knows it directly, but then apologetics is showing it to others. That's kind of a distinction that he would make.

KEVIN HARRIS: Sean goes ahead and gives him a really good answer because he asked him a question. So I just encourage people to go to Sean's podcast and see his answer. But we wanted to deal with the fact that you were mentioned, that the 500 eyewitnesses came up. He kind of touched on hiddenness of God, and your epistemology.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Exactly. As Davidson was speaking, thoughts were just whirling through my mind about – there's so many points here, what would be the best way to respond? I thought Sean McDowell's response was brilliant because he cut right to the chase and made it so simple: this distinction between knowing and showing. That is to say, you can know that Christianity is true through the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit, or, as Sean puts it, a personal relationship with the Risen Lord himself. But then when you're talking to an unbeliever and the task is to show him that Christianity is true then you will appeal to those historical evidences that are so important. It rather tickled me that in the past I have been associated with evidentialism and making a case for the resurrection of Christ. But now it seems I'm starting to be associated more with this view of Reformed epistemology that belief in God and the great things of the Gospel can be properly basic. Both of them are true! We shouldn't play them off against each other. As Sean said, one is a matter of knowing, the other of showing. Now, when it comes to showing our faith to be true, I think the case for the resurrection of Jesus historically is not at all thin as Davidson seems to suggest. On the contrary, the central facts undergirding the inference to the resurrection of Jesus (namely, things like Jesus’ death by Roman crucifixion, his burial in a tomb by a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin, the discovery of his empty tomb by a group of his female followers, the post-mortem appearances of Jesus to various individuals and groups, and the very origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection despite every predisposition to the contrary) those facts represent the wide consensus of New Testament historians with regard to the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. If there's a shortcoming in the case for the resurrection, it doesn't lie with the historical facts. Those are widely agreed upon. Rather, the question will be: What best explains those facts? Here again, despite all the naturalistic hypotheses that have been offered down through history, there is no other single naturalistic hypothesis to the resurrection of Jesus that has garnered considerable scholarly support. The fact is that scholars who accept those facts but do not believe in the resurrection of Jesus typically respond with agnosticism. They say something transformative and incredible happened on that Easter morning, but we just don't know what it is. So they prefer to remain agnostic. That is not a shortcoming in the historical facts. That's a question philosophically for things like your openness to a supernatural worldview – the existence of God, the possibility of miracles. I think it's that naturalistic bias that prevents people from making that inference to the resurrection of Jesus. It's not that the evidence is thin.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next up, let's go back to the dialogue between Michael Shermer and Stephen Meyer that we featured in a podcast a few weeks ago. We have some more from this dialogue. They mention you again. We shortened these as much as we could, but we have several clips to look at here. Let's go to the next clip.

MR. SHERMER: So if the accumulated evidence you present in your book along these three major lines of inquiry were true or that it's substantial evidence, wouldn't most scientists who work in these areas read your book and go, “Yeah, I think that's probably correct.” I don't see that happening. I mean, your book just came out so maybe that's not fair for your book. But the arguments that you guys have been making since the 90s have been around. So I just take Brian Keating's podcast. He read your book. He knows all the cosmology that you present in there. He understands it. And so when I had him on my podcast, I asked him, “So, did you convert? Are you a theist now?” And, to be fair, Brian's not an atheist like in the Dawkins mode. He's not militant about it at all. It’s not something he’s trying to do. Here's what he said: “I read this as a cosmologist and I find oftentimes, like with William Lane Craig in particular, that it's sort of this – it borders on confirmation bias. It borders on manipulation of evidence to support a conclusion, and that conclusion always ignores the existence of alternative cosmologies of which there are many.”

DR. CRAIG: The accusation of confirmation bias is simply a highfalutin way of saying that you're prejudiced – you're biased – and therefore you're not being objective in assessing the evidence. And, as Steve Meyer will point out, that accusation cuts both ways. A person can be biased in favor of his atheistic perspective so that he's not open to the evidence. Now, if we ask the question: Why aren't these unbelieving scientists persuaded? I think there's two ways of answering that question. One would be the straightforward, face value explanation, and that would be: well, what are the reasons that they give? They tell us why they don't accept the argument. Those who don't embrace the kalam cosmological argument will either reject the premise that “whatever begins to exist has a cause” or that “the universe began to exist.” Now, since this is a probabilistic argument, there's always room to deny the premises if you want to. You can always appeal to the unknown and therefore escape the force of the argument. In the case of the second premise that the universe began to exist, what reason does Brian give for not accepting my argument for that premise? He says “Craig hasn't considered alternative cosmologies.” That's just patently false. Anybody who's read my work knows that right from the beginning there are lengthy discussions of alternative cosmogonic models, especially those attempting to restore a beginningless past. These are discussed in great detail in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology article that I co-authored with James Sinclair. So here Brian is simply inaccurate. We have examined these models in great detail, and there is no empirically tenable mathematically consistent model of a universe with an infinite past. And you needn't believe me. Ask Alexander Vilenkin, one of the most prominent of contemporary cosmologists. Even if I could be guilty of the oversight of not looking at other cosmologies, certainly Vilenkin is not guilty of that oversight. And he argues extensively that in fact it is probable that the universe did have an absolute beginning a finite time ago. So people like Vilenkin choose instead to deny the first premise – that whatever begins to exist has a cause. So you find cosmologists like Vilenken, Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss saying that the universe came into being uncaused out of nothing, and that's their alternative to believing the existence of God. Here I would just simply say I think it's far more rational to believe that there's an ultramundane, transcendent cause that brought the universe into being than to think that something can come out of nothing. So on the straightforward, simple level, if you ask, “Why aren't they convinced?”, you look at their objections why they say they're not convinced. And I don't think those objections are very good. Now, on a deeper level you might be asking a question about personal psychology. What makes them resistant to this? And here I would say just think of what's at stake for the atheist. The theist can easily give up the kalam cosmological argument without giving up his theism. He might have other grounds for believing in theism. In fact, I do. So I can give up the kalam cosmological argument at the drop of a hat if the evidence should not support it or the argument should prove to be unsound. But the atheist can't do that. If the argument is sound then his whole worldview has to change, and I think that some people are so deeply committed to naturalism (Sean Carroll, the cosmologist, comes to mind here) that they will believe almost anything, even that the universe sprang into being uncaused out of nothing, rather than embrace theism.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's check out the next clip. I think the Big Bang comes up in this clip. Let's go to this one.

MR. SHERMER: In this article for the cover issue of Skeptic, this article he did for us, “I want to flesh out the fact that it is by no means settled that there was a Big Bang. Now, listen, I said ‘a’ Big Bang because it seems to me that if there were multiple Big Bangs that doesn't give more support for a creator than it might give less support for a creator.”

DR. CRAIG: I think what he's talking about there would be probably inflationary models of the origin of the universe. Multiverse models where the mother universe, so to speak, is this expanding false vacuum, and at different points in this expanding false vacuum bubbles of true vacuum decay and form many universes – multiple Big Bangs as he says – and our universe just happens to be one of these little bubble universes. That gave some theorists hope of extending this process of inflation not only into the infinite future but also into the infinite past. And then what happened was that Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin formulated the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem which showed that these inflationary models cannot be extended to past infinity so that even if those models are correct the universe still began to exist. In this case I think it's Brian who hasn't given adequate scrutiny of alternative cosmogonic models.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip, and we start to get into Steve's response here. Let's go to this one.

DR. MEYER: I've got a lot to say about that. It's a great question. First of all, there may be confirmation bias in the scientific community that would prevent a majority consensus congealing around something as provocative as I'm proposing. We do know that there is a default rule of method known as methodological naturalism that says that if you're going to be a scientist you have to explain everything by reference to purely materialistic causes whether you're even including things like the origin of the universe, the origin of life, its fine-tuning, or the origin and nature of human consciousness. If that's taken as normative then no amount of evidence for creative intelligence could move a group of people who already hold that as normative.

KEVIN HARRIS: Anything to add to Steve's response?

DR. CRAIG: Well, just this. I want to say that the scientist in his off-hours, so to speak, the scientist as a human being can make the inference to a transcendent creator and designer of the universe even if, when he puts on his white lab coat, as a scientist he's committed to methodological naturalism. I fear that some of these fellows, as I said before, are committed not simply to methodological naturalism qua scientists but they are committed to metaphysical naturalism – that space-time and its material contents is all there is and that therefore there cannot be a God or a transcendent creator. As Steve quite rightly points out, a commitment to that kind of naturalism will preclude a person's being open to arguments like the kalam cosmological argument.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's more of Steve's response.

DR. MEYER: The second thing to say is I don't accept the premise of the question that these evidences are not moving professionals who are working in the fields in which I'm talking. I've got some fantastic book endorsements including Nobel Laureate in Physics and from leading scientists but also going back to the 1980s you had books like God and the Astronomers by Robert Jastrow. You had the very dramatic public conversion of Allan Sandage who cited evidences from cosmology as a factor in his intellectual conversion from materialism to theism. So I don't think we can make an argument one way or another from the sociology of science alone.

DR. CRAIG: Interesting that Steve mentioned Allan Sandage there, the grand old man of astronomy before his death. When we were living in Europe I had the opportunity to actually meet and chat with Sandage and his long time collaborator, the Swiss cosmologist Gustav Tammann. It was so exciting to hear Sandage's story of his conversion to Christianity and his belief in God. I discovered to my surprise that Gustav Tammann was also a believer. So two of these giants of astrophysical astronomy were both Christian believers. Also, I had the privilege of meeting Christopher Isham when we were in England. He is probably the greatest quantum cosmologist, and I say that advisedly because that means he's better than Stephen Hawking. Christopher Isham is likewise a theist. And then George Ellis at the University of South Africa. He's been described by Tony Rothman as the man who knows more about cosmology than any other living human being. Ellis is also a Christian believer. When I was in South Africa I spoke at a cosmology conference on the evidence for the beginning of the universe and Ellis was my commentator. And he not only reinforced everything that I said for the astronomers that were there, but then added to it by drawing in moral considerations. I thought this is really funny. It's the astrophysicist who's using a moral argument as well to supplement the scientific evidence. So I think Steve's point is good. What we need to keep in mind, however, as has been shown by a sociologist at Rice University (whose name unfortunately I forget) is that the religious beliefs of scientists today were pretty much formed and set in their early teens before they became scientists. So their unbelief insofar as that exists is not the result of their science; rather, it was the result of their upbringing and their rejection of, perhaps, Christianity as these early teenagers. Then that's gotten into cement and stuck with them ever since.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this next clip, Steve responds to Brian Keating's article.

DR. MEYER: As to Brian. He's an interesting guy. He describes himself as an agnostic who wrestles with God, but he clearly is a theist. He's a practicing Conservadox Jewish fellow. He's told me – I don't know what he's told you; but he's told me – that he finds the argument from design in biology quite persuasive.

MR. SHERMER: But not cosmology.

DR. MEYER: Interesting. Let's talk about the cosmology. What I argue is that the evidence has theistic implications. Obviously, there are new models being proposed all the time, and I’ve addressed the cyclical and oscillating models in cosmology head on. There's very powerful work critiquing those models going back to the work of Alan Guth who showed that with each successive cycle in an oscillating universe you have an accumulation of entropy. You have to because there's energy blowing the universe apart. So the next cycle has less energy available to do work. You've got an entropy buildup. And therefore if you've had an infinite number of cycles you’re eventually going to damp out like a bouncing ball. And if the universe was infinitely old, we would have reached that state of nullifying equilibrium a long time ago. Ergo, the universe couldn't be infinitely old. Ergo, even on an oscillating universe model you have a beginning. Now, the newer cyclical models that have been proposed by Steinhardt and Penrose posit some mechanism with each cycle of reducing entropy of going back to a highly ordered state. But the mechanisms have no specificity and they're contrary to everything we know about physics in our universe.

DR. CRAIG: Here Steve responds to some of the alternative models. These oscillating models that he refers to at first were popular among Soviet physicists back in the 1970s and the thermodynamic problem that he mentions with them was already pointed out by Richard Tolman in the 1930s. I discussed this in my 1979 book The Kalam Cosmological Argument. Since then the models have gotten much more sophisticated. In inflationary models it's thought that you can avoid this thermodynamic problem, but then along comes the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem that shows that those models cannot be extended to the infinite past. And there are other problems that Vilenkin has pointed out with respect to oscillating universes. I think Steve is quite right to point out that a model like Roger Penrose's depends upon an alien physics. It is not a physics that governs the actual universe that we know. It's an alien physics that he invents himself in order to have this sort of eternal cyclical cosmology. So I agree with Steve. I think that the evidence is very good for the absolute beginning of the universe at a point in the finite past.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the final clip. Steve Meyer mentions several issues.

DR. MEYER: There is a form of naturalism now which I call in the book exotic naturalism. It's a form of supernatural materialism where things are posited beyond this universe in order to explain the key features we have about the key indicators we have of a beginning to this universe as well as the fine-tuning of the universe as well as the deep mystery of the origin of life. I think there's a tremendous basis for skepticism about these exotic forms of naturalism whether we're talking about multiverses in a sense that are invoked to explain the fine-tuning or whether we're talking about an infinite cycle of previous universes to which we have no empirical access by definition or whether we're talking about Hawking's notion of imaginary time or even folks positing space alien designers to explain the evidence for design and the digital informational properties of living systems. I mean, no less a person than Francis Crick posited panspermia with a design coming from some immanent intelligence within the cosmos because he recognized the extreme difficulty explaining the origin of life within this cosmos. Koonin has posited the multiverse as an explanation for the origin of the first life. You've made your bread and butter as a skeptic and rightly so. Many of the things you're skeptical about, I'm skeptical about. But I'm suggesting that there is an appropriate skepticism about these extremely and increasingly convoluted materialistic models that are invoking things beyond this universe beyond any possible observational confirmation as explanations for the key features that I'm addressing in the book. So I'm not skeptical about modern cosmology. I think every indicator we have in cosmology points to a beginning. Of course, we can create imaginative scenarios of multiple cycles before this one or other verses out there – multiverses, the billions of them – but I think it's reasonable to be skeptical about them and to weigh whether they really provide a better explanation than the single and more simple postulate (in the Occam's Razor sense) of a transcendent intelligence.

KEVIN HARRIS: There are a lot of topics in that clip. By the way, I like your term “bloated cosmologies.” He says “exotic naturalism.” These exotic models and everything. Anything jump out at you as we wrap up today?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, they did. I think it's important for our listeners to understand that Steve Meyer is a proponent of intelligent design, and one of the earmarks of intelligent design theory is that the inference to a designer is a scientific inference. Therefore, if these exotic multiverse hypotheses don't meet the standards in empirical physical science, Steve is skeptical of them and tends to be dismissive. As a philosopher, I'm frankly much more open to these than Steve is because for me the inference to a transcendent creator and designer is a philosophical inference, not a scientific one. I am engaged in what Alexander Vilenkin frankly calls “metaphysical cosmology.” That's what Vilenkin considers his own work to be. It's metaphysical cosmology. I think what we can say is that these multiverse and other sorts of exotic naturalistic theories may not pass muster as scientific theories but then I don't think that the God hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis either. It's a metaphysical hypothesis. So we have to consider naturalistic metaphysical hypotheses in addition to considering a theistic metaphysical hypothesis. My argument is that when you do that, these exotic naturalistic metaphysical hypotheses inevitably fail as good explanations for the origin of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life, the applicability of mathematics. I think in every case you can show that these multiverse hypotheses are not tenable and they ultimately fail. So I'm more open than Steve is, I think, to these naturalistic metaphysical hypotheses because I don't think that the inference to the existence of God needs to be a scientific one but can be a philosophical or metaphysical one.^[2]