Dr. Craig's Amazing Admission Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, congratulations, Bill! You’ve blown up the Internet, and you’ve gotten everyone stirred up. This issue comes up every few years. I’ve noticed from Facebook comments and other social media that some of our newer listeners to Reasonable Faith aren’t familiar with your views on things like Reformed epistemology, the witness of the Holy Spirit, evidentialism. There is a lot to it. In a recent podcast, you answered a question from Kyle who is having doubts about his faith as a Christian.^[1] He said, in essence, that the commitment to Christianity was so all-encompassing that he should perhaps demand a visit from an angel or Mary or Jesus himself in order to make such a commitment. Your response to him has produced multiple response videos, especially from atheists. What we should probably do is just go back in case our listeners have not heard that question. Let me give the question again, and then you also read your answer. We’ve got the transcript of it. Kyle says,

Hello, Dr. Craig, I've enjoyed your ministry and it has helped strengthen my faith over the years but I have recently been having troubling thoughts in my mind. My trouble is that one of the things about Christianity is that it requires a lot of work to follow. In order to follow Christ you have to orient your entire life around him. Christianity is not just a set of propositions that one holds, but it's a faith-practice, a way of life. With that in mind, wouldn't the smart thing to do is require very high epistemic standards before one decides they will dedicate their life to Christ? If you're going to live for Christ then wouldn't it be smart to actually meet Jesus Christ in person or even talk to his mother Mary or an angel? I know you often mention the witness of the Holy Spirit as a way that one can have direct access to God but I have done meditative prayer and deep meditation for years upon years and nothing has come up in terms of God speaking to me directly where I know it wasn't just my own imagination. Many of my fellow Christians have had similar concerns on this also. This is perhaps my biggest struggle and I cannot seem to get it out of my head as it is causing me to abandon the Christian life because I cannot have high epistemic confidence that Christianity is true. Kyle, United States.

That was the question. We put you on the hot seat and asked you to answer that. Why don’t you read – we have the transcript here – what you said at the time. Your answer.

DR. CRAIG: Alright. I think this will be helpful because having heard these clips that you are going to play, confusion will inevitably result if we don’t have this original answer on the table before us. What I said was this:

When I first heard the message of the Gospel as a non-Christian high school student, that my sins could be forgiven by God, that God loved me, he loved Bill Craig, and that I could come to know him and experience eternal life with God, I thought to myself (and I'm not kidding) I thought if there is just one chance in a million that this is true it's worth believing. So my attitude toward this is just the opposite of Kyle's. Far from raising the bar for the epistemic standard that Christianity must meet to be believed, I lower it. I think that this is a message which is so wonderful, so fantastic, that if there's any evidence that it's true then it's worth believing in, especially when you compare it to the alternatives like naturalism or atheism or other forms of life. If Kyle really knows what it's like to experience the love of God and to have this hope in eternal life and forgiveness of sins then it seems to me that he will gravitate toward that alternative. It will be so attractive that it would take really, really decisive disproofs to make him give up his Christian faith and abandon it. Now, when I talk about the witness of the Holy Spirit I don't mean God speaking to me directly in the way Kyle describes. God doesn't speak to me directly either in that sort of way as an inner voice or any other way. But I just mean a kind of fundamental assurance that one's faith is true. People often talk about this as the assurance of salvation, and I think that is the privilege of every born-again Christian. I hope that Kyle is more than just a nominal Christian, that he's really come to experience the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit and that he's indwelt and filled with the Holy Spirit because I think then that removes the huge epistemic bar that he thinks you need to get over in order to become a Christian.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. That was your answer verbatim. We have the transcript there, and we just let you read it as you did. Let’s go to this first clip and see where the controversy and the problem is and why there has been so much response. This is kind of typical. This guy is named Reginald. We’ve got a few highlights from this one response. Let’s go to that one now.

AUDIO CLIP: Hi, my name is Reginald, and I'm here to help you Christians overcome your doubts. William Lane Craig has provided a stunning response, and I just wanted all of you to have the chance to hear it. OK. So listen up, doubting Christians. The first thing you need to do is lower your standards; bring them way down to the ground. If you want something to be true really, really badly, then there's nothing wrong with that, and don't let anyone else tell you otherwise. Second, doubting Christians, you might just need to question your salvation just a little bit. “The assurance of salvation, and I think that is the privilege of every born-again Christian. So I hope that Kyle is more than just a nominal Christian.” In all seriousness, Craig's advice to doubting Christians like this can be summarized fairly quickly: lower your standards of evidence, and make sure that you're really saved. Maybe it is as simple as he lowers his standards of evidence for things he wants to be true. But let's be as charitable as possible and assume he's just recommending doubting Christians to take Pascal's Wager. OK, but there are lots of problems with that, and even if there weren't, it's not clear that people shouldn't just take the wager for whatever religion seems most plausible to them. A lot of Christians wouldn't be comfortable with that. On the second point, just think of how pastorally bad this kind of gaslighting is. You don't have the assurance of salvation which, oh by the way, “The assurance of salvation, and I think that is the privilege of every born-again Christian.” Also, “It's important to realize the doubt is never simply an intellectual problem. Doubt is also, I think, a spiritual problem.” So to recap, doubting Christians. Lower your standard of evidence. Also, you have a spiritual problem and might not even be saved to begin with. Or consider the possibility that Christianity doesn't really make sense.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK, Bill. A lot to talk about there. Do you want to unpack some of what [he said]?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Exactly. There's so much there. We have here, I think, swirling currents that can easily muddy the waters. So let me try to clarify things by identifying these different currents. One current of discussion here is the relationship between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification. The other current is the issue of the relationship between the witness of the Holy Spirit and arguments and evidence in support of the Christian faith. Now, let me focus on that first issue – the relationship between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification. Many epistemologists have noted that there are two ways in which a person can be justified in holding a belief. One would be to be epistemically justified. Epistemic justification focuses on providing truth-directed reasons in support of your belief. That is to say, it tries to marshal reasons to show that the belief is true. By contrast, pragmatic justification focuses on non-truth directed reasons. Typically, pragmatic justification will be a kind of cost-benefit analysis of believing, and will play off the costs and benefits to determine whether a person should hold that belief. Now, one of the classic examples in the literature on this is a case in which you are a patient who has just been diagnosed with stage four cancer and it looks very grim. You're probably not going to make it. So if you simply go on the basis of the evidence, you would not be epistemically justified in believing that the treatment is going to be successful and that you're going to survive. Epistemically, you should believe that you're going to die. The problem is that studies have shown that cancer patients who believe that they're going to get better, that they're going to make it, actually have a much higher rate of survival because having this sort of optimistic, positive attitude is conducive to good health, so that if you believe that you will make it you actually increase the chances of survival. So in a case like this, you would not be epistemically justified in believing that you're going to make it, but you would have good pragmatic justification for believing that you're going to make it. I think, as you can already see from the illustration, we have here a phenomenon that epistemologists refer to as the pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic; that is to say, these pragmatic arguments can encroach on the amount of epistemic justification that a person needs in order to rationally hold to a belief. And this is what Kyle believes. Kyle thinks that in view of the costs of following Christ and living the Christian life that he ought to raise the bar for epistemic justification of belief in Christianity. My impression is Reginald doesn't think that. Reginald thinks that you should just simply weigh the epistemic evidence and go exclusively on the basis of epistemic justification. And if you want to take that approach, that's fine. I have provided multiple arguments for the existence of God and evidences for the truth of Christianity. So I'm fully prepared to argue that Christian belief is epistemically justified. But then, you see, you don't connect with Kyle because Kyle doesn't think that you go only on epistemic justification. Kyle believes in the pragmatic encroachment of the epistemic, and the irony of this is that I agree with Kyle! I think that it is legitimate for the pragmatic to encroach upon the epistemic. But what our interlocutors today – these clips we're going to watch – don't understand is that this encroachment of the pragmatic on the epistemic, which Kyle and I both think is appropriate, can work both ways. It can either raise the bar required for epistemic justification, or it can lower the bar required for epistemic justification. Our illustration of the cancer patient illustrates that in lowering the bar for the belief that you're going to get better. My disagreement with Kyle then is not on the relevance of pragmatic justification to epistemic justification of Christianity. I think it's relevant. Rather, my disagreement with Kyle is in his cost-benefit analysis. I think Kyle has got it completely wrong in terms of the cost-benefit analysis. The benefit of Christian belief is that if you believe in Christ and it turns out to be true then you have infinite benefit. You have gained eternal life, a love relationship with God, forever an incommensurable good. And at what cost? Well, let's give Kyle the negative costs of the rigors of living the Christian life and eschewing sin and so forth. Though I wanted to say here, parenthetically, I don't think the Christian life is like that at all. I think in my experience the Christian life is a life that is filled with joy, peace, meaning, love, so that I don't count these as negatives at all. I can't think of any better way to live than as a Christian. The blessings of having a clear conscience and of avoiding moral evil and living the ethical life I think are just incalculable. But leave that aside. Let's grant Kyle that there are these shortcomings, these costs, associated with Christian belief. Clearly, these are completely swamped by the infinite benefit of eternal life and the knowledge of God. Now, on the other hand, if you do believe in Christ and it turns out that Christianity is false then what have you lost? You haven't lost anything in terms of eternity because you're just going to be dead. All you've lost is these finite costs of living for Christ. So when you do a cost-benefit analysis, the benefits infinitely swamp any costs that would be associated with Christian belief. So I think, as I said, that the encroachment of the pragmatic on the epistemic in the case of Christian belief serves to lower the epistemic bar required for rational belief in Christ. Now, as Reginald recognizes, this is Pascal's Wager. That's right. And I agree with Pascalian wagering. I think that he was correct. What is Reginald's objection to this? Well, it's the famous “many gods objection.” Different religions can all say the same thing. But there are two responses that the Pascalian can make to that. One is that if these other alternatives have sufficiently low probability they can be safely ignored. For example, the probability that Odin or Zeus is really the true God is so negligible that it can be left aside. Secondly, however, if you can reduce the number of alternatives to a tractable number (like, say, two or three) then you can run Pascal's Wager successfully. In particular, I contrasted Christian belief with naturalism, which is a lifestyle and a worldview that leads ultimately to meaninglessness, valuelessness, purposelessness, and I think despair (as the existentialist philosophers realized). And when you read Pascal’s Pensées, what you discover is that although Pascal didn't like arguments for the existence of God, he was a real enthusiast for Christian evidences. There are passages in the Pensées where Pascal – he sounds like Josh McDowell! He's presenting arguments for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. And these are very colorful, entertaining passages. So I think Pascal himself was convinced that the alternatives basically come down to Christian theism versus naturalism, and in that case when you do the cost-benefit analysis that I've just described then clearly Christian belief wins out. Therefore, I think Kyle is quite wrong to think that the pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic raises the bar rather than lowers it.

KEVIN HARRIS: Pascal's Wager comes up again in another clip here in just a moment. We might explore that some more, but I'm curious if you have been hearing the term “gaslighting” a lot lately.

DR. CRAIG: No, I haven't. That comes from the famous Ingrid Bergman movie Gaslight where her husband is deceiving her and trying to drive her mad to make her think that she's out of her mind. And, frankly, I don't understand the use of that analogy in this context. When he says I'm gaslighting, I don't understand the analogy. He needs to explain it. On the contrary, what Kyle and I are both talking about is the relationship between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification, and how pragmatic arguments can serve to raise or lower the epistemic bar for rational belief.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yeah. Just like Pascal's Wager, there are definitions and uses of Pascal's Wager that Pascal didn't intend and that are incorrect. Same thing for gaslighting. But everybody's using that phrase these days, and everybody's accusing others of gaslighting. And that's why when it came up it's like: if you try to convince the other person that they're crazy and that they're the one at fault, you're gaslighting them. And so, if you're having doubts about the Christian faith, well, then it's your fault, not the evidence’s false. Things like that.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, all right. So that’s the sense in which he's using it. Now that relates to my genuine pastoral concern for Kyle. Is Kyle actually a regenerate Christian, or is he a merely nominal Christian? I think that is a perfectly legitimate question to ask. And I say that on the basis of certain clues in his question. For example, he says that the Christian life is a lot of work, and it gives me the impression he is talking about a kind of performance-oriented Christian life where you try your best to be as good as you can so that God will accept you. And this is not genuine New Testament Christianity, which is a relationship with God that is lived out naturally from the inside out in the power of the Holy Spirit. When we get these questions from people that we don't know, that we've never met and can't sit down and talk to, I think you've got to raise the question: Does this person really know Christ, or is he someone who's simply been raised in the church or in a Christian environment but has never really experienced the life-changing power of a relationship with Christ? And that's not gaslighting. That's just self-examination. You know, Paul in the New Testament says, “Examine yourselves to see whether you are holding the truth. Test yourselves.” I think that it's quite legitimate to do a kind of spiritual inventory and, as I say, I'm quite confident that if Kyle is a regenerate Christian that he will feel a natural attraction to the love of God and to Christ that will preserve him in his faith rather than lead him to abandon Christian faith simply because it doesn't, in his thinking, meet some sort of epistemic bar that is set so high that he's expecting appearances of the Virgin Mary or Jesus to him in order to make belief rational. So that’s my concern there. It is not at all about gaslighting. It is a very heartfelt pastoral concern for Kyle.

KEVIN HARRIS: Oh, and by the way, that is exactly the point of the newest animated video from Reasonable Faith: “So, You Just Became a Christian?”^[2]. It explains how to live a victorious Christian life. So be sure to check that video out. We are just getting started on this topic. We’ve got some more clips to play. We are going to continue this next time on the next podcast, Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. We’ll see you then.^[3]