Dr. Craig's Amazing Admission Part Two

KEVIN HARRIS: Let’s go to this first clip. It is from Paulogia. He claims to be an ex-Christian. He is now an atheist. We’ve interacted with some of the material that he’s presented before. Quite popular. Here’s that first clip – his response to your answer^[1] to Kyle.

PAULOGIA: Yesterday I was walking my pup and I heard the new episode, I guess we could call it, of the Reasonable Faith podcast with Willliam Lane Craig. It is one of my regulars that I visit. In yesterday’s podcast, William Lane Craig admitted something that I didn’t think that any Christian would ever actually openly admit. So I mainly want to share with you something that I think is amazing. So to recap there, the person who has sent in a question to Dr. Craig's podcast is currently a Christian but is saying, “Hey, Christianity is a very costly endeavor.” And he listed off some things you have to do. I would add in there, as someone who is now a former Christian, that Christianity demands the focus of your entire life. And given that we know we have one life, we are not guaranteed any more life than that, so to spend the one life you have in full devotion to that set of propositions of truth claims – that is a huge gamble because we will not get a do-over.

DR. CRAIG: This is a description of the negative costs of Christian belief, and, again, I so disagree with Paulogia about the character of the Christian life. That isn't descriptive of my Christian life, Kevin, and I don't think your’s either. The Christian life is a life of abundant joy and meaning and purpose. Yes, it demands total commitment, but then you are given the peace and love and purpose of God that fills your life during this life, so that even if it ended at the grave you will have had a wonderful life in this world. Now, that isn't critical to my argument. I'm willing to grant that these are negative costs that need to be subtracted from the great benefit of Christian belief if it's true. Because if Christian belief is true then you have this infinite gain to be made of eternal life and the love relationship with God that will last forever, and that infinite gain simply swamps these finite costs that Paulogia describes.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip from Paulogia, clip number two.

PAULOGIA: But, again, this makes sense. He's saying should we not have a very high epidemic value? Should we not, in the words that I prefer to use from Matt Dillahunty and others, should we not apportion our belief to the amount of evidence provided? Have little confidence when there's little evidence, and having a lot of confidence when there's a lot of evidence? This makes good sense. So great question, Kyle. He is calling out to God, asking God to reveal himself in a very clear, non-ambiguous way. It's great that Kyle is recognizing that a lot of the ways that we think we're feeling affirmations potentially can be attributed to our own internal monologue, so he's looking for a way to rule that out, even though he's open to the evidence. I love this question. What does William Lane Craig have to say?

DR. CRAIG (transcript): 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.

PAULOGIA: Holy cow. All right. So William Lane Craig, master of the kalam, ontological argument, the man who is almost synonymous with making philosophical arguments for Christianity, when he was in high school he basically Pascal Wagered himself into Christianity. He thought, “Hey, if there's a one in a million chance that the sin is true and that Jesus has a way out, I'm all in.” One in a million chance. That's what William Lane Craig just said. All you need to follow Christianity is Pascal Wager this thing. Forget the kalam. Forget the ontological. Are you saying that you don't think there's a one in a million chance that the Christian God is true?

DR. CRAIG: OK, here, you see he champions pure epistemic justification, and he denies the pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic. He thinks that all you should consider is the epistemic justification for Christian belief. And, as I said, I'm fine with that! No problem! I have defended arguments for the existence of God such as the argument from contingency, the kalam cosmological argument, the argument from the applicability of mathematics, the fine-tuning argument, the moral argument, and so forth, as well as Christian evidences for the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. So I am perfectly fine with making our decision to believe purely on epistemic grounds. But then the problem is you don't connect with Kyle and his question because Kyle does believe in the pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic. And I personally believe with Kyle that that is legitimate. That's right. But what these folks don't seem to realize is that this can either lower or raise the epistemic bar, and in the case of Christianity, I think it significantly lowers it.

KEVIN HARRIS: A lot of young apologists that I've seen on Facebook are only familiar with a few of your debates and they’ve read some of your articles. I think they expect you to be a little more of an evidentialist than you are. They've only heard you present the evidence. They haven't seen some of these other aspects philosophically.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Now, that's the second current that I spoke of that's in this answer, in this debate. The first current we've already talked about, namely the relationship between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification. The second, quite different, current is this relationship between the witness of the Holy Spirit and evidence and argument in the epistemic justification of Christianity, and we haven't gotten to that yet. I think probably Paulogia is going to bring that up, and we can address it then. But my point of view is that Christian belief is epistemically justified on the basis of the witness of the Holy Spirit even in the absence of argument and evidence for Christianity.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's clip number three.

DR. CRAIG (transcript): So my attitude towards this is just the opposite of Kyle’s. Far from raising the bar or the epistemic standard that Christianity must meet to be believed, I lower it. I think that this is a message which is so wonderful . . .

PAULOGIA: Did you hear what he just said? When you come to Christianity, you shouldn't be looking to raise the bar. The God who invented truth, the God who is synonymous with what is real and what is true, don’t raise your epistemic bar for God to meet. You put it on the floor. You lower it. William Lane Craig just said he literally lowers the bar as low as he can. And if that is the bar that his omnipotent, omniscience, all-powerful God can clear, good enough for William Lane Craig. Think about that the next time he is spouting off the kalam cosmological argument to you. This is the man who says he sets the bar for God on the floor, and he’s proud of it. This is wonderful news.

DR. CRAIG: Here these two currents that I spoke about begin to get blended together. On the one hand, I've already said I do believe in Pascalian Wagering because I, like Kyle, believe in the pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic, and that pragmatic concerns can serve to either raise or lower the epistemic bar required for rational belief. But saying that you can do that is in no way inconsistent with the provision of good arguments and evidence for Christianity! I do think that there are good arguments and evidence that epistemically justify Christian belief. I just don't think they're necessary. They are sound, they are available, but they're not necessary for Christians belief to be rational. And I think this is just intuitively obvious when you think about it. Consider my belief that I had an omelet with sausage this morning for breakfast. That is a properly basic belief that is grounded in my memory of breakfast this morning. It's a properly basic memory belief. So it's not a belief that is based on evidence. But if you were to ask me for evidence that I had a sausage omelet for breakfast this morning, well, fine. That would be easy to provide. I could point to eyewitness testimony – my wife Jan ate breakfast with me. She saw that I had a sausage omelet for breakfast, and we got eyewitness testimony. We've got physical evidence. The shattered eggshells in the trash can, the scouring that's still in the frying pan where she cooked the omelet. Those things are still there. In fact, if you wanted to go to extremes, you could exhume the omelet by pumping out the contents of my stomach to prove that I had a sausage omelet for breakfast. Does that mean, however, that my belief that I had a sausage omelet for breakfast is based on that evidence? No. It's a properly basic memory belief, but that's entirely consistent with my ability to defend that belief by providing objective evidence for it. And it's exactly the same with Christian belief. There are good arguments and evidences to epistemically justify Christianity, but I would maintain that they're not necessary; that Christian belief can be rational by being grounded in the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. And in the absence of some sort of a defeater of that experience, I'm perfectly rational to believe in the Gospel on the basis of the witness of the Holy Spirit in a properly basic way.

KEVIN HARRIS: Did you notice that Paulogia said that one of the reasons that he abandoned his Christian faith is that he asked God to reveal himself in a clear, non-ambiguous way? It causes me to wonder, well, what are his criteria here? What is clear? What would be clear? What would be non-ambiguous?

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. I was very worried by Kyle's demand for an appearance of the Virgin Mary to him or an appearance of Jesus himself to him. I strongly suspect that even if that happened he could say something like, “Man, did I have the wildest hallucination last night” or something of that sort. The fact is that the evidence and arguments for Christianity are certainly sufficient to epistemically justify that belief even if it doesn't have the sort of epistemic force that an appearance of Jesus would have.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip.

DR. CRAIG (transcript): That if there's any evidence that it's true then it's worth believing in.

PAULOGIA: If there's any evidence, it's worth believing it. Does he hear himself? Is there any evidence for Islam? Is there any evidence for Buddhism? Is there any evidence for anything? William Lane Craig will be believing in aliens and that Elvis is alive and the Sasquatch and QAnon. He will be believing in everything because all he needs is one piece of evidence, and that's good enough for William Lane Craig.

DR. CRAIG: This is nothing more than just sarcasm. I've already explained the pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic that Kyle himself agrees with that can serve to raise or lower the epistemic bar required for rational belief. And I've already explained that my belief in Pascalian Wagering or properly basic belief in Christ is not at all inconsistent with offering arguments for the existence of God and evidences for Christianity. So there is no tension whatsoever between my offering arguments like the kalam cosmological argument in defense of theism and my believing that these arguments are not absolutely necessary for rational belief.

KEVIN HARRIS: A couple of more clips, and here's the next one.

DR. CRAIG (transcript): Especially when you compare it to the alternatives like naturalism or atheism . . .

PAULOGIA: Especially when you compare it to atheism or naturalism? Are you saying that there isn't any evidence for atheism or naturalism? First of all, naturalism is merely just saying that we believe that the natural world we live in is what there is, there's evidence for it because we are in the natural world. We don't have to make a single assumption by Ockham's Razor. We're making zero assumptions to assume that naturalism is true. Is he appealing to consequences? He doesn't come around to this, but he's especially when you compare it to atheism or naturalism. So these are philosophies that young high school William Lane Craig didn't like. He didn't like the consequences that he felt atheism led to. So that's why he turned to Christianity. I think we need to all save this clip every time William Lane Craig comes out in a debate from now on. This is the best clip ever.

DR. CRAIG: There are a couple of confusions going on here. First, Paulogia doesn't understand what naturalism is! He thinks that naturalism is just a belief that the natural world exists, and, of course, that's true because we're in it. But that isn't the distinguishing feature of naturalism. I believe that the natural world exists, Catholics believe that the natural world exists. But that doesn't make Catholics naturalists! Rather, what the naturalist believes is there are no supernatural realities. Indeed, most naturalists are physicalists. They don't even believe in the reality of the human soul or self and therefore are physical determinists. So he hasn't correctly characterized naturalism. Naturalism is a radical worldview that denies that God or any sort of transcendent spiritual realities exist, and that requires good epistemic justification, I think. Now, when I compare naturalism to Christianity, I'm obviously not comparing their epistemic status. I was comparing the cost-benefit analysis of believing in these. We're talking about pragmatic justification, and here, as I said, the cost-benefit analysis clearly favors Christian belief over atheistic belief. On naturalism, you are left with a meaningless, ultimately purposeless, ultimately valueless, finite existence, and then everything is ended at the grave. Whereas, on Christianity, if Christianity is true, then you have infinite gain. So the comparison here is not epistemically; the comparison is pragmatically – in terms of the pragmatic justification of Christianity versus naturalism. I can't think of any pragmatic arguments in favor of naturalism. Now, when it does come to epistemic justification, well, then you need to go to one of those debates when I come to your campus and hear the epistemic justification for the existence of God and the historicity of Jesus and contrast that with the epistemic justification that the atheist offers for naturalism. And I think when you make that comparison, again a fair-minded observer will say that the case for Christianity is superior.

KEVIN HARRIS: This next clip.

DR. CRAIG (transcript): 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.

PAULOGIA: If Kyle has the good feelings that come from Christianity, a sense of hope (which of course you can generate internally), a sense of love (which, again, of course you can generate internally) then you just hold on to that. William Lane Craig has no outsider test of faith going here at all. Because burning of the bosom with the Mormons, for example – they have all the good feelings and that's supposed to be good enough evidence that it's true? Come on.

DR. CRAIG: Here, Paul is addressing that issue of the proper basicality of Christian belief. And the fact is that a great many of our beliefs cannot be proved by argument and evidence; rather, they are properly basic beliefs grounded in experience. For example, the belief in the reality of the external world cannot be proved because any evidence you would give for it would be based upon the veridicality of your sense perceptions of the external world. The reality of the past cannot be proved because you could never prove that the appearances of age around you are not merely that – mere appearances. So our lives are characterized by properly basic beliefs that we all hold in the absence of argument and evidence, but they are grounded in experience. The argument here is that the Christian’s experience of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit grounds his properly basic belief in Christ and in God. And in the absence of a defeater of that, he's perfectly rational to go on believing in that just as you are rational to believe in the reality of the past or the reality of the external world. Now, what about the Mormon who claims to have a burning in the bosom or someone else who has a non-Christian experience? I think that there are good defeaters for those that suggest that those experiences are not veridical. But I do not know of any such defeaters for the veridicality of the Christian experience. And so in the absence of those defeaters I am perfectly rational to believe in the truth of the Gospel in a properly basic way.

I already addressed the so-called many-gods objection where I think there is a negligible probability of some of these alternatives that can safely be ignored. And then in the case of Islam or Mormonism or visits from extraterestrial life, we have really good defeaters of those beliefs, whereas in the case of Christianity, I don’t think we have those kinds of defeaters of Christian belief. So to believe on pragmatic grounds is, I think, quite acceptable and quite appropriate.

KEVIN HARRIS: It's difficult to know how to wrap this up because, as you've said, there are a lot of cross-currents. I do want to encourage some of the younger apologists and people who are new to Reasonable Faith, go back and read and get a copy of the book Reasonable Faith if you don't – third edition – and go through some of your early chapters where you talk about the difference between knowing Christianity is true and showing Christianity is true. And when you're in a pastoral situation and when you're in an academic debate, there are two different approaches. And then, of course, all the cross-currents that you've mentioned today. But let's see if we can kind of draw some of the threads together.

DR. CRAIG: Let me try to recap here. It seems to me that there are two broad issues here that need to be discussed. One is the relationship between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification, and I think it's very clear from the comments of these non-theist interlocutors that they don't have any understanding whatsoever of that relationship, and so they are offended at the idea that the pragmatic might encroach upon the epistemic. The other issue then is the proper basicality of Christian belief grounded in the witness of the Holy Spirit, and that is not inconsistent with also being able to provide good arguments and evidence to epistemically justify Christianity. So I want to say to our viewers today, especially to those who are not believers, to be very skeptical of these overly easy dismissals that you see on the Internet from these popular atheistic bloggers. Typically, they are skating on the surface and don’t understand the deep philosophical questions that are often involved in sorting through these issues. This, I think, is one that really illustrates that fact.^[2]