Popular Questions for Dr. Craig

KEVIN HARRIS: Hey, there! Come on in! Welcome to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. It’s Kevin Harris. Stay close. We have some podcasts coming up that are ripped from the headlines. In a few days, Dr. Craig will be discussing the leaked documents from the Supreme Court which, to some extent, has revealed the Court’s direction concerning Roe v. Wade. We’ve been watching this closely, and it has really gotten Dr. Craig’s attention. So we’ll be talking about that. Oh, and by the way, people from all over the world have been asking for an update on Dr. Craig’s health. Well, here’s a spoiler alert – he’s doing fantastic. But he did have a little excursion into the hospital. We’ve talked him into spilling the beans and telling us all about it. That’s coming up as well. In the meantime, today we have some of the most popular questions Dr. Craig gets asked. Now, there are a lot of these, but we are just going to give you a little sample today. As we get to the questions and Dr. Craig’s answers, we want to thank you for your prayerful and financial support of this ministry. Any size gift helps, and we ask that you lift us up in these rather tumultuous times that we are all experiencing. Reasonable Faith is needed more than ever, and I’m sure you agree. Give online at ReasonableFaith.org, and thank you so much.

Here’s the first question:

Why would God create such a big universe with human beings on this tiny planet?

DR. CRAIG: What you need to understand is that the size of the universe is a function of its expansion and its age. In order for the universe to form the heavy elements (like carbon, of which our bodies are made) there need to be stars because the heavy elements are forged in the stellar interiors – in the furnaces – of the stars. Then these explode through supernovae and are distributed throughout the universe. And this is what we're made of – these heavy elements. In order for stars to exist, the universe has to be a certain age. So if the universe begins in a big bang and is expanding then it has to be this big in order for there to be stars and planets and people like us. So even though the universe seems incomprehensibly large, given that God has created the Big Bang and set things in motion it needs to be this big. I think that this just bespeaks the majesty and the grandeur of the Creator. When I look at the universe and the pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, I think of the words of the psalmist: when I consider the heavens and the works of thy hands that thou has made what is man that thou art mindful of him? We understand even more than the psalmist does the greatness and majesty of God in having created such a beautiful and vast cosmos that would be necessary for us to exist apart from some sort of miraculous intervention in the laws of nature.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question.

Dr. Craig, if the God of Christian theism exists then he is a moral being, and we certainly don't live up to his moral standards. That can be a scary thought. So scary, in fact, that it can cause us to perhaps be irrational in our evaluation of whether God exists. So how do we remove our biases or how do we remove that fear as we try to come to true conclusions?

DR. CRAIG: Let me make a couple of comments on this because I think you've raised several interesting points. First of all, for those of you who were here last night, I shared seven arguments for God's existence, one of which was the moral argument (which I've developed more fully tonight). My favorite argument is the cosmological argument. That's the argument that really turns my crank. But I find that with students many of them don't connect with the cosmological argument. But I find it's the moral argument – this argument – that really connects with people because you can blow off the cosmological argument or ignore the philosophical contingency argument or the ontological argument but you can't escape the moral argument because every day you wake up you answer the question “Do I think there are objective moral values and duties?” by how you live. Are you going to live as though other people are ends in themselves? Or as they are merely means to be used for your ends? So this moral argument really hits us where we live. We cannot escape its demands and we have to answer the argument. If not verbally, we answer it by our behavior and how we choose to live. So I do think that this would be an illustration, I think, at the point you were making that this is an argument that really has deep existential significance. Now, the further point that you make is an interesting theological one. Namely, if we do grant that there are objective moral values and duties then this immediately confronts us with the terrible realization that I haven't fulfilled my moral duties. I haven't lived up to the moral demands that a holy God would put on me. I haven't loved my neighbor as myself. I've done and thought and said things that are selfish, cruel, petty, and mean-spirited, and therefore I find myself with moral guilt and needing to be cleansed and forgiven. So it does carry with it this realization. It also might mean, “Gee, I'm going to have to change my lifestyle if I want to bring it into conformity with the moral law.” And that can be hard to do because, as I said, self-interest and temptation run in the face of morality many times. But if we take seriously the existence of a holy God who holds us morally accountable for our actions I think that can provide real incentive for saying, “I need to get right with God, basically, and to seek his forgiveness and his moral cleansing and to seek his strength for changing me from the inside out to transform my life so that I become a better person and I grow to be more and more like him and replicate his character in me.” And as a Christian, I believe that this happens through Jesus Christ. I think that Christ died on the cross to pay the penalty for my wrongdoing and that as I allow him to live out his life in me he changes my character to be more like his so that I will become a better person. I think that you're right that this question of the objective nature of moral values and duties has profound theological ramifications that need to be faced.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question.

Dr. Craig, how can eternal punishment in hell be morally justified?

DR. CRAIG: I think that we should not understand hell in terms of punishment for the array of finite sins that we commit in this lifetime. Sins like murder and theft and adultery and even terrorism and mass murder surely merit finite amounts of punishment, not infinite punishment. But I think that the sin of rejecting God is a sort of meta-sin of an entirely different order because this sin separates us from God decisively and because of the dignity of God's person is a sin of infinite gravity and proportion and therefore deserves infinite punishment.

KEVIN HARRIS: Another question.

Dr. Craig, what is the difference between physical time and metaphysical time? More specifically, wouldn't the members of the Trinity be subject to time in their loving relationship with each other prior to creation?

DR. CRAIG: OK. Great question. Metaphysical time would be time that is not dependent upon physical clocks. It would exist and pass independent of any physical realities or mechanisms. It's what Isaac Newton called absolute time. Newton believed that absolute time flows necessarily independent of any physical processes whatsoever. I think that we have a kind of knockdown argument for the difference between metaphysical and physical time in the thought experiment of God counting down to the moment of creation. If we imagine God counting down (“3... 2... 1... Let there be light!”) then there wouldn't be any physical time prior to the end of the countdown. But those mental events of counting down would be sequentially ordered in time and so there would be a kind of metaphysical time prior to the physical time that begins at the Big Bang. Now, I think that the doctrine of the Trinity actually provides a wonderful illustration of how God can be personal and yet exist timelessly. The Greek church fathers had a doctrine called perichoresis, and the doctrine of perichoresis is that the three persons of the Trinity are completely transparent to each other. What the Father loves, the Son and the Spirit love. What the Son knows, the Father and the Spirit know. What the Spirit wills, the Father and the Son will. They all have the same knowledge, will, and love unchangingly. It can never change because they are perfect and complete. So it seems to me that they would exist in this perfect timeless love relationship of knowledge, will, and love together, and it would be just like two lovers who sit staring into each other's eyes and we say they were lost in that timeless moment. Well, that is literally how I think it would be for God existing in this perichoretic relationship of the Trinity without the creation.

KEVIN HARRIS: Final question today.

Dr. Craig, in heaven there is no evil. In heaven, good exists in the absence of evil. So why couldn't God just create the world with no evil?

DR. CRAIG: I think that it's possible that the reason there is no evil in heaven is because the freedom to sin has been removed. I think that God has created us in this world to go through a sort of veil of decision-making during which we are at something of an arm's length from God. God's existence is obscured, and this permits us to have the freedom to reject him or to follow him. But when we go to heaven then I think we will see Christ in all his glory and all his beauty and that vision of God will be so overwhelming that it will effectively remove the freedom to sin. I like to compare it to a huge electromagnet with iron filings in its presence. The iron filings would be immediately attracted to stick to the electromagnet and they couldn't possibly fall away because of its overwhelming force. So God, I think, has given us this opportunity in this lifetime to freely choose where we want to spend eternity, but once we do make that choice and go to heaven then the freedom to sin will be removed by what medievals called the beatific vision of God.^[1]