The Power of Reasonable Faith Videos

KEVIN HARRIS: You are listening to the music of Aryn Michelle. Her album is called “The Realest Thing” and was inspired by Dr. Craig’s writings[1]. We have been featuring some of Aryn’s music on the podcast. Welcome to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. By the way, you can download Aryn’s music at arynmichelle.com. Let me spell her name for you: Aryn Michelle. Today we are talking about another art form and how it is making some of what you read and hear from Dr. Craig very visible.

Bill, I have received emails and communiques on how much people are enjoying these animated videos that illustrate your work and the work of Reasonable Faith, especially this latest one – the Zangmeister video on the problem of evil. Is this something we can expect from Reasonable Faith in the coming years?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. In fact, we have engaged the Zangmeister to do even more work for us so that these videos should be able to be produced in a more rapid succession. They are enormously involved, an incredible amount of work that he puts into these animations, and they are quite expensive as well. This is an important part of the Reasonable Faith annual budget – paying for the production of these Zangmeister videos. As you know, what we have done now is complete videos on the main arguments for the existence of God that I have defended in my books like On Guard and Reasonable Faith. We have the kalam cosmological argument, the Leibnizian argument from contingency, the moral argument for the existence of God, the argument from fine-tuning, and finally the ontological argument. Together these five videos I think make a very powerful cumulative case for the existence of God. Now in our most recent video Zangmeister has turned to answering the principal argument for atheism which is the problem of evil and suffering. Because this problem requires such length to treat he broke the video into two videos. There is the first one on the logical version of the problem of evil and suffering, and then there is the second video which is on the probabilistic version of the problem of evil and suffering. It also closes with a discussion of the emotional problem of evil.

KEVIN HARRIS: Do you spell these out, or does he just look at all your work and compile this into a concise way?

DR. CRAIG: This is the great thing about the Zangmeister. He reads my work and he understands it. He gets it. Using Reasonable Faith, On Guard, and other things that I have done he writes a script and then he will send me the script. I will go over it, make corrections, revisions, suggestions, and then he will revise that again until we finally get the script done. Then he will begin to construct a kind of storyboard for it that will accompany the script. Then we will finally hire some talent to do the voiceovers. That has been a lot of fun because I told him right at the beginning I want to get different native English speakers to do these videos. The first one was a South African accent. The second one I believe was an American accent. Then we have an Indian accent. We have a British accent. For the most recent one he has been looking for a Canadian accent, although he has been unsuccessful in finding one. He says the Canadians refuse to talk like Canadians. They all talk like Americans! But that makes it really nice that we have these different native English speakers each with their own charming accent to do the narrations on these different animations.[2]

KEVIN HARRIS: We were talking at lunch, I told you, Bill, that I am kind of naïve. I think that Alvin Plantinga has put a fork in the problem of evil and why should anybody, the atheist community, even keep bringing it up? I realize that it is still a thorny problem, but I survey websites and blogs and everything and the problem of evil is still there and big as ever. There are still aspects of it.

DR. CRAIG: I think the average unbeliever simply has no acquaintance with the work of people like Alvin Plantinga, William Alston, or others who have written on the problem of evil and suffering. So they are for the most part just reacting emotionally. I saw one reaction to the Facebook video on the problem of evil and suffering that Zangmeister did, and the respondent simply said, I can’t see any reason for why God would permit a little child to suffer horribly. I thought, That question was addressed in the video. Didn’t you even watch it? It is almost like some people aren’t able to engage intellectually with the argument. They are just reacting emotionally. So this is going to be a perennial problem that needs to be addressed by every generation, I think.

KEVIN HARRIS: Sure. Especially on the street and with laypeople because even if the academic community says, Oh yeah, we have really made progress in this area, the layperson is not going to know that. They just may not have looked at the literature. So it is always going to be a question that your brother-in-law asks. The next video production – the absurdity of life without God.

DR. CRAIG: That is the one that Zangmeister is working on now. Having done the arguments for God’s existence and then answered this principal argument for atheism he is now going back to the very beginning and doing that preliminary video, a prequel if you will, on the absurdity of life without God which is the opening chapter in both On Guard and Reasonable Faith where I argue that we cannot afford to ignore the question of God’s existence because so much hangs existentially on it. This is the most important question a human being can ask. This is the video in which it will be argued that if God does not exist then philosophers like the French existentialist atheists are right in saying that life is absurd. I analyze the absurdity of life in terms of three distinct but related elements: meaning, value, and purpose. I argue in each case if there is no God then there is no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose.

Meaning has to do with significance – why does something matter? Value has to do with moral values and duties. Finally, purpose has to do with a goal. My argument is that in the absence of God ultimately we find ourselves in a universe that is destined to a cold grave in the dark recesses of outer space, everything will be reduced to just a thin gas of elementary particles expanding endlessly into the darkness, no life, no light, no heat, nothing will matter ultimately because it all comes to destruction. I think the French existentialists are right in saying that in the absence of God that ultimately man’s life is absurd.

KEVIN HARRIS: What is the ultimate value of this? Because it is not an argument necessarily for God.

DR. CRAIG: No, not at all. It is an argument to get people to think about it. This is a response to the “whatever” attitude of so many people. So many people just think, Yeah, if you believe in God that’s fine for you, but I don’t. Or, Who cares? What difference does it make? This is an attempt to answer that question and sort of motivate people to move out of their apathy and to begin to really think about this. I am persuaded that if you can get people to move out of their apathy and indifference and to begin to really think about it, then these other animated videos we’ve made on the various arguments will look much more compelling to them for providing reasons to believe that God does exist and therefore that life does have meaning, value, and purpose.

KEVIN HARRIS: I am trying to remember if you and I have talked about whether there is an argument from purpose in life, an argument for God.[3] In other words, because life is so imbued with significance and meaning and purpose perhaps that is verifying our intuitions that it is.

DR. CRAIG: Right. Yeah, and there are arguments for the existence of God based on meaning. You could say that if God doesn’t exist there isn’t any ultimate meaning, value, or purpose in life. But we do sense that our lives are significant and meaningful, that our lives are purposeful and worth living. It would follow from that that God exists. I myself have defended a moral argument along those lines. If God does not exist then ultimately there are no objective moral values and duties. But there are objective moral values and duties, therefore God exists. You could run a similar argument using meaning or purpose if you wanted to.

KEVIN HARRIS: I would love to see how the Zangmeister would do Hilbert’s hotel. That would be an interesting illustration.

DR. CRAIG: That is a possibility because the kalam cosmological argument video focuses only on the scientific evidence. In the interests of time and brevity he didn’t discuss any of the philosophical arguments for the finitude of the past. Maybe someday we will produce a second kalam cosmological argument animated video that would focus on the philosophical arguments.

KEVIN HARRIS: For those not familiar with Hilbert’s Hotel can you give a couple of quick illustrations?

DR. CRAIG: Hilbert’s hotel is a brainchild of the great German mathematician David Hilbert designed to illustrate the absurdity of the existence of an actually infinite number of things. It is a hotel that has an infinite number of rooms. Hilbert shows that even though this hotel can be fully occupied so that there are literally no vacancies (every room in the hotel has a flesh-and-blood person in it) nevertheless it can always accommodate infinitely more guests, which seems mad.

KEVIN HARRIS: Or you can move all the people in the odd rooms to the even rooms all the way on up through infinity.

DR. CRAIG: That would be how you would make room for the infinity of new guests to check in.

KEVIN HARRIS: I would like to see that illustrated. That would be pretty cool. We look forward to more videos then. It is just another great aspect of Reasonable Faith.

DR. CRAIG: I think the production of these animated videos may in the long-run be one of the most important things that Reasonable Faith has ever done. They are so engaging, they are so entertaining, and they are so substantive. I don’t know of anybody else that is offering this kind of media product in defense of God’s existence.[4]