YouTube Apologists React!

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, I think that you have more than answered the allegations of certain YouTube atheists on what has become known as the Lowering The Bar controversy. Not only have you devoted a podcast and a Question of the Week on it, but you appeared on other podcasts to discuss it. Rather than rehearse the whole thing, I’ll just refer our listeners to the website for the backstory. But today we want to interact with some excerpts from the young man who asked you the now-famous question, Kyle. Kyle has a podcast, and he invited some other podcasters to join him in discussing various atheist reactions to you.^[1] Spoiler alert here – they are not impressed with the atheist reaction. These young men who are well-versed in apologetics and philosophy and theology, I’m impressed with all of them. They did get together, and they talked together for an hour and a half. I just had to go in and get a few excerpts. But I got to tell you that they have been interacting with your work, they are positive about what you said and how you answered. Kyle has not abandoned his faith. He is a deep-thinker. He tries to be fair. We’ll hear from him in just a moment. Bill, we’re a few weeks beyond this. What do you make of all the hoop-la that has surrounded this?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I have to tell you that I'm just so gratified at the response to my original Question of the Week in response to Kyle. This is why I write this weekly Question of the Week. In the first place, it was a help to Kyle. It encouraged him and strengthened him in his own Christian faith and walk, and that just makes it all worth it. But more than that, it has an even wider impact upon all the Christians who now learn something about differences between pragmatic and epistemic justification and are better educated now in the defense of the Christian faith as a result of this controversy. Then, finally, this sort of thing gets a rise out of the atheists on the secular web, and by doing so it gets them to engage with this work and causes even more attention to be drawn to the Gospel and to Christ. For all those reasons, I am just very gratified by the result of this hoop-la, as you call it.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this first clip, Kyle is asked to further explain his question to you. Here's clip number one.

PODCASTER: . . . what you were talking about? It seems you weren't talking about apportioning your beliefs to the evidence as much as apportioning your credences to the commitment that you're making. So it's like things that are more consequential, you're looking for more evidence.

PODCASTER (KYLE): Yeah, so that was sort of what I was trying to ask Craig. I think Paulogia might have misunderstood at least that portion of the question. When I asked the question originally, I was sort of like in a panic mode, so to speak, in the sense that if Christianity requires A, B, and C, and if A, B, and C have a lot of cost to them, it wasn't that I was having intellectual doubts, it was more like practical doubts. Like, shouldn't we raise the bar of evidence if it requires . . . like if the belief requires very high practical bars, so to speak. Like if you're going to be a Christian, you're going to have to live a certain way that you might not necessarily want to. So my issue was, OK, shouldn't we raise the bar of evidence if Christianity requires this? That was what I was writing to. At the time, it wasn't necessarily doubting my Christian beliefs; it was more like shouldn't we just raise the bar higher than where it's at now basically.

DR. CRAIG: I think that Kyle was in panic mode when he wrote that question because he wanted to raise the bar so unrealistically high that he was asking for an appearance of the Virgin Mary or even of Christ himself. What I wanted to say in response was that any kind of pragmatic justification for raising the bar would also give opportunity for pragmatic justification for lowering the bar. When it comes to pragmatic justification, that can either raise or lower the bar. So one can be pragmatically justified in believing things that are epistemically improbable. One of the benefits of this controversy was that it gave me the opportunity to talk with fellow philosophers who are experts in this area. For example, Liz Jackson who writes and publishes in this area of pragmatic and epistemic justification. Liz, in our conversation, said that there is really nothing that is so low epistemically in terms of its probability that you could not be pragmatically justified in believing it. So it seemed to me that the advice that I gave to Kyle was exactly correct.

KEVIN HARRIS: This next clip discusses the difficulty of setting one's own subjective standard of evidence. They got into that a little bit. Here's clip number two.

PODCASTER: My biggest issue in this whole thing is how do you measure evidence? Like how do you know when it's gotten to 50 or 60 percent, building on what you said. I don't know how to really measure the amount. When a skeptic like Paulogia here says you need a lot of evidence in proportion to the evidence, I'm always like how do we know when it's enough? This just seems like everyone sets their own subjective standard to determine when there's enough evidence. And I'm always kind of going like, well, I don't know where you set your subjective standard, or how we can actually measure to know if there's enough evidence. I just think, at the end of the day, we need to go with the best explanation. That's the way we sort of judge this which is going to be the least ad hoc, the most plausible, that kind of thing. It's really hard to measure people's subjective standard for what they think is enough evidence.

DR. CRAIG: I think that this fellow has put his finger on a real problem, and that is that it's very, very difficult to assign these sorts of epistemic probabilities. You can't put specific numbers to them. You just have to make rough estimates like “the probability is not very low” or “there seems to be a high probability that this is the case.” But he is quite right in saying that for so many people these are subjective. I remember talking with a Campus Crusade staff member at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who remarked to me that it seems like everyone has inside of them a skeptical dial which he turns way up when it comes to Christianity but then he turns way down when it comes to his own worldviews, and if he applied the same standards equitably his own views would come out unjustified and would fare no better than the Christian faith. So this really is a problem, and it's interesting that the person in the podcast says, “Let's work instead with inference to the best explanation.” That is to say, we don't try to assign these probabilities, but let's see which hypothesis has the most explanatory power, the most explanatory scope, is simpler, is less ad hoc. And those would be other means of assessing the value of explanatory hypotheses or worldviews.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yeah. That's Mike Jones. He has a channel on YouTube called Inspiring Philosophy. Man, he is good. Next they discuss how Paulogia . . . and, by the way, I sent Paulogia an email and apologized for butchering his name so many times. It wasn't on purpose. In fact, a couple of people said in comments, “You're mispronouncing his name just to harm his credibility.” No, not at all. That’s not the case at all. I was on a podcast. It was an atheist podcast. I was a guest on it several years ago, and they called it “Apologia” with a J sound. It all whirls around in your head. But in this clip they discuss he poisons the well.

PODCASTER: That was clearly poisoning the well. That was just poisoning the well. That is literally the fallacy. “Oh, look what he says. The next time you hear him present the kalam, just remember who . . .” That’s a textbook example of poisoning the well. That's all I'll say.

PODCASTER: I was also just going to say. OK. If William Lane Craig did believe that and you thought that Christianity had to be at least 99% sure before you could come into . . . I’m pretty sure William Lane Craig is really confident that Christianity is true!

PODCASTER: I was just going to say. To say he just Pascal Wagered himself and now because of that all of his work is just meaningless.

PODCASTER: Not only that, but notice the key context by which Craig was referring to in his response. This is something that Paulogia just completely ignored. He's talking about when he first converted. He's not presenting his entire case for Christian theism on this one response to a question. He's just giving a practical reason for why he converted when he was younger. Of course, when he got older he found reasons to believe. I feel like Paul's just really being extremely uncharitable to Craig.

DR. CRAIG: I think these are very perceptive comments. He's absolutely right when he describes this as my initial reaction as a 16-year old non-Christian high school student who had no evidence for the truth of Christianity but was simply struck that it seemed to me to be true. When I read the New Testament there was the ring of truth about it. So these pragmatic considerations were important for me, especially at that time. I did wonder about these attacks. What was the purpose of them? Why were they making this criticism? Because even if I were in error about what I said, how would that impact the soundness of the kalam cosmological argument or the argument from fine-tuning which have been offered and defended by myriads of people besides myself? It did seem to be a strategy to poison the well so that people would not look at those defenses or would discount them based on these personal considerations.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this next clip they clear up another confusion. Here's clip number four.

PODCASTER: I think that they were interpreting you as saying the evidence for Christianity is so bad what do I do?

PODCASTER (KYLE): That's the thing. If I did think the evidence for Christianity was bad, I would have said it in my question. But notice I didn't. I didn't say that it was.

PODCASTER: But I think that's how they're interpreting you. What they would expect Craig to answer with is, “Oh, here are these arguments that are actually good evidence, but because he's not doing that, oh, then there isn't actually good evidence. You have to lower your epistemic bar.” I hope that's not uncharitable. There's obviously some sort of disconnect here.

PODCASTER (KYLE): Because here's the thing. I actually think Craig understood my question better than they did.

PODCASTER: I agree.

DR. CRAIG: That was a really important thing for me. I wanted to connect with Kyle, and so rather than just try to say, “Look at all the great evidence for Christianity,” I wanted to address what I thought was his central concern; namely, that these pragmatic considerations can serve to raise the level of evidence that you would demand in order to believe something. And what I wanted to suggest is that if that's right, pragmatic considerations can also decrease the amount of evidence that you should demand in order to believe something. I firmly think that, with respect to the truth of the Gospel, you are pragmatically justified in believing it even if you don't have very good evidence for it.

KEVIN HARRIS: In this next clip, they clarify what you meant by the “one in a million chance of being true.” Here's clip number five.

PODCASTER: And he doesn't think – I think Square pointed this out earlier – he's not saying that he thinks the actual probability of Christianity being true is one in a million. He's saying at the time as a teenager he felt even if that is the case that would be worth it. Now, of course, he hadn't looked at the evidence at the time. He didn't know any defeaters. Just with the information he had, which was that experience. But he's done – if you look at his debate with Bart Ehrman – he does an entire Bayesian formula for the probability of the resurrection. So it's not as if he thinks it's actually low. He's just saying that from that perspective. So, yes, I will agree with everyone that I think Paul is misunderstanding, and I think he's unintentionally poisoned the well here. And that's just unfortunate.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, thank you for that. That is quite right. You know, sometimes Christian apologists like to give testimonies of how they became a Christian because the evidence led them to this conclusion, and they were persuaded to believe even against their will. And that’s not my testimony, I'm afraid. I was utterly naive with respect to the arguments for God's existence or the historicity of the Gospels. It was simply that when I heard the Gospel, read the New Testament, it just struck me so powerfully as being true. It had the ring of truth about it, and I could see that if this is the truth then for goodness sake it's the most wonderful news that's ever been announced. So he's quite right in saying that I wasn't trying to give an assessment of the odds of the truth of the Christian faith.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to this next clip then. This one starts out with Bigfoot.

PAULOGIA: Elvis is alive, and the Sasquatch, and Q Anon. He'll be believing in everything because all he needs is one piece of evidence. And that's good enough for William Lane Craig.

PODCASTER: OK. That’s where I just really . . . it's like, no, this guy doesn't know what he’s talking about. Because he's trying to compare it to Sasquatch. OK, Sasquatch. We’re not talking about . . . I mean is he really trying to compare Christianity to Sasquatch here? A Pascal Wager argument is not going to work for that. Right?

PODCASTER: Right. There's no utility in believing that Sasquatch exists, first. But I think he's also just completely misunderstanding what Craig is saying here. Because Craig's not saying, “Hey, here’s one data point that supports the hypothesis of Christianity. Therefore, you should believe it.” Craig is saying evidence in the absence of defeaters is reason to believe in Christianity. I think Paulogia is completely missing that.

PODCASTER: You know what also just bothers me is like, I'll hear Christian say this, and I'm like, okay, but I hear atheists say the opposite. When I was on David Smalley's podcast, I was presenting evidence, and he brought up the idea that if Christianity is true we need to raise the bar much higher because if it is true I need to adjust my lifestyle. So it must have a much higher bar of standard if it's going to affect how he was living. When I was on the podcast When Belief Died they said something similar, as well. So I've seen atheists do this, but in the opposite, where they think they’ve got to raise such a high standard because it would affect their life in many ways. So they got to judge it by such a much higher standard. So they're going in the opposite direction of Craig. There’s not a lot of videos about that. I never really thought this was a big deal because I've seen Christians do this, and I've seen atheists do the opposite.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. He's absolutely right. You can't have the pragmatic considerations encroach on the epistemic so as to raise the bar without also allowing the possibility that the pragmatic could encroach on the epistemic to lower the bar as the case may be. This will not apply just willy-nilly to everything. There needs to be what I described as a cost-benefit analysis in order to be pragmatically justified in holding some belief. I also note here, too, that the notion of believing what seems to be true to you in the absence of a defeater is rational. That's pertinent to this question of the witness of the Holy Spirit and the experience that I had that Christianity just seemed true to me. It had the ring of truth about it. So in the absence of some defeater, which I didn't have, I was perfectly within my rational rights in believing it.

KEVIN HARRIS: This next clip refers to your work on approaching other religions. It's sometimes called “the outsider test” when evaluating worldviews. Here's clip number seven.

PODCASTER: By the way, if you want to know Craig has an outside test, go on YouTube and type in “William Lane Craig properly basic belief in other religions” and someone asks him that question. He gives the answer in terms of “we would look for defeaters in those other religions.” So he's not saying, “Yes, Christianity is prima facie true.” He's not a presuppositionalist. A presuppositionalist would say you have to presuppose the Christian God to even do logic. And Craig is not saying that. He's saying if you had this experience of the Holy Spirit, in Reformed epistemology, you are warranted to believe in that experience unless there is the defeater, if you trust your senses. That's the argument. So it's not the same thing as presuppositionalism. So, yes, if a Hindu had a religious experience and they didn't have any connection to any other group and didn't know that, I think that they would be warranted in believing that. But if they do know about other religions and their arguments don't hold up then I think they would have to give that up; they would have to switch that out for a different belief. This is why it depends on what evidence you have available to you. You can't fault someone for not knowing if the evidence wasn't available to them. So Paul, I think, just is getting these two categories mixed up here.

DR. CRAIG: Amen! That’s all I can say to that. That was excellent. I think that the great insight of Alvin Plantiga’s Reformed epistemology is that he sees what is right about presuppositionalism without making the presuppositionalist’s mistake of reasoning in a circle – that you have to presuppose Christianity is true in order to prove that it's true. Rather, Plantinga’s point is that you can have properly basic beliefs that seem to be true to you, and you are perfectly rational to believe in them so long as you do not have defeaters for those beliefs. Like the podcaster, Plantinga would say that a person in another religion could say exactly the same thing if he is not confronted with certain defeaters. So I'm really impressed with the grasp on the issues that these young apologists seem to have.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the final clip. Even though it's somewhat of a side issue, I included it because I think it's interesting. They get into the hiddenness of God or divine hiddenness. Here's clip number eight.

PODCASTER: It's just hard to really determine what, if Christianity has met a high epistemic bar or not, because it's all subjectively determined by each person. I mean, Dillahunty has such an extremely high bar that it’s just unreasonable. And you could say that maybe little old ladies at church have got a really low bar. I mean how do we really judge this? This just seems subjectively so.

PODCASTER: Doesn't Dillahunty think that even if God were to appear to him he would think it's a hallucination.

PODCASTER: He has said some stuff like that. Similar stuff.

PODCASTER:  He told me that in our debate. Well, he said even if he was convinced God existed, he wouldn't worship him. But he also said he doesn't know what would convince him but God does know and so the burden is on God to demonstrate that. I think that the whole point of this is that I think it's – Dan can correct me, I know he knows Swinburne better but – Swinburne talks about the joy of seeking. I think the idea that . . . you know, we all have these channels and we're doing this right now and we're talking about theology and apologetics because there is stuff to discuss and debate. If God was as obvious as the existence of trees or something, I think we would go about our lives and be indifferent towards him. But I think the idea that we have to work and we have to study and we have to learn, it not only builds up our own self-discipline but makes us more engaged and more interested to learn more about God. If God just told us everything up front, I think we would become brutally bored with it. So I'm excited that we have to discuss these and disagree on things. I think that just makes it more worthwhile.

PODCASTER: You could just say something like God has axiological reasons for keeping an epistemic distance.

DR. CRAIG: This is wonderful. I think that what these fellows realize is that the seeking of God is conducive toward finding the genuine knowledge of God. And that's why the Bible urges us, “Seek, and you will find.” But for the person who is indifferent, who's cold-hearted, who is even hostile to God, that person is unlikely to find God or to be convinced because his heart is so closed. So there is genuinely something beneficial and worthy in the need to seek after God in order to come to God on God's terms, and not to stand back, fold one's arms, be as skeptical as one can, and demand unrealistic evidence that you know will never be supplied and so to feel comfortable in your unbelief.

KEVIN HARRIS: In conclusion, I know that you probably agree with me that the future seems to be in pretty good hands here. It is very encouraging to see these young men getting together and discussing these issues, interacting with your work, and, as you said, getting a good grasp of some of the things that have come up in this whole controversy.

DR. CRAIG: I agree completely. I commend these young apologists for what they are doing. This gives me confidence that our side is going to win because we out-think the other side.^[2]