Why Should I Believe God Exists? | Clemson University - 2019

In January of 2018, Dr. Craig gave a lecture on foundational arguments for belief in God. The event was sponsored by Ratio Christi and hosted at Clemson University in South Carolina.

RICK LUCAS: Welcome everybody to Clemson University. We've got a packed audience here. I'm absolutely delighted that we have everybody here. I know we've got people from around the Upstate Campus Ministries. Some of my colleagues, professors, and students. Delighted to have you here for this interesting discussion on why we should believe that God exists. My name is Rick Lucas, I'm a faculty member here at Clemson University. I work actually right across the street here in PRTM. I'm also the faculty advisor for Ratio Christi. Before I introduce our guests here, I would like to just give you just a little quick personal message. A few days ago I called a colleague at Harvard University. He just started there as a professor, and he's a dear friend. So I wanted to call and see how he's doing. He started there just a few months ago, and so I called, “How's it going at Harvard?” He said, “Rick, it's going pretty well. I’m making a lot of friends so we're having a lot of discussions. Rick, I want to tell you a little bit about that.” I said, “Yeah. Tell me what's happening at Harvard.” He said, “Well, the president of Harvard University made an announcement to the faculty based on a survey.” They took a survey of all the faculty at Harvard University, and what they found out is 93% of the faculty at Harvard University support, donate, and vote for one political party. So the president of the university made an announcement to faculty and said, “Based on this survey, ladies and gentlemen, we've just discovered there's a lot of people that don't agree with us, and we need to understand that.” And so what the president of the university did, which I think was brilliant, said, “You know what? What I want you to do – each faculty member – I want you to go and see your colleagues and tell your colleague what is false about what they believe to be true.” That gets the discussion going, doesn't it? Interesting. I'm a Christian in an academic environment. I'm in the minority. And so it is good to have some interesting discussions. Several years ago I talked to one of my faculty members – he's an atheist. He says, “Rick, I know you're a Christian. You believe in God, and I don't believe that God exists.”  I said, “Do you mind me asking you this? Why do you not believe that God exists?” He said, “Well, Rick, science and human reason.” I was stunned. I was like, “Wow, those are exactly the reasons I do believe God exists! We're going to have an interesting discussion. This is going to be great.” And so we did, and it was fascinating. And so what I like to do is maybe a little bit of Harvard. For my colleagues and professors out there, do this for me if you would. Come to my office (you know where I’m at – in PRTM) and tell me what is false about what I believe to be objectively true. I'd like for you to do that for me. Now, there's a little twist to this. Where are we going to meet? Will we have lunch? That's fine. But I got something really cool to offer with this. You see, before coming into academia I was a golf pro. At PRTM we like to have a lot of fun so we have this indoor driving range, I mean lab, in Newman Halls. I hope the provos isn't here. We can go hit balls. I mean, do a field study. And I could give you a golf lesson. I know there's a lot of professors that like to play golf, and they want to maybe learn how to play. So I can help you with that. So while we're trying to wrestle through the existential problem of why is there something instead of nothing, and we're wrestling with that, I can help you with your golf swing. Now, I can't perform miracles, but I can help you with your slice. Here’s what I discovered. I talk golf for a long time, and when you help somebody with their golf swing, you have a friend for life. If that's all that happens, I will be absolutely delighted. So I have that. Now, for the students out there. I've been here 18 years. It’s been a joy of my life to watch that 18 year-old grow up into a 22 year-old. Man, you're a different human being. The growth in your intellect, the maturation. I mean, it's just fantastic. I get to play a small part in that, and the other professors will concur. It's just an absolute joy to my life. But in that, obviously I've talked to a lot of students and they have a lot of questions. What do I believe? I talked to a student a few months ago: “I believe in nothing” and so forth. So for the students out there, you have those questions. I've got a good deal for you, too. There is somebody that I'm going to bring up on stage right now that I've gotten to know. He's a member of Ratio Christi. He is really a driving force for why this event has taken place. He's going to talk a little bit about that. I want everybody, if you would, give a great round of applause for Nathan Beasley.

NATHAN BEASLEY: Let me add my word of welcome. Thank you so much for being here. Good evening. I'm honored to be your host tonight. To get things started, first, let me recognize some special people that helped make tonight happen. A big thank you to Mr. Roger Troutman, and his family. And the Sears family who gave their generous donations to make this night happen. And thank you Ocean Drive Church, First Baptists of Easley, NewSpring Church, all of you for your support. Last, but certainly not least, thank you Mr. Barry Sudduth and the Sudduth family for your donations, your time, thought, leadership, and your elbow grease. Can you give them a hand?

On behalf of Ratio Christi at Clemson, thank you for joining us. We have a very special program in store for you tonight. Tonight's production is brought to you by Ratio Christi, a student apologetics organization that has a local chapter right here in Tiger Town. I hope that you'll join our weekly discussion Monday nights at 5:30 in Hardin Hall. We invite people of all beliefs to come investigate historical, philosophical, and scientific challenges to the Christian faith. We exist to discuss the big questions of life, and what bigger question is there then, “Why should I believe that God exists?” Well, perhaps a more contentious question for this audience is which Clemson quarterback is greater – Deshaun Watson or Trevor Lawrence? We may not all agree about that, but here at Clemson University we pride ourselves on our community. It has been called often the Clemson family. We use this phrase a lot because, especially after winning things such as the 2019 College Football National Championship, we gather together. But, you see, as soon as the focus moves away from football, one will quickly realize that our family is divided on almost every question of public policy, social organization, economy, and especially religious questions. We have very different beliefs. My challenge for you tonight is to consider – seriously consider – the positions opposing yours, no matter where you stand. Why? Because at least one of your neighbors believes differently than you do. And if we can grow to understand one another's beliefs, do you know that our sincere disagreement will be more respectful, our interactions more fruitful, and these will be very good results. I expect that you will see this exact honorable consideration demonstrated by our guest speaker tonight as he addresses respected leading scholars who disagree with him. There are several. Our special guest is none other than Dr. William Lane Craig, Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist University. At the age of 16 as a junior in high school he first heard the message of the Christian Gospel and yielded his life to Christ. Dr. Craig then pursued his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College and graduate studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, the University of Birmingham, and at the University of Munich. From 1980 to ‘86 he taught philosophy of religion at Trinity. In 1987 the Craigs moved to Brussels, Belgium where Dr. Craig pursued research at the University of Louvain until assuming his position at Talbot in 1994. He has authored or edited over 30 books including The Kalam Cosmological Argument, Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus, Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, and God, Time and Eternity as well as over a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology including the Journal of Philosophy, New Testament Studies, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, and The British Journal for Philosophy of Science. And would you believe it, in 2016 Dr. Craig was named by The Best Schools magazine as one of the 50 most influential living philosophers. Without further ado, would you help me give a warm welcome to Dr. William Lane Craig.

DR. CRAIG: Thank you very much. It is a thrill to be here at Clemson University. When I accepted this invitation I had no idea that I would be speaking at the home of the National Collegiate Football Champions, and so it is a special privilege to be with you tonight.

I've been asked to talk tonight about the question: Why should I believe God exists? The problem is that that question is ambiguous. For example, the Bible says anyone who wants to come to God must believe that he exists, and that he rewards those who seek him. So on one level, the reason you should believe God exists is so that you can come to him. This is actually the most fundamental reason to believe in God – so that you can come to know him. On another level though, the question might mean: What reason is there to believe that God exists? Well, one answer to that question is that God, by his Spirit, speaks to your heart, convicting you and drawing you to himself. God has not abandoned us to our own devices to work out by means of our own cleverness and ingenuity whether or not he exists. Rather he speaks to the heart of every person, and it's up to us whether we will respond to his initiatives, or whether we will shut our hearts against his love and grace. But that's not what the organizers of this event had in mind when they asked me to speak this evening. In their invitation they wrote, “We would like you to give an overview of the best arguments for God's existence, as well as why we can be confident that our beliefs entail knowledge and truth as opposed to being merely subjective preferences.” Note that having good arguments for God's existence does not preclude also having a subjective experience. They are both perfectly valid ways of knowing. But our focus tonight is supposed to be on the arguments.

Now, as a professional philosopher I believe that the hypothesis that God exists makes sense of a wide range of the data of human experience. I think there are many good arguments for the existence of God, whereby a good argument I mean an argument that makes its conclusion more probable than not. A good argument doesn't need to make the conclusion certain or indubitable but simply more probable than its opposite. In the time that we have together tonight I want to share four good arguments for God's existence. In order to make these arguments easy to understand, I'm going to be showing some animated videos that we've developed at Reasonable Faith. These, and many others, are all available on our website ReasonableFaith.org.

Number one: God makes sense of why anything at all exists. This is the most fundamental question of philosophy: Why is there something rather than nothing? Why does anything at all exist? The great German philosopher, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, came to the conclusion that the answer to this question is to be found not in the universe of contingent things but in God. God exists necessarily and is the explanation of why anything else exists. Our first video explains Leibniz’s reasoning.

VIDEO: We live in an amazing universe. Have you ever wondered why it exists? Why does anything at all exist? Gottfried Leibniz wrote, "The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?" He came to the conclusion that the explanation is found in God. But is this reasonable? Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. The universe exists. From these it follows logically that the explanation of the universe's existence is God. The logic of this argument is airtight. If the three premises are true, the conclusion is unavoidable. But are they more plausibly true than false? The third premise is undeniable for anyone seeking truth. But what about the first premise? Why not say, "The universe is just there, and that's all"? No explanation needed! End of discussion! Imagine you and a friend are hiking in the woods and come across a shiny sphere lying on the ground. You would naturally wonder how it came to be there. And you'd think it odd if your friend said, "There's no reason or explanation for it. Stop wondering. It just IS!" And if the ball were larger it would still require an explanation. In fact, if the ball were the size of the universe, the change in its size wouldn't remove the need for an explanation. Indeed, curiosity about the existence of the universe seems scientific - and intuitive! Someone might say: "If everything that exists needs an explanation, what about God? Doesn't he need an explanation? And if God doesn't need an explanation, then why does the universe need an explanation? To address this, Leibniz makes a key distinction between things that exist NECESSARILY and things that exist CONTINGENTLY. Things that exist NECESSARILY exist by necessity of their own nature. It's impossible for them NOT to exist. Many mathematicians think that abstract objects like numbers and sets exist like this. They're not caused to exist by something else; they just exist by necessity of their own nature. Things that exist CONTINGENTLY are caused to exist by something else. Most of the things we're familiar with exist contingently. They don't HAVE to exist. They only exist because something else caused them to exist. If your parents had never met, you wouldn't exist! There's no reason to think the world around us HAD to exist. If the universe had developed differently, there might have been no stars or planets. It's logically possible that the whole universe might not have existed. It doesn't exist necessarily, it exists contingently. If the universe might NOT have existed, why DOES it exist? The only adequate explanation for the existence of a contingent universe is that its existence rests on a non-contingent being - something that cannot not exist, because of the necessity of its own nature. It would exist no matter what! So "Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence"..."either in the necessity of its own nature, or in an external cause." But what about our second premise? Is it reasonable to call the explanation of the universe...God? Well, what is the universe? It's all of space-time reality, including all matter and energy. It follows that if the universe has a cause of its existence, that cause cannot be part of the universe - it must be non-physical and immaterial - beyond space and time. The list of entities that could possibly fit this description is fairly short - and abstract objects cannot cause anything. Leibniz' Contingency Argument shows that the explanation for the existence of the universe can be found only in the existence of God. Or, if you prefer not to use the term "God," you may simply call him: "The Extremely Powerful, Uncaused, Necessarily Existing, Non-Contingent, Non-Physical, Immaterial, Eternal Being Who Created the Entire Universe...And Everything In It."

DR. CRAIG: Here, once more, are the premises of Leibniz’s argument.

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the explanation of the existence of the universe is God.

According to premise (1), there are two kinds of things: things which exist by a necessity of their own nature, and things which are produced by some external cause. Let me explain this a bit more.

Things which exist by a necessity of their own nature exist necessarily. It's impossible for them not to exist. Philosophers call such things metaphysically necessary beings. Examples? Many mathematicians think that numbers, sets, and other mathematical entities exist in this way. By contrast, things that are caused to exist by something else don't exist by a necessity of their own nature. They exist because something else has produced them. If their causes were removed then they would not exist. Examples? Familiar physical objects like people, planets, and galaxies belong in this category.

So when Leibniz says that everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, that explanation may be found either in the necessity of its own nature or in some external cause.

So what is the explanation of the existence of the universe, whereby “the universe” I mean all of physical reality. It can only be found in an external cause which transcends the universe. Since it's not part of the universe of contingent things, this cause must exist by a necessity of its own nature. So if the universe has an explanation of its existence, there must be a metaphysically necessary, immaterial being beyond space and time. There are only two candidates that could possibly fit that description, either an abstract object (like a number) or an unembodied mind or consciousness. But abstract objects can't cause anything. That's part of what it means to be abstract. The number 7, for example, has no effect upon anything. So it follows logically that the cause of the universe must be a transcendent mind, which is exactly what God is.

I hope that you grasp the power of Leibniz’s argument. If successful, it proves the existence of a metaphysically necessary, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, personal cause of the universe. This is truly mind-blowing.

Number two: God makes sense of the origin of the universe. Have you ever asked yourself where the universe came from? Typically, atheists have said that the universe is just eternal and that's all. But is that plausible? The next video explains how the scientific evidence for the origin of the universe points beyond the universe to its transcendent creator.

VIDEO: Does God exist, or is the material universe all that is or ever was or ever will be? One approach to answering this question is the cosmological argument. It goes like this. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist.Therefore, the universe has a cause. Is the first premise true? Let's consider. Believing that something can pop into existence without a cause is more of a stretch than believing in magic. At least with magic you've got a hat and a magician. And if something can come into being from nothing, then why don't we see this happening all the time? No; everyday experience and scientific evidence confirm our first premise. If something begins to exist, it must have a cause. But what about our second premise? Did the universe begin, or has it always existed? Atheists have typically said that the universe has been here forever. The universe is just there, and that's all. First, let's consider the second law of thermodynamics. It tells us the universe is slowly running out of usable energy, and that's the point. If the universe had been here forever it would have run out of usable energy by now. The second law points us to a universe that has a definite beginning. This is further confirmed by a series of remarkable scientific discoveries. In 1915 Albert Einstein presented his general theory of relativity. This allowed us for the first time to talk meaningfully about the past history of the universe. Next Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaitre, each working with Einstein's equations, predicted that the universe is expanding. Then in 1929, Edwin Hubble measured the red shift and light from distant galaxies. This empirical evidence confirmed not only that the universe is expanding, but that it sprang into being from a single point in the finite past. It was a monumental discovery almost beyond comprehension. However, not everyone is fond of a finite universe, so it wasn't long before alternative models popped into existence. But one by one, these models failed to stand the test of time. More recently three leading cosmologists, Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, proved that any universe which has on average been expanding throughout its history cannot be eternal in the past, but must have an absolute beginning. This even applies to the multiverse, if there is such a thing. This means that scientists can no longer hide behind a past eternal universe. There is no escape. They have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning. Any adequate model must have a beginning just like the standard model. It's quite plausible then that both premises of the argument are true. This means that the conclusion is also true; The universe has a cause. And since the universe can't cause itself, its cause must be beyond the space-time universe. It must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, uncaused, and unimaginably powerful, much like... God. The cosmological argument shows that in fact it is quite reasonable to believe that God does exist.

DR. CRAIG: Here, once more, are the three simple premises of this argument.

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the universe has a cause.

One of the most startling developments of modern science is that we now have pretty strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning about 14 billion years ago in a cataclysmic event known as the Big Bang. As explained in the video, in 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which is on average in a state of cosmic expansion throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a beginning. And that goes for multiverse scenarios, too. In 2012, Vilenkin showed that models which do not meet this one condition still fail for other reasons to avert the beginning of the universe. Vilenkin concluded, “None of these scenarios can actually be past eternal. . . . All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”^[1] In the fall of 2015 Vilenkin strengthened that conclusion. He wrote:

We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV [Borde-Guth-Vilenkin] theorem gives reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed.^[2]

The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem proves that classical space-time under a single very general condition cannot be extended to past infinity but must reach a boundary at some time in the finite past. Now, either there was something on the other side of that boundary or not. If not, then that boundary just is the beginning of the universe. If there was something on the other side then it will be a region described by the yet-to-be discovered theory of quantum gravity. In that case, Vilenkin says, it will be the beginning of the universe. Either way the universe began to exist. Since something cannot come into being from nothing, the absolute beginning of the universe implies the existence of a beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, changeless, immaterial, enormously powerful, creator of the universe.

Number three: God makes sense of the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. In recent decades, scientists have been stunned by the discovery that the existence of intelligent life depends upon a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions simply given in the Big Bang itself. Scientists once believed that whatever the initial conditions of the universe might have been, eventually intelligent life might evolve somewhere. But we now know that our existence is balanced on a razor’s edge. The existence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos depends upon a conspiracy of initial conditions which must be fine-tuned to a degree that is literally incomprehensible and incalculable. The following video explains how this remarkable fine-tuning points to a personal designer of the universe.

VIDEO: From galaxies and stars down to atoms and subatomic particles, the very structure of our universe is determined by these numbers. These are the fundamental constants and quantities of the universe. Scientists have come to the shocking realization that each of these numbers has been carefully dialed to an astonishingly precise value, a value that falls within an exceedingly narrow life-permitting range. If any one of these numbers were altered by even a hairsbreadth, no physical, interactive life of any kind could exist anywhere. There'd be no stars, no life, no planets, no chemistry. Consider gravity, for example. The force of gravity is determined by the gravitational constant. If this constant varied by just 1 in 10 to the 60th parts, none of us would exist.To understand how exceedingly narrow this life-permitting range is, imagine a dial divided into 10 to the 60th increments. To get a handle on how many tiny points on the dial this is, compare it to the number of cells in your body, or the number of seconds that have ticked by since time began. If the gravitational constant had been out of tune by just one of these infinitesimally small increments, the universe would either have expanded and thinned out so rapidly that no stars could form and life couldn't exist, or it would have collapsed back on itself with the same result: no stars, no planets, and no life. Or consider the expansion rate of the universe. This is driven by the cosmological constant. A change in its value by a mere one part in 10 to the 120th parts would cause the universe to expand too rapidly or too slowly. In either case the universe would again be life-prohibiting. Or, another example of fine-tuning: if the mass and energy of the early universe were not evenly distributed to an incomprehensible precision of one part in 10 to the 10 to the 123rd, the universe would be hostile to life of any kind. The fact is, our universe permits physical, interactive life only because these and many other numbers have been independently and exquisitely balanced on a razor's edge. Wherever physicists look, they see examples of fine-tuning. The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. If anyone claims not to be surprised by the special features that the universe has, he's hiding his head in the sand. These special features are surprising and unlikely. What is the best explanation for this astounding phenomenon? There are three live options. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design. Which of these options is the most plausible? According to this alternative [physical necessity], the universe must be life-permitting. The precise values of these constants and quantities could not be otherwise. But is this plausible? Is a life-prohibiting universe impossible? Far from it. It's not only possible; it's far more likely than a life-permitting universe. The constants and quantities are not determined by the laws of nature. There's no reason or evidence to suggest that fine-tuning is necessary. How about chance? Did we just get really, really, really, really lucky? No; the probabilities involved are so ridiculously remote as to put the fine-tuning well beyond the reach of chance, so in an effort to keep this option alive, some have gone beyond empirical science and opted for a more speculative approach known as the multiverse. They imagine a universe generator that cranks out such a vast number of universes that, odds are, life-permitting universes will eventually pop out. However, there's no scientific evidence for the existence of this multiverse. It cannot be detected, observed, measured, or proved, and the universe generator itself would require an enormous amount of fine-tuning. Furthermore, small patches of order are far more probable than big ones, so the most probable observable universe would be a small one, inhabited by a single, simple observer. But what we actually observe is the very thing that we should least expect: a vast, spectacularly complex, highly-ordered universe inhabited by billions of other observers. So even if the multiverse existed, which is a moot point, it wouldn't do anything to explain the fine-tuning. Given the implausibility of physical necessity or chance, the best explanation for why the universe is fine-tuned for life may very well be it was designed that way. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect monkeyed with physics and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question. There is for me powerful evidence that there is something going on behind it all... it seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature's numbers to make the universe. The impression of design is overwhelming. The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge.

DR. CRAIG: The examples of fine-tuning in the video are all accurate, up-to-date, and well established. The question we face then is: What is the best explanation of the cosmic fine-tuning? There are three live options in the contemporary literature on fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design. So our argument can be formulated in three simple steps.

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

As the video explains, the only serious alternative to design is the multiverse chance hypothesis. There are multiple problems with this hypothesis, but let me highlight one of the most important. If our universe were just a random member of a multiverse then we ought to be observing a much different universe than we do. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has explained this objection forcefully. He calculates that the odds of our universe’s initial low entropy conditions existing by chance alone are 1 chance out of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123. By contrast, the odds of our solar system suddenly forming by the random collision of particles is around 1 chance out of 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 60. This number, says Penrose, is “utter chicken feed” in comparison with 10 to the 10 to the 123rd.^[3] What that means is that it is far more probable that we should be observing an orderly region no larger than our solar system since a universe like that is unfathomably more probable than a fine-tuned universe like ours. In fact, the most probable observable universe is one which consists of a single brain which pops into existence by a random fluctuation with illusory perceptions of the external world. So if you accept the multiverse explanation, you're obliged to believe that you are all that exists and that this auditorium, your body, other people, and everything you perceive in the world are just illusions of your brain. No sane person believes such a thing. On atheism, therefore, it is highly improbable that there exists a randomly ordered multiverse.

With the failure of the multiverse hypothesis, the alternative of chance collapses. Neither physical necessity nor chance provides a good explanation of the fine-tuning of the universe. It follows logically that the best explanation is design.

Number four: God makes sense of objective moral values and duties in the world. The following video makes this argument very clear.

VIDEO: Can you be good without God? Let's find out. [An atheist saves a cat stuck in a tree.] Absolutely astounding! There you have it; undeniable proof that you can be good without believing in God. But wait; the question isn't can you be good without believing in God. The question is, can you be good without God? See, here's the problem. If there is no God, what basis remains for objective good or bad, right or wrong? If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist, and here's why. Without some objective reference point, we have no way of saying that something is really up or down. God's nature provides an objective reference point for moral values. It's the standard against which all actions and decisions are measured. But if there's no God, there's no objective reference point. All we are left with is one person's viewpoint, which is no more valid than anyone else's viewpoint. This kind of morality is subjective, not objective. It's like a preference for strawberry ice cream; the preference is in the subject, not the object, so it doesn't apply to other people. In the same way, subjective morality applies only to the subject. It's not valid or binding for anyone else. So in a world without God, there can be no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. God has expressed his moral nature to us as commands. These provide the basis for moral duties. For example, God's essential attribute of love is expressed in his command to love your neighbor as yourself. This command provides a foundation upon which we can affirm the objective goodness of generosity, self-sacrifice, and equality, and we can condemn as objectively evil greed, abuse, and discrimination. This raises a problem. Is something good just because God wills it, or does God will something because it is good? The answer is: neither one. Rather, God wills something because he is good. God is the standard of moral values, just as a live musical performance is the standard for a high-fidelity recording. The more a recording sounds like the original, the better it is. Likewise, the more closely a moral action conforms to God's nature, the better it is. But if atheism is true there is no ultimate standard, so there can be no moral obligations or duties. Who or what lays such duties upon us? No one. Remember, for the atheist, humans are just accidents of nature, highly evolved animals. But animals have no moral obligations to one another. When a cat kills a mouse, it hasn't done anything morally wrong; the cat's just being a cat. If God doesn't exist, we should view human behavior in the same way. No action should be considered morally right or wrong. But the problem is good and bad, right and wrong, do exist. Just as our sense experience convinces us that the physical world is objectively real, our moral experience convinces us that moral values are objectively real. Every time you say, “Hey! That's not fair! That's wrong! That's an injustice!” you affirm your belief in the existence of objective morals. We're well aware that child-abuse, racial discrimination, and terrorism are wrong, for everybody, always. Is this just a personal preference or opinion? No. The man who says that it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says two plus two equals five. What all this amounts to then is a moral argument for the existence of God. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. But objective moral values and duties do exist. Therefore, God exists. Atheism fails to provide a foundation for the moral reality every one of us experiences every day. In fact, the existence of objective morality points us directly to the existence of God.

DR. CRAIG: Here, again, this argument can be very simply formulated:

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
2. Objective moral values and duties do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind about the moral argument is not to confuse moral ontology with moral epistemology. What do I mean by that? Moral ontology has to do with the objective reality of moral values and duties. Moral epistemology has to do with how we come to know moral values and duties. The moral argument has nothing to say about moral epistemology. It is entirely about moral ontology. It makes no claim about how we come to know objective moral values and duties. It is all about the grounding of objective moral values and duties in reality. So epistemological objections about how we come to know our moral duties or values are irrelevant.

From the two premises, it follows logically that God exists. The moral argument complements the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments by telling us about the moral nature of the creator and designer of the universe. It gives us a personal, necessarily existent being who is not only perfectly good but whose very nature is the standard of goodness and whose commands constitute our moral duties.

There are many other arguments for God's existence which we don't have time to discuss this evening. But on our website, ReasonableFaith.org, you can find videos explaining some of these as well. The arguments presented here tonight constitute a powerful, cumulative case for the existence of God. Together they yield a metaphysically necessary, uncaused, transcendent, immaterial, personal creator and designer of the universe who is the paradigm and source of absolute moral goodness and love. And that not only makes a huge difference for mankind in general, but it can also make a personal life-changing difference for you as well.

NATHAN BEASLEY: Dr. Craig, let's go over here and have a little bit of discussion. You've given us four very powerful reasons to believe that God exists – four powerful lines of evidence. I have to say, don't we also have to consider that there are many people that do not accept things of God, and I think that they have very good reasons to believe the way that they do. Why don't we consider some of those in some video interviews? Let's perhaps first consider Lawrence Krauss’ comments.

DR. LAWRENCE KRAUSS: One of the most amazing realizations of the 20th century was that quantum mechanics combined with relativity allows something to come from nothing. In fact, nothing is unstable. Religion and theology and to some extent philosophy have contributed almost nothing to our fundamental understanding of the universe because questions such as “What is something?” and “What is nothing?” are really scientific questions, not philosophical ones. When we applied quantum mechanics to gravity the truly remarkable thing is that even space itself can be created from nothing by quantum mechanical effects. There's been a revolution in cosmology in the last 25 years. We now understand that the dominant energy in the universe resides in empty space, and that's changed everything. In fact, it helps point unambiguously to the possibility that the universe arose from nothing. It turns out the universe we live in is perhaps the worst of all possible universes for the long-term future of life. In the far future, the universe becomes cold, dark, and empty, and life will end. Nothing will once again reign supreme.

DR. CRAIG: Lawrence Krauss’ remarks in the clip are relevant to the first two arguments that I shared tonight. He would answer Leibniz’s question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and object to the first premise of the cosmological argument that everything that begins to exist has a cause by saying that quantum physics can explain how the universe came into being from nothing.

Unfortunately, Professor Krauss has made some very fundamental grammatical and logical mistakes. The word “nothing” is a term of universal negation. It is a quantifier expression meaning “not anything.” There is a whole series of these negative universal quantifiers in English. For example, “nobody” means “not anybody,” “nowhere” means “not anywhere,” “none” means “not one,” “never” means “not ever.” So these quantifier expressions, because they're pronouns, can be used as the grammatical subject of a sentence rather than as a quantifier expression. But when you use it that way (as a referring term to something) in fact you're misunderstanding the grammar of the sentence. By taking “nothing” as a referring term rather than as a negative quantifier you can generate all sorts of humorous situations. For example, if you say, “I saw nobody in the hall,” the wiseacre says, “Yeah, he's been hanging around there a lot lately.” Or if you said, “I had nothing for lunch today” he says, “Really? How did it taste?” Or if you say, “We went nowhere for Christmas” he says, “Well, why did you go there?” You can make jokes misusing these quantifier expressions as singular terms of reference. And these jokes are as old as literature itself. In Homer's Odyssey, he tells the story of how Odysseus is captured by the Cyclops, and Odysseus tells the Cyclops that his name is Nobody. One night Odysseus puts out the Cyclops’ eye, and the other Cyclops hear him screaming, and they say, “What's going on? What's the matter?” And the Cyclops says, “Nobody is killing me! Nobody is killing me!” And they say, “Well, if nobody is hurting you then there's nothing we can do about it. Just be quiet and go back to sleep.” To repeat: the use of these quantifier expressions as referring terms is a joke! Now, in light of this, how remarkable it is that Professor Krauss, his native tongue is English, uses the word “nothing” as a referring term to what is clearly something. For example, he says things like this:

* Nothing is unstable.

* Nothing weighs something

* There are different kinds of nothing.

* Nothing is almost everything.^[4]

This is simply a misuse of language. In fact, what Krauss is actually talking about is the quantum mechanical vacuum or quantum mechanical fields which are physical realities governed by physical laws. They are most emphatically not nothing. And they cannot be extended infinitely into the past. Let me read to you the response from his review of Krauss' book, A Universe From Nothing, by David Albert, a very eminent philosopher of science in the New York Times Sunday Review of Books. This is what Albert had to say:

According to relativistic quantum field theories, particles are to be understood, rather, as specific arrangements of the fields. Certain ­arrangements of the fields, for instance, correspond to there being 14 particles in the universe, and certain other arrangements correspond to there being . . . no particles at all. And those last arrangements are referred to, in the jargon of quantum field theories, for obvious reasons, as “vacuum” states. Krauss seems to be thinking that these vacuum states amount to the relativistic-­quantum-field-theoretical version of there not being any physical stuff at all. . . .

But that’s just not right. Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states . . . are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. . . . The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings . . . amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

. . . Krauss is dead wrong and his religious and philosophical critics are absolutely right.^[5]

NATHAN BEASLEY: I am starting to see that the way that we use language is very important to clear communication.

DR. CRAIG: Exactly. And that is why, by the way, the trash talk of certain physicists like Krauss or biologists like Richard Dawkins with regard to philosophy is so misconceived because one of the benefits of good philosophy is conceptual analysis so that we aren't misled by language in the way that Professor Krauss has been so evidently misled.

NATHAN BEASLEY: Thank you for that clarification. Let's consider at least one more comment.

INTERVIEWER: Do you believe in God?

DR. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Me? The more I look at the universe, just the less convinced I am that there is something benevolent going on. If your concept of a creator is someone who's all-powerful and all-good – that's not an uncommon pairing of powers that you might ascribe to a creator, all-powerful and all-good – and I look at disasters that afflict Earth and life on Earth – volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, disease, pestilence, congenital birth defects, you look at this list of ways that life is made miserable on Earth by natural causes, and I just ask: how do you deal with that? So philosophers rose up and said if there is a God, God is either not all-powerful or not all-good. I have no problems if, as we probe the origins of things, we bump up into the bearded man. If that shows up, we're good to go. OK? Not a problem. There's just no evidence of it. And this is why religions are called faiths collectively because you believe something in the absence of evidence. That's what it is. That's why it's called faith. Otherwise, we would call all religions evidence. But we don't for exactly that reason. Given what everyone describes to be the properties that would be expressed by an all-powerful being in the gods that they worship, I look for that in the universe and I don't find it. So I remain unconvinced. But if you've got some good evidence, bring it. Bring it up. Bring it. OK? So I don't lead with that information because what I believe should be irrelevant to anyone. It's not about me. It's about the real world.

DR. CRAIG: I found this clip to be very reasonable and thoughtful on the part of deGrasse Tyson. He basically explains that there are two things that prevent him from believing in God. First is the philosophical problem of evil, particularly natural evil. And then the second one is the claim that there's no evidence for God. Now, I think we can immediately dismiss that second claim on the basis of the good arguments that we've seen this evening, and Dr. Tyson offers no refutation or response to any of these arguments.

I do want to correct one thing, though, that he said. He said faith is believing something in the absence of evidence. This is a caricature of faith that is offered by the unbeliever. This is not the believer’s definition of faith! Faith is trusting in what we have good reason to think is true. Faith is trusting in what we have good reason to think is true. So the question is: Do we have good evidence for God? If we do then we face the question: Am I going to put my trust in him?

Now, with respect to the natural problem of evil, the version that Dr. Tyson raises is called the logical version of the problem of evil. We have a video on this at our website ReasonableFaith.org.^[6] The claim here by the atheist is that there's some sort of logical contradiction between the propositions “God is all-powerful and all-good” and “natural evil exists.” These are logically incompatible with each other, he claims. The difficulty is that there's no explicit contradiction between those two propositions – one is not the negation of the other. So if the atheist is claiming that they are implicitly contradictory, he must be making some hidden assumptions that would serve to bring out the contradiction and make it explicit. The problem is no atheist has ever been able to identify what those plausibly true assumptions are. In fact, I think we can show that these two propositions are logically compatible with each other. All we need to do is come up with a third proposition which is consistent with the first and entails the second. And here's an example: God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting the natural evil in the world. If that's even possibly true then it shows that the existence of an all-good, all-knowing God with the natural evil in the world is perfectly consistent. Now, you might say, “What are some of those morally sufficient reasons?” Well, we can just guess at them. For example, perhaps only in a world suffused with natural evil would the optimal number of persons freely come to know God and so find eternal life. Now, is that true? Who knows?! But as long as it's even possibly true it shows that there is no logical incompatibility between God's being all-good and all-powerful and the natural evil in the world. So I'm very pleased to say tonight that it is almost universally agreed among philosophers today, both theists and atheists, that the logical version of the problem of evil has been resolved. And that should be good news for Neil deGrasse Tyson.

NATHAN BEASLEY: We’ll have to see what he says when he watches this video. I'm sure you're not surprised that there are more people who disagree with you. Let's hear some more comments.

DR. RICHARD DAWKINS: I think most physicists – those who accept that there is a problem – resort to something that they call the Anthropic Principle, which I think is rather elegant, although many physicists hate it. We could only be living in the kind of universe which is capable of giving rise to us, so the fact that we are observing anything at all means that we are in that kind of universe. Now, some physicists stop there and say end of story because we are here. We, in a sense, create the necessity for the laws of physics that make it possible for us to be here. I agree with those who don't find that totally satisfying. The philosopher John Leslie expresses his dissatisfaction with it by imagining a man facing a firing squad and there are 10 men in the firing squad. They all aim their rifles at him. The rifles all go off, and he finds himself still alive. And so he says to himself, “Well, obviously, the rifles all missed because otherwise I wouldn't be here.” But that leaves unexplained why the rifles all missed. You still feel you need an explanation for why they all missed. A version of the Anthropic Principle does answer that, and that's the one that I think many physicists, including the present Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, favors. There are, I gather, and physicists here may correct me, independent reasons to believe that the universe in which we are is only one of billions of universes. They describe it as a bubble foam of universes and we're just in one bubble, and all the different bubbles in the foam have different fundamental constants and different laws and the great majority of them have their knobs tuned to different places and do not give rise to the conditions where evolution becomes possible. There's only a small minority of these universes in which the conditions, the fundamental constants, make evolution possible. And now the Anthropic Principle comes in. We have to be in one of that minority of universes. So it's a kind of Darwinian selection of universes. There's one physicist called Lee Smolin who makes it very much more explicitly Darwinian. He actually thinks that universes give birth to daughter universes. He suggests in black holes. So that there's a kind of family tree of universes and each universe can trace its pedigree backwards through its mother universe, its grandmother universe, and so on. And at the moment of birth which he considers to be a black hole, the laws and constants of physics in the daughter universe are slightly tweaked versions of the mother universe’s laws and constants. Now, the qualities that make for a successful universe (success in the Darwinian sense of giving birth to baby universes) are qualities like lasting long enough to form galaxies and stars and therefore black holes because you need black holes to give birth to baby universes, and those are the very same qualities that you need in order to give rise to the conditions for life. So Smolin even thinks of a kind of natural selection and an actual evolutionary progression towards universes that get better and better at building baby universes and coincidentally get better and better at making the conditions for evolution. The Smolin theory is not widely accepted by other physicists, but the weaker version of the Anthropic Principle favored by Martin Rees the Astronomer Royal and many others is strongly favored by many physicists.

DR. CRAIG: This is a wonderful clip on the fine-tuning argument that I shared this evening. You notice in this clip that Dawkins admits that on the basis of John Leslie’s firing squad illustration that the Anthropic Principle in and of itself is impotent to explain away the fine-tuning. Rather it must be conjoined with this metaphysical hypothesis of a multiverse of randomly ordered worlds. Now, one of the problems with the multiverse hypothesis is how to explain its existence. Why does this multiverse exist? Dawkins, in order to explain it, appeals to Lee Smolin's evolutionary cosmology which he admits is not widely accepted. Now, that's an understatement! I'm not aware of any cosmologist that embraces Smolin’s speculative scenario. But what Dawkins doesn't realize is that Smolin’s scenario actually backfires on the opponent of the design argument, for the universes which will be most proficient in producing black holes will be universes which produce primordial black holes prior to star formation so that Smolin’s evolutionary cosmology would actually tend to weed out universes that produce stars, galaxies, planets, and hence life. So the scenario would actually make the fine-tuning problem worse and not better. And, moreover, you notice that Dawkins had nothing to say (I think he's not even aware) of Roger Penrose’s objection to the multiverse hypothesis that was shared in the video.

NATHAN BEASLEY: Well, I’ll have to say the multiverse is sounding a lot more complicated the more we learn about it. Let's hear at least one more comment.

DR. BART EHRMAN: My first interest in this particular question about the accurate preservation of the Gospels started out when I was a student at Moody Bible Institute. At Moody Bible Institute I believed, as did my professors, that the Bible is without error in the autographs; in other words, the originals of the New Testament did not have mistakes in them even if subsequent copies of the New Testament may have mistakes in them. The problem is we don't have the originals of the New Testament. What we have are thousands of copies of the New Testament that were made in most cases centuries later. We don't have the originals. We have copies made centuries later. These copies that were made centuries later contain numerous mistakes, thousands of mistakes, tens of thousands of mistakes, hundreds of thousands of mistakes. This was a problem for me at Moody Bible Institute, and I decided that I wanted to learn more about the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. I went to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with the foremost scholar in the field, Bruce Metzger. I devoted years of my life to this study. This has been the core of my research for the past 30 years. At some point I came to the realization that my belief in the inerrancy of the autographs didn't make sense. If God inspired the Bible without error, why hadn't he preserved the Bible without error? I couldn't think of a good answer then, and I still can't think of a good answer now, even though I think I've heard every answer ever proposed. I couldn't any longer believe that God had inspired the originals because I was sure he had not preserved the original. Let me tell you now what I think about this entire situation, which is that we cannot know whether the Gospels have been preserved accurately through the ages, and I'm going to try and illustrate with you by explaining how it worked. Take the Gospel of Mark. Whenever Mark was written (say it was written in the year 65 or in the year 70 in the city of Rome, say, I don't know where it was made). Whoever wrote Mark put it in circulation and somebody copied the Gospel of Mark then somebody copied that copy and somebody copied the copy of the copy then somebody copied the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy, and we don't have any of those copies. Everybody who copied the text made mistakes. Our first surviving copy of Mark probably dates to around the year 220 A.D. That is 150 years after Mark was first produced. Our first complete copy of Mark comes from the year 350, about 280 years after Mark. We have lots of copies from later times, a thousand years after Mark we get lots of copies. When you compare all of these copies with one another, they all differ from one another.

DR. CRAIG: OK. When you see Bart Ehrman, you understand that he was once a fundamentalist preacher, and he gets into that preaching mode. His argument here is that the New Testament documents cannot be inerrant because we no longer have the original autographs. All we have are copies of copies of copies that are filled with thousands and thousands of mistakes. Now, this is extremely misleading. The New Testament is the best attested book in ancient history both in terms of the number of manuscripts and in terms of the nearness of those manuscripts to the date of the original. Textual scholars, by comparing these thousands of manuscripts with each other, are able to reconstruct the text of the original autographs to about 99% certainty. There are about 138,000 words in the New Testament and only 1,400 of those words remain uncertain as to their reading. And those words are utter trivialities. They are things like in 1 John 1 the author says, “We write this that our joy may be full.” But some manuscripts say, “We write this that your joy may be full.” Is it “our” or is it “your?” It doesn't matter. Nothing hangs upon that kind of trivial uncertainty. So only about 1% of the New Testament concerns words that are uncertain, and those are complete trivialities. That's why, when I learned Greek in college, I can pick up my Greek New Testament and when I read it I know that 99% of the words that I am reading are the original words penned by Luke or by Paul or by John. That's how well textual scholars have been able to reconstruct the original text. And Bart Ehrman knows this. He is a textual scholar. He knows this. His fellow New Testament scholars have differentiated between two Bart Ehrman's – there is scholarly Bart who knows this, and then there's popular Bart who deliberately misleads laypeople by writing controversial and sensationalist books that are bestsellers. But he knows the difference between the two. This was very evident on a Lutheran radio program that I heard in 2008 when Ehrman was interviewed. After describing all these copyist errors that we saw on the clip, the interviewer says to Ehrman, “Well, what do you think the New Testament originally said?” And Ehrman said, “I don't know what you mean. I don’t understand you.” And the interviewer said, “What do you think these New Testament documents originally said?” And Ehrman said, “Well, they said pretty much what the text says today.” And the interviewer said, “But you said there were all these copyist mistakes.” And Ehrman said, “Yeah, but we've been able to reconstruct the text.”^[7] So he knows this, but for the sake of sensationalism, and honestly (or dishonestly) misleading unsuspecting and innocent laypeople you get this kind of misrepresentation.

NATHAN BEASLEY: And how important it is to listen to the scholars both on stage and in their written work. That’s one take-away. Very good. I think we have time for one more comment. Let's consider this last one.

DR. SAMUEL HARRIS: I think there's a few obvious things to point out. One is that we clearly don't get our morality out of our holy books because when you go into the holy books they are bursting with cruelty. The Old Testament, the New Testament, the Qur’an. These are profoundly cruel and morally ambiguous books at best. I mean, the Ten Commandments – the first four commandments have nothing to do with morality. They have to do with theological offenses. You know: don't take any other gods before me, don't take God's name in vain, no graven images, etc. Don't work on the Sabbath. What are you supposed to do when people break those commandments? You're supposed to kill them. I mean this is unbelievably immoral, and we're not doing that now. Not because the book itself is so wise. I mean, to take a more relevant example: slavery. Slavery is clearly endorsed in the Bible. It's endorsed in the Old Testament. It's endorsed in the New Testament. We all agree that slavery is wrong. We conquered that ground morally through some very hard fought conversations and also wars. Religion was of very little help in that. I mean, there were – it's true that abolitionists were cherry-picking Scripture trying to find ways to justify their project. But their project wasn't coming from Scripture because Scripture is clear – it supports slavery. There was . . . the evil of slavery is not recognized in the Bible, and it is certainly not repudiated in the Bible. And so the slave holders of the South were on the winning side of that theological argument, and religion was an impediment to making that moral progress. Again, even if it were not an impediment, even if it were extremely useful, that would not be a reason to believe that any of our books were dictated by an omniscient being.

DR. CRAIG: OK. The basic argument from Sam Harris here is that our morality is not derived from the Bible because the Bible sanctions various immoralities like slavery. Now, there are a number of confusions in his statements. First, he fails to distinguish between what is immoral and what is illegal. I think that it is immoral, for example, to blaspheme against God. But it's not illegal. That's because we do not live in a theocracy as ancient Israel did. So of course our laws don't mirror those of ancient Israel which was a theocratic society. Secondly, it's not true that the breaking of the commandments that Harris mentioned were all capital crimes in ancient Israel. Every Israelite knew that he didn't love the Lord his God with all his heart and soul and mind and strength, but forgiveness was available through the Levitical sacrifices and sincere repentance. Thirdly, it's false that ancient Israel practiced slavery as we understand that term. Our understanding of slavery is shaped by the experience of the American South, but that's not what ancient Israel practiced. What was practiced in ancient Israel is more accurately described as indentured servanthood. That is to say, in those days there was obviously no government safety net to help people who fell on hard times. There was no aid to families with dependent children. There was no Medicare. There was no food stamps. So how could you provide for these persons? Well, indentured servanthood was a sort of anti-poverty program in ancient Israel. If a man fell on hard times, couldn't pay his debts, he could keep his family together by selling himself to someone as an indentured servant and then working off his debts until he had to be released and could go back into normal free society. Israel had the law, moreover, that every seven years everyone had to be released from indentured servanthood, even if their debts had not been fully paid off. So, in fact, this was actually a kind of voluntary indentured servanthood that served as an anti-poverty program. It was not like slavery in the American South. And, you know, in some ways it was a better system than what we've got today because rather than create a dependency class of second and third generation welfare recipients that breaks up the nuclear family, the Israelite system allowed a man to retain his dignity while he worked off his debt and kept his family together until such time as he could be out on his own again. So in some respects, at least, it was really a better system, I think. If you're interested in this subject, take a look at Paul Copan’s book Is God a Moral Monster? His two chapters on slavery in that book are eye openers and very helpful.

Finally, one last comment on Harris. Harris himself has no basis for morality. The intrinsic value of human beings is rooted in the biblical doctrine that man is created in the image of God and therefore endowed with intrinsic moral value and inherent human rights. But on Harris' naturalistic view, human beings are no more valuable than rats. So, in fact, it's Harris that faces the real problem here of grounding morality in a naturalistic worldview. You can have a look at the debate that I had with Sam Harris at the University of Notre Dame on the question “Is the foundation of morality natural or supernatural?” In fact, as I think about it, I've debated every one of these guys in the videos except Neil deGrasse Tyson who refuses to do so. But you can go on YouTube and look at the debates with Krauss, Dawkins, and Harris and see how they fare when their arguments are subjected to critical scrutiny.

NATHAN BEASLEY: I have to say it is so clarifying to understand the historical facts which illuminate the reality, and how surprising that Dr. Harris' comments actually turn about when he is so strong in his moral indignation. It actually supports the reality that God exists. Well, we've all heard a lot from Dr. Craig and his comments here, but we want to open it up to you, the audience, who has made it out to the theater tonight. If you would, if you have a question that you'd like to ask Dr. Craig, you'll have a unique opportunity. If you'll line up in this aisle here to the stage right, and there's a mic set up. Please line up at the line, and you'll also see an X marked on the ground. If you would position yourself near the mic and speak slowly and clearly so that Dr. Craig can hear you and address your question. Thanks.

QUESTION: Good evening. It is quite an honor to be able to be in the presence of someone who's been so defensible in the name of the Lord. It seems tonight we've talked a lot about the cause of things – why we believe in such things. Just from my personal experience, the cause for a lot of atheists' views can sometimes almost be pre-existing from experiences in their lives. They use almost scientific reasoning to really overview the underlying fact that a lot of their experiences with Christianity were not healthy experiences. What are your kind of takes on a lot of those experiences?

DR. CRAIG: I try not to psychoanalyze my atheist interlocutors. As a philosopher, I'm called upon to assess the arguments that they give and not to psychoanalyze them as persons. But, I must say, sometimes the anger and the vitriol that comes from them does make me suspect that there are deep-seated emotional issues here more than just rejection of an argument or evidence. So after sharing the argument with the person I will sometimes say, “I'd like to know why are you so angry? Did you have a negative experience as a child or something that turned you against God?” And kind of in a sense begin to do a little pastoral counseling rather than philosophical argument. But the important thing in doing philosophy is to try to detach the arguments from the person so that you're not attacking or criticizing the person but just the argument.

FOLLOWUP: As it seems a lot of times atheists like to do to Christians as a lot of your experiences with Professor Krauss.

DR. CRAIG: Oh, you've seen those Australian debates. Yeah, that was pretty vicious.

FOLLOWUP: Attacking your character just because of your beliefs, not even because of the person that you are, but just because of the beliefs that you believe in.

DR. CRAIG: That was a difficult experience. I have never sustained such personal venomous attack as from Lawrence Krauss.

FOLLOWUP: But as a Christian and as someone who's just trying to grow up in the society we live in, it's nice to see someone who can take those criticisms and attacks and just deflect them in such a humble and in such a kind way.

DR. CRAIG: You are very kind.

QUESTION: Thank you for coming, Dr. Craig. I really appreciate it. My question concerns the issue of natural evil that you brought up in response to one of those objections. My basic question is . . . I would object to your response by saying . . . you proposed this third proposition that God can justify natural evil if there's some morally sufficient reason to justify it. So, for example, making a world in which people can know him. But if God is all-powerful then he could fulfill this morally sufficient reason, for example, by having people know him through any means. He could create any universe without natural evil that would fulfill this morally sufficient reason because by definition he is all-powerful.

DR. CRAIG: God's being all-powerful doesn't mean that he has the ability to do logically impossible things, and it's logically impossible to make someone do something freely. So given human freedom, we don't know that there is a world that's feasible for God in which he could bring as many people to eternal life and salvation freely as this world or a world suffused with natural evil and suffering. The atheist would have to prove that there's a possible world that God could have actualized free creatures in which more persons or a greater percentage of persons would freely come to find salvation and eternal life but without an equivalent amount of suffering. And that's pure speculation. Nobody knows such a thing. I think that the atheist argument just lays a burden of proof so heavy on the atheist’s shoulders that no one can sustain it.

FOLLOWUP: That seems to me like you're just limiting the definition of all-powerful at that point then. There is a limitation then.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think so. This is the general understanding of omnipotence. It is the ability to do whatever is logically possible for an agent to do. It doesn't mean God can do logical impossibilities.

FOLLOWUP: Why is it logically impossible to create a universe in which you can make free agents willingly believe in you while not suffering natural evils?

DR. CRAIG: Because it's logically impossible to make someone freely do something.

FOLLOWUP: Why can’t you create a universe rather? My verbiage was . . .

DR. CRAIG: You're asking why couldn't God create a universe of free creatures in which just as many people come to know him and his salvation but with less natural evil in it. And I'm saying that we have no idea whether such a world is feasible for God or not. Given human freedom, there are possible worlds like that but they may not be actualizable or feasible for God because the human persons wouldn’t cooperate – they wouldn't do what God would want them to do. So the burden of proof lies upon the atheist to show that there is a feasible world like that available to God. And there's simply no way to prove that. Now, let me come back on your earlier point. Suppose you do say that omnipotence means the ability to do the logically impossible. Then the problem of evil immediately evaporates because God can bring it about that he is all-powerful, all-good, and that natural evil exists, even though that's logically impossible. No problem.

QUESTION: I'm an atheist but I have a more simpler question. Do you believe in the separation of state and church?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I believe both in the Establishment Clause of the Constitution that the state should not make any establishment of religion. But then also in the Freedom of Exercise Clause that the state should not inhibit the free exercise of religion. So I think both of these guarantees in the Bill of Rights are to be ardently defended.

FOLLOWUP: Me, too. My question is: if you believe in the government being separate from the church so therefore the government is not tied to the church at all, do you think therefore . . . because your question that therefore a Christian has to run the state in order for it to be moral, could it be a Muslim or agnostic or atheist?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, no. I don't think . . . in fact, if I may speak, well, no . . . Let me just say this. I think that many evangelical Christians came of age politically during the Carter Administration. Many people voted for Jimmy Carter because he said he was a Southern Baptist, born-again Christian, and so the Christians came out and voted for Carter. And then, I think, for most of those voters, he turned out to be a huge disappointment. What those voters, I think, came to realize as a more sophisticated approach is that you don't elect someone because of his religious beliefs or because he is a Christian. You elect him because of his policies that you support. And that's what the left, I think, has difficulty understanding about the evangelicals who support Trump. They deplore the man's character and narcissism and anti-Christian behavior, but they agree with a lot of his policies, and so they just swallow hard and ignore his character while supporting those policies. I don't think at all that we should vote for Christians or try to get them into office because that's just no guarantee that that person is going to adopt the right policies.

QUESTION: Thank you for coming here. Earlier you talked about the moral argument. I just kind of wanted to play the devil's advocate for a second because there's something . . . this is an argument I've heard before. I'm not sure if I believe that it is not possible for humans to not be moral without God.

DR. CRAIG: Wait. Say that again?

FOLLOWUP: It might be possible for humans to be moral without religion.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. So do I. That's what the video says. The question isn't “Can you be good without believing in God?” Yeah. Remember the atheist who rescues the little kitten? You can be good without believing in God. The issue in the video is: “Can you be good if there is no God and hence therefore there is no good and no evil, no right and no wrong.”

FOLLOWUP: Right. But I think that we can all agree that what separates humans from other animals is that we are self-aware, and we are aware that other people are just like us and they also suffer and they also feel pain. I think that just from a purely logical standpoint, causing someone else pain and suffering is not good because we would not do that to ourselves. I feel like just on basic humanism it can work on its own. Is that? . . .

DR. CRAIG: I think that that is what a lot of people believe, but it seems to me that that kind of humanism has an arbitrary and premature explanatory stopping point. It's arbitrary because there's just no reason on an atheistic or naturalistic worldview to think that human beings have intrinsic moral worth or duties to obey. Who or what lays these moral duties upon them? I can't see any ground for it on a naturalistic view. I think it's premature because we can always ask why are human beings intrinsically good or why shouldn't I inflict pain upon my fellow human beings? Animals do this all the time to one another. If you look at the animal kingdom, actions like rape or actions that look like rape go on all the time in the animal kingdom. So why is this wrong for Homo sapiens to engage in? You might say because it harms someone else. Why is it wrong to harm another member of your species? It seems to me that that is a premature explanatory stopping point. You need to get to, I think, God as the locus and paradigm of moral value and duties.

FOLLOWUP: But what I was saying is that because . . . let’s say it's common in the animal kingdom . . . let's say a wolf kills another wolf's mate and then to purify the gene pool he kills the previous wolf’s cubs. The wolf doesn't understand that those other creatures that he killed are other sentient beings. He doesn't understand that they also suffer pain because he’s an animal. Humans, I think, are different, and I feel like there's a big difference between those two.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I do, too, but that's because I believe in the existence of God which grounds and explains that difference. But on a naturalistic view, man has just got a more evolved relatively advanced nervous system. But as Richard Dawkins says in his book they're just animated chunks of matter like the other things. And I just don't see any reason to think that humanism is a non-arbitrary and non-premature explanatory ultimate.

QUESTION: Thank you, Dr. Craig, for coming. My question is with regards to the kalam cosmological argument. There are two theories of time: the A theory and the B theory. I understand that some people try to get out of the kalam argument by appealing to the B theory because on the B theory all moments in time are kind of like events on a movie reel. They're all equally real, but the film reel itself could be eternally existent. So they would say the second premise is only true with respect like a ruler has a beginning – it has a first inch on it – but the ruler didn't come into being. Now, how would you respond to someone who tried to use the B theory? I don't accept the B theory, but I don't really know what to say if someone tried to appeal to it other than just expressing my own personal incredulity.

DR. CRAIG: This is a point that I've made myself. This isn't something discovered by objectors. In my work on the kalam cosmological argument I raise the issue of these two different theories of time, and I think that some of the kalam arguments are dependent upon the A theory of time which sees time as something that is dynamic, temporal becoming is objective and real, the past and the future do not exist in any sense. I think you can still run the kalam cosmological argument on a B theory of time, but it's just all the more obvious if the A theory is true. It becomes almost undeniable on the A theory. But even on the B theory of time – suppose that we have a movie reel with different frames in it and all these frames are equally real. And on one of the frames suddenly a horse appears in that frame where before in the prior frame was just your empty living room. Even B theorists will say there has to be a cause which would explain why the horse exists in that frame whereas he didn't exist in the previous frame. I think that the argument can still go through given that static B theory of time. But my own persuasion, like you, is that that theory of time is false and that the better theory is the A theory. I have done my philosophical duty on this issue. I have written two books on this subject. One called The Tenseless Theory of Time: A Critical Examination and another The Tensed Theory of Time: A Critical Examination. In these two books I look at all of the arguments both for and against the A theory of time and the B theory of time respectively and defend the superiority of the A theory. On a popular level, these are summarized in my little book Time and Eternity which is a more popular level treatment of these issues. But I'm ready to go to the mat, so to speak, for the A theory of time which I think makes the kalam argument all the more persuasive.

NATHAN BEASLEY: I think an audience question which demonstrates the knowledge of the philosophy of time should be commended.

DR. CRAIG: Yeah. Obviously he's already done some reading.

QUESTION: Dr. Craig, thank you so much for coming tonight. I just had a question about your work on God and abstract objects. In your published work, obviously you've defended the view that abstract objects like numbers don't actually exist and so on. You've also defended the view that objective moral values and duties do exist. So obviously both are immaterial things. My question is: Isn't it being inconsistent in affirming that objective moral values and duties do exist but also denying that abstract objects [exist].

DR. CRAIG: It would be inconsistent only if one were a Platonist about moral values and duties. If you thought like Plato that “Justice” just exists as an ideal form or that “Virtue” or “Goodness” or “Loyalty” just exists, but that's not the view. The view that I'm defending meshes hand-in-glove with my anti-realism about Platonism because it grounds moral values in a concrete object – in God himself. And so this view is anti-Platonist in that the objectivity of moral values and duties is grounded in God and his commands, not in some sort of a Platonic realm.

QUESTION: Dr. Craig, thank you for coming tonight. It’s been great. I love your work. I have a question and it's related to the objective values that you talked about that humans have. I wanted to ask you about the inherent value that we have. It's also kind of relating to some current cultural issues. New York just passed a bill allowing abortions up to birth. A lot of evangelicals, at least most that I know, have rightly expressed this as wrong. One thing that I struggle with is we really only have value about preborn children when they're older and more developed. So can you give us maybe a talk about the image of God or some way to help us value preborn children, not only when they're very developed, but also when they're conceived? How can we hold that value all the time?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. The question here is: Is the developing fetus a potential person? Or is it rather a person with potential? I would take the latter view. I would say that this little fetus – the embryo, the fertilized egg that is now a human being in the earliest stages of its development – is a person with enormous potential. And if that is not interrupted by accident or artificial destruction of its life it will grow into a full adult member of its species. What makes it a person is not the body, it's the soul. Human beings have a rational soul in virtue of which we are in God's image and therefore have inherent human worth and dignity. So it is in virtue of being ensouled creatures that these little ones, I think, have intrinsic human value and that therefore it’s homicide to destroy them.

QUESTION: Thank you for coming to South Carolina. My question is in regard to the fourth argument that you presented with objective moral values and duties, and specifically to the second premise of that argument where it says that objective moral values and duties do exist. I've thought about that argument before, and it seems to me that objectivity there is being conflated with universality in that we're saying that just because everybody believes something doesn't necessarily make it that that thing actually is true.

DR. CRAIG: You are very perceptive to see that distinction.

FOLLOWUP: Obviously in Nazi, Germany everybody would have believed that Jews were evil and terrible, but that doesn't actually mean that Jews were evil and terrible. So is it the case that just because everybody believes that rape or murder is wrong, does that really make it wrong or does that just means everybody believes that?

DR. CRAIG: It just means everybody believes that. You are quite right; you should not equate objectivity with universality. Had the Nazis won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them, maybe everyone would have thought the Holocaust was good. But that would not make it objectively good. There can be societies like Nazi, Germany or Afrikaner, South Africa which are so morally corrupted that they perpetuate atrocities thinking that these are good. Remember I said the argument isn't about moral epistemology. There's no claim here that our moral intuitions are infallible or indefeasible. On the contrary, moral growth means that we can come to perceive moral values and duties more clearly than perhaps we used to. I know in my own life my attitude toward certain things has changed as I've grown older, and I think I have a better perception on certain activities that in terms of their moral worth or their rightness or wrongness than I did as a young man.

NATHAN BEASLEY: Dr. Craig, we had questions submitted by ticket holders – people here tonight. I want to ask you one of these questions. I'll keep the questioner anonymous – initials CB. How do you go from arguments like the ones you've used tonight that support the idea that the universe was created by a god-like being to show that this creator is in fact the God of the Bible? In other words, how do you go from the general theism that might be supported by some of these arguments to specifically believe in the God of the Bible? And if there are such arguments to make that progression, are those arguments not more important to emphasize?

DR. CRAIG: Well, that latter question should be directed toward the organizers of this event, not to me! They invited me to speak on “Why should I believe God exists?” And I do think that's the more fundamental question. Once you believe that God exists then the question arises: Has this God revealed himself to us in some way that we can know him more fully, or has he remained aloof and distant from the world that he has made? I think that's where you make the transition from a kind of generic theism to specifically Christian theism. The way that transition would be made – I've already hinted at – you've got to look at the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be the revelation of God. He claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had broken into human history, and that in his person we could see God and his love for us. So the question will be, I think, who do you think Jesus of Nazareth is? This was a subject of my doctoral work in theology in the University of Munich where I looked at the historical credibility of Jesus’ resurrection. I have to say, I was stunned to discover that the majority of New Testament historians who have written on this subject today believe that after Jesus was crucified, his corpse was interred in a tomb by a man named Joseph of Arimathea, that thereafter his tomb was discovered empty on the first day of the week after his crucifixion by a group of female disciples, thirdly that thereafter various individuals and groups of people saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death, and fourth that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead despite every predisposition to the contrary. Now, those facts are agreed upon by the wide majority of scholars who have written on the historical Jesus and on the fate of the historical Jesus. So the question is: What's the best explanation of those facts? Down through history various counter-explanations have been offered than the resurrection – things like the conspiracy hypothesis, the apparent death hypothesis, the displaced body hypothesis, the hallucination hypothesis. And none of these has commended itself to contemporary scholarship as a good plausible explanation of those four facts. So I'm persuaded that the best explanation of those facts is the one that the original eyewitnesses gave – that God raised Jesus from the dead. If that is a historical fact, what that means is that God has unequivocally and publicly confirmed the allegedly blasphemous claims for which Jesus of Nazareth was crucified thereby showing that he was who he claimed to be. And that's why I'm a Christian rather than a Muslim or a Jew or just a deist – because of Jesus and the evidence for his resurrection.

NATHAN BEASLEY: As you've already hinted, it sounds like we have more worthwhile discussions to bring you back for. I think the audience agrees. All right. We have time for one last audience question.

QUESTION: Hello. Thank you so much for coming tonight. I just wanted to ask how can you reconcile . . . because in the Old Testament God calls himself “a jealous God” and he has committed such atrocities as killing individual people or having his nation of Israel kill other people. How is that reconciled with the all-good God?

DR. CRAIG: I've dealt with this in my column on our website called Question of the Week where I take a question every week from readers. I believe it was question number 16 and then I revisited again question number something like 324 where I deal with this question.^[8] I would commend those to you. In a nutshell, when God says that he's jealous, what it means is that God will not permit worship to be given to any false god or deity other than himself. The reason for that is plain – as the embodiment of goodness itself, as the paradigm of goodness, worship should only be directed toward God. To worship some finite lesser thing is evil because worship and adoration should only be directed toward the supreme good, the paradigm of goodness, which is what God is. So that's what it means to say that God is a jealous God. He will not allow people to worship false gods rather than him. That is sin; that is evil to do that. And I think that's quite correct. Now, in these cases in the Old Testament that you mention, these judgments were always upon people for their sin. God was visiting judgment upon them. These were not arbitrary acts of cruelty or viciousness. These were judgments for sins. So, for example, when the people of Israel went down into Egypt, God consigned them to slavery in Egypt for 400 years. He allowed them to languish there for 400 years because he said the iniquity of the Amalekites (the people who were living in the promised land) “is not yet complete.” They were not yet ripe for judgment. But when those people became so reprobate, so evil in their sin, practicing things like child sacrifice and all sorts of sexually deviant practices like bestiality and so forth, then God brought Israel out of Egypt and he used the armies of Israel to bring judgment upon the tribes in Canaan. Judgment which, I think, was in fact merited and deserved, just as hundreds of years later he would use the armies of Babylon to judge his own people Israel for their sin when Israel was carried off into exile. So these judgments are simply manifestations of the holiness of God and his intolerance of evil.

NATHAN BEASLEY: Thank you to our questioners for such impressive and thoughtful questions. Well, this is the conclusion of our event tonight. Thank you so much everyone for making it out. Thank you, Dr. Craig.