Thinking Christian

Coming to Chesapeake, VA, on March 13!
The Answers 2010 Regional Apologetics Conference

With a lineup including several nationally-known speakers, a debate, and two sessions that I’ll be leading.

From the conference website:

The Answers -
Questions come at us from every angle: our friends, our relatives, even ourselves. These questions ask, “Does God Really Exist?”, “Is the Bible trustworthy?”, “Why does God allow so much suffering?” The questions are difficult, and they’re important. Now, it’s time to get The ANSWERS.

This conference is designed to help Christians answer these questions and more. Parents, teens, college students, home-schoolers, new believers, and pastors: EVERYONE can come here to get The ANSWERS. Experts from all over the country are gathering here to answer questions related to: atheism, Islam, Creation vs. Evolution, the Bible, the Resurrection, Pop-Culture phenomena like the Da Vinci Code, and more. Some of the speakers include best-selling author Mark Mittelberg, nationally renowned scholars Dr. Michael Licona and Dr. Craig Hazen, and former-Muslim Christian evangelist Dr. Nabeel Qureshi. The evening will conclude with a live debate between international debater David Wood and atheist author John Loftus on the topic “Does God Exist?” Seating is very limited, so sign up early to make sure you are here to get the ANSWERS!

[From The Answers 2010]

Not mentioned in that front-page promotion from the conference website: several breakout session speakers, including myself. I’ll be speaking on Postmodernism and “Does Faith Make Sense In an Age of Science.”

There’s still room for you! If you’re anywhere within range, don’t miss this great event.

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Book Review
Readers of this blog may be familiar with Dr. William Lane Craig’s work; we’ve discussed him more than once. A prolific author, Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and a frequent debater on the truth of Christianity. His recent revision of Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (Third Edition) represents a state-of-the-art presentation of evidences and arguments in support of Christian belief.

It includes some potential surprises for some readers. Did you know…

• That “all of the various traditional arguments for God’s existence find prominent, intelligent proponents, who defend these arguments in books published by the finest academic presses, in articles in professional journals, and in papers presented at meetings of professional philosophical societies;” in contrast to, say, the mid-1960s when TIME magazine asked, “Is God Dead?”
• That science and philosophy both strongly indicate that the universe had a beginning—for which science can provide no explanation?
• That the progress of skeptical thought has a history of its own—it has been contingent on various currents of thought, and is not (as some have supposed) the necessary result of scientific thinking?
• That apologetical thinking and research has a history, too—it didn’t time-warp from Thomas Aquinas to Josh McDowell?
• That Jesus Christ understood himself to be Messiah and to be Divine—and that this can be demonstrated from even that tiny portion of the New Testament that skeptical scholars acknowledge as genuine?
• That the tide of New Testament scholarship has turned in the past few decades, and now the majority of scholars, believers and skeptics alike, acknowledge that the New Testament can be trusted in its accounts of several basic facts regarding Christ’s life, death, and even his post-death (resurrection) appearances?
• That (related to that) a strong case for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ can be made just on the basis of information that even skeptical scholars consider to be trustworthy?
• That Christians may reasonably and rationally be assured that the faith is true, even apart from extra-biblical apologetical evidences?

For some readers these things may be a surprise, and for others they may be provocative. I can’t (and won’t try to) explain and defend them all here. Craig covers them carefully over the course of 400+ pages of material. Before considering evidences for the Resurrection, for example, he devotes entire chapters to philosophical questions surrounding miracles and historical knowledge. (Are miracles possible? Could reports of miracles ever be credible? Can we genuinely know any of what really happened in history?). The book is intended for seminary-level study, and includes extensive documentation through footnotes (not endnotes, thankfully) and chapter-by-chapter bibliographies.

I owe it to you to develop at least one point further here: that Christians may reasonably and rationally be assured the faith is true, apart from extra-biblical evidences. Craig makes the important distinction between knowing it is true, and showing it is true. Following Alvin Plantinga in Warranted Christian Belief, Craig says that the proposition “God exists,” can be properly basic. A belief B is properly basic if some person S can reasonably and with good assurance take B to be true, apart from an evidential foundation of other assured beliefs that imply B.

Properly basic beliefs include those that are

self evident or incorrigible…. For example, the proposition, “The sum of the squares of the two sides of a right triangle is equal to the square of the hypotenuse” is self-evidently true [well, to some people]. Similarly, the proposition “I feel pain” is incorrigibly true, since even if I am only imagining my injury, it is still true that I feel pain.

Craig suggests (following Plantinga still) that belief in God may be properly basic:

Man has an innate, natural capacity to apprehend God’s existence even as he has a natural capacity to accept truths of perception (like “I see a tree”). Given the appropriate circumstances—such as moments of guilt, gratitude, or a sense of God’s handiwork in nature—man naturally apprehends God’s existence…. Neither the tree’s existence nor God’s existence is inferred from one’s experience of the circumstances. But being in the appropriate circumstances is what renders one’s belief properly basic; the belief would be irrational were it to be held under inappropriate circumstances. Thus, the basic belief that God exists is not arbitrary, since it is properly held only by a person placed in appropriate circumstances.

He goes on to speak of two ways of knowing Christianity to be true: through the work of the Holy Spirit, and through argument and evidence. Concerning the first:

I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable … for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; … that such an experience provides one not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity’s truth, but with objective knowledge of that truth….

This may appear to run the risks of being circular or a potential source of self-deception on the part of the believer. Understood properly, it is most assuredly not circular. It is not, after all, an argument; it is much more akin to a perception. Can my perception that there is pain in my toe be circular? Hardly. Could I be deceived about that pain? I could be fooled, yes, regarding the source of the pain. Amputees can feel pain in limbs they no longer even have; it’s called phantom pain, and it’s quite common. If, however, I have an unmistakable personal experience of God, and if (a) my interpretation of that experience is not defeated by other knowledge and (b) other knowledge such as may be available to me supports that conclusion, then I am rational to take it to be an unmistakable experience of God. (A defeater is some argument or information that, if true, tends to refute a belief or to reduce confidence in it.) The amputee’s knowledge that he has no right foot is a defeater for the belief that his right big toe is actually hurting.

Craig acknowledges there are potential defeaters for the conclusion that an experience of God actually comes from God. Someday, he says, he may write a book to show that they do not in fact successfully undermine the Christian faith. This is not that book; rather it is his extensive compilation of positive information (evidence and argument) that supports the conclusion that God exists, that Jesus Christ claimed to be his Son, and that he validated that claim by his resurrection from death.

The point of all this is to put apologetics, belief, and rationality in proper perspective. Millions throughout history have believed in Christ without studying apologetics, and they have not made irrational decisions. God does not necessarily work through evidence and argument, although in the right context, evidence and argument may rationally and profitably be employed. One or their purposes is to address possible defeaters to the conclusion that one is experiencing God. Another purpose is on the second side of the know/show coin. I do not expect my experience of the Holy Spirit to persuade you, the unbeliever, that God exists and that Jesus Christ is his Son (Craig does not expect that either). I cannot show you, in a way that you will be able to take in as your own knowledge, how it is that I know God through my experience. I can, however, use evidence and arguments to show you that the existence of God is plausible, even more plausible than his non-existence.

That last clause counts for a great deal, by the way. Even as committed a Christian apologist as Craig will not claim he has a proof for God’s existence. He presents multiple overlapping and complementary lines of argument for God’s existence and for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Each of them individually makes Christianity more plausible (in my opinion) than competing worldviews. They do not constitute proof, though taken together, they make a very strong case for Christ indeed.

I must leave my other provocative bullet points hanging without further discussion, at least on this post. I expect I will come back to some of them in a future post, or that commenters will lead us to pick up one or more of them here. I strongly encourage you to read Reasonable Faith. Christians, you will gain considerably in your knowledge of God and his work in the world. Your faith will increase as you see more clearly how well founded it is. Questioners or skeptics, you will be able to interact with Craig’s arguments, and see for yourself whether, in light of the most current scholarship, Christianity is indeed a Reasonable Faith.

Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics by William Lane Craig. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008. 415 pages including index.Amazon Price US $17.16.

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Nathan Schneider emailed me today, informing me of his response to William Lane Craig’s recent cover article in Christianity Today. I mentioned that article briefly here on July 4, which was a day for family and not for blogging. Nathan’s article, Rumors of God’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated, provides a timely opportunity to say more.

Craig spoke in CT of a striking resurgence in evangelical scholarship, especially in philosophy. He illustrated this with an an all-too-brief summary of several apologetic arguments. Schneider’s response to Craig’s article is best summed up in this one sentence:

Whispering to his coreligionists in Christianity Today, to his subculture, Craig does not do justice to what the revolution is up against.

Schneider believes the resurgence of Christian scholarship is visible only from inside the culture. In other circumstances I might have acknowledged an element of truth to that. Christian readers may call to mind the names of our contemporary “heroes,” names including Chuck Swindoll, John Piper, Billy Graham; or musicians like Mercy Me, The Newsboys, or Kutless. You can add your favorites to the list. Here’s the sad fact: other than Billy Graham and Mercy Me, most of the rest of the world has never heard of them.

Schneider is saying something like that is the case with Christians in academia, and that the situation is nowhere near as rosy as Craig presents it. He dismisses Craig’s view of “bygone atheism” as “a straw man,” noting the continuing crop of atheistic bestsellers in the bookstores as evidence that atheism is not dead. He complains that Craig did not inform Christianity Today readers of objections to arguments for God, briefly outlined in the article. It is with open disdain that Schneider describes Craig as “almost cheerful about intelligent design theory, though he fails to mention its lack of support among credible biologists,” and he goes on to offer a rebuttal of the fine-tuning argument Craig had mentioned in his CT article. But he missed what Craig was intending to do with this article. He almost recognized it, as we see here:

 

Again, I do not mean to insist that these arguments are categorically wrong. Only that atheists and theists alike will never quite prove their “intellectual muscle” until they stop misrepresenting each other and misinforming their readers. Admittedly, Craig has limited space in the magazine format and cannot be expected to cover everything.

 

But it was never Craig’s purpose to properly represent the arguments, certainly not in all their substance and nuance. Rather he was trying to make readers aware of the discussion, and to illustrate the kinds of things that are being debated. To complain, as Schneider did, that he did not address the major objections is to miss the point. The article was not a work of apologetics, but a work of journalism about apologetics, with brief examples to illustrate, and a suggested reading list.

Craig obviously recognizes the reality of the debate. In the CT article he wrote,

Of course, there are replies and counterreplies to all of these arguments, and no one imagines that a consensus will be reached. Indeed, after a period of passivity, there are now signs that the sleeping giant of atheism has been roused from his dogmatic slumbers and is fighting back. J. Howard Sobel and Graham Oppy have written large, scholarly books critical of the arguments of natural theology, and Cambridge University Press released its Companion to Atheism last year. Nonetheless, the very presence of the debate in academia is itself a sign of how healthy and vibrant a theistic worldview is today.

It seems to me in view of this that Schneider is being singularly uncharitable with respect to Craig’s treatment of the arguments.

Regarding the cultural ghetto Schneider thinks Craig is mired in, he may simply have missed this brief reference Craig made to a source well outside Christian culture. It was early in the CT piece:

In a recent article, University of Western Michigan philosopher Quentin Smith laments what he calls “the desecularization of academia that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s.” He complains about naturalists’ passivity in the face of the wave of “intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.” Smith concludes, “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”

You can read Smith’s article for yourself at Philo Online. Before you do that, though, read this description of the journal, from Philo’s own website:

Philo is published biannually at the Center for Inquiry ["A Global Federation Committed to Science, Reason, Free Inquiry, Secularism, and Planetary Ethics"] with assistance from Purdue University. Its goal is to publish original, conceptually precise, and argumentatively rigorous articles in all fields of philosophy. Although not devoted to any specific branch of philosophy, Philo encourages the submission of work that examines philosophical issues from an explicitly naturalist perspective…. Philo is the publication of the Society of Humanist Philosophers.

That’s not exactly the monthly mimeograph newsletter from Chigger Creek Baptist Church (begging J. P. Moreland’s pardon—Chigger Creek Church being a favorite phrase of his). And what does Quentin Smith say, that Craig did not have space to quote more fully? Things like this:

The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of Plantinga’s influential book on realist theism, God and Other Minds, in 1967….

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga’s writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians.

Elsewhere Craig actually says he thinks the “one-quarter or one-third” estimate may be high. He is by no means breathlessly and blissfully unaware of what’s going on in the wider world, as Schneider seems to think he is. In view of his concern over theists and atheists “misrepresenting each other and misinforming their readers,” Schneider may want to re-examine how he has treated William Lane Craig’s work of journalism on a scholarly topic.

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This deserves more comment, but now on the 4th is not the time: William Lane Craig’s cover article on the resurgence of apologetics and Christian scholarship, in Christianity Today. Don’t miss it.

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I gave this talk at Seaford Baptist Church on Wednesday, April 23, 2008. Some portions have been edited out because they’re not applicable to a wider audience.

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