Thinking Christian

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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A few weeks ago at Auckland University, New Zealand, William Lane Craig debated Bill Cooke on “Is Belief In God a Delusion?” I hope you’ll view the debate. I have just a few points from it to highlight.

Dr. Craig had the opening statement and offered reasons to believe there is a God. Dr. Cooke’s approaches included giving emotional reasons to be repelled by belief in God, including some rather irrelevant political shots; questioning whether we really know what we mean when we say the word “God,” and trying “to show that Dr. Craig’s notion of God is not the only God in town.”

It seemed to me that he really unlocked his central worldview later in the debate when he insisted he was not trying to undermine Dr. Craig’s faith at all. He said he was happy for Dr. Craig’s Christian faith, but “it doesn’t wash” to claim that “my projection of God upon the universe is the true one.”

So in essence, his view seems to be that it’s fine to believe in God, as long as you don’t do icky things with it like make a big deal about morality; but don’t assume that you know what you mean by “God,” or that you have any reason to believe your view connects with any reality whatsoever. Keep your beliefs, but keep them to yourself. Remember they are not just to be disconnected from society, they’re actually disconnected from all reality. Above all, don’t think of your truth as being objectively or exclusively true. This, Dr. Cooke says later, is a “wiser, more humble view of God,” less likely to build barriers between people.

Dr. Craig’s defense was primarily to take the offense: there are real reasons to believe we know true things about the true God. Dr. Cooke really offered no rebuttal to those arguments. He appealed to a number of (generally liberal) Christian theologians who would disagree with the idea of “proving God.” More context here would have been helpful. Dr. Craig does not generally try to prove God exists. He speaks of having “good grounds for belief in God” (my emphasis). The actual proof he attempts is this: that God is a better explanation for various phenomena than the alternatives.

I’ll say that again in a different way: Dr. Craig’s general approach, not just here but elsewhere, is to say that for things like the beginning of the universe, the universe’s fine-tuning for life, the historical accounts of Jesus, the near-universally recognized fact of objective morality, and so on, God is the best explanation. His arguments are not intended to prove God exists; they are intended to show that God is a better explanation for these things than other options are.

I myself do not think God’s existence can be proven, but I do think we can demonstrate that God is the best explanation for these kinds of things. Still I know that even if such a proof—that God is the best explanation—succeeds completely, one could still opt against believing in God; but then one would be rejecting the better explanation and choosing some lesser one. If you want to do that, it’s certainly your prerogative.

I hope that distinction is clear: the difference between proving God and proving that God is a better explanation.

Now, admittedly there are theologians who say that answers to the question of God can’t be known at all, especially by rational/evidential means. God simply cannot be known, or if he can, not by any rational faculties. Dr. Craig’s response is simple. I’ll paraphrase: say what you will, the arguments point to God.

For my part, I would add that theologians who doubt we can know anything at all about God are committing the wrong-God fallacy (a version of the straw man). It is an argument against a God that Dr. Craig doesn’t believe in himself: a God who cannot make himself known to his creation, an incompetent God. I’m sure Dr. Craig would be quite content to have such a God’s existence disproved, or the concept shown to be meaningless. But the God he believes in, and that I believe in, is a God who is not less capable of communication than you and I are. You and I can speak to each other. God, who is greater than we are, can speak to us too. What’s complicated about that?

Liberal Christians theologians are often inclined to say that in some sense or other, God is love. Pity their poor God, then, who is all love, yet who cannot connect relationally with us whom he loves. He would be like the young man mooning over the picture of some unattainable woman. All emotion, but no relationship. In God’s case, the failure would be entirely his. That’s rather an odd view to take of him, isn’t it?

I know there are issues relating to God’s other-ness, his transcendence, and the like. He is not like us. That does not make him less competent than us, however. He made us in his image, so there is certainly something of himself he could share with us: personality, mind, volition, emotion, and so on–including the ability to relate and to communicate. He was even able to take human form in Christ and reveal himself in that most human-relevant manner.

I strongly encourage you to watch the debate and hear the interchange for yourself.

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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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