Note: even if you have heard Dr. Craig’s arguments before, I recommend jumping to the 48 minutes of Q&A time, which starts 72 minutes in.
About Dr. William Lane Craig:
William Lane Craig (born August 23, 1949) is an American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work on the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion, specifically the existence of God and the defense of Christian theism. He has authored or edited over 30 books including The Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979), Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology(co-authored with Quentin Smith, 1993), Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (2001), and Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity (co-edited with Quentin Smith, 2007).
Craig received a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1971 and two summa cum laudemaster’s degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, in 1975, in philosophy of religion and ecclesiastical history. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy under John Hick at the University of Birmingham, England in 1977 and a Th.D. underWolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich, Germany in 1984.
Dr. Craig was in Scotland to lecture at a physics conference, but a local church organized this public lecture at the University of St. Andrews.
Here is the full lecture with Q&A: (2 hours)
Summary:
- Naturalism defined: the physical world (matter, space and time) is all that exists
- Dr. Craig will present 7 reasons why naturalism is false
- 1) the contingency argument
- 2) the kalam cosmological argument
- 3) the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life
- 4) the moral argument
- 5) the ontological argument
- 6) the resurrection of Jesus
- 7) religious experience
Dr. Craig does mention an 8th argument early in the Q&A – the argument from the non-physicality of mental states (substance dualism), which is an argument that I find convincing, because a materialist conception of mind is not compatible with rationality, consciousness and moral agency.
Questions and Answers
He gets a couple of questions on the moral argument early on – one of them tries to put forward an evolutionary explanation for “moral” behaviors. There’s another question the definition of naturalism. There is a bonehead question about the non-existence of Jesus based on a Youtube movie he saw – which Craig responds to with agnostic historian Bart Ehrman’s book on that topic. There’s a question about God as the ground for morality – does morality come from his will or nature.
Then there is a question about the multiverse, which came up at the physics conference Dr. Craig attended the day before. There is a good question about the Big Bang theory and the initial singularity at time t=0. Another good question about transfinite arithmetic, cardinality and set theory. One questioner asks about the resurrection argument. The questioner asks if we can use the origin of the disciples belief as an argument when other religions have people who are willing to die for their claims. One of the questioners asks about whether the laws of nature break down at 10^-43 after the beginning of the universe. There is a question about the religious experience argument, and Craig has the opportunity to give his testimony.
I thought that the questions from the Scottish students and faculty were a lot more thoughtful and respectful than at American colleges and universities. Highly recommended.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I find that the arguments of conventional apologetics (against naturalism, for the existence of God, etc.) are of limited value, even when executed as beautifully as WLC executes them. For even if you win the argument and the unbeliever concedes the point, you still then have to prove that Israel’s God is the one true God, that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, that Messiah’s commandments must be obeyed by Jew and Gentile alike, and that the Bible is historically reliable if not the word of God. That’s why I prefer apostolic apologetics, which goes straight to the identity and authority of Jesus and the Bible – giving the maximum return on the investment of time.
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Oh he covers that with his resurrection argument. And the other arguments are necessary to establish that you have someone there to do the resurrecting. The resurrection is God’s stamp of approval on Jesus’ teaching which includes the claims you mentioned.
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Oh, I agree that WLC’s basket of arguments does a lot of good work. I’m just saying apostolic apologetics is more time-efficient, both for the apologist and the listener.
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If atheism is true, then apostologic apologetics won’t work.
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Apostolic apologetics implicitly defeats atheism because if you’ve proven that God speaks, you’ve proven, ipso facto, that He exists.
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Also, you can’t use the Bible without arguing for historical reliability.
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Conventional apologetics eventually has to get around to historical reliability of the Bible because, otherwise, there’s no way to actualize the lordship of Christ. Apostolic apologetics puts that argument front and center and thus saves time.
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Got it!
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I agree that approach is more time efficient, but I don’t know if it’s necessarily the best approach. Most people who change their minds don’t do it all of a sudden. It takes time to mull things over. Sometimes, it’s easier for people to mull things over if it only requires small steps.
Also, whether it’s easy to change your mind about something depends on what you already believe. A person who already believed in the supernatural would have an easier time swallowing an argument for the resurrection of Jesus than a person who didn’t believe in the supernatural.
I think arguments against naturalism are useful in that they prepare a person for further argumentation that might seem completely nuts if they didn’t already believe in the supernatural.
Of course everybody is different. Some people do change their minds radically in short periods of time. I just don’t think that’s the case with most people. So asking a full blown naturalist to completely change their mind about all kinds of specifics that entail radical changes in their worldview is just asking a lot in a short amount of time.
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I agree with you that people vary in the time it takes them to transition from unbelief to belief. It’s also true that the apologist catches people at different starting points, so this, too, creates variations in the time a conversion will take – if there is a conversion at all. All that said, the goal is to get people to Jesus, and the fewer steps you give them to get to Him, the shorter that trip will be…even though they’ll all take varying times to complete the walk.
All that said, there are more advantages to apostolic apologetics than just time-efficiency. Just to name one, anyone can present the apostolic apologetic method, but how many of us can make the arguments that William Lane Craig makes? One of the reasons WK keeps posting them is because the man’s intellect is amazing and his rhetorical skills are well-honed. His performances are mesmerizing, but I do not think for a minute that I, or most other people, could succeed at what he does.
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Much to my chagrin, I have learned in the last 24 hours that the term I used above – “apostolic apologetics” – is defined in different ways by different people. Though you fellows did not seem to misunderstand me, let me for the sake of others abandon the term and say that all I meant by it was using the New Testament in its capacity as the collection of all the primary historical sources for Jesus.
We cannot expect an unbeliever to accept the Bible, or any part of it, as the word of God in order for us to prove the claims of Jesus. But we have every right to use the New Testament in the same way that any other ancient texts – such as those of Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, or Livy – can be used to establish history. To unilaterally surrender this right is good for neither the believer nor the unbeliever.
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