In this episode Trent sits down with his academic role model, the philosopher William Lane Craig.
Transcription:
Trent:
Dr. William Lane. Craig, welcome to the Council of Trent podcast.
Dr. Craig:
Good to be with you, Trent.
Trent:
I’m just really jazzed to be here sitting down with you. I’m not even sure how to start. I’m just like, I don’t know. I’m just kind of a little bit starstruck or people would say Fanboying, if you will, because I followed your work for such a long time and it was just really instrumental in my own conversion to Christ really, and in becoming an apologist, being a debater. So yeah, I just want a few different things to chat about. One I want to talk about, there’s a little bit of similarity kind of in our spiritual and vocational journey. So on my end for you to know, my religious journey began. I was raised in kind of a non-religious household. I didn’t go to church. My parents would read Bible stories to me, but when I was in junior high, I asked, how do I know these Bible stories are true? Right?
Dr. Craig:
Was this a nominally Catholic home?
Trent:
This is interesting. So my mother was Catholic, but left the Catholic church and she became kind of a nominal Protestant, and my dad is Jewish, but he didn’t go to temple, so we didn’t go. I was raised just kind of nothing, just some Bible stories here and there. Eventually I became a deist in high school. I believe there was a god out there who kind of started everything, but I thought religion was just for, I loved science. I was in the Young Astronomers Club. I thought that religion was for unintelligent people. Then when I was in high school, I met some Catholic friends and they took me to a youth group, introduced me to the faith, and I thought, okay, well, how do I know that this is true? And so that would’ve been around in 2001. And so I went online and I started watching debates between Christians and atheists and yours were at the top of the list. And that’s, and just seeing how someone like yourself could understand the scholarship science and philosophy and really take atheist to task. I mean, it just sent me down the rabbit hole of then starting with debates
And then reading the essays back and forth on each side. I remember I went to the secular web infidels.org, Jeffrey j Lauder’s
Dr. Craig:
Website.
Trent:
So this is early for me. This is 2001. This is before YouTube. Before there was really, I mean, there were some that were out there, but not a lot in order to, it took forever Just to download one of your debates. So I remember there was the Atkins debate. I loved your debate with Keith Parsons.
Dr. Craig:
Oh yes.
Trent:
In 1998. So some of your debates, tell me about how you got, because you began your work. You were an academic, you’re studying at University of Birmingham Munich, you’re a teacher, but then you really made a contribution to the kingdom, taking your, being a philosophy and theology professor going out and doing these debates. How did that kind of start?
Dr. Craig:
My debate training began before I even became a Christian. When I went to high school, my older sister said to me, all you want to do is argue. You should debate, join the debate club. And I said, well, what’s that? And she says, oh, it’s this club at school where all they do is argue with each other. And I thought, well, that sounds really interesting. So I went out for the debate team, and for four years, I competed in high school debate tournaments all around the state of Illinois. And when I graduated and went to Wheaton College, I joined the Wheaton debate team,
Trent:
And
Dr. Craig:
We debated all over the country on the university circuit. Well, when I graduated from Wheaton, I thought my debating days were over, I would never do it again. And then after I finished my gradual work that you mentioned in philosophy and theology, I started getting invitations from Canadian University campus groups to debate prominent atheists or humanists on subjects pertinent Christian faith. Now in high school and college, our debates were always on political or economic
Trent:
Questions,
Dr. Craig:
Policy questions. But what I discovered was that if I were to have a debate on a university campus where there’s a level playing field, both sides are given the opportunity to present their best case that thousands of students would come out to such a debate. And I thought, this is really the forum for evangelization.
Trent:
As opposed, if you just went to the school and William Lane Craig is giving a talk on God’s existence,
Dr. Craig:
Then we’d get a few score who would come to hear my talk, and probably mainly Christians, but you have a debate on the existence of God, and thousands will come, many of whom are nonbelievers. And this gave me the opportunity to present or an intellectual defense of the gospel to these non-Christian students, which I was burdened to do.
Trent:
Yeah, so I’ve noticed this myself. When I’ll do episodes for a podcast or YouTube, if I were to give a one hour online lecture, arguments to the existence of God, might get a few thousand views, but if I did a one hour debate on the existence of God, it could get 50, a hundred thousand views. People are always interested say, oh, well, what’s the other guy going to say? What’s he going to say in response to him? Okay. So you brought that debating experience in. So to show the similarity here, you experienced the conversion to Christ in high school, which I also did. So tell us, how did that happen?
Dr. Craig:
It happened through a girl who sat in front of me in my sophomore German class.
Trent:
Was that Sandy?
Dr. Craig:
Tristan?
Trent:
Yeah, Sandy, yeah.
Dr. Craig:
And Sandy was one of these types that is always so happy, it just makes you sick. And I was really miserable at that time as a non-believer. I had no purpose in life, no reason for living. I realized that my life and the life of every human being was doomed to end in death, and that eventually the human race would go extinct. And that seemed to me to just put a question mark behind the meaning or significance of anything that I did. And so I felt the darkness and despair of this naturalistic worldview that I later found out in college was so well articulated by French existentialist philosophers like sar.
And so I was really in deep despair, and I went into my high school German class one day, and I tapped Sandy on the shoulder, and she turned around and I said, well, what are you always so happy about anyway? And she said, bill, it’s because I’m saved. And I said, you’re what? And she said, I know Jesus Christ is my personal savior. And I said, well, I go to church. I was a nominal Methodist and was attending a church though it was meaningless. It’s a ritual. And she said, well, that’s not enough Bill. You’ve got to have him really living in your heart. And I said, well, what would he want to do a thing like that for? And she said, because he loves you, bill.
Trent:
Yeah
Dr. Craig:
That just hit me like a ton of bricks. The idea that the God of the universe could love me.
Trent:
Yeah
Dr. Craig:
Worm down there on that speck of dust called planet Earth just staggered me. I went home that night and I found a New Testament that had been given to me by the Gideons in the fifth grade when they visited our elementary school. And for the first time I opened and began to read it. And as I did, I was absolutely captivated by the person of Jesus of Nazareth. There was a wisdom about his words that I’d never encountered before, and there especially was an authenticity
Trent:
About
Dr. Craig:
His life that was just undeniable. And I realized that I couldn’t just throw the baby out with the bathwater. I couldn’t reject him. And so that sent me on a search that lasted about six months, months, and finally ended with me just coming to the end of my rope and crying out to God and experiencing this tremendous infusion of divine joy, a transformation spiritually that I think was being born again, a kind of inner spiritual rebirth. And it changed my life because I had thought enough about this message during those six months to realize that if Bill Craig ever became a Christian, I could do nothing less than devote my entire life to spreading this message among mankind. Because if this were really the truth, then it is the greatest message ever announced.
Trent:
And then you feel like this. I think you used referenced for the burden of sharing the gospel, even, especially even through debates and other formats. There’s the joy and the joy of sharing the gospel, but then just the humbling burden of it, the Holy Spirit working through us, as Paul says in one Corinthians, we’re God’s coworkers
Dr. Craig:
Yes
Trent:
Planting in the vineyard. So the similarity there, so I was not religious at all. I was 16 years old, and it was a girl in my Spanish class who, no, the similarities will get even more. No, this is uncanny even more. We even notice everyone. But before this, Dr. Craig and I have the same style of wedding ring. I wear a rubber one when I do martial arts and things like that. So it is just Bill. I can call you Bill, right?
Dr. Craig:
Yes,
Trent:
Of course. I love that. Okay, so I was 16 years old in my Spanish class, and it was a girl, her name was Mary Allen. Mary Ellen, and she just said, Hey, our church, we’re going to go to a new burger place that opened up called Inn Out. Do you want to come? And so the youth group would have, there was the evening church service, and there’d be an activity for the teenagers afterwards.
And so then she invited me and I said, I don’t know if I’m up for the church service yet. I’ll go to the burger place with you guys. So I went, we got on the bus and went there, and then I started going back to church. And I felt this idea similar to you, I am being told, well, God wants to come down and be here in this place and that he loves me. People ask me, what’s the hardest thing for you to wrap your head around? And some people might want to say it’s Hilbert’s Hotel or something like that. The Infinite Hotel, for me, the hardest thing is that I could never really love an amoeba. If I think of an amoeba, like a little one celled creature, I could put it in a terra. I can’t love that thing. The distance between me and that amoeba, it’s vast, but still finite. So if I can’t love an amoeba, how could the infinite God love me? I can only take that on faith that he’s demonstrated that on the cross. Otherwise, I couldn’t reason my way
To that, that he’s taken this self divine revelation to do that. And I remember just six months later, six months later, I was going through this like, Lord, I believe in you. But part of my journey was I had to say, okay, I love science, young Astronomers Club, and I had thought to be a Christian, I had to be a young earth creationist. I had to believe a certain theology. And I thought, well, if I have to believe that I can’t be a Christian. But then I saw other people, and a lot of them, they were evangelical philosophers. There were some Catholics. One was Peter Kraft.
Dr. Craig:
I
Trent:
Read his book with Ronald Elli, A Handbook of Christian Apologetics. I remember getting that at the bookstore, but then I started reading through, I saw your debates, and I thought, okay, then I got to go deeper than that. And I think I had the second edition of Reasonable Faith. That was the one where they had Craig Blumberg’s about the gospel was kind of in there. But I love the third edition. Looks very spiffy, by the way. But yeah, and just seeing that what I always appreciated about your work was that you understood that we as Christians have to engage. What are scholars saying? Let’s represent it accurately and then engage it appropriately. So how did your journey go? So you went, you studied, well, I guess you were already getting into academics and you were engaging scholarship, but now you had to parlay that into making it accessible to popular people and accessible in the debate format, because a lot of people are, what makes you unique, I think, is that there are a lot of professors who can engage people at the scholarly level, but if they had to talk to a regular person or do a debate, oh, it’d be helpless to understand what are they even talking about?
But I think your work is blessed so many people because it reaches those two areas, understanding the differences there. Have you tried to notice that balance in your own work?
Dr. Craig:
Well, it certainly is a balance. And I had the great advantage after I graduated from college of taking two years out of my education, and I joined the staff of a ministry called Campus Crusade for Christ. And for two years I was on staff at Northern Illinois University where every day I was going into the dorms and into the student union, sharing my faith in Christ leading fellows to a Christian commitment and then discipling them and how to go as grow as a Christian. And so that was wonderful practical training in evangelism and discipleship. That served me very well later on. And after that stint was completed with Crusade, I married a step girl named Jan Coleman. We were married on the campus at NIU, and then together we went on to seminary and pursued my graduate studies. So even after doing the graduate studies, I had the experience and the burden of sharing the gospel in a popular, winsome accessible way and wanted to continue to do that. Actually, it’s interesting. My inspiration in this was I Emmanuel Kant. Oh, really? Because Kant had published his critique of pure reason, which was so incomprehensible. Oh my goodness. So difficult.
Trent:
He makes up his own words for things that doesn’t actually help, but yeah. Okay. So he
Dr. Craig:
Followed it up with a little book called Progam on to any future metaphysics, which was meant to be a sort of popularization and explanation of his critique. And I thought, what a great strategy. And so when I published my doctoral work, for example, from the University of Birmingham, is the cosmological argument from Plato to Leitz. There we are there. And then the Kal cosmological
Argument,
I popularized it
And also put it out in a little book called The Existence of God in the Beginning of the Universe, which was for the layperson and nonbeliever. So I’ve always tried to follow that dual level strategy in my work of doing the finest scholarly work I was capable of published in professional journals and talk academic presses, but then also, so publishing the same material in a popularized form in a way that would be accessible to laypeople.
Trent:
I think that that’s a great strategy, and I’ve also noticed it for our Catholic listeners who are interested. There are Catholic scholars that do something similar. Grant Petri, Michael Barber and Scott Hahn, they will publish a book for an academic press and then get her permission to take that 600 page manuscript, whittle it down to a 300 page volume that a popular reader can wrap their head around
Dr. Craig:
When
Trent:
It comes to the uncanny similarities between you and I, so when it comes to debates, people ask me, because I’ve done a fair number of debates, where did I get my experience? And I never had any formal debate training. I never did the Lincoln Douglas debates. Where my training came from was after I graduated college, I worked for a pro-life ministry, and then I felt really moved to want to do something about the scourge of legal abortion in the United States. So I went and joined the staff of a traveling pro-life missionary group called Justice For All. And so we would travel the country and set up large photo exhibits on college campuses with pictures of the unborn before and after abortion. Oh boy. People, they would come up and they’d get so mad at me sometimes I was a little Ry. I would say, why are you so mad at me? I’m not the one who did this to these children.
Dr. Craig:
Yes.
Trent:
But it got the conversation going. We would get hundreds of people would come and dialogue with us. And so I spent a few years doing that traveling, and that gave me the experience of the one-on-one dialogue. But was interesting was that we wouldn’t just talk about the issue of abortion because eventually people, I would say, well, look, if the unborn are human beings, human beings should have equal rights. And they’ll say, well, why think humans have any value at all? Oh wow.
Dr. Craig:
Well,
Trent:
Maybe humans are made in the image of an ultimate source of value. And so we very quickly, I found myself talking about the existence of God, the resurrection of Christ with all, it was the perfect opening
To talk about the gospel with these students. And then later on, we were trained in talking about the issue of abortion. But I would lead special seminars teaching my other colleagues. And then if people ask you about atheism or about Jesus, here’s an approach that I find to be helpful. And I was reading your books at the time, Mike Laconas Works, Gary Habermas. I just felt so blessed from that. And so my experience in trying to make things accessible to people, it did come from that missionary one-on-one, not just being ivory tower head in the books, it’s talking to real people, conversations over and over. And especially because the issue of abortion helped me to fine tune how to keep a cool head when someone’s a little hot buttoned. And so in doing that, and then to continue the uncanny similarities, that’s where I met my wife. She was another missionary.
Dr. Craig:
Oh,
Trent:
Yeah. So she was doing that, and she was just this little petite, funny blonde girl. And we were at the debrief once, and I can come off a little bit. I’m very introverted, melancholic, analytic person, and she’s the blonde, bubbly extrovert. And I was just infatuated when we were doing the debrief. And she said, so I was talking to a professor and telling him, here’s why abortion is wrong. And I was asking him, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? And the professor said, you can’t just ask me a bunch of questions about this. And she said, why not? And she was just so perky and fun about it, but she was just courageous and wanted to do philosophy with the Socratic method. And those conversations really taught me how to use that method. So that’s where we met. And then a few years later we got married, but it was those engagements to help people see, okay, using a calm Socratic approach with accessible evidence, people can wrap their heads around. You can make the Christian faith accessible to people. It’s not something you just have to take on faith.
Dr. Craig:
And there’s another lesson here, Trent, that I think our listeners need to hear, and that is we both married women who were partnered with us in ministry and who therefore shared our vision and our burden. And that is so gratifying and helpful as you go forward in life. One of the great dangers to any marriage relationship is growing separateness that you begin to lead separate lives. And increasingly you find yourself strangers to each other. Whereas if you’re partnered in the way that you and I both have been, there’s a unity there and a glue that helps to counteract that growing separateness.
Trent:
It has blessed my marriage in so many ways, Dr. Craig, to know that Laura and I, we have that shared bond that she also did missionary work. And what I love is that she’s just so brave and what she does, she was once on doing a public highway demonstration showing images of abortion on a public highway to show hate. So she is a real soldier. Oh, yeah. So I think she was 19 years old. She was young. 17, 18, 19 when she was doing that. I think she might’ve been, no, she was 17. She was a minor. So she was doing that, and the police were called and they were arrested, but then later sued. She was part of the lawsuit to sue the police department for an unjust arrest that infringed their first amendment rights
Dr. Craig:
And
Trent:
They won.
Dr. Craig:
Wow.
Trent:
And so she persevered in that, but she had the desire to want to be brave, to share the gospel, to share important truths no matter what the cost was. I remember once, actually during my discerning days as a young man, I went on a date with another girl and we were talking and I said, oh, I’ve done pro-life work and I fight abortion. And she said, oh, that’s great. I just can’t stand the people with the big ugly pictures. Oh, well, the rest of this, it’s going to be very
Dr. Craig:
Often. Well, yeah, start looking at your watch now. Did you say your wife’s name is Laura? Laura,
Trent:
Yes.
Dr. Craig:
That’s Jan’s middle name.
Trent:
Stop
Dr. Craig:
It. Stop it right now. Isn’t getting out of hand.
Trent:
I love that. So let’s talk a little bit also about your career. So you went into your philosophical doctorate in your theological work
With philosophy, you focused on the Kal cosmological argument, and you kind of brought this argument back from the dead because originally, well, I remember there was that debate. When you think about debates on atheism in the mid 20th century, the most famous one would be like the Father Copleston with Bertrand Russell. And mostly there it’s well, if things are contingent, and Bertrand Russell would say, I think your error is you think every man as a mother. So human race has a mother, but of course, that’s not the fallacy being applied, the contingency argument. But they were focused more on that. The Kal argument, the idea that you could use reason to show the past had a beginning. And so the universe as a cause just wasn’t very popular by that point. And what motivated you to want to research that?
Dr. Craig:
When I graduated from Wheaton just before graduation, there was a sale in the bookstore and on the clearance table, there was a book by Stuart Hackett called The Resurrection of Theism. And I’d heard of this book, but never read it. So I decided to buy it. And after graduation that summer, I read this book, and the centerpiece of Hackett’s argument was what I later came to called the Klum Cosmological Argument. And I was absolutely astonished at his book, he was defending this argument for the existence of God that as you say, I thought had been utterly eclipsed. And he was refuting every refutation and objection conceivable against it. And I thought to myself, I have got to settle my mind about the soundness of this argument. I can’t see anything the matter with it, but I want to be sure. And so I purposed in my heart that if I were to ever do doctoral work in philosophy, I would do it on this argument for the existence of God. And in God’s good timing, that did happen. We moved to England to study under John Hick at the University of Birmingham, and he agreed to let me write on the cosmological argument for the existence of God.
And when we arrived in Birmingham, this is interesting. He said to me, are you sure you want to write on the cosmological argument? Isn’t it sort of beating a dead horse? And I said, no, no, I really do want to do this. And he permitted me to do so. And at the end of my time after turning in the doctoral thesis and so forth, I said to Professor Hick, do you still think the cosmological argument is like beating a dead horse? And he said, no, not at all. So that was just a tremendous victory. And out of that work came the two books that you have here as well as the popular level book that I mentioned. And I hav... Read more on Catholic.com