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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 have used this argument in debates and on university campuses over and over again over the decades.
Trent:
It’s born a lot of spiritual fruit. We were discussing before the episode about different arguments for the existence of God. And you were saying that some people, if they approach your work and they start with the live nian contingency argument that can be hard for regular, and I’ve noticed this myself when I try to explain arguments for God, when you start to explain the contingency argument that there must be a necessary explanation for all of these contingent objects or facts or however you want to phrase it, people’s eyes just start to glaze
Dr. Craig:
Over. And this was the argument, as you say, that was front and center in the Copleston Russell debate, the contingency argument. And so what I was doing was something much different than that.
Trent:
Yes, it was the idea that, and what I was saying to you earlier, it takes a lot to get your head to wrap around necessity and contingency, but people have a natural intuitive sense of asking the question, how did everything begin?
Dr. Craig:
Yes.
Trent:
It just comes so naturally for people to want to know, well, I know what happened yesterday, but what happened before yesterday, and there’s actually a wonderful book. I think his name is Ferrell, he wrote, it’s a biography of Father George LaMere, who is the Belgian priest who helped to promote the Big Bang Theory.
Dr. Craig:
Helped to discover
Trent:
It. Yeah. Well, he discovered it along with Friedman. But yeah, I mean, he didn’t call it the Big Bang. Fred Hoyle called it that, but it was a biography on Monsignor LaMere. And the title of the biography is The Day Without a Yesterday. So the idea, if there was a first day, it’s the day without a yesterday,
And people have that, could there have been a day without a yesterday? And so I find when I share the Kal argument with people, it just naturally they grapple onto it. But your work, what you started, I think it was 1979, was this book, oh my goodness, that we could fill this whole room with volumes that you opened the floodgate of so much thought about infinity and cosmology. And it’s encouraged me also in the argument, we’re not going to hash it all out here, but I’ve shifted my view a little bit on the Kal argument. I know you’ve engaged some of my criticisms, but what I’m excited about is how I’ve looked at the Kal now because your argument is whatever begins to exist as a cause, the universe began to exist. And it has a cause. We use a conceptual analysis to have divine attributes of the cause. And we can use reason to show either that if actual infinites cannot exist and the past is an actual infinite, the past cannot be beginningless or it cannot be formed by success of addition. And I’ve changed my thought on some of those, though I’m still a big fan of the successive edition argument.
Just on a quick tangent, well, I’ll save that for later. But what I’ve been really interested in is the Caus finit arguments from people like Alex Press or Andrew Looch. I am forming something that I see as a complimentary argument to your
Dr. Craig:
Position. Yes. I think this is worth mentioning for our viewers today, is that in addition to the many criticisms of the Kal cosmological argument that had been published, there are brilliant new defenders like Alexander Proce, who is a mathematical philosopher, brilliant guy
Rob Koons from University of Texas, Austin.
Trent:
Dr. Craig:
Mentioned Andrew Loc at University of Hong Kong, and proce defends what he calls causal fism. That is to say that no effect can be the result of an infinite number of causes, and also then defends arguments for the causal finitude of the past that you cannot have a sequence of temporally ordered causes that goes back
Trent:
Dr. Craig:
And this has been so gratifying to me to see that there are these additional complimentary arguments in support of the critical second premise that the universe began to exist. So that is tremendously gratifying. And then there have been scientific advances by
Trent:
Dr. Craig:
People like Aaron Wall developing the wall theorem about the generalized second law of thermodynamics that supports the beginning of the universe. And the board, Gutha Lincoln Theorem came along supporting that premise as well. So both philosophically and scientifically, this is a cutting edge argument that continues to advance.
Trent:
So where I’m at in the argument to compliment yours, that if your argument states that a beginningless past would be an actual infinite, and so that is not metaphysically possible, I’m defending just a more modest claim to go with that. To say that a beginningless past could entail contradictions with things like, for example, Andrew LO’s example of constructing Hilbert’s hotel room by room in a beginning list fast. So for people who don’t know, you can Google Hilbert’s Hotel and watch a nice, well, the Reasonable Faith website has a good visual summary of the Kal argument and the idea, and I love Hilbert’s Hotel, the idea of a hotel with an actually infinite number of rooms leads to all of these paradoxes. So the argument that I have been taking saying, well, Hilbert’s Hotel, it can’t really happen or it’s an infinite past, is not like Hilbert’s Hotel because all the rooms exist at one time. And LOE says, okay, fine, just build one room at a time. You could do one room at a time and you would have it now, why couldn’t you? And so that’s moved me the argument for Kal that I’m interested in,
Dr. Craig:
And that argument as lo illustrates it, is actually St. Bonaventure.
Trent:
Yes.
Dr. Craig:
This is anticipated by Bonaventure
Trent:
About the orbits of the planets.
Dr. Craig:
Well, and if there were souls being begotten from eternity, if the race of men went back to infinity, then there would be by now an infinite number of souls just as there would be an infinite number of rooms.
Trent:
And this is something that always puzzled me about St. Thomas Aquinas, because Aquinas did not believe the finitude of the past could be proven by reason. But he did believe there could not be an actually infinite number of objects
Dr. Craig:
In
Trent:
The present. And he gave the example of a blacksmith hammering away at one horseshoe for all eternity or working on a horseshoe for all eternity. And I think one author has posed would love to, he said, I’d love to ask Aquinas, what if the blacksmith has been working on horseshoes for all eternity? Could he have done that? He’d have an actually infinite number of them, which Aquinas says is not possible.
Dr. Craig:
Yeah. Someone I remember imagines that as the Smith works, he breaks.
Trent:
Dr. Craig:
One hammer after another. And the question then that someone like Bonaventure or Looch would pose is, well then how many broken hammers will there be by now in the pile? And the answers clearly an actually infinite number.
Trent:
So what I’m interested in, especially with causal fism, some atheists have said, well, you could have, because press’s argument, Kunz’s argument is that if you had an infinite series, you could have contradictory things that will real, because people say, well, Hilbert’s Hotel isn’t a contradiction.
It seems to be, and people all agree in the causal, there are contradictions here. And so they’ll say, I love this response. Well, there’s maybe there’s just a mysterious force that will prevent the contradictions from arising. And I say, that smells a lot like theism to me, if you have to invoke this to get around it. So that’s why the argument for Kal I’m interested in is it’s kind of like an argument against time travel. Now, we’ll get into time here in a second. If the A theory is true where only the present exists, you’re not going anywhere in time travel. But if the B theory were true, if the past, present and future were equally real, and we talk about time travel, one argument is that, well, time travel can’t happen because paradoxes could easily happen. You have the grandfather paradox. If time travel could happen, I could go back and kill my grandfather. What’s the university
Dr. Craig:
Before? He has children,
Trent:
Before he has children? That creates a paradox that can’t happen. And so time travel can’t happen unless you say, well, maybe there’s just some force that will make you slip on a banana peel and you’ll never end up doing it. So I would say, well, if there could be time travel, it could only happen if there was a divine cause that keeps the universe in order and prevents paradoxes. But otherwise, no, the universe won’t allow these paradoxical things. That’s what I want to explore. Saying the same reason time travel is not possible is the same reason a beginningless past is not possible because in such a series you would get the paradoxes that Coons talks about. And so that’s what I’m exploring, and it takes a more modest claim and what it’s making, and it evades many other criticisms. But yeah, I am grateful. And it’s interesting what you’re saying is you can pour scholarship into an area and then see so much fruit you never even thought of that will come from it. Yeah.
Dr. Craig:
Yeah. That’s so true. It’s been really gratifying in this respect.
Trent:
Yeah. Well, I need to nerd out a little bit more here. I think you once said this is one of your favorite books that you wrote, but I have your book Time and Eternity.
Dr. Craig:
Yes.
Trent:
If you want to really give your head a workout, give your brain a workout. I think you’ve said before that it’s hard to think about God, it’s hard to think about infinity, and then when you try to put them together and thinking about God and time, it’s a cerebral aerobics class,
But it’s really, so I’ve been fascinated by that as well. I’m still somewhat agnostic about, I’m trying to make my arguments. I’m not fully committed to what theory of time is true. I think I’m trying to make arguments more, well, even if the B theory were true, let’s just trying to grant as many premises of a critic and then still flow from that. But there’s one, we will be in the nerd territory just for a minute, people, we’ll get back to other stuff here. There is a theory of time that I am really fascinated by, well, I’ll fill in the people who are listening. I need to serve them too. There’s two theories of time that are given the highly creative names, the A theory and the B theory or the dynamic, the tense and the tense, less theory, the idea. And I’ve tried to use the examples of a play and a film strip. So a theory would say that the present is what’s real. The past no longer exists, and the future does not exist yet. It’s the present that exists.
Dr. Craig:
Yes.
Trent:
Similar to when you’re watching a play, the scenes that were performed are gone. And the scenes that have not been performed, they’re not here yet, but if you watch a film strip, it’s like through a projector, there’s the present scene you’re seeing and the scenes you watched are still there in the film strip. They’ve just gone out of your view. And the scenes that will arrive, well, they’re just not there in the projector yet, but they are real. You just can’t see them yet. That’s my best attempt at an analogy to help people.
Dr. Craig:
Well, I think it’s an excellent analogy
Trent:
To understand presentism versus this B theory that past, present, future equally real. And so it has a lot of ramifications about theology, the temporality of God. It really does. Foreknowledge providence. One view that I, so I’m not firmly committed yet, but one view I have an attraction towards, it’s more of a minority view, is the growing block view.
So if I ever one day am done with when I could write my big thick book, I’d love to do one called God and the Growing Block Universe. Because if the growing block says that instead of just either only the present is real or past, present and future equally real, the growing block for our audience says the present is real. And past events are real. They have been actualized, but future events are actualized. They’re not real. And so the universe has a kind of four dimensional growing block. And so I found when I researched that view, it often overcomes many of the objections from relativity theory. A lot of the objections B theorists will make can be overcome. I’ve tried to modify it a little. I’m partial to the view that it’s called the grow glow view, where the edge is where consciousness lies. And the past block, there is no consciousness. There’s just events. But the idea here is if this growing block view were true, I can make a really neat argument from successive addition to a beginningless past and
Dr. Craig:
Oh yeah, that’s clear.
Trent:
So that’s where
Dr. Craig:
Unfortunately, I think the view is incoherent. You
Trent:
Don’t hold with you. I understand
Dr. Craig:
That. I agree. If you had a book by the title, you suggest it would sell. Well, that’s a very good title.
Trent:
Sure. So the Glowing View is my way of trying to get around the objection. If the growing block is true, how do we know we’re in the present? It’s more likely, how do we know we might be in the past? And we don’t realize it. And there’s Daniel, I think is his name. He wrote a book called Divine Relativity in the Arrow of Time was a recent book that I think explores this more. But that’s all the learning I wanted to do on full. But philosophy of Time is just, I love, there was a documentary made several years, I feel like it was a while ago, that featured you and Quentin Smith and others. I don’t know if you remember.
Dr. Craig:
Yes, yes. Quentin has now passed
Trent:
Away. Yes. Very sad.
Dr. Craig:
But he was a good friend and we often collaborated
Trent:
On this book.
Dr. Craig:
Yes. Which was the compilation of quite a number of articles published in journals where we would go back and forth with each other and we were sharp critics of each other.
Trent:
Dr. Craig:
But good friends were friends would sometimes room together at American Philosophical Association meetings.
Trent:
And so comment on that a little bit more. What have you seen that in engaging in apologetics? Because one thing I find difficult now in the age of social media, and you’ve told me before, interview, you don’t monitor. So if you have important journal articles and works to publish, which all better to you? Frankly, I’m still in the midst of that because I’m reaching popular level working on that. There’s just a lot of vitriol sometimes and snark and it’s like a war. But you’ve had an experience, and I’ve had this experience too with other critics, people like Gavin Orland, Alex O’Connor, where there are people who sharply disagree with me, but we can still be amiable towards one another. Tell me a bit more about that in your experience and how you’ve fostered that.
Dr. Craig:
Well, I think that as public representatives of Christ, it is very important that we exhibit the character of Christ in how we interact with people who disagree with us. And as you know, Jesus taught that if someone strikes you on the right cheek, then turn to him the other also,
Trent:
And
Dr. Craig:
To love your enemies and pray for those who speak evil of you and despitefully use you and bless them. And so as Christians, we want to exemplify that kind of character. And so what we want to do is to attack arguments relentlessly, but to treat with love and respect those persons who propound those arguments
Trent:
With
Dr. Craig:
Which we disagree. So it’s very telling that in one Corinthians 10 and verse five,
Trent:
We attack arguments.
Dr. Craig:
Yes. Paul says that we attack arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of Christ, taking every thought captive to obey Christ. And so his focus is right. It’s on the arguments, not on the people.
Trent:
I love that passages. Paul says that we have weapons that are powerful, capable of destroying fortresses, but our battle, we attack the arguments. We take every thought captive to Christ. So goodness. Well, I think it has really been a joy be able to speak with you on all of these subjects. I think one thing a lot of my listeners will want me to ask you about though, because I’m a Catholic apologist, that’s something I’ve engaged in a lot frequently. I know you even asked the question many times, but what are some of your thoughts on Catholicism and what do you think is one of the biggest stumbling blocks to you as that being a viable theological system for you?
Dr. Craig:
Our ministry, reasonable faith, wants to be a resource to Christians of all of the major confessions. And so it has been really encouraging to me when I’m out traveling and speaking, I will have Coptic Christians come up to me as well as Orthodox Christians in long black robes, Catholics and Protestants saying that they’re using the materials of reasonable faith in their own ministries. In fact, we met someone who told us that the monks at the monastery in Mount AFOs in Greece, he says they’re praying for you, bill. There’s one monk at the monastery that has access to the outside world through the internet and collects prayer requests, and they’re praying for me. And that just is so humbling. So we want Catholics to be built up and encouraged and edified through what we do, even if I’m not a Catholic
Trent:
Personal
Dr. Craig:
Now.
Trent:
Well, before we go to the stumbling blocks, I want to build
Dr. Craig:
On,
Trent:
Build on that because I found for me want to share, I believe that Christ established one church and I authentically want everyone to belong to that church. That’s why I do share the Catholic faith with people, and I believe it’s important necessary for people’s salvation. However, I have found what’s been effective for me in sharing my Catholicism with Protestants is when I create resources for issues that Protestants are really hungry for. I’ve met many Protestants who said I became Catholic. Trent, I first started reading your book Persuasive, or I read your book answering. I saw your debate with Alex. And that just really fired me up to want to learn how to do apologetics. And so for me, it is similar to how you are. I never want to just focus on while they are important truth claims, I’m committed to defending. I never want to, well, at Council of Trent, I’ve tried to have a division where I spend a quarter of my time on the fundamentals of Christianity, a quarter on important, nice, important elements of theology, 25% on important moral issues, same-sex marriage or pro-life. But to never lose that focus on bringing people to the person of Christ when there are so many people that while the Pew Forum has been showing at least that the decline in Christianity seems to be leveling off,
Which is a good thing,
Dr. Craig:
I
Trent:
Would very much like to take advantage of that. Still so many people who are apart from Christ, and I just implore, I think Catholics, they are able to learn a lot from your work and the other work of Protestants who’ve done so much. I mean, this book, when I was studying for defending Christ’s resurrection, I love just pouring through. This was your dissertation on Christ’s resurrection.
Dr. Craig:
Yes.
Trent:
And Mike Lao’s work. It has been helpful. So I just really appreciate how your work has benefited so many Christians and I myself want to benefit all Christians to do the similar things, but we do have important theological differences, and it’s okay to talk about those.
Dr. Craig:
So we’ve got these core beliefs that are very much the same where we are united. I want to share today two pieces of advice for Roman Catholics. One would be theological advice and the other would be pragmatic. The theological advice would be to, well, here’s my concern. It seems to me that Catholic theology is in the straight jacket of the Council of Trent. And that some flexibility in interpreting the documents of Trent would be in order and would go a long way toward bringing consensus. And particularly what I’m thinking of here is that a number of commentators have noticed that what Trent calls justification Protestants would call sanctification. And many Catholic New Testament scholars today, like Raymond Brown and Joseph Fitz Meyer agree that justification in the New Testament is a forensic notion. It is a legal declaration of righteousness by God and not an infusion of righteousness into a person. But sanctification is an infusion of righteousness through the indwelling Holy Spirit into the life of a person. And so if a person reads Trent in such a way that what it says about justification is really about sanctification, then it’s merely a semantic difference. We’re really talking about the same thing. And even the doctrine that we, by God’s grace perform works, that merit salvation can be given, I think an acceptable spin
If we think of these as rewards given for sanctification.
Trent:
Well, the New Testament is replete with the doctrine of rewards. I mean, Jesus even says, talks about he uses the Greek word misos your wages for the good works that you do.
Dr. Craig:
Paul talks about,
Trent:
Yeah, they’re not earned. That’s from God’s gratuitous gift, from fatherly love for us.
Dr. Craig:
And so that would be my theological piece of advice is that I think that we should be able to unite on the forensic nature of justification and then the infusion of sanctifying grace through the Holy Spirit that enables us then to lead more and more Christ-like lives leading to beatification. My pragmatic advice would be this. Okay, I think Roman Catholics need to get rid of infant baptism. It seems to me that there is a fatal combination here that has had disastrous effects on the church.
Trent:
Well, it wouldn’t just be Catholics. Many Protestants believe in infant baptism.
Dr. Craig:
Well, yeah. But today I’m talking to a Catholic theologian,
Trent:
Of course. Sure.
Dr. Craig:
The twin doctrines of baptismal regeneration and infant baptism, I think result in a church which is filled with unregenerate non-Christians because they’re trusting that in being baptized as an infant, they were regenerated by the Holy Spirit. If you simply hold to baptismal regeneration, that regeneration occurs at the moment of baptism the way Lutherans do.
Well, then you could hold to that without great harm if you only baptize believers. On the other hand, if you do hold the infant baptism like the reformed do, but you don’t regard that as the moment of regeneration, then again, the consequences won’t be so bad. But it’s this combination of baptismal regeneration and infant baptism that I think results in a church that is filled with so-called cradle Catholics who have been nominally Catholic from birth, but who live like non-Christians because they’re really unregenerate. And so it seems to me that it would be very easy for the Roman Catholic Church without any great change of doctrine to just say, we’re not going to baptize infants anymore. We’re going to adopt believers baptism.
Trent:
I would say that is one that’s going to be non-negotiable from a Catholic perspective, especially since the belief in baptismal regeneration. I mean, the belief in baptismal regeneration and the focus, while there’s some silence on infant baptism in the early historical record, even people like RC Sproul admit that it’s testified to early. There isn’t opposition to it. The only opposition in the early church was people said, well, you should wait eight days to baptize an infant when circumcision was done. And you had early writers saying, no, do it immediately. Children die all the
Dr. Craig:
Time. Though some remember would delay as long as possible so that their post baptismal sins wouldn’t need penance and so forth.
Trent:
Abuses, non tous uses abuse does not an null the proper use. So I would say that the baptism regeneration and infant baptism, it really does represent Christian teaching for 1500 years. And I’d say that there’s a strong pedigree to that. But I think this ties a bit into your view about philosophical theology because you operate, I think you’re one of the most honest people when it comes to operating under the principle of solas scriptura, that for you, your theology is informed by the Bible alone. And there’s many other Protestants who will say that, but then they’re critical of you because you hold to a different Christology. You would hold to the view that Christ has only one will rather than a human and a divine will. And there are Protestants who will say to you, but Bill, that contradicts the ecumenical councils and your responses, but we’re Protestants. Why does that matter?
So I think that that is, so for me, when I’m engaging other Protestants on a lot of these historical theological questions, I find it interesting that many of them will try to incorporate these early creeds, early ecumenical councils, but then have sort of an arbitrary cutoff date on which ones are binding to them and which aren’t. But I see, whenever I see lax Christians, it’s a concern and to try to find out, okay, well what is the root of this? And whether you see it in the world or in the Catholic world. But I do get concerned because for me, I would say that the initial justification, I mean it could be forensic and it can be infused. It’s like when God declares let there be light, he declares it and something actually happens. I find. So for me, I was baptized when I was 17 years old. I was not baptized as a child.
Dr. Craig:
Yeah. See, that’s a pattern I want you to
Trent:
Adopt. But I missed out on the graces of baptism that I even see in my own children who received the sacrament early. So for me, there is a bit of a pickle here when it comes to salvation and faith because it seems like, I mean, you have children. I got little kids right now. It seems like children are capable of sinning at an age before they’re capable of accepting Christ. Not gravely sinning, but they’re capable of like I have. You have a four and a 5-year-old.
Dr. Craig:
Sure. Disobedience.
Trent:
Yes. There can’t be such a thing to me as moral wrongdoing that isn’t sinful.
Dr. Craig:
Boy, this is really interesting. I get into this in volume three of my systematic philosophical theology in the section on man is sinner.
Trent:
Yeah, okay.
Dr. Craig:
And I would hold of something similar, but I express it differently. I think it’s possible for someone to do moral evil and so be sinful, but not be a transgressor because he has not broken a divine command to him. And so I want to say something very similar to that with respect to infants and little children, that they can have a sinful disposition or do things wrong, but they’re not transgressors because they’re not willfully violating a divine command.
Trent:
Yeah. I think that’s where, to me, when it comes to the issues of justification, I will agree with you that Catholics and Protestants can fine tune the semantic differences. And several decades ago, there was a joint statement on declaration between Catholics and Lutherans, for example.
Dr. Craig:
Yes, I’ve read that.
Trent:
And there is a very good book out. You talked about Raymond Brown and all that. There’s a very good book by Michael Barber, Kincaid and Petri Catholic scholars called Paul a New Covenant Jew. And so it’s a wonderful study of Pauline theology, and some of this is a bit of an offshoot of the new perspective on Paul somewhat. And I think that that can help also form a bridge. So I think on some of the finer points, and I think I agree with you, that oftentimes Catholics and Protestants can talk past one another, especially with, because for Catholics justification and sanctification tend to be more synonymous terms, the renewal of the inner man versus how Protestants might define it. But I think that even in Protestantism, there can be similar abuses or negative consequences of things like from eternal security thinking salvation can’t be lost, or just saying that the sinner’s prayer was, I really saved.
So I think that whenever we judge, I think for us, because we’re not going to hash everything out here, it’s always best when you’re looking at any system, whether it’s theology or philosophy, is to compare the best members and best articulations, best to best not best to worst in every system enough, best to best on everything, I think would be, but I think that you do have you issue. I think what is a fair point that I often can be jealous of that among evangelicals, there can just be such a tight knit community that really enforces, not enforces, but promotes a vigorous faith community and a sharing of the faith. I mean, even here, we’re at this Baptist church. I love that outside there’s parking dedicated to new visitors at a Catholic. Now I’m an introvert. When I went to a Catholic church, I went to a Baptist church once and I was so overwhelmed by everyone saying hi to me.
Dr. Craig:
Oh.
Trent:
So for my temperament, I’m very more introverted. And so when I went to a Catholic church and nobody said hi to me, that was a relief for
Dr. Craig:
Me. Relief.
Trent:
I was like, oh, I can rest easy here and just sit quietly and pray. But for other people, they would feel very left out or feel very unwelcome. So I think the problem of the nominal believer, and you were a nominal believer yourself in a Methodist church before.
Dr. Craig:
Yes, I was. That’s true.
Trent:
It’s like, what is the cause of that and how do we engage that? I think that is a big question that all of us, every denomination does have to address. For sure. So, alright, so I guess we’ve covered all that. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else, but maybe I’ll just end with what is some advice that you might have? Well, I guess maybe I get some advice from you people. It’s interesting when I will share my books and I’ll do debates and people will come to me and they’ll talk about how, oh, Trent, your book helped me to go back to church or believe in Jesus. Thank you so much. But what’s weird is I can feel like this humbling big weight on my shoulders of just like, and when people say that, I always say back to them, praise be to God for how he used my book in your life. But it’s like this humbling weight of a person’s spiritual journey, having some kind of dependency on me. I’m just a man. I’m just a fallible individual who makes all kinds of mistakes and will make more mistakes. It can be a lot of a way. It’s like CS Lewis had that great prayer. Do you know it’s the AP apologist Evening Prayer
By CS Lewis where it is almost a bit of melancholy how he describes the spiritual weight an apologist has. I don’t know if you’ve felt that in how you manage that.
Dr. Craig:
Well, I’ve certainly felt the humility that you mentioned when people tell you that God has used you in their lives, that is so gratifying and humbling. And I am aware that as a public Christian, it’s vitally important for me to maintain my marriage and to try to be sure that my children and come to know and follow Christ as well.
If we fail in our marriages and our families, then it does not matter what sort of accolades of success we have academically or ministry wise. We will have failed in God’s sight. So anyone who does want to embark on this sort of ministry, first and foremost, needs to guard his heart and to cultivate those relationships with wife and children that honor God and will keep you from disgracing the name of Christ by falling into sin and the way that so many Christian leaders have. So that is certainly a great responsibility. And I think that this underlines the importance of maintaining a good devotional life of Bible, reading, prayer, meaningful worship, sharing the gospel. We need to make sure that we’re not just cerebral Christians, but that our hearts are warm toward God and that we love him and want our lives to reflect his love. So that’s, I think just really vitally important. Amen.
Trent:
Well, Dr. Craig, thank you so much for sitting down. You’ve made an invaluable contribution to my life and to the lives of many people. So I just want to thank you
Dr. Craig:
For that, sir. Well, thanks Trent. It’s been good to be with you today.
Trent:
Good to be with too.