On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

by William Lane Craig

atmosphere was electric! Bill began by spelling out five powerful arguments for God and Christianity. First, the beginning of the universe clearly points toward a Creator (“Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause”). Second, the universe’s incredible fine-tuning defies coincidence and exhibits the handiwork of an intelligent designer. Third, our objective moral values are evidence that there is a God, since only He could establish a universal standard of right and wrong. Fourth, the historical evidence for the resurrection—including the empty tomb, eyewitness accounts, and the origin of the Christian faith—establish the divinity of Jesus. And, fifth, God can be immediately known and experienced by those who seek Him.

To the audience’s surprise, Bill promptly used Zindler’s arguments against him. He pointed out that if evolution did occur despite the prohibitive odds against it, then it must have been a miracle and therefore it would be additional evidence for the existence of God! As for evil in the world, Craig said, “No logical inconsistency has ever been demonstrated between the two statements ‘God exists’ and ‘evil exists.’” Besides, he added, in a deeper sense the presence of evil “actually demonstrates God’s existence, because without God there wouldn’t be any [moral] foundation for calling anything evil.”

Apologetics comes from the Greek word apologia, which means a defense, as in a court of law. Christian apologetics involves making a case for the truth of the Christian faith.

We can present a defense of the Christian faith without becoming defensive. We can present arguments for Christianity without becoming argumentative.

if you have good arguments in support of your faith, you’re less apt to become quarrelsome or upset. I find that the better my arguments, the less argumentative I am. The better my defense, the less defensive I am. If you have good reasons for what you believe and know the answers to the unbeliever’s questions or objections, there’s just no reason to get hot under the collar. Instead, you’ll find yourself calm and confident when you’re under attack, because you know you have the answers.

Secularism is a worldview that allows no room for the supernatural: no miracles, no divine revelation, no God.

Relativism is the view that something is relative rather than absolute. That is to say, the thing in question (a truth, a moral value, a property) is the case only in relation to something else. For example, being rich is relative. Relative to most Americans, you’re probably not rich. But relative to the people of the Sudan, you are fabulously rich! By contrast, it is not just relatively true that the Cubs did not win the 2009 World Series. It is absolutely true that they did not win. Many people today think that moral principles and religious beliefs are at best relative truths: true, as they say, for you, but not true for me.

The steps of an argument that lead to the conclusion are called the premises of the argument.

when I use the word God in this context, I mean an all-powerful, perfectly good Creator of the world who offers us eternal life. If such a God does not exist, then life is absurd. That is to say, life has no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose.

Something is objective if it’s real or true independent of anyone’s opinion about it. “Water is H2O” is an objective fact. Something is subjective if it’s just a matter of personal opinion. “Vanilla tastes better than chocolate” is subjective. You can keep these terms straight by remembering that “objective” is like an object that is really there, whereas “subjective” is like a subject or a person on whose opinion something depends.

Meaning has to do with significance, why something matters. Value has to do with good and evil, right and wrong. Purpose has to do with a goal, a reason for something.

My claim is that if there is no God, then meaning, value, and purpose are ultimately human illusions. They’re just in our heads. If atheism is true, then life is really objectively meaningless, valueless, and purposeless, despite our subjective beliefs to the contrary.

If God does not exist, our lives are ultimately meaningless, valueless, and purposeless despite how desperately we cling to the illusion to the contrary.

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no ultimate difference whether you live as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. Since your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: “If there is no immortality … then all things are permitted.”

if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong.

God is the explanation of the existence of the universe. Moreover, the argument implies that God is an uncaused, unembodied Mind who transcends the physical universe and even space and time themselves and who exists necessarily.

1. If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist. 2. Objective moral values and duties do exist. 3. Therefore, God exists. This simple little argument is easy to memorize and is logically ironclad. I had argued for the truth of the first premise and the students had insisted on the second. Together the two premises imply the existence of God. What makes this argument so powerful is that people generally believe both premises. In a pluralistic age, students are scared to death of imposing their values on someone else. So premise 1 seems correct to them because of its implicit relativism. At the same time, certain values have been deeply instilled into them, such as tolerance, open-mindedness, and love. They think it’s objectively wrong to impose your values on someone else! So they’re deeply committed to premise 2 as well.

So there’s a difference between good/bad and right/wrong. Good/bad has to do with something’s worth, while right/wrong has to do with something’s being obligatory.

But not only is it false that you can’t prove a universal negative (all you have to do is show something is self-contradictory), but more importantly, this claim is really an admission that it’s impossible to prove atheism! Atheism involves a universal negative, you can’t prove a universal negative, therefore, atheism is unprovable. It turns out that it is the atheist who is believing a view for which there is and can be no evidence. This argument ought to be part of the Christian’s apologetic arsenal!

Doctrines about God and Suffering These four doctrines increase the probability of the coexistence of God and suffering: 1. The chief purpose of life is not happiness, but the knowledge of God. 2. Mankind is in a state of rebellion against God and His purpose. 3. God’s purpose is not restricted to this life but spills over beyond the grave into eternal life. 4. The knowledge of God is an incommensurable good.

As I neared the end of [the] hallway, I saw an old woman strapped up in a wheelchair. Her face was an absolute horror. The empty stare and white pupils of her eyes told me that she was blind. The large hearing aid over one ear told me that she was almost deaf. One side of her face was being eaten by cancer. There was a discolored and running sore covering part of one cheek, and it had pushed her nose to one side, dropped one eye, and distorted her jaw so that what should have been the corner of her mouth was the bottom of her mouth. As a consequence, she drooled constantly.… I also learned later that this woman was eighty-nine years old and that she had been bedridden, blind, nearly deaf, and alone, for twenty-five years. This was Mabel. I don’t know why I spoke to her—she looked less likely to respond than most of the people I saw in that hallway. But I put a flower in her hand and said, “Here is a flower for you. Happy Mother’s Day.” She held the flower up to her face and tried to smell it, and then she spoke. And much to my surprise, her words, although somewhat garbled because of her deformity, were obviously produced by a clear mind. She said, “Thank you. It’s lovely. But can I give it to someone else? I can’t see it, you know, I’m blind.” I said, “Of course,” and I pushed her in her chair back down the hallway to a place where I thought I could find some alert patients. I found one, and I stopped the chair. Mabel held out the flower and said, “Here, this is from Jesu...

www.reasonablefaith.org.)

This is really quite extraordinary when you reflect on how obscure a figure Jesus was. He had at most a three-year public life as an itinerant Galilean preacher. Yet we have far more information about Jesus than we do for most major figures of antiquity.

The so-called apocryphal gospels are gospels forged under the apostles’ names during the centuries after Christ. None is earlier than the second half of the second century after Christ. While not very valuable as sources for the life of Jesus, they are significant to the church historian who wants to learn about the various competing movements, often deeply influenced by pagan gnostic philosophy, that the Christian church contended with during the first few centuries after Christ. Some of the apocryphal gospels include: Gospel of Peter Gospel of Thomas Gospel of the Hebrews Infancy Gospel of Thomas Gospel of Judas Gospel of Philip

Historians think they’ve hit historical pay dirt when they have two independent accounts of the same event. But in the case of the empty tomb we have no less than six, and some of these are among the earliest materials to be found in the New Testament.

As the agnostic Australian philosopher Peter Slezak nicely put it in our debate, for a God who is able to create the entire universe, the odd resurrection would be child’s play!

this objection is a double-edged sword. For the pluralist also believes that his view is right and that all those adherents to particularistic religious traditions are wrong. Therefore, if holding to a view that many others disagree with means you’re arrogant and immoral, then the pluralist himself would be convicted of arrogance and immorality.

Providence is the doctrine that God orders events in history so that His purposes are achieved. The challenge is doing this while respecting human freedom. Some theologians abridge God’s providence; some curtail human freedom. A better way is to say that God takes human free choices into account in His planning. He does this by knowing how every possible person would freely choose in whatever nondetermining circumstances God might place him in. By creating certain persons in certain circumstances, God knows exactly how they will freely choose and can plan accordingly. On this view everything that happens is either directly willed by God or permitted by God, including where and when people are born.