On Guard Quotes

“The point is this: If God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist. As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“In a world without God, who’s to say whose values are right and whose are wrong? There can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. Think of what that means! It means it’s impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can you praise generosity, self-sacrifice, and love as good. To kill someone or to love someone is morally equivalent. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare, valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“When you’re going through hard times and God seems distant, apologetics can help you to remember that our faith is not based on emotions, but on the truth, and therefore you must hold on to it.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“God exists necessarily and is the explanation why anything else exists.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“If God is dead, then man is dead too.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by just social conventions, like driving on the right-hand versus left-hand side of the road? Or are they merely expressions of personal preference, like having a taste for certain foods? Or are they somehow valid and binding, independent of our opinion, and if they are objective in this way, what is their foundation?”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“If the atheist believes that suffering is bad or ought not to be, then he’s making moral judgments that are possible only if God exists.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Ask a physics teacher: Why do elementary particles exist? Is it impossible for them not to exist? (Be prepared for the possibility that your physics teacher doesn’t want to have this conversation.)”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong. All we’re confronted with is, in Sartre’s words, “the bare, valueless fact of existence.” Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“G. W. Leibniz, codiscoverer of calculus and a towering intellect of eighteenth-century Europe, wrote: “The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?”[1] In other words, why does anything at all exist? This, for Leibniz, is the most basic question that anyone can ask. Like me, Leibniz came to the conclusion that the answer is to be found, not in the universe of created things, but in God. God”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“in 1991, Dr. L. D. Rue, confronted with the predicament of modern man, boldly advocated that we deceive ourselves by means of some “Noble Lie” into thinking that we and the universe still have value. According to Rue, “The lesson of the past two centuries is that intellectual and moral relativism is profoundly the case.” He says that the consequence of this realization is that the quest for self-fulfillment and the quest for social coherence fall apart. This is because on the view of relativism the search for self-fulfillment becomes radically privatized: Each person chooses his own set of values and meaning. So what are we to do? Rue says there is on the one hand “the madhouse option”: We just pursue self-fulfillment regardless of social coherence. On the other hand, there is “the totalitarian option”: The state imposes social coherence at the expense of people’s personal fulfillment. If we’re to avoid these two options, he says, then we have no choice but to embrace some Noble Lie that will inspire us to live beyond selfish interests and so voluntarily achieve social coherence. A”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“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.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Mere duration of existence doesn’t make that existence meaningful. If man and the universe could exist forever, but if there were no God, their existence would still have no ultimate significance.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“From earliest times men wholly ignorant of the Bible have concluded on the basis of the design in the universe that God must exist.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Paradoxically, then, even though the problem of suffering is the greatest objection to the existence of God, at the end of the day God is the only solution to the problem of suffering. If God does not exist, then we are locked without hope in a world filled with pointless and unredeemed suffering”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“How would you explain the fact that atheists just know that harming an innocent human being is wrong, and can live good lives, without believing that God is the ultimate source of values and duties? To repeat: Belief in God is not necessary for objective morality; God is.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“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.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Christians have an unfair advantage in the marketplace of ideas: We have truth on our side! You”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“If God does not exist, our lives are ultimately meaningless, valueless, and purposeless despite how desperately we cling to the illusion to the contrary.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Richard Dawkins’ assessment of human worth may be depressing, but why, given atheism, is he mistaken when he says, “There is at bottom no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pointless indifference.… We are machines for propagating DNA.… It is every living object’s sole reason for being”?”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“WHY IS THE UNIVERSE FINE-TUNED FOR LIFE?”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“if you’re a first-century Jew, and your favorite Messiah got himself crucified, then you’ve basically got two choices: Either you go home or else you get yourself a new Messiah. But the idea of stealing Jesus’ corpse and saying that God had raised him from the dead is hardly one that would have entered the minds of the disciples.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Health and Wealth? The “health and wealth” gospel and the gospel of positive thinking that are being proclaimed in various megachurches and denominations are false gospels that are setting people up for a fall. That kind of gospel won’t preach in Darfur or in Iraq or in a thousand other places. And if it won’t preach there, it isn’t the true gospel. We need to understand that God’s plan for human history may involve terrible suffering for us, whose point or reason we can’t expect to see. Our hope lies not in worldly happiness but in that day when God will wipe away every tear.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Christianity entails doctrines that increase the probability of the coexistence of God and suffering.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Probabilities are relative to background information.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision

“Values and Duties Moral value refers to the worth of a person or action, whether it is good or bad. Moral duty refers to our obligation to act in a certain way, whether that action is right or wrong.”
― William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision