Does the Christian God Exist?

Gregor McLennan (Chair of the debate)

Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, members of the public, adherents to many faiths and adherents to none, a very warm welcome to you for tonight’s event.  There are many, many people in this hall keen to hear and discuss and think about the question before us tonight.  And we’re not alone; everyday, it seems, in the middle brow press or in the radio and TV programs of discussion the question of faith and reason, their compatibility, their togetherness or apartness and the future of these debates for multicultural and other kinds of democracy in this country are happening all the time.  So there’s lots and lots of people who could be here tonight, I’ve never seen such an audience in the great hall actually.  So, as a sociologist, this is fascinating to me. Somehow or other we have the pulse of the present in the room and as a sociologist, of course a revival in the question of religion is not necessarily the same as a revival of religion about which sociologists are still deeply and controversially divided.

But if we needed any evidence for a revival of the interest in the question of religion then you are the evidence tonight, so thank you very much for coming indeed, and I’m sure we’re going to have plenty to talk about, both in the session and afterwards.

The debate tonight is being hosted by the universities and multi-faith chaplaincy and it brings together two speakers of very high calibre, one of whom is William Lane Craig, a very prominent and well known professor; Research Professor of Philosophy at the Talbot School of Theology, in La Mirada California. William’s doctorate was gained at the University of Birmingham in England. I note that it was one year before I got my own, at Birmingham. So we must have crossed at some point I think. Then Bill went on to take a doctorate in Theology from the University of Munich in Germany.  He is a prolific and well known writer, well over thirty books and a hundred odd articles and scholarly philosophy and theology journals, and a well known popular performer at the kind of road show that he is doing in Britain just now, a quite extraordinary itinerary. Going from Bristol, to Manchester, to Oxford to Cambridge, just the other night, in front of over two thousand people, he and Lewis Wolpert were hammering it out together. So this really has a bit of razzmatazz to it as well as well as serious intellectual content. Perhaps Bill’s best known book is something called Reasonable Faith which, if you’re interested, can be found outside on the array of books covering all spectrum of the debate on the tables outside. I should say that Bill Craig is here at the invitation of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship whose national president, Peter May, is with us in the audience tonight.

Arguing against William Lane Craig on the question of the existence of God is Andrew Pyle from the University’s own philosophy department. Andrew’s got a very wide range of philosophical interests, of which the question of God and religion is only one, in particular in the history and philosophy of science with a special interest in scientific revolutions and metaphysics and epistemology round about Descartes to Kant type of period. He’s recently completed a book on the seventeenth century philosopher Malabranche, and, directly relevant to this debate, Andrew has produced a book – a kind of readers guide – to David Hume’s fantastic work on the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Again, that book, along with the others, can be found outside tonight.

Let me tell you how it’s all going to pan out. We’re going to have several rounds of debate from the two main speakers, four to be precise: one of 18 minutes, one of 11 minutes, one of 7 minutes, and one of 5.  So there’s four engagements that we can look forward to in the course of which, if you wanted to start developing issues and questions of your own that you want to put to either of the speakers, then let those happily settle in your mind and then when the four rounds of discussion have finished, there’s a microphone there if you want to put a question to Andrew, and a microphone over there if you want to put a question to William.  But please try and observe that convention, Andrew there, William there, for questions, and please, it’s a huge audience, we simply cannot afford to have people hogging the floor with their own pet theory, comment, critique, or whatever, so please do keep these to questions. That would be greatly appreciated.

We should then have something like half an hour for questions and depending on the appropriateness of the question I’ll ask both speakers to address it if one won’t do, as it were.

That’s enough from me. I hope it’s a stimulating session; I’m sure it will be. So listen, enjoy, and take these debates out into the wider world afterwards.  And I’ll now hand over for the first bout to William Lane Craig. If you could join me in welcoming William to the University of Bristol. [Applause]

William Lane Craig

Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here, and I’m grateful for the invitation to participate in the debate this evening. I’m also delighted to be sharing the podium with Dr. Pyle tonight. I really hope that our discussion this evening will be of practical benefit to you as you work through these very important issues on your own.

Let’s begin by defining our terms. By ‘the Christian God’ I mean the God who has revealed himself decisively in Jesus of Nazareth. I’m not going to be defending the view of every church council or biblical author. When I use the word ‘God’ it is God as revealed by Jesus that is to be understood. Now in order to answer the question before us this evening, we’ve got to address two further questions. First ‘what good reasons are there to think that God exists?’, and second, ‘what good reasons are there to think that God does not exist?’ Now I’ll leave it up to Dr. Pyle to present the arguments against God’s existence, and then respond to them in my next speech. For now, I want to sketch five arguments which provide good reason to think that God does exist.

Number one then, the origin of the universe implies the existence of a transcendent Creator.  Have you ever asked yourself where the universe came from? Why anything at all exists? Typically atheists have said that the universe is just eternal and uncaused but there are good reasons, both philosophically and scientifically, to doubt that this is the case.  Philosophically, the idea of an infinite past seems absurd. If the universe never had a beginning that means that the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite. But mathematicians recognise that the existence of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions.  For example, what is infinity minus infinity? Well, mathematically you get self-contradictory answers. This shows that infinity is just an idea in your mind, not something that exists in reality. But that entails that the number of past events must be finite. Therefore the series of past events can’t just go back forever; rather the universe must have begun to exist.

This conclusion has been confirmed by remarkable discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. In one of the most startling developments of modern science, we now have pretty strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning about thirteen billion years ago in a cataclysmic event known as the Big Bang. What makes the Big Bang so startling is that it represents the origin of the universe from literally nothing.  For all matter and energy, even physical space and time themselves, come into being at the Big Bang. As the physicist P. C. W. Davies explains “the coming into being of the universe, as discussed in modern science, is not just a matter of imposing some sort of organisation upon a previous incoherent state, but literally the coming into being of all physical things from nothing.”  Now of course alternative theories have been crafted over the years to try to avoid this absolute beginning. But none of these theories has commended itself to the scientific community as more plausible than the Big Bang theory.  In fact, in 2003 Arvind Bord, Allan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which is, on average, in a state of cosmic expansion, cannot be eternal in the past but must have an absolute beginning.  Vilenkin emphasizes, and I quote, “with the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past eternal universe. There is no escape; they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”  That problem was nicely captured by Anthony Kenny of Oxford University. He writes “a proponent of the Big Bang theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the universe came from nothing and by nothing.” But surely that doesn’t make sense. Out of nothing, nothing comes. So why does the universe exist? Where did it come from? There must have been a cause which brought the universe into being. 

We can summarise our argument thus far as follows:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

As the cause of space and time, this being must be an uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial being of unfathomable power. Moreover, I think it must be personal as well. Why? Because this cause must be beyond space and time, therefore it cannot be physical or material. Now there are only two kinds of things that fit that description, either abstract objects, like numbers, or else an intelligent mind.  But abstract objects can’t cause anything, therefore it follows that the cause of the universe is a transcendent, personal mind. And thus we are brought, not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe, but to its Personal Creator.

Number two, the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life points to a designer of the cosmos. In recent decades scientists have been stunned by the discovery that our universe is fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a precision and complexity that literally defy human comprehension.  For example, if the atomic weak force or the force of gravity were altered by as little as one part out of ten to the one hundredth power (10¹⁰⁰), the universe would not have been life permitting.  Now there are only three possible explanations of this extraordinary fine-tuning: either physical necessity, chance, or design.

Now it can’t be due to physical necessity because the constants and quantities in question are independent of the laws of nature. In fact string theory predicts that there are some ten to the five hundredth power (10⁵⁰⁰) different universes compatible with nature’s laws.

So could the fine-tuning be due to chance? The problem with this alternative is that the probabilities that all the constants and quantities would be fall by chance alone into the life permitting range is vanishingly small.  The odds against the fine-tunings occurring by accident are so incomprehensibly great that they cannot be reasonably faced. In order to rescue the alternative of chance its proponents have been forced to adopt the hypothesis that there exists an infinite number of randomly ordered universes composing a sort of world ensemble, or ‘multiverse’, of which our universe is but a part. Somewhere in this infinite world ensemble finely tuned universes will appear by chance alone and we happen to be one such world. There are, however, at least two major failings of the world ensemble hypothesis. First, there’s no evidence that such a world ensemble exists; no one knows if there are other worlds. Moreover recall that Bord, Guth, and Vilenkin proved that any universe in a state of continuous cosmic expansion cannot be infinite in the past. Their theorem applies to the multiverse, too. Therefore, since the past is finite, only a finite number of other worlds can have been generated by now so that there’s no guarantee that a finely tuned world will have appeared in the ensemble.  Second, if our universe is just a random member of an infinite world ensemble then it is overwhelmingly more probable that we should be observing a much smaller universe than we do in fact observe.  Roger Penrose, of Oxford University, has calculated that it is inconceivably more probable that our solar system would suddenly form by a random collision of particles than that a finely tuned universe should exist. Penrose calls it ‘utter chicken feed’ by comparison. So if our universe were just a random member of a world ensemble, it is inconceivably more probable that we should be observing a universe no larger than our solar system.  Since we do not have such observations, that fact strongly disconfirms the multiverse hypothesis. On atheism, at least, it is therefore highly probable that there is no world ensemble. Thus the last ring of defence of the alternative of chance collapses. So we may argue as follows:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance or design.

2. The fine-tuning is not due to either physical necessity or chance.

3. Therefore, it is due to design.

Thus the fine-tuning of the universe implies the existence of a Designer of the cosmos.

Number three: objective moral values are plausibly grounded in God. If God does not exist then objective moral values do not exist. By ‘objective moral values’ I mean values which are valid and binding, whether anybody believes in them or not. Many theists and atheists agree that if God does not exist then moral values are not objective in this way. Michael Ruse, a noted philosopher of science, writes “the position of the modern evolutionist is that morality is a biological adaptation, no less than our hands and feet and teeth. Considered as a rationally justifiable set of claims about an objective something, ethics is illusory. I appreciate that when somebody says ‘love thy neighbour as thy self’ they think they are referring above and beyond themselves.  Nevertheless, such reference is truly without foundation. Morality is just an aid to survival and reproduction, and any deeper meaning is illusory.”

Like Professor Ruse, I just don’t see any reason to think that, in the absence of God, the herd morality evolved by homosapiens is objective.  On the atheistic view some action, say rape, may not be socially advantageous, and so in the course of human development has become taboo. But that does absolutely nothing to prove that rape is really wrong. On the atheistic view, there’s nothing really wrong with your raping someone.

But the problem is that objective values do exist, and deep down we all know it.  There’s no more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than the objective reality of the physical world. Actions like rape, cruelty, and child abuse, aren’t just socially unacceptable behaviours, they’re moral abominations. Ruse himself admits, “the man who says it is morally acceptable to rape little children is just as mistaken as the man who says 2 + 2 = 5.” Some things, at least, are really wrong. Similarly, love, equality and self-sacrifice, are really good.

Hence we may argue as follows:

1. If God does not exist, then objective values do not exist.

2. Objective values do exist.

From which it follows logically and inescapably,

3. Therefore, God exists.

Number four: the historical facts concerning the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus imply God’s existence. The historical person Jesus of Nazareth was a remarkable individual. New Testament critics have reached something of a consensus that the historical Jesus came on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority, the authority to stand and speak in God’s place. He claimed that in himself the kingdom of God had come and as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracle working and exorcisms. But his supreme confirmation of his radical claims was his resurrection from the dead. If Jesus did rise from the dead then it would seem that we have a divine miracle on our hands, and thus evidence for the existence of God. Now most people would probably think that the resurrection of Jesus is something that you just believe in by faith or not. But there are actually three established facts recognised by the majority of New Testament historians today which, I believe, are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus.

Fact number one: on the Sunday following his crucifixion Jesus’ tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers.  According to Jacob Kramer, an Austrian specialist in resurrection studies, by far most scholars hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements about the empty tomb.

Fact number two: on separate occasions different individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death. According to the prominent New Testament critic Gerd Ludemann, “it may be taken as historically certain that the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.” These appearances were witnessed not only by believers but also by unbelievers, sceptics, and even enemies.

Fact number three: The original disciples suddenly came to believe in the resurrection of Jesus despite having every predisposition to the contrary. Jews had no belief in a dying, much less rising, Messiah, and Jewish beliefs about the afterlife precluded anyone’s rising from the dead before the end of the world. Nevertheless, the original disciples came to believe so strongly that God had raised Jesus from the dead that they were wiling to die for the truth of that belief. N. T. Wright, an eminent New Testament scholar, concludes “that is why, as a historian, I cannot explain the rise of early Christianity unless Jesus rose again leaving an empty tomb behind him.”  Attempts to explain away these three great facts like the disciples stole the body or Jesus wasn’t really dead have been universally rejected by contemporary scholarship. Therefore it seems to me the Christian is amply justified in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and was who he claimed to be. But that entails that God exists.

Finally, number 5, you can experience God personally.  This isn’t really an argument for God’s existence. Rather it’s the claim that you can know that God exists wholly apart from arguments simply by immediately experiencing Him.  This was the way people in the Bible knew God. As Professor John Hick says: “to them God was not an idea adopted by the mind, but an experienced reality which gave significance to their lives.”  If you’re sincerely seeking God then I believe that God will make his existence known to you. We mustn’t so concentrate on the external proofs that we fail to hear the inner voice of God speaking to our own hearts.

So, in conclusion, if Dr. Pyle wants us to believe otherwise then he must first tear down all five of the reasons that I’ve presented and in their place establish a case of his own to prove that God does not exist. Unless and until he does that then I think we should agree that theism is the more plausible worldview.

Andrew Pyle

Okay, first of all, a word or two on my own position. I’m not going to be here to try to persuade you that God doesn’t exist. I’m not going to provide any arguments at all for that thesis. I’m here to rebut Professor Craig’s arguments that he’s just provided.  I think there are no good arguments to believe in the existence of God. Does that make me an atheist? An agnostic? A fideist?  Well I’m not a fideist.  There are plenty of Christians who are, who believe that there is a God, but they believe that is a matter of faith, and not of reason.  The fideists over the years have often welcomed attempts to rebut the arguments for the existence of God, because they don’t think their belief rests on argument at all.

Am I an atheist or an agnostic? Well, this is a very hard one because of course it’s going to turn on that wonderful old chestnut of ‘when absence of evidence is evidence of absence’. In the empirical domain, this is pretty clear.  The absence of any evidence for elephants in my back garden is very strong evidence that there are no elephants in my back garden; extremely strong. On the other hand, the absence of evidence of intelligent extra-terrestrial life somewhere out there in the rest of the universe is very, very weak evidence that there’s no intelligent extra-terrestrial life.  When we’re in the empirical domain, this is pretty clear cut. We ask ourselves how likely is it that we would’ve detected this evidence if it were there?  The problem, of course, with the God debate is we don’t know whether God’s there with the elephants and we can infer from the fact that we don’t have good evidence to the fact that he probably doesn’t exist. Or whether he’s there with the intelligent extra terrestrials, in which case the fact that we don’t have good evidence is no good evidence of absence. Precisely how you interpret the evidence is precisely the problem. So, when asked about this I say I’m a sort of atheist leaning agnostic. In different contexts I would call myself an agnostic or an atheist and I’m never quite sure how to spell it out. I don’t think the arguments are good, but I don’t have any very powerful reasons for thinking there isn’t a God. Looking at the arguments that Professor Craig has just presented us with, I think four of them are hopeless, and one of them is interesting.

Let’s start with experience.  The obvious worry about religious experience is just multiplicity; there’s lots and lots and lots of it about and, of course, it’s very, very, very culturally diverse.  And people will tend to interpret their religious experience in terms of the faith they were brought up in; how could it be otherwise? And of course there’s lots of religious experience in faiths where, whether there’s a God or not is rather debateable.  Buddhists have lots of religious experience but, at least in there more austere forms, the Buddhists probably don’t believe in a god at all.  And what about the high priests of the Aztecs? Did they have religious experience of gods demanding human sacrifice? ‘More blood on the altar please’? So there’s a worry here. Religious experience is obviously real, but it’s massively diverse, massively culturally variable, even idiosyncratically variable. Just think about the various religious experiences of people within the Christian tradition.  Do they experience a loving and benign God? Do they experience a stern and wrathful God? How can they all be right?

And do we have any criteria of correctness for religious experience? In his little book with Sinnet-Armstrong, Professor Craig draws an analogy with colour blindness. He says we don’t have a criteria but nevertheless some people have been getting it right. But of course the analogy he draws there is a complete failure; in the case of colour blindness we do have a criteria.  My Father is red-green colour blind; he didn’t know about it until he was 16 and joined the merchant navy. He was subjected to some tests, and they showed him he was red-green colour-blind.  And importantly, they showed him he was red-green colour blind using the sensory information available to him. He knew, using his own senses, that he failed various tests.  He’d be lousy at picking the right fruit out of a box of fruit.  So, in that case we have a criterion of correctness, in the case of religious experience it looks as if we don’t.  We just have enormous diversity.

Second, morality. First step towards clarity here; get rid of the terms subjective and objective.  Excise them from your vocabulary when you’re doing serious philosophy. This is the first thing I tell my students when they come to do ethics; the terms objective and subjective are just sources of endless confusion, endless muddle. When they object and they say I’m sure I know what I mean when I say something’s objective and something’s subjective. I then ask them What about colours? Are colours subjective or objective? As soon as you ask that question, you see that actually it has two different facets or aspects. When we experience colours is there some aspect of the world that we’re responding to? Is there something out there in the world that makes something red or blue or green? Answer: yes. So you might say colours are objective, aren’t they? On the other hand you could say, could we explain colour experience and the distinctions we draw between colours without saying quite a lot of rather subtle things about human sense organs, human receptivity to colours, the fact that we divide up the colour space in one way rather than another? No, we couldn’t.  We know that other organisms have very different sense organs, respond to different bits of the spectrum, parcel up the spectrum in different ways. So it looks as if colours are subjective, doesn’t it?  You have to get rid of the terms subjective and objective and pose the questions right.

Let’s do a tiny bit of modern meta-ethics. Modern meta-ethicists usually ask the following questions. First question: Are moral judgements truth apt? That is, are they making propositional claims capable of being true or false in the first place? Many say yes; some say no.  What else might be going on if they’re not truth apt; if they’re not propositional?  Well, they could be expressions of emotion; many theorists have thought that. Or they could be commands. Richard Hare at Oxford developed in the 1960’s the theory of moral judgements as implicit commands. Commands aren’t true or false, but commands are important in our lives. Let’s suppose that we think that moral judgements are truth apt; propositional. Do they occasionally state truths? If we believe that some moral judgements state truths then we owe our readers, or listeners, an account of truth-makers. We want to know what makes them true. In modern normative ethics we’ve got three great theories. We’ve got the Aristotelian theory, that moral truths are made true by facts about what constitutes human flourishing. We’ve got the Utilitarian theory, which says that moral truths are true by virtue of, or corresponding to, facts about human welfare or, more broadly, the welfare of sentient beings. And we’ve got the Kantian theory, which says moral truths are truths of practical reason and you test them by the famous universalisability test.  None of these theories requires God. Normative ethics, I proclaim, gets on very well without God. How might ethics depend on religion? Well only as far as I can see if the divine command theory were true. But I think the divine command theory is hopeless. Many, many, many years ago Plato famously asked: is something good because the gods command it or do they command it because it is good? I think sanity requires us to say that the gods command it because it’s good and that means we need an independent standard of what is good and what is bad. On the divine command theory it looks as if, if God were to command rape or murder or genocide, that would make it right. I hope none of you think that. I hope, if somebody commanded you to commit rape, or genocide, or murder you would say, No, I must not do it and not ask where the command was coming from.  Kant famously called that the autonomy of ethics. We use our own independent moral standard to judge any orders that we get from any source whatsoever. That’s what it is for morality to be autonomous. 

Now I thought, in my innocence, that the divine command theory was a dead letter.  But I have since learned that it’s not, and that there are rather eminent philosophers in the United States who are trying to breathe life back into what I always thought was a corpse. I shall let Professor Craig explain that in his next answer. I still think it’s a dead letter, but we must move on. Ten minutes.

The Big Bang. Well I just want to dismiss the old a priori arguments. Professor Craig has given us the argument that Kant gives us in the first antinomy of The Critique of Pure Reason for the finite past of the universe.  He doesn’t give us Kant’s argument for the antithesis – for the universe having an infinite past. And he doesn’t give us Kant’s own solution, which is transcendental idealism. I think that the serious argument for the finite aged universe is the Big Bang. Does the Big Bang need God? Quentin Smith argues no. In his paper in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism, he offers an atheistic Big Bang cosmology that, he thinks, answers all the questions – all the questions, he says, that can properly be asked. To my eyes his account appeared self-consistent, and consistent with observation. I felt, I confess, a vague disquiet, that something somewhere had been left unanswered, but I couldn’t articulate this into a good argument against Smith; and I couldn’t be sure that I could trust my intuitive sense of unease. Would God be a good explanation of the Big Bang? I think not. Why not? Not because we can’t give a cause for the cause. That’s sometimes raised as an objection to positing God as a cause of the Big Bang. But I don’t think that’s the real objection, and it’s one that Professor Craig has easily rebutted elsewhere. He says you could explain an unknown disease in terms of a new virus and it looks as if even if you don’t know where the virus has come from you might still have an interesting causal hypothesis. I think that’s fine.  Similarly, Newton, when he postulates his theory of universal gravity, he famously refuses to speculate about the cause of gravity. Does he still have an interesting causal hypothesis? Yes. Why? Well, because you can get lots of new and testable predictions out of it. Newton says, If universal gravitation is true, the planets will swerve off their nice ceclerian orbits at conjunction. And he writes to his friend, the Astronomer Royal Aaint, Go and point your telescope and you’ll see it. You get propositions about the shape of the earth, you get Halley’s Comet, you get lots and lots of new empirical content from this theory. Likewise with Craig’s own example of the virus.  If it’s a virus, that’s going to tell us something interesting about the method of transmission, and about the ineffectiveness of antibiotics, which work against bacteria.  The key objection to positing God as the cause of the Big Bang is that the causal hypothesis is entirely ad hoc.  This is argued by Adolf Grunbaum, Mr. Space and Time, or should I say Professor Space and Time, in a paper in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science in 2004, a paper entitled, The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology. He says, If your original hypothesis is just that God exists, that explains nothing.  If your original hypothesis is God exists and causes the physical universe to have certain features, this explains those features, but only trivially. So the obvious challenge here is: say something interesting about this causal hypothesis to convince us that this causal hypothesis is not entirely ad hoc?

Fine-tuning: the latest and most sophisticated version of the design argument. First question: Is there a problem here at all? There are plenty of people who call themselves anthropic sceptics who say there’s no problem here – the probabilities are undefined, the numbers are bogus. This, if true, would undercut both design and infinite universe explanations, because they’d both be solutions to a non-problem. In the BJAPS for June 2005 there’s an article by Geoffrey Kopersky; ‘Should we care about fine-tuning?’ He discusses the views of the anthropic sceptics, masses of technical mathematics here, and eventually concludes that it’s natural to assume indifference (that is equal probability of a given value falling within any given range of interval unless we know otherwise). So we come across a dice with six faces and we say unless we know something to the contrary we’ll assume that the probability of it falling on any one of the faces is one sixth. Actually, the one thing we do know about dice is that that’s false. For any given dice the probability is certainly not one sixth. No dice was ever a perfect cube with the mass perfectly distributed across it. So any given empirical dice is always going to have some slight bias somewhere or other.  Kopersky says that this assumption of indifference is the natural assumption. It catches the intuition that nature has no preference for certain parameter values. Science might one day show that nature does. Only then will the question of the true distribution have to be addressed. So he says let’s assume indifference.  That generates the vast numbers, and they are staggering numbers that Professor Craig has alluded to.  But there’s a serious doubt about whether the problem has even been well posed.

Does the argument that Professor Craig has given for fine-tuning actually entail that life or mind is staggeringly improbable? No, it doesn’t. The fine-tuning argument entails that, around “here” there are lots and lots of life-prohibiting universes. Take the values of the twenty physical constants, tweak one of them a little bit, you get a life-prohibiting universe, we wouldn’t be around.  But what we’ve got here is a twenty dimensional hyper-space. Very hard to imagine, but the mathematics is fairly straight forward. Just imagine twenty independent variables. Do we know anything about very, very distant worlds in this hyperspace? Nothing at all. So out there somewhere else in this hyperspace, there might be lots and lots and lots of universes that permit, as they say in Star Trek, life but not as we know it.  Now I’m going to have to speed up, otherwise I’m going to have to say nothing about the resurrection, that’s a shame. Let’s return to Craig’s argument.

I had a little tutorial before coming to this debate from Stewart Prenell, who is the assistant editor of the BJAPS, and he took me through the wonders of string theory and, rather more interesting, loop quantum gravity.  Both of these various branches of modern physics generate infinite ensembles of universes.  The loop quantum gravity’s fun, this is a wonderful cosmogony, with universes emerging out of black holes. Each universe has values for the fundamental physical constants that are variations on those of its parent universe, and you get a sort of quasi-Darwinian story of the evolution of universes; this is a wonderful fun story.  Is it true? I haven’t the foggiest notion! Is it all metaphysical? Well, not necessarily. Not if our theory tells us things we can predict, things we can observe in our physical universe. Is it merely ad hoc? Are we multiplying probabilistic resources merely to solve the fine-tuning problem? Well, it might not be.  I read a nice little web article by Lee Smolin, the pioneer of loop quantum gravity, before coming to this debate.  And he stresses again and again and again the possibility of performing experiments. This is the test for adhocness – can we go away and perform some experiments? Can we test this hypothesis? And he says for about thirty years in fundamental physics we were generating hypotheses but we were completely unable to test them. And, he says, now we’re beginning to be able to form tests. So he says the rival infinite universe versions of string theory have met some set backs; they’ve come across some facts that are inconsistent with their theory. Is this a death knell for the theory? Well, not necessarily. But my theory, he says, loop quantum gravity, passes the tests.  Now at this point it looks as if we can turn round to the natural theologian, the partisan of design, and say, Are you going to develop your design hypothesis into something testable? Are you going to tell us on the basis of your hypothesis of design, that the universe will be observed to have properties F and G and H, where these are independently testable. That’s the test here.  I think the positing of a God to explain the Big Bang is utterly ad hoc, but the positing of a God who’s a Designer might not be.  After all, previous partisans of the design hypothesis actually came up with some claims about the empirical world on the basis of it. Many of them turned out to be false, but that’s not the end of the world. I better stop. The challenge to Craig is to come up with any empirical content to the Designer hypothesis.

If time permits, I’ll come back to the resurrection later.

William Lane Craig

You’ll remember in my first speech, I said that in order to decide whether or not the Christian God exists we need to answer two questions. First, are there any good reasons to think that God does not exist? Now, Dr. Pyle, by his own admission, is unable to offer us any reasons to think that God does not exist. This leaves us then, at best, with a sort of agnosticism, God may or may not exist. And, as he himself recognises, this is compatible with Christianity. I may believe that God exists simply on the basis of my religious experience of God or on the basis of faith. And, therefore, the failure of any arguments for God’s existence does nothing at all to disprove that he exists. Dr. Pyle also admits that he doesn’t know if the absence of evidence would prove that there is no God, and I would suggest, in this case, that the absence of evidence for God, even if it were true, does nothing to disprove God’s existence because the absence of evidence is evidence of absence only in the case where if the entity did exist you should expect to see more evidence of its existence than what we do in fact see.  And what that would mean is that if God exists, should we expect to see more evidence of his existence than the beginning of the universe out of nothing, the extraordinary fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life, the existence of a realm of objectively existing moral values, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, and religious experience of knowing God personally? I don’t think there’s any probability that we ought to have greater evidence than that if God did exist.  So basically at worst we are left tonight with agnosticism, which is completely compatible with Christianity.  But I have offered five reasons to think that God does exist, and Andrew has offered some very technical responses to some of them.

First, the origin of the universe points to a Creator. Notice that Andrew does not deny my first premise that “whatever begins to exist has a cause.”  I then offered two arguments as to why the universe began to exist, the first was a philosophical argument against the possibility of an actually infinite past. And, by his own admission he says I will simply dismiss this argument. Well, dismissing it is not the same as refuting it. He says “Kant offers an antinomy to this” but does Dr. Pyle seriously mean to endorse the antithesis of Kant’s first antinomy? I think not. That is easily solved by simply saying that time begins at the moment of creation and that God beyond the Big Bang exists timelessly. So unless he thinks, and I’m sure he does not, that Kant’s argument in the antithesis is sound, we’re left with a perfectly good argument against the infinitude of the past. I’m going to stake my claim on that philosophical argument. 

What about the scientific evidence? Well, here he simply alluded vaguely to Quentin Smith’s arguments but didn’t tell us what those arguments were. In fact, Quentin Smith believes in the beginning of the universe, he agrees with the second premise that the universe began to exist. So I think we’ve got good scientific and philosophical reasons for believing that the universe began to exist, and from that it follows with logical necessity that therefore the universe has a cause. Now, Dr. Pyle indicts this conclusion by saying God’s not a good answer to this because you can’t make any new predictions on the basis of the God hypothesis. It’s ad hoc. The problem with this response is that I’m not offering a kind of creation science here; I’m not offering this as a sort of scientific hypothesis.  This is a deductive philosophical argument and given the two premises, the conclusion follows with logical necessity. Whether you think it’s explanatory, whether you like it or not is irrelevant. It follows logically from the two premises, and he’s done nothing to refute either of those two premises, on the contrary I think that both of them have, in effect, been granted.  So we have good reason to believe that there’s a personal, transcendent, uncaused beginningless, timeless, spaceless, creator of the universe.

Now what about the second argument from fine-tuning? Here he said the fine-tuning may not be a problem, and I’m sure you didn’t understand what he was talking about here. He admitted, however, that it is natural to assume a principle of indifference. If you’ve got ten to the five hundredth power (10⁵⁰⁰) different possible universes permitted by string theory, there’s a principle of indifference that says “none of those is preferred” and he admitted that that’s right. So this would be a good question, “Why does a life-permitting universe exist, given its enormous improbability?” He said, But do we really know anything about very, very distant universes? You don’t need to consider those for this argument to be sound.  All you need to do is consider this local group of universes that are governed by our same laws and then you slightly alter the constants and quantities, and as you do so you find that it’s inconceivably improbable that there are life-permitting universes within that dimension. It’s like having a fly on the wall and a single shot is fired, and the bullet pierces the fly.  Even if outside, the large blank area around the fly, the wall was covered with flies so that a bullet would likely hit one fired at random, nevertheless, within the blank area it is much more probable that the bullet would miss the fly than hit it. And the fact that the universe is fine-tuned for our existence, I think, cannot be plausibly explained by the result of chance. And, in fact, the appeal to many universes in loop quantum gravity admits this.  It is to say, yes, we can’t explain this by chance alone without the metaphysical hypothesis of enormous proportions of this infinite world ensemble.  But my two objections remain. First, there is no evidence that loop quantum gravity is correct; this is a highly embryonic field of exploration and certainly no evidence that there are these other worlds.  Secondly, the Penrose problem remains. If we are just one member of a random assortment of worlds then it is inconceivably more probable that we should be observing a much smaller universe because there are many more of those types of universes in the ensemble than finely-tuned universes. Again he asked, What predictions can you make?  I’m not offering this as creation science. This is a deductive argument, and it follows that if these three alternatives are the only alternatives for explaining fine-tuning and if two of them don’t work, then it follows that the third one has to be the best explanation.  So I think it’s that the best explanation for the appearance of design in the universe is that it is designed.

What about the moral argument for God’s existence? I do not think or agree that the terms objective and subjective are muddled terms.  Objective means mind independent.  The problem with his example of the colours is that it wasn’t objectivity or subjectivity that was muddled, it was colours that are muddled, because colours are secondary qualities that seem to exist in the world and in the mind.  It was the colours that were the source of the ambiguity, not the objectivity.  Think about elephants, do elephants objectively exist? Yes, they do. If there were no human beings to think about them there would still be elephants.  They have objective, mind-independent existence. It’s the colour example that he used that misleads you to thinking that there’s some muddle here.  But cast the argument in terms of moral judgements. My argument is that apart from God there’s no reason to think that any of these moral judgements are true. Richard Dawkins, for example, in his recent book, takes the view that there is no good, no evil, there is simply DNA replicating itself, there is no meaning beyond that. That’s the position of the secular evolutionary atheist.  And what I would like to know from Dr. Pyle, is, Why is Dawkins wrong? Paul Kurtz, the humanist philosopher, has said that the central question about moral and ethical principles concerns their ontological foundation.  If they are neither derived from God nor anchored in a transcendent ground, which he hasn’t offered, are they purely ephemeral? That’s the challenge for the atheist.  So cast the argument in terms of moral realism and truth and I don’t see any reason to think that there are any moral truths of the sort that he seems to agree that there are.

Do objective moral values exist? He seems to think that they do because he says that we can get on without God, so he grants the second premise. But I, for the life of me, don’t understand why, on atheism, human beings are morally valuable.  They’re just primates, relatively evolved animals, and animals are not moral agents.  He says divine command morality faces the arbitrariness objection of the Euthyphro dilemma. Not at all. I’m not a voluntarist. I don’t think that God just makes up moral values. Rather, God’s commandments flow necessarily from his own holy and perfectly loving nature so that God’s own nature is the paradigm of moral goodness which serves as the necessary expression of his moral commands to us.  So I think divine command morality is a quite viable alternative to atheism, which I think cannot provide any ontological foundation for moral values.

He did not respond to the arguments for the resurrection of Jesus, for which I think we have good personal grounds. So let me go to my fifth point about personal experience.

The problem here, he says, is that there’s a multiplicity of religious experience and there’s great diversity and no criteria to judge among them. What I would say is simply this: a person is rational to believe in the object of his religious experience in the absence of some defeater of that experience.  If there is no reason to think that experience is delusory, then he is perfectly within his rights in thinking that it is veridical. And of course he hasn’t offered any defeaters, because he says he doesn’t have any arguments for atheism. So in the absence of any arguments against the existence of God I’m perfectly rational to believe in the object of my religious experience.

Second, as for diversity, notice that false claims to something do nothing to undermine the truth of a veridical claim. If you do have a genuine experience of God, someone else making a counterfeit claim does absolutely nothing, logically, to undermine the veridicality of your experience.  So I don’t think that the problem of multiplicity is so serious a question or problem as he would have us believe.

So I think, in the end, we have five arguments which remain intact for the existence of the God revealed by Jesus and admittedly no arguments against it. So at worst we’re left with agnosticism; at best I think we are left with good reasons for Christian theism.

Andrew Pyle

Let’s just correct a couple of misunderstandings and then I’ll go on to say something about the fifth argument, the argument about the resurrection. Professor Craig thinks I’m endorsing the antithesis in Kant’s second antinomy. No, I was making a rather different point. I was suggesting that the time is long gone when we settled great debates about whether the universe is infinite or finite in space, or in time, by a priori argument. I have a very good colleague and a good friend called James Ladyman who writes lengthy and very vitriolic polemics against people who think that we should do this stuff by a priori argument.  As a historian of philosophy I have to look at the a priori arguments because that’s where this stuff is coming from. So, when I was talking about Kant I was simply saying Kant presents an argument for the thesis for a finitely old universe.  He presents an argument for the antithesis, for an infinitely old universe. And then he presents his own solution to the problem which is transcendental idealism (the physical universe doesn’t exist in its own right anyway). Now, I don’t think this is the right way to tackle these problems.  That’s why I wanted you to dismiss that line of argument from Professor Craig. I wanted to say the right way to do this stuff is to look at the physics, and Professor Craig, of course, does that.  He looks at the Big Bang. With regard to the Big Bang he says I’m not presenting an empirical hypothesis here. I’m presenting a metaphysical argument.  But, of course, he’s presenting a causal claim, and when somebody comes up with a causal claim you can ask, What reason do I have to believe in this posited cause?  When Professor Craig says, It’s a virus that’s producing this disease, not something else, not a bacterium, not any other sort of micro organism, it’s a virus that’s causing this disease.  And I say well, what reason do I have to think that it’s a virus that’s causing this disease?  And the answer, of course is, It will pass some tests. If this disease is caused by a virus, antibiotics will be ineffective, it will pass through filters of a certain kind, and so on and so forth.  So, when somebody advances a causal claim, a causal hypothesis, you have to ask what evidence is being presented.  And then the question is whether that causal hypothesis is ad hoc; whether it has been merely contrived to explain the available evidence. And the test for ad hocness is ‘independent testable content’. The natural theologians of the past were not shy of adopting this challenge. Professor Craig seems to be.

Now, let’s say a little bit about the resurrection.  There’s lots more I could say about what Professor Craig just told us. But, Professor Craig said, quite correctly, that I’d said nothing about the resurrection. Well, it won’t do for Professor Craig just to say, These are facts that need to be explained. Remember the nature of our sources. These are documents selected; how? On what basis? By what criteria? From a mass of documents written in Greek by a group of people living at least thirty years, probably more, later than the original, Aramaic speaking disciples of Christ.  Just remember those historical facts and you get the endless possibilities of misremembering, misreporting, mistranslating, spin-doctoring: endless possibilities for a misrepresentation of the original fact from any number of sources of human error.  You might ask, Do I believe in the historical Jesus at all?  Well, I think the answer is yes. I think that myths and legends tend to accumulate around some kernel of historical fact. Do I believe in the crucifixion?  Well, almost certainly. It seems the most extraordinary thing for anyone to make up. Remember that the disciples and the Jews were looking for a Messiah who would lead them to glory. So it seems a bizarre assumption that anyone would make up the tale of the Messiah being put to death like a common criminal.  So I have a very high subjective probability that something like the crucifixion probably happened. Do I believe in the empty tomb? Well, I neither strongly believe, nor strongly disbelieve it. Empty tombs happen, nothing miraculous about an empty tomb.  Bodies go missing for all manner of reasons. Might have happened, might not have happened.  But to get from the empty tomb to the miracle of the resurrection, Professor Craig needs to take on the most astonishing four-fold task.  Let me explain what this fourfold task consists of.  He’s going to have to list the naturalistic hypotheses. There are what? Eight or nine hundred people here in this room? Well, I suggest that you all go away and write a little naturalistic story about how a body can go missing from a tomb in a couple of days.  If my playwright friend Anthony Smith is here, he can write two since he’s good at writing stories. Then you have to eliminate the naturalistic hypotheses.  And where Professor Craig does this in more detail elsewhere, his arguments amount to little more than special pleading. They amount to little more than the claim that, If the body had gone missing because somebody had pinched it, somebody had run off with it, then some personal persons would have done something for which we don’t have a proper explanation in terms of motives.  Some personal persons, unknown, have done something for which we don’t understand the motives. [shrugs as if to say ‘so what?’].  And of course people never do things for motives we don’t clearly understand.

And of course, if we’re on to admitting supernatural causes, you can admit any other supernatural causes ad hoc; maybe the devil did it all; and then you’ve got to eliminate those.  So you’ve got to list naturalistic hypotheses, eliminate naturalistic hypotheses; list rival supernaturalistic hypotheses, eliminate rival supernaturalistic hypotheses.  All I can say is: good luck.

I wanted to leave a little bit of time for an excursus into comparative religion.  When I read the works of Professor Craig I have come to the conclusion that comparative religion is a rather discernable weakness in his philosophy of religion.  He argues for the historical truth of the Christian miracle of the resurrection, and I want to ask him what he thinks of the Ganesh milk miracles of 1995.  I looked these up on the web the other day, and I came across 97,400 entries under ‘Ganesh’ plus ‘miracle’.  I confess I only looked at the first 40.  What was the occurrence? Well, statues of the Elephant god Ganesh in Hindu temples all over the world started to accept milk offerings for a day, and then stopped. That’s what we’re told.  This happened on September the 21st 1995.  As a neutral observer, with no allegiance to either religion, Hinduism or Christianity, I found myself in the position of being the sort of neutral judge and scoring the debate.  Which of these two miracles has better evidential credentials? Well, what sort of tests might we employ?

Quantity of witnesses: this is no contest, Ganesh wins hands down.  These reports came from many, many, many hundreds of Hindu temples, right across the Hindu world, each of them witnessed by hundreds, possibly more, witnesses.  So if we’re counting quantity of heads, that’s Ganesh one, Christ nil. 

Quality of witnesses: well the Scriptures tell us that the disciples were uneducated, illiterate, superstitious folk.  Many of these late twentieth century Hindu’s are highly educated; much more important than level of education [is] level of critical awareness.  If you read the reports on these websites, you’ll find that the believers in this Ganesh miracle are being forced very, very early on to confront sceptical naturalistic counter-hypotheses.  Maybe it’s just capillary action! They’re being forced to try to rebut sceptical, naturalistic counter-hypotheses.  So in terms of quality of the witnesses, again Ganesh wins hands down.  That’s two – nil to Ganesh.

Time Lag: Well, there’s two time lags here of course, time lag between the events and the reports and time lag between the reports and us.  And again of course on both counts it’s perfectly clear that Ganesh wins hands down.  These reports were occurring in the media almost immediately after the events that they supposedly record.  And, of course, these events were only 12 years ago, so we can go and visit these Hindus in their temples and talk to them. So, by the time lag criterion, again Ganesh wins hands down.  That’s three – nil to Ganesh. 

Fourth criterion, prejudice or bias:  Well this one’s a straight draw. Christian miracles are reported by Christians.  The most favourable reports of the Ganesh milk miracles are in Hinduism today, well there’s a surprise for you.  So we have Christian miracles reported by Christians; we have Hindu miracles reported by Hindus.  That one’s a straight draw.

What should we conclude from this?  The evidential case for the Ganesh milk miracles is vastly superior to that for the Christian resurrection.  This needn’t worry me. I can be sceptical about both, but rather more sceptical about the resurrection.  But I think it should worry Professor Craig. After all, he’s come here today to argue for the Christian God, not just any old god.  And I think if he really takes the argument for the resurrection seriously, he should take this argument for the milk miracles and for the elephant god Ganesh seriously.  I look forward to his appearance on the next of these debates in the guise of the Hindu holy man, proclaiming his allegiance to the great god Ganesh.

William Lane Craig

We’ve still not heard any good reasons to think that God does not exist in tonight’s debate. So, at worst, we’re left with a level playing field with agnosticism; that’s not incompatible with Christianity. 

But are there any good reasons to think that God does exist? Consider my argument based on the origin of the universe. Premise one: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.  Dr. Pyle tacitly agrees.  Number two: The universe began to exist. Dr. Pyle tacitly agrees. He dismisses the philosophical argument, but without refutation.  He says, The time is long gone by which we settle questions by means of such a priori arguments. This is not an a priori argument in the first place, but it is a philosophical or metaphysical argument.  And as for it being “long gone,” well, I think that’s just a manifestation of modern arrogance to dismiss arguments in this way. I think the argument is sound, and there are plenty of other contemporary philosophers such as David Otterberg at the University of Leeds, or G. J. Whitrow who was at Imperial College of Science and Technology, who agree with me. So, you’ve got to do more to refute a philosophical argument than just treat it dismissively.  And as for the scientific evidence, I’ve already indicated that among contemporary scientists the prediction of the Big Bang Theory, that the universe began to exist, is widely accepted.  That leads, then, deductively to the conclusion that the universe has a cause. Now, again, he simply says, But what reason is there to believe in this cause? What predictions do you make?  It’s a deductive argument. If you grant the two premises, then there must be such a cause. Then I gave arguments as to why we ought to think this cause is timeless, changeless, personal, and so forth.  But, let me also add, it is confirmed by the other arguments for the existence of God; the arguments from fine-tuning, from moral values, from the resurrection of Jesus.  All of these create a cumulative case which I think make the God, or Creator, hypothesis quite plausible. 

He hasn’t yet responded to my refutations of his objections to the fine-tuning argument or the moral argument so let’s turn to the argument concerning the resurrection of Jesus.

And here I was slightly amused to find that it was Dr. Pyle who was using a priori methods to deal with a historical question.  He says, Look at the nature of the sources, there’s ways of misrepresenting, ways of misremembering. All of these things are possible. Sure! And biblical historians are aware of those!  That’s why they have criteria of authenticity to determine what does and does not belong to the historical core of these narratives. These historians are not naïve.  Criteria such as multiple attestation in independent sources, embarrassment (the very criterion that he implicitly used in accepting the crucifixion of Jesus), coherence with readily established facts, Semitic language and traces of milieu, and so on and so forth.  And when they do this, they find that, in fact, these narratives are very credible with regard to these three facts.  In the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, in a review by Mark Alan Powell in the year 2000, he points out that “the dominant, and in my mind, likely view is that the passion narratives are early and based on eyewitness testimony.”  At the conclusion of his epical study of the empty tomb and appearances, N. T. Wright says that “the empty tomb and appearances have a historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, like the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70.”

So, given the tools of historical research, you arrive at these three facts, and they can’t be dismissed a priori by appealing to general possibilities.  So the real question then is: what is the best explanation of these facts?  Notice that Dr. Pyle didn’t defend any naturalistic explanation. He just says, There’s any number you can think of. Fine, suggest them.  The fact is that those that have been suggested by serious historians have been all dismissed by researchers on this topic: conspiracy and theft by the disciples, apparent death of Jesus on the cross, hallucinations, visit to the wrong tomb, twin theories.  What naturalistic theory is he going to defend?  I’d like to hear it, and then we can deal with it.  So I don’t think my arguments are a matter of special pleading.  In fact, it is true, I mean it’s just a fact, if you know the literature that there is no naturalistic hypothesis for the explanation of these three facts which has garnered a large number of contemporary adherents.

What about other supernatural hypotheses? I would suggest that here it’s the religio-historical context in which the event occurs that gives us the clue to the correct interpretation of the miracle.  Namely, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified for his personal blasphemous claims about himself to be the revelation of the God of Israel. If indeed he has been supernaturally raised from the dead, the God of Israel has vindicated those allegedly blasphemous claims for which he was executed.  So in this religio-historical context I think this gives us good grounds to think that Jesus was who he claimed to be.

I must confess I am not familiar with the Ganesh miracles that he talks about.  But what I would say about this is that you can’t dismiss these sort of things a priori. By pointing to other miracles you cannot disqualify the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. That’s just bad historical method.  You’ve got to look at both of them with serious historical scrutiny, and then compare them. I’ve never looked at these Ganesh miracles but one thing I would say is that they are suspiciously like the sort of things that adherents to a particular religion would believe in, just like crying statues of Mary or visions of Mary.  It’s the sort of thing that proponents of that particular religion would naturally believe in.  In that respect, you see, it is totally unlike the belief in the resurrection of Jesus.  Jews had no idea of a crucified Messiah. The Messiah was supposed to crush Israel’s enemies, and that meant in that context throwing off the yolk of Rome.  Much less did they have any idea of a Messiah that would rise from the dead.  In fact, as I say, Judaism prohibited any notion of resurrection from the dead until the end of the world.  So this is the last sort of miracle that these disciples would invent or come to believe in given their Jewish frame of mind and thought form.  So I think that it stands qualitatively apart from the kinds of miracles that Dr. Pyle is talking about.  But in any case, we would need to do a historical examination of both cases and see where the evidence lies.  And I think that in the case of the resurrection of Jesus the three facts are fairly firmly established, and the religio-historical context gives us good ground to believe plausibly that the God of Israel has raised Jesus, his Son, from the dead in vindication of those claims.

Andrew Pyle

Professor Craig says I’ve not provided reasons against God’s existence; quite true, I haven’t tried to.  He goes back to the Big Bang and says, I’ve got a deductive argument for a cause.  Well, that’s just a deductive argument for a cause labelled ‘a cause.’  The deductive argument says, Here’s something that comes into existence, therefore it has a cause.  But he wants to say a great deal more about the nature of that cause; he wants to say a whole lot of stuff about what that cause is. He’s advancing a causal explanation.  Now, I think when somebody advances a causal explanation, it’s legitimate for somebody else to come back and say, Why should I believe that that is the cause, rather than anything else?  Now, we’ve got the Quentin Smith account, which makes the physical universe effectively self-sustaining. He says the whole thing works fine without a God.  Does he believe that it has a cause?  Well, he believes that every causal question you could ask about the physical universe can be answered by reference to the physical universe.  So he flatly denies that the physical universe needs a transcendent cause. If you buy into the Lee Smolin scenario of the wonderful reproducing universes, then again you are going to get a cause for this physical universe, for the Big Bang that led to the creation of this physical universe, but it’s going to come out of a previous physical universe, which was in an ancestral relation to this physical universe.  Now we’re not going to be in a position to reconstruct that causal story, of course, because no information gets across the Big Bang. But there’s another naturalistic account of how our universe came to be through a Big Bang that doesn’t require any sort of transcendent God. 

Now we go on to naturalistic versus supernaturalistic explanations.  I don’t think I have to defend any particular naturalistic explanation.  I don’t believe in ghosts.  Somebody comes along and asks me why I don’t believe in ghosts and cites, let’s say, some very, very famous ghost stories.  I run through the ghost stories and I discover, let’s say that of the hundred best known ghost stories, sixty can be explained in terms of known natural causes, thirty-five can be explained in terms of human fraud basically, made up. And five are left unexplained; a reasonable percentage.  I think I then have grounds to think that, probably, the others can be explained in terms of either more naturalistic causes or human fraud.  Of course, I’m not going to be able to run through all the cases, and I’m not always going to be able to list naturalistic hypotheses.  I just think we have very, very strong grounds from track record arguments, for inductive arguments, from the workings of nature for a sort of broad based naturalism.  I can’t prove that to you. I can’t show that supernaturalistic explanations are bad explanations.  But I think naturalism has a great deal going for it, and I think that we can explain miracle reports very often in purely naturalistic terms.  I think if you’re a naturalist you’re going to expect there to be lots of miracle reports, and there are going to be lots of miracle reports whether there are miracles or not. 

Let’s say a little bit about the Ganesh miracles.  I’m astonished, frankly, that a Professor of the Philosophy of Religion knows nothing about the most publicised, the most widely-known, miracle debate of modern times.  If I were a Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, I would have gone into the discussion in some detail.  I would have spent some time looking at these reports and seeing whether, as I’ve claimed, they are much better evidenced than the resurrection case.  Professor Craig has at least the beginnings of a reply. He says, Well, these are the sorts of things that the people in a particular religion would believe in and he says, This is completely different from the resurrection. Well, I want to remind him of a debate he conducted with Bart Ehrman not so many years ago which is available online.  And Ehrman says that the famous passage about the disciples meeting the mysterious stranger on the road to Emmaus, towards the end of the Gospel of Luke, can be explained in the following way: the disciples met a mysterious stranger, and the mysterious stranger opens the scriptures for them (and I presume this is both literal and metaphorical), and he explains the meaning of some very well-known passages of Scripture, passages I think, and I’m quoting from Ehrman here, but I think he’s probably right about this, from Isaiah and the Psalms, pointing to how the chosen one of God will be treated, in this case mistreated, thus explaining within Jewish belief system what they’ve just observed.  So I don’t think this is quite as alien a thought to the Jews as Professor Craig is suggesting.  Professor Ehrman, with whom Professor Craig had this debate, is, I understand, a very eminent scholar in these matters, very well-learned in Jewish Law, in the Old Testament.  He says, These are very, very familiar passages from Isaiah; and I think what we have here is the beginnings of a naturalistic account of the origins of a myth.  Just put yourself in the position of the early disciples.  Their beloved leader has just been killed.  They haven’t the foggiest notion what to do next. Shall we all pack up and go home? What are we for? What do we do? What’s the point?  They meet the mysterious stranger, and the mysterious stranger explains to them. He explains the significance of what they’ve just observed, and that gives them a way of going on, a raison d’etre, a reason for carrying on the faith.  I actually think this is a much more human story; a story with much more human appeal than the traditional story of the resurrection as a miracle.  I think what we have here is one of the great myths of origins.  And in the course of time between the death of Christ and the writings of the Gospels, a period of about thirty years which involves translations out of Aramaic back into Greek, this myth becomes established as the great Christian story which has come down to you all.

William Lane Craig

In my closing statement I’d like to draw together some of the threads of this debate and see if we can come to some conclusions.  In the first place, we’ve not seen any good arguments to think that God does not exist tonight and therefore, at worst, we’re left with agnosticism which is perfectly compatible with Christianity.  But secondly, I think we do have the balance of probability on the side of Christian theism tonight.

First, the origin of the universe.  It’s never been disputed that what begins to exist has a cause. Nor has the argument for the beginning of the universe been disputed. Tonight it’s simply been dismissed as not modish any longer. He did in his last speech say, Well, loop quantum gravity might be able to provide an alternative, but it’s dubious that loop quantum gravity (or Smolin’s model) can be extended backward to infinity. This has never been successfully done.  So, on balance, there is no doubt that the balance of the scientific evidence, as well as the philosophical evidence, is that the universe had an absolute beginning at some point in the past, and therefore it must have a cause.  Now he says, But what is the nature of that cause? Well, I answered that in my first speech.  I gave several arguments as to the nature of this cause: timeless, spaceless, immaterial, beginningless, uncaused, personal, and enormously powerful.  And all of those follow from a conceptual analysis of what it means to be a cause of time and space.  But this is not offered as a scientific explanation; this is a personal explanation. If I go in and find my wife in the kitchen and there’s a kettle boiling, I say, Why is the kettle boiling? She might give me a scientific explanation in terms of the heat of the flame passing kinetic energy to the molecules of the water causing them to fly off in the form of steam. Or she might say, I put it on to make a cup of tea. The one is just as valid an explanation as the other, and I’m offering an explanation in terms of an agent and his volitions.  A scientific explanation of the first state of the universe cannot be given because it is an absolutely first state.  He says, But Smith thinks the singularity could be the cause of the universe.  But the problem is that the singularity itself came into being at some point in the past and needs an explanation.

The fine-tuning argument has been dropped in the debate, as has the moral argument.

What about the resurrection of Jesus? He says, Well, naturalism has a great deal going for it but he never told us what it is.  In fact, naturalism is plausibly the same as atheism, and he’s not offered any arguments for atheism tonight.  So you can’t disqualify the evidence for the resurrection by presupposing naturalism. That would be question-begging.  He says, Well, there are other ghost stories that one might explain and therefore you don’t need to explain every ghost story of that sort. Granted.  But that’s why the uniqueness of the resurrection is so important.  If you could show that the resurrection is exactly similar to other types of spurious miracle stories you would have some grounds for doubting it.  But it is the uniqueness of this event, and of this belief, that sets it apart.  If his understanding of the Ganesh miracles is as poor as his understanding of the road to Emmaus story in the Gospels then I have no confidence in what we’ve heard about those miracles tonight.  Ehrman’s position is not that the disciples met some stranger and this caused them to believe in the resurrection of Jesus.  The whole point of the Emmaus story is it’s a backward-looking reflection upon the fact that the disciples did not believe when they found the tomb empty, because there’s no expectation in Judaism of a crucified Messiah much less a rising one. So he completely misunderstands the story and misses the point.  There is no reason to go on in Judaism. Messiahs were a dime a dozen in the century before and after Jesus, and the Romans dealt with them all in the same way; they crucified them.  And if your favourite Messiah got himself crucified you basically had two choices: either you went home, or you got yourself a new Messiah. But in no case, right across the first century before or after Christ do we find any Messianic group of Jews claiming that their crucified victim was the Messiah after all.  Even if they had wanted to still believe in Jesus then at most they would have believed that he had gone to heaven where the righteous dead go to await the resurrection at the end of the world. But why they would have come to believe in what would have appeared to them an un-Jewish fairy tale, namely that he was already risen from the dead, remains inexplicable on a naturalistic account. So I’m sorry, but I think we’ve got good grounds for thinking these facts are true, and I think that there is no better naturalistic explanation than the explanation the disciples gave and were willing to die for; namely that God had raised him from the dead.

Finally, as to personal experience, again I want to say that personal experience, in the absence of some defeating reason, is perfectly rational.  And therefore on the basis of the reality of God and his relationship to me, I’m perfectly rational to believe in God unless and until Dr. Pyle can give us some overriding arguments for atheism.

Andrew Pyle

Well, I’m afraid I must have missed something. The balance of the scientific evidence shows that the physical universe, or rather the multiverse even, must be finite in time. I didn’t spot any arguments for that.  Dr. Craig has given us some arguments for the nature of the cause as well as arguments for there being a cause. He’s provided some arguments for the cause being timeless and spaceless and all the other stuff? I didn’t spot any arguments; I just spotted assertions.  I didn’t spot the glimmering of an argument for the claim that the cause of the physical universe and what brings about the Big Bang must be timeless and spaceless and so on and so forth, far less a personal being and a transcendent being.  What about personal explanations? I think this actually works against Professor Craig.  I don’t know much about persons, but the persons I know all act and operate in time.  If you read Locke’s definition of a person in chapter 27 of book 2 of The Essay Concerning Human Understanding, probably the most famous definition of a person, “a person is a thinking, reflective substance, that can consider itself the same at different times and in different places.”  Persons exist in times.  I’m not even sure I really understand what it would be to be a timeless person.  Sounds a bit like a round square to me.  So the idea that the acts of a timeless person are going to be the causes that bring about the physical universe existing in time, well, I just find that unintelligible.

We get a misrepresentation of the Quentin Smith position.  Quentin Smith doesn’t say that the singularity might be the cause.  He doesn’t even talk much about the singularity.  He just says, I can present a model of the Big Bang in which every event is explained in terms of a prior event within the order of nature. i.e. an account of the Big Bang which does not require any sort of transcendent agent.

Anything else to say? I think Professor Craig rather undersells what I said about naturalism.  I think I would want to defend something like the real Hume in the argument against miracles.  Not the travesty offered by John Earman.  I had hoped we might get on to that in the course of this debate but it seems that we’re not going to.  I think I want to defend something like the real Hume’s views.  Now the real Hume doesn’t say that you should give a probability of zero to any account of a miracle.  And he certainly doesn’t say that your subjective probability for the occurrence of a miracle shouldn’t go up when you hear witnesses.  What he says is your subjective probability shouldn’t go up very much.  Why not? Well, there are lots and lots and lots of false positives out there.  Just think of the people who go to Lord every year. Thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people, devout believers, go to Lord hoping to be cured.  Some of them are going to get better. Some diseases spontaneously go into remission. Doctors make mistakes, misdiagnoses.  And of course there’s the well-known bunch of psychosomatic effects. So there are going to be lots and lots and lots of false positives on any account.  I think it’s that sort of argument that gives me good grounds for thinking that there probably aren’t miracles going on at Lords and for thinking that we’re going to be able to tidy up the remaining anomalies of the ghost world.  I think this is ultimately an empirical argument, not an a priori one; it’s ultimately a track record argument.  We end up explaining what’s going on in the world solely in terms of natural causes.  Is this a proof that there isn’t a God? Well, of course it’s not.  Is this a proof that no miracles occur? Well, of course it’s not; how could you provide such a proof? The argument is of the form no reasonable person would believe that on the available evidence.

As for personal experience, we’ve been offered not even a glimmering of a criterion for when people get it right.  Professor Craig just says, Oh, well, if they get it right, they get it right and it’s the real thing but, of course, anyone can say that.  No doubt the Aztec High Priests demanding further human sacrifices said that.  So I hope none of you are going to think that personal experience gives good grounds for believing in the Christian God, or any other god.  You’d better find better grounds than that.

Chairman's Remarks

Well, that was quite a series of high octane engagements.  At times approaching tremendous sophistication, but never quite leaving behind some of the very basic questions and intuitions that I’m sure some of you have got to reflect on and bring to the floor here now.  So we’re going to enter into a question and answer session.

Q & A

Thanks very much for kicking this off.  Please, who are you and what’s your question?

Q to WLC: I am Deneil, I study philosophy here. I just had a question, in your first argument, when you talked about the infinity as a manifestation in existence being self-contradictory. I was just wondering if that could be applied to God. Is it therefore self-contradictory to have an infinitely powerful, infinitely loving God.

WLC: This is a good question that students often will ask, and I would say that, no, it doesn’t apply because the type of infinite I’m speaking of here is a quantitative infinite of a collection of definite and discrete parts that are collected into a whole. Whereas when one speaks of the infinity of God this is not a quantitative concept. It is, as it were, a qualitative infinity, not a quantitative, or mathematical infinity. Basically it means that God has attributes like being all powerful, all knowing, all loving, eternal, necessary, self-existent, and these are all sort of captured by the umbrella term “the infinity of God,” but there isn’t really a separate attribute of God called infinity. It’s a sort of umbrella term for all of these other superlative attributes which are not mathematical or quantitative in nature, and so this wouldn’t impinge upon the theological concept of God’s infinity.

Q to AP: Can I just say thank you both. My name’s Edward, I’m a scientist so I don’t have any grounding in philosophy. I do apologise if I have a slightly simplistic question. But can I first just say thank you to both of you for a really engaging debate. My question is: your issue with the argument a priori of God being a Creator, you were worried that that didn’t have any testable quantities.  I wondered perhaps if we know from empirical evidence that animals, creatures arise through a process of evolution. That’s a fact about the universe. Then we look to loop quantum mechanics and we see that perhaps universes arise with the state of being able to support life, through maybe a sort of process of Darwinian evolution.  I wondered if that itself doesn’t provide some sort of underlying testable evidence for the existence of God?

AP: I don’t think it provides any evidence of the existence of God at all. One of the beauties of the loop quantum theory, if it works, and this is all terribly speculative stuff, is that it would provide an account of the fine-tuning that doesn’t require a God. It would provide a quasi-Darwinian account of fine-tuning. According to this theory, universes reproduce through black holes, so we can expect our universe to be well-adapted to producing black holes because that’s how universes reproduce. The production of black holes is like the sort of analog in cosmology of Darwinian fitness, and then if it turns out that universes well-adapted to produce black holes are also well-adapted to produce life and mind then universes are going to be well-adapted to produce life and mind, and we’re going to be a sort of spin off.  What these reproducing universes are really trying to do is to produce as many black holes as possible and we’re just a side effect, and we mistakenly think that we’re the purpose of the whole thing. Now this is terribly, terribly speculative stuff, I haven’t the foggiest notion if this theory is true, but if you look at Smolin’s stuff, he insists again and again and again that his theory is leading to predictions, you can test it, and some of the tests come out right.  Now as I said to Professor Craig, in the past natural theologians were quite prepared to make empirical claims about the universe, and currently they seem to be running away from doing that.

Q to WLC: My name’s Joel, I’m a single honours philosopher. Dr. Craig, you said in your moral argument that if we didn’t have a God we wouldn’t be moral agents and you proceeded to throw a lot of emotive terms around, I don’t know maybe to break the audience’s glass jaw by using ‘rape’ and other such words. I’m just a bit curious; I saw an anthropological video today in anthropology of religion about an Amazonian tribe whose punishment for the woman going into a man’s hut is to rape her. Now I felt a bit shocked by that, but I don’t think they’re not human. Are you positing that this Amazonian tribe don’t fall into the category of humanity because they don’t agree with your morality?

WLC: No, on the contrary.  What I’m arguing is that, given atheism, there is no absolute standard of right and wrong by which you could judge their actions to be immoral or wrong, and neither could you judge national socialist Germany or apartheid in South Africa or some homophobic society to be doing something morally wrong because in the absence of God to set an absolute standard for moral right and wrong we are lost in a kind of socio-cultural relativism which your example illustrates for us.

Q to AP: Good evening. My name is Edward Sutton, and I’m reading physics. Dr. Pyle, why would the disciples of Jesus have been prepared to be imprisoned, tortured, and killed, very often in most unpleasant ways, if they were not absolutely convinced that Jesus was actually alive again? What made them believe this so strongly?

AP: Why they can believe this so strongly? Well, people believe all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons. I don’t think I’m obliged to give some sort of account or explanation. If you look around the world are there not many, many, many people who are going to die for something you regard as purely mythical?

Q [same questioner]: Am I expected to reply?

AP: It’s a rhetorical question. I don’t think that we necessarily regard the willingness to die for a cause as (a) any evidence of anything more than a belief and [(b)] I don’t think we can regard their belief as any evidence of probable truth. People are prepared to die for all manner of silly causes.

Q to WLC: Tim Acral, I am retired. Sir, you refer to the death of Jesus. The Nicene Creed uses the phrase “that Jesus, being of one substance with the Father.” Could you comment on the idea of Jesus dying but being of one substance with the Father?

WLC: The classical Christian understanding of the death of Christ is that he died in his human nature. That Christ is one person having two natures – a divine nature and a human nature – and he obviously cannot die insofar as he is God.  He dies in his human nature, and a human being dies when the soul is separated from the body. So in the case of Jesus, his soul was separated from his human body, which was then laid in the tomb by Joseph of Arimathea. So that would be the understanding of how Jesus died.

Q to AP: Hello, I’m Swithan Dobson. I study economics in Cardiff. Dr. Pyle, what is your position on a priori arguments in general since you seem to reject a priori arguments especially in regard to cosmology and the origin of the universe but you seem to do that a priori and thus perform a contradiction.

AP: No, no, no, no; this is a track record argument. The record of doing physics a priori is lousy. Just go back through the history of science and try to look at the number of people who’ve tried to make substantive, informative claims about the physical universe on the basis of a priori methods and they’ve got it wrong again and again and again and again and again. This is an empirical argument; it’s a track record argument. Classic example is the wonderful joke about Hegel; that he managed to come up with a wonderful a priori proof that the number of planets could only be seven just before somebody discovered the eighth. But there’s oodles of examples. This is not an a priori argument against doing physics a priori, this is an empirical argument against doing physics a priori. Just look at the track record and you’ll see that the ‘a priorists’ get it wrong endlessly.

Q to WLC: Hi, I’m Brianny. I study philosophy. Dr. Craig, you seem to be trying to prove that the Christian God exists by reference to religious experience. And you also seem to be saying that all non-Christian religious experiences are kind of counterfeit, and therefore can’t undermine the truth of the veridical claims of Christian ones? Isn’t that just begging the question in favour of Christianity?

WLC: Let me correct that impression, if that’s what I gave. My point was that the existence of counterfeit experiences does nothing, logically, to undermine the veridicality of a genuine experience. But that’s not to say that there aren’t veridical religious experiences in other religions. I think, in other religions, their experiences are very different from Christian experiences. For example, an experience of transcendence. I have no reason to think that, in other religions, one doesn’t have an experience of transcendence, or an experience of some whole greater than all of us as finite parts and things of that sort.  So, I don’t deny that there can be religious experiences that are veridical in other religions. But it’s not question begging in any case because if I have an experience of God as a personal Saviour and Lord who forgives my sins and brings me into relationship with himself, and I have no good reason to think that that experience is delusory, I’m perfectly within my rational rights to believe that I am so related to Him. And so what one would need would be some kind of a defeater of that belief. I would say that’s true for religious experience in general; that in the absence of some sort of a defeater (and by a defeater I mean an overriding objection) you are perfectly rational to go with what your experience tells you.

Q to WLC: Herman Caulders, citizen. I think I’m on the wrong side here actually. But may I ask you this question? I believe Professor Craig mentioned that Christianity is compatible with agnosticism; could you explain that more?

AP: I think that’s probably true. Certainly there are versions of agnosticism in the nineteenth century which come very, very close to religious belief. If you look at nineteenth century agnosticism, you’ve got a very negative tradition running through T. H. Huxley, which comes out of Hume, and says, maybe the world of phenomena is all there is; maybe there’s nothing behind the scenes. That’s very close to atheism. But you’ve also got a strand of agnosticism coming out of Kant.  And Kant believes that behind the phenomenal world of appearances, there’s a numinal world of things in themselves. We can know that it’s there but we can’t know anything about it.  And that strand of agnosticism runs through people like Herbert Spencer, and he talks about the Unknowable, with a big ‘U’. Now you might think that’s a pretty watered down version of religion to say, There’s this sort of unknowable thing that lurks behind the scenes; maybe it’s God but we don’t know that. But there certainly are strands of meaning, nuances of meaning, within agnosticism, and some of them come fairly close to being positive about religion. Not about any particular religion because of course this is the Unknowable, so you’d lose a lot of particular creeds, but of course it could be perfectly true . . . that there is the God of Christinaity.

WLC: They could be a fideist.

AP: Indeed. And everything I said today is perfectly consistent with fideism. You know, the fideists believe that God exists, or even the God of a particular tradition exists, but we just don’t have any good arguments.

GM: A quick word from William.

WLC: What I meant was that many Christian theologians believe in the full Christian Gospel and truth, but they don’t do so on the basis of argument and evidence.  And so it’s in that rational sense they’re agnostic about the value of arguments and evidence for Christian faith.  But they’re still Christian. They believe it on faith or on the basis of religious experience, not on the basis of rational argument and evidence. That’s what I meant.

AP: Yes, in that sense Christianity and agnosticism are compatible. That’s right.

GM: Okay, next question

Q to WLC: I’m Laura. I’m a philosophy student. You said in your moral argument that God must exist on the basis that he’s the only possible source of objective morality and that in society people would not like to admit that murder and rape are wrong purely on the basis that society has made it this way. What I would like to ask is, of course it’s comforting and it’s all well and good to say that, Oh, yes, there must be an objective moral law, murder and rape are always wrong. As a philosophy student I’ve learnt that logic is incredibly important; where is the logic in moving from the fact that society has dictated, so to speak, that murder and rape are wrong; where is the logical movement from that to the fact that there must be objective moral laws and that there must be a God?

WLC: It would be on the basis of our moral experience. In the same way that we trust our sense experience, that there is a world of external objects out there and that you’re not, say, a body lying in the Matrix being stimulated to believe that there is a reality out there when it’s really all virtual. In the same way, we perceive a realm of objectively existing moral values and duties.  And in the absence of some reason to think that this moral experience is delusory, we’re perfectly justified in believing that our apprehensions of the moral realm are veridical. It’s on a par with our sensory perception of the external world. And let me just ask you, you said you’re a philosophy student, as you reflect upon moral experience and moral values, don’t you think that if you were to walk out of this room this evening and somebody assaulted you and raped you, that that person has done something wrong, that that’s not morally indifferent what he did?

Q [same questioner]: Is that a rhetorical question?

WLC: No, that’s a serious question. Don’t you think that that person has not done something that’s morally indifferent, that that person would have done something wrong?

Q [same questioner]: Of course, I would think that. But there’s no reason for me then to conclude logically that that must always be wrong. That’s just what society has taught me. There’s no reason to jump from the fact that society has taught me that being attacked in the street is wrong, to that there must be a moral realm of truth’s that are objective. There’s no connection.

WLC: But, I want to know though, as a philosopher, and as you think about this, is that what you think? Do you think in fact that he hasn’t done anything wrong, this is just societal conventions, or do you think that he really would do something wrong to you, and I’m not talking about always wrong, I’m talking about is it ever wrong? Do you think there are objective moral values and duties?

Q [same questioner]: As a philosopher I’ve probably not studied enough to come to a valid conclusion towards that. As a person, I would believe that that was wrong, but in philosophical terms there’s nothing that would say to me that there is a logical connection there.

GM: Thanks for that robust exchange, Laura.

Q for AP: Hello, I’m Rob. I’m an engineer. What I’d like to ask you Andy Pyle is . . .  you ended your talk making the statement, You’d better have better evidence than William Lane Craig has presented. Can I ask you what evidence would be acceptable?

AP: Evidence for a miracle?

Q [same questioner]: Yeah, what criteria would you . . .?

AP: Oh, evidence for a miracle’s easy.  I mean, I talked about the people going to Lord and many of them get better and many of them report miracles. But they tend to be sort of marginal cases – cancers going into remission, whatever – which happens anyway in the course of nature.  So, it’d be very hard to discern any one case whether it was a genuine bona fide miracle.  How about setting up the scene this way. Suppose I say: what I want is the following case: a man who’s just lost both his legs in a car crash, cut off above the knee. So he’s just had both his legs amputated. Now he’s wheeled into some room in Lords and there’s a jury of appointed observers including Richard Dawkins, my good friend Anthony Grayling, the Great Randy, you know the American magician who goes around exposing fraudulent mediums and so on. So, we’ll appoint a team of real hard line skeptics and unbelievers and they can have all of the resources that are available to account for fraud, and then within a minute, this man’s legs grow back to their original size and shape and muscularity. Or perhaps something better. Let’s make it something better. Let’s make it a vast improvement on his earlier state and he goes out from the hospital and he runs the hundred metres in 9.5 seconds – world record time. And you’re going to say, Well, you’re asking a lot aren’t you? Well, I don’t think I am. After all, Professor Craig and many, many of you here believe in an omnipotent God. Now, if a God can create the universe, out of nothing, surely what I’ve just asked is pretty easy; child’s play for an omnipotent God. Now if something like that were to happen at Lords, I’d be convinced!

GM: I think we’re getting close to time. I think we’ll take one more on each side. What time do we have to finish, Julian? Can we run another five minutes? Run another five minutes, so let’s keep questions and answers short. I don’t like to disappoint people at the end of the queue.

Q to WLC: I’m Sam Cullens, another philosophy student. Professor Craig, how do you account for the people who never had the benefit of hearing Jesus Christ’s teachings? Isn’t there a big inequality between the people who had the chance to hear him and people who don’t? Isn’t that a very unfair state of affairs?

WLC: I’ve written on this, and you can find articles on this on my website at williamlanecraig.com.[1] They’re free; they’re there to download. And I think what we can say is that God judges people on the basis of the response to the information that they have. So that those who have never heard of Christ will not be judged on the basis of how they respond to Christ. That would be manifestly unfair. But they will be judged on the basis of their response on the information that they do have.

Q [same questioner]: Doesn’t that render Jesus’ importance pointless? Couldn’t you just have no Jesus and just have everyone responding to the information they get?

WLC: No, no, it wouldn’t at all because they would still only be saved through the atoning death of Christ. But if they respond to the information that God has revealed to them, the benefits of Christ’s sacrificial death can be applied to them without a conscious knowledge of Christ. This is the way people in the Old Testament were saved and their sins were forgiven. They had never heard of Christ, many of them never even heard of the idea of a Messiah, and yet they responded to the revelation that God had given to them and therefore it was reckoned to them as righteousness.

Q [same questioner]: Are you seriously suggesting . . .

GM: Uh-uh, take it or leave it. Next question.

Q to AP: My name’s Tim. I’m a student.  Hi, Andrew. I was just wondering about your point about supernatural or miracles as in evidence for that. You brought up Ganesh as a sort of comparative example to the resurrection. You gave us reasons as to why there’s more evidence for that compared to the resurrection. As an aside, William then said, That’s to be expected from this religion, to expect this sort of miracle to occur, and you said, Well that’s the same for the resurrection, talking about this mysterious stranger on the Emmaus road and how that was a way of going on or whatever. William then went on to say that actually that was totally unexpected for Messianic groups to resurrect their Messiah. How would you respond to that?

AP: Well, I know far, far less about this than Professor Craig. I was relying on, not this one, but the other website debate with Professor Ehrman, and Professor Ehrman says, It’s actually not a hundred percent true that this was completely unexpected. He gives an account in which it makes good sense to say the mysterious stranger explains the meaning of the Scriptures and in the light of that explanation of the meaning of the Scriptures the disciples come to get some sort of sense of the significance of what’s just happened and start to develop what I think is the myth. Now Professor Craig obviously thinks this is historically real. But I think all I wanted to say there is: it’s not wholly unexpected, it’s not wholly alien. There’s an account here that refers back to existing Jewish tradition and existing Jewish practice, and that’s not coming from me, that’s coming from a man who’s studied the stuff.

Q to WLC: Hi there. I’m Chris, and I’m also an engineer. Dr. Craig, a lot of the arguments you gave, it seemed to me, were applicable to all different types of religion, not just Christianity and, of course, the argument tonight is “Does the Christian God exist?” Do you think that, if you had been brought up in a different part of the world, that you would be a Christian?

WLC: I don’t have any idea. It depends on what part of the world I would be brought up in. But you’re quite right that the first three arguments are basically arguing for monotheism which would be consistent with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It’s not until you get to the resurrection of Jesus that the field narrows down among those monotheisms to Christian monotheism.

GM: I’m terribly sorry, I’m unable to fulfil my hope that we would get all of the questions in. Maybe you could, all five of you who are waiting to give a question, maybe someone could give you a free copy of William’s book out there, or something like that. So, thanks very much for coming, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

Can I thank the audience, because I think it’s terribly important that these kind of debates are conducted in the right kind of spirit. To me, one of the problems about, as it were, the Dawkins’ position is not so much what he says but the kind of implication that is rather demeaning people who hold contrary views. And, similarly, I’ve heard atheists just because they firmly hold their views that they must somehow be fundamentalist, and I think we’ve got to get a proper democratic dialogue into these issues on both sides. Can I thank you for providing just that kind of spirit tonight. But above all, can I thank our two speakers, William Lane Craig and Andrew Pyle, and good night everybody.