A Skeptical Philosopher Becomes a Christian Part Two

KEVIN HARRIS: Next he writes^[1] about how obnoxious, crass, and irrational he found the New Atheist crowd to be, so he never aligned with them. He said in his experience they wouldn't even consider the possibility of God's existence and were more dogmatic than any religious fundamentalist. I think he may have just hammered the final nail in the New Atheist coffin.

DR. CRAIG: He’s not alone among unbelievers in being disaffected with the New Atheists. People like Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss and Christopher Hitchens really alienated a lot of unbelievers because of their antics.

KEVIN HARRIS: Continuing his timeline, he decided not to pursue a career in academia but did finish his dissertation then taught philosophy classes at Ohio State and other local colleges. He mentions you next in his testimony, Bill. He discovered your debates and says that those exchanges did not get to the deeper philosophical issues that he was aware of so he wasn't very complimentary. But I want to hasten to point out that his complaints were not warranted, and I'm not just saying this as your friend and your co-host. His complaints were things like the kalam and design arguments not going far enough to show that God – the God of the Bible – was the proper candidate for first cause or the designer, but it seems that he didn't interact with your work because you've more than addressed his concerns. And surely he realizes that a debate situation is only a gateway to those more complex issues.

DR. CRAIG: I think that's right. I was intrigued when you said that he taught philosophy classes at Ohio State because you may remember that's where I had a debate with Kevin Sharp in the philosophy department. It would be amazing if we actually overlapped. I think you're right. These debates are meant to be just an intro to students who have never studied philosophy, haven't thought about these things, to try to provoke them to going deeper. In my published work I do go into great depth with regard to these issues. However, it does seem to me that Larry is also failing to take cognizance of the fact that in these debates what I typically did was present a cumulative case for Christian theism. You don't arrive at the Christian God until all five of the arguments have been discussed. So, for example, the cosmological argument will give you a first uncaused cause of the universe. Then the fine-tuning argument will give you a personal designer of the universe, an intelligent mind. Then the moral argument will give you the moral qualities of this being. He is the locus and source of absolute goodness and love. Then the resurrection of Jesus gives you his self-revelation in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and therefore Christian theism. And finally the appeal to personal experience is that you can know that God exists through a personal experience of the God revealed in Jesus and proclaimed by Jesus. So when you understand this as a cumulative case you can see it's really quite wrongheaded to indict the kalam argument or the fine-tuning argument as not proving the God of the Bible.

KEVIN HARRIS: He comments again on his interaction with atheists on campus and the Internet. He says,

They insisted strongly that anyone who merely failed to believe in the existence of any god was properly called an “atheist.” Under such a definition, I was an atheist. Yet I was not like them: I was always willing to consider seriously the possibility that God exists. They were not. Nor was I very hostile to religion. I thought it obviously had some salutary effects. The atheists typically, by contrast, said that they simply lacked a belief that God exists, but their mocking attitude screamed that God did not exist. In my experience, the people who call themselves “atheists,” regardless of how they define this term, rarely take the possibility of God’s existence seriously.

That's quite an indictment.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think that these people who champion what they call “a-theism” (namely, the lack of belief in God) are simply intellectually lazy. They don't have any good arguments to support the belief that God does not exist. They can't refute the arguments for God. They just don't believe in God, and so they are a-theists (non-theists). But as Larry realizes, so-called a-theism (or the lack of belief in God) comprises at least three alternatives. One would be traditional atheism – the view that God does not exist. Second would be agnosticism – Larry's view – that you don't know whether God exists. And then the third would be a kind of non-cognitivism which says that it's a meaningless question whether God exists. In all of those cases, one would lack the belief that God exists. So a-theism really isn't a position at all. It's just a psychological state.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next he says,

There was one thing that I did frequently say, about the arguments for the existence of God, and that is that, perhaps, I did not understand them perfectly. I had studied enough of philosophy, as a methodological skeptic, to have developed this sort of reluctance or uncertainty. For example, William Alston had written a book with the puzzling title Perceiving God, which for my dissertation I dipped into. This book develops a version of the so-called Argument from Religious Experience. That argument, in Alston’s hands anyway, seemed beyond my ability to grasp: I mean, I was not having any religious experiences. I concluded that, perhaps in the future, I might have a religious experience and thus “perceive God,” as Alston said is possible. I could not rule that out. (I was right not to.)

He comments on William Alston – the argument from religious experience.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Alston's argument is not an argument from religious experience. He is not claiming that the best explanation of our religious experience is that there is a God – that this experience is veridical. Rather, Alston is making the point that I made earlier against methodological skepticism – that many of our beliefs cannot be proven by argument and evidence but nevertheless we are entirely rational in holding these beliefs. The perception that Alston is talking about in Perceiving God is a reference to our sense perception. The whole book is not really about religious experience. It's about sense perception – that I look out the window and I see trees and grass and daffodils and I believe that there really is an external world there. Now, there's no way for me to prove that because I can't get outside my sense experience and prove that my perceptions are veridical, but nevertheless I'm perfectly rational to believe what my perceptions tell me – that there is an external world. Alston says you can have a perception of God like that. You can experience God, and that was the fifth point that I mentioned in my debates. You can know that God exists by having a personal experience of God not grounded in argument and evidence. And Larry obviously didn't understand Alston’s argument – didn't appreciate it – but the analogy between sense perception and this kind of religious perception or experience of God is pretty tight. Just as I should believe what my sense perception tells me unless I have a good reason to doubt that experience, so I'm perfectly rational to believe what my religious experience tells me unless I have a good reason for doubting the veridicality of that experience.

KEVIN HARRIS: By the way, he says that when he was an agnostic he greatly admired Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne and that they showed that belief in God was rational. But he said his attitude toward the Bible was mixed. The methodology he developed would not allow the miracle stories in the Scriptures. So I think what I'm wondering here is if he just had an anti-supernatural bias that he brought to the Scriptures and that tainted . . .

DR. CRAIG: It sounds like it. There's nothing in his methodology that would rule out miracles. You would simply say I'm not going to believe in a miracle until I have good evidence that one has occurred. And Swinburne, in particular, has argued strongly that we have good evidence for believing in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and that therefore he was who he claimed to be. So Swinburne would follow a methodology of evidentialism and would claim that the evidentialist can be perfectly rational in coming to believe in the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next he says both his marriage and the birth of his first child led to him to rejecting Ayn Rand's ethics. He says,

After these events I certainly could no longer endorse Ayn Rand’s (in retrospect) ridiculous notion that we can somehow justify our moral obligations toward other people in terms of our own self-interest, no matter how “enlightened.” Indeed, if I am willing to die for my wife and children, would I be acting in my own self-interest at all? I had always believed that morality had something to do with caring for other people. But, in caring for them, is it my interest that I care for, or theirs? I say this because, again, Rand made an impression on me between the ages of 16 and 26, or so, and her unbelief in God confirmed me in mine. But I was now firmly rejecting her ethics, which struck me as a clear lapse of judgment. Awareness of that lapse later made it easier to reject her atheism as well.

It sounds like a big roadblock to God in his life that just got knocked down.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think that this experience of having children and experiencing your deep love for those children and their inherent moral value is something that really does shake up atheists and agnostics. That's one reason I try to cut some slack for a lot of the snarky, nasty comments that you often see on Facebook and other places. I think that many times these come from young people who will probably be someday embarrassed and ashamed about their attitudes when they get married and begin to start families of their own. What's interesting about Larry's experience here is – notice again, we come back to this point over and over again – he didn't come to reject Ayn Rand's ethics based upon some sort of argument. Rather it was the basic perception of moral worth in his children and in his sense of moral obligation to them even to give his own life for them that led him to reject her ethics. It was this kind of properly basic apprehension of moral truth that led him to abandon these other beliefs that he had adopted.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let me synopsize his timeline at this point so we can get to his conversion. He says the New Atheism became even more obnoxious and the popularizers were unsophisticated in philosophy. He found Dawkins and Harris “transparently mediocre” (quoting there) in their writings. He said most but not all Christians by contrast were mature and gracious online and on social media. He began to wonder if he had not given Christianity a fair shake. He writes,

the thought slowly dawned on me: maybe, just maybe, I too had been indoctrinated, in a way. Perhaps I had misunderstood things I only thought I had understood.

That should remove any doubt one may have that we should be mature, loving, gracious, and informed just like you just said when we are representing Christ.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. It's hard but keep in mind the next time some troll on social media says nasty things or insulting things that these are the people we want to win and therefore try to be loving and gracious toward that person and not to return in kind the sort of insulting behavior that they exhibit.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, here's what happened. He began studying morality and the problem of evil then he began to read the Bible earnestly and was surprised to find the Bible

far more interesting and—to my shock and consternation—coherent than I was expecting. I looked up answers to all my critical questions, thinking that perhaps others had not thought of issues I saw. I was wrong. Not only had they thought of all the issues, and more that I had not thought of, they had well-worked-out positions about them. I did not believe their answers, which sometimes struck me as contrived or unlikely. But often, they were shockingly plausible. The Bible could sustain interrogation; who knew? It slowly dawned on me that I was acquainting myself with the two-thousand-year-old tradition of theology. I found myself positively ashamed to realize that, despite having a Ph.D. in philosophy, I had never really understood what theology even is. Theology is, I found, an attempt to systematize, harmonize, explicate, and to a certain extent justify the many, many ideas contained in the Bible. It is what rational people do when they try to come to grips with the Bible in all its richness.

As the first volumes of your Systematic Philosophical Theology are being released, that must really warm your heart.

DR. CRAIG: It really does. And what Larry is describing here is not just theology, but he's describing Christian theology which is this systematic, sustained reflection upon biblical truth.

KEVIN HARRIS: Not only did he begin studying the Bible, he talked to God. He didn't know yet whether God was there but he dialogued with him anyway. He then began to reexamine the arguments for God. He said he assumed “William Lane Craig” and Steven Meyer were using “God of the gaps” in your arguments. But then he discovered you were not doing that at all. He said,

What I dwelled upon more than anything is the fact that the arguments taken together are far more persuasive than I had understood.

Finally, in February of 2020, he admitted he believed in God and began to pray to him properly rather than just as an experiment. He read the Gospels again, and over the spring of 2020 received Christ. He said he was alarmed at first because he wasn't motivated by distress over his sin. He didn't fully understand his own sinfulness, but he writes,

I certainly did, eventually, come to better appreciate my own sinfulness and why one of our deepest obligations is to be thankful to God for adopting me into his family and forgiving my many sins.

He writes that the resurrection of Jesus “unified his disciples into a permanent worldwide movement” and vindicated his claims. There it is. Larry Sanger's testimony. It's much more detailed on his blog, but that's the short version that we're looking at today. Give us your concluding thoughts. And, by the way, it looks like he's giving your work a second chance, too.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I'm grateful for that, certainly. And, boy, welcome Larry Sanger into the family! This is just so wonderful, so exciting to hear of his spiritual journey, and just pray that God will continue to lead him and to deepen that walk with him, and for his family as well.^[2]