Dr. Craig's Health Update

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, I’m sure that you and Jan appreciate the outpouring of prayers and concern over your brief stay in the hospital. It was all over social media. Would you like to just tell us what happened?

DR. CRAIG: Jan and I went on a little four-day vacation to Florida, and we both contracted coronavirus. Mine was compounded by pneumonia. It was the pneumonia, I think, that really laid me low and put me in the hospital until they could get me through that. Then I came home. Now we are both recuperating and regaining strength. Everyday we are taking it easy so as not to overextend ourselves, but we are virtually back to normal I’d say.

KEVIN HARRIS: And you just went to a clinic because you had some congestion, a few symptoms, and that they ended up there suggesting that you go ahead and get further checked out?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that’s right. It was just a walk-in clinic here in the area. We just thought we'd get some antibiotics or something from them. We had no idea that it was severe. So they were the ones that advised me to go to the hospital, and so we did. Again, we didn't think they would check us in, but they did! And so I wound up being there for five days.

KEVIN HARRIS: You work from your home office and so your chances of getting COVID were much lower. Did you ever expect that this would catch up with you and that you would get it?

DR. CRAIG: I really didn't. Because I'm so sequestered here working at home I just didn't expect it. We've been two years without incident. But going on this trip to Florida proved to be an exposure to the virus.

KEVIN HARRIS: And you're feeling good now and doing well?

DR. CRAIG: Yes.

KEVIN HARRIS: You missed a conference or two, a couple of engagements, because of this. I think both of them were on the historical Adam. You were able to attend one and you weren't able to attend one. Talk about those.

DR. CRAIG: That’s right. There was a conference in late April that I had to cancel. It was a conference based on a Four Views on the Historical Adam book that I'm participating in. It is edited by Ken Keithley who's a professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. It features Kenton Sparks, who is taking the view that there was no historical Adam, then I take the view of the mytho-historical Adam, and then Andrew Lok takes the view of the recent genealogical Adam popularized by Josh Swamidass. And then the young earth creationist view is defended by Marcus Ross. That conference took place at Southeastern Baptist without me. I understand it went very well, and so now the next step is that each of us will write a response to the contributions of the other panelists. That remains now for me to be done with regard to this book. The other conference, I was able to attend. I think my recovery has been quite remarkable. So this past month in May there was a conference at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the Chicago area. Josh Swamidass and I did a four-hour pre-conference workshop on our two books on the historical Adam. We refer to Josh's model as the recent genealogical Adam, and my view as the ancient genealogical Adam. I just loved seeing Josh Swamidass again and fellowshipping with him as well as with several of the other theologians at this conference. It was a real encouragement. It was the very last of these conferences that will ever be held. Their funding is now gone, and so this was the final conference. Josh said to me, “I think these conferences that we've been going to here over the last four or five years will be historic in their impact.” Certainly it has been in my life because my book In Quest of the Historical Adam flowed out of the stimulus that I received in attending these conferences.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, let's see. Stuck in the hospital four or five days, I'm sure that maybe you got a little reading in while you were there. You want to fill us in?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. While I was in the hospital, at first I had nothing to do but lie in bed! There was a phone in the room, and so I would call Jan and talk to her. So she says to me, “While you're lying in bed, why don't you think of a philosophical problem?” What a woman! So, I thought, yeah, that sounds like a good idea. So I decided to think about the problem of identity and the doctrine of the Trinity. And I think I came to some genuine insights about this that I have since written up after I got home and incorporated into my chapter on the Trinity. Let me try to share this with our listeners as simply as I can. An author a number of years ago named Wainwright wrote a book on the Trinity in which he argued that most of the authors of the New Testament weren't even aware that there is a problem of the Trinity. For them the notion was unproblematic. He says he thinks that Paul and the author of the book of Hebrews and John sensed that there was a problem here, but only John really grasped it and proposed a solution to it. And that really got me to thinking why would the authors of the New Testament not be aware that the doctrine of the Trinity is problematic? Then it hit me. The authors of the New Testament and the ancients in general didn't have a modern grasp of the relation of identity. The relation of identity is the strongest equivalence relation that holds between an object and itself and nothing else. This is a relation which is reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. But you can show that the ancients didn't have a modern grasp of the identity relation. Aristotle alone in his Topics has a paragraph on the identity relation but it was overlooked and forgotten for centuries until others rediscovered these insights later. So when the authors of the New Testament said things like “Jesus is God,” “The Father is God,” “But Jesus is not the Father,” they just didn't see any problem with that. In order to see that as problematic you've got to have a grasp of the logical relation of identity which these ancient authors did not have. So I think that we are in real danger of overreading them, of importing into their statements modern concepts of identity that they simply didn't have. So when they said things like “the Father is God” or “the Son is God” they didn't intend for these to be identity statements in a modern sense of the word. For them I think the notion of the Trinity just didn't even appear to be problematic. For me this was really a major new insight into the New Testament material on the doctrine of the Trinity.

KEVIN HARRIS: Wow. Hearing you say that, one of the things that occurs to me is how we as ambassadors of Christ have tried so hard to reach to our Jehovah's Witness friends, our Mormon friends, our Muslim friends, because all of them (those three I mentioned there) have issues with the Trinity. We find ourselves trying to go to prooftexts, trying to go to the Scriptures and go to the scriptural data, which is quite appropriate. But how would this play in do you think when you have a dialogue with a thoughtful member of the LDS or a Jehovah's Witness or Muslim?

DR. CRAIG: It would come into play when they read statements like “the Father is God” as an identity statement, and they would say therefore it cannot be true that the Son is God because identity is a transitive relation. If x is identical to y, and y is identical to z, then x is identical to z. So if you say “the Father is God” and “the Son is God” that implies that the Son is identical to the Father if you read those as identity statements. I'm convinced that these ancient authors didn't intend these to be identity statements in the modern sense because they didn't even have a modern grasp of the theory of identity. This really undercuts a large portion of the argument offered by various unitarians against the Trinity by saying it's an incoherent doctrine.

KEVIN HARRIS: Maybe another book will come out of this!

DR. CRAIG: Well, my systematic philosophical theology is going to have a long chapter on the Trinity in it, and that is exactly what I'm writing on now. In fact, after being in the hospital for a couple days, Jan (she could not visit me because I had coronavirus; I could have no visitors) sent a book up to me to read while I was there. And here's the book she sent me: Philosophical and Theological Essays on the Trinity by McCall and Rea. This is a great book of collected essays on the doctrine of the Trinity. It's just chock full of material. Now, I want to advise our listeners that it's not for lay people. But if there are any professional philosophers listening to our podcast today and they haven't read this book by McCall and Rea, this is, I think, an indispensable collection. I spent much of my time digesting that book.

KEVIN HARRIS: To wrap it up today, I've seen firsthand how you take care of your health. You exercise. You eat right. You try to get plenty of sleep. I think that we can probably attribute a lot of that to Jan, if not most of it. But you're always vibrant. I'm sure this was a factor that helped when when you got corona. Can you talk a little bit about your routine? What has worked for you? Because, believe me when I say, we all need a little encouragement to take care of ourselves.

DR. CRAIG: I do believe that because my underlying health was really good that I was able to recover rapidly from this pneumonia and to shake off the lingering effects of fatigue and weakness from it. One of the things that I do that you might not know is that, like Jordan Peterson, I pretty much follow a carnivore diet. I eat an enormous amount of red meat and very, very few carbs. I've given up bread all together. So I'm basically a carnivore. It has really, I think, bolstered my health and stamina. The other thing that has really helped me is sleep, as you said. When you're recovering from an illness like this I think it's so important to be patient with yourself and not to be overanxious to get back to the normal routine, to get back in the swing of things. Rather, listen to your body. If you feel tired even though it's mid-morning, go to bed and get a nap. And if you feel tired again in the afternoon after lunch go to bed. The world's not going to come to an end if you don't get done all your projects. So, I've really (and Jan as well) have really tried to just be really patient and not overdo it. Not overextend ourselves. And get lots of rest. I think that's been a great help. And so I would encourage any of our listeners who might be recovering from illness of this sort to not to overextend themselves and to really be patient and to keep in mind that there is enough time in every day to do all the will of God.

KEVIN HARRIS: I’m glad you are doing well. A lot of people prayed for you and prayed for this ministry during that illness. I’m glad you are doing good.

DR. CRAIG: We do appreciate it so much. Those prayers sustain us and keep us going. Thank you.^[1]