Evidence, Arguments, and the Witness of the Holy Spirit

KEVIN HARRIS: Welcome back to Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig. Hey, it’s Kevin Harris! Have you heard about the Equip Project? We’re going to be talking about it. In the meantime, you can get some information at ReasonableFaith.org. You are going to love this. And if you have been keeping up with current events here, you know that there has been quite a storm surrounding Dr. Craig’s answer to a particular question which dealt with whether one should raise or lower the epistemic bar when it comes to the truth of Christianity. Dr. Craig has been busy making sure that we know all that is involved when exploring and answering that question. I’m sure there will be more on this from Dr. Craig in the future, so stay close. That is mostly due to the fact that certain very vocal opponents are convinced that they got him in a corner on this, and they are not giving up. So today we are going to highlight some of the pertinent areas in past podcasts that will continue to shed light on all the fascinating layers of this question. So back to the studio. We begin with this question from a listener.

My question is, Dr. Craig, can subjective religious experience (that is, the feeling of the presence of God or an awareness of the voice of the Holy Spirit) serve as good objective evidence showing the truth of the Christian faith? How can religious experience be self-authenticating in the epistemic sense (or in the area of knowledge, what we know)? As adherents of different world religions have different religious experience, how can we tell whose religious experience is veritable, or truthful.

Now, that is probably the top on the charts that comes up. The Mormons claim that they have a religious experience, and so on. Take us through these waters.

DR. CRAIG: All right. First of all, it is very important to understand that the witness of the Holy Spirit is not just a subjective religious experience. This is an objective reality. It is a witness which God himself bears with our spirit. It is as objective as light rays impinging upon your retina and causing you to see something. This is an objective work and activity of God on the spirit. So this isn’t just some sort of a subjective religious experience that arises from your own emotions and feelings.

Having said that, that does not mean that the witness of the Holy Spirit serves as objective evidence for the Christian faith as the reader seems to think. That is a misunderstanding of what one is talking about here. The witness of the Holy Spirit is not construed as evidence from which you then infer that God exists, as though one infers from this experience that the best explanation of this experience is that there really is a God. There are arguments like that from religious experience. But this is not an argument from religious experience. In fact, it is not an argument at all. It is the claim that you can know that God exists and that Christianity is true wholly apart from arguments simply through the inner testimony of God to your heart. So don’t think of this as an argument from religious experience. Rather, it is the claim that for the person to whom God bears witness by means of this spiritual testimony, such a person can know with confidence that Christianity is true because of the witness that God bears to him.

Now he asks, “How can this be self-authenticating?” Well, I don’t think that is hard to understand. An experience can be so powerful, so enlightening, that it simply bears its own credentials. I think, for example, of the movie Contact where the figure played by Jodie Foster has this experience at the climax of the movie of seeing the secret or the mystery of the universe and all of its majesty and its beauty. She says, “I never knew, I never knew!” Then when she comes back she tries to relate this experience to others and they are skeptical about it. She can’t prove that it really happened and so forth. But for her, herself, she had this experience. She saw it herself. For her, this was like a self-authenticating experience even if she couldn’t prove it to others. Now as it turns out later there were something like 18 minutes missing on the tape or something of that sort that did show she really was having this experience, and that tended to confirm it. But even apart from that, she didn’t need that kind of evidence to know that what she had seen was true and authentic because she had had the experience, and it was so real and overwhelming that she knew it was valid.

So how does this then impact the situation when you are confronted with someone else who claims to have a self-authenticating experience of God, say the Mormon or the Muslim? It seems to me it doesn’t do anything to logically undermine the truth of the claim on the part of someone who really has it. Someone who really has an objective witness of the Holy Spirit in his heart is not given any reason to doubt that claim by the fact that other people falsely claim to have a witness of the Holy Spirit. Whether they do so sincerely and are just mistaken, or whether they do so insincerely and are just making it up, in either case false claims to a witness of the Holy Spirit does nothing logically to undermine the authenticity of someone who has a genuine witness of the Holy Spirit. So it seems to me that this just isn’t problematic at all.

KEVIN HARRIS: Is there an illustration from Plantinga that kind of sheds light on this? Of someone accused of a crime?

DR. CRAIG: That’s right.

KEVIN HARRIS: Relate that for us.

DR. CRAIG: He gives a wonderful illustration of someone who is trying to get one of his departmental colleagues to write a letter of recommendation for him for a grant. He tries to bribe the colleague to write this glowing letter and the colleague indignantly refuses and tries to report this to the chairman of the department in a letter. But the letter mysteriously disappears from the chairman’s box. The accusation is that I stole it because I didn’t want the chairman to see that I had tried to bribe this person in this underhanded way. So all of the evidence points toward me as the thief. I had the motive. I knew the letter was there. I had the ability, the access to the office. All the evidence points to me as being the one who stole the letter. But, in fact, I didn’t steal the letter. I was on a walk in the woods all alone at the time that the letter disappeared from the chairman’s mailbox. So I know that I am innocent even though all the evidence is against me. But I can’t prove I am innocent. No one was in the woods with me when I was on this solitary stroll. So I can’t prove that I am innocent, and yet clearly I am not obligated to go along with where the evidence points because I know better. I know that I didn’t do it; I was in the woods at the time of the alleged crime. Therefore, I am within my rational rights in believing in my innocence in spite of the evidence against it.

KEVIN HARRIS: This really helps clarify some thinking on this. Our thinking is often that if the evidence points a certain direction then you have to go that way at all costs. But if you are accused of a crime but you know that you didn’t commit it, even if all the evidence pointed – even if they have your DNA – but you know where you were, do you throw up your hands and say, “Well, I guess I did do it?”

DR. CRAIG: Obviously, not. This is, I think, a good illustration of why the religious epistemology called theological rationalism (or sometimes called evidentialism) is really incorrect. I think that this is an unbiblical and ultimately untenable way to think about how we know religious truths.

KEVIN HARRIS: Yet you vigorously defend the faith in your career.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. This isn’t to say that one couldn’t give evidence in favor of one’s – in this case – innocence, to return to our illustration of the letter. Suppose that a case was mounted against me. Well, I might be able to produce testimony from someone who saw me, say, coming out of the woods at that time and would provide an alibi. I could try to find the real culprit who stole the letter and produce evidence that it was that person. There would be other ways in which one could try to provide evidence to show that what you know to be true is true. That is why I like to distinguish between knowing my faith to be true and showing my faith to be true. The fundamental, ground level way in which I know my faith is true is through this inner self-authenticating witness of God’s Spirit which assures me that I am a child of God. That entails, of course, then, that God exists and the great truths of the Gospel are correct. On the other hand, I can show that this is true to someone else by providing argument and evidence in support of it. So as long as we keep this distinction between knowing and showing clear, I don’t think we’ll become confused about these problems that have been raised by the reader in his question.

KEVIN HARRIS: Knowing versus showing. There is a difference. Let me understand you, Bill. If you are alone in the woods and the sunshine is shining on your retina, it is only happening to you but that is an objective experience. The light rays, the photons, are coming onto your receptor cells. So it is an objective experience. In the same way, God’s actual Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit of God, third person of the Trinity, can come upon you in a self-authenticating witness and that is an objective experience. But people often call that a subjective experience.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. And I think that is a misunderstanding. It is subjective in the sense that it is interior. It is not something that is in the physical world.

KEVIN HARRIS: It is not a material event.

DR. CRAIG: Right. It is not a material event, and so in that sense it is not part of the external physical world. But it is external in another sense in that the Holy Spirit is an external reality that exists outside of me and who is having an impact, a causal effect, upon me. So in that sense it is external. But it produces an interior experience of an awareness of, as I say, the truths of the Gospel, assurance of salvation, conviction of sin, things of this sort. So people will sometimes confuse this with emotional experiences which are produced entirely from within and are merely subjective experiences.

KEVIN HARRIS: You also see kind of the thrust of this question sent in by this listener who is saying, “If you share your religious experience, or your self-authenticating witness of the Spirit, with someone of another faith, and they share theirs with you, you are at a standoff.” They have their experience and you have yours.

DR. CRAIG: Worse than that. I think what the listener seems to be implying is that if you confront somebody else who claims to have a self-authenticating religious experience of a counter-Christian claim, that that somehow undermines the rationality of your claim, and that you no longer have the right to claim that you know that Christianity is true or that it is rational for you to believe Christianity to be true just because somebody else makes that sort of a claim, which you would say is false. That seems to me to be crazy. That doesn’t make sense at all. To give an illustration, if we imagine, say, several bottles containing a clear liquid, and they all have a label on them that says H2O. So they have this clear liquid, they are all labeled water, but in fact only one of them has water in it. The rest have poison. Now, is the accuracy and truth of the correctly labeled bottle in any way undermined by the fact that the other bottles have false labels on them? It seems to me obviously not. Despite the existence of falsely labeled bottles, the one that is correctly labeled H2O remains accurate and true. Similarly, the person who does have an objective witness of the Holy Spirit is not undermined or in any way rendered irrational because somebody else falsely claims to have a witness of the Holy Spirit.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let me try this. I’ve personally seen Mount Rushmore. I went there. I saw it. If I am in discussion with someone and they say, “You know what? I went to that location, too, and it wasn’t there. There is no Mount Rushmore.” Would I, therefore, go, “Oh, well, I guess I was wrong.”

DR. CRAIG: Or that you no longer have any right to believe that you saw it.

KEVIN HARRIS: Or I can’t ever tell anybody about this experience again because somebody else experienced something different.

DR. CRAIG: That would be crazy.

KEVIN HARRIS: It would be crazy. All right.

DR. CRAIG: You would just say instead either this other person is nuts, or he was mistaken in some way. He wasn’t really at that location or he’s lying deliberately or something like that. But you wouldn’t come to believe that you, yourself, failed to see Mount Rushmore.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here’s another thing that would come in and perhaps this applies. The evidence would be on my side. I could show the historicity of Mount Rushmore.

DR. CRAIG: That would be the other element of showing it.

KEVIN HARRIS: All right. So if a Mormon had a profound experience (and I believe that is a false religious system), if they had a profound religious experience – a burning in the bosom as they call it – and they shared that with me and I shared mine with them, at this time it seems to me that apologetics would come into play because I have the evidence on my side.

DR. CRAIG: Exactly. So what you can each do at this point is say we each have our experience, but now what is the objective evidence to support the veridicality or the truth of our experience?

KEVIN HARRIS: To show what we know.

DR. CRAIG: To show what we know. The hope would be then, in a case like this, since that other person doesn’t really have a self-authenticating witness of the Spirit but merely some sort of a psychological religious experience, that under the weight of the evidence his confidence will crack and he will come to see that in fact he doesn’t have a genuine experience of the Holy Spirit. That, in fact, he was mistaken, and he would change his mind and become a Christian.

KEVIN HARRIS: This is a real crux, this is the bottom line, I think, in a lot of things people ask. So I want to take a step further back. That is, what we are talking about here with the inner witness of the Holy Spirit usually relates to our salvation experience, of God drawing us to Christ, with the authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit, that the Gospel is true. What about further back? God’s revelation to the human hearts of everyone that he is. Now that seems to me just anecdotally, just from my own observation, most people have to talk themselves out of it. We all have a tendency to gravitate toward the God of the universe but then encounter some kind of an influence that turns us around.

DR. CRAIG: There are actually sociological studies that support that. That there is a kind of innate tendency to believe in God that then has to be suppressed or one has to be disabused of. So there is support of what you are suggesting. I think that the Scriptures indicate that through the Holy Spirit God seeks to draw persons to a knowledge of himself. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment. Notice here the witness of the Holy Spirit is being described not toward believers but toward the world. The unbeliever who will be convicted of his own sin, of God’s judgment on the basis of that sin, and of God’s righteousness in doing so. Given that work of the Holy Spirit in the life of the unbeliever, I think that ultimately no one really fails to come to Christ through intellectual doubts or arguments. Ultimately, the reason a person refuses to come is because he willingly ignores or suppresses the work of the Holy Spirit in his heart which is drawing him to God.

KEVIN HARRIS: People suppress the truth in unrighteousness as Paul says.

DR. CRAIG: In Romans chapter 1.

KEVIN HARRIS: I don’t think we’ve discussed Henry Dodwell and his view, who is mentioned in your book. He has a precursor to Plantinga.

DR. CRAIG: Right. He was one of the oddballs, so to speak, of the 18th century in that he departed from the prevailing religious epistemology of that time which was a kind of evidentialism. The overwhelming majority of Christian thinkers at that time had a kind of theological rationalism as I call it. They thought that belief in God had to be justified on the basis of evidence and argument. Apart from evidence and argument for religious beliefs, religious beliefs is what they called enthusiasm, and enthusiasm was the thing to be avoided at all costs. Dodwell disagreed with that. He felt that evidence and argument could not be the way in which God intended us to know him because these are so uncertain and they vary from time to time and place to place. So he held that it is through an immediate communication from God and the Spirit that God gives us a knowledge of the truth of Christianity. As I say, he was a real maverick in his time but very much in line today, I think, with what is called Reformed epistemology which also says that we can know that Christianity is true wholly apart from argument and evidence on the basis of a kind of immediate knowledge imparted by God himself.

In terms of why engage in these sorts of argument and evidence if there is such a thing as an inner witness of the Holy Spirit that is indefeasible, think about it from my point of view as a Christian. The average non-believer thinks that Christianity is intellectually deficient. He's never heard an intellectual defense of the Christian faith. So if I can present arguments and evidence for the truth of the Christian faith that hold up even in the face of an intelligent and articulate atheist like Prof. Parsons, that is going to open up the unbeliever's mind to the Holy Spirit in a way that he may not have been open before. Very often these sorts of arguments can open him to the ministry of the Holy Spirit in his life speaking to him so that he will then begin to pursue the truth. So the Holy Spirit can work through argument and evidence to draw people to him. So in these debates I want to share both good arguments for the truth of Christian theism, but then also to let people know that this isn't the only source of warrant for Christian belief. There is another independent source of warrant which comes through the personal experience of God himself via the testimony of the Holy Spirit. In that way I am not asking people to base their faith and confidence in my arguments – who am I, after all, to say that my words are infallible – but rather consider the arguments and then also to begin to seek God on a spiritual level and to see if there isn't in fact this personal knowledge of God by acquaintance that is available quite independent of the arguments and evidence.

KEVIN HARRIS: You call this double-warrant.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. It is a dual- or double-warrant for Christian theism. There is the warrant for Christianity's truth that is provided by argument and evidence, and then there is the non-inferential warrant which is provided for Christian theism through the immediate witness of the Holy Spirit – this knowledge by acquaintance so to speak where you come into a personal relationship with God himself.^[1]