Ivy League Speaking Tour Part One

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, you had an opportunity to speak to some brilliant people at some Ivy League colleges. A lot of people got excited reading about it on Facebook. You posted some behind the scenes things that were going on in this tour. We want to get into that. But first, I want to remind everyone – and Bill, you can speak to this – something we have been doing every year: our matching grant program. And if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Our listeners, our followers, have responded quite well to this. This matching grant gives people an opportunity to double their impact.

DR. CRAIG: That's right. And a major portion of our budget for the following year, 2023, comes in during this matching grant campaign. We have a select group of donors who are willing to match every gift to Reasonable Faith up through December 31st to a total of $250,000. So it's a wonderful opportunity to double the impact of your giving. If you believe in what we're doing at Reasonable Faith and its effectiveness then this is a great way to really stretch your Lord's dollar and double its impact.

KEVIN HARRIS: Do it now because we're running out of time. It's coming up on the end of the year. Just go to ReasonableFaith.org, and you can give right there. Bill, let's talk about this Ivy League tour, these roundtable discussions, and speaking to faculty. Tell us a little bit about the backstory of this.

DR. CRAIG: Well, about 25 years ago or so, a fellow named Dave Thom conceived the idea of holding these roundtable events that would be geared toward faculty at these Ivy League universities. I spoke at one of these at Harvard, MIT quite a number of years ago, and it went so well and we had such a good time that when Dave asked me to come back and do a multi-campus tour this December I found the invitation irresistible. I spoke at these roundtable events at University of Massachusetts Amherst, then Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Then we drove north to Hanover, New Hampshire where I did a roundtable at Dartmouth College. Then we drove down to Providence, Rhode Island where I spoke to faculty at Brown University. And finally the two are climaxed with an event in Cambridge, Massachusetts to which faculty from Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Brandeis, Wellesley College, UMass Boston, and other institutions attended. So, as you say, it's quite a sophisticated audience. It's by invitation only. It's for faculty only or in some cases (such as at Dartmouth) key members of the community. But the attempt is to reach out to non-believing faculty and to present an attractive picture of Christian scholarship that would be of interest to them.

KEVIN HARRIS: You've been doing this for a long time. God has given you a lot of grace, but it still must be rather intimidating to speak to such an elite group. Did you feel that intimidation at all?

DR. CRAIG: To a certain extent, but, you know, I have to tell you in all honesty, it rapidly dissolved because what you find is that these professors, though brilliant in their tight area of specialization, know next to nothing about theology and philosophy, and that therefore their questions about these are really the questions that laymen would raise. Indeed, they are laymen when it comes to these fields that lie outside their area of expertise. So I found myself in the situation where I simply knew vastly more about the subject on which I was speaking than anybody else in the room, and therefore I was able to answer their questions. The topic that Dave Thom asked me to speak on was rather odd. He said, “I want you to speak on your recent work on the historical Adam.” And I said, “But Dave, this wouldn't be the sort of thing that would be of interest to non-Christian faculty.” And he said, “Oh, I think it really would. I think the Christian origin story has shaped the West and it's really important to talk about this and its compatibility with contemporary science.” So that was the topic that I addressed. Then I was paired with David Haig, who is a professor of microbiology at Harvard University and has written a book called Darwin to Darrida. He presented his perspective on meaning in life and the use of teleology or final causes in biology. We didn't have much overlap between our two talks, but nevertheless we were both presenters. What they do at these roundtable events is they have both a Christian speaker and a non-Christian speaker, and these are given equal time on a level playing field. These are definitely not Christian faculty club meetings. They typically open the evening with a cocktail hour. Dave says, “You've got to have an open bar if you want faculty to attend.” And then this is followed by two very short talks – 15 to 20 minutes long – one by the Christian, one by the non-Christian. And that's followed then by a very fine elegant dinner that has group discussions around these large round tables. The settings for these are, as I say, really elegant. For example, at Yale we met in the hoity-toity Lawn Club adjacent to campus which is apparently some sort of tennis club. At Cambridge, Massachusetts we met at the Harvard Faculty Club with its rich, dark wood decor that just exudes old world charms. So these were really sophisticated evening events. And then after the dinner there's an open Q&A period with both of the speakers up front. The emphasis in these things is not to try to demolish the non-Christian speaker, not even to try to persuade people that Christianity is true. The emphasis is giving every faculty member the opportunity to share his personal views, regardless of what they are, in an open environment where it's not threatening. It really is amazing to see how these faculty react to these events. Many of them have been coming to these events for years because they enjoy this chance at dialogue and interaction so much. I really had a wonderful time at each of these venues presenting on the historical Adam and then interacting with people around my table and getting to know David Haig a bit. It was really a fine tour.

KEVIN HARRIS: You spoke at the University of Massachusetts first at Amherst. Talk about that event.

DR. CRAIG: I had an 18-point outline of my case for the historical Adam for every person to follow along. And then I spoke extemporaneously going through these 18 points. Now, a number of people have asked whether or not these events were video recorded because they'd like to hear the talk, and the answer is that they were not video recorded. Rather, it was essential to the success of the events to maintain the privacy of these meetings so that faculty would be open and honest in expressing their views and objections and so forth. So nothing is recorded. But I just spoke at the American Academy of Religion a couple of weeks ago where I gave the same talk using the same 18-point outline and that talk will be available on YouTube. But, unfortunately, you just won't have the advantage of hearing the question and answer time with the faculty that followed. My talk went super at Amherst. David Haig, on the other hand, is a very different sort of fellow. He's a post-modernist who believes that texts have no meaning including the genetic text that is encoded in our genome. He says of the U. S. Constitution that it had no original meaning and that we're free to give whatever meaning we want to it. So he's really into that sort of anti-objectivism. I had an interesting group at my roundtable. There was an atheist microbiologist, there was a biochemist, and there was (to my delight) an anthropologist. I asked the biochemist about the possibility of origin of life scenarios which is what I'm currently studying in my systematic philosophical theology. How did life originate on Earth? The challenge for origin of life research is to provide a purely chemical account – pure chemistry – of how these chemicals came to life and life originated. This scientist told me that as a result of his scientific studies, he said he's come back to belief in God because he said he cannot see any plausible way in which life could have originated on this planet through random chemical processes. The anthropologist at the table was absolutely fascinated by my suggestion that Adam and Eve may have belonged to the species Homo heidelbergensis. As an anthropologist, she was familiar with this species and was just intrigued by my suggestion. The atheist microbiologist, despite his atheism, admitted that on the metaphysical level the entire evolutionary process could be directed by an intelligence even if it does proceed imminently by random mutations and natural selection. The whole thing could be under the providential control of a transcendent intelligence. So I thought that showed real openness to theism. During the Q&A that followed after the dinner, it was just a scintillating time. Almost all the questions were directed toward me, and that gave me the chance to really unfold more fully the richness and the interest of the Genesis account. For example, one young woman asked about why we should take the Genesis narrative to teach the universal progenitorship of Adam and Eve for the human race, and that gave me an opportunity to explain the three reasons that I have for thinking that we are biblically committed to Adam and Eve as the founding pair of the entire human race. So it was a really exciting and wonderful evening at UMass Amherst.

KEVIN HARRIS: It doesn't sound like you got a lot of pushback, Bill. Plenty of questions, but any pushback?

DR. CRAIG: That's true. I got more pushback at Yale, the next venue.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's talk about that then.

DR. CRAIG: UMass people were more inquiring, as opposed to raising objections.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, Yale was up next. So let's talk about that event.

DR. CRAIG: At Yale, David Haig went more on the offensive against my realist views of meaning and value, and so even though that wasn't the topic of my talk (and I had said nothing to set the table for the affirmation of objective meaning in life), I had to defend my position by grounding it in a theistic worldview. I said God provides the foundation for objective ultimate meaning, value, and purpose in life. Haig then expressed the difference between our two views so poignantly in a single sentence. He said, “I am Heraclitus; Bill is Plato.” In just six words he epitomized the whole difference between our worldviews with what for me was a startling clarity. Now, I realized that most of the audience have probably never even heard of Heraclitus or knew what Plato thought, so I explained to them that for Heraclitus everything is in constant flux and there is no permanence, whereas for Plato ultimate reality is necessary, and eternal goodness and truth are objective and the world of appearances is founded upon it. It reminded me of that podcast you and I did on Christian Platonism where I expressed my disagreement in another respect with Christian Platonism, but here I thought the comparison was very apt between Heraclitus and Platonism. The thing that really struck me as odd about this was that I think both Haig and I accurately expressed what Haig believes and the consequences of his worldview, but I did so negatively while he did so positively. So, for example, I said that on naturalism there is no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose in life, whereas he said very cheerily that we each create our own meaning in life. Moral values are human inventions and person-relative and we each have our own purpose in life. So we both agreed on the consequences of his worldview, but he treated it as a very rosy sort of picture whereas to me it's dreadful, it's horrible. And I don't think that secular Yale audience truly understood the horror of moral nihilism and relativism in the way that the French existentialists did. But that's just part of the ball game when you're in a forum like this.

KEVIN HARRIS: Sure, and you ended up talking a lot about meaning of life – life and meaning.

DR. CRAIG: This was the irony – I come there to talk about the historical Adam and wind up talking about meaning and purpose in life, the existence of God, and even the Gospel in later roundtables at some of the universities that I went to next.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let’s save that for the next podcast. We are out of time today, but let’s pick it up right there. We are going to continue to talk about the tour, how it went, and what you talked about on the next podcast – Reasonable Faith with Dr. William Lane Craig.^[1]