Questions on Experiencing God, Sexuality, and Transworld Depravity

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Craig, some really good questions have come into Reasonable Faith. A lot of these you have addressed on the Question of the Week. We have a few more here that we’d like for you to address. We’ve got question number one here. He says,

I’m an atheist curious about the existence of God, in particular your argument from the historicity of the resurrection interests me. But most importantly for me, a layman about history and philosophy in general, and as you mentioned it, to be so for yourself would be to receive that self-authenticating inner-witness of the Holy Spirit. I know it might not be straightforward to answer, but for someone who fears I might simply never know enough or even simply fail to see the force of other apologetic arguments (they don't presently convince me) I really feel the need to ask: how do you ask for such an experience? Do you ask for it in the first place? What kind of experience might one expect? How to be sure it is not illusory? I definitely want to at least go the route of allowing such a self-authenticating experience of the Holy Spirit into my heart before resigning belief in it to the neutral place that it really has right now for good.

This is Sebastian in the United States.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I want to commend Sebastian for his openness to seeking the Lord. As he said, the answer to this isn't straightforward. There isn't a recipe that you can follow to find the Lord and the witness of the Holy Spirit. But the promise of the Scriptures is, in the words of Jeremiah, “You shall seek me and you shall find me if you seek for me with all your heart.” So what we're talking about here is a spiritual quest, a longing for God, a hungering or thirst for God that is humble and open rather than proud and presumptuous. I think it's perfectly appropriate to ask God to meet with you in your experience. Tell him in prayer, “God, I want to know you. If you are there, speak to me. Draw me to yourself.” And wrestle with God in prayer. Contend with God in prayer. Go to him again and again on your knees seeking for him with all your heart. At the same time, read the Scriptures. Read the Gospels and the teachings of Jesus and try to understand what Jesus says. Understand your own sin and your need for confession and repentance before God, a holy God before whom we stand guilty and dirty and in need of his forgiveness and moral cleansing. And if Sebastian will do this with an open heart and an open mind then the promise is that he will find that he will come to a knowledge of Christ. Now, he says, “How do I know that this isn't illusory?” Well, that is like the question that single people always ask to married people – “How do you know when you're in love?” It's so frustrating when the answer is, “Well, you just know.” That may be frustrating, but it's really true! You just have the experience, and that's what it means when it says it's self-authenticating. If God gets a hold of Sebastian's life and he comes into this knowledge of God, finding forgiveness, cleansing, spiritual rebirth, he'll know it and will not need to have some sort of external authentication of it. So I would just encourage him to go on this sort of a spiritual quest such as I've described and trust God to meet him on that quest.

KEVIN HARRIS: Question number two, from Jose in Mexico,

Hello, Dr. Craig. First of all, thank you for your work in apologetics and natural theology. You've been a great help in my studies on the defense of the faith both introductory and in my deeper studies on philosophy of religion. My question is related to your article, “A Christian Perspective on Homosexuality.” In it you expose the fact that the Bible does not condemn a person for having a homosexual orientation. What it condemns is homosexual acts. My main problem has been to expose this same point of view to many of my brethren both Catholic and Protestant. They usually object that the Bible does condemn homosexual orientation or same-sex attraction based on Matthew 5:28, “But I say unto you, whoever looks at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.” According to this reasoning, a person with a homosexual orientation by being attracted to another of the same sex would be lusting after her or him and that may be biblically condemnable.

Do you want to take that one first?

DR. CRAIG: I think this is the most ridiculous use of Matthew 5:28 that I've ever heard. That verse addresses a heterosexual orientation and sexual lust. And if you try to say that it condemns homosexual desires then you've got to say it also condemns a heterosexual orientation and desire which is absurd because God has created man and woman and ordained marriage for them. What it's condemning is an improper use or indulgence of our passions and desires. And it would certainly be true that in the same way that a heterosexual man should try to keep his thought life pure and avoid fantasizing or looking at images that promote these sorts of passions, so a homosexual person ought to do the same thing. He ought to strive to keep his thought life pure, to not fantasize and to do everything that he can to keep his heart correct. But the verse has nothing to do with a person's sexual orientation.

KEVIN HARRIS: This one really bothers me because obviously there's a difference between God-given sexual desire and lust, which is viewing someone as an object. Now, if you have sexual desire that means your plumbing works, perhaps. But it's what you do with it. It is: you're not to look upon another person for your selfish use or view them as an object. That's the difference between mere sexual desire that's healthy and lust. Am I right about that?

DR. CRAIG: Absolutely.

KEVIN HARRIS: He said,

Others have told me that if a person is born with a homosexual orientation they need to be born again to stop being homosexual. These do not seem like good arguments to me, but I've not found a satisfactory answer at least for the first one.

Well, you just gave it, Bill.

but I would like to know if you have an answer for both objections. Thank you for your attention. May God assist you with his grace to continue conquering souls through apologetic preaching.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Thank you, Jose. The second argument is no better than the first. The idea that in virtue of being born again your sexual orientation is going to change is just psychological nonsense. You can talk to plenty of Christian homosexuals who are trying to live chaste and pure lives of abstinence, and they will tell you these desires are still there. Your psychological orientation doesn't go away just because you become a Christian. So this may be a heavy cross that Christian homosexuals have to bear, but they are called to nothing different than what heterosexuals are called to – namely, a life of sexual purity and chastity as single adults.

KEVIN HARRIS: This next question, she says,

I'm a 13 year old female Christian but I want to become a male. If I ask God to make me a male or got surgery for it when I get older, would that be a bad thing? Anonymous, in the United States.

DR. CRAIG: Well, I would urge this young girl not to do this. God cannot make her a male in the sense that surgery would do so. She's using the word “male” here in both a kind of gender sense and a biological sense. Surgery could alter her physically, but that doesn't alter her psychologically, and God isn't going to alter her in the way that surgery would. And she doesn't need God to alter her psychologically to become a male because she feels like she already is a male in gender. So the request just doesn't make sense. I would encourage her not to go this radical route of getting surgery. It may well be that her feelings will change and she could plunge herself into a life of just terrible misery and ruin by taking so radical a step as undergoing surgery. Instead, I would encourage her to accept the sexuality that God gave her, that she was born with, and then to get counseling and try to do the best she can to live a sexually pure life as a female even though she has this strong orientation toward the gender of being male.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question,

Dear Dr. Craig, this is a question on the finitude of the past. You have said that if the past comprises of an actually infinite number of past events then the present would never occur because before today would have ever happened you would need an infinite amount of previous days to happen first. What if the past is not actually infinite but potentially infinite? What if the past is increasing towards infinity as the present continuously slips into the past. Could we then say that we have an infinite past? Or would a B-Theory of time be able to avoid the problem of the present? Daniel from the United States.

DR. CRAIG: As I've explained in my published work, you cannot analyze the past as a potential infinite as you can the future. For the past to be potentially infinite it would have to have a beginning in the present and be increasing in a backward direction even though it is at every point finite. And that is simply incompatible with the nature of time. It is the nature of time that one event happens after another. Events do not begin in the present and then happen sequentially earlier and earlier than one another. Our thoughts can range over the past events beginning in the present and regressing into the past, but the events themselves are happening forward so to speak from the earlier to the later than direction. And so the idea that the past could be potentially infinite, I think, is incoherent. The past would have to be finite but growing in a backward direction which makes no sense at all. As for the so-called B-Theory of time, what he's talking about there is a view of time according to which there is no difference between past, present, and future. There is no temporal becoming. All events in time are equally real and, yes, that would solve this problem of how you could have the past formed by successive addition ending in the present because on this view of time there is no temporal sequence. All of the events simply exist, and the past is not formed sequentially by one event happening after another. So the question then will be: Is this theory of time true or false? And I've argued extensively in my published work that, in fact, this theory of time is incorrect. Time is, as they say, tensed – there is an objective difference between past, present, and future – and temporal becoming is a real and objective feature of reality. Therefore, if the past is beginningless then an actually infinite number of past events has been successively enumerated ending in the present.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question. We've talked about transworld depravity a few times. This is a question on that.

Dr. Craig, thank you for all you have done to defend the Christian faith. My question is this: Do you accept Alvin Plantinga’s notion of transworld depravity and its use in response to the problem of evil? If I understand correctly, transworld depravity is the notion that doing at least one morally wrong action is an essential property of free human creatures. But why should we accept this? Depravity as defined above does not seem to be essential to humans in the same way that, for instance, three-sidedness is essential to triangularity. I can conceive of free creatures who also do what is morally right, but I can't conceive of things like a non-three-sided triangle. Forgive me if I've misunderstood Alvin Plantinga’s argument. Thank you and God bless. Thomas in the United States.

DR. CRAIG: I think Thomas has misunderstood the notion of transworld depravity. Transworld depravity is not the suggestion that doing at least one morally wrong action is an essential property of every possible human being that God could create. There are certainly possible worlds on Plantinga’s view in which everyone always freely does the right thing. But what Plantinga is suggesting is that those worlds may not be feasible for God. It might be the case (it's possible) that every creaturely essence has the property that if it were instantiated then it would do at least one morally wrong action. Now, that's not to say that it is essential to this creature that it do morally wrong actions. Not at all. There are plenty of possible worlds where it lives a sinless life. But what he's talking about are these counterfactuals of freedom that it's possible that for any person that God could create, if he were to create him, then the person would freely sin. Thomas needs to understand the difference here between possible worlds and worlds that are feasible for God. It has to do with these counterfactuals of freedom. It is possible that for any person God might create, if he were to create that person then that person would freely sin. That’s transworld depravity.^[1]