Questions on Natural Evil, Demons, and the Soul

Kevin Harris: Bill, we get a lot of questions at ReasonableFaith.org. Some of them make Question of the Week, some of them don’t, and we give you a chance to respond to as many as we can. This first one says,

Hello, Dr. Craig. I’ve got a bit of an unusual philosophical question for you. I believe that life begins at conception, and I also believe in the age of accountability. From listening to you, I think you believe both of these as well. Together, these two beliefs give us comfort that every aborted baby ends up in heaven. While this seems nice at first, I believe it creates a real ethical dilemma. This would mean that by having an abortion, you could guarantee your child enters heaven. This seems like a completely upside-down conclusion. How would you reject this? The only way out I see would be to argue from a utilitarian view that the baby might have grown up and done even more good than just simply getting a free pass into heaven. But what if a couple decided to get pregnant and then have an abortion just for this purpose? Then it would be a choice between the baby not existing at all or going straight to heaven. I don’t see how guaranteeing heaven for someone could ever be a bad thing. But I also know that murder can never be a good thing. Thank you for your time and ministry. Stephen in the U.S.

Dr. Craig: I don’t think there is an ethical dilemma here, Stephen, because our moral duties are determined by God’s commandments, and God has commanded us, “Thou shalt not murder.” Even though it would be better for someone to die and go to heaven, that doesn’t mean you are morally permitted to take that person’s life. You would be committing a violation of God’s commands and therefore a serious transgression. The answer is not from a utilitarian point of view. That’s what’s causing your problem — you’re thinking of it as a utilitarian, and it would be good for the child to go to heaven. But you shouldn’t think like that. You should think on the basis of a deontological view of ethics — that you have certain moral duties to fulfill, these are established by God’s commandments, and therefore you are morally obligated to do what God commands.

Kevin Harris: Next question,

Hello there, Dr. Craig. I have an atheist friend of mine who used to be a Christian but has now left the faith. He said that, “you cannot prove the resurrection without presupposing the supernatural since it’s impossible for a miracle to happen in a natural world. You have to prove a theist world exists before you can even talk about the resurrection of Christ.” So my question boils down to how do I answer this objection? Many thanks for the app and the great books. Levi in the U.S.

Dr. Craig: I would say to Levi that I do think proving the resurrection of Jesus as the best explanation of the facts is immeasurably easier if you first prove that the supernatural is real. Therefore, before doing your Christian evidences, you need to do your natural theology — present arguments like the argument from contingency, the kalam cosmological argument, the argument from the applicability of mathematics, the fine-tuning argument, the moral argument, the ontological argument — and build a solid case for theism. Once that is in place, then I think you cannot justifiably say that the resurrection of Jesus is an implausible explanation of the evidence, given that God exists.

Kevin Harris: Next question,

Dr. Craig, I’ve been a fan of your work for many years now, and I think given your dual degrees in philosophy and theology, you’re in a perfect position to answer this question. Do you think the average Christian today is more deficient in philosophical knowledge or in theological knowledge? And what resources would you recommend other than your own exhaustive publications? Thanks. Taylor

Dr. Craig: Well, I think that Christians would be more deficient in their philosophical knowledge than in theological knowledge. The reason for that is that most Christians, through attending church and hopefully their own devotional reading, have some acquaintance with the Bible and therefore have some theological knowledge. But they have very little exposure to philosophical thought. So, I do think they are more deficient in philosophical knowledge.

But, if you were to ask me which of these is more important to have, I would say unequivocally that theological knowledge is more important to have. That’s what you need to learn first and foremost, and then philosophical knowledge after that.

A good book on theology would be Know the Truth by Bruce Milne. It’s a very nice survey of Christian doctrine that surveys the various loci or themes of theology from various confessional perspectives like Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed, Methodist, and so forth.

Philosophically, I can’t think of anything better than Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, which is a publication by Dr. J. P. Moreland and myself.

Kevin Harris: Next question,

Dear Dr. Craig, I really admire your work and the life you have lived. Your thoughts and beliefs on God, time, ontology, and evolution have influenced me profoundly, and I cannot thank you enough. I recently read your work In Quest of the Historical Adam, and I found your argument for classifying the first eleven chapters of Genesis as mytho-history very compelling. I was excited to share this theory with some elders in the church I was attending. It met with fierce resistance, and the church then took a clear stance that one needed to be a literal six-day creationist to become a member. What would you say to those elders? How should I respond when I encounter people who refuse to hear out a rational, orthodox viewpoint or argument and not only refuse to hear but refute that which they do not understand? How would you respond if you were me? Jared

Dr. Craig: Well, Jared, from your description of these folks, I would advise you not to respond at all. It seems to me that you could not become a member of this church in good conscience, but that doesn’t prevent you from attending the church, worshiping, and fellowshipping there. If I were you, I just wouldn’t talk about Young Earth Creationism and creation. Just keep a low profile. It’s not important enough for you to become divisive in your local congregation.

Kevin Harris: I would say to Jared as well, if you’re going to be presenting Dr. Craig’s book to the elders, take some donuts. [laughter] Next question,

I’m curious, Dr. Craig, why demons are described in the Bible as wanting or possibly needing a host. For example, in Mark 5, where the impure spirits begged Jesus not to send them out of the area but instead preferred to be sent among the pigs. Donald in the U.S.

Dr. Craig: I don’t know the answer to this question, Donald. That’s a great question, and all I can say is that perhaps by inhabiting the body of a person, this gives them a vehicle for acting in the world that they would not otherwise have. That would be the best answer I could give to the question.

Kevin Harris: Next question,

Dear Dr. Craig, I have a question about divine providence and the nature of the best possible outcome, both individually and corporately. For years, my family prayed earnestly for our daughter Sophia to be admitted to a very good private Christian primary school here in secular Germany. Admission is extremely limited. Unfortunately, Sophia was not selected but was put on the waiting list. Still, we took comfort in the thought that this was ultimately in God’s hands and he had a good reason for allowing it. At the time, I believed, and still believe, that while it may not have been the optimal outcome for Sophia personally, it could still have been the best overall outcome from a broader societal perspective. Perhaps another child needed the place more or would have a greater impact in the future. In other words, God may ensure the best possible outcome corporately even if not every individual receives what would have been best for them in isolation. My friend Gabriel disagrees with my following belief. Maybe for a certain individual—namely Sophia—it was not the optimal outcome, and her life would have turned out to be better if she had been accepted. My friend Gabriel is convinced that God’s decision not to grant Sophia a place at the school was not only the best possible outcome for humanity as a whole but also the best possible outcome for each and every individual, including Sophia. Our friend points to Romans 8:28, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God.” I understand this verse in the context of comprehensive divine providence. So that’s where we disagree. Who’s right? Is it coherent to say that God’s providential plan ensures the best outcome globally even if some individuals experience less than optimal personal outcomes?” . . . In a surprising turn of events, a child dropped out at the last moment, and Sophia was admitted after all—a wonderful and humbling reminder that God does hear our prayers. Thank you for your ministry which had a significant impact on my faith journey. Michael in Germany

Dr. Craig: I agree with you, Michael, not with Gabriel. I see no reason at all to think that God’s providential plan has to include the very best thing, the optimal outcome, for each individual. Rather, it is a global plan, and it may well require suffering on the part of certain individuals. Look at Jesus as the perfect example—you could hardly say that being crucified was optimally good for him. Certainly, many other persons have experienced horrible suffering and loss in this life. But in God’s providence, these deficits on a personal level can redound to his overall providential plan for human history, especially if God’s aim is to actualize a world in which the optimal number of people would freely come to know him and find salvation. If we could see that, I think any of us would be willing to sacrifice our personal goods for the goods of others.

Kevin Harris: Well, that was a long question, Bill. Let me give you one that’s short and sweet.

Dr. Craig, should Christians evangelize Jews, or is their covenantal path different? Val in Israel

Dr. Craig: Christians should evangelize Jews. There are not two covenantal paths to salvation. Salvation is through Christ alone. The promise is that whoever confesses him before men will be confessed before the angels of God, and whoever denies him will be denied before the angels of God. So, we certainly need to evangelize Jews.

Now, that doesn’t mean that a Jew needs to give up his Jewishness in believing in Jesus as Messiah. There are many Messianic Jews who are Jewish; they continue to observe the law, follow Jewish forms of religiosity, and so forth. They are Jewish, but they believe that Jesus is the Messiah. They would be very similar to some of the earliest Jewish believers in Jesus before Christianity spread to the Gentile world. So, it’s not a different covenantal path, but there can certainly be within the Christian church different sorts of ethnicities, including Messianic Jews.

Kevin Harris: This next question is from Singapore. And, just as an aside, I can usually tell when someone who doesn’t speak English, or is limited in their English, is using AI to do translations here. Sometimes it’s kind of hard to read, but I’m doing my best to decipher what’s going on. This is from Singapore.

Hi, Dr. Craig. I’ve just ministered to a German friend who abandoned the Christian faith last October. His reasons are as follows:

1.     God can be described with attributes such as omnipresence, omnipotence, goodness.

2.     God cannot choose to not be omnipresent, omnipotent, and good.

3.     These attributes precede him, and God cannot free himself from them.

4.     God therefore cannot be the greatest possible being.

5.     In addition, does God even have a personality at all, or is he dictated by those attributes?

6.     It is therefore more probable that the universe came to be by attributes rather than by a personal creator.

I’ve sensed multiple flaws in this argument. I’m just not sure how to craft a coherent response. I believe the flaws are as follows: One, just as a circle is round, God’s attributes such as omnipresence, omnipotence, and goodness are part of his ontology. If God calls himself by those attributes, have those attributes necessarily bound him?

Dr. Craig: Let me interrupt at this point and take the questions one at a time. I think the response here is absolutely correct. The idea that God cannot be the greatest possible being because he has all of these essential attributes is obviously false, and so he should challenge the inference to step four in the argument.

Kevin Harris:

And number two, attributes themselves are immaterial and therefore cannot create material objects. Only material beings can create material objects. My friend did ask, though, if a mind being such as God is material at all. Perhaps my word choice of “material” has not been adept here.

Dr. Craig: Yes, I think that’s exactly right. The intent of the response is correct, but he should have used the words “abstract” and “concrete” rather than “material” and “immaterial.” An abstract object cannot create a concrete object, and therefore God cannot be just a set of attributes or properties. He must be a concrete being in order to create the world. I think this fellow from Singapore is very astute, and I applaud his analysis.

Kevin Harris: Next question,

Dear Dr. Craig, I just read what your book Philosophical Foundations says about the Trinity and was not fully satisfied, so I turned to Reasonable Faith and was surprised not to find a fuller treatment there. Philosophical Foundations says, “If God is perfectly loving by his very nature he must be giving himself to another.” And that other must be a non-created person. This strikes me as both plausible and promising, but I don’t see that it takes us beyond a second person, the beloved. I found something online saying that the third person is the love relationship between the first two persons. But I find persuasive your argument that a relationship cannot be a person. But it also seems to me that the second person must love the first person, so that if the loving relationship were the third person, then we’d have a fourth person for the relation of love of the second person to the first.

I don’t know if I’m following here. You want to stop there and parse this a little bit?

Dr. Craig: All right. What Alan here is referring to is an argument that I give in the chapter on the Trinity in Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. The Trinity is typically regarded as a doctrine that does not belong to natural theology—it cannot be proved on the basis of reason alone apart from authoritative divine revelation. We believe in the doctrine of the Trinity on the basis of scriptural revelation, and I think that’s true.

But I suggest that there is what I call a plausibility argument that many Christian philosophers have argued that makes it plausible to think that there are multiple persons in God. The idea there is that if God is absolutely and essentially loving then he must be loving another person—he must be giving himself away in love to this other person. This cannot be any created person because created persons are not necessary; they’re contingent, and therefore there are possible worlds in which there are no created persons. And in this world created persons have not always existed.

So, this makes it plausible to think that within God himself there are multiple persons. Now Alan is right—this doesn’t go beyond two persons. I don’t know a good argument for saying that God must be tri-personal. But this is sufficient to refute all forms of Unitarian theology, whether it be Islam, deism, or forms of Unitarianism or Jehovah’s Witnesses or other cults, because it does show that God must be multiple persons.

Kevin Harris: Next question,

Dr. Craig, why do some people think that a micromanaging, deterministic God would have more glory than a God that creates creatures with free will and still fulfills his plan? A deterministic universe wouldn’t be different than the fictional worlds that we humans create, right? Fictional good guys have no choice but to be good guys. How could we be morally responsible for our actions if determinism were true? Amy in the U.S.

Dr. Craig: I agree wholeheartedly with Amy here. When I was a boy, I used to play with toy soldiers and would set up these battlefields on the floor of my room with all of these soldiers, forts, and tanks. These were all determined by me—they had no agency, no freedom to do anything. It was all a game. And on this sort of universal divine causal determinism, we are just like those toy soldiers on the board. It does seem to me that it makes human existence meaningless and utterly trivial.

So, I think that God is much greater if he can achieve his providential purposes through the agency of free creatures than if he has to determine them to do what he wants. A God who has to determine the creatures in order to arrive at his ends seems to me less great than one who can achieve those ends through the free decisions of persons.

Kevin Harris: Here’s another quick one for you, Bill.

If our universe was fine-tuned for our existence, then why do creatures exist that can harm or kill humans, like alligators and lions?

Dr. Craig: The fine-tuning argument says that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of embodied conscious agents. Now, what God’s plans are for those agents is a totally different subject. What Mark is raising here is the question of natural evil—why does God create a world in which natural evil and animal predation exist? That doesn’t do anything to undermine the fine-tuning argument; it has to do with the goodness of God and what God’s providential plan is for humanity.

Kevin Harris: Final question today,

Dear Dr. Craig, when thinking about an immaterial God-given soul, I find the hard problem of consciousness stands out as convincing to me. However, it appears that it is commonly accepted that animals have consciousness too, which given evolution seems to suggest a smooth transition of greater consciousness, which seems hard to reconcile with the idea of God slowly giving the animals more and more of a soul. How do you reconcile this as a dualist? It is common to suggest that God enlightened Adam, giving him a soul. But if his ancestors were already highly conscious, how was that necessary? Levi

Dr. Craig: This is a great question. It does seem that many of the arguments for the human soul would also apply to animals because they have phenomenal states of consciousness like feeling pain, experiencing emotional anxiety, having intentions, and so forth. Many dualists, like my colleague J.P. Moreland, think that animals have souls.

But this is not a matter of God slowly giving animals more and more of a soul. Rather, it’s a matter of the soul’s faculties and giving a soul greater and greater cognitive faculties. For example, the soul of a turtle is much more poorly endowed than the soul of a horse, and the soul of a horse is not as richly endowed in cognitive faculties as the soul of a chimpanzee. But the soul of a human being is even more richly endowed because we are rational souls. We are self-conscious persons with a first-person perspective so that we can say “I think that” in front of anything that we think—something that apparently no other animals can do.

So, it’s not a matter of getting more and more soul. It would be a matter of seeing souls as being differently endowed with various cognitive faculties, and coming to the greatest endowment in human beings, who have rational souls created in the image of God and therefore set apart from all the rest of creation.

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