Reasonable Faith Book (part 4)

Transcript Reasonable Faith Book (Part 4)

Kevin Harris: In the new revised version of Reasonable Faith, your book, Dr. Craig, you expand the section on the existence of God arguments – about five of them. We’ve talked about two of them. Let’s talk about some more – the design argument, moral argument, and the ontological argument. What is your take on the design argument?

Dr. Craig: The design argument has come roaring back into prominence in our day and age as a result of the discovery that the initial conditions of the universe present in the Big Bang itself had to be fine-tuned to an incomprehensible delicacy and complexity in order for intelligent life to evolve and exist anywhere in the entire cosmos. It is this fine-tuning of the universe for life that has really put the design argument back in center stage. What I like about the fine-tuning argument, Kevin, is that it enables us to do an end run around the whole emotionally charged issue of biological evolution and the creation-evolution debates and public school debates and courtroom debates and everything, and to go right back to the very beginning of the universe and point out that unless those initial conditions are fine-tuned to an incomprehensible precision evolution couldn’t even take place anywhere in the universe. So the very evolution of biological life presupposes a designer.

Kevin Harris: You are going even further back than some of the traditional design arguments that we’ve all learned and maybe heard in church and that is that we are just the right distance from the sun and we have just the right amount of oxygen for life. This goes back even further.

Dr. Craig: That’s right. It goes back to the very beginning of the universe before there ever was an earth, before there ever was a galaxy, and says these initial conditions have to be fine-tuned in such a way that the most plausible explanation is intelligent design. So you don’t even need to get into the question of the distance of the earth from the sun, its atmosphere, its size, the presence of Jupiter. All of those things simply layer on more improbability after you’ve shown how improbable the fine-tuning is. So the fine-tuning lays the foundation and then on top of that you can just layer on more and more improbabilities as you talk about all of these factors necessary for the existence of life on earth and for the origin of life and then the development of intelligence and complexity. All of that just strengthens the argument for design.

Kevin Harris: These constants, these fine-tuning aspects that we’ve discovered – what the last 50 years?

Dr. Craig: That’s right. That’s why this is so recent. This is only really been discovered within the last forty years or so.

Kevin Harris: It seems to resist the common objection that, well, if it wasn’t that way we wouldn’t be here to observe it. Obviously, it had to be that way. I can see how that would be the case with our distance from the sun, the oxygen, and things like that. But I really get suspicious that there is an intelligence if it goes all the way back to the Big Bang itself, if it goes all the way back to the beginning of the universe and then these things are there.

Dr. Craig: Right. It is not enough to say, “Well, if the universe weren’t fine-tuned then we wouldn’t be here to be surprised about it.” It is certainly true that we could not observe the universe if it weren’t fine-tuned because we’d be dead or we wouldn’t even exist. But that in no way means that we shouldn’t be surprised that we do observe a universe which is incomprehensibly fine-tuned for our being here. That ought to arouse in us the suspicion that there is some kind of further explanation going on here.

Kevin Harris: Can you name a couple of things off the top of your head that show this fine-tuning?

Dr. Craig: Yes, certainly. One of the factors that is the most discussed today that is really a hot topic is the so-called cosmological constant. As you mentioned, there are many different constants in nature and what these are are quantities that are constant in the laws of nature when they are given mathematical expression. And one constant is called the cosmological constant. What this does is that it controls the speed of the expansion of the universe. [1] It determines that the universe will accelerate in its expansion at a certain point. It has been calculated that this constant has to be fine-tuned to one part out of ten to the hundred and twentieth power in order for the universe to be life-permitting. That is one chance out of one followed by one hundred and twenty zeroes, which is just an incomprehensible number.

Kevin Harris: So how does this differ from the traditional William Paley watchmaker arguments? Finding a watch on the beach and you immediately infer that it was designed?

Dr. Craig: The difference, I think, would be that the examples of design that Paley used were organic features of biological organisms. Things like the eye, the ear, the heart, the nose. These sorts of things. And Paley argued that these couldn’t have arisen by accident; these must be the products of design. This is where the Darwinist will counter by saying that these organs are the result of a long period of genetic mutation and natural selection which has fashioned these organs that look like they are designed but they are really not. I think you can engage in that debate. That is a good debate to participate in. But I prefer to just do an end run around the whole thing and say there wouldn’t even be any planets, there wouldn’t even be any galaxies where life might evolve unless the universe was fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life in the very moment of its inception. So you just completely circumvent that whole debate.

Kevin Harris: Do you think we’ll continue to discover some of these fine-tuning aspects?

Dr. Craig: Yes, I do, Kevin. The pattern of discovery with respect to fine-tuning is that any attempt to eliminate the fine-tuning by trying to explain it through some mechanism is kind of like the proverbial bump in the carpet. You depress it at one point and it pops up at some other place. That has been the pattern. For example, many scientists thought that you could get rid of the fine-tuning of the expansion of the universe and how homogenous the universe is by appealing to a so-called inflationary theory of the universe where the universe for a brief period of time inflates very rapidly, a kind of super-rapid expansion. And they thought this would explain the so-called flatness problem and the expansion problem. But it was then that they discovered the cosmological constant problem because it is the cosmological constant that determines the rate of inflation. So the bump in the carpet had been pushed down at one point only to have it pop up somewhere else. And that has been the pattern. This fine-tuning is so various, it is so widely varied, and it is so extensive throughout physics that I think it is extremely unlikely that it is ever going to be eliminated. I think the more we discover, the more this fine-tuning is going to pop up in different places.

Kevin Harris: Let’s turn to the moral argument for God’s existence. Break that down for us, Dr. Craig.

Dr. Craig: This argument basically has two premises. The first premise is that if God does not exist then objective values and moral duties do not exist. In the absence of God, basically everything becomes relative. We have no moral duties to fulfill, there are no objective moral values. The second premise is: but there are in fact objective moral values and duties. Certain things really are right or wrong, good or evil. From those two premises it follows logically and inescapably that God exists. So the atheist who wants to deny God’s existence is going to have to deny one of those two premises in order to avoid the conclusion.

Kevin Harris: A lot of atheists don’t want to deny that morals are objective.

Dr. Craig: Right.

Kevin Harris: They just don’t want them to be somehow located in God. Where do they put them?

Dr. Craig: That’s the question, of course. I think this is a surprise perhaps to the layperson. I find that laypeople and especially, say, high school students and even college students have been taught relativism and so for them they think that the controversial premise in this argument is the second one – that objective moral values and duties exist. But, in fact, when you talk to professors of philosophy – and when I have debates on this subject – almost nobody disagrees with that second premise. They all recognize that, say, the Holocaust was wrong. That Apartheid is wrong. That child abuse is objectively wrong. [2] So, as you say Kevin, the atheist usually wants to desperately affirm the existence of objective moral values and duties, and the challenge for him then is to show how on an atheistic worldview these things would exist and would be objective and wouldn’t just be sort of socio-biological spinoffs of the evolutionary process that produced us. So it is very, very difficult, I think, for the atheist to have any kind of grounding for objective values and duties.

Kevin Harris: We’ve talked about this in some other programs, Bill – talking about the moral argument and so on. And we talked about what it meant for morals to be objective and that means that they are binding, that they are true and binding on everyone, whether you believe it or not.

Dr. Craig: That is right. They are independent of human opinion. And the argument is that if there isn’t any God then moral values and duties aren’t objective in that sense. They are basically dependent upon what people think, what we’ve come to believe, and so forth. Here, I love to use the work of guys like Richard Dawkins because Dawkins endorses this first premise. There is a wonderful quotation from him where he says, “There is no purpose, there is no meaning, there is no good, there is no evil, there is nothing but pointless indifference. . . . We are machines for propagating DNA. . . . It is our sole purpose for living.” [3]Well, that is a nihilistic point of view where there is no meaning and there is no objective moral values. Now what is so interesting about Dawkins is that despite the fact that that is his worldview, he is an unabashed moralist. His books are filled with moral judgments. He condemns those who discriminate against homosexuals, he condemns the religious indoctrination of children, he condemns the Inquisition, he even has his own Ten Commandments in The God Delusion for guiding our lives. So Dawkins exemplifies the horrible dilemma that the atheist finds himself in. He knows that given his worldview we are just animals and animals aren’t moral agents. And yet at the same time he also recognizes that moral values and duties do exist and he affirms them all the time. So he is caught in a contradiction.

Kevin Harris: Is something moral because God says that it is moral? Or is something moral because God recognizes that it’s moral?

Dr. Craig: This is a very famous argument that is often used against basing moral values in God. Is something good because God says so, or does God say that it is good because it is? What I want to say is that God says that it is good because God is good. Moral values are rooted in the nature of God. God is essentially loving, compassionate, fair, just, holy, and so forth. So what God commands us to do flows out of his own moral nature. So his commandments are not arbitrary. They are reflections of his own moral character which defines what is good and evil is. His moral character is the yardstick or plumb line for determining good and evil. So what God says is based upon who God is and he defines what is good and evil by his very character. His commandments to us then constitute our moral duties. That is where right and wrong comes from – it’s from the commands of a holy and loving God.

Kevin Harris: How do moral values exist, Dr. Craig? It is not like you can go out and touch them or collect them in a basket. They are just kind of there. And when you think about them, there they are. What’s up with that?

Dr. Craig: Well, I think that moral values are properties of God’s nature. I don’t think that moral values exist in themselves in some sort of independent realm. This is what Plato believed. He thought that things like Justice, Fairplay, Kindness, just sort of exist. Well I, for one, just can’t make any sense of that. I understand what it means for a person to be kind or to be just. But I don’t have a clue what it means to say that, independent of any people, Kindness just exists. Or Justice just exists. In fact, when you think about it, Justice would be a sort of abstract object; it wouldn’t itself be just. Kindness isn’t itself kind. So if there weren’t any people there wouldn’t be any Justice or Kindness. But that contradicts the view that Justice and Kindness just exist on their own. So the way I see it is Justice and Kindness are properties of a person; namely, God. God is just and kind and he defines, by his moral character, what is right and by contrast what is wrong, or good and evil. [4]

Kevin Harris: The ontological argument. That is a big name. What do we mean by the ontological argument?

Dr. Craig: Yeah, this is a more difficult one to explain to a popular audience.

Kevin Harris: Well, you only have five minutes.

Dr. Craig: OK. This is the argument that says if God’s existence is even possible then God must exist. Once you come to see what God is, if you admit that it is even possible that there is a God, then God must actually exist. I have come to be convinced – after initially thinking this argument wasn’t a good argument – I’ve come to believe that this is a sound argument; that it is not only valid but that the premises are true. I think it is a sound argument for God’s existence.

Kevin Harris: Who do we trace this argument back to?

Dr. Craig: It goes back to a 12th century monk, Anselm of Canterbury, England. Anselm had defended cosmological arguments for God’s existence and he wanted to find an argument that would demonstrate that God exists in sort of one fell swoop, with all of his superlative attributes. It was then that Anselm hit upon this concept of God as the greatest conceivable being. He said God, by definition, is the greatest conceivable being. If you could conceive of anything greater than God, then that would be God. So God has to be by definition the greatest conceivable being. But then Anselm went on to argue that a being which is the greatest conceivable being would have to be one that exists. So if it is even possible that there is a greatest conceivable being, then he must exist.

Kevin Harris: Wow. Thank you for keeping me up late on that one tonight. Well, what are the objections to that?

Dr. Craig: There is only one objection, really, to this argument. When it all boils down to what is at stake here, it is: do we have any reason to think that it is possible that God exists? I think that informed atheists will say, yes, if it is possible that God exists then God must exist. And therefore the atheist has to say it is impossible that God exists. It is not just that God doesn’t exist; it is impossible that God exists. There is not even a possibility that there is a God. So what the atheist will say to the theist or the one who defends the ontological argument is you can’t show me that it is possible that God exists and therefore I deny the argument. I think God’s existence is impossible and you can’t prove to me that it is possible.

Kevin Harris: What would your move be? Would you supplement the argument then?

Dr. Craig: Well, I would try to give arguments to suggest that it is possible that God exists. Although one has to say that if the atheist takes a strong stand here, I don’t think you are going to be able to succeed in dislodging him from that. But what you have done at least, Kevin – I think this is the merit of the argument – is you’ve shown him the price that has to be paid for his atheism. It is not enough just to say that God doesn’t exist; the atheist is going to have to take the more radical position that it is impossible that God exists. So the benefit of the argument is that even if you can’t prove that it is possible that God exists, you’ve at least been able to show that if God’s existence is possible then God exists.

Kevin Harris: Most thoughtful atheists don’t want to go that far as to say that it is impossible that God exists.

Dr. Craig: They don’t want to go that far. I think most people would say, yeah, it is intuitively possible that God exists; even if he doesn’t, it’s possible that there could be such a being.

Kevin Harris: When you get there then that starts getting you down the road to the ontological argument.

Dr. Craig: Yeah, I think it does, Kevin. That is exactly right. I think that we can say some things to suggest that it is possible that God exists. For example, when we say that it is impossible for a married bachelor to exist, or a round square, we say that because that is an evidently incoherent concept. The idea of a married bachelor is incoherent because the idea of a bachelor is an unmarried male.

Kevin Harris: It is a contradiction.

Dr. Craig: Yeah. So the idea of a married bachelor – we could say, yeah, it is not even possible that a married bachelor exists. But the concept of God isn’t like that. There isn’t any evident contradiction or inconsistency or incoherence in the concept of God. So the atheist is having to say this is impossible even though there is no evident incoherence in this concept. I think the theist will want to say that intuitively this is a coherent idea; it is not like a married bachelor or round square so it is intuitively possible being. I think that is a strong argument for the possibility of God’s existence.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, our question of the day – what about all the evil done in the name of God? People cite the Crusades, and the Inquisition, and crimes committed by religious people.

Dr. Craig: I guess I would say, Kevin, that that is simply testimony to the fallenness of man. It is testimony to how wicked and perverse we are that we could take the most beautiful and wonderful things in the world and use them as instruments of violence and torture and cruelty the way Christianity has sometimes been used in the hands of wicked men. So it does nothing to disconfirm Christianity. On the contrary, if anything it confirms the Christian doctrine of sin, that we really are depraved and fallen and alienated from God.

Kevin Harris: I guess every philosophy or every system could be abused. Or perverted.

Dr. Craig: That’s right. Bertrand Russell once remarked that you cannot prove a system of thought is true by looking at the lives of its adherents. What he meant was just because the adherents lived good and righteous lives doesn’t mean their system is true. But it also applies to when those adherents fail to live up to their system of beliefs and are wicked and hypocritical and deceitful. In the same way that doesn’t mean that their system of beliefs is false. [5]