Reasonable Faith Book (part 1)

Transcript Reasonable Faith Book (Part 1)

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, the name of this program is Reasonable Faith and you’re well known for a book called Reasonable Faith. That book is very provocative – the title there – because a lot of people think that faith and reason are mutually exclusive. They see that as an oxymoron.

Dr. Craig: Right. That is part of the reason, I think, we picked the title. We wanted to put something out that would be provocative and that would show that faith is a rational thing to do and that therefore there is no contradiction between faith and reason.

Kevin Harris: The faith and reason debate has been going on for a long time. This is nothing new. It stretches all the way back to early thinkers. Augustine – what did he say about it?

Dr. Craig: Well, Augustine had a sort of authoritarian view of faith and reason. He thought that faith precedes reason and that faith is based upon authority. He said, “I would not believe if it were not for the authority of the Catholic Church.” So for Augustine basically the foundation for faith is authority. Then you reason about that having come to believe what you believe.

Kevin Harris: That is maybe strange to Protestant ears, perhaps in today’s evangelicalism or Protestantism – that kind of authority. We would hold more to perhaps the authority of the Word of God?

Dr. Craig: Exactly. In other words, it is not a difference necessarily. There can be Protestant forms of authoritarianism, but generally the authority will not be the church, it will be the Scriptures. So there are certain modern theologians like Karl Barth, for example, or even a Cornelius val Til, who are really authoritarians. They would say the basis for faith is simply the authoritative Word of God which demands obedience and which cannot be questioned. So the basic approach to knowledge is still the same – it is authoritarianism – but you just have a different authority. That of course raises one of the difficult problems with authoritarianism: how do you know which authority to believe? How do you know which authority is the true authority?

Kevin Harris: It certainly makes it rather vulnerable to criticism, I think. How do you know your authority is authoritative and so on? I do want to get to a definition of faith and a definition of reason. But Augustine also said something that he is rather famous for and that is “faith seeking understanding.” What do you think he meant by that?

Dr. Craig: Well, again, I think that that speaks of the priority of faith that first you believe and then you seek to understand what you believe. So it is not a matter that first you seek to understand and then you believe as a result, but it is first belief and then you try to unfold that through rational reflection and so forth. There is of course huge debate on which of these has priority. Does faith precede reason or reason precede faith? Augustine wasn’t altogether clear about exactly how you put this whole package together.

Kevin Harris: Yeah, because he seemed to engage reason a lot but then he also engaged his faith.

Dr. Craig: Exactly, he was authoritarian in terms of saying that you first believe and then you reason about it. But he also recognized that you have to figure out whom to believe and that that will be a search that does involve reason at the same time as you look at the different competing authorities. So his view isn’t altogether clear as to how this is going to work its way out.

Kevin Harris: Let’s get a good definition of faith then. What do we mean by faith?

Dr. Craig: The way I understand faith, Kevin, is that it is a trust or a commitment in something. I don’t think that faith is a way of knowing something. I think this is a fundamental mistake that a lot of people make. They think reason takes us so far and then faith makes the leap that bridges the remaining gap however that might be. So the way you come to know something is through faith. That is not the way I understand faith in the New Testament sense. As I understand faith, you could know something to be true and yet still not have faith in it. The Scriptures say that the demons believe that God exists and they tremble. Why? Well, because they don’t have saving faith in him. So I don’t think that faith is a way of knowing. I don’t think that faith is something that is incompatible with knowledge. You can know something to be true and still face the decision, “Am I going to have faith – that is to say, trust or commitment – in this thing that I know to be true?” [1]

Kevin Harris: I’ve heard theologians say that faith is not a way of knowing something, faith is what you do with what you know. That might work. Does that work as a definition?

Dr. Craig: I think so.

Kevin Harris: It is a commitment to something that you hold as true.

Dr. Craig: I think that that is the best way that it should be done. Now in some cases I think that people could trust or place their commitment in something that they don’t know to be true but maybe they hope is true or they have an idea it might be true and so they are willing to make that commitment or trust even though they don’t know it. But at least I think we want to say that faith is not in any way incompatible with knowledge, that faith can be trusting in something I know to be true. In a sense, that is what you were saying.

Kevin Harris: That is opposite of what Mark Twain said it seems, “Faith is the belief in what you know ain’t true.”

Dr. Craig: Right, exactly. Faith is for people who know it ain’t true but you believe it anyway. That is, I think, a very popular conception of religious belief in our culture.

Kevin Harris: Bill, it seems to be maybe some nuances – maybe you have a scale of faith. It seems on one end you’ve got blind faith and on the other end you have reasonable faith. Some things take more faith than others.

Dr. Craig: Well, I think the definition is the same, namely, trust or commitment. But you are very right, I think, in saying that that trust or commitment can be made on very different grounds. As you say, one could be a blind faith where, oh, imagine you are hiking in the Alps and you see a mountain thunderstorm arising and you realize you’ve got to get off that mountain. You have to get off quickly and you don’t know the way down and you come to a fork. You may just have to decide blindly which fork to take and just trust that this is the path that will lead you to safety even though you don’t know. That would be an example of blind faith. But an example of reasonable faith would be where you have some indication that this is the truth – there is some pointers that say this is the way. Some testimony perhaps saying that this is the way. Then you can have a faith that is based on absolute certain where, say, that you see that this leads down the mountain and it’s right there in front of you. You are still trusting in this path to take you to the right destination even though you know that it will.

So once we think of faith in those terms we can see there are all kinds of different grounds for faith that might be made. I think that faith itself comes in degrees. I think that is something else that you pointed out. Some people’s faith can be weak, other people’s faith can be very strong, and our faith can waver in times. So faith comes in degrees as well.

Kevin Harris: It would take more faith for me to get on an airplane if there was smoke coming out of the tail and one of the wings are broken off – it would take a lot of faith to get on that plane. But it wouldn’t take as much faith at all to get on a healthy looking plane because the odds are very much in your favor and we have a history of the airlines that would support you placing your faith in there. It would take a lot of faith to get on a busted up looking airplane.

Dr. Craig: I suppose it would be more of a blind faith in that case that you are talking about.

Kevin Harris: Well, if faith is trust, assent, commitment that something is true then what would reason be?

Dr. Craig: The way I understand or use the word reason, particularly in the book Reasonable Faith, is what I’m talking about is argument and evidence for a conclusion so that you have good reasons to believe the conclusion is true. That is what I mean. Arguments and evidence for some conclusion.

Kevin Harris: By the way, the book Reasonable Faith has been out for some time and you are doing the third revision on it.

Dr. Craig: That’s right. Almost 25 years now that this book has been in print and Crossway asked me to do the third edition of it. So one of the projects that I was recently involved in was going through the whole thing again, revising it, updating it, expanding it, in preparation for that third edition.

Kevin Harris: There seems to be a contrast also in your book of seeing something is true versus believing something is true. I guess if we were to see that something was true we would empirically verify it and maybe see it with our eyes. But believing may not involve the optical nerve.

Dr. Craig: This is a distinction that again you find in Augustine and in Aquinas where again I think you have this kind of opposition between knowing and believing. That if you see something to be true then you don’t need to believe it is true. That is the kind of opposition that I am opposing. I think that you can see that something is true and yet still confront the crisis of “Am I going to trust in this? Am I going to commit myself to it?” [2] So I don’t see that this distinction between seeing and believing is a good one although it is one that is found in classical authors like Aquinas.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, Alvin Plantinga is a very important philosopher of religion. What is his take on this whole topic?

Dr. Craig: Plantinga believes that there are good arguments and evidence for the existence of God. I’ve seen statement by him where he says that he thinks the evidence and arguments makes it more probable than not that God exists. That is a pretty bold statement. He would say that someone who was just following the evidence would come to the conclusion that God exists (more than 50% probability).

But Plantinga’s concern is to show that this isn’t necessary in order for faith in God to be rational or even for us to know that God exists. He thinks that evidence and arguments are fine, they exist, they are there, but you don’t need them. You can know that God exists wholly apart from arguments because God has put into us certain faculties, certain cognitive mechanisms if you will, that when they are functioning properly will naturally form the belief that he exists. One of these he calls a divine sense. He thinks it is innate in every person. It is like the sense of sight or the sense of hearing or the sense of smell. He thinks we have a kind of divine sense that when functioning properly will form in us the belief that God exists.

Then in addition to that he also thinks that the Holy Spirit produces in us beliefs in the great truths of the Gospel, by that he means the central Christian doctrines that are declared in Scripture. So when I read the Scripture the Holy Spirit in some way moves me to assent to these doctrines. He testifies to their truth. Plantinga thinks that on the basis of this divine sense and this inner witness of the Holy Spirit we can know both that God exists and the great truths of the Gospel even if we have no evidence or arguments on behalf of those truths.

Kevin Harris: It seems like we know a lot of things like that, Bill. We know them immediately or directly.

Dr. Craig: Yes. Plantinga would say that this is the way we actually know most things. I remember Georges Mavrodes, who is a philosopher at the University of Western Michigan, saying to me once that when you read Plantinga you might at first get the impression that he is saying you have a sort of foundation of your system of beliefs which is like the foundation of a skyscraper. Then on top of that you build this great skyscraper on top of that foundation. It is only the foundation that you know in this sort of immediate way that we’ve just described. But he said really that is not Plantinga’s view at all. He says Plantinga’s view is more that your system of knowledge is like a big empty lot with rambling foundations going all around the lot and here and there there might be a few bricks piled on top of these foundations. But in fact most of the things that we know, he would say, would be known in this kind of properly basic way. For example, my belief that there is an external world isn’t formed by some kind of an argument where I say I am getting these sense impressions that there are cars and people and trees out there. Those impressions are likely to be correct, therefore it is likely that there is an external world. No, he would just say that in the immediate context of seeing and hearing and feeling things we instinctively form the belief in the external world and we have no good reason to doubt it. So we just accept it as a kind of properly basic belief. It is part of the deliverances of reason but it is not based on arguments and evidence. He would say exactly the same thing is true of God.

Kevin Harris: I wonder if we have known this for millennia but empirical verification and the scientific method has kind of come in and rubbed this out of us a little bit and made us doubt it. I mean we live in a culture where seeing is believing and that means the five senses. It has kind of crowded out the common sense of what you are saying, or what Plantinga is saying.

Dr. Craig: Well, historical – I’m thinking historically here – there has always been in Western philosophy a skeptical tradition. There are ancient Greek skeptics. But it is true that this skeptical tradition really came to a head in Modernity, with Descartes and the French skeptics who began to doubt everything even the existence of the external world, the existence of the past, and tried to find some sort of foundation for knowledge that would allow them to build this sort of skyscraper as it were on top of that. [3] I think that project has largely failed. I think that most folks would recognize that you can’t build that kind of a structure; that most of our beliefs are going to have to be foundational sort of beliefs that are simply formed in the context of certain experiences. If you have no good reason to think those are false then you are perfectly rational to go ahead with those beliefs and to hold to them. So in one sense Plantinga is getting back, I think, to that more traditional view that was undermined, I think, in the modern age by the rise of skepticism.

Kevin Harris: It seems like in this first chapter of Reasonable Faith, Dr. Craig, you kind of contrast knowing Christianity is true versus showing Christianity is true.

Dr. Craig: Yes, this distinction is one that I hit upon after wrestling for a long time with this problem of the relationship between faith and reason. What I think pulled me in opposite directions is on the one hand it seems that we do have, through the witness of the Holy Spirit and the experience of God, a kind of assurance of the truth of Christianity that is wholly independent of arguments and evidence. The simplest child of God or even a mentally retarded person who can’t comprehend philosophical arguments or historical arguments for the Gospels can know, and know with assurance, that Christianity is true. You don’t want to deny those people the privilege of having faith which you would have to do if you say that in order to know Christianity is true that you have to have all sorts of arguments and evidence for it. On the other hand, what you want to avoid then is some sort of relativistic subjectivism where everybody and anybody who claims to have some sort of an experience is rational in claiming that he knows what he believes in this properly basic way.

So the distinction that I hit upon is this difference between knowing and showing. I think the way that I know that Christianity is true is, as Plantinga says, through the immediate witness of the Holy Spirit. This is an objective function of the Holy Spirit in my life testifying to me that I am a child of God, that God exists, that I know him, and so forth. On the other hand, because that is an interior experience, when I come to talking to someone else who doesn’t have that experience it does no good for me simply to say that I have this inner experience that you don’t have but, gee, if you did you would know this, too. If I want to show him that what I believe is true then I need to present arguments and evidence. So I see the arguments and evidence as confirmatory of what I already know independently of argument and evidence, but I can use to show another person that what I know to be true in a basic way is in fact true and I can give him good reasons to think so.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, some have criticized this view and called it kind of a dual-knowledge, dual source of knowledge. You’ve got knowledge of Christianity through facts and evidence and you’ve got knowledge of Christianity directly by the Holy Spirit. Is there any warrant to that criticism?

Dr. Craig: I don’t think it is a criticism. I think it is true, and I don’t see anything that is problematic about it. I think that, on the one hand, I know that Christianity is true through the inner and immediate witness of the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, I do think that I have good evidence to think that this is true and in a discussion with someone could present such evidence.

To give an analogy: suppose you are accused of a crime that you know you didn’t commit. You know you were home alone in your room at the time this crime was said to be committed. So you know you are innocent. You don’t need any evidence; you don’t need any proof of that. You know you didn’t do it. But if you were accused and dragged into court, you would need to produce evidence that would convince the jury that you are innocent. Hopefully you’d get some kind of an alibi or something of that sort. That evidence and argument might be entirely sufficient to make them acquit you. Anybody looking at that argument and evidence would know that you didn’t commit the crime. Now, that evidence is also available to you. It is not available to just the jury. [4] So in a sense you would be doubly warranted in belief in your innocence. On the one hand, you would know it immediately because you’d know that you didn’t do it – you were home alone. But then also you would have all the warrant that accrues to that belief from the evidence and the argument that the jury gets to hear. So you would have a kind of double warrant, I think.

Kevin Harris: Bottom line, as we end this program, Dr. Craig – it seems like you are saying the poor farmer in a small town in the Midwest who is uneducated can come to know Christ without an exhaustive examination of all the evidence for Christianity, or a highly educated professor can come to Christ because he is persuaded by the evidence and the historicity of Christ. They both come to the same Lord but they seem to come in different ways. Do we have to do an exhaustive – or do we have to know the evidence and arguments – before we can make a commitment to Christ?

Dr. Craig: Absolutely not. I think that your example is a good illustration of the fact that both of these people can come to the same conclusion – the same Lord – by different routes and moreover (and this is the key thing I want to say) both routes are perfectly rational. It is perfectly rational to follow the arguments and evidence to the conclusion they lead to; it is also perfectly rational to believe in the great truths of the Gospel on the basis of the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. Both are the deliverances of reason.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig – our question of the day: Is the Big Bang compatible with the book of Genesis?

Dr. Craig: Wow, that’s a big question. I think it is. It certainly is compatible with what Genesis says at the very beginning: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Hebrew – the language – had no word for “the universe” so they would use the expression “the heavens and the earth” to mean the totality of everything. So it says, “In the beginning, God created the universe.” Then in verse 2 the focus suddenly shifts – it narrows to the earth – and it says “the earth was without form and void.” So I take it that verse 1 describes the origin of the universe and then the remainder of the chapter describes how God turned the earth into a habitable place for man.

Kevin Harris: From what you are saying, it seems that the Christian should not be in any way threatened by Big Bang cosmology and the research done in that area.

Dr. Craig: I don’t think so because the Big Bang confirms the fact that the universe has not existed forever but came into being and was created.

Kevin Harris: Psalm 19 says that the heavens declare the glory of God and they literally give knowledge of what he has done. Can we take that to mean that God has revealed himself in nature and we can actually gain knowledge of how he has done it and what creation says?

Dr. Craig: I believe that very firmly. You see the fingerprints of the potter in the clay, so to speak. As physical science probes the universe, it finds as it were signposts of transcendence pointing beyond its existence to its ground in a supernatural creator and designer. [5]