Reasonable Faith: The Book

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, we are concluding a series today on five of your books. I think it's appropriate that we conclude with Reasonable Faith. Those two words say it all. The title alone is provocative. I found that it angers some atheists because they think they're the only ones who are known for using reason – that's their domain. And it disturbs some believers because they have a faulty definition of faith. At any rate, do you think the book is probably your flagship work?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I think that Reasonable Faith has become my signature piece, and I smile because that was not the title that I originally picked for the book! The first edition of the book was called Apologetics: An Introduction. It was my lectures in apologetics at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School when I began to teach there in 1980. But when Moody let the book go out of print, Crossway Press picked it up and did a second edition. I wanted to call it Faith on the Offensive because I conceived of apologetics as being either offensive (where you present positive arguments for Christian faith) or defensive (where you answer objections). And the book was intended to be an exercise in offensive apologetics. So I thought I’d call it Faith on the Offensive. The editors at Crossway didn't like it. They said, “Let's call it Reasonable Faith.” And I thought that title was about as exciting as cold oatmeal. I didn't like it at all, but I agreed to let it be titled that. As it turned out, as you say, Kevin, that turned out to be a very provocative title that actually gets under the skin of some people. As a result of the book, the ministry that we founded in 2007 was named after the book – Reasonable Faith – and our website ReasonableFaith.org continues that same tradition. So it really has become a signature piece.

KEVIN HARRIS: Thank the Lord for marketing people because it really is good, and it's proven to be so. It’s not surprising that the book is dedicated to Jan.

DR. CRAIG: I wanted to honor her by dedicating to her a book that was so central to my mission in life. The book Reasonable Faith includes my work on the kalam cosmological argument and other arguments for the existence of God as well as my work on the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection. Both of those flowed out of my doctoral work at the University of Birmingham and the University of Munich. So this was a book that encapsulated my apologetic defense of our Christian faith, and so I thought it appropriate to dedicate it to Jan. One thing that many people – most people – do not know is that she actually wrote the last chapter in the book. The chapter titled “The Ultimate Apologetic” is by her, and I simply revised it and then included it in the book.

KEVIN HARRIS: You had Craig Blomberg do a chapter on the New Testament in, I believe, the first edition of the book. But you changed strategy and didn't include that in the later editions. Why the change?

DR. CRAIG: I was not at all happy with the editors for demanding that there be a chapter on the general reliability of the Gospels in the book because, although I believe and accept such arguments, they are not necessary for the case for the radical personal claims of Christ and his resurrection from the dead that I present in the book. What became very clear to me in my work in Germany is that you can defend the radical self-understanding of Jesus as well as the central facts undergirding his resurrection even if you think that the Gospels are shot through with legend and contradictions and fictions. My doctoral mentor, Wolfhart Pannenberg, thought that the resurrection narratives in the Gospels were so legendary that there was scarcely a historical kernel in them, and yet he presented arguments for the historicity of both the empty tomb and the postmortem appearances of Jesus. So it seemed to me that that chapter was just extraneous. It was just a fifth wheel that wasn't necessary for the central argument of the book. And so in the third edition I excised it.

KEVIN HARRIS: What were some of the other changes in the second and third editions?

DR. CRAIG: Mainly updating, especially the scientific information. Cosmology is such a rapidly developing field of science and with each edition of the book I wanted to bring it into conversation with current cosmological models. So that updating would be the main change. The arguments are roughly the same, but I wanted to be in conversation with the cutting-edge work in the field.

KEVIN HARRIS: Based solely on my observations, the most maligned part of the book is your explanation of the witness of the Holy Spirit – knowing versus showing the truth of the Christian faith and the role of reason, etc. One atheist approached you at an event and asked you to sign a statement that you still believe what you wrote on pages 48-52. Why do you think that section gets some people so bent out of shape?

DR. CRAIG: I think it's because a lot of atheists, agnostics, and skeptics are clinging to a sort of 19th century evidentialism which holds that to believe anything without adequate evidence is irrational. This reflects an epistemology called classical foundationalism. They are simply unaware that this has been eclipsed during the 20th century in epistemological debates. Today epistemologists recognize that all of us hold beliefs that are what are called properly basic. That is to say, they are not based upon argument and evidence but that they lie at the foundation of our structure of beliefs and, moreover, that we are perfectly rational in holding such beliefs in the absence of any defeaters of those beliefs. So beliefs like belief in the existence of the external world or the reality of the past or the existence of other minds – these are things that cannot be proven on the basis of evidence but nevertheless you're perfectly rational to accept them as properly basic beliefs in the absence of some sort of defeater. The contribution of someone like Alvin Plantinga has been to show that belief in God can be a properly basic belief, as well. But unfortunately a lot of these Internet Infidel types are simply not in conversation with current epistemology. They're stuck in the 19th century.

KEVIN HARRIS: Who were some of the key influences or mentors in your life that contributed to the ideas presented in Reasonable Faith?

DR. CRAIG: Certainly Stuart Hackett, my undergraduate professor in philosophy who first acquainted me with the kalam cosmological argument in his book The Resurrection of Theism. Stu's work was pivotal for me in my own philosophical growth. Believe it or not, Josh McDowelll was very influential in that he kindled my interest in the resurrection of Jesus and the historicity of that event. I outgrew, I think, Josh's popularistic apologetic, but nevertheless he should have credit as being the one who really stimulated me in beginning to explore the historicity of the resurrection.

KEVIN HARRIS: This continues to be a very influential book, and it's kind of hard to gauge the impact. I look and I see it quoted everywhere, and it seems like in all the apologetics communities everybody has it. But perhaps you can just talk about who you wrote the book for.

DR. CRAIG: The book was originally written for my students. It is intended to be a textbook for graduate courses in apologetics. It was, in fact, originally a transcript of my lectures and then grew and expanded into the third edition. So this is not an evangelistic book. This is a book for seminary students to train them in the art of the defense of the Christian faith. I've been gratified to see how much influence it's had on contemporary apologetics, both on the popular level and on the scholarly level as well.

KEVIN HARRIS: As I recall, you've completed the section on faith for your systematic philosophical theology, and you've included some new material on the subject. Tell us about it.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I have a chapter in volume 1 on the nature of faith, and this includes not only your typical questions like what rational justification is there for Christian faith, but also it raises this very interesting question: Does faith imply belief? There are quite a number of Christian philosophers today who think that faith does not imply belief. So if you say, “I have faith that God exists,” you don't necessarily believe that God exists. These thinkers hold that it's possible to have saving faith in God and in Christ without believing that God exists or that Christ rose from the dead. I find that a novel view, and so a major part of my chapter on faith is exploring this question: Does faith imply belief?

KEVIN HARRIS: There’s so many topics to cover in Reasonable Faith; it must have been quite a task to narrow it down. How did you narrow it down?

DR. CRAIG: I wanted to present, as I say, a positive case for the Christian faith that would begin with the discussion of the relation of faith and reason and then would move to the existence of God and then having established a kind of generic theism would then seek to justify Christian theism in particular. So those were the topics I chose – the ones central to presenting such a positive case. You notice the book doesn't include any chapters on things like the problem of evil or answering atheistic objections. As I say, this is an exercise in offensive or positive apologetics, and so the choice of topics reflects that aim.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we wrap it up today, I want to mention that you have contributed to a new book Perspectives on the Historical Adam and Eve: Four Views. We have a podcast on it, but give us a sneak preview.

DR. CRAIG: The advanced copies just arrived this past week in our mailbox, and it's a good looking little volume. This is a Four Views book that includes discussion of the historical Adam and Eve by Kenton Sparks (who denies that there was a historical Adam), me (who holds that there was a historical Adam but that the narratives about Adam in Genesis are not to be interpreted with a wooden literality), and then there is Andrew Lok who holds to what's called a recent genealogical Adam. That is to say, he thinks that Adam did exist only several thousand years ago or so but that he isn't the universal progenitor of every human being that has ever existed. There are anatomically similar creatures – persons – who existed who were not descended from Adam and Eve. And then the final view is Marcus Ross, and he is a Young Earth Creationist who thinks that Adam and Eve were the universal progenitors of mankind and that they lived relatively recently. So we have a very congenial dialogue between the four of us on these competing perspectives on the historical Adam.^[1]