The Danger of Apologetics Part Two

DR. CRAIG: Hello! This is William Lane Craig. Every spring at Reasonable Faith we have a spring campaign to raise funds for the ministry. Your giving to Reasonable Faith helps to support, for example, our Equip project which has just released a new course on doctrine of Scripture. We've also released a new video in our animation series on the attributes of God called “The Eternity of God.” This year I'm especially excited about our spring campaign because we have an extraordinary premium to offer those of you who become strategic donors at the highest level. We have three stages, or levels, of donors: $30 per month, $50 per month, and $100 per month. For those of you who are in the top tier, you will receive – free – a copy of Volume 1 of my newly released Systematic Philosophical Theology. This is a $65 value, and it will be yours free of charge for your sustaining donor membership in Reasonable Faith. If you've already got a copy of Volume 1, as many do, we also will be making available Volume 2A for a premium so that you can choose between Volume 1 or Volume 2, which I don't even have a copy of yet to show to you but will be released. We thank you for your interest and your support of Reasonable Faith, and I hope that you'll take advantage of this really wonderful offer this year to become a sustaining strategic donor and to join us in reading the Systematic Philosophical Theology.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here is his second objection.^[1] Clip number six.

CHRIS: Let's talk about the next thing. Reading Francis Collins' work and kind of realizing the overwhelming evidence for evolution, and it struck me – my own deconstruction went in a very different direction. It had nothing to do with science. As I said, I'm not much of a scientist. It was all biblical studies. But I think what happens is that for actual intelligent people, apologetics can often be the first step out of Christianity. Because what apologetics does is it convinces people that Christianity is this little box that you can protect and keep safe, and when you have really smart people they're going to keep asking questions. They're going to keep looking for answers. They're going to keep exploring things. And you have a lot of young evangelicals who are getting really good educations in the sciences or in the humanities. They realize that the box that apologists have given them is going to fall flat every time. And if we had just given them a Christianity that could actually handle some questions – if they understood Christianity not as a box of beliefs that they have to protect but as a world that they can explore and engage and see that Christian tradition is full of richness and full of theologians who have asked a lot of hard interesting questions. But when you give intelligent kids a box and say, “You have to protect this box,” well, you shouldn't be surprised when some of those kids are a little smarter than you and they step outside of the box. And guess what? That's what's happening.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, I'm just trying to think if there's a better term for someone who adamantly defends a narrow view and stirs up followers and says, "We got to protect this at all costs." I don't think it characterizes what apologetics is supposed to be about.

DR. CRAIG: Maybe a better term would be religious bigotry, but it's certainly not apologetics. Chris mentioned in the clip, for example, Francis Collins. Francis Collins is doing Christian apologetics. He's trying to show the compatibility of Christianity with evolutionary biology. So how is that defending the box? Collins would be a good example of someone who's engaged in scientific apologetics.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to the third objection. This is clip number seven.

CHRIS: The third thing I would say apologetics does, and this really gets at the heart of Christianity and what we are actually doing because apologetics can convince people that Christianity is just a rational pursuit. That really all we are here to do is use our brains to try to find the right answers. But I am a Christian for other reasons. I'm not just about trying to think my way into belief or to think my way into the faith. And when you convince people that the reasons to belong in the faith are all intellectual and rational, you convince people that being a Christian is ultimately just an intellectual pursuit or rational pursuit. This is where I need to be careful because I'm pretty all-in on intellectual pursuits. I love this side of it. But I'm OK with a Christianity that isn't built on my intellectual pursuits. It's a lot more built on my experiencing of faith and my practice. I want to push back a little bit because I'm OK with using my brain as a Christian. But at the same time, if you are convincing people that faith is ultimately just about a brain pursuit then you are missing a really key component of what faith can and should be.

KEVIN HARRIS: You've written on this, and you've spoken on this, Bill, in your work. Is he decrying rationalism or perhaps certain aspects of evidentialism? Again, I think that this can be addressed if people will read your Systematic Philosophical Theology. You have some helpful stuff there on the faith section.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that's certainly right. Here Chris finally says something that I can resonate with. I think he's right that there is a real danger of over-intellectualizing Christian faith that Christian apologists could be prone to. But, honestly, I think that for the vast majority of Christians who are not intellectually engaged with their faith, this danger is almost nonexistent. The scale tips too far in the other direction: emotionalism and just pure faith with no intellectual engagement on their part to speak of. I think that Chris is apparently not familiar with the work of contemporary Christian philosophers working on religious epistemology who stress the collapse of classical foundationalism – that evidentialism that you mentioned – and who emphasize the importance of properly basic beliefs as part of the deliverances of reason. These will include beliefs that we hold that are not based on argument or inference and yet are perfectly rational to hold. So the fact is that Christian philosophers and apologists are addressing this dimension of Christian faith. In fact, it occurs to me just as we speak, a great Christian apologist in this regard would be Blaise Pascal who, in his famous Pensées, emphasized what he called reasons of the heart as well as Christian evidences as a basis for Christian belief. So this is not in any way absent from the apologetics community.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's go to his fourth objection where he brings up confirmation bias. Clip number eight.

CHRIS: Fourth thing. Let's talk a little bit about confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is pretty powerful, and when I hear an apologist arguing for why it's okay that the Bible endorses slavery, for example, you're doing some really weird confirmation bias work. Why are you so angry about Christian apologists? They've just looked at different evidence and come up with different conclusions. But that's not actually what apologetics does. Apologetics actually looks for the evidence to support their pre-existing conclusions. Apologists think they already know what's right. They have very little interest in exploring any evidence that questions that. It's true everybody has some kind of bias, but I hope at the end of the day I'm actually interested in knowing where the evidence leads.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, I'm glad that he admitted that we all have biases. But this is an accusation that we hear a lot - that apologists are not actually interested in evidence.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think Chris really understands what confirmation bias is. Confirmation bias is the universal tendency to accept arguments that support what we already believe and to be skeptical of arguments that challenge what we believe. Now, as such, confirmation bias is universal. It affects not only Christians but also atheists and agnostics as well. We all have that tendency. But I think what's really important here is to realize that bias has absolutely no effect upon the soundness of one's argument. The soundness of an argument is determined by its logical validity and the evidential support for its premises. Therefore, the soundness of an argument is independent of the biases of the person who is offering it. To think that an argument is bad because it is offered by a biased person is to engage in the fallacy of argumentum ad hominem: you're attacking the person rather than exposing a deficiency in the argument.

KEVIN HARRIS: Finally, his fifth objection. Let's check it out. Clip number nine.

CHRIS: The fifth and final thing is that Christian apologists have made the faith – this rich, beautiful Christian tradition – has made the faith so over-simplistic, has made the faith so simple. I want to even use the word dumb. Most of the Christian faith has just been chopped off. Most Christians don't get to experience the richness of the Christian faith instead of these simplistic oversimplifications of the faith into a bubble that matches this weird modern fundamentalist evangelical movement. That's actually a very weird thing in Christian history and very anti-intellectual. What if the Christian tradition wasn't like a goldfish bowl? What if it was like an ocean that you could never reach the end of and that you could swim in for an entire life and never exhaust the interesting questions and things you get to explore? That's the Christian tradition I want to belong to. When I threw off Christian apologetics, Christianity became a beautiful tradition.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, he said it before. He wasn't free until he got rid of apologetics. Again, he really seems to have had some negative experiences. For me, the study of apologetics has introduced me to that richness in the Christian faith that he's talking about.

DR. CRAIG: Exactly. The very first book in Christian apologetics that I ever read was E. J. Carnell's Introduction to Christian Apologetics which I read my senior year in college. I had never read a book like this in my life. Carnell answering the questions that really interested me (like "What is truth?", "Why is Christianity true?"). Carnell's book opened up for me a world of thought that I was unaware of. And that's just the beginning. For many people, apologetics is like a stepstool that gets them into Christian philosophy, New Testament studies, physics, and biology, and so on. At Talbot School of Theology, many students start in the department of apologetics pursuing a degree in that subject, but after a year they transfer to the philosophy department and begin to do an MA in philosophy. Some of them will even go on then to PhD work. So apologetics is like a gateway to that richer intellectual tradition that Chris talks about. That rich Christian tradition includes people like Origen, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Butler, Paley, and so on. What does he think these were doing? These men were writing apologetics in defense of the Christian faith. So part of that rich Christian tradition is Christian apologetics.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the summation. Here in this final clip Chris sums it all up. Clip number ten.

CHRIS: You know, at the end of the day I think Christian apologetics feeds an addiction. It feeds our addiction for certainty, and faith is not certainty. I'm sorry to say faith is never going to be certainty. Faith is faith. There's a lot of doubt. There's a lot of mystery. There's a lot of questions. There's some darkness in there. And at the end of the day, to me, that's a faith I would rather belong to – a faith that has all those questions and doubts. And the addiction of certainty feels good. The addiction of believing you're right and everybody else is wrong. Oh, that feels good. I remember that feeling. That was a great feeling. But guess what? It's just narcissism. It's not reality. So if you want to actually engage with this tradition and if you are engaging with apologetics, you're going to find it comes up short. And if you are doing Christian apologetics, if you identify as a Christian apologist, you should be very careful because you actually need to stop and realize that you're probably pushing a lot of people out of the faith and at the very least you're probably giving people a version of the faith that is very limiting, and that is not representing the richness and beauty of the Christian tradition.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, I'm sure you agree with several things he said, and you've certainly answered many questions about certainty (no pun intended).

DR. CRAIG: I think what Chris is criticizing here is people who do apologetics poorly, but not people who do it well. I agree with him that we need to exemplify what I call apologetical modesty. That is to say, we should make modest claims on behalf of Christian faith, and then you surpass them with very powerful arguments that more than establish those relatively modest claims. Unfortunately, there are many Christians who do not practice apologetical modesty. For example, just this Easter I heard a pastor say in his morning sermon that there was more evidence for the resurrection of Jesus than for any other fact in ancient history. Now, it was not an apologist who made that outrageous claim. It was a pastor. And, frankly, it made me cringe. The truth that what Chris is saying is that we do need to exercise our minds to explore all of the riches of the Christian faith, and we need to do it with modesty and integrity.^[2]