The Latest Events of Reasonable Faith

KEVIN HARRIS: Dr. Craig, there are a lot of things coming up and there are a lot of things that you have been involved in. We just want to reflect on that. Speaking of reflection, there have been two deaths in the news. I would like to get your thoughts on the passing of Billy Graham and the passing of Stephen Hawking.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, those have been very significant haven’t they? Let me say personally that the impact of Billy Graham upon my life was significant. Because I first became familiar with him and his ministry as a non-believer. I was a non-Christian high school student when Billy Graham was on television. I watched some of the Crusades on television. They spoke to my heart. I wanted to learn more about becoming a Christian, and so I wrote to them. The first New Testament that I ever really read and studied was a Crusade New Testament that was offered free to anyone who would write in. I wrote in and received this New Testament and it soon became covered with colored pencil lines as I was marking verses and underlining passages. That was really my first New Testament that I began to study and read. Before becoming a Christian I actually read Peace with God by Billy Graham and The Secret of Happiness by Billy Graham. So his works and ministry were an impact and influence in my life in leading me to eventually become a Christian. So I am personally indebted to him for that. I was inspired by his example of evangelism. My calling to be an evangelist was in a sense inspired by the model that Billy Graham provided. In fact, you may not know that when I graduated from Wheaton College I wrote to the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and said, “Dear Sirs, I am a graduate of Wheaton College (as was Billy Graham, you know) and I would like to become an associate evangelist with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. What do I need to do to apply?” They wrote back and said, “Dear Sir, Associate evangelists are usually invited to join the association. So why don’t you get some experience first and then rethink about this later on.” So I was rebuffed, but nevertheless it showed, I think, the serious intention that I had of following the model and the ministry that he had forged. I wanted to be used by God in helping to spread the Kingdom and the message of the Gospel. Although my path then took a much different route in terms of providing an intellectual defense of the Christian faith in the context of proclaiming the truth of the Gospel, nevertheless his model did serve me well in my calling.

KEVIN HARRIS: It feels like the end of an era in a sense, doesn’t it?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, I think so. Very much so. The idea of crusade evangelism just now seems so passe. The idea of renting big stadiums in cities and holding a crusade. That was kind of the modern equivalent of the old tent meeting that they used to have and the sawdust trail on the frontier and the mourners bench. That all seems to be passe. I think probably the model of Bill Bright, who founded Campus Crusade for Christ about the same time that Billy Graham emerged with Youth for Christ as a prominent force, is the model that I think going forward will have more impact, and that is personal one-on-one evangelism, learning to share the Gospel oneself, training Christians in the church to be evangelists, to learn how to share their faith and to lead another person to Christ, rather than holding big spectacular stadium events that would draw non-believers to that venue. I think that probably the personal route is going to be the more influential way going forward of doing effective evangelism.

KEVIN HARRIS: The other person that recently passed away is Stephen Hawking who has also been a person that you have kept up with and studied.[1]

DR. CRAIG: I really have. With the passing of Hawking I thought about the articles and the talks that I have given responding to his work, and I was surprised myself at how frequently I have interacted with Hawking’s material. One of my talks that I gave was called “Has Hawking Eliminated the Need for a Creator?” which responds to the model of the universe that he developed with James Hartle from University of California Santa Barbara. Then I also did an article on The Grand Design, the book that he co-authored with Leonard Mlodinow. Then finally the movie, A Theory of Everything, on his life prompted a talk by me called, “Cosmology: A Religion for Atheists?” which was the way he defined cosmology to Jane, his eventual wife, when he first met her. So I have been interacting with Hawking’s work for some time and have the greatest respect for him as a scientist. He helped to pioneer the standard model of the beginning of the universe, and therefore almost in spite of himself as a non-theist was a tremendous help to proponents like myself of the kalam cosmological argument in providing evidence for the second premise that the universe began to exist. I think it is remarkable that probably the most ardent proponents of that premise in the scientific community have not been theists but have been people like Stephen Hawking and Alexander Vilenkin who are at best agnostic and yet who follow the cosmological evidence where it leads that the universe began to exist.

KEVIN HARRIS: Just a couple of days before he died an article came out kind of summarizing some of his views and some of his recent interviews. In a couple of weeks we will do a podcast on that. We will take a look.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I read the article and was discouraged at the misunderstandings that the popular media typically has of scientific work and of his in particular. So that does bear talking about.

KEVIN HARRIS: The last several months – catch us up with what you have been doing.

DR. CRAIG: 2018 has been a really banner year for Reasonable Faith so far in terms of events that have been real headliners, significant events. The first of these was a dialogue with the Catholic Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles, Robert Barron, whom I met a couple of years ago when I spoke at St Mary’s on the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Illinois. He was at that seminary at the time as an administrator, and then was reassigned to Los Angeles. The folks at Claremont Center for Religion and Popular Culture decided to invite both of us to participate in a dialogue together on the common concerns that Protestants and Roman Catholics have in evangelizing an increasingly secular culture and in living as Christians in such a culture. It was a very friendly dialogue that we participated in before a large audience out at Claremont College. Then it has been live-streamed and put onto YouTube where it has been seen tens of thousands of times. This was a really good chance to defend mere Christianity and to reach out to Roman Catholics in order to encourage them in their walk with Christ.

KEVIN HARRIS: We really have to talk more about that. I have some notes from that event. That was a magnificent event, I think. The audience was riveted at what the two of you were saying just when the camera panned.

DR. CRAIG: They were very engaged. I think the audience was largely Catholic. So for me this was really a chance to kind of reach out to this group. Catholics themselves will tell you that the Catholic Church needs to be evangelized. There are a lot of Catholics that don’t really know the Lord in a personal way.[2] The Catholic church needs to be evangelized. So to participate in a dialogue on evangelization with a prominent Roman Catholic bishop and with a largely Roman Catholic audience I think was a strategic opportunity.

KEVIN HARRIS: The dialogue on meaning – how about that?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that was interesting as well. I was contacted by folks at Wycliffe College which is a Christian college that is part of the University of Toronto. The University of Toronto is like a British university like Cambridge or Oxford that is comprised of various colleges. One of these is Wycliffe. They wanted to have a dialogue on campus with some non-Christian professors that would be a means of reaching out to the university community with the truth of the Christian faith. We talked back and forth for some time about who would be an appropriate person for such a dialogue. Someone in my Defenders class said, Why don’t you get Jordan Peterson? I was aware of him but not really familiar with his work because he primarily works in a different field than me. He is a psychologist, and he is most known for standing up to the forces of political correctness at Canadian universities in the name of free speech. But I began to look at some of his material online and saw that this would be, I think, in fact a useful dialogue. A number of people have noted the sympathetic things that he has had to say about Christianity and about the Bible and has noted his openness to these sorts of spiritual things. So we said, All right, let’s get Jordan Peterson as the dialogue partner, and he agreed to do it. But the organizers of the dialogue said, We can’t have this just be a sort of lovefest; we need somebody who is a determined opponent. So they suggested Rebecca Goldstein. I had reviewed her book on 36 Arguments for the Existence of God and responded to her critique of the cosmological argument some years ago. So I thought, yeah, she would be a good opponent. So they contacted her and she agreed. So Goldstein, Peterson, and I dialogued on this question: is there meaning to life? It was held in the very same auditorium at the University of Toronto that over twenty years ago I had debated the Canadian humanist and abortionist Henry Morgentaler in. So it was a strange experience for me to be in that venue. It was like deja vu. We had a very, very good dialogue that evening, which has again since then been viewed by tens of thousands of people on YouTube.

KEVIN HARRIS: It has got traction. It will continue to rise.

DR. CRAIG: And this is simply in virtue of who Jordan Peterson is. He is so . . .

KEVIN HARRIS: He has just gone viral.

DR. CRAIG: The interview that he did on the BBC just a week or so before the dialogue received I think three million views within just two or three days. I was told that the New York Times said that he is now the speaker most in-demand of anybody in the Western world. What an opportunity for the Gospel to be in dialogue with this man who is quite open to spiritual things!

KEVIN HARRIS: Let’s talk more about that in a podcast. I have some notes from that event. We could spend some time on that. I thought that was a terrific event. By the way, Rebecca Goldstein, she is married to Steven Pinker?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that is right. She is Steven Pinker’s wife who is himself a prominent secular thinker.

KEVIN HARRIS: There was then the debate on morality that you did with Wielenberg. How was that event? We will spend some time on that as well.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, that bears discussion. This debate with Erik Wielenberg was very important for me to do because in recent years Erik Wielenberg has emerged as the most important philosophical critic of theistic accounts of morality. That is to say, of attempts to base moral values and duties in God. In his earlier book on moral values and God he offers incisive criticisms of thinkers like Robert Adams and Steven Evans and, in particular, me.[3] He really takes me to the woodshed and dissects my views as he understands them. So it was really important for me to have this dialogue or debate with Erik Wielenberg and to respond to his criticisms and offer a defense of moral values based in God.

KEVIN HARRIS: You knew going in that this was going to be a vigorous debate.

DR. CRAIG: I did, in fact. Wielenberg, not being a public speaker or debater, agreed to do the debate because we arranged that our speeches would be exchanged in advance. So this debate actually evolved over about fourteen months or so. I sent Wielenberg my opening speech. He then had six weeks to think about it, to write a response, craft it, revise it, hone it, and then send it to me. Once the speech was sent to the other debater it was fixed. It couldn’t be changed after that. Then I had six weeks to write my rebuttal, sent it to him, he had six weeks to write his rebuttal, send it to me, and so on right down through the closing statements. Then, when we finally met, we would give our prepared speeches that we had worked on during those months. This debate, unlike an extemporaneous debate, is very well-crafted, very well-thought through, very succinct. The points have been formulated carefully, reflected upon, revised, and so forth, before we ever got up to speak. So as a result it is a debate which is very substantive, and we hope to turn it into a book as a result. The only extemporaneous part of the debate was the Q&A with the audience. That was done spontaneously with the people who were there. As a result, it is a very, very solid, substantive exchange on the basis of objective moral values and duties.

KEVIN HARRIS: What is coming up? I know very shortly a trip to Brazil.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, at the time of this podcast we have the trip to Brazil just around the corner. There are a wide variety of events that are planned for that trip. I will open the trip by speaking at the Federal University in Joao Pessoa. I don’t know if that is the correct Portuguese pronunciation. I will be talking there about God’s relevance and contemporary philosophy and sharing with them the revolution that has happened over the last fifteen years in Anglo-American philosophy including the resurgence of Christian philosophy. This, as I discovered on my previous trip to Brazil, is news to Brazilian students. Brazil has not been significantly influenced by Anglo-American thought. It is dominated by Continental European thought including Marxism and post-modernism. So it is very hostile to Christianity. For them to hear of this revolution in Christian philosophy is just electrifying as I learned from my previous visit to Brazil where I talked on this subject at St. Benedict’s University in San Paulo. After that I will be giving a number of talks at a congress for Christian leaders and pastors. I will be talking on subjects like how apologetics can help your church, the difference between knowing and showing Christianity to be true, the absurdity of life without God, the case for God in which I will be using a number of our animated videos which have been translated into Portuguese and so are available to the Portuguese audience. I will be talking about the challenge of the New Atheism and the evidence for the resurrection. Then from that congress we fly to Brasília, the capital of Brazil, and I will be speaking in a town called Anápolis to university students as well as Christian leaders and pastors in the area. I will be giving two talks there on who was Jesus – who was the historical Jesus, part 1 and part 2.[4] Then I will be speaking at a university in the area on God and science, and then on the evidence for Christianity. Finally we fly back to San Paulo, and there I will be lecturing at the Catholic University in San Paulo with a local philosophy faculty member at the university on, “What difference does it make if God exists?” So there is a wide variety of talks. What is exciting to me about this is because I will be doing this through a translator we will have video recordings of all of these talks now in Portuguese to put up on YouTube and will complement our new Portuguese Reasonable Faith website and Facebook page. We now have website and Facebook pages that are wholly devoted to Portuguese speakers and are in Brazil. So this is a great opportunity to augment those resources for the Brazilian church.

KEVIN HARRIS: You are very busy, Bill. You have been busy, and you are still busy. Let’s talk some more about Stephen Hawking next time.

DR. CRAIG: Very good.[5]