The Only Wise God

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, we are continuing a series on five of your books. We’ve produced podcasts on these select books in the past, but this is a chance for all of us to go behind the scenes and hear your reminiscences of the writing of each one. Next up: The Only Wise God, published in 1987. You tackle one of the most pondered theological questions. Give us a brief overview.

DR. CRAIG: This is a book about the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. If God knows everything that you are going to do in the future, and if God cannot be mistaken and holds no false beliefs, then are you really free to do other than what God knows you will do? Isn't everything fated to occur in light of God's infallible foreknowledge of the future? Some Christian theologians have said yes, such as Martin Luther and Jonathan Edwards. Others, however, have disputed that claim. In this book I wanted to examine the compatibility of divine foreknowledge of the future with libertarian free will.

KEVIN HARRIS: You've dedicated this book to Clark and Ann Peddicord. Introduce us.

DR. CRAIG: Clark and Ann were very dear friends that Jan and I met when we began to study at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in the MA program in philosophy of religion. Clark and Ann were a couple of years ahead of us, and they took us under their wing and showed us the ropes at Trinity navigating a seminary education. They also became very close friends. When Jan and I would be having marital adjustments as a young couple, we'd go and talk to Clark and Ann and get their advice. They were so vulnerable and transparent to us that they were just a tremendous help both on a personal level and on an academic level. Well, after graduating from Trinity, they went to Germany as missionaries with Campus Crusade for Christ. Clark eventually became the national director of Campus Crusade for Christ in Germany. When we finished my doctoral studies in Birmingham and moved to Germany and began to study at the University of Munich, once again we began to collaborate with Clark and Ann, and he would give me speaking engagements in Germany. They would encourage us on our way. When I went through that disastrous episode of failing my exams at the University of Munich, Clark wisely advised us not to make any decisions quickly. He said, “Give it some time. You've got to process this emotionally and then decide what you're going to do.” And that was very wise advice for us. Years later, after we left our teaching position at Trinity and moved to Belgium, once again being in Europe we took up again with Clark and Ann and participated in conferences together and ministry together in Europe. So they have been good friends who had a profound impact upon our lives as a couple.

KEVIN HARRIS: I want to ask you about a phrase that I hear constantly from our fellow Christians, and that is, “If it's meant to be, it's meant to be.” And it's applied to everything. If I'm supposed to get this job then I'll get it – nothing I can do about it. Or if I'm supposed to marry this girl, it will happen. Yeah. But what if you don't pick up the phone and ask her on a date? You address this in the Introduction; you quote Que sera, sera. Is this kind of fatalism something Christian theology teaches at all? Or should we avoid saying that phrase as believers?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, I think we should avoid it if it means that there is no human free will. Taken literally, it's just a tautology. Of course, what will be, will be. But it is interpreted to mean what will be must be, and that's an expression of fatalism – that everything that happens happens necessarily, and therefore there is no human free will. And that is deeply contrary to biblical teaching. The Jewish view of humanity is that human beings are free moral agents in relation to God who can obey and disobey God and who are held responsible for their moral decisions receiving either punishments or rewards. So the idea that everything happens necessarily is utterly foreign to a Jewish and biblical view of humanity and is not something that I think we should as Christians embrace.

KEVIN HARRIS: You also distinguish fatalism from determinism. Do we often confuse the two?

DR. CRAIG: I think on the popular level these are often confused. Determinism is the doctrine that everything is causally determined so that the choices and the thoughts that you have are determined by prior causes and those are determined by prior causes so that once you give the causes then the rest of the sequence just falls like dominoes. Everything is causally determined. That's not the same as fatalism. Fatalism is a very abstract view which says that even if events are causally indeterminate, nevertheless, in light of God's foreknowledge of them, everything that happens happens necessarily. So there's a kind of logical necessity that removes human freedom. It's not a causal necessity. The events could be causally undetermined, but in light of God's knowledge they are fated to occur; logically necessarily they will occur. So we need to distinguish fatalism from determinism; they're not the same doctrine at all.

KEVIN HARRIS: What prompted you to write this book? Was it something you had always pondered personally? Were you often asked this question? Or both?

DR. CRAIG: Actually, neither. When I came back from my doctoral work in Germany in 1980 and began to teach at Trinity I had to decide what project I, as a Christian philosopher, would embark on. How should I invest my time and research? And I had read a wonderful little book by Anthony Kenny called [The God of the Philosophers]^[1] in which Kenny examines various of the attributes of God with a view toward determining the coherence of the Christian doctrine of God. And one of the topics in [The God of the Philosophers] is the compatibility of divine foreknowledge with human freedom, and that sparked my interest. I thought, well, I think I'd like to write a book on the coherence of theism. I'd like to research this. And so I'll start with divine foreknowledge and human freedom. Well, little did I realize that that would turn into a black hole that would just plunge me into a wealth of literature, and I spent the next seven years working on the subject of divine foreknowledge and human freedom as my main research interest. So that was how I got into the topic. The Only Wise God is a popularization of two scholarly books that I published with E.J. Brill on the same question.

KEVIN HARRIS: You're currently writing your systematic philosophical theology. Are you doing a chapter on this?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Volume 2, Part A is devoted to the subject of the coherence of theism, and so I go through quite a number of the classical attributes of God and ask if these can be formulated in a philosophically coherent and biblically consonant way. And one of these chapters is on divine omniscience and the problems posed by God's being all-knowing. So definitely this is a central chapter in the second volume of my systematic philosophical theology.

KEVIN HARRIS: How did you discover Molina and Molinism? What intrigued you about all of it?

DR. CRAIG: That came through reading Alvin Plantinga's book in 1974, The Nature of Necessity. In The Nature of Necessity, Plantinga talks about counterfactuals of freedom like “If the mayor had been offered a smaller bribe, he would not have thrown the election.” Plantinga has this lengthy discussion of how these counterfactuals of freedom affect God's ability to actualize possible worlds, and this enabled Plantinga to draw a crucial distinction between possible worlds and worlds that are feasible for God to actualize. There may be worlds which are logically possible in and of themselves but which God is incapable of actualizing because the free creatures in them would not do what God wants them to do in the circumstances in which he places them. This is critical for dealing, for example, with the problem of evil, and that was the context in which Plantinga dealt with this. Well, when Anthony Kenny (who I just mentioned) read Plantinga's book he said, “Why, that's Molinism!” And Plantinga said, “What's that?” And Kenny, who is a fine historian of philosophy, explained to Plantinga that Molina had invented this doctrine of middle knowledge dealing with these counterfactuals of freedom back in the late 1500s. Plantinga had no idea he had reinvented the doctrine of middle knowledge all on his own without any knowledge of Molina as his precursor. Well, this very soon became quite the rage among Christian philosophers debating back and forth over the possibility of divine middle knowledge. Some philosophers such as William Hasker vehemently opposed the doctrine of middle knowledge whereas others like Thomas Flint and Alfred Freddoso at the University of Notre Dame became ardent defenders of the doctrine. As I would go to philosophical conferences and read the literature, I eventually became convinced that this doctrine was not only biblically consistent but was the single most theologically fruitful idea that I had ever encountered. So I became an ardent Molinist myself.

KEVIN HARRIS: I'm tempted to just pursue this topic as we've done many times in many podcasts, but for our purposes here let me just ask you what the practical implications are of fatalism and hard Calvinism. So what if, like they say, we're divinely determined in everything and we have no choice? By the way, I've met several people who are downright depressed over this issue.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I just read an email to my Defenders class from a fellow who says Molinism saved his marriage because his wife was an Arminian and he was an ardent Calvinist, and he said they argued all the time about this and were at odds with each other and even came to tears over this issue until he discovered Molinism. Both of them now have embraced Molinism. He says it saves marriages by reconciling these two views. I think what's really so objectionable about Calvinism is that you have to say that God prefers to send people to everlasting damnation in hell rather than save them. That it is his perfect will that certain persons whom he could have saved if he wished to, he does not save but instead condemns to everlasting pain and perdition. And that seems to me to be not only contrary to the goodness and loving kindness of God, but contrary to what Scripture says when it states that God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. God wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. I think that is an insuperable objection to the Calvinistic view that God determines everything that happens.

KEVIN HARRIS: Take us back to the late 80s when you were writing this. What was going on with you and Jan?

DR. CRAIG: These were the years during which we bought our first home at Trinity in Deerfield, teaching there as a young professor, and started our family. Jan and I did not have children for the first ten years of our marriage. I was involved in graduate school all that time. We weren't even sure that we wanted to have children. I finally came to the decision that we needed to start a family. I did not want to risk deciding against children and then later regretting that irrevocable decision, and so I said, “I think we should start a family.” So our little daughter, Charity, was born in 1982 and came home on our 10th wedding anniversary with Jan from the hospital, and then two years later our son, John, was born. So these were the years during which we were a young family with little children making our way in our little house in Deerfield.

KEVIN HARRIS: I know that you're constantly challenged to publicly debate the contents of this book, and while you have responded in print and in some dialogues, like with James White, what is your policy on debating topics like this?

DR. CRAIG: My policy, or motivation, for doing debates has been that these are evangelistic outreaches on secular university campuses. So I'm not really interested in having debates with fellow believers about theological topics. These can be discussed at theological conferences like the Evangelical Philosophical Society annual conference or in print in published articles. And there I certainly do participate in dialogue and conversation on these issues. But I don't want to debate in-house issues in front of a secular audience at a non-Christian university. I want to debate there on issues like the existence of God, the resurrection of Jesus, the truth of Christianity versus Islam or humanism or Buddhism. I want these to be evangelistic events.

KEVIN HARRIS: Wrapping it up today, you've talked about in the past how Molinism seems to be one of the fastest growing theological topics. Do you think this trend will continue?

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I do, and I think the reason is because, as I mentioned, it is so theologically fruitful a doctrine that it just has endless applications. Thomas Flint, who is one of the premier Molinists today, has said that the objections to middle knowledge and Molinism have pretty much all been dealt with and adequately answered. So what we need to do is to get on with the theological application of this doctrine. So, for example, in the very first volume of my systematic philosophical theology I treat the subject of the doctrine of Scripture. The challenge there is how to have a biblical doctrine of inspiration that can affirm that the Scriptures are verbally, plenary inspired and yet not dictated by God. How do you get verbal inspiration consistent with human freedom? And I think middle knowledge provides the solution to that conundrum. So I lay out a Molinist theory of the doctrine of biblical inspiration in that chapter.^[2]