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What's New With 'The WLC'

September 21, 2014     Time: 21:59
What’s New With ‘The WLC’

Summary

A new radio venture, book, and Alvin Plantinga's arguments are on the caldendar for Reasonable Faith!

Transcript What’s New With ‘The WLC’

 

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, as we move into the fall season this year, Reasonable Faith has a lot going on – a busy schedule with you. I think paramount is a radio opportunity which is another expansion of Reasonable Faith.

Dr. Craig: It is a new venture, Kevin. It is sort of ironic because, as you may recall, when we started Reasonable Faith about seven years ago our initial plan was to have a radio program called Reasonable Faith. But then we instead founded the website and had a web-based ministry. But now through my affiliation with Houston Baptist University, there is the possibility of our getting on radio. Dr. Sloan, the President of HBU, has a radio show in Houston. He is going to give over to Reasonable Faith two weeks of his show in October and November for us to run a pilot program on radio in Houston. If the response of listeners is good then HBU is interested in sponsoring a Reasonable Faith radio program on Houston radio. This could, of course, expand in Texas – to Dallas, San Antonio. So it is a real opportunity for us to do this show.

Kevin Harris: Followers of Reasonable Faith I hope will take note because this is an opportunity for syndication to even get more people to the podcast and to the resources that are on ReasonableFaith.org. So it is great to go with traditional broadcasting to do this.

Dr. Craig: Right, and it will be non-exclusive as you say. HBU will sponsor the program but this same program could be aired in California or in Seattle or in different venues around the nation. So it is not exclusive use of our material in Houston. It is inclusive of other places.

This past week I’ve been in Atlanta at the Atlanta Video Studios recording these broadcasts of these 22-minute programs. It has really been a job to get it down to just 22 minutes. I tried my best timing them at home by reading them aloud to have it about 22 minutes. But then, as it turned out, actually doing it in studio they came out to 27 and even 29 or 30 minutes. So now I am cutting them down, and they are coming out to be 20 minutes and 31 seconds or something! So now I have to add material back in to try to get it to exactly that length. That has been one of the things I’ve been involved in lately – working on these broadcasts that will then go on the air in Houston in October.

Kevin Harris: These will be the big guns, too, these initial programs. You are doing the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus. Putting all of that into 22-minute programs, synopsizing the evidence and the arguments has got to be challenging.

Dr. Craig: It is actually; to try to get just the essentials into 22 minutes. But we will do four arguments the first week on the existence of God – the traditional ones that I’ve defended. The next week we will do five shows on the resurrection of Jesus taking these principal facts of the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances of Jesus, the origin of the Christian Way one a day and then a day at the end to look at explanations of these facts. So it fits into a very nice weekly stretch on Jesus’ resurrection.

Kevin Harris: You are teaching a course, as well, in October at HBU.

Dr. Craig: Right, I’ll go to HBU in October to teach a one-week class there. They’ve asked me to do one on God and time. So we will be doing that for both undergrads and some graduate students in the program.

Kevin Harris: Coming in November to Baylor University – it is a Plantinga Palooza! I think they are calling it a Plantinga Fest. It is all dealing with Alvin Plantinga and his work that will be at Baylor University. You have been invited to this.

Dr. Craig: Right. Trent Dougherty, who is faculty at Baylor in the Philosophy Department, is putting on a conference based upon Plantinga’s very famous lecture, “Two Dozen (or So) Arguments for God’s Existence.”[1] What he has done is assembled a group of philosophers who would each address one of these arguments and unfold it and assess its soundness. Plantinga will be there as well to give a response. So this looks to be a very fun conference at Baylor. Although Plantinga has never addressed explicitly the kalam cosmological argument, there is a little section of his lecture “Two Dozen (or So) Arguments” called “Et cetera.” So the kalam argument falls under “Et cetera” – a rather ignominious classification for it.[2] But Trent wanted me to be involved in this conference, so I will be giving a paper there on the kalam cosmological argument and its prospects as a piece of natural theology.

Kevin Harris: Does Alvin Plantinga have a favorite natural theology argument for God? Does he have one that he is most famous for?

Dr. Craig: I don’t think that you would say that there is a favorite argument that he has for the existence of God. He presents this sort of cumulative case. Certainly his evolutionary argument against naturalism would be one of the most important arguments he has offered, but it is not an argument for theism. It is a critique of naturalism to say that naturalism is rationally unaffirmable. It is not even to say naturalism is false, just that no one can rationally be a naturalist. If naturalism is true, you cannot affirm it rationally. So it is an untenable position. That is probably his most famous argument, but it is not really an argument for God’s existence.

Kevin Harris: On Guard continues to make waves – your book. Perhaps a new version?

Dr. Craig: Yes, I am very pleased about this. David C. Cook is the publisher of On Guard. They publish Sunday School materials that go into churches. We went with Cook because I wanted very much for On Guard to get into churches where it could be used in small groups and Bible studies and Sunday school classes to train Christians in the defense of the faith. It has been very encouraging to see different groups using it in exactly that way.

Well, Cook now wants to put out a student edition of On Guard that would be geared for high school students and college students. So this will be re-written in the language of the youth culture’s vernacular. So it will probably have a lot of expressions in it like “fine-tuning is cool” or “awesome” or something like that. [laughter] I want to write the book in such a way that it will not be geared toward Christians as is the original, but will be geared toward the unbeliever who is seeking to find the truth about God and Christianity. So this student edition will have a very different feel than the original version.

They want to make it a standalone volume on God’s existence, and then supplement it with additional chapters covering even more arguments for the existence of God. That also could be a very nice project.

Kevin Harris: What has been the reaction to On Guard as opposed to Reasonable Faith, your other book? On Guard is a little more on the lay level?

Dr. Craig: Much more!

Kevin Harris: Is it a lot more accessible perhaps; an introductory to Christian philosophy and apologetics?

Dr. Craig: Yes, it is a primer for the beginner. The response has been very good. I’ve been really happy with the way it has been adopted for use in different groups. People are using it to get trained in the defense of the faith. It has been very gratifying.

Kevin Harris: We get letters and emails – people go online and they try to test their knowledge against the opposition. They will go onto atheist and skeptical websites. Often we hear of people just really being beaten up when they go in there. They go in unprepared. It is also a bad thing to go in in an unloving way and just fight, because these can be real brutal, nasty areas. Do you have anything to say about how On Guard could help that; maybe even the attitude?

Dr. Craig: Yes. I think that Christians who try to enter into these forums or go Google “Does God Exist?” on the Internet and read these materials are just crazy if they do so without having first equipped themselves. They don’t seem to understand that they are entering into a spiritual and intellectual battleground and that their souls may be imperiled as a result of reading this sort of material. So they need to equip themselves first and not read this sort of material unless and until they are thoroughly grounded and equipped in natural theology and Christian evidences.

It is so interesting to see the difference this makes. On the one hand you hear about these naïve and ill-equipped Christians who lose their faith by confronting the most silly and spurious objections to theism or Christian faith.[3] On the other hand, we get emails constantly from people who have first studied these arguments, then they go read these atheistic materials, and these people are typically shocked, even appalled, at the superficiality of these atheistic critiques and how easy they are to answer. They find out that really this whole New Atheism is just an impostor. It is a bluff really that preys upon the naïve and the uninformed.

Kevin Harris: Bill, I want to emphasize what you just said. It is not that the arguments are so persuasive and compelling that you will find on so many of these Internet atheist websites. It is just that there is a spirit, such an opposition, to the soul that is there that wants to produce doubt. It wants to produce questioning everything that just breeds this inappropriate skepticism. There is a lot going on there than just the arguments that need to be dealt with.

Dr. Craig: This is coupled with an air of condescension where, if you are a religious believer, you are looked down upon as some sort of an idiot or mental midget – you are not a true thinker or true philosopher. These people are saying this utterly in ignorance of the tremendous intellectual resources of Christianity and the great contemporary scholars who are Christians in various fields.

Kevin Harris: The EPS is coming up in November. Talk about the Evangelical Philosophical Society and why perhaps some of our listeners may want to be involved.

Dr. Craig: The Evangelical Philosophical Society is the largest professional society of Christian philosophers in the world. We have an annual conference every year that moves around the country. This year it is in San Diego. I’ll be there presenting a paper and participating in some panel discussions. The EPS has a very rich conference that is coupled with the conference of the Evangelical Theological Society which attracts a few thousand theologians. It is a really great conference. I would encourage Christians who are interested in Christian academia to participate in this.

One thing we will be doing new this year is having a special breakfast for all of the Reasonable Faith chapter directors who are in attendance. This would be a chance for me and Jan to meet some of our chapter directors that we’ve never met before, as well as to hear stories about what’s happening in different local chapters around the country.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, as we wrap up today, talk about this opportunity in Washington D.C. from The Teaching Company?

Dr. Craig: As you know, Kevin, The Teaching Company markets this curriculum called The Great Courses where they get some of the best professors at various universities to offer these courses via DVD that then ordinary laypeople can purchase and participate in. Courses on mathematics and literature and various fields of science and so forth. Lo’ and behold, I have been contacted by The Teaching Company about the possibility of doing a course in Christian apologetics. This just astonished me that The Teaching Company would be interested in having a class on Christian apologetics! Apparently there is considerable interest in their customer base in having such a course. So they’ve invited me to come to Washington on December 4th and 5th, and to film a pilot lecture of such a class. Then based upon how that is received and judged they would offer then a contract for a 30-hour course on Christian apologetics that would be part of The Great Courses curriculum.

Kevin Harris: Outstanding. This is going to be in December, so what famous sweater are you going to wear? [laughter] You have to pick it out in advance so we can auction that one off as we’ve done in the past. That is exciting. Apparently, they are noticing a marketing interest, which translates to an interest in the deeper things of the Christian faith.

Dr. Craig: That is very significant in and of itself, isn’t it, Kevin? From a marketing standpoint, there is demand out there from customers for training in Christian apologetics. How remarkable! And that The Teaching Company should see this as a marketable opportunity for them.[4] That, in itself, is very interesting. But I would pray that the pilot would go well and that it would be well-received.

Kevin Harris: Bill, so many of the things that we talk about are found on the newsletter. I just want to encourage anyone who is not signed up for the newsletter to go to ReasonableFaith.org and just sign up. You will get it right there in your inbox. It details what is going on – some behind the scenes things. Also some testimonials that some people don’t often see.

Dr. Craig: Yes. I would really encourage folks – if you are at all interested in Reasonable Faith as a ministry, you’ve got to be on this mailing list for our monthly newsletter because there you will hear about all the exciting things that we’ve been involved in. One reader wrote in and said it is like reading the 29th chapter of Acts! I certainly find writing the letter to be exciting and fun. I know it will be an encouragement to folks who read it.

Kevin Harris: They even get to hear from Jan who has a section in the newsletter. Pictures, the whole thing. So sign up for that at ReasonableFaith.org.

Dr. Craig, if all else fails, you can go into professional wrestling because you are being known as “The WLC” nationwide. The new terminology. I don’t know if you are aware of that. [laughter][5]

  • [1]

    See here (accessed September 24, 2014).

  • [2]

    5:10

  • [3]

    10:02

  • [4]

    15:02

  • [5]

    Total Running Time: 16:33 (Copyright © 2014 William Lane Craig)