#974 Proving “God”
January 11, 2026Good morning Dr. Craig. I hope your day has been going well.
Dr. Craig... What would you answer to an objection like this in a debate:
DR. CRAIG: [First speech]
ATHEIST OPPONENT: Yes, your cumulative case works but your God still lacks 100% omnipotence, 100% omniscience, 100% immutability, 100% aseity and maybe others attributes. These properties are necessary for a perfect being and even if your little g god existed, that wouldn't show atheism is therefore implausible.
Because we have no grounds for saying "it's probable that he has those lacking attributes", you need to bring more arguments.
And in fact, it might make atheism plausible. For if this little "god" existed, then there wouldn't be a perfect being, since being omnipotent requires that he created your "god" but you showed that your "god" is uncreated (through the Kalam) therefore throwing away the possibility of a true GOD.
Your resurrection argument also works but now we have to be sure that Yahweh is perfect which is another subject. So the ressurection in and of itself faces the same problem than the others arguments.
And I have no problem with accepting the existence of this "god" as long as he's not perfect.
Thank you.
DR. CRAIG: ....
Daurelle
Côte d’Ivoire
Dr. craig’s response
A
There are numerous problems, Daurelle, with this imagined atheist response to my theistic arguments.
1. We need not adopt for debate purposes a theologically highly refined conception of God, but may simply work with a dictionary definition of the word: “the Supreme Being, worshiped as the creator or ultimate source of the universe.” This is the notion of God as understood in ordinary language and employed in most debates on the subject.
2. The atheist has not proven his assertion “your God still lacks 100% omnipotence, 100% omniscience, 100% immutability, 100% aseity, and maybe others attributes.” If I prove that there is an enormously powerful, hyper-intelligent Creator of the universe who may well be omnipotent and omniscient and exist a se as well, how will the atheist prove that he lacks such superlative properties? When you say that “if this little god existed, then there wouldn’t be a perfect being,” you are assuming that the proven Supreme Being lacks these properties, which the atheist has not proven.
3. In order to prove that something exists, one does not need to prove all of its essential attributes. If that were required, then we could not prove the existence of anything! For example, I could not prove that you exist, since I cannot prove all of your essential attributes. One of your essential attributes, after all, is that you were created by God, in which case in order to prove your existence, I should have to prove God’s existence! So the inability to prove all of God’s essential properties is not a serious deficit.
4. The ontological argument does prove that God has the superlative properties that you mention. If that was part of my opening speech’s case, as it sometimes is, then the atheist critic has failed to engage with my argument.
Let’s be honest: the atheist response that you imagine is just an excuse for ignoring what is successfully proven by the theistic arguments. Are we seriously to suppose that the atheist is ready to agree that there is a transcendent, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful, personal Creator and Designer of the universe who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ by raising him from the dead, and yet to deny that he believes in God? You say, “I have no problem with accepting the existence of this ‘god’ as long as he's not perfect.” But how do you know that he is not perfect? The failure to prove his perfections does not imply that he lacks those perfections (that was the error mentioned in point 2 above). Any atheist who is willing to grant the conclusions of the theistic arguments is as much a theist as most Christians.
- William Lane Craig