#1000 The One-Thousandth Question of the Week

Dr. craig’s response

I can truly say that it has been beyond my wildest dreams. When we started Reasonable Faith, our consultant Curt Swindoll advised us to give people a vision for reaching a tangible goal, for example, one million visitors each month to our website. At the time that seemed to me so unreachable that it was best not to set such an unrealistic objective. Yet today we experience over 70 million engagements per year across our social media platforms. We ourselves can hardly believe it. To get a taste of the breadth of Reasonable Faith’s impact, just visit our 20th Anniversary Celebration page.

Reasonable Faith has tried to exploit every medium we know of in the proclamation and defense of the Gospel. Originally, I thought that our website reasonablefaith.org would be our principal means of outreach. I did not anticipate that in our highly visual culture people would turn to videos rather than written materials for their information. Fortunately others were videotaping my lectures and debates on university campuses and posting them on YouTube long before these channels were donated to Reasonable Faith. Now we’re trying to exploit every social medium like Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and so on, in addition to our several YouTube channels. Our extraordinary Zangmeister animated videos have been an unexpected development which has proved enormously fruitful with millions of views. We are now handling the marketing of our videos in-house, which has proven to be more effective as well as less expensive, and I anticipate that our viewership will continue to swell around the world. I am especially thrilled by the way in which these media enable us to penetrate Muslim and communist countries which are closed to the Gospel.

Sometimes what we do has totally unintended consequences! Here is one of the most exciting. “Dr. Craig, do you realize that you are teaching AI?” a middle school teacher asked me. He told me that when his students Googled, “Does God Exist?” AI responded in the affirmative! He said that Reasonable Faith has so inundated social media with our material that it influences the answers that AI gives as it scans the Internet. When you think about how young people are increasingly turning to AI for answers to their questions, the cultural influence of Reasonable Faith becomes almost unimaginable.

I’m so gratified as well by the growth in our Reasonable Faith local chapters around the world, now totaling over 270 active chapters. These empower local Christians to have a ministry of their own in their country and community. To ensure that every chapter is meeting and active, we periodically cull them to remove any that go defunct. A dream of mine is to see the number of these chapters grow to over 500 and to expand their reach around the world, especially in Africa, where we are currently underrepresented (in contrast to Latin America, where our chapters are burgeoning).

When we started Reasonable Faith, I was determined not to allow it to impede my work as a Christian scholar. One of the things that makes Reasonable Faith unique is that it is undergirded by a mass of Christian scholarship, much like an iceberg, nine-tenths of which lies unseen beneath the surface. Ever since the Covid pandemic hit six years ago, I have cut back on my traveling and speaking and focused almost entirely on writing my five-volume Systematic Philosophical Theology, the culmination of my life’s work as a Christian scholar. It has become my “magnificent obsession,” the preoccupation of every working day. It has truly been a labor of love, as every theological locus or topic I have tackled has opened up into a fascinating and luxurious garden. I am currently working on the fifth and final volume on Ecclesiology and Eschatology, the areas of theology about which I knew the least when I began. Like every other area, however, they have proven to be fascinating, and I think that this final volume will be unexpectedly interesting to many because of the questions it explores. Just to give a sneak preview, I am currently writing on what life in the intermediate state of the soul between death and resurrection might be like. Almost no one discusses this; most works on the intermediate state content themselves with showing that the New Testament teaches that there will be such a state, but what it will be like is left a mystery. God willing, I should be able to finish writing this volume by the end of this year. Meanwhile, volume III, and perhaps volume IV, will appear by year’s end.

As this monumental writing project draws to a close, I’m feeling a bit more freedom to undertake significant speaking engagements. Those of you who read our monthly newsletter will know that we have recently returned from a successful speaking tour in England featuring dialogues with people like Alex Malpass, Emily Qureshi-Hurst, and Alex O’Connor, as well as talks in Oxford and at Eton College. I’ve now accepted the invitation of Lee Strobel and Mark Mittelberg to engage in a major debate in Dallas next March with the self-proclaimed sceptic Michael Shermer on Jesus’ resurrection, scheduled to coincide with the release of Mel Gibson’s new film on Christ’s resurrection. Then in April I have the honor of delivering the Trotter Lecture in science and religion at Texas A&M in dialogue with the prominent cosmologist Brian Greene. May these events have a great impact for the Kingdom!

Having reached the one-thousandth Question of the Week, I briefly wondered if I should no longer write this weekly column and simply be content with the large archive of such questions at reasonablefaith.org. I quickly decided that I should continue to write this column every week. It helps me to keep in touch with you and to see the sorts of questions that you’re asking.  I want to keep interacting with you by this means. So, just as I shall continue to teach my weekly Defenders Sunday school class in our local church and to record our Reasonable Faith podcasts on issues of our day, I shall, Lord willing, continue to write answers to your Questions of the Week.