#962 Why Think Yahweh is the True God?
October 19, 2025Question
Hello there Professor Craig! I hope you are doing well! Before I begin, I want to thank you for leading me to the faith as your argument for the resurrection was one of the principal reasons for opening my heart to the possibility of Christianity, leading to my eventual conversion.
As I hail from a Hindu background, I've always been fascinated by objections to Christianity by pagan philosophers. One particular argument that I found quite difficult to answer is this: how do we demonstrate that the Yahweh of Israel is the supreme being? Why couldn't it be that Yahweh is just one deity among millions of other contingent deities in an infinite pantheon? Why is He the necessary being?
I assume this has to do with something related to the type of miracle that Yahweh performs. Yahweh's miracles are genuine suspensions of the natural order (ex:- the resurrection), while those performed by demons are merely illusions. Given that the teleological order of the world is due to the necessary being (Aquinas' fifth way), true miracles can only be performed by the necessary being and not some contingent entity within the created order.
Is this how you would reason for this?
Thanks in advance! And God bless!
Adi
India
Dr. craig’s response
A
Adi, I am so thrilled to learn of your coming to Christ out of the spiritual darkness of Hinduism! That is an incredible transition!
Your question raises the issue of how we move from a generic monotheism affirmed on the basis of the arguments of natural theology to one of the specific monotheistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity, Islam, or Deism. I have often remarked to Jewish acquaintances that it is really difficult to see how one could justify belief in Judaism apart from Jesus. If one denies that Jesus of Nazareth really was who he claimed to be, then on what basis can we affirm that Yahweh, the God of Israel, is the true God? It will not suffice to appeal to the historicity of Old Testament miracles like those attending the Exodus because that assumes that the Old Testament narratives of such miracles are historically reliable, which begs the question. I doubt that any Old Testament scholar thinks that, given the sources we have, we can prove the historicity of any Old Testament miracle.
Rather, the best reason for believing that the God of Israel exists is because Jesus claimed to be the revelation of precisely that God, whom he called his Heavenly Father. Jesus was a Jew who believed in and proclaimed the advent of the Kingdom of God, that is to say, of the God of Israel. Therefore, if we have good reason to believe that Jesus was who he claimed to be, then we have good reason to believe in the God revealed by Jesus and thus to think that Yahweh is in fact the true God. And here we have, as you know, the evidence for Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, which vindicated his radical personal claims whereby he put himself in the place of God. When we argue that the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ fate is that “God raised Jesus from the dead,” by “God” we mean the God Jesus believed in and proclaimed, the God of Israel.
So ironically, the best reason for being a Jew is Jesus. Because we have good reason to believe in Jesus, we have good reason to believe in Yahweh.
- William Lane Craig