Q&A: Is Christianity Credible? | Gibson Hotel - Dublin, Ireland 2017

In March 2017 Dr. Craig traveled the island of Ireland on a speaking tour that included various debates, lectures, and meetings. On March 24th he gave a lecture at the Gibson Hotel in Dublin on the topic, "Is Christianity Credible?" Immediately following his talk, Dr. Craig engaged various questions from the audience.

MODERATOR: One of the advantages of being the chair of this is that I can get a starter in while you're thinking of yours. So let me kick things off, and allow you to have some thinking time. Then we will pick some of your questions. Dr. Craig, I was intrigued at how you portrayed the change in academia and how it became now philosophically credible to defend theism, and almost how the 1960s and mid-20th century skepticism had faded. I’m just wondering then, how do you explain the rise of New Atheism a decade or so ago and the popularity that that got? Could you put that in context for us?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. Thank you. That’s an excellent question. I'm talking about a revolution that has been going on in the academy, particularly in philosophy departments. The New Atheism is not an academic movement. It is a movement in pop culture. The proponents of the New Atheist atheism are not sophisticated thinkers but rather they are cultural figures influencing a popular movement. In fact, in the academic realm many of them have been roundly denounced by academic philosophers and scientists for their naive scientism and verificationism. I think the New Atheism represents in a sense the long lingering shadow of that earlier era that I spoke of during the 30s and 40s when verificationism and positivism reigned at the universities. These men are typically not aware of the revolution that has transpired in philosophy; they're not aware that the positivism and verificationism is now obsolete and regarded as untenable. So you have this pop cultural movement that is going on in quite the opposite direction of the academic movement that I described. My hope is that over time this academic movement will increasingly filter down into popular culture and begin to affect popular culture as well. I think we are already seeing that happen. So that would be how I would explain these seemingly different currents that you see in pop culture versus in the academy.

QUESTION: Could I ask you a question about the concept of original sin? To my understanding of Protestant Christian traditions at least, one of the philosophical frameworks is that since the event known as the Fall every human being that has come into existence is tarred with the mark of original sin from the point of birth or conception at some point. I've always struggled to reconcile human beings coming into existence already in the state of original sin and then being subsequently held accountable for it. I wondered, what are your thoughts?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I do have some thoughts. I teach a Sunday School class called Defenders in which we have a survey of all of the major parts of Christian doctrine from beginning to end. This is on our website. We're currently in the third series of surveying Christian doctrine and apologetics. You'll find my lectures on original sin in the section called doctrine of salvation. Christians differ in their view of original sin, so if you have reservations about this you will be in very good company. It's not as though this is a cardinal doctrine of Christianity. The Catholic Church holds to the doctrine of original sin but Eastern Orthodoxy, for example, does not. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, it’s believed that we all bear a corrupted nature as a result of sin’s entry through Adam into the human race, but we don't hold or bear original guilt. We're not condemned for something we didn't do. In Protestant theology, although Reformed theology holds to the doctrine of original sin, many Arminians do not. Many would think that it was simply through the fall of man that sin entered into the world but that we do not carry the guilt of Adam’s original sin. So there is a diversity of opinion within Christendom on this, and this is one of the strengths of the Christian faith, I think, that it permits this kind of diversity. If one is convinced of the doctrine of original sin, what might be said in defense of it? Well, here would be my best shot. I would say that Adam can be regarded as the federal head of the human race. That is to say, he is our representative or proxy before God so that what he does, he does as our representative. For example, I will get every year a proxy form for stockholders meetings in mutual funds that we invest in. If you cannot attend the stockholders meeting yourself, you sign the proxy form and somebody else whom you've authorized will vote in your place. He doesn't vote for himself. This is your vote. But he votes for you. In the same way, one can understand Adam to be our proxy before God. He is the federal head of the human race. Now, someone might object, “Well, fine. But who appointed him to act on my behalf? I didn't authorize him to vote for me. Why should I be held responsible for what my representative did?” Here I think that the person who believes in original sin might plausibly reply that if you had been in that situation then you would have done exactly the same thing so that no one can complain that their representative failed to act in a way that was consistent with their own will. I think that that makes it reasonable to believe in the doctrine of original sin. Adam was my proxy before God, and what he did, I would have done had I been there myself. Therefore his guilt is imputed to me.

QUESTION: [I had a chance to hear very strong arguments . . . for a Young Earth explanation. I recall by watching some of your lectures and some of your views, you briefly mention that such an understanding would not be very plausible, but I never got to hear what would be your arguments for an Old Earth.]

DR. CRAIG: Again, the question of the age of the universe is one on which Christians differ. There is a very tiny minority of Christians today who believe that the world was created some ten to twenty thousand years ago. Obviously, from what I've said this evening, I don't agree with that. I had the pleasure today of visiting The Long Hall in Trinity College and having my picture taken next to the bust of Archbishop Ussher who calculated the creation of the world in 4004 BC, as you may know. I think that that was a huge mistake. I think that the book of Genesis is open to a wide range of legitimate interpretations and that thinking of it as a consecutive week of 24 hour days a few thousand years ago, while one legitimate interpretation, is not one that is forced upon Christians. So I would say that there are hints in the text itself that a seven day, 24 hour day creation week is not contemplated by the author. For example, the seventh day is clearly not a 24-hour period of time because we are still in the seventh day, the day of God's Sabbath rest. Moreover, notice how God creates the vegetation and the fruit trees on day three. God doesn't say, “Let there be fruit trees. Let there be vegetation. And it was so.” No. The text says, “And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth vegetation bearing seed after its kind, and fruit trees bearing fruit after its kind.’ And it was so.” The earth brought forth vegetation bearing seed after its kind and fruit trees bearing fruit after their kind. Unless you think that the author contemplated a process that looks like a film being run on fast-forward where the tree sprouts out of the ground and grows up and sprouts out apples and they pop out all over it so that this happens in 24 hours, this must have been a long period of time in which these trees and vegetation would grow and flower and mature and finally produce fruit. I find it hard to believe that the author of Genesis 1 was thinking of this narrative as being like a film run on time-lapse photography. That would be just one other indication in the text itself that suggests we're not thinking here of literal consecutive 24-hour days. There are others as well. I discussed this in my Defenders lectures on doctrine of creation. We have a long excursus on creation and evolution. If you're interested, that's on the website as well.

QUESTION: How do Christians deal with modern ethics? For example, abortion. If a girl was raped and then turns out that the baby is causing her problems, and it would be either the baby dies and she survives or she dies and the baby survives. How would a Christian respond to this?

DR. CRAIG: It seems to me that here one has to use moral reasoning based upon sound ethical principles to arrive at a decision. I think that the decision about abortion will be decided on the basis of your answer to two questions. One would be: Do human beings have intrinsic moral value? I would say that they do. Every human being is not to be treated as a means to some end but rather is an end in himself and has intrinsic moral value and worth. The second question would be: Is the developing fetus a human being? That question is answered by biology and medicine, and is clearly, yes. The developing fetus is not bovine. It is not canine. It is not feline. It is human. This is a human being in the earliest stages of his development. So it follows from your answer to those two questions that this developing human being has intrinsic moral worth and therefore fundamental human rights which may not be violated without sufficient justification. What would constitute sufficient justification? Probably something like saving the life of the mother. If the mother's life would be taken by trying to carry the baby to term then what the doctor would be morally justified in doing would be saving the mother's life by terminating the pregnancy. But I'm sure you realize that that represents an insignificant number of the abortions that are performed today which are often performed for convenience or sex selection preferences and concerns of that sort. So making an exception in the case that one needs to save the life of the mother and that would justify taking the life of this other person, I think in virtually all the other cases it would not be sufficiently justified.

QUESTION: I wanted to ask about the historical value of the Gospels. Since they are written by believers that obviously believe in the resurrection and things like that, can they legitimately be taken as historically accurate or historically valuable? I know we have the other Roman historians around at that time or historians that had nothing to do with Christianity, but it seems as far as I read that they suggest that, yes, believers of Christianity at that time believed there was a resurrection.

DR. CRAIG: New Testament historians are acutely aware of this problem. Indeed, all ancient history is written from a point of view. This isn’t unique to the Gospels. Every ancient historian has a point of view, a case to make, a point he wants to prove. So scholars approach these documents with a considerable degree of skepticism as to their historical reliability. What has happened with respect to the Gospels is that that skepticism has in large measure been overcome by a number of factors. For example, one of the most important tests for historicity would be multiple, independent, and early attestation of an event or saying. If an event or saying in the life of Jesus is multiply attested in independent sources, and one of them at least is very early, then it's more probable that that is a genuine reminiscence of the historical Jesus rather than something that was independently later invented. Another example would be the absence of legendary or theological embellishment. If a narrative is simple and lacks signs of later Christian theology or legendary embellishment, that counts in favor of its historical credibility. Another factor would be if the narrative or saying is very different from antecedent Judaism and from subsequent Christianity then it's unlikely to be a residue of antecedent Judaism or a retrojection of later Christianity but is more plausibly a reminiscence that goes back to the historical Jesus. There are quite a number of these sorts of tests that New Testament historians use in exploring the Gospels, and when they do so the facts that I talked about tonight with regard to Jesus and particularly with regard to the fate of Jesus following the crucifixion have won the majority consensus in this respect. So scholars are very much aware of the problem of bias. It's common in ancient history. They've developed various criteria to try to help overcome this.

QUESTION: In your examples of the origins of the universe, the appearance of fine-tuning, the Gospel accounts, if you were to discover somehow that there were good explanations for these examples that did not require God, how confident would you still be about the Christian God based solely on your personal experiences that you attribute to the Holy Spirit?

DR. CRAIG: That's a psychological question. You ask, “How would you respond?” How can I answer that? I don't know what the answer to a psychological question like that would be. The question you really should be asking is if these arguments and evidences were to fail, “What should you believe?” Not, “What would you believe?” What should you believe? I would say that if these arguments failed, it would simply mean that these are not good reasons to think that God exists and Christianity is true. But that wouldn't do anything to affect the truth of the existence of God or the truth of Christianity. I think that the witness of the Holy Spirit is entirely adequate to both justify and warrant the knowledge that Christianity is true. So one would need to have something more than just the absence of arguments in order to overthrow the Christian faith. You would need to have some defeaters – some arguments for the opposite – in order to defeat the witness of the Holy Spirit. I might add as well, I've got other arguments. Right? I've got other arguments like the moral argument, the argument from the applicability of mathematics to the physical world, the Leibnizian cosmological argument, the ontological argument. So there's a lot more than what was on display here this evening.

FOLLOWUP: So you have many arguments to fall back on. Supposing you had a defeater of the Holy Spirit – some natural explanation for example – then how far would you go on faith alone?

DR. CRAIG: You are still asking your psychological question.

FOLLOWUP: How far should you go on faith alone?

DR. CRAIG:  I think that given that the Holy Spirit does bear witness to the truth of the Christian faith, you should go all the way with the Holy Spirit. Alvin Plantinga talks about an intrinsic defeater of defeaters. If you have a defeater of a belief that you hold, in order for you to continue to rationally hold to that belief you need a defeater of the defeater. Is that clear? If you hold to a belief and somebody brings a defeater against it, to continue to believe that rationally you need a defeater of the defeater. But what Alvin Plantinga points out is that some beliefs may be so powerfully warranted that they are intrinsic defeater-defeaters. That is to say the warrant for the belief itself is so powerful it intrinsically defeats any defeaters brought against it. He gives the example of a person who is accused of a crime that he didn't commit and that he knows he didn't commit, but against whom all the evidence lies so that a jury of his peers going simply on the basis of the evidence ought to convict him because all the evidence is against him. Plantinga says if that happens am I obligated to believe that I did commit the crime after all? He says obviously not. My knowledge of my own innocence is an intrinsic defeater-defeater of the evidence that has made it look as though I have committed the crime. In the same way, I would say, in my view (this is my view), I would say that the witness of the Holy Spirit is an intrinsic defeater-defeater so that even in the face of unanswered objections a person is rational and should continue to believe in the Christian faith. I think this gives tremendous encouragement and hope to persecuted brethren who are living, for example, in communist countries like the former Soviet Union or North Korea who have no access to apologetic materials or books. Or people in Islamic countries that are persecuted and have no access to Christian materials. These people manage to have a rational faith simply because the Holy Spirit so powerfully warrants to them the truth of the Christian faith that it intrinsically defeats the defeaters that Marxist propagandists and Muslim clerics bring against them.

QUESTION: My question is on eschatology. When is Jesus coming back exactly?

DR. CRAIG: You think that he doesn’t know, but I do? [laughter]

FOLLOWUP: I’ve been listening to N. T. Wright a lot lately – N. T. Wright, the theologian from Britain. I tried to listen and read a lot of different perspectives within the Christian worldview to see the same thing from different points of view. One thing that N. T. Wright . . . I’m trying to give some background and then I’ll ask the question. I’ll try to be brief. . . . He thinks Christians misunderstood the idea of heaven and Earth coming together basically. He says that we made it appear that all we have to do is wait until this miserable life ends and then we will go to heaven. But he says this is not what the Bible teaches. He says we should actually be waiting for heaven to come to Earth, and then God will transform and redo everything. I am a fairly new Christian. I came to faith two and a half years ago so it is a very personal question for me as well. I was all about heaven – “going there.” And I forgot the social aspects, not taking care of people. My question is this: How would you view N. T. Wright’s view? What would you say about that? Because especially in Western Christianity, Protestantism, United States evangelicalism, it seems “going there” – waiting for that moment. But not working here to restore things. Because N. T. Wright says the revolution began on the cross and Jesus launched the Kingdom of God and this was his main message, and we should be working for the Kingdom within the Kingdom. You are waiting for the Kingdom to come, as it were.

DR. CRAIG: All right. You have really opened a Pandora's Box here. Let me refer you again to my Defenders lectures. In the final section of the class, it's on the doctrine of the last things. We deal with these various questions including N. T. Wright’s view. I do not agree with N. T. Wright’s view of the second coming of Christ. N. T. Wright has this very peculiar view that the Son of Man returned in AD 70 with the destruction of Jerusalem, and that this was not predicting a sort of worldwide cataclysmic event that would be publicly visible to everyone. Instead it's the Son of Man entering into the throne room of God in heaven and being enthroned there as the authority. He thinks with the destruction of Jerusalem that these prophecies that Jesus made about the return of the Son of Man were fulfilled. I think that that is erroneous. It seems to me that's a mistake. I think the principal reason would be this. The return of Christ in the New Testament is associated with the resurrection from the dead, and the resurrection of the dead did not occur in any sense in AD 70. Jesus has yet to return, and it will not be until Christ returns that the dead will be raised and we will receive these new resurrection bodies that will be fit for an immortal bodily existence forever. There, that's quite right. That's going to be the new heavens and the new earth – a renewed creation with resurrection bodies. But that doesn't take place until sometime in the far future. There isn't within the New Testament, I believe, any differentiation between a coming of the Son of Man in AD 70 and the coming of Christ at the end of the world. They are the same event, and Paul still is looking forward to that event in his epistles. He's not looking back on it or thinking that it's something that already occurs. So I would say that the truth of what he's saying is that when we die we do not go immediately to our final state. There is an intermediate state of disembodied existence which Paul describes as “being with the Lord.” He says, “to be away from the body is to be present with the Lord” in 2 Corinthians 5. And then when Christ returns the resurrection will happen. The disembodied souls of the dead in Christ will be reunited with their resurrected bodies, those alive at the time will be similarly transformed, and then we will be taken into the final state which is the new heavens and the new earth. Let me just say one other thing about this that is interesting scientifically, and that is this. It's hard to believe in the second coming of Christ. It's an event that is so strange, so overwhelming, that it's hard to believe that, say, next Wednesday the world might come to an end and Christ is going to return. It's just so hard to believe something like that. But what's interesting is that in modern science physical cosmology predicts an exactly similar cosmological end of the world. In modern cosmology there is a field of cosmology that discusses, not the beginning of the universe (that's cosmogony); it discusses the end of the universe. And do you know what that field is called? Eschatology. It is now a field of science, not just theology. Physical eschatology discusses the end of the world. And what scientists tell us is that if the world is hung up in a kind of unstable quantum position, the entire universe could undergo a quantum transition to a lower energy level. And if it does, in the blink of an eye this would spread across the universe faster than the speed of light transforming the entire universe resulting in a new set of laws and a new universe. And no one would know that it was coming. It could happen next Wednesday, and no one would know that it was coming. It is utterly unexpected. It will come like a thief in the night. This is remarkable because it reminds one of what one reads in 1 Peter where it says that the heavens and the earth will melt away like a great cataclysm, and there will be this new heavens and new earth inaugurated. Now, I'm not saying that Peter is predicting physical eschatology, but I am saying it's very, very similar. So if you can believe in what modern science says about physical eschatology, I think that makes it a lot easier to believe in Christian eschatology about the return of Christ in the end of the world.

QUESTION: Just say you are taking the atheist’s . . . The concepts of original sin . . . You bring him the true story of salvation history. The atheist said, “It's credible. I understand original sin. I understand prophecy. I concede there’s enough evidence for the historicity of Jesus.” But then he gets to the point where he says . . . essentially what you are saying is there’s an innocent guy who has done no wrong to anybody and he says, “How could that ever be credible to sell that message of atonement to the world when he's really done nothing?” What would be your best answer to that?

DR. CRAIG: Help me to understand what the objection is. What's the problem with saying that Christ died for our sins?

FOLLOWUP: The problem for the person that doesn’t believe is that this concept of fairness in their mind of how atonement should . . . the mechanism of atonement should . . . so we come to the person who doesn’t believe and we say it is innocent blood that needs to be spilled for our tarnished blood which is sinful. In their mind, when they get to a very logical and deep-rooted level of fairness they just go, “That doesn’t seem rational at all.”

DR. CRAIG: This is the subject that I am currently employed in studying. The doctrine that you described would be a view of the atonement as involving substitutionary punishment – that Christ bore the punishment for our sins so that we would not have to bear that punishment ourselves. On that basis God can then pardon us and receive us because our sins have been paid for. This is something that Jesus does voluntarily. He voluntarily undertakes to pay the punishment for our sins that we deserve. Now, there's many things that could be said about this, but one that is most interesting is the assumption that Jesus is innocent. Right? You just said that. But according to the doctrine of penal substitution, even though Christ is personally virtuous, our sins are imputed to him legally so that he bears the guilt of our sins. Our sins are imputed to him, and therefore he is justly punished in our place. Now, you might say, “But the imputation of sins – what sense does that make?” Well, the fact is that imputation plays a regular role in our European and North American legal system. There's something in the law called vicarious liability where the liability for an offense can be vicariously imputed to another person who did not do the offense. This is according to a principle of law called respondeat superior which means “the master is answerable.” In earlier times this was a relationship between the master and his servant whereby wrongs done by the servant in his employment could be vicariously attributed to the master so the master was held responsible for the wrongdoing of the servant. In contemporary law, this has resulted in a principle that is relatively uncontroversial today between employers and employees where the liability of the wrongdoing of an employee is imputed vicariously to the employer so that the employer is held liable. You might say, “Is this just in civil law?” No. This is in criminal law as well. Let me give you a couple of examples. There's a couple of cases – Sherras vs De Rutzen and Allen vs Whitehead, I think – where the owner of a cafe assigned the management of the cafe to a manager who then allowed prostitutes to consort in the cafe in violation of the law. The manager’s crime was imputed vicariously to the owner of the cafe. He was held liable for the crime of the manager even though he had nothing to do with it. In the other case, a bar owner was held liable because the bartender sold alcohol to a constable on duty in violation of the law. Here again the liability of the bartender was imputed to the owner of the bar. So this is a regular feature of law. It's called vicarious liability. So the person who would regard this as unjust in Jesus’ case is going to have to say the entire Anglo-American justice system is also flawed in this respect because this is a very common practice in law of holding employers vicariously liable for the deeds of their employees in their role as the employee. The other thing I would add relates to what we said about Adam. If Christ is our proxy before God then he represents us before God so that in punishing Christ God punishes us. I am punished in my proxy who voluntarily takes my place and bears my sin. I think given the imputation of sins there's simply no problem with God's punishing an innocent person because Christ is legally guilty in virtue of the imputation of my sins to him and therefore justly punished.

QUESTION: My question really is about the topic of the talk – is Christianity credible? You talk about God being credible and Jesus’ resurrection being credible. From my perspective, in a sense . . . I have to deal with a lot of people who are Gnostic in their thinking or take on that kind of work. What makes Christianity as we know it more credible than the kind of Gnostic Christianity that in a sense has become resurgent, I think, in the last 20 or 30 years, certainly in my experience?

DR. CRAIG: I guess I would have to know what you mean by Gnostic Christianity because it seems to me that classical Gnosticism is incompatible with what I shared tonight.

FOLLOWUP: Yes, I agree. My argument is that from an outsider’s perspective, maybe from atheists, who often say that this is the kind of Christianity that I can see as well. What makes that different? What response can I give?

DR. CRAIG: I want to know what you mean by Gnostic.

FOLLOWUP: Gnostic always seems to mainly be about some kind of secrets. There are secrets in the Gospels or there are secrets in something, and it’s only we Christians who know that secret. I try to say it’s very open and you can read the Bible yourself. But it always comes down to sometimes theology. What theology people come out with – what bits they ignore or what bits they don’t ignore.

DR. CRAIG: As long as these people affirm the existence of God and his self-revelation in Jesus by raising him from the dead then I would count them as orthodox Christians. They would be in the fold. Beyond that it's an in-house debate about what secrets they think there are and look at the New Testament and see if there are any secrets. The only one I can think of is the mystery hidden for ages and ages in God but now made known through the apostles and prophets which is the union of the Jews and Gentiles in God's economy. So I just wouldn't know what secrets there are. I suspect that the people you are talking with probably have more serious aberrations and may deny, for example, a physical resurrection of Jesus in favor of some sort of spiritual resurrection. In that case you would need to do a good exegesis of 1 Corinthians 15 to explain what Paul means by a spiritual body and to show how this resurrection body is a physical, extended, material entity such as you have described in the resurrection appearances in the Gospels.

QUESTION: My question is in some ways related to the original sin question. If one was to believe in original sin, everyone is born with the stain of sin because of what Adam did. My question is regarding people with mental difficulties or children and babies who die before they reach the age at which they make a decision to accept Jesus Christ and to believe in faith in God. Does God change his mind for them? Change his rules for them? What would you say in that case? What happens when they die?

DR. CRAIG: My inclination is to say that Jesus’ attitude toward little children gives us grounds for believing that those who died in infancy or who never graduate from infancy because of a mental disability are accorded grace by God and are forgiven. Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me for such is the Kingdom of God,” and again he said, “No one who does not receive the Kingdom of God like a little child will be able to come into the Kingdom of God.” So I take it that Jesus’ attitude toward children gives us good grounds for thinking that they will not be excluded from the Kingdom by original sin if they bear its taint and they should die.

QUESTION: My question is: Has anyone ever come up to you and asked you, “If there is a God then what created God?” I have a friend of mine who once asked me this question. My answer to him was no one created God. God is the eternal creator. He wasn’t really satisfied with my answer because he was like, “So before God there was nothing?”

DR. CRAIG: When you say “before God there was nothing” you don't mean that God had a beginning preceded by nothing. You mean there wasn't anything before God because God is eternal, and that's a quite acceptable answer. I would, in fact, say that since time and space began at the Big Bang, God is timeless without the universe. It's not as though he stretches back into the past as far as you can go time immemorial. Rather, it's that God doesn't exist in the temporal dimension at all. He's atemporal – he’s timeless without creation, and therefore never had any beginning. He just exists permanently. I think that's an entirely satisfactory answer. I suspect if the person isn't satisfied by that answer then the difficulty is that he doesn't understand it. Because once you understand the concept of a timeless being you can see that the question “Where did he come from?” is just inept. It's meaningless. He didn't come from anywhere.

QUESTION: I just wanted to make one comment. The serpent in Genesis, to me that exhibits reason, questioning, total undermining insidiousness. And Eve falls for it. I’m just saying that kind of questioning is, to me, it dominates the world. It's more than rational. You're speaking always rationally. Understand Jesus in John’s Gospel got a big shock with the Jews. Their questioning, their constant questioning, he couldn't believe that they had so many questions. I’m saying he met the serpent, and I’m saying the serpent rules . . .

DR. CRAIG: I would want to differentiate between asking questions and having destructive, malicious criticisms. I think what you're describing is that kind of malicious disobedience and rebelliousness against God. But for those of us who enjoy thinking, and especially enjoy having a coherent worldview, questions like: What is God's relationship to time? How can we be held responsible for Adam's sin? How could Christ bear our sins so as to free us from our obligation of punishment? These are all profound questions that are asked in faith with a view toward deepening our faith. St. Anselm put it so beautifully. Anselm talked about fides quaerens intellectum – faith seeking understanding. And that is the project that I am about and excited in. Faith seeking understanding. So this is an exploration in faith that proceeds with God-given reason to try to understand more deeply the truths that God has communicated to us.

QUESTION: I’ve often heard atheists argue that if God is so great he could have bypassed the whole Earth situation and just created us all in heaven. That way there wouldn’t be trouble and strife and misery and all the stuff that goes with that. So the question is really: Why are we here on this planet?

DR. CRAIG: I think that this is a veil of decision-making that we go through. God has created us at a sort of arm's length that allows us the ability to rebel against him and to choose whether we want to spend eternity with him or not. If he were to display to us his full glory and power, it would be like a gigantic electromagnet in the presence of iron filings. They would just stick to it because it would be so attractive, so beautiful, so irresistible. God has therefore, as Paul says, created us so that we see through a glass darkly and we don't see face-to-face at this point. That allows then for us, as free moral agents, to decide whether we want to love and worship and serve God or whether or not we want to go our own way. This is related to what I talked about in the debate last night called the so-called hiddenness of God. God could have made his existence a lot more obvious. But God is hidden. As Pascal says, there's enough light for those who have eyes to see, but there's enough obscurity so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed. So I think this way of doing it is a way that God has given us to exercise our freedom.

QUESTION: [Christianity (and even other religions) seem to be preoccupied with sin and we carry this burden. Why do we have to always see ourselves as sinners?]

DR. CRAIG: I think this only makes good sense because sin is evil and it separates us from God. Therefore, this is the fundamental human predicament – how do we overcome the moral evil that taints us and pollutes us and prevents us from fellowship with a holy God? And the answer to that is to be found in Christ and his atoning death which cleanses us of sin, gives us pardon, and enables us to be restored to fellowship with God.

FOLLOWUP: [But we are not sinners. . . . Sin is a human construct. I wish to not have to carry that burden the rest of our lives.]

DR. CRAIG: Well, that’s not Christianity. Christianity says that God is holy, that man has rebelled against God and done moral evil, and therefore finds himself justly condemned before a holy God. I think there's no truth, probably, that is more empirically verified in the world today than the sinfulness of humanity. The wickedness and depravity of humanity is legendary, and we see it not only every day in the news but more sharply I think we feel it in our own hearts. We see the depravity within and our own need of forgiveness and cleansing.

QUESTION: I am a Christian but [I have a question about] free will in heaven. Do you think we will have free will in heaven, and if yes would that imply that there might be a possibility for another Fall? If we have free will but no other Fall then couldn’t God have made us that way in the first place?

DR. CRAIG: This is a good question. I think there are a couple of ways of answering it, but let me give the answer that I find most plausible and theologically attractive. I think that when we go to heaven, that epistemic distance from God that I described a moment ago (that arm's length) is removed, and the Christian now sees God in his beauty and glory and attractiveness. And, as I say, like this giant electromagnet attracting these iron filings so that now it's impossible for them to fall away from it because it is so beautiful and attractive. I think that when we see Christ, when we see God, in heaven that the freedom to sin will effectively be removed so that there will not be free will to sin in heaven. Freedom of the will to sin is a condition of this veil through which we are passing – this veil of decision-making – that requires us to be at arm's distance, so to speak, from God so as to be able to rebel against him. But once we see God in all his beauty and holiness and greatness then I'm inclined to think that the freedom of sin will effectively be removed. So there is no possibility of a further Fall in heaven.

QUESTION: We know God knows everything before he ever created us. So he knows what decisions we are going to make. My question is: Is it fair to say that when God created Lucifer he knew he was going to be evil. Does that mean that God created evil? If so, when God knows there’s going to be an awful lot of people who don’t choose to believe in him and therefore are actually condemned. Why bother to create them? I could almost say it is cruel. Do you know what I mean?

DR. CRAIG: Oh, yes, I do. And I've struggled with this same question myself. Here's a possible answer. It's possible that in any world of free creatures in which a significant number of people freely come to Christ and find salvation, there will also be a significant number of people who will freely reject him and be lost. I believe that God wills that everyone be saved and that every person that he creates he seeks to draw to himself and to salvation so that the only reason anyone is ever lost is because of willful rebellion against God and his Holy Spirit and every effort to save them. Now, as you say, God knew that these people would do this. But in any feasible world for God there would be such people. So the question would be then why doesn't God just refrain from creating any world at all? And I think the answer to that is that the blessedness and the joy and the incommensurable good of those who would freely embrace God's love and salvation shouldn't be prevented by these hard-necked people who would freely reject God and his every effort to save them. Why should they be given a veto power over which worlds God is free to create and prevent the blessedness and joy of those who would like to be saved. So it seems to me that God does no wrong in creating a world in which some are freely lost despite his every effort to save them because there are also then multitudes who will freely come to know God and his salvation.

Thank you very much.