Evidence for Christianity + Two Q&A Sessions | Emmanuel Barrie - Ontario 2018

To finish off his Toronto speaking tour in January 2018, Dr. Craig spoke at Emmanuel Barrie Church in Ontario. His sermon is followed by the Q&A sessions from both services.

DR. CRAIG: Thank you so much. Today we bring to a close a very fruitful speaking tour of the Toronto area that was highlighted by a Friday night dialogue with Jordan Peterson and Rebecca Goldstein at the Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto. I'm glad to have the opportunity to close out the trip with you folks here at Barrie this morning.

The great agnostic philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say if he found himself standing before God on the Judgment Day and God were to say to him, “Why didn’t you believe in me?” Russell replied, “I would say, ‘Not enough evidence, God; not enough evidence.’” As I travel around North America and Europe speaking on university campuses, I think that most of the non-Christian university professors that I meet would probably say pretty much the same thing. And this attitude is in turn conveyed to their students. In all probability, in an audience of this size, there are probably those of you sitting here this morning silently thinking in your minds the same thing: There's not enough evidence.

But I want to invite you to think with me about that a moment this morning. What do people mean when they say “not enough evidence.” Not enough for what? Not enough to coerce faith in Christ? Not enough to compel someone to become a Christian? Well, I think that a lot of people take it that way. I find that most people are spiritually apathetic. They're either too busy or too unconcerned to be bothered about looking into spiritual things. Or, if they are into spirituality, they may be pursuing alternative forms of spirituality as in the New Age movement. But basically people just can't be bothered to look into the evidence for Christianity. So I find that most people aren't even acquainted with the evidence for the Christian faith. And this is true in particular of university professors.

One of the most interesting aspects of the work I do is the debates that I participate in on university campuses. Often I'll be invited onto a campus where some professor has a reputation for being especially abusive to Christian students in his classes, holding them up as objects of ridicule. And we’ll challenge him to a public debate on a topic like the existence of God or Christianity versus humanism or whatever. And do you know what? I find that while these fellows are pretty good at beating up intellectually on an eighteen-year-old in one of their classes, they can't even hold their own when it comes to going toe-to-toe with one of their peers. In their opening speech, they may trot out the objections from their Intro to Philosophy class, and then after I've answered those they're pretty much left with nothing more to say. So they either start repeating themselves or else making emotional appeals to the students. I find that they're especially ignorant of the evidence for the Gospels. I suspect that most of them have never even cracked a New Testament. Many of them turn out to be just big, inflated intellectual blowhards who have no good reason for rejecting Christianity or for ridiculing the Christian students in their classes.

Now, in one sense this isn't really surprising. All of us in the academy have to specialize in a certain discipline and as a result are ignorant of things in other fields. For example, I know something about philosophy, but I know absolutely nothing about economics or chemical engineering or agriculture or business. Thus, it's possible to have a perfectly profound knowledge of one's area of specialization and yet have little better than a Sunday School acquaintance with Christianity. For example, several years ago I had a debate on the existence of God with a professor at the University of South Carolina. This man was a brilliant philosopher of quantum physics. Yet the first words out of his mouth when he got up to speak were these: “I don't really feel qualified to be participating in tonight's debate because I don't know anything about philosophy of religion.” And I thought to myself, well then why in the world are you getting up in front of 800 students trying to convince them not to believe in God when you admit you don't know anything about the topic? It doesn't compute!

When you read the biographies of the world's great atheists, what you discover is that most of them lost their faith when they were around 11 or 12 years of age and they've never studied it again since. Now think of what that implies. That means that most of them reject Christianity based on the objections of a 12-year-old. So when people say there's not enough evidence, what they really mean is there's not enough evidence to coerce me out of my indifference. If I choose to ignore it, the evidence isn't going to grab me by the lapels and force me to believe. To which I say of course the evidence isn't coercive in that sense. But why should it be? You see, the knowledge of God is unique in that the knowledge of God is conditioned by moral and spiritual factors. A spiritually indifferent person can have a perfectly profound knowledge of physics or Russian literature or history or sociology or even theology, but a spiritually indifferent person cannot know God. According to the Bible, the knowledge of God is promised to those who honestly seek him. Thus the prophet Jeremiah wrote, “you shall seek Me and you shall find Me, if you seek for Me with all your heart.”^[1] And Jesus said, “seek, and you will find; knock, and the door shall be opened; ask, and it will be given you. For he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks the door shall be opened, and to him who asks it shall be given.”^[2] In other words, God doesn’t force himself upon us. He has given evidence of himself which is sufficiently clear for those with an open heart and an open mind but which is sufficiently vague so as not to compel those whose hearts are closed.

The great French mathematical genius Blaise Pascal, who came to know God through an encounter with Jesus Christ at the age of 31, put it in the following way.

Willing to appear openly to those who seek Him with all their heart, and to be hidden from those who flee from Him with all their heart, [God] so regulates the knowledge of Himself that He has given signs of Himself, visible to those who seek Him, and not to those who seek Him not. There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.^[3]

In other words, the evidence is there for those who have eyes to see.

So, admittedly, the evidence is not sufficient to coerce you if your heart and mind are closed. But that's not the really interesting question, is it? The really interesting question is: Is there enough evidence for faith to be rational? And the answer to that question is, yes, there certainly is! The traditional arguments for God's existence and the evidences of Christianity are certainly sufficient to ground Christian belief rationally if you're willing to look at them with an open mind and an open heart.

Consider first the question of the existence of God. There has been literally a revolution in Anglo-American philosophy concerning this question during the second half of the 20th century. Back in the 40s and 50s it was widely believed among philosophers that talk about God was literally meaningless.

This movement reached its crescendo in the mid-1960s with the so-called “Death-of-God” theology. On April 8, 1966 in a dramatic red-on-black cover story, Time magazine asked, “Is God Dead?” And it described the movement among contemporary theologians that proclaimed the death of God. And yet, at the same time that the theologians were writing God’s obituary, a new generation of young philosophers was rediscovering his vitality. Just a few years after its Death-of-God issue, Time ran a similar cover story, only this time the question read, “Is God Coming Back to Life?” That is how it must have seemed to those theological morticians of the 1960s. During the 1970s, interest in philosophy of religion continued to grow. In 1980, Time ran another major story entitled, “Modernizing the Case for God,” in which it described the movement among contemporary philosophers to refurbish and re-defend all of the traditional arguments for God’s existence. Time marveled,

In a quiet revolution in thought and argument that hardly anybody could have foreseen only two decades ago, God is making a comeback. Most intriguingly, this is happening not among theologians or ordinary believers, but in the crisp intellectual circles of academic philosophers, where the consensus had long banished the Almighty from fruitful discourse.^[4]

According to the article, the noted American philosopher, Roderick Chisholm, believed that the reason that atheism was so influential in the prior generation is that the brightest philosophers at that time were atheists. But today, he says, many of the brightest philosophers are theists, and they are using a tough-minded intellectualism in defense of that belief that was formerly lacking on their side of the debate.

In the year 2001, the secular journal Philo carried an article^[5] by a prominent atheist philosopher lamenting what he called the desecularization of academia that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s. He complained,

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism . . . began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians.

. . . in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, “academically respectable” to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.

He concludes,

God is not “dead” in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.

So today I'm pleased to say that some of England and America's finest philosophers at major universities are outspoken Christians. I think of people like Richard Swinburne and Brian Leftow at Oxford University, Robert Adams and Dean Zimmerman at Rutgers, Alvin Plantinga, Peter van Inwagen at University of Notre Dame, Eleonore Stump at St. Louis, Alex Pruss at Baylor. I could go on and on. The idea that Christians are intellectual nincompoops and losers is an idea that is simply rooted in ignorance and needs to be now once and for all decisively put behind us.

My own work has focused upon the implications of cosmology for theology. I believe that as natural science probes the physical world, it encounters as it were signposts of transcendence pointing beyond the natural world to its ground in a supernatural creator and designer of the universe. For example, the evidence for the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe points to the creation of the universe out of nothing. Most laymen do not realize that according to the standard Big Bang theory not just all matter and energy but physical space and time themselves came into being at the Big Bang. In the words of the British physicist P. C. W. Davies, “the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself.”^[6] But that raises the inevitable question: How can the universe come into existence out of nothing?

Notice that this is a philosophical, not a scientific, question. The claim of some scientists like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence Krauss that physics can explain the origin of the universe from nothing takes the word “nothing” to refer not to literally nothing but to empty space filled with energy or to quantum physical fields which are obviously not nothing. Properly speaking, out of nothing, nothing comes. The atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen gives the following illustration. He says, suppose you suddenly hear a loud “bang!” And I ask you, “What made that bang?” And you reply, “Nothing. It just happened.” He says, “I wouldn’t accept that. In fact, I would find that reply quite unintelligible.” Well, what is true of the little bang is also true of the Big Bang. There must have been a cause which brought the universe into existence . And from the very nature of the case, this cause would have to be an uncaused, immaterial, changeless, timeless, and enormously powerful being.

Moreover, and here we come to the second signpost that I mentioned, the evidence for the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life points to this cause’s being a personal, intelligent mind. During the last 50 years or so, scientists have been stunned by the discovery that the initial conditions present in the Big Bang were fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a complexity and precision that literally defy human comprehension. For example, P. C. W. Davies has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation (without which of course planets could not exist) is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeros at least. He also estimates that a change in the strength of gravity or of the weak force by only one part out of 10 to the 100th power would have prevented a life-permitting universe. The cosmological constant which drives the early inflationary expansion of the universe must be fine-tuned to one part out of 10 to the 120th power. There is no physical reason why these quantities have the values they do. The inference to an intelligent designer of the cosmos seems far more rational than the atheistic interpretation of chance.

Some people have tried to avoid this conclusion by saying that we shouldn’t really be surprised at the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life because, after all, if the universe were not fine-tuned then we wouldn't be here to be surprised about it. Given that we are here, we should expect the universe to be fine-tuned. But I think that the fallacy of this reasoning can be made plain by means of a parallel illustration. Suppose you're traveling abroad and arrested on trumped-up drug charges and dragged in front of a firing squad of 100 trained marksmen, all with rifles aimed at your heart. You hear the command given, “Ready! Aim! Fire!” And you hear the deafening roar of the guns. And then you observe that you're still alive! That all of the 100 marksmen missed. Now, what would you conclude? “Well, I guess I really shouldn't be surprised that they all missed. After all, if they hadn't all missed, I wouldn't be here to be surprised about it. Given that I am here, I should expect them all to miss.” Of course not. You would immediately suspect that they all missed on purpose – that the whole thing was a setup engineered by some person for some reason. And in exactly the same way, given the incomprehensible improbability of the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the universe for intelligent life, it is rational to conclude that this is not the result of chance but rather design.

Now much more could and should be said about these matters. But I think this is sufficient to show that there is certainly enough evidence to make belief in God rational.

But what about belief in the Christian God? Is it rational to believe in Jesus as the Gospels portray him? Jesus has certainly become the storm center of controversy in our day, hasn't he? Every Easter and Christmas, you can count on the popular media to carry stories about some radical critic who claims that Jesus was the leader of a hallucinogenic cult or that he was a peasant cynic philosopher or the figment of someone's imagination based upon Egyptian mythology. When you check out the evidence, however, a very different picture emerges than the one painted by the skeptics. In fact, did you know that today the majority of New Testament historians agree that the historical Jesus deliberately stood and spoke in the place of God himself, that he claimed that in himself the Kingdom of God had come, and that as visible demonstrations of this fact he carried out a ministry of miracle working and exorcisms. According to the German theologian Horst Georg Pöhlmann,

Today there is virtually a consensus . . . that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority, with the claim of the authority to stand in God’s place and speak to us and bring us to salvation. . . . With regard to Jesus there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. Tertium non datur. [There is no third way.]^[7]

Thus, Jesus either was who he claimed to be, or else he was a blasphemous megalomaniac which seems utterly implausible.

But there's more. For we have dramatic confirmation of Jesus’ radical personal claims; namely, his resurrection from the dead. Again, during the second half of the 20th century, there has been a dramatic reversal of scholarship on this issue. Back in the 30s and 40s, Gospel events like the discovery of Jesus’ empty tomb were widely regarded as legendary and even an embarrassment for the Christian faith. Similarly, Jesus’ appearances alive after his death were widely taken to be hallucinations induced by the disciples’ fervent faith in Jesus. This skepticism concerning Jesus’ resurrection also peaked somewhere in the late 1960s and then began very rapidly to recede. Today it still lingers on in liberal backwaters, but the majority of New Testament critics today agree: (1) after his crucifixion, Jesus of Nazareth was interred in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea, (2) the tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of his women followers on Sunday morning, (3) various individuals and groups of people on multiple occasions and under a variety of circumstances saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death, and (4) the original disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection was not the result of their faith in him or of wishful thinking but quite the reverse – their faith in him was the result of their having come to believe that God raised him from the dead. Those are the facts. The question is: How do you best explain them?

Here the skeptic faces a rather desperate situation. To illustrate, a few years ago I had a debate on the resurrection of Jesus with a professor at the University of California, Irvine.^[8] This man had written his doctoral dissertation on the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. He was thoroughly familiar with the evidence. And he could not deny the facts of Jesus’ honorable burial, his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, or the origin of the disciples’ faith. So his only recourse was to come up with some alternative explanation of those four facts. So he argued that Jesus of Nazareth must have had an unknown identical twin brother who was separated from him at birth, grew up independently, came back to Jerusalem just at the time of the crucifixion, stole his brother's body out of the tomb, and presented himself to the disciples who mistakenly thought it was Jesus risen from the dead. Now, I'm not going to go into how I went about refuting this theory, but I think that the example is instructive. Because it shows to what desperate lengths skepticism must go in order to explain away the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. In fact, did you know that the evidence is so good that one of the world's leading Jewish theologians, Pinchas Lapide (who taught at Hebrew University in Israel), declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus of Nazareth from the dead.^[9]

Again, much more could be said about this. But, again, I think that enough has been shared to show that the Christian is certainly within his rational rights in believing that Jesus rose from the dead and therefore was who he claimed to be. So while the evidence is admittedly not enough to coerce you if your heart and mind are closed, I think it is certainly enough to ground faith rationally if you're just willing to look at it with an open mind and an open heart.

Our whole discussion up to this point this morning has just assumed that becoming a Christian is a matter of weighing the evidence and then making up your mind. But when you think about it, there's surely something wrong with that assumption. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard gives the illustration of a young university student who's trying to decide whether to become a Christian. In order to make an informed decision, he decides to study the evidence. So he studies philosophy so that he can comprehend the arguments for and against the existence of God. He studies comparative religions so that he can compare the worldviews of the various religions of the world. He studies Christian theology so that he can grasp the body of Christian truth claims. He learns Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic so that he can read the biblical documents in the original languages. He studies Old Testament and New Testament backgrounds so that he can read these documents in their original cultural context. And so on and on and on it goes until finally he is convinced that Christianity is true and so at the age of 70 he places his faith in Christ and becomes a Christian. Kierkegaard says that such a scenario is insane. Faith cannot be expected to hold its breath indefinitely while reason patiently sifts and re-sifts through the evidence. A loving God would not abandon us to our own devices to work out through our own cleverness and ingenuity whether or not he exists. Rather, a loving God would himself pursue us and seek to draw us to himself. And this is exactly what the Bible says God has done. Jesus said, “No man comes to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”^[10] And again Jesus said, “When I am lifted up, I will draw all men to myself.”^[11]

So it wasn't quite accurate when I said earlier that in order to find God we must honestly seek him. From a human perspective, that's true. But from God's perspective, it's really God who is seeking us. And it's up to us whether we open our hearts to his love and forgiveness, or whether we shut our hearts up against his grace.

I mentioned earlier that when he was 31 Pascal came to know God through a dramatic encounter with Jesus Christ. That conversion experience changed his entire life. When Pascal died, there was found sewn into his clothing a memorial of that event which he constantly carried with him. This is how it read: “From about 10:30 at night, until about 12:30. FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and of the learned. Certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace. God of Jesus Christ . . . Jesus Christ. . . . Let me never be separated from Him.”

Arguments and evidence can help. But as Pascal discovered, ultimately we have to come to grips, not with arguments, but with the living Lord himself.

Let's close with prayer. If you this morning have been seeking to know God and have not yet found a personal relationship with him, I want to invite you to pray with me, to open your heart to God's love and grace, and to receive him into your life. God, I really need you. I believe that you are real, and I know that through my moral failures I am guilty before you and in need of your forgiveness and cleansing. I believe that you sent Jesus to die for my sins and raised him from the dead. Right now, in the best way I know how, I want to open the door to my heart and invite you to come in. Come into my life. Forgive my sins. Cleanse me, and make me anew into the kind of person that you want me to be. Right now as an expression of my faith, I thank you for hearing this prayer. Amen.

I'm glad to have had this time to share with you this morning. I believe we have some time for questions.

MODERATOR: That’s right. Can we say thank you to Dr. Craig again for sharing with us? We're going to begin with this question, Dr. Craig. It's a big one. We're going to go right to the hard ones here. I've always dreaded the challenge from non-Christians who raise the Old Testament accounts of God commanding the Israelites to wipe out women and children in addition to the men in a city. They asked how could I see this as any different from the actions by the worst jihadists in our time? What are your thoughts, Dr. Craig?

DR. CRAIG: This is indeed a profound and difficult question. I've addressed this question on our website – question of the week #16.^[12] So rather than give just a soundbite-ish answer here, I want to refer you to that question of the week #16 where I look at this in detail. I argue that there is no inconsistency between God's being all-loving, all-powerful, and is issuing the command to drive the Canaanites out of the land. This was not a genocidal command to kill everybody. It was to divest the Canaanite tribes of the land, and the land then was being given over to Israel. If they had not stayed to fight, no one needed to have been killed. If they had simply fled before the advancing Israeli armies, no one would have died. It differs from jihadism in that this is not a religious Jewish war. In Islam, jihad is a means of evangelism. It is a way of spreading the religion of Islam by bringing non-Muslim countries into submission. The conquest of Canaan was driving the tribes out of the land and divesting themselves of the land. It was not an attempt to convert them to Judaism. There was no attempt to use violence as a means of converting people to the Jewish religion. In that sense, it is fundamentally different from the Islamic concept of jihad.

MODERATOR: ReasonableFaith.org. I forgot to mention that earlier. That is the address to Dr. Craig's website. He has a lot of questions and answers on there. A lot of great materials. So if you want more on that particular question, please go there – answer 16 on the questions of the week. Here's another one. The question stems from “In the beginning, God created” (Genesis 1:1). Most people I talk to don't have a problem believing that God created and continues to create. Their question is: What about God? How could there be nothing and then – poof – God existed? How do we as finite created beings – Christians – explain and debate the existence of a God that stands outside of time and space?

DR. CRAIG: The question has a certain inner inconsistency in it. The Christian doctrine of creation is not that there was nothing and then – poof – God began to exist. That shows a complete misunderstanding of the concept of God. The concept of God is of a being who transcends time and space and who brought these things into being. So God is an eternal being which never began to exist and so never came into being and is therefore uncaused. Now, if you have difficulty understanding that notion of timelessness and spacelessness, understand that cosmologists regularly talk about other spacetimes. You've heard of multiverse theories where in addition to our four-dimensional spacetime there might be another spacetime that is not connected with ours. That would be an analogy to God. God can exist outside of time and space rather than inside our four-dimensional spacetime continuum. But he is causally related to space and time in that he brings them into being and he sustains them in being.

MODERATOR: Here's a question from one of you here. Jesus as just a myth is rampant on the Internet. How would you give a refutation to friends and family who raise this objection?

DR. CRAIG: That's what I just addressed this morning! Right? Honestly, I'm always surprised when we get questions over something that's already been dealt with. The second part of this talk was: Who was Jesus of Nazareth? What do we know about him historically? As I say, this idea that Jesus is a myth is poppycock. It's nonsense. There's no scholar that would defend this. The majority of scholars agree with what I said about the historical Jesus: believing that in him the Kingdom of God had come into human history, he was a miracle worker and exorcist in first century Israel, he put himself in the place of God and made blasphemous claims for which he was crucified, the crucifixion of Jesus by Roman authority is indisputable, and then what I argued was that the very facts that undergird the inference to his resurrection are also accepted by the majority of scholars. So all of that goes to explode this Internet idea that Jesus of Nazareth is a non-historical myth.

MODERATOR: So basically when you see these popular ideas being promoted on the Internet, we can turn to scholarship and say scholarship doesn't believe this, even non-Christians.

DR. CRAIG: Even non-Christians. Jewish scholars such as the man I cited. That's absolutely correct.

MODERATOR: What is the evidence supporting the resurrection of Christ, as in what supports the actual sighting of him?

DR. CRAIG: OK. That’s the third fact that I mentioned: the post-mortem appearances of Jesus. We have extremely early evidence of these post-mortem appearances in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. There Paul reminds the Corinthians of the Gospel that he preached to them, and he gives a list of the witnesses who had seen Jesus. New Testament scholars have demonstrated that Paul is not writing in his own hand there freely. Rather, he's quoting a prior tradition that probably goes back to within the first five years after the crucifixion. So we have here extremely early evidence from a man who was in firsthand contact with the eyewitnesses about these resurrection appearances. Moreover, these are confirmed independently and multiply by the Gospel narratives which also describe these sorts of resurrection appearances. When you have multiple, early, independent sources attesting to some fact then you are on very strong historical paydirt. So I cannot think of any contemporary historian who denies that the original disciples saw these post-mortem appearances of Jesus. You can try to explain them away as hallucinations if you want to, but you cannot responsibly deny that these men did have these sorts of experiences.

MODERATOR: If God is such a good and great God and he exists, why did he create humans when he knew that they would sin and bring the curse of death.

DR. CRAIG: It seems to me that the answer to that would be that he knew that he would also initiate a plan of salvation for those human beings whereby he would draw millions and millions of men and women freely into fellowship with himself. The great good of redemption through Christ, of his self-giving sacrifice, and of knowing God and finding eternal life should not be prevented because some people would freely and obstinately resist God's grace and his every effort to save them. They should not be allowed to have a veto power over all of those who would want to experience God's love and forgiveness and claim it as their own.

MODERATOR: Tim Keller has a quote. He says if Jesus rose from the dead then you have to accept all that he said. If he didn't rise from the dead then why worry about any of what he said? The issue in which everything hangs is not in whether you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead. Can you talk a little bit about the significance of the resurrection in terms of our Christian faith over other faiths in the world?

DR. CRAIG: The significant thing about Jesus’ resurrection is that it's not the resurrection of just any old person. Rather, it is the resurrection of this unique individual who put himself in the place of God and arrogated to himself privileges and rights belonging properly only to God. So if this man did not rise from the dead then he was a blasphemer, and that is why the Jewish authorities instigated his crucifixion – for blasphemy – and he would be revealed as a blasphemer. But if God has raised him from the dead then God has publicly and dramatically vindicated those allegedly blasphemous claims for which he was crucified thereby showing that he really was who he claimed to be. So I agree with Keller that the resurrection of Jesus is the interpretative key to the identity of Jesus. If this man has been raised from the dead then indeed he holds the key that unlocks the door to eternal life and salvation.

MODERATOR: I might have to reword this. It's basically a question about Islam and Christianity. How do I best present or challenge my friend to lead him to Jesus? He follows Islam because of explosive growth. Jesus is referred to as a teacher. How do I start and lead him to faith in Jesus?

DR. CRAIG: I think you focus upon Jesus. Do not attack Muhammad or his life. Do not attack the Qur’an. That just gets the Muslim’s back up and puts him on the defensive. Muslims have great honor for Jesus. He's a great prophet. So talk about who Jesus is. It's very much like witnessing to a Jehovah's Witness quite honestly. You use the same verses. Talk about the parable of the vineyard. Read him that parable from the Gospel of Mark and say, “Who did Jesus claim to be here in this parable?” He was distinct from all the prophets that God had sent to the vineyard before. He was the owner’s only beloved Son, and yet he was rejected and killed. Help him to see that Jesus breaks the mold of being a mere prophet, but that he put himself in God's place as divine. This will help, hopefully, to push the Muslim to an even higher view of Jesus and lead him to faith in Christ.

MODERATOR: I have a friend who follows Islam. How do I speak to him about Jesus and help him understand Christianity? What's the best way forward?

DR. CRAIG: I think that in dealing with our Muslim friends we need to focus upon who Jesus is. Do not attack Muhammad. Do not criticize the Qur’an. That will only make your friend defensive and get his back up. Instead begin to talk about who is Jesus. Muslims have a very high regard for Jesus. He's one of the greatest of the prophets. What you want to help our Muslim friends see is that Jesus was more than a prophet. Witnessing to a Muslim is very much like witnessing to a Jehovah's Witness. The Bible verses you use will be very much the same. The verses that show the deity of Christ. For example, I love the parable of the vineyard where the owner of the vineyard (who symbolizes God) sends his servants to the vineyard to collect its fruit. The servants are the prophets sent by God who are abused and killed by the tenants of the vineyard until finally the owner of the vineyard says, “I have one left to send – my only Son. They will listen to my Son.” Now, what does that tell us about Jesus’ self-understanding? It shows that he thought of himself as the unique Son of God, the last Messenger of God to be sent, and one distinct from all of the prophets who have gone before. If we can help our Muslim friends to have this higher vision of who Jesus is, this may lead them to then giving their lives to Christ in faith and repentance.

MODERATOR: Thank you. Here's another one, a hard one. I think a lot of Christians wonder about this. I have always dreaded the challenge from non-Christians who raise the Old Testament accounts of God commanding the Israelites to wipe out women and children in addition to the men in a city. They asked, “How could I see this as any different from the actions by the worst jihadists in our time?”

DR. CRAIG: I've addressed this question at our website ReasonableFaith.org, question of the week #16. It deserves a lengthy answer because it's a tough question, but if you look at question of the week #16 at ReasonableFaith.org you'll see my argument that God's command to Israel to drive the tribes out of Canaan and divest themselves of the land is not inconsistent with God's being all-powerful and all-loving. It's important to understand this was not a command to commit genocide; rather, it was a command to drive these tribes out of the land. They were being divested of the land, and the land was being given over to Israel. If these Canaanite tribes had simply fled before the advancing Israeli armies no one would have died. No one needed to die. It was only those who stayed behind to fight that were killed. And notice that this is completely different from jihad in Islam. In Islam, jihad is a means of evangelism. It is a way of spreading Islam by violent means. One brings into submission countries which are not yet under Muslim domination. So the purpose of jihad is to bring other nations into the orbit of Islam and bring about their submission. By contrast, this conquest in Canaan was not a means of Jewish evangelism. This was not a means of converting the Canaanite tribes to Judaism. This was not a religious war. Rather, it was God's judgment upon the tribes of Canaan to divest them of the land. It wasn't a means of trying to secure their conversion to Judaism, and thus it's completely different from jihadism.

MODERATOR: So there’s a lot more. I think it's number 16 under – what did you call it?

DR. CRAIG: Questions of the week.

MODERATOR: Questions of the week on ReasonableFaith.org. You can get a lot more on that particular question. I'm getting lots of buzzing going on here on my phone, so we're going to try and take some from the floor now that we have. What can be done to protect young Christian students from spiritually indifferent professors or maybe even the kind of professor that you were talking about earlier?

DR. CRAIG: You Christian moms and dads need to be intentional in teaching your children from a very early age Christian doctrine and apologetics. You need to teach your children what we believe and why we believe it. If you do not do this, we are in real danger of losing the next generation. Do not think that the youth pastor or the church will bear this responsibility for you. It's moms and especially you dads who need to be the role model here in teaching our children what we believe and why we believe it. This will, I think, be the best protection against that high school teacher or university professor that takes aim at their faith. Let them encounter these objections and questions first in the security of the home, and then when they run into them elsewhere they will not feel so threatened by them.

MODERATOR: OK. Here's another one. How do you account for the theories that the disciples moved the stone from the tomb of Jesus? Is there any account for that? And then one little bit related to that. How do you account for the book of John being written 80 years after the historical events.

DR. CRAIG: With respect to the disciples moving the stone and stealing the body of Jesus, this was a theory propounded by European deists in the late 1700s. It is now completely dead. There is no historian or scholar who believes in this conspiracy theory. The fact that this is still bandied about on the Internet only shows the Grand Canyon that exists between scholarship about the historical Jesus and popular attitudes. To name just one problem with the conspiracy theory. It's utterly anachronistic. Jews had no idea of the resurrection of an isolated individual within history prior to the general resurrection at the end of the world, and therefore they would never think to steal the body of Jesus and say he was risen from the dead. The conspiracy theory looks at the disciples’ situation through the rearview mirror of 2,000 years of Christian history rather than looking at the situation of where the disciples as first century Jews would have stood and how they would have seen the situation. And for a first century Jew, a crucified Messiah was a contradiction in terms. There was no hope of a resurrection within history prior to the end of the world. They would either simply have gone home or else got themselves a new Messiah, but not steal the body and lie about the resurrection.

MODERATOR: Very good. What about John? Just the dating of John?

DR. CRAIG: It's unclear actually when the Gospel of John was written. It is at least before the end of the first century. We know that. But some scholars like John A. T. Robinson have argued that there's no reason John couldn't be dated earlier than AD 70. These arguments about the dating of the Gospels have been aptly compared to a line of drunks reeling arm and arm down the street. If one of them falls over and is knocked out the rest all collapse as well. The late dating of John tends to depend on the late dating of Matthew and Luke, and that will be affecting the Gospel of Mark as well. I think we've got very, very good grounds for thinking that Luke-Acts was written prior to the AD 60s while Paul was still alive, and that Mark was written even earlier. And that would mean you could pull the date of John forward as well. There's no reason to push it into the 90s. So this is, I think, a great deal of uncertainty.

MODERATOR: OK. There's still a big gap there between the Gospels as we know them genuinely and the other writings – Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Judas.

DR. CRAIG: Right. Completely qualitatively distinct. These apocryphal gospels which were forgeries under the disciples’ names (like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas) did not arise until the second half of the second century after Christ, after the generation of the eyewitnesses had died off. By contrast, all four of the Gospels were written and circulated within the first generation while the eyewitnesses were still alive.

MODERATOR: And the nature of the material is quite different, too. Isn't it?

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, these apocryphal gospels such as we mentioned are Gnostic documents. That is to say, they are pagan philosophy who used Jesus as a kind of sock puppet to mouth Gnostic Greek philosophy. They're not like the four Gospels about the historical Jew, Jesus of Nazareth.

MODERATOR: Very good. When discussing God with a non-Christian, what verses and prayers are running through your mind. What do you think about in terms of what would you share, where would you go in the Bible to begin sharing with someone who is a non-Christian?

DR. CRAIG: I guess I would focus on, or begin with, John 3:16 – that God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. I wouldn't want to get bogged down in the discussion about God unless the person has questions or objections, and then one can respond to him on a personal basis what his particular question is. But I don't have a sort of set pattern. I would just begin with the Gospel.

MODERATOR: Very good. Here's one. Last one, folks. Dr. Craig has to catch a plane in a few hours.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, I wish I could linger and chat.

MODERATOR: He's going to leave immediately from here, and I trust you'll understand and just be gracious to allow him to go. We'd love to keep you here and just keep asking questions, but let me just give you one more. How should students respond to teachers who only give marks to anti-Christian responses?

DR. CRAIG: Well, let me just say this in general. I do not think Christian students in classes should shoulder the responsibility of refuting the professor. I think that is a vain hope and is apt just to produce resistance and have recoil effect upon you. Rather, I would encourage you to treat the professor with utmost respect. He is the authority, and you are there to learn from him, even if he is diametrically opposed to you. If you treat him with that sort of respect and then do really good work, hopefully the grade will not be knocked down. But don't be a smart aleck who tries to refute him and embarrass the professor in front of other students. That's not your role.

MODERATOR: Can we say thank you to Dr. Craig?