Philosophical Issues in the Atonement
It is the purpose of this article to examine certain philosophical problems involved in the classic doctrine of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, particularly penal substitution. Objections based ...
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Philosophical Issues in the Atonement
It is the purpose of this article to examine certain philosophical problems involved in the classic doctrine of Christ’s substitutionary atonement, ...
Read MoreOn Systematic Philosophical Theology
The disciplines of systematic theology, dogmatic theology, fundamental theology, philosophical theology, and philosophy of religion are characterized and their relations to one another are discussed....
Read MoreIs God’s Moral Perfection Reducible to His Love?
Defenders of the identity thesis maintain that God’s moral perfection is reducible to and identical to His love. Unfortunately, this thesis overlooks the fact that, biblically, God‘s righteousness...
Read MoreGod and Space
This paper inquires into the nature of God’s relationship to space. It explores two different views, one that God transcends space or exists aspatially and the other that God exists throughout space...
Read MoreChrist, Our Indemnitor
Although Jonathan Rutledge’s suggestions for reinterpreting some Old Testament atonement motifs might be accommodated by my theory of the atonement without great disruption, nevertheless such reinte...
Read MoreReply To Peter Leithart
I’m grateful to Peter Leithart for his thought-provoking response to my proposal. A couple of points are worth making in counter-response. 1. The genre analysis of Genesis 1-11 as mytho-history...
Read MoreNo Trouble
Eric Wielenberg’s two alleged contradictions in my view of God, time, and creation are easily resolved. The first is dissolved by appreciating that God’s power to create the universe is a&...
Read More Download PDFA Reply to Wielenberg on a Temporal First Cause
Erik Wielenberg seeks to advance his critique of the kalām cosmological argument by putting forward three further criticisms of the view that God is temporal since the moment of creation. It is s...
Read More Download PDFIs Penal Substitution Unsatisfactory?
It might be objected to penal substitutionary theories that punishing Christ could not possibly meet the demands of divine retributive justice. For punishing another person for my crimes would not ser...
Read More Download PDFEleonore Stump’s Critique of Penal Substitutionary Atonement Theories
The first three chapters of Eleonore Stump’s Atonement are devoted to a critique of atonement theories she styles “Anselmian,” including penal substitutionary theories. I focus on he...
Read More Download PDFDivine Forgiveness and Legal Pardon
I argue that divine forgiveness of sinners, bzw. sins, is more akin to legal pardon than to forgiveness as it is usually understood in human relationships. For divine forgiveness involves not merely a...
Read More Download PDFBen Witherington III reviews <em>Atonement and the Death of Christ</em> and interviews William Lane Craig
Review It’s been a long, long time since I’ve read a good book on the atonement. The last one that I found really stimulating and challenging was Jurgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God...
Read MoreBig Bang Cosmology
Pre-Relativistic Cosmology In Aristotelian physics, prime matter, of which all physical substances are composed, is, like God Himself, eternal and uncreated. It underlies the eternal process of gener...
Read More'Men Moved By The Holy Spirit Spoke From God' (2 Peter 1.21): A Middle Knowledge Perspective on Biblical Inspiration
Scriptural inspiration has traditionally been understood by Christian theologians to be plenary, verbal, and confluent. But how is the plenary, verbal inspiration of Scripture compatible with Scriptur...
Read More Download PDFResponse To Van Inwagen And Welty
In response to my critics, I argue that Peter van Inwagen, despite his protestations, is an advocate of an indispensability argument for Platonism. What remains to be shown by van Inwagen is that his ...
Read More Download PDFA Christian Perspective on Homosexuality
A frank attempt to deal with the question of whether a homosexual lifestyle is immoral. First published in Hard Questions, Real Answers (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2003). Medical data updated by Dr. Pet...
Read More Download PDFRESPONSE TO JEFF KOPERSKI
This paper is a response to a paper by philosopher of science Jeff Koperski entitled “The Nature of the Laws of Nature.” Koperski addresses the question, “What ultim...
Read More Download PDFIs God the Son Begotten in His Divine Nature?
The doctrine of the Father’s begetting the Son in his divine nature, despite its credal affirmation, enjoys no clear scriptural support and threatens to introduce an objectionable ontological subord...
Read More Download PDFDivine Forgiveness As Legal Pardon
I argue that divine forgiveness of sinners, bzw. sins, is more akin to legal pardon than to forgiveness as it is usually understood in human relationships. For divine forgiveness involves not merely a...
Read More Download PDFIs Penal Substitution Unjust?
Penal substitution in a theological context is the doctrine that God inflicted upon Christ the suffering which we deserved as the punishment for our sins, as a result of which we no longer deserve pun...
Read More Download PDFIs Penal Substitution Incoherent?: An Examination Of Mark Murphy's Criticisms
Some critics of the doctrine of penal substitution have alleged that the doctrine is incoherent because punishment entails an attitude of condemnation or censure towards the person punished, which imp...
Read More Download PDFBergson Was Right about Relativity (well, partly)!
In the spring of 1922 a remarkable encounter occurred between the world’s most prominent scientist and the world’s leading philosopher of time. Einstein delivered a lecture on Relativity T...
Read More Download PDFNecessary Beings by Bob Hale
Bob Hale is one of the most important Platonists writing today. The unintended interface of his rich metaphysical theory of modality with theism is briefly explored....
Read More Download PDFReview: Natur und Zahl: Die Mathematisierbarkeit der Welt by Bernulf Kanitscheider
A critical review of a prominent, non-theistic, German philosopher’s attempt to articulate a philosophy of mathematics consistent with naturalism, an attempt which, it is argued, fails, both wit...
Read More Download PDFAbsolute creationism and divine conceptualism: A call for conceptual clarity
The contemporary debate over God and abstract objects is hampered by a lack of conceptual clarity concerning two distinct metaphysical views: absolute creationism and divine conceptualism. ...
Read More Download PDF"Absolute Creation" And "Theistic Activism": A Plea For Terminological Uniformity
Morris and Menzel’s view that God is the Creator of abstract as well as concrete objects is variously referred to by the labels “absolute creation” and “theistic activism.&rdqu...
Read More Download PDFGod and the Platonic Host
First given at the C. S. Lewis Society in Oxford, England, this lecture explores not only the challenge posed by Platonism to divine aseity but also C.S. Lwis’ interesting response to that chall...
Read More Download PDFReview: An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics: Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure
Review: An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics: Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure by James Franklin. James Franklin aspires to a realist view of mathematical objec...
Read More Download PDFResponse To Bridges And van Inwagen
Bridges’ so-called “moderate realism” is really a misnomer, since Aquinas’ view was that mathematical objects and universals are mere entia rationis, having no existence in the...
Read More Download PDFGod and Abstract Objects
Central to classical theism is the conception of God as the sole ultimate reality, the creator of all things apart from Himself. Such a doctrine is rooted in Hebrew-Christian Scripture and unfol...
Read More Download PDFGod and Abstract Objects
Platonism poses a challenge to the Christian doctrine that God is the sole ultimate reality. The claim of absolute creationism that God has created abstract objects faces the formidable problem ...
Read More Download PDFCreation <em>ex nihilo</em>: Theology and Science</p>
The biblical doctrine of temporal creation ex nihilo has received strong scientific confirmation from post-relativistic physics. Two lines of evidence point to an absolute beginning of the universe: t...
Read More Download PDFThe Resurrection of Theism
"The contemporary Western intellectual world," declares the noted philosopher Alvin Plantinga, "is a battleground or arena in which rages a battle for men's souls."[1] It is in the field of philo...
Read MoreReview Article: <em>God and Necessity</em> by Brian Leftow
A critical review of Brian Leftow's claim to ground modality in God's will.
Read More Download PDFGod and the 'Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics'
Neither realism nor anti-realism about mathematical objects has much to contribute to the question of the applicability of mathematics to the physical world. Theism provides the best answer to this qu...
Read More Download PDFPeter Van Inwagen, Substitutional Quantification, and Ontological Commitment
Peter van Inwagen has long claimed that he doesn’t understand substitutional quantification and that the notion is, in fact, meaningless. Van Inwagen identifies the source of his bewilderment as...
Read More Download PDFReview: God and Necessity
A critical review of Brian Leftow's attempt to safeguard divine aseity in the face of the challenge of Platonism.
Read More Download PDFConcept of God in Islam and Christianity
Do Muslims, Jews, and Christians worship the same God? Dr. Craig explains the essential differences between the Islamic and Christian conceptions of God....
Read More Download PDFWhat Happens When We Die?
In this sermon Dr. Craig uses reports of near- or after-death experiences to explain the Christian perspective of the intermediate state of the soul after death and the implications for the veridicali...
Read More Download PDFThe Scientific Kalam Cosmological Argument
In this lecture at Georgia Tech Dr. Craig focuses on the scientific evidence for the premises of the kalam cosmological argument for a Personal Creator of the universe....
Read More Download PDFThe <em>Kalam</em> Cosmological Argument
This article is the text of Dr. Craig's 2015 lecture at the University of Birmingham, where he did his doctoral studies which led to the revival of the kalam cosmological argument in our day....
Read More Download PDFHas the Multiverse Replaced God?
For many thinkers, the multiverse has become a sort of God-substitute, serving to explain the creation and fine-tuning of our cosmos. Dr. Craig explains why the multiverse fails as a surrogate deity....
Read More Download PDFCosmology – A Religion for Atheists?
In the award-winning film, "The Theory of Everything" a young Stephen Hawking introduces himself to his wife-to-be Jane as a student of cosmology. When she asks what that is, he replies, "It's a ...
Read More Download PDFPropositional Truth - Who Needs It?
On a deflationary view of truth the truth predicate does not ascribe a property of any explanatory significance to statements. The truth predicate is merely a device of semantic ascent, by means of wh...
Read More Download PDFPerils of the Open Road
PERILS OF THE OPEN ROAD When the course of events can go in more than one direction, given present conditions, does God know which way it will go? Open theists deny that God has knowledge of such &ld...
Read More Download PDFMary Leng's <em>Mathematics and Reality</em>
Mary Leng’s new book is a very thorough and closely argued response from a non-realist perspective to W. V. Quine’s Indispensability Argument for the existence of abstract objects, specifi...
Read More Download PDFAlvin Plantinga's <em>Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism</em>
Plantinga’s book is a semi-popular treatment of the conflicts, real or perceived, between science and religion, broadly construed. Because these disciplines are so broadly construed, the Christi...
Read More Download PDFHumanism for Children
A critical examination of the American Humanist Association's a new advertising campaign and website designed to furnish children with naturalistic or atheistic perspective on science, sexuality,...
Read More Download PDFThe God Particle
Dr. Craig's article on the God particle
Read More Download PDFGod and the Platonic Host
This paper, presented before the C. S. Lewis Society in Oxford on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, surveys the options available to the theist for meeting the challenge posed by platonism to div...
Read More Download PDFDoes God Exist?
In this article Dr. Craig sets forth eight reasons why he thinks God exists.
Read More Download PDFGod and Abstract Objects
To the uninitiated, platonism, science, and Christianity might seem poles apart. Neither the average scientist nor the average Christian, after all, finds abstract objects to be relevant to his quotid...
Read More Download PDFNavigating Sam Harris' <em>The Moral Landscape</em>
What is the best foundation for the existence of objective moral values and duties? What grounds them? What makes certain actions good or evil, right or wrong? If God does not exist, what foundation r...
Read More Download PDFApologetics Ministry - Advice to Christian Apologists Part 2
For those feeling called to an apologetics ministry, Dr. Craig continues his lecture offering advice to help students in that pursuit. In this second installment, he explains how societal ideas are fo...
Read More Download PDFIs Uncertainty A Sound Foundation For Religious Tolerance?
Founding religious toleration on uncertainty about the truth of one’s own religious convictions is multiply flawed. It naively supposes that the sources of religious intolerance are primarily in...
Read More Download PDFFailure
Personal reflections on how God can use failure in your life.
Read More Download PDFHow Can Christ Be the Only Way to God?
A rigorous attempt to answer the problem of the fate of the unevangelized and the challenge of religious pluralism.
Read More Download PDF<em>The Grand Design</em> — Truth Or Fiction?
When it came to the creation of the Universe, God just wasn’t necessary. This is the conclusion renowned English physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking has made in his latest book with Leonar...
Read More Download PDFThe Challenge of History: An Interview with William Lane Craig (<em>Australian Presbyterian</em>)
The most distinctive claim about Christianity in relation to other world religions is that Christianity says that God has revealed himself in history. As British theologian, Alan Richardson, has state...
Read More Download PDF<em>36 Arguments for the Existence of God</em>: Goldstein on the Cosmological Argument
Rebecca Goldstein's novel presents and refutes three dozen "arguments" for God's existence. The arguments, however, are straw men of her own construction, bearing only passing resemblance to...
Read More Download PDFIn Intellectual Neutral
A challenge to Christians to intellectual engagement.
Read More Download PDF'Noli Me Tangere': Why John Meier Won't Touch The Risen Lord
John Meier distinguishes 'the real Jesus' from 'the historical Jesus.' Meier claims that whatever happened to the real Jesus after his death, his resurrection cannot belong to the ...
Read More Download PDFTime, Eternity, And Eschatology
In order to explore the interface of time, eternity, and eschatology, we must first come to a differentiated understanding of these three notions....
Read MoreResponse to McCall and Balashov
This paper is an unpublished response to Yuri Balashov and Storrs McCall which was presented at a session of the Philosophy of Time Society devoted to Dr. Craig's Time and the Metaphysics of Rela...
Read More Download PDFDucking Friendly Fire: Davison on the Grounding Objection
Though Scott Davison is sympathetic to a Molinist account of divine providence, the so-called Grounding Objection still gives him pause. In response to my claim that the Grounding Objection is based u...
Read More Download PDFVan Inwagen On Uncreated Beings
Peter van Inwagen argues that (1) there are uncreated abstract objects like properties and (2) the affirmation of the existence of uncreated abstract objects is consistent with the affirmation of the ...
Read More Download PDFTaking Tense Seriously in Differentiating Past and Future: A Response to Wes Morriston
Wes Morriston argues that even if we take an endless series of events to be merely potentially, rather than actually, infinite, still no distinction between a beginningless and an endless series of ev...
Read More Download PDFOn Being a World Christian
A challenge to Christians to become involved in the task of bringing the message of the Gospel to the entire world.
Read More Download PDFThe End of the World
What does science tell us about the way the universe will end and how does this relate to Christian views?
Read More Download PDFPresuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar
In this first part of a two-part article, the presuppositions and pretentions of the Jesus Seminar are exposited and assessed. It is found that the principal presuppositions of (i) scientific naturali...
Read More Download PDFThe New Atheism and Five Arguments for God
Are there good arguments for God’s existence? Have the so-called New Atheists shown that the arguments for God are no good?
Read More Download PDFChristian Apologetics: Who Needs It?
Recently, Dr. Craig had the privilege of delivering two lectures on Christian Apologetics for the Stob Lectures at Calvin Theological Seminary. In this talk, Dr. Craig describes what Christian apologe...
Read More Download PDFDoes the Balance Between Saved and Lost Depend on Our Obedience to Christ’s Great Commission?
As a follow-up to my middle knowledge solution to the problem of Christian exclusivism, I ask whether the problem does not recur in another form under that solution: is it not the case that the balanc...
Read More Download PDFDale Allison On Jesus' Empty Tomb, His Post-Mortem Appearances, and the Origin of the Disciples' Belief in His Resurrection
I limit myself principally to a discussion of Dale Allison's treatment of what I take to be the three central facts undergirding a historical inference to Jesus' resurrection, namely, the di...
Read More Download PDFA Formulation and Defense of the Doctrine of the Trinity
After a brief historical survey of patristic Trinitarian thought, I contrast Social and "Anti-Social" Trinitarian views. A Social Trinitarian model is then presented, according to which God is a soul ...
Read More Download PDFDivine Eternity
Philosophical theologians have been sharply divided with respect to God's relationship to time. What are the principal arguments which they have offered for divine timelessness and temporality?...
Read More Download PDFMiddle Knowledge, Truth–Makers, and the "Grounding Objection"
The so-called "grounding objection" is the most commonly raised misgiving which philosophers have to the doctrine of divine middle knowledge: how can counterfactuals of creaturely freedom be true when...
Read More Download PDFWhy are (some) Platonists so insouciant?
Some platonists truly agonize over the ontological commitments which their platonism demands of them. But many others are remarkably insouciant about positing the existence of abstract objects, despit...
Read More Download PDFReflections on "Uncaused Beginnings"
Graham Oppy’s interesting analysis of the “causal shape” of reality conflates causal ordering with temporal ordering of causes and assigns the wrong causal shape to reality as concei...
Read More Download PDFWho Is The Real Jesus: The Jesus Of The Bible Or The Jesus Of The Qur’An?
A comparison of how Jesus is described in the New Testament and in the Qur’an in order to determine which is more reliable.
Read More Download PDFWhat is the Relation between Science and Religion
Examines several ways in which science and theology relate to each other.
Read More Download PDFThe Evidence for Jesus
Five reasons are presented for thinking that critics who accept the historical credibility of the gospel accounts of Jesus do not bear a special burden of proof relative to more skeptical critics. The...
Read More Download PDFDawkins' Delusion
From Contending with Christianity's Critics, pp. 2-5. Ed. Paul Copan and Wm. L. Craig. Nashville, Tenn.: Broadman and Holman. Used by permission....
Read More Download PDFApologetics Training - Advice to Christian Apologists Part 1
Have you ever wondered what type of training would be the most beneficial for those who aspire to become Christian apologists? Dr. Craig, when asked to present for the Stobb Lectures, recently address...
Read More Download PDFShould Peter Get A New Philosophical Advisor?
This article responds to William Hasker’s critique of my article “Does the Balance between Saved and Lost Depend on our Obedience to Christ’s Great Commission?” I argue that wh...
Read More Download PDFRediscovering the Historical Jesus: Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar
In this first part of a two-part article, the presuppositions and pretentions of the Jesus Seminar are exposited and assessed. It is found that the principal presuppositions of (i) scientific naturali...
Read More Download PDFTrinity Monotheism Once More: A Response to Daniel Howard-Snyder
A response to Howard-Snyder's criticism of the Social Trinitarian model laid out in Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview. Exploiting insights from mereology, I offer a possible alte...
Read More Download PDFOmniscience, Tensed Facts, and Divine Eternity
A difficulty for a view of divine eternity as timelessness is that if time is tensed, then God, in virtue of His omniscience, must know tensed facts. But tensed facts, such as It is now t, can only be...
Read More Download PDFTimothy O’Connor on Contingency: A Review essay on <em>Theism and Ultimate Explanation: The Necessary Shape of Contingency</em> (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008)
In the first part of Theism and Ultimate Explanation Timothy O’Connor provides a compact survey of the metaphysics and epistemology of modality, defending modal realism and a priorism. In the bo...
Read More Download PDF<em>Creatio ex nihilo</em>: A Critique of the Mormon Doctrine of Creation
A critique of the Mormon doctrine of the eternity of matter in light of philosophy and science.
Read More Download PDFThe Birth of God
Does it make sense to say that Christmas marks the birth of God? This question evokes the primary theological debates of the fourth and fifth centuries – how Jesus Christ can be considered both ...
Read More Download PDFGod Is Not Dead Yet
Dr. Craig's cover story for Christianity Today, in which he describes the renaissance of arguments for God's existence among contemporary philosophers. He closes with some provocative commen...
Read More Download PDFAdvice to European Christian Apologists
Tips to budding European Christian apologists.
Read More Download PDF"No Other Name": A Middle Knowledge Perspective on the Exclusivity of Salvation Through Christ
The conviction of the New Testament writers was that there is no salvation apart from Jesus. This orthodox doctrine is widely rejected today because God's condemnation of persons in other world r...
Read More Download PDFRediscovering the Historical Jesus: The Evidence for Jesus
Five reasons are presented for thinking that critics who accept the historical credibility of the gospel accounts of Jesus do not bear a special burden of proof relative to more skeptical critics. The...
Read More Download PDFPantheists in Spite of Themselves? Pannenberg, Clayton, and Shults on Divine Infinity
Christian theology has traditionally affirmed that God is infinite. But some contemporary theologians seem to think that this affirmation stands in tension with the Christian belief in the reality of ...
Read More Download PDFGod and the Beginning of Time
Leibniz's question to Clarke, "Why Did God Not Create the Word Sooner?" poses a difficult problem for theists holding to a neo-Newtonian view that God is omnitemporal and that time is beginningle...
Read More Download PDFOn Hasker's Defense of Anti-Molinism
In a pair of recent articles, William Hasker has attempted to defend Robert Adams's new anti-Molinist argument. But I argue that the sense of explanatory priority operative in the argument is eit...
Read More Download PDFVilenkin's Cosmic Vision: A Review Essay of <em>Many Worlds in One: The Search for Other Universes</em>, by Alex Vilenkin.
Vilenkin's recent book is a wonderful popular introduction to contemporary cosmology. It contains provocative discussions of both the beginning of the universe and of the fine-tuning of the unive...
Read More Download PDFJesus and His Passion
Examines what we know from history of Jesus’ Passion.
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