Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who took a medieval Muslim argument for God out of the history books and made professional philosophers answer it. + In 1977 a young American finished a doctoral thesis at the University of Birmingham on an argument that Western philosophy had quietly retired. It came from the medieval Islamic schools, it ran in three short lines, and almost nobody was using it. Within thirty years it had a literature of its own: articles for it and against it in the professional journals, a book-length exchange with an atheist philosopher published by Oxford, and a place in the standard undergraduate anthologies on the existence of God. The thesis writer was William Lane Craig, and the argument was the kalam. Craig belongs on a Christian apologetics shelf for a reason that has little to do with any single argument. He is the man who carried the case out of the seminar room. Alvin Plantinga had made belief in God respectable again inside philosophy departments, and Richard Swinburne had put the weight of probability behind it, but Craig went where neither of them went: onto stages, in front of ticketed crowds, against Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris and Lawrence Krauss, with a stopwatch running and a microphone in his hand. The high school debater never really stopped debating. One fact tells you what kind of career this was. He holds two doctorates, one in philosophy from an English university and one in theology from a German one, taken seven years apart, and in both cases he went and sat under a supervisor who disagreed with him. Then, a few years after the second of them, he spent seven years with no teaching post at all, and that stretch is where his most technical books came from.

(●) 1949 AD: Born in Peoria to a railway man’s family that did not go to church, and grew up a competitive debater. + William Lane Craig was born on 23 August 1949 in Peoria, Illinois, the second of three children. His father, Mallory John Craig, was an executive with the Toledo, Peoria and Western railway; his mother, Doris Irene Walker, kept the house. The family lived for a time in Keokuk, Iowa, and he finished his schooling at East Peoria Community High School. It was not a religious home in any serious sense, and by his own later account the teenage Craig was miserable. What he was good at was talking. He joined the debate team, where he learned to build a case against a clock and to hear an opponent’s argument well enough to answer the actual words of it, and he won the Illinois state oratory championship. Nobody watching a high school boy take a trophy for public speaking would have guessed what the skill was being sharpened for. Yet every one of the debates he would hold forty years later against the best-known atheists in the English-speaking world ran on rules he first learned in a high school gymnasium: an opening statement, a rebuttal, a clock, and a room full of people deciding for themselves who had answered whom.

(●) 1965 AD: A girl in his German class told him God loved him, and six months later he gave his life to Christ. + Her name was Sandy Tiffan, and she sat in front of him in high school German. Craig has told the story many times and always the same way: he was, in his words, "an alienated and miserable non-Christian" and she was "a radiant Christian," and what finally undid him was not an argument at all. She told him that God loved him. As he puts it, that idea "so staggered me that six months later I yielded my life to Christ and was born anew." He remembers the date: "It was September 11, 1965." There is a detail in his account that is worth keeping. When he asked Sandy where he should go to church, she steered him away from her own congregation, which she thought had too many problems, and sent him instead to Mt. Olive Missionary Church in Peoria, where he spent the next two years putting down roots. It is a small, unglamorous piece of honesty from a teenage girl, and it shaped the rest of a life. Years later Sandy’s own teenage sons sat in an apologetics class at a Christian high school where the teacher was showing videos of a philosopher debating atheists. The boys told their teacher, "Oh, yeah, our Mom led that guy to the Lord."

(●) 1971 AD: He left Wheaton for Campus Crusade, married Jan, and found that the students’ questions were sending him to philosophy. + Craig graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in communications, taken with high honors. He went from there onto the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ, the student mission organization, and it was there that he met Jan. They married in 1972 and have been married ever since, with two grown children; she has run the ministry side of his working life for half a century. Campus work is where the question that shaped him first bit. Students asked things he could not answer, and a young man who had won a state championship for talking discovered that being quick on his feet is no help at all when the honest reply is that you do not know. So he went and found out. In 1973 he entered Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, and came out in 1975 with two master’s degrees taken summa cum laude, the highest of the honors a school awards, one in philosophy of religion and one in church history and the history of Christian thought. His teacher there was Norman Geisler, an evangelical philosopher of the older generation who worked in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas. Philosophy of religion is simply the branch of philosophy that asks whether religious claims are true and what they even mean: not what Christians believe, which is a question for historians, but whether there is a God, whether such a being could become a man, whether a dead man could rise. It was an unfashionable field in 1973. Within Craig’s working life it became one of the liveliest in the discipline.

(●) 1977 and 1984 AD: Two doctorates in two countries, one on the argument for God and one on the resurrection. + The first doctorate was in philosophy, at the University of Birmingham in England, finished in 1977. His supervisor was John Hick, one of the most distinguished philosophers of religion alive and a man travelling in the opposite direction: Hick was in the middle of becoming the leading advocate of religious pluralism, the view that the great faiths are so many culturally shaped responses to one ultimate reality, none of them uniquely true. Craig wrote under him on the cosmological argument, the family of arguments that reason from the existence of the universe back to a cause of it. The thesis became two books, The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979) and The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (1980). The second doctorate was in theology, and it came out of a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation that took the Craigs to Munich. He finished in 1984 under Wolfhart Pannenberg, the German theologian who had startled his own guild by insisting that the resurrection of Jesus is a historical event and must be argued for as one, in front of historians, on the evidence. That thesis was published in 1985 as The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus during the Deist Controversy, a study of the eighteenth-century fight over whether miracles can be established by testimony at all. Two supervisors, two disagreements, two doctorates. Think for a moment about how deliberate that is. A student choosing where to do a doctorate is choosing who will read every page he writes and where the objections will come from, and a man who intended to argue publicly that God exists and that Jesus rose from the dead went and put himself under readers who would not simply wave him through. Whatever else the resulting books are, they were not written in a room where everybody agreed.

(●) 1987 AD: With no post left to take he moved his family to Belgium for seven years of research, and came back to a chair built for writing. + For seven years the path looked ordinary enough. Craig taught philosophy of religion at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School from 1980 to 1986, then spent a year at Westmont College in California, and then the road simply ran out. There was no post waiting, and a man with two doctorates and no classroom had to decide what to do about it. What the Craigs did next looks strange until you see what came of it. They moved to Brussels, and from 1987 to 1994 he pursued research at the University of Louvain, listed on his own record as a visiting researcher rather than as a professor with a lecture list and a stack of essays to mark. Seven years, in other words, of reading and writing in a country where nobody expected him at nine on Monday morning. The books that came out of that stretch are the technical ones: the studies of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, the beginnings of the long project on time, and the exchange with the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith that Oxford published in 1993 as Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology. In 1994 he joined Talbot School of Theology at Biola University in La Mirada, California, and within a couple of years was its research professor of philosophy. The arrangement was unusual, and the unusualness was the point: a post with no ordinary teaching load, so that the man holding it could write books and go where the arguments were. From 2014 he also held a professorship at Houston Baptist University, later Houston Christian University, until 2024. In 2017 Biola endowed a chair of philosophy in his name.

(●) 2009 AD: He spent a decade on stage against Hitchens, Harris and Krauss, and in Oxford one famous opponent left his chair empty. + The ministry Reasonable Faith was founded in the middle of the 2000s and its website went up in 2007, carrying transcripts, a weekly podcast, and a long-running teaching class called Defenders; local chapters began in 2010 in Dallas and Tulsa and multiplied from there. It gave Craig something most philosophers never have, which is an audience that was not sitting an exam. Then came the debates. Christopher Hitchens faced him at Biola in April 2009, having said beforehand that Craig was "thought of as a very tough guy. Very rigorous, very scholarly, very formidable." Sam Harris took him on at the University of Notre Dame in April 2011 and opened his own first speech by calling Craig "the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists." The physicist Lawrence Krauss debated him the same year and the cosmologist Sean Carroll in 2014, and both of those men went away irritated, Carroll complaining that Craig would simply restate the original argument after it had been answered. Craig would contend and show they neither engaged his premises nor brought any worthy defeaters. The strangest evening was 25 October 2011, in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford. The Oxford University Christian Union had invited Richard Dawkins to defend The God Delusion against Craig. Dawkins declined in the Guardian, borrowing an old retort to say that such a debate would look great on Craig’s curriculum vitae and not so good on his own, and adding that his real reason was Craig’s defense of the slaughter of the Canaanites, which he called reprehensible. The organisers held the event anyway, with the atheist philosopher Peter Millican in the chair, a panel of three academics to press Craig, and Dawkins’ chair left standing empty on the platform. The photograph of that chair travelled further than most debate transcripts ever do.

(●) 2020 AD: At seventy he began the work of his life, a systematic theology of the whole Christian faith, and published it one volume at a time in case he did not live to finish. + Sometime in the mid-1970s at Birmingham, a doctoral student asked his supervisor what he meant to write next. Craig retold it on the Reasonable Faith podcast when the first volume appeared: "I asked Professor Hick what his next project was going to be, and he said that he was thinking about writing a systematic philosophical theology." He had never heard the phrase before. It went into the back of his mind and stayed there the better part of half a century. Hick went the other way, into the religious pluralism that made his name, and no such book ever came from him. Jan pressed her husband to write it himself, and in 2017 he agreed. He cleared the desk first, finishing the long study of the atonement and the work on Adam, and then the world shut down in 2020 and he wrote straight through it, ten months of writing behind him by the time he told a Talbot audience over a video link what he was doing. He was seventy. A systematic theology is the whole of Christian doctrine set out in order, in the classic Protestant pattern of the loci communes, the common places: prolegomena, meaning the questions that come before the doctrines, what the discipline is and how it should be done, and then Scripture, God, creation, man, Christ, salvation, the church, and last things. The middle word is what Craig added. His is a systematic theology written by a philosopher, in analytic philosophy, the style that pins down what each word in a claim means and then tests the argument a step at a time rather than tracing the history of an idea. He has an explanation for why such books are rare now: the medieval systematic theologies were thoroughly philosophical, the Summa of Thomas Aquinas above all, while the theologians who write systematics today are usually trained as biblical or historical scholars rather than in philosophy. Few philosophers with the training attempt a whole system either, and he names Richard Swinburne as the outstanding exception. Every locus opens with the biblical evidence, gathered before a word of philosophy is spoken. And he keeps the two tasks apart: proving a doctrine true is the apologist’s business, while the systematician’s business is to state it clearly and show that it holds together. Wiley-Blackwell contracted the whole series and brings it out a volume at a time. Volume 1, Prolegomena, On Scripture, On Faith, appeared in February 2025: 368 pages on what the discipline is, on the divine authority of Scripture, and on what faith is and how a man holds it rationally. The doctrine of God needed two books. Volume 2a came in April 2025, 576 pages taking the divine attributes one at a time, incorporeality, necessity, aseity (owing his being to nothing outside himself), simplicity, eternality, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence and goodness; volume 2b followed in May 2026, 496 pages that gather six arguments for God’s existence into one place and then set out a doctrine of the Trinity on the model of God as a tripersonal soul. Volume 3, On Creation, On Man, is due in October 2026 and runs to 656 pages, with organic chemistry, evolutionary biology, neurology and paleoanthropology worked in beside the exegesis, and providence handled on Molinist lines (T3). Volume 4 will take Christ and salvation, volume 5 the church and last things. Four books, some two thousand printed pages, and the doctrine of Christ has not been reached yet. Nearly every position he has defended in fifty years arrives in them in order, in its proper place, with the objections attached. He had guessed eight to ten years and at least five volumes. Publishing in installments was a decision he reached with Wiley-Blackwell, and the reason he gave for it in that same conversation is the plainest sentence in the whole project: "Death or illness could intervene and this project might be aborted." Better, he said, to get each volume out where it will stay, so that "at least you’re producing something, you’re getting it out there, and that will be there permanently." His colleagues take its measure in the endorsements: Charles Taliaferro calls it "the culmination of an impressive career in philosophy and theology," and Alister McGrath calls it a landmark treatise and "a major contribution to our understanding of the relation of philosophy and Christian doctrine." He turned seventy-seven in August 2026, emeritus at Talbot, retired from the post but keeping the title, with volume four already announced for January 2027 and the church and the last things still to come. The debates were the part the world watched. This is the part he means to leave behind him.

What He Taught

(T1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began to exist. + Something crashes in the next room. You do not stand there wondering whether it might have happened for no reason whatever; you go and look for what knocked the shelf over. That instinct, taken seriously and applied to the largest thing there is, is the cosmological argument: an argument that reasons from the existence of the universe back to a cause of it. Craig’s version is called the kalam. Kalam is the Arabic word for speech, and it came to name the medieval Islamic tradition of theological argument; the version he revived was sharpened by al-Ghazali, an eleventh-century Persian theologian. It runs in three lines and a reader can hold all of it in mind at once: - Whatever begins to exist has a cause. - The universe began to exist. - Therefore, the universe has a cause. The first line is the one most people grant without being asked, and Craig defends it much the way you would defend it at a kitchen table: if things really could pop into being with no cause at all, we ought to catch it happening now and then, and we never do. Nobody has ever come downstairs to find a horse in the hallway that nothing whatever put there. The second line is where he spends most of his effort, and he defends it twice over, once as a philosopher and once from the physics. The philosophical case turns on a distinction most of us never have occasion to make: the difference between a collection that simply keeps growing and one that is already complete with an endless number of things in it. The first sort is ordinary enough. Start counting, and there is no last number waiting to stop you. The second sort is what mathematicians call an actual infinity, a finished set with infinitely many members already sitting in it, and on paper it is a perfectly respectable idea. Craig’s claim is that it cannot be cashed out in the world we actually live in, because when you try, absurdities follow: take one book off a shelf holding infinitely many and you have exactly as many books left as you started with, take away every odd-numbered one and you still do, and subtraction has stopped meaning anything. And even supposing such a collection could exist, he argues, you could not arrive at today by living through it one moment after another, any more than a man could finish counting down from infinity and announce that he had at last reached zero. So the series of past events has to have had a beginning. The scientific case is the one his opponents find harder to wave off. Big Bang cosmology already points to a beginning, and beyond it Craig appeals to the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem of 2003, a result named for the three physicists who proved it. Its claim is a modest one, and the modesty is the strength: any universe whose expansion has run at an average rate above zero, whatever the details of the physics turn out to be, cannot be stretched back into the past forever. Somewhere behind it there is a boundary. Then comes the step that makes the argument theological rather than merely cosmological. Craig asks what a cause of space, time and matter would have to be like, and several answers fall out at once: it cannot sit inside space or time, since it made them; it cannot be made of matter, for the same reason; and it must be powerful past imagining. The last property is the interesting one. He argues that the cause must also be personal, meaning a mind that chooses rather than a mechanism that simply runs, and the reason is a puzzle about timing. A cause standing changelessly outside time, with every condition for its effect permanently in place, ought to produce that effect permanently too, the way water below freezing is ice for as long as it is that cold. An effect with a birthday is exactly what such a cause should not be able to manage. Unless, that is, the cause is the sort of thing that can decide, which is what we mean when we say a man got up out of his chair and nothing made him do it. He is careful about what this does not do, and the care is part of why philosophers took the argument seriously. The kalam does not get you to the Trinity, or to Christ, or to the God who spoke to Israel. It gets you to a beginningless personal cause of the universe and no further, which is why Craig hands the reader on from there to the historical arguments (T2). Nor does he pretend the case is closed. Adolf Grünbaum, Quentin Smith, Graham Oppy and Wes Morriston have all pressed him on the infinity arguments and on the causal principle in the first line, he has spent decades answering them, and the exchange in the journals is still going.

(Q) "On the basis of the kalam cosmological argument it is therefore plausible that an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful." + Source: William Lane Craig, "The Scientific Kalam Cosmological Argument" (reasonablefaith.org). "Sans" is simply the French for "without," a piece of philosopher’s shorthand: apart from the universe, with nothing else there, this is what the cause must be. Notice how modest the verb is. Not "proves" but "it is plausible that." Craig argues in probabilities and says so.

(T2) The best explanation of the empty tomb, the appearances and the disciples’ faith is that God raised Jesus from the dead. + Imagine a detective who refuses to use any evidence the defence will not concede. She has fewer facts to work with, but every one of them is granted by both sides of the room, and whatever she builds on them is that much harder to knock down. That is the shape of Craig’s case for the resurrection. He does not begin by arguing that the Gospels are inerrant, meaning without error in anything they assert, or even that they are generally reliable. He begins with four facts he says the majority of scholars who write on the subject accept: that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish council; that his tomb was found empty by women followers on the Sunday morning; that afterwards various individuals and groups experienced appearances of Jesus alive; and that the first disciples came to believe he had been raised, against everything in their background that would have predisposed them otherwise. The earliest evidence is not a Gospel at all but a summary Paul says he received and handed on: "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve" (1 Corinthians 15:3-5). Then he asks a question that belongs to ordinary reasoning rather than to theology: what best explains those four facts together? This is what philosophers call inference to the best explanation, which is what a doctor does with a set of symptoms and a jury does with a set of exhibits. You lay the candidate explanations side by side and ask which one covers the most ground with the least strain. Craig runs the rivals through: that the disciples stole the body, which does not explain their willingness to die; that the women went to the wrong tomb, which the authorities could have corrected in an afternoon; that the appearances were hallucinations, which does not empty a tomb and does not fit group experiences. His conclusion is that the hypothesis the first Christians themselves gave still explains the evidence better than anything since. The standing objection is not about the facts but about the rules. Bart Ehrman, who debated Craig on exactly this in 2006, argues that a historian as historian can never establish a miracle, since a miracle is by definition the least probable of events. That question, whether testimony can establish a miracle at all, was the subject of Craig’s Munich doctorate, and he has been answering it since before Ehrman asked it.

(Q) "There are four facts agreed upon by the majority of scholars who have written on these subjects which any adequate historical hypothesis must account for: Jesus’ entombment by Joseph of Arimathea, the discovery of his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection." + Source: William Lane Craig, "The Resurrection of Jesus" (reasonablefaith.org). "Post-mortem" simply means after death. Craig’s conclusion from the four is stated just as plainly: the hypothesis that best explains these facts is "God raised Jesus from the dead."

(T3) God knows what every free creature would freely do in any circumstance, and that is how providence and freedom fit together. + A mother knows her daughter. Put the girl in a room with a friend who is crying and she will stay; put her in a room with a friend who is showing off and she will walk out. The mother has not made her daughter do anything. She simply knows her well enough to know how she would freely act, and she can arrange an afternoon accordingly. Stretch that to infinity and you have what theologians call middle knowledge. The idea comes from Luis de Molina, a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit, and Craig has spent more pages on it than on anything else. Molina distinguished three kinds of divine knowledge, and the third is the one everything turns on. God knows, first, everything that could happen, every way things might possibly go, and that is called his natural knowledge. He knows, second, everything that actually will happen, which is called his free knowledge because it depends on what he has freely decided to create. Between those two, Molina said, stands a third kind, and because it stands between them it is called middle knowledge: God knows what every free creature would freely do in any circumstance in which that creature might be placed. Statements of that form ("if Peter were warming himself at that fire, he would deny me three times") are what philosophers call counterfactuals of creaturely freedom. A counterfactual is simply an if-then claim about how things would have gone in a situation that may never come about at all, the sort of thing we say to each other every day: if you had taken the earlier train you would have missed the accident. Molina held that God knows every last one of these about every creature he might ever make, and knows them before and independently of deciding what to create. If that is right, a great deal falls into place. God can order history with complete sovereignty and without pushing anyone, by choosing which world of free creatures to make. Peter tells the crowd at Pentecost that Jesus was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" and in the same breath that "you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men" (Acts 2:23): a plan and a free crime, in one sentence, and middle knowledge is Craig’s account of how both can be true. It is disputed, and not only by atheists. The standing objection has a name, the grounding objection, and it is easier to feel than to answer. A true statement is normally made true by something out in the world: it is true that the kettle is boiling because of what the kettle is doing. So if Peter had never existed at all, what would have made it true that he would have denied Christ at that fire? There is no Peter, no fire, and no denial, and so there seems to be nothing left to do the job. The theologians object from two directions at once, and they do not agree with each other either. Reformed theologians reject middle knowledge from one side, holding that God’s decree, not the creature’s free choice, settles what happens; open theists reject it from the other, holding that free future choices are not there to be known. Craig has answered both at book length and neither side considers the matter closed.

(Q) "By knowing how creatures would freely behave in certain circumstances and putting them in those circumstances, God can ultimately bring about his ends without abridging the freedom of persons but actually allowing them to do as they please knowing that ultimately despite their freedom his ends will be accomplished." + Source: William Lane Craig, Defenders class transcript, series 3, "Doctrine of God (Part 15): God’s Middle Knowledge" (reasonablefaith.org). "Abridging" here means cutting short or curtailing. The whole doctrine is an attempt to say that God gets what he intends without anyone being overridden (T3).

(T4) A Christian knows the faith is true by the Spirit’s witness and shows it true by argument, and the two must never be confused. + A woman knows her husband loves her. Ask her to prove it and she may do rather badly: she will mention a hospital waiting room and a decision he made about a job, and none of it amounts to a demonstration. But it would be a strange philosopher who told her that until she can produce the proof she is not entitled to the belief. Craig makes a distinction out of that, and it sits underneath everything else he does. Knowing that Christianity is true and showing that Christianity is true are two different tasks. A believer knows it, he says, fundamentally through the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, which is not an inference from evidence but something more like a direct awareness. Showing it, by contrast, is the work of argument and evidence, and that work is done for other people: for the enquirer, the objector, the son home from university with questions. He is drawing here on an account called Reformed epistemology. Epistemology is the study of when a belief counts as knowledge and what a person needs in order to be entitled to hold it, and the Reformed version of it, developed by Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstorff, holds that belief in God can be properly basic. A properly basic belief is one a person is entitled to hold without arguing for it, the way you are entitled to believe the world did not begin five minutes ago, or that other people have minds. Craig’s claim is that belief in God, grounded in the Spirit’s witness, is that kind of belief. You might be thinking: is that not just a way of saying "I feel it, so leave me alone"? Craig’s answer is that the witness is self-authenticating for the person who has it while remaining neither irresistible nor beyond doubt, and that it does not excuse anyone from doing the intellectual work. But the objection has been pressed hard, most persistently by the philosopher Michael Martin, who replied that a Muslim or a Mormon can say precisely the same thing, and that a belief protected in this way can never be corrected by evidence. It is the point at which Craig’s critics and some of his admirers meet. There is a pastoral edge to it that explains why he will not give the distinction up. He says plainly that arguments never converted anyone; the Spirit does that, and may use an argument to do it. The apologist’s job is not to win a soul by logic but to remove what is in the way.

(Q) "The way we know Christianity to be true is by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit." + Source: William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, chapter 1, "How Do I Know Christianity Is True?"; he puts it in the same words in his answer "Counterfeit Claims of the Spirit’s Witness" (reasonablefaith.org). "Self-authenticating" means the witness carries its own credentials and does not wait on other proofs to back it up. Craig adds at once that it is not therefore irresistible or beyond doubt.

(T5) If God does not exist, life has no ultimate meaning, value or purpose, and nobody manages to live as though that were so. + This is the lecture Craig has given more than any other, usually to students, and it is the one that empties a room of small talk. It starts from two assumptions, which he asks his hearers to grant only for the length of the hour: no God, and no life beyond this one. Then it asks what follows if both are true. Take meaning first. The universe on that picture is running down toward heat death, a cold and lifeless end from which nothing recovers, and whatever the human race manages in the meantime, the cures and the cathedrals and the children, goes into the dark along with everything else. Value comes next, and here the trouble is not about the far future but about this afternoon. If there is no God, Craig argues, there is no standard standing above human opinion to make an act actually right or actually wrong rather than merely approved of or disliked, and anyone who says otherwise owes an account of who or what a moral obligation is an obligation to. Purpose is the third, and the shortest to state. A person who came from nothing by accident and returns to nothing was not for anything, whatever he does in between. He then turns to the honest half of the lecture, which is that almost nobody lives this way. He points to the atheist writers who saw it most clearly and flinched: Jean-Paul Sartre, who said we must create our own values and thereby smuggled significance back in; Albert Camus, who called suicide the one serious philosophical problem and then wrote of resisting the absurd; Bertrand Russell, who said the soul’s habitation must be built on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, and then spent his life campaigning as though justice were real. What matters for the rest of his work is the piece of self-restraint at the end of it. Craig does not claim that atheism is false because its consequences are bleak, and he says so in as many words, because an argument of that shape is wishing rather than reasoning: the world is under no obligation to be comfortable. What he claims is narrower. The alternatives are what they are, the cost of one of them is not usually counted, and a person who wants to live consistently should at least read the bill before he chooses.

(Q) "If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution." + Source: William Lane Craig, "The Absurdity of Life without God" (reasonablefaith.org). The restraint is in the same essay: "Now I want to make it clear that I have not yet shown biblical Christianity to be true. But what I have done is clearly spell out the alternatives." (T5)

(Q) "The Gospel is never heard in isolation. It is always heard against the background of the cultural milieu in which one lives." + Source: William Lane Craig, "Christian Apologetics: Who Needs It?" (reasonablefaith.org). He has just asked why considerations of culture should matter to an apologist at all, and this is his answer. The sentence that follows explains why he thinks the work is worth a life: "A person raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the Gospel which a person who is secularized will not." The point of the debates was never the scorecard. It was the background against which the next generation would hear the gospel at all.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He gave ordinary Christians a case they could use and gave professional philosophers one they had to answer. + Peter wrote to scattered and frightened Christians about "always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15). The Greek word behind "defense" is apologia, a courtroom word for the speech a defendant makes, and it is where the word apologetics comes from. For most of the twentieth century that instruction was hard for an ordinary believer to obey, because the materials were either too thin to survive a hostile question or too technical to read. Craig built both tiers and kept them connected. Reasonable Faith, which grew out of a 1984 textbook, appeared under its own title in 1994 and reached a third edition in 2008, became a standard seminary text; On Guard (2010) does the same work for a reader with no training; the Defenders class walks a congregation through Christian doctrine week by week; and the Reasonable Faith website put transcripts, debates and answered questions in front of anyone with a connection. The chapters that began in Dallas and Tulsa in 2010 spread because there was demand for them. The other tier is the journals, and it is the harder-won achievement. An apologist can always be ignored. What Craig did with the kalam was make it expensive to ignore: Adolf Grünbaum, Quentin Smith, Graham Oppy and Wes Morriston wrote against it in the professional literature, and Oxford published the book-length exchange with Smith in 1993, which is the sort of thing that happens only when an argument has to be answered. Sam Harris, no friend of the conclusions, called him "the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists," and it was the atheist philosopher Peter Millican who chaired the Oxford evening in 2011. Set him beside his two nearest contemporaries and the division of labour comes clear. Alvin Plantinga made Christian belief respectable again inside philosophy departments, and Richard Swinburne put the machinery of probability behind the case. What Craig added was the third thing, and it was the one nobody else wanted to do. He took the case outside, into halls with ticket queues and cameras at the back, and taught a generation of ordinary Christians that they were allowed to argue.

(†) Every position he defends was put first in front of the specialists most likely to refute it. + Apologetics is a field in which a man can publish a whole shelf of books without a single expert ever being obliged to read one. They sell, the arguments circulate among people who already agree with them, and nobody trained to test the third step is ever put in the position of having to. Craig took the other road from the beginning, and the habit is as much a part of what he handed on as any single argument in it. - The journals, and which journals. He has published more than a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology, and the telling thing is where. Peer review is the arrangement by which a journal sends a submitted paper out to specialists in the field, usually with the author’s name stripped off, and prints it only if they cannot find sufficient reason to reject it. New Testament Studies, the flagship journal of the international guild of New Testament scholars and not an apologetics venue, published his case for the historicity of the empty tomb in 1985. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science published "God, Creation, and Mr Davies" in 1986. The astrophysics journal Astrophysics and Space Science published "The Ultimate Question of Origins: God and the Beginning of the Universe" in 1999. The Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, Erkenntnis and Synthese have taken his work as well. The referees at those journals had no stake whatever in the conclusion and every professional reason to say no. - Asking the man whose result it was. The second premise of the kalam (T1) came to lean on the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, a result published in 2003 showing that any universe which has on average been expanding cannot be extended infinitely into the past. Craig did not simply quote it and move on. He wrote to Alexander Vilenkin, one of the three physicists who proved it, asked whether he was representing it correctly, and then published the reply: "I think you represented what I wrote about the BGV theorem in my papers and to you personally very accurately." He printed the qualifications alongside it, including Vilenkin’s point that the theorem assumes a classical spacetime and that at very small scales quantum fluctuations could make those concepts inapplicable. A man who wanted only the useful half of that answer had no reason to print the other half. - The books where the other side gets a printed rebuttal. He has contributed to at least five multiple-view volumes, the format in which each writer argues one position, the rival advocates answer him inside the same covers, and he then answers them back. He took the classical method in Five Views on Apologetics (2000) against evidentialism, the cumulative case, presuppositionalism and Reformed epistemology; middle knowledge (T3) in Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views (2001) against Gregory Boyd on open theism, David Hunt on simple foreknowledge and Paul Helm on the Augustinian-Calvinist view, and again in Four Views on Divine Providence (2011); his hybrid position on eternity in God and Time: Four Views (2001) against Helm, Alan Padgett and Nicholas Wolterstorff; and anti-Platonism in Beyond the Control of God? Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects (2014). A man who only wanted to be agreed with does not keep signing up for that. - Two-sided books and commissioned opponents. The 1993 volume with the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, came out from Oxford in alternating chapters, each man answering the last thing the other had said, and God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist (2004) did the same with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, in writing, with time to think on both sides. When he edited The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology (2009) he commissioned the leading specialist on each argument rather than writing the volume himself, which meant handing chapters to philosophers whose conclusions he could not control. - Answering the hardest critics by name. Adolf Grünbaum on creation, Quentin Smith on the beginning of the universe, Graham Oppy on the cosmological argument, Wes Morriston on the kalam and later on the Canaanites: he answers them one at a time, at length, in print, setting out the objection in full before he touches it. The pattern started with the doctorates, taken under John Hick while Hick was becoming the leading advocate of religious pluralism, and under Wolfhart Pannenberg, who had made his name insisting that the resurrection be argued in front of historians on the evidence. And where the answers have gone against him he has changed his position in print and said so. That is why the professional literature answers him instead of ignoring him, and it is the part of the career that is easiest for other Christians to copy and the least often copied.

(†) Christians who use his arguments still divide sharply over where he takes them, and the hardest objections are to proposals that are his own. + A great deal of Craig’s work is common property across Christendom, and a great deal of it is contested inside it, often in the same volume, which is worth saying plainly, because the reader who finds the kalam useful on Monday may find the next chapter impossible on Tuesday. Three of the disagreements are about where he takes arguments that other Christians share with him. - Middle knowledge. Molinism, the name the position goes by after the Jesuit who framed it (T3), is a live minority view rather than a consensus. Reformed theologians hold that it puts a creature’s free choice logically prior to God’s decree and so limits him; open theists hold that there is nothing there for God to know. Craig, caught between them, thinks it is the only account that keeps both divine sovereignty and genuine human freedom. - The historical Adam. In In Quest of the Historical Adam (2021) he reads Genesis 1 to 11 as mytho-history, figurative narrative that nonetheless refers to real people and events, and places Adam and Eve provisionally between 750,000 and one million years ago in the species Homo heidelbergensis. Young-earth creationists rejected the conclusion, and some who accept evolutionary science thought the genre argument did too much work. He offered it as a model to be tested, and it is being tested. - The divine processions. Craig declines to confess that the Son is eternally begotten of the Father, the Nicene clause that has the Son receiving his being from the Father in an act with no beginning and no end, as light comes from a burning flame. He affirms the full deity of the Son and the Trinity itself, and put the reservation carefully in his ministry’s clip of 19 August 2026: "I am skeptical of this doctrine. I don’t want to deny outright a doctrine that has such a strong ecclesiastical tradition, but I refrain from affirming it. I do not confess it." Nobody in the exchange accuses him of denying that the Son is God or of dividing the one God into three; Scripture teaches the Son’s eternity and full deity in its own words rather than by way of the begetting clause; and those who keep the clause and those who question it confess the same one God in three persons, each fully God. Whether the Son is eternally begotten is a question inside the faith rather than a test of it. - The neo-Apollinarian model of the incarnation. Every attempt to explain how the eternal Son took up a real human life runs onto the same rock: what is the human part, once you have said that the person living the life is divine? In Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (2003, with J. P. Moreland) Craig proposes that the Logos himself supplies the soul of Christ’s human nature, bringing to that human body the rationality, self-consciousness and freedom of will that make a nature human. The name is a warning label he attached himself, after the Apollinarius whose followers Constantinople condemned in 381 for teaching that the divine Word replaced Christ’s human mind. His reply is that the Logos already possesses the properties that constitute a human nature, so nothing human is missing, and he offers the model as "merely a possibility" on which "we cannot be dogmatic," affirming Chalcedon’s one person in two natures. Whether it can carry that affirmation is the live question. - The Canaanite conquest. In a 2007 answer Craig defends the command on the ground that God, unlike us, "can give and take life as He chooses," and that the children who died were not wronged if God’s grace reaches those who die in infancy, adding that the deepest wrong may be the brutalizing of the soldiers ordered to carry it out. Wes Morriston pressed him hard on that reasoning, and many readers who find every other page of his work steadying have found this one difficult. Very little rests on it. The answer to the charge of genocide runs on other ground: the target was what the Canaanites did rather than what they were, the sweeping phrases in Joshua match a documented ancient Near Eastern way of writing about war, the Hebrew verbs run heavily toward driving out rather than killing, the fortified compounds that fell held the king and his soldiers rather than a civilian population, and the ban had exits that people took, as Rahab did. None of these is a footnote to the career, because they all come from the centre of his method: build a model, offer it as a possibility rather than a dogma, and defend it until something better arrives. That method served the church well on the beginning of the universe and on the empty tomb, where a clear proposal was exactly what was missing, and it is under more strain where the church has already spoken. Craig has revised his positions in print before, and says so without embarrassment.