Reasonable Faith Podcast

A listener who has begun studying the moral argument for God's existence wants to know if they have understood its logical form correctly. The listener also asks what to make of the statement "If God exists, there would be objective morals," since using it to argue for God seems to commit the fallacy of affirming the consequent. Dr. Craig walks through the logic of both premises, explains how they relate to each other, and considers what a believer should do with that second statement.

Twenty years after The God Delusion fueled the rise of the New Atheism, Dr. Craig argues that Richard Dawkins’ central case against God doesn’t follow from its own premises. Must a cosmic designer be more complex than the universe? Is God just a “sky daddy”? What does Douglas Adams’ puddle have to do with fine-tuning? Plus, the surprising stories of people who came to faith through Dawkins’ book.

A listener is troubled by the impression that atheists and materialists have already answered every argument for Christianity, and wonders how belief in God is still possible. Dr. Craig responds by drawing a simple but important distinction, and reflects on why so many people feel overwhelmed by the volume of skeptical material online.

Dr. Craig answers more listener questions from around the world. If Christ paid for the sins of the lost, is hell a double punishment? Was Jesus really separated from the Father on the cross? Is God’s justice only retributive? Could downloading our consciousness offer a kind of digital immortality?

A listener asks Dr. Craig to imagine a possible world filled with free persons, love, moral agency, and a genuine relationship with God, but with none of the cancer, war, animal suffering, or death we see in our own. If a world like that is logically possible, what greater good could justify God choosing a world like ours instead? Dr. Craig takes up this possible-worlds objection and considers whether it really undercuts his view that God permits suffering for the sake of bringing people freely to know Him.

Dr. Craig answers listener questions from around the world. If Christ paid for every sin, why would anyone still face judgment? Could God have made the universe and simply moved on? What should we make of a skeptical historian who says the disciples must have seen something? Plus: when science and Scripture seem to collide, which gives way? Why did God allow Mark’s snake-handling passage into our Bibles? And will the wicked exist forever?

A listener writes that his faith is hanging in the balance. Wherever he looks, from natural theology to the resurrection, he thinks the scholarly consensus seems to be against Christianity, and online critics accuse Christian thinkers, Dr. Craig included, of intellectual dishonesty. Questions about James Tour and the origin of life have only deepened his doubts. Is Christianity a respected position in the academy? Would a naturalistic account of abiogenesis threaten the faith? And how can we tell legitimate theological development from ad hoc accommodation to science? Dr. Craig responds.

Philosophical theologian Ryan Mullins argues that William Lane Craig’s version of Molinism is incoherent, and the charge comes down to one word: deliberation. If God already knows everything, can he really deliberate about which world to create? And if he can’t, is his choice truly free? Dr. Craig responds to Mullins’s critique, evaluates defenses offered by Tim Stratton and Reasonable Faith's own Tyson James, and explains why Mullins’s proposed fix would come at a steep theological price. Plus, a decades-old atheist argument from Dan Barker turns out to be the same puzzle in different clothes.

If nothing is impossible for God, how can some worlds be “infeasible” for Him? A listener named Howard presses Dr. Craig on a phrase that sounds like a limit on God’s power. Dr. Craig explains the Molinist idea behind it: true counterfactuals about how free creatures would choose narrow the range of worlds God can actually bring about. He then argues why this places no restriction on divine omnipotence.

A viral clip from Fr. Mike Schmitz claims that Protestants who take Jesus’ words in John 6 seriously end up becoming Catholic. Dr. Craig explains why the bread of life discourse doesn’t require eating Christ’s literal flesh, and why that claim overlooks the many non-Catholic traditions that also affirm a real presence. He then weighs in on John Piper and Kevin DeYoung’s friendly exchange over baptizing infants, and asks whether baptism is really the new covenant’s counterpart to circumcision.

If the Son is not eternally begotten of the Father, is it arbitrary which person of the Trinity is called "Father" and which is called "Son"? And what distinguishes the three persons from one another in the first place? Dr. Craig responds to a reader's two worries about his view of the Trinity, drawing on the distinction between the economic and the ontological Trinity and on the observations of Marcellus of Ancyra, one of the orthodox leaders at Nicea.

In this episode, Dr. Craig provides his argument for God's existence that may also help build relationships with Muslims.

Dr. Craig has argued that annihilationism can't be reconciled with penal substitutionary atonement, since Christ was not annihilated on the cross. But a questioner from Spain turns the tables: Jesus didn't suffer eternal conscious punishment either. So is the traditional view of hell in the same trouble? Dr. Craig explains why he thinks the traditionalist has an answer the annihilationist doesn't.

In this episode, Dr. William Lane Craig answers questions regarding the resurrection of Jesus. What do scholars say about the empty tomb? What does prominent scholarship on the resurrection tell us? Does the best New Testament research support the facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus?

An undergraduate philosophy student presses Dr. Craig on his view that God exists timelessly without the universe but temporally once creation begins: if God can timelessly bring about a temporal effect like the beginning of time, why couldn't God perform other timeless acts with temporal consequences too? He argues the lack of an explanation for that is just an open puzzle, not a real problem for the view, and asks what actually motivates Craig's position in the first place. Craig responds by distinguishing two models of causation, the medieval idea of a cause that simply exists timelessly versus the modern idea of a cause simultaneous with its effect, and argues his own view depends on the latter: God's causal power is exercised at the very first moment of time, not before it. He grounds his motivation in the case against an infinite past, arguing that even proposals to dodge a beginning by positing "metrically amorphous" time end up looking like timelessness anyway, which is why he holds God is timeless without creation and temporal with it.

A YouTuber named Jay claims Frank Turek dodged a university student's question: if God is perfect, why didn't He create us perfect rather than flawed? Kevin plays the clips, and Dr. Craig explains why the question is built on confusion. Only God is a perfect being, and God cannot be created, so any created being is necessarily imperfect. Imperfect does not mean morally bad. Adam and Eve were sinless, but innocent rather than perfect. There is also no problem with a world where sin is possible, only with a world where it is actual. Dr. Craig applies Alvin Plantinga's idea of transworld depravity: there may be no feasible world in which free creatures always choose rightly. He also corrects the claim that God can alter the laws of logic, and explains why omnipotence does not mean doing the logically impossible.

A listener who's been working through Dr. Craig's Systematic Philosophical Theology asks whether it's more accurate to say Jesus Christ is "the Spirit of the Logos" united to a human body, rather than "the soul of the Logos," pointing to passages describing God as spirit and drawing an analogy to how a human spirit unites to a body. Dr. Craig first corrects the premise: his actual view is that the Logos is the soul of Jesus, not that the Logos possesses a soul. He then explains why he avoids "spirit" language here, it risks blurring the incarnation with the Holy Spirit's indwelling or even demonic possession, when in fact the incarnation is a unique union unlike either.

A listener from the UK argues that the Kalam cosmological argument has a fatal flaw: even if it proves God created the universe, that doesn't prove God still exists today, any more than a house proves its builder is still alive. Dr. Craig responds by pointing to arguments for a metaphysically necessary being (from the Leibnizian cosmological, moral, and ontological arguments), which by definition cannot go out of existence. He also explains why the Kalam functions as one link in a cumulative case rather than standing alone, and closes with the resurrection of Jesus as public, historical evidence that God remains active in the world.

Journalist Jonathan Rauch's Atlantic essay "Let It Be" argued that apatheism, simply not caring whether God exists, is a mark of civilizational progress, making society safer and less prone to religious conflict. Philosopher Paul Copan disagrees, calling it a sign of decline. Kevin and Dr. Craig work through the disagreement: what's actually at stake if the question of God goes unexamined, whether a secular society can sustain objective meaning and purpose without a theistic foundation, and whether the altruism and self-sacrifice inspired by Christian belief have any real secular equivalent. Dr. Craig also revisits his case for the absurdity of life without God, drawing on thinkers from Pascal to Nietzsche, and argues that an atheistic worldview cannot be lived out both consistently and happily. He closes with thoughts on how Christians can awaken genuine curiosity about God in a culture that has simply stopped caring.

A listener writes in with a philosophical challenge to the coherence of Christian doctrine: if God knowingly creates the exact conditions under which people will sin, how can he justly hold them responsible for sinning, and how can Christ's atonement make sense as a remedy for a failure that was effectively built into the system? Dr. Craig traces the problem to a hidden assumption in the question: theological necessitarianism, the idea that circumstances which make sin likely also make it inevitable. He argues that God's providence creates freedom-permitting circumstances, not deterministic ones, citing 1 Corinthians 10:13 on God's promise to supply a way of escape from every temptation. Craig also draws a key distinction between moral perfection, which he grants is impossible for finite creatures, and simply living without sin, using Adam and Eve's pre-fall innocence as an example of the latter without the former. He closes by addressing apostasy directly, denying that God ever places anyone in circumstances they are unable to handle. View the full Question of the Week here!