VideoSimon Smart speaks to William Lane Craig, a philosopher and Christian apologist who has authored more than thirty books. Here, William Lane Craig defines what he thinks faith is, and talks about why he believes there are good reasons to believe in a god, and specifically the Christian God.
This is a short segment from a longer interview. To watch the full interview, click here.
Transcript
SIMON SMART: Let’s talk about faith. I want to ask you, can you explain simply why you think it’s more likely that there is a god of some kind, than not?
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG: Yes. Let me say first what I think faith is. I think faith is trusting in that which we have good reason to think is true, so that faith and reason are not contrary to each other, but rather faith is trusting in something that we have good reason to think is true. And I think that the hypothesis that God exists explains a vast range of the data of human experience, such as: the origin of the universe at a point in the finite past; the applicability of mathematics to the physical world; the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent, interactive life; the existence of a realm of objective moral values and duties; states of intentionality or consciousness in the world; the historical facts concerning the life, death and resurrection of Jesus; and finally I think that God can be personally known and experienced. And so, for all of those reasons, I think that the God hypothesis is a very powerful explanatory hypothesis, and therefore is much more likely to be true than the hypothesis that God does not exist.
SIMON SMART: Some of what you’re talking about there might lead someone to consider a god, and they might even become theists, but that’s some way from the Christian God. Why the Christian God, for you?
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG: Well you notice the first several points that I enumerated are consistent with any sort of monotheism. If these arguments are correct, they will serve to exclude atheism and agnosticism, as well as pantheistic religions that identify the world as divine. It gives us a transcendent creator and designer of the universe. So, it narrows down the fields of the world’s religions to the great monotheistic faiths, like Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Deism. Now to move beyond that I think we need to look at the historical person Jesus of Nazareth and what he claimed and taught. And my argument would be that Jesus’ claims to be the absolute revelation of God were vindicated by God raising him from the dead, and that therefore the historical credibility of the resurrection of Jesus vindicates his radical personal claims, shows that he was who he claimed to be, and thus serves to narrow down the field of monotheisms to Christian monotheism in particular.