A William Lane Craig Interview

On Reasons to Believe. Here.

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A question for Bill Craig on the Inner Witness of the Spirit

I have some questions about Craig's "Holy Spirit Epistemology," which may not be quite the typical ones.

The picture that we often have of Craig's position is that while he is prepared to argue for Christian theism, he thinks even if he were to re-evaluate all the arguments negatively, he would still continue to believe, because of the inner witness of the spirit. When he says this we are inclined to picture an "inner voice in the head" that is going to continue to convince him that Christianity even though all the evidence points the other way.

If this is the picture, then I have a few problems with it. Although I believe myself to have the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, I don't find a clear voice in my head that I can always identify as the Holy Spirit, as it were, by feel. Consider an inner voice that told me to commit adultery. However, much it might feel like the Holy Spirit, I am sure Bill Craig would tell me that it can't possibly be the Holy Spirit, but probably has to come either from the flesh or the devil. He would direct me, no doubt, to the Bible's prohibition against adultery and argue that, no matter how strongly I felt that I should commit adultery, and no matter how much the feel of this prompting resembled the feel of other promptings to, say, help my neighbor, or go to church on Sunday, it cannot come from the same source. People who think the inner witness of the Holy Spirit tells them to commit mass murder, or violate any other of the Ten Commandments, have to be  mistaken. Something external to the inner voice, in this case Scripture,

I think it's a mistake to think of the witness of the Holy Spirit as an inner voice that some how goes on speaking within one's head regardless of what is outside of it. Rather, it has to operate, in large part, by calling our attention to things outside ourselves.

Is it reasonable to suppose that God might allow me, by honest reflection on the arguments about belief in God, come to believe that insofar as reason is concerned, none of the theistic arguments are good, and that some atheological arguments, such as the argument from evil, are good, but then enable me to continue believing because of an inner voice? I don't see the Holy Spirit doing that.

Craig does says this on his website.


Now it might be said, that God would, indeed, not permit a person to fall into circumstances where the rational thing for him to do is to apostatize and turn his back on God, but what God would do is provide sufficient evidence to such an individual so that he is able to defeat through argument and evidence the alleged defeater. I grant that such a view is possible (how could anyone who believes in middle knowledge think differently?). But as I look at the world in which we actually live, such a view strikes me as naïve.

The vast majority of people in the world have neither the time, training, nor resources to develop a full-blown Christian apologetic as the basis of their faith or to defeat the sundry defeaters which they encounter. I have been deeply moved by the plight of Christians as I have traveled abroad and seen the sometimes desperate circumstances in which they find themselves. In Europe, for example, the university culture is overwhelmingly secular and even atheistic. I met many theological students when we lived in Germany whose professors had exposed them to nothing but radical biblical criticism and anti-Christian scholarship. These students held on to Christian faith in spite of the evidence. It was far, far worse in Eastern Europe and Russia. I wish I could convey to you the spiritual darkness and oppression that existed behind the Iron Curtain during the days of the Soviet Union. I remember asking one Russian believer, "Have you no resources to help you in your Christian life?" He replied, "Well, there is an encyclopedia of atheism published by the state, and by reading what is attacked there, you can learn something. But that's about all." These bothers and sisters endured horrible oppression and atheistic indoctrination by the Marxist regime and yet did not abandon Christ. As I emphasized in my answer to Question #13, evidence varies from generation to generation and from place to place and is accessible only to those privileged few who have the education, leisure time, and resources to explore it. God has provided a more secure basis for our faith than the shifting sands of evidence and argument, namely, the indwelling Holy Spirit.

Now, admittedly different people have different intellectual needs which might be met differently. When I was in my teens and early twenties I used to get frustrated with many Christians who didn't seem to need to think critically about their faith as intensely as I did, but as I have gotten older I realize people have other fish to fry, and not everyone is cut out to be a philosopher. However, some of us, like Dr. Craig and myself, have been exposed to arguments for and against theism. Could a Christian decide, yeah, the cosmological argument is bad, the design argument in all its forms is bad, the AFR is bad, the historical evidence for the resurrection is poor, the problem of evil looks like a strong case against God, but I have this inner voice that tells me Christianity is true nevertheless. Or maybe a warm fuzzy feeling? Does the Holy Spirit work like that?  Remember I said that even those of us who believe we have the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit can't introspectively determine whether a voice inside our own head is the Holy Spirit of indeed from a less sanctified source.

So I wonder if this picture of Craig's position is really what he thinks, or is it a straw man?

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Dawkins' failure to debate Bill Craig

In any event, Dawkins' failure to debate Craig is not something I have a problem with per se.

However, I find the charge of "defending genocide" to be somewhat misstated. Could an omniscient being ever be justified in ordering a genocide if he thought that the overall balance of good over bad would be enhanced by so doing? Regardless of what you think the answer is on this, I don't think you could use that as a basis of supposing that your opponent was an evil person, or that you shouldn't be seen on stage with someone like that. Unless you thought this person could end up advocating a present-day genocide, I don't see that such a position would render someone dangerous. And if you really thought someone might end up justifying a real genocide, wouldn't you want to debate them to make sure that such ideas were effectively refuted? I certainly would.

But the fact is, I have no trouble with Dawkins not debating Craig, except that I consider it to be symptomatic of an overall unwillingness to be responsive to critics of his atheistic programme. An atheist might think that a public debate format is a bad setup for that person to engage the points at issue betwee Craig and himself, which is fine. What he has not done is shown either the ability or the willingness to engage, say, Craig's Kalam Cosmological argument, beginning with an effort to state the argument clearly enough so that his audience can be sure he knows how to distinguish that argument from other versions of the cosmological argument. To take a page from Jesse Parrish's book, anyone who writes about the credibility of belief in God should be able to pass this Simple Test For Understanding. Otherwise....

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Why a Catholic secretly roots for atheists in theist/atheist debates

Here. 

Why? Because he keeps hoping to see some real arguments.

What I was wholly unprepared for, however, was the way in which the Atheist team consistently abandons the effort to present logical arguments at all and simply reverts to name calling. As I said, when faced with worthy opponents, such as Dr. Craig or Dinesh D’Souza, many of the atheist debaters give up any effort to mount rational arguments and just start making snide remarks.

Never happens here at DI. :)

Now, I have heard theist-atheist debates in which atheists have produced real arguments.

HT: Bob Prokop

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Craig's Holy Spirit Epistemology

I'm not a defender of Craig's epistemology. I'm against using Craig's Holy Spirit Epistemology against him when he's presenting an unrelated argument. But, if if he had a sufficiently direct experience of God at some time t1, he can't guarantee that he will have that same experience if he were to come to think his theistic arguments have been refuted at time t2. So I don't see how he can say how he would react if he were to discover that his arguments were bad.

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Bill Craig and Mormon epistemology

A redated post.

William Lane Craig has been criticized for using the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit in a way that parallels what I have been criticizing as the "misuse" of the Mormon "burning in the bosom" appeal. I say misuse in deference to Mormons like Clark who say that there are legitimate limits on its use and that it cannot be used to simply dismiss any and all evidence that might amount to falsification of Mormon claims. In other words, what I am talking about is the use of it as what Steve Cannon calls a "Don't confuse me with facts" strategy. But this is what many Christians think happens to them when they give what they think are good arguments against Mormon claims. But is Craig caught up in the same strategy? Mark Smith, of the Contra Craig website, writes:

MS: In my twenty minute discussion with Craig, in the process of getting his signature, I asked him about his views on evidence (which to me seem very close to self-induced insanity). In short, I set up the following scenario:

Dr. Craig, for the sake of argument let's pretend that a time machine gets built. You and I hop in it, and travel back to the day before Easter, 33 AD. We park it outside the tomb of Jesus. We wait. Easter morning rolls around, and nothing happens. We continue to wait. After several weeks of waiting, still nothing happens. There is no resurrection- Jesus is quietly rotting away in the tomb.

I asked him, given this scenario, would he then give up his Christianity? Having seen with his own eyes that there was no resurrection of Jesus, having been an eyewitness to the fact that Christianity has been based upon a fraud and a lie, would he NOW renounce Christianity? His answer was shocking, and quite unexpected.

He told me, face to face, that he would STILL believe in Jesus, he would STILL believe in the resurrection, and he would STILL remain a Christian. When asked, in light of his being a personal eyewitness to the fact that there WAS no resurrection, he replied that due to the witness of the "holy spirit" within him, he would assume a trick of some sort had been played on him while watching Jesus' tomb. This self-induced blindness astounded me.

VR: I think it would depend on the context. If someone were to walk up to me and say they had invented a wayback machine, and I wasn't at all sure that it worked properly, and we got out and saw some hillside that looked like a Jewish graveyard from the 1st Century, and no one left the grave or rolled the stone away, then that woudn't be convincing. If there were reliable time travel technology, and we got some supporting evidence, the challenge might be more severe. Generally fundamental changes of belief occur because of a wide range of considerations, so it is hard to point to one thing that would alone do the trick. But I can imagine overwhelming contrary evidence against Christianity.

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The Best Skeptical Response to Resurrection Apologetics

There are two sets of evidence that Christians appeal to argue that Christianity is divine rather than human in origin. First, there was the evidence of the empty tomb. The tomb, apparently, was found empty. At least, that is what the early Christians proclaimed, and it was not refuted by those people who would have wanted to see the movement quashed. The second is the fact that various people claim at least to have seen appearances of Jesus following his death. Skeptics typically respond by saying that we have reasons to have doubts about the claim that Jesus was buried in a known tomb. Executed criminals typically had their bodies dumped rather than buried. Second, skeptics typically argue that the disciples hallucinated the risen Jesus. Perhaps there weren't as many people who saw the appearances as the Bible claims. But people tend to hallucinate when they are very depressed, and are experiencing great cognitive dissonance, as must have happened to the disciples when their leader was executed on the cross. So, some people had visions, and the early Christians concluded that he must have been resurrected. 

This, I think, is the best response that skeptics have to the historical case for the Resurrection. While I don't buy the hallucination story, I do think it's the strongest skeptical response.

This is still, I think the best resurrection debate, between William Lane Craig and Keith Parsons.

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