[Interviewer] Dr. Craig could you please introduce yourself. [Craig] Yes. I'm William Lane Craig; I'm
a research professor at Talbot School of Theology, and I'm a Christian philosopher
and theologian. [Interviewer] It's the experience of many Christian students who attend
university that they find their faith troubled, and they begin to have doubts.
What advice would you give to someone who is experiencing serious
doubts? [Craig] Well there's a number of things, I think, that I would say about that. First
of all, I think that I would tell them that they need to understand the proper
relationship between faith and reason. And my view here is that the way in
which I know Christianity is true is first and foremost on the basis of the
witness of the Holy Spirit in my heart, and that this gives me a self-authenticating
means of knowing that Christianity is true wholly apart from the evidence,
and therefore, if in some historically contingent circumstances the evidence
that I have available to me should turn against Christianity, I don't think that
that controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. In such a situation I should
regard that as simply a result of the contingent circumstances that I'm
in, and that if I were to pursue this with due diligence and with time, I would
discover that in fact the evidence, if I could get the correct picture, would
support exactly what the witness of the Holy Spirit tells me. So I think that it's
very important to get the relationship between faith and reason right; otherwise,
what that means is that our faith is dependent upon the shifting sands of
evidence and argument, which change from person to person, place to place, and
generation to generation, whereas the Holy Spirit and his testimony gives
every generation and every person immediate access to a knowledge of God
and the truth of of Christianity that's independent of the shifting sands of
time and place and person and historical contingency.
The second thing I think I would say follows from that what this means is the
doubt is never simply an intellectual problem. There is always a spiritual
dimension to doubt as well. There is an enemy of your souls, Satan, who
hates you intensely, and who is bent on your destruction, and who will do
everything in his power to see that your faith is destroyed, and therefore when we
have these intellectual doubts and problems we should never look at them as
something that is spiritually neutral or divorced them from the spiritual
conflict that we're involved in. Rather, we need to take these doubts to God in
prayer, to admit them honestly, to talk to our Christian friends about them, to not
stuff them or hide them; we need to deal with them openly and honestly and
talk to people about them and seek God's help in dealing with them. I think
frankly no human being in this lifetime will ever have all of his questions
answered. There's always going to be a question bag on the shelf of
unanswered questions that we haven't had time to deal with in this lifetime. So
that the key to victory in the Christian life is not having all your questions
answered; the key to victory is how is learning how to live with unanswered
questions. That's the real key. How do you allow unanswered questions not to become
destructive doubts? And I think part of the secret of that will be by
cultivating your spiritual life, engaging in spiritual disciplines like prayer,
meaningful worship, Christian music, sharing your faith with other people,
being involved in Christian service, so that you will foster the witness of the
Holy Spirit in your life, be filled with the Holy Spirit, so that when you come
into the circumstances of doubt and the shifting sands of evidence and so forth,
you aren't thrown into shipwreck because of that. Finally, I would encourage you
whenever you get the opportunity to take one of those questions out of the
question bag and pursue it into the ground until
you come to intellectual satisfaction with it.
And I can say from my own personal experience that this is one of the most
spiritually exhilarating and healthy things that you can do in your Christian
life, is to take some issue that has been a nagging doubt and make it the subject
of a research project. Do a paper in your philosophy class on it or something like
that, and pursue it into the ground until you are intellectually satisfied with it,
and it will free you from that ever being a source of doubt again in your
life, and that is a wonderful experience. I've done that with a number of
questions that I have had and it leaves you with the conviction that
Christianity does indeed stand intellectually headed shoulders above
every -ism or philosophy that it might compete with. But of course, as I say, we'll
never empty the question bag completely, and so while this is a healthy exercise,
the more fundamental task that we need to do is to learn how to live with
unanswered questions without allowing them to become destructive doubts.
[Interviewer] Dr. Craig thank you for your time.