[Robert] Bill, can the existence of God be demonstrated? [Craig] Well I think that depends
on what you mean by a demonstration, Robert. I don't think that you can
demonstrate God's existence with mathematical certainty that will
convince everyone [or make him appear right here], right. But I do think that
there are good arguments for God's existence; there are good reasons to
believe God exists. [Robert] Now we've had reasons for millennia about God's existence, so I
really am interested in your feeling of what are the best of those arguments that
you're comfortable with today. [Craig] Well one of the most appealing arguments to
me personally that I find convincing is the cosmological argument for God's
existence. [Robert] And what does that consist of? [Craig] Well this is a family of arguments that
tries to show that there is a first cause, or sufficient reason, for the
existence of the world. [Robert] So everything has to have a cause. [Craig] Well not everything that
exists has to have a cause, but I would put it this way: anything that begins to
exist has to have a cause. Anything that comes into being must have a cause, and
this is rooted in the metaphysical idea that being cannot come from non-being.
Out of nothing, nothing comes; so if something comes into being, there must be
a cause which brought it into being. [Robert] So the only thing you would exclude from
that is God himself? [Craig] Well I wouldn't exclude God from this, but I would say
God never began to exist. In other words, what this argument will get you to is an
uncaused, eternal, first-cause that never came into being. [Robert] And that's God. [Craig] Right.
And so the key premise here will be to demonstrate that the universe began to
exist, because if the universe began to exist then it follows logically that the
universe has a cause. [Robert] And that's the cosmological argument? [Craig] Right. [Robert] What else? [Craig] Well there are
other versions of the cosmological argument that don't depend on the
universe having a beginning. For example, the great German philosopher
Leibniz asked the question why is there something rather than nothing? And
I think probably all of us have wondered about the mystery of existence; why
is there anything at all? And doesn't there need to be some sort of an
ultimate explanation of reality? And I think that that's a very plausible
principle, that everything that exists has to have some kind of
explanation for why it exists until you get to an absolutely necessary being
which is self-existent and not explained by anything outside of itself. [Robert] Well
people would argue that there are brute facts, which means it's just there and
you can't explain it. [Craig] Right, and I think that there may be brute facts but I don't think
that there are any brute things, that concrete objects, things that actually
exist, don't just do so without an explanation. Things that are real, that
actually exist, have their explanation in causes that produce them. Or if you're
talking about abstract things, like numbers and so forth, they exist by the
necessity of their own nature. [Robert] Alright, so we have again the cosmological
argument, has efficient cause and you need a beginning. [yes] Alright, what
other arguments do you have? [Craig] Well there's the famous teleological argument, which
would say that the universe exhibits a complexity in its structure that cannot
be attributed plausibly to either chance or to physical necessity, and that
therefore this is best explained by saying it's the product of intelligent
design. [Robert] And teleology means that from first happenings you project some sort
of an end result? [Craig] Yes, it's the idea that there is an end in mind for which
things exist, and so things are literally designed. [Robert] And so the teleological
argument is the design argument? [Craig] That's right; a new life has been breathed into
this argument by the discovery of the fine-tuning of the universe
for intelligent life, which doesn't seem to be explicable on the basis of
physical necessity because these constants and quantities that are so
finely tuned are independent of the laws of nature, and it can't be plausibly
explained by chance because the odds against it are just so overwhelming that
it seems rational to think that the reason the world looks designed is
because it was designed. [Robert] What else do you have in your bag of tricks of arguments?
[Craig] Well there's the moral argument for God's existence, and this would say that
if there is no God then there really are no objective moral values and duties. On
this view, unless there is God to serve as an anchor point for moral values and
duties, moral values and duties are just the products of sociobiological
evolution, and on this view without God everything is relative. Human beings are
just relatively advanced primates and moral values are just something we've
evolved to get along in society without killing each other off. [Robert] This argument to
me sounds different in that you need to assume the absolutism of moral values.
In the other arguments you're assuming the reality of a beginning in a
world, which I think everybody admits, but when you deal with moral questions, you
have to make the assumption that there are absolute moral values, as opposed to
relative values. If you don't have absolute values then you
certainly don't need God. [Robert] I prefer to speak of objective moral values, by which
I mean mind-independent values, and you're right; that would be the second
step of the argument, would be to say but there are objective moral values and
duties. That is a premise in the argument. [Robert] That's an assumption! [Craig] Well
it's a premise; I don't think it's just an assumption. I think that there's no
more reason to deny the objective reality of moral values than
there is to deny the objective reality of the physical world. [Robert] Well that's a
strong statement. [Craig] Any argument that you could give me for
denying the objective reality of moral values I could construct a parallel argument
for being skeptical about the objective reality of the external world. If we
trust our sensory intuitions, that there is a world of objects independent of us
out there, I don't think we have any grounds for distrusting our moral
intuitions of the realm of objective values. [Robert] Certainly to verify
the objectivity of the external world we're dependent upon our senses; everybody
agrees with that. [Craig] And there's no way to get outside your senses to prove
you're not a body lying in the matrix programmed to believe in something. [Robert] Sure I'll agree
with that, but when you get to moral values that's different. That's not an
objective sense in the same way that everybody in every society in the
history of the world would have had that same view of this chair or this carpet, I
mean they would know it's there, but if you deal with moral values, different
societies have had different moral values. [Craig] Well I think that's certainly
true, though very often you will find there is a commonality among cultures
that underlies the different cultural expressions of these moral values. For
example, modesty is a common moral value, but what is considered modest in one
culture rather than another may differ. Or for example cannibalistic tribes do
believe in the ethic of loving your neighbor, but they don't consider people
in other tribes to be their neighbors, so that while they wouldn't cannibalize
their own tribal members, they would members of another tribe. So beneath
seeming moral diversity there is I think a common moral code. [Robert] There are some
tribes that would practice cannibalism to ingest the wisdom of their ancestors.
[Craig] Well I think you would be hard-pressed to find examples of many tribal groups
that cannibalized their own people. [Robert] Alright, let's go
on; I think that's there's a difference between the moral argument and some of
the others. [Craig] Yeah I guess I don't think that's right; I mean it does seem to me
that we have good grounds for accepting our moral experience. When I talk to
folks, 99% of people will say to me yes I think there is an objective difference
between torturing a child for fun and loving that child and caring for it, that
these are not morally indifferent acts. And I simply say, why distrust that moral
intuition? We clearly perceive objective moral differences in the world, but if
they exist, and that first premise is right, then it follows logically and
inescapably that God exists. [Robert] I think that first premise is critical for the moral
argument. What else you got? [Craig] Well that would be the argument that would be
rooted in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. I don't think that any
historian who is a purely naturalistic historian can give a plausible account
of events like the death and resurrection of Jesus. I think we have
here in essence a kind of argument from miracles for the existence of God. It may
surprise most people, but the fact is that there is a majority of New
Testament biblical critics who have come to believe that part of the portrait of
the historical Jesus that is established by an examination of the evidence is
that after his death Jesus was buried in a tomb by a Jewish Sanhedrus named
Joseph of Arimathea, that on the first day of the week following this
crucifixion that tomb was found empty by a group of his women followers, that
thereafter various individuals and groups of people experienced appearances
of Jesus alive after his death, and that the original disciples suddenly and
sincerely came to believe that Jesus was risen from the dead,
despite having every predisposition to the contrary. Now those are the generally,
not unanimously, but generally agreed facts, and the question is how do you
best explain them? Well I don't know of any naturalistic hypothesis that can
explain those facts without bruising them. I think that the best explanation
is the one the disciples gave, and that was God raised Jesus from the dead, and
that entails that God exists. [Robert] I would think that's a rather lengthy
set of premises to get to your conclusion, but I will leave that for you
and go on to the next one. [Craig] Well the next one would be the ontological
argument, and this is the argument that the very concept of God properly
understood implies that God exists. And the idea here is that God is a maximally
great being; he is the greatest conceivable being by definition, but a
greatest conceivable being would have necessary existence. He would be
omniscient, omnipotent, morally perfect, [Robert] and really existing!
[Craig] Well yes, in every possible world. And since this is a possible world, it
follows that God must exist in this world, and therefore he exists. And I
think that this argument is a sound argument for God's existence.
[Robert] How about arguments that are personal, that you can't convince anybody else of
but that you feel? I know people have them, because many people about them [right],
but are those are those philosophically legitimate? [Craig] Oh absolutely;
I would say that my belief in the existence of God is ultimately not
rooted in these arguments. These arguments provide confirmation, or
reinforcement, for my belief that God exists, but my belief that God exists is
rooted in my personal experience of God. He's a living reality in my life and has
been ever since I became a Christian as a teenager. And I think that's perfectly
defensible; we spoke a moment ago about our knowledge of the external world.
There's no way to prove that the external world exists; there's no way to
prove you're not a brain-in-a-vat of chemicals wired up with electrodes to
think that we're here in this room having this conversation.
Similarly, there's no way to prove that the past is real, that everything
wasn't created five minutes ago with built-in memory traces and appearances
of age. These are what philosophers call properly basic beliefs; they lie at the
foundations of our system of beliefs. Now these beliefs aren't arbitrary;
they're rooted in experience. My experience of seeing and feeling and
smelling objects, and remembering the past, and so forth. So these beliefs are
grounded in experience, but they're properly basic beliefs to my
foundational system of beliefs. And I would say similarly the belief that God
exists is for those who experience him a properly basic belief
rooted in the experience of God himself, and in the absence of some overwhelming
defeater or objection to belief in God, the believer is perfectly rational to
accept that God exists just as we are perfectly rational to believe in the
external world of the reality of the past.
[Robert] Well most people's internal feelings about things are acculturated
because of society or family or experiences or psychological benefits or
problems that people have had. How can you depend upon something that is so
emotionally-based to root your deepest belief? [Craig] Well I think that an
atheist, to carry this argument, would have to show that there's a particular
psychological profile that religious people have, and that just has never been
demonstrated throughout the world. There isn't any sort of particular
psychological profile that religious believers exhibit; they come from all
sorts of backgrounds, all sorts of belief systems,
all sorts of emotional and cultural upbringing, and so I think it would be
very hard for the unbeliever to try to show that this experience of God is
spurious or non-veridical. [Robert] But what you're saying, though, demonstrates that
all these different expressions of people's belief are vastly different
kinds of gods and religions and systems and doctrines and all this mushed together,
but you're pointing to some core commonality among all these superficial
differences that somehow proves an existence of God, yet the God that
those are all related to are all different! [Craig] Well no, actually I wasn't
appealing to that; I was thinking of people who believe in a traditional
theistic concept of God, that they don't exhibit any sort of psychological
profile. Freud attempted to do this by saying that it's the projection of a
sort of father figure on the heavens due to an oedipal complex, and that's been I
think completely evacuated of any plausibility. So I wasn't speaking of
pantheistic concepts of God or other concepts of God; that's an
entirely different question. What I meant was that believers in the traditional
concept of a monotheistic God don't exhibit any commonality in terms of
their psychological upbringing or culture or profile that would lead us
to think that you can say this is non- veridical. [Robert] And you as a real individual
will rely upon that more than all the other arguments from science or
philosophy? [Craig] Yeah, I would; I think that the experience of God, for him who has it, is
a self-authenticating experience. It's something that's so real that it
overwhelms the defeaters which are brought against it.