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May 12, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:03:50

William Lane Craig | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 50

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	In the absence of some defeater, it seems to me that we're perfectly within our rights in believing that there is an objective realm of moral values and duties, just as we're within our rights in believing that there is a world of physical objects around us.
	Hey, and welcome to the show.
	This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special, and we're eager to welcome to the program philosopher and theologian, Dr. William Lane Craig.
	He's also the author of the book, En Garde, and the President of Reasonable Faith.
	We'll get to that conversation in just a moment.
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	Dr. Craig, thanks so much for stopping by.
	I really appreciate your time.
	My pleasure.
	Good to be with you.
	So why don't we start with this.
	We're living in an increasingly secular age where people by polling number, seculars are now by polling numbers the largest religious constituency in America.
	Why do you think we're seeing such a decline in religious belief in the West right now?
	I think what's happening is not so much increasing secularization, Ben, as the collapse of the old mainline Christian denominations like the Episcopalians, the Catholics, the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, and so forth.
	And as a result, there is an increasing polarization in American society.
	People are evacuating the middle and going either to the secular end or to the evangelical end.
	Evangelicals are maintaining their percentage of the American population, keeping up with the population growth.
	But the impression of increasing secularization exists because the middle is emptying out, and these old-line denominations are collapsing.
	Why do you think they are collapsing in on themselves?
	And we're seeing it in Judaism as well, that the old conservative Jews and Reform Jews, they're kind of dying away, and you're getting the modern Orthodox movement even moving toward more Orthodoxy.
	Why do you think that's happening right now?
	That's very interesting, and I think it's a reflection of the fact that People who are just nominally religious, in a sense, come to the realization that they don't really believe this.
	And so, why should you get up in the dark and the cold on a Sunday morning to go worship somebody you don't really think is there?
	And so, as a result, those who have been simply nominal in their beliefs I think are increasingly recognizing that, in fact, they're secular.
	And the unfortunate byproduct of this is that Christianity has lost its place of cultural influence in the United States as this middle mainline denomination empties out.
	And it's my hope that in coming decades, increasingly these evangelical denominations, which are holding fast to biblical truth, will begin to assume that position of cultural influence that was once held by the mainline denominations.
	Well, Friedrich Nietzsche declared the death of God back in the late 19th century, and it took a while for that to become a reality in the United States, as far as occupying any significant portion of the public mind.
	We're still significantly more religious than Europe, but starting in the 1960s and moving beyond, there was a real move away from religious belief generally.
	What do you think presaged that?
	Why do you think that happened?
	Considering we have a civilization built on Judeo-Christian values, we're incredibly prosperous, incredibly free, and yet we seem to be moving away from a lot of the religious beliefs upon which our society is based.
	Well, I think in Europe and in Canada, it's the lingering shadow of the Enlightenment that swept away The church, along with the monarchy, because these two were aligned and resulted in a deep disaffection with Christianity, which was seen to be aligned with the old order.
	In the United States, I think it's hard to underestimate the influence of the Vietnam War.
	That war tore this culture in two and resulted, I think, in the alienation of many, many young people from the values and the beliefs of their elders.
	And I suspect we're still living with the results of that.
	There's sort of a mainstream discomfort with religion that we see these days.
	Religious believers are seen as sort of anachronistic.
	If you say that you believe in the Bible or the God of the Bible, then you're seen as somewhat of a fool these days.
	As somebody who speaks on college campuses a lot, and I speak in purely secular forms about politics, whenever I'm asked about religion, it's always phrased in a sense of derision or condescension.
	Why would you believe all that old stuff?
	Well, your work has been based on the idea that faith is, in fact, backed by reason, and that the presence of God is a reasonable assumption to make about the universe.
	Why do you think that, first of all, there's that gap that occurred, that breach that occurred between reason and faith, that you were considered to be mutual buttressing and supportive of one another for centuries?
	What presaged that gap?
	Well, I do think that this is confined to certain disciplines at the university, particularly the soft sciences and the social sciences.
	Those who were disaffected by the Vietnam War and the Cultural Revolution went into anthropology, sociology, women's studies, literature, religious studies, and so forth.
	But in the hard sciences and in my discipline, philosophy, I think, frankly, there's a renaissance of theistic belief.
	And there is a virtual revolution going on in Anglo-American philosophy right now where Christian philosophers represent a significant and respected voice in the philosophical community.
	So I find there's tremendous interest on university campuses in these topics.
	When I debate a secularist on our university campuses, we will have hundreds and sometimes thousands of students attend these debates, and the discussions are always rational, respectful, deliberative. and the discussions are always rational, respectful, deliberative.
	And so my experience is that there is tremendous interest in our culture and in the university age group in hearing a rational, fair discussion of issues related to religious belief.
	One of the things I think that's happened in the religious community is you see people who are brought up in religious homes and they're taught the stories of the Bible.
	They're never taught any deeper philosophy or theology that attaches to that, so they have sort of a children's eyes view of what God is and how to think about God, sort of think of God still as the old man in the sky who's controlling things.
	What in your opinion is the most reasonable proof of God?
	What have you found to be the most convincing proof of God's existence?
	Well, I think that those are two questions.
	For me, My favorite argument for the existence of God that I find the most compelling is a version of the cosmological argument, which goes like this.
	Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
	Something can't just come into being from nothing.
	Secondly, the universe began to exist.
	I think we have both good philosophical arguments and scientific evidence for the finitude of the past from which it follows.
	Third, therefore, the universe has a cause.
	And when you do a conceptual analysis of what it is to be a cause of the universe, You arrive at a being which is an uncaused, beginningless, timeless, spaceless, enormously powerful personal creator of the universe.
	So for me, that is a very convincing argument for God.
	But I find that with university students, that's not the most convincing argument.
	You can ignore philosophical arguments for the finitude of the past or scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe.
	But the argument that they find I think the most compelling is what I call the moral argument.
	And it would go like this.
	One, if God does not exist, Then, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
	That is to say, in the absence of God, everything becomes socioculturally relative.
	Two, but objective moral values and duties do exist.
	There are some moral absolutes, some objective values and duties.
	Three, therefore, God exists.
	Now, this is an argument which is impossible, I think, to ignore because every day you get up You answer by how you treat other people, whether you regard them as having intrinsic moral value, or whether they are mere means to be used for your ends.
	And so this argument, I find, tends to be the most convincing for people.
	So for purposes of elucidating these arguments, I'm going to play devil's advocate with you a little bit on both of these arguments.
	Let's start with the cosmological argument that you're making.
	So the Richard Dawkins comeback, the one that you hear most frequently, with regard to the finitude of time and the idea that everything has a cause, is okay, well then what caused God?
	Yes.
	It's important to state the first premise correctly, Ben.
	It's not everything has a cause.
	It is everything that begins to exist has a cause.
	Something cannot come into being without a cause.
	But if something is eternal, never began to exist, There's no need for a cause.
	So, that objection to the argument is simply based on a misunderstanding of the first premise.
	What must we posit such an eternal being, or could we just have an infinity of regressive causes?
	Well, that's the second premise that the universe began to exist.
	And I think there are deep philosophical problems with the idea of an infinite past.
	For example, how did we get to today?
	If you had to go through an infinite number of prior events one at a time, that would be like trying to count down all the negative numbers one at a time ending at zero, which seems an absurd task.
	Moreover, we have remarkable scientific evidence from the Big Bang expansion of the universe and the thermodynamic properties of the universe, which suggests that the universe cannot be infinite in the past, but must have had a beginning around 13.8 billion years ago.
	So I think that second premise is very powerfully supported both philosophically and scientifically.
	Okay, and then on the other argument, the moral argument, the argument that I've heard made in contravention of that, it's an argument made by Dawkins, Harris, Brett Weinstein, evolutionary biologists, who suggest that morality, there is a certain sense of morality that is innate to mammals that you see even in species that are not our own.
	A sense of primitive altruism, a sense of kinship protection, for example.
	So, is it possible that that morality is embedded This response is almost a textbook example of the genetic fallacy.
	give an objective morality that we think about and therefore enact, that it's just embedded in the natural code?
	This response is almost a textbook example of the genetic fallacy.
	The genetic fallacy is trying to invalidate a point of view by showing how that point of view came to be held.
	Even if evolution and social conditioning has programmed into us a certain set of moral beliefs, that does nothing to show that those beliefs are false.
	In fact, Indeed, if moral values are gradually discovered rather than gradually invented, then our gradual and fallible apprehension of the moral realm no more undermines the objectivity of that realm than our gradual, fallible apprehension of the physical world undermines the objectivity of the physical realm.
	In the absence of some defeater, it seems to me that we're perfectly within our rights in believing that there is an objective realm of moral values and duties, just as we're within our rights in believing that there is a world of physical objects around us.
	So, I want to ask you to steel man the opposing argument.
	So, now play atheist.
	So, you're the atheist in the room and it's your job to attack the arguments that you've just made.
	What do you think are the strongest objections to the cosmological argument and the strongest objections to the moral argument that you've made?
	Well, I think that the first premise of the cosmological argument is unassailable for any sincere seeker after truth.
	With respect to the philosophical arguments, perhaps what the skeptic might simply say is that infinity is just a really strange thing, and yes, it leads to counterintuitive consequences, but that's just the way things are.
	With respect to the scientific evidence, he can always hold out hope That the advance of physical theory will overturn the current consensus in astrophysics and cosmology and restore a past eternal universe.
	And that's about the best he can do, I think.
	There isn't much prospect for that, but he could hold out hope.
	So in a second, I want to ask you about the Bertrand Russell theory that essentially posits brute facts in place of God as the beginnings of these sorts of arguments.
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	So philosopher Bertrand Russell suggested that God is sort of unnecessary to these conversations, that instead of trying to look for a final cause, this is just the way things are.
	So in other words, if you go back to the very beginning, okay, so something sprang from nothing.
	Why not?
	This is a different cosmological argument that Russell was responding to.
	This argument goes something like this.
	Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
	Number two, if the universe has an explanation of its existence, then its explanation is a transcendent, eternal cause.
	Premise three would be the universe exists, and from that it follows logically that therefore the explanation of the universe is an external, transcendent cause.
	Now, what Russell denied was the first premise.
	He said that there doesn't need to be an explanation, either in the necessity of a thing's nature or in an external cause.
	Now, I disagree with Russell on that.
	But notice that that skeptical response doesn't apply to the first version of the cosmological argument, because in that case we're talking about something that begins to exist, something that comes into being.
	And I don't think even Russell would have affirmed that something could come into being Without a cause.
	Even if for some eternally existing universe, you might say, well, it just exists with no explanation.
	So one of the counters that's sort of been posited nowadays to that idea is the sort of David Hume, well things pop in and out of existence and people tend to point to quantum mechanics as the basis of this.
	So how do you respond to the quantum mechanical argument that it appears that certain particles are almost literally winking in and out of existence?
	Let me first respond to Hume on this because I think he's been misunderstood.
	What Hume said was that you cannot prove the causal principle either by demonstration or intuition.
	But he said in a letter to John Stuart, I never affirmed anything so absurd as that something could come into being without a cause.
	I only said that it's not proved through demonstration or intuition.
	Now, in quantum mechanics, things don't come into being out of nothing.
	The quantum vacuum is definitely not what the layperson means by vacuum, namely a state of nothingness.
	The quantum vacuum is a sea of roiling energy having a rich physical structure and governed by physical laws.
	It is most emphatically not nothing.
	And therefore, when people like Lawrence Krauss and certain others say, well, the modern physics shows that something can come from nothing, this is a deliberate abuse of science and is grossly misrepresentative of, in fact, what the science says.
	So I'm going to go through one more argument with you, and then I want to talk about the importance of religion as opposed to theology, which are not quite the same thing.
	Because you're making some reason-based arguments for the existence of God, but these aren't obviously arguments for Christian revelation or Jewish revelation or anything like that.
	No, although I do think there are good reasons to be a Christian theist.
	That's also part of my work.
	And I want to get to that in just one second.
	But I first want to tackle another argument that you hear made a lot, and that seems, I think, to be given short shrift.
	The ontological argument, the St. Anselm argument.
	So the ontological argument, if you could spell that out, and then why people seem to get this so wrong.
	Because the way they posit it is that it's this simplistic argument.
	If we just posit an island, then you could somehow debunk it, which would make no sense, because any person could have discovered that when St. Anselm said it, as opposed to spending hundreds of years trying to figure it out.
	So what is the ontological argument?
	The ontological argument in a nutshell says that if it's even possible that God exists, then it follows that God actually exists.
	And this argument has been stated and defended with great sophistication by philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, for example, and I, like you, am persuaded that this is actually a sound argument.
	And basically what Plantinga says is, define a maximally great being to be a being that is metaphysically necessary, omnipotent, Omniscient and morally perfect.
	Now, if it's possible that there is such a being, then there's a possible world in which that being exists.
	But if a maximally great being exists in any possible world, it exists in all possible worlds.
	That's part of what it means to be maximally great.
	Therefore, it exists in the actual world.
	Therefore, a maximally great being exists.
	And the steps of this argument, your viewers may be surprised to learn, are actually relatively uncontroversial.
	The whole argument stands or falls with the first premise.
	Is it possible that a maximally great being exists?
	If you think it's possible that God exists, then you ought to believe that God actually exists.
	The atheist has to say not merely that God does not exist, but that it's impossible that God exists.
	So the typical comeback doesn't even meet this argument.
	So just for the folks who haven't studied the ontological arguments at all, the typical comeback is, imagine a maximally great island, the greatest island you've ever heard of, well then it must exist using the exact same principles here.
	But what you would say is there's no possibility of a maximally great island because...
	But that description is simply too vague.
	There's no way to actually write that down.
	That would be one of the problems with it.
	What contributes to the greatness of islands?
	Do you prefer a desert island or one chocked with hotel resorts?
	There isn't any really objectively such a thing as the greatest conceivable or maximally great island.
	So it turns out that these attempts to parody the argument by talking about a maximally great pizza or a necessarily existent lion all fail because they postulate incoherencies.
	When the idea of a maximally great being, that is to say a being that is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect in every possible world does seem to be An intuitively coherent and therefore possible idea.
	So how do we get from the idea of an unmoved mover in some of the arguments that you've been making to the idea of a moral god who cares about us and is involved in the world?
	Well, it's quite right that arguments like the cosmological argument or the teleological or design argument, which we haven't talked about, don't get you the moral properties of the creator and designer of the universe.
	But the moral argument and the ontological argument do.
	Both of those lead to a being which is the moral paradigm and source of all moral value and moral obligation.
	And so those arguments complement the cosmological and teleological arguments by telling us something about the moral properties of the creator and designer of the universe.
	Now, looking at those properties, what makes that being a god of mind?
	And what makes that being constant, meaning like present now, as opposed to the kind of deistic conception of a god who laid things in motion, maybe embedded moral codes within us, and then walked away?
	What makes god Okay, now, there's a couple of questions there.
	First, with regard to why I think this is a mind, most all of the arguments that I just shared do lead to a personal, intelligent The first argument does.
	The teleological or design argument leads to a cosmic intelligence that has created the world.
	The moral argument leads to a personal embodiment of moral value, because persons are the source of moral value, not inanimate things.
	The ontological argument leads to a being who is omniscient and morally perfect and therefore is a person.
	So, these theistic arguments don't just leave you with some kind of unmoved mover.
	They give you a personal creator and designer of the universe who is perfectly good.
	Now, some of them give you a being that is metaphysically necessary.
	The second version of the cosmological argument that I mentioned leads to a being who exists by a necessity of his own nature and therefore cannot fail to exist.
	The moral argument leads to a being who is the paradigm and source of all moral value.
	Now, if you believe that some moral values are necessary, which most ethicists do, that means this being is also necessary in its existence.
	And therefore, having demonstrated that a being like that exists, it cannot fail to be present in the world today.
	That means that this being also exists now.
	It couldn't cease to exist.
	Now, that still leaves open the question of deism.
	Has this Creator and designer of the universe, perfectly good, revealed himself to us in some way that we can know him more personally.
	Or has he remained aloof and distant from the world that he's made?
	That's still an open question to talk about.
	Okay, so let's talk about that question.
	The proofs that you're talking about, many of them can be traced back to Aristotelian roots.
	Aquinas obviously talks about a lot of these proofs himself, but he's getting them from Aristotle because they're also present in Maimonides.
	Exactly!
	Maimonides has the same argument.
	So with all of that said, that sort of brings us to the Tertullian question, which is, okay, so why do you need Jerusalem?
	So we've got Athens, you've got this idea of of a God that's present in the universe and that has a moral component to him, is the unmoved mover, all of these things.
	So why do you need the idea of revelatory God who speaks to human beings?
	The arguments that we've discussed already narrow down the field of the world religions to basically the great monotheistic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, or perhaps deism.
	The question as to which of these is true, I think stands or falls upon the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
	Who do you think Jesus of Nazareth was?
	Jesus claimed to be the decisive self-revelation of God.
	And I believe that we have good reasons to believe that those claims were true and that therefore the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.
	Okay, so let's get into that.
	So what is the proof that Jesus was who he says he is in the Gospels?
	Well, first we need to establish who he thought he was.
	When you look at the religio-historical context of the life and ministry of Jesus, I think you can show that among the historically authentic words of Jesus,
	were claims that he thought he was the Jewish Messiah, that he believed himself to be the Son of God in a unique sense that set him apart from Jewish kings and prophets, and finally, that he thought that he was the Son of Man predicted by the prophet Daniel, to whom God would give all dominion, power, and authority.
	So he had this radical self-understanding of being Messiah, Son of God, and the Son of Man.
	And at the trial scene before the Sanhedrin in Mark 15, all three of these titles come to a head When the high priest asks him, are you the Messiah, the Son of the Blessed One, that is, the Son of God, and Jesus says, I am, and then virtually quoting from Daniel, and you will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven and seated at the right hand of the power.
	And at that point, the high priest rips his robes and says, you have heard the blasphemy.
	What more witnesses do we need?
	And Mark says they all condemned him as worthy of death.
	And that enabled them, since they didn't have the ability to carry out capital punishment, to deliver him over to the Roman authorities by slandering him as a pretender to be king of the Jews and therefore A political figure who could be tried for treason and sedition and crucified.
	So, from the Jewish perspective, this narrative has some holes in sort of Jewish philosophy.
	The narrative begins with the idea that Jesus appears in front of the Sanhedrin and then claims to be the Messiah.
	Well, there's nothing actual criminally in any of the tractates that say that if you declare yourself the Messiah, this is actually a punishment, a punishable offense even.
	There are many Jews, including Bar Kochba, who have declared themselves messianic figures.
	The real gap here is that in the Gospels, Jesus' vision of himself as the Messiah is completely different from the prior vision of what the Jewish Messiah is and is actually outside the scope of how Jews describe the Messiah or really have ever described the Messiah.
	The Messiah in Judaism has always been a political figure who is destined to do certain things, restoring the kingdom of Israel, maintaining control of that kingdom, bringing more Jews back to Israel.
	All of these things are considered sort of political things that the Messiah does, but the idea of the Jewish religious philosophy going all the way back to the beginning.
	So even the idea that the Sanhedrin would be questioning him in those terms and would get from that, that what he means is, I am God, which would be a much more punishable offense, presumably that would be actual blasphemy.
	That's, it's an oddity.
	I think you're absolutely right in saying that Jesus' understanding of the Messiah was radically different from the prevailing cultural understanding of the Messiah among the chief priests and the common people, and he didn't meet their expectations.
	Indeed, that's what helped to get him crucified.
	Being the Messiah, you're right, in and of itself isn't a blasphemous claim.
	But to claim to be the Son of God in a unique sense, and then especially the Son of Man prophesied by Daniel, sitting at the right hand of the power, that is truly blasphemous and is sufficient for his condemnation.
	Now the question, I think, that is raised by your Your interpretation, Ben, is this.
	Why should we believe Jesus' reinterpretation of the Messiah rather than the one that the chief priests and the people held?
	And I think the answer to that is his resurrection from the dead.
	Jesus' resurrection from the dead is Yahweh's public and unequivocal Vindication of the man whom the chief priests had rejected as a blasphemer.
	It is the divine demonstration that These allegedly blasphemous claims are in fact true, that he was who he claimed to be, and that therefore I follow Jesus in his conception of what it means to be the Messiah.
	So when it comes to the resurrection, why is resurrection proof of divinity?
	So Lazarus is resurrected.
	That was why I wanted to emphasize the religio-historical context before we talked about the resurrection.
	A miracle taken in isolation is inherently ambiguous.
	The proper interpretation of a miracle is going to be given by the religio-historical context in which it occurs.
	And the resurrection of Jesus is not just the resurrection of any old body.
	It's the resurrection of the man who claimed to be Messiah, Son of God, and Son of Man, and who was crucified for those allegedly blasphemous claims.
	If God has raised this man So one of the counterclaims to some of this is that the Gospels are written significantly after Jesus lives.
	Even the earliest Gospels written, what, 70 C.E.?
	blasphemous claims. - So one of the counterclaims to some of this is that the gospels are written significantly after Jesus lives.
	Even the earliest gospel is written, what, 70 CE?
	Somewhere 40 years after Jesus is crucified.
	So, what's to say, I mean, that, like most historical events, there is some play in the joints here?
	So that this would be the historical argument against the exact veracity of the gospel revelations, for example.
	Now, I think it's important to understand, Ben, that in order for a historical document to be reliable, it isn't required that it be inerrant.
	Contemporaneous, of course, of course.
	What I would argue is that underlying the inference to the resurrection of Jesus are three great independently established facts which are supported by the historical evidence and which surprisingly—I did my doctoral work on this in Germany—are recognized as such by the majority of New Testament
	Scholars today who studied the historical Jesus, and these facts would be that after his crucifixion and burial by a member of the Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea, the Jesus tomb was discovered empty on the first day of the week by a group of his female followers.
	Secondly would be that various individuals and groups of people then witnessed appearances of Jesus alive.
	And finally, number three would be that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead, despite having every predisposition to the contrary.
	The vast majority of scholars have come to accept as convincing the evidence in support of those three facts, not assuming biblical inerrancy or inspiration, but treating the Gospels as ordinary historical documents.
	You can show, for example, That the fact of the discovery of the empty tomb is attested by at least six independent sources in the New Testament, some of which are extraordinarily early.
	No scholar denies that individuals and groups saw post-mortem appearances of Jesus.
	The only question is whether you should or could dismiss them as hallucinatory.
	And again, nobody denies that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead.
	So these three facts are pretty firmly established, and the only question is then how do you best explain them?
	And down through history, attempts have been made to explain these facts without recourse to the resurrection, like the conspiracy theory, the apparent death theory, the hallucination theory, and so forth.
	And I would argue that none of these naturalistic theories meets the criteria for being the best historical explanation of the facts.
	And None of them is as good an explanation as the one that the original disciples gave, that God raised Jesus from the dead.
	And if that's right, then I think we have good grounds, indeed we're almost compelled To revise our typical understanding of who the Messiah was supposed to be.
	So we can have the historical argument back and forth, obviously, and I think that there are arguments that you can make, I think there are arguments that I can make, but I honestly find them relatively uninteresting, is the truth, simply because I'm not sure that we're going to come to any sort of consensus on them.
	No.
	On the historical argument, for example, I think it's fairly Easy to claim.
	There's a sect of Judaism right now in which there's a small subsection of people who believe that the Lubavitcher Rebbe is still alive.
	The Lubavitcher Rebbe passed away in the 1990s.
	And there's still people who treat him as though he is not dead.
	They call him the Messiah.
	They think that he was the political Messiah.
	And they still do that 20 years after his death.
	That's not proof to me that he is actually alive.
	Some of them claim to have experienced it.
	Especially when you're talking about events 2,000 years ago.
	If people write that down, I think there's sufficient... I doubt this man's tomb is empty.
	I mean, I haven't dug him up.
	So I wouldn't know, but if somebody claimed 2,000 years from now that his tomb was empty, or claimed 70 years from now that his tomb was empty, then... Yeah, that's an important difference, Ben.
	The important time gap is not the gap between the events and the present.
	Good evidence doesn't become bad evidence just because of the lapse of time.
	The critical event, as you just said, is The time gap between the events and the recording of those events.
	And in the case of the events of the life of Jesus and his resurrection, that time gap is extraordinarily narrow.
	We can push back even before the writing of the Gospels and the epistles of Paul by discerning The traditions upon which they relied when they wrote, and some of these go back to within, it's estimated, five years after Jesus' crucifixion.
	I'm thinking of the ones that Paul transmits to the Corinthian church in 1 Corinthians 15.
	So, we're on pretty good ground there in terms of the earliness and the multiplicity of our sources for the life of Jesus.
	So, let's talk for a second about sort of the necessity for Judeo-Christian revelation because, and here I'm going to merge the two in terms of the idea of God Personally speaking to people and giving them the morality of the Old Testament, which largely is reflected in the New Testament.
	And the New Testament is part of the Old Testament, according to Christians anyway.
	It reflects the chief morality of the Old Testament.
	It doesn't supplant it entirely.
	The Old Testament doesn't become nothing just because the New Testament comes around.
	So that's why I'm now moving back toward the kind of theological question, which is, what's the purpose of the revelation?
	Meaning, could we, would it be sufficient To work within the framework of the first half of our conversation with regard to rational pushes not toward revelation and the presence of God in human form in Christianity or the presence of God on top of a mountain in Judaism.
	Would a God of reason alone be sufficient or do you need to have, for what purpose do you need to have a God who is speaking directly to people at Sinai or speaking through Jesus in Christianity?
	I think that the answer of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament can be put into one word, atonement.
	What is needed is atonement for sin and in the Levitical sacrifices In the tabernacle and later in the temple, you had a sacrificial system whereby atonement was made for sin through the sacrifice of various animals.
	And Jesus himself And the authors of the New Testament think of Jesus as being the ultimate sacrificial offering to God to make atonement once and for all for the sins of mankind, so that in his sacrificial death on the cross, he fulfills all of these Jewish antecedents or foreshadowing of
	A decisive atonement for sin that will reconcile us to God and bring forgiveness and pardon and cleansing.
	So you've debated a bevy of atheists and agnostics on a variety of topics.
	Which was the debate that you felt was most challenging for you?
	I think the best debate that I've ever had was with a professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University named Doug Jessup.
	The backstory behind this debate is that even though I would be on the affirmative and therefore normally go first, he insisted on going first in the debate.
	And I thought, something is suspicious here.
	He wants to launch a preemptive attack on my argument so that before I even get up, I'm already behind the eight ball.
	And so I insisted that I go first in the debate.
	And we had to decide it by a coin flip of the departmental secretary, and he won and so got to go first.
	And so sure enough, he got up there and in his opening speech, he launched into a withering attack on every one of my five arguments for God's existence before I even got up to speak.
	And I thought, oh man, how am I going to get out from behind this?
	Well, I had prepared A short speech for my opening so that it would leave me about five minutes of time extemporaneously to respond to his preemptive attack and try to level the playing field again.
	And so that was what I did.
	And then the debate just went back and forth, back and forth, right down to the final rebuttals.
	It was a great debate.
	And afterwards, I went up to him and I said, you are a very good debater.
	And he said, thanks, I was on my university debate team.
	And I thought, oh man, so here's a guy who had both the philosophical training and the debate training that I have, and as a result it was a great Contest.
	A really good debate.
	Now, in one of those conversations, have you ever found yourself doubting your own principles?
	Have you ever found yourself thinking that maybe the other person might be right, or shifting on your moorings a little bit?
	Not really doubting, though I think there have been a couple of times, rather rare, where the other fellow's thrown a curveball at me that I wasn't expecting.
	I prep hard for these debates and prepare briefs, like a lawyer would, for anticipated objections.
	But in my debate, for example, my first debate at Purdue University with Austin Dacey of the American Humanist Society, he threw a couple of arguments out there that I hadn't thought about before.
	And so I had to kind of wing it.
	And that was difficult.
	And after the debate, I was rather dissatisfied with my performance.
	And I thought, if I ever get a chance, I want to debate Dacey again.
	And sure enough, a couple years later, I got an invitation to have a debate at Fresno State University with Austin Dacey.
	And this time I was prepared to the hilt, and so it went much better.
	So there have been times when there have been curveballs, so to speak, but for the most part, Honestly, Ben, for the most part, these fellows don't prepare.
	They're so arrogant.
	They're so sure of themselves that they think they're just going to blow away this Bible-pounding ignoramus, and that if they just trot out their arguments from Philosophy 101 that everything will go well.
	They usually are pretty surprised.
	So let's talk about a couple of those philosophy arguments from 101 that are constantly trotted out.
	I've had similar experiences.
	The most common one that I've heard, of course, is the problem of evil, the suggestion that how can God be good if so much evil takes place in the world?
	The more sophisticated version of the argument to me is not the problem of human evil, which seems pretty easily disposable, but the problem of natural evil things happening to children, a child with cancer.
	Yes.
	In dealing with this problem, I think it's really important that we distinguish between what I call the intellectual problem of evil and the emotional problem of evil.
	with Tay-Sachs, in which horrible things happen to good people.
	Yes.
	In dealing with this problem, I think it's really important that we distinguish between what I call the intellectual problem of evil and the emotional problem of evil.
	There is no doubt that emotionally, the evil and suffering in the world make it very difficult to believe in God.
	It's a tremendous emotional obstacle.
	But intellectually, considered dispassionately as a philosophical problem, it's extraordinarily difficult to show that there's either any inconsistency or improbability between the existence of an all-loving, all-powerful God and the evil and suffering in the world.
	The atheist would have to show that it is either impossible or improbable That God has morally sufficient reasons for permitting the natural and moral evil in the world.
	And how could he possibly show that?
	We're simply not in a position to make those kind of probability judgments with any confidence.
	And so I think that the problem of evil, as difficult as it may be emotionally, Intellectually, it lays a burden of proof on the shoulders of the atheist, which is so heavy that it has proved to be unsustainable.
	These days the other argument that is brought up an enormous amount is the supposed backwardness of the Bible itself and biblical morality.
	This happens largely with regard to, for example, Homosexual marriage, it's been brought up with regard to abortion, which I think is more, again, easily disposable, because I think there's a solid secular argument in favor of the protection of human life.
	But homosexual marriage is the one that most often comes up.
	You also hear arguments that the Bible permits slavery.
	So if the Bible is so wonderful, then why are there all these weird sections of the Bible where it talks about wiping peoples from the earth, where it talks about enslaving other human beings?
	Some things that we would certainly consider moral evils today are Well, let me address briefly first this question of slavery.
	When we hear the word slavery, Ben, we think of slavery as it existed in the American South.
	And as you know, that is nothing like The system that existed in ancient Israel.
	In ancient Israel, there was no social safety net sponsored by the state.
	There was no poverty program.
	So if a man got himself into a situation where he couldn't pay his debts, He could keep his family together and retain his self-respect by selling himself as an indentured servant to his creditor until he could work off his debts, and then he would have to be set free.
	After seven years, he had to be set free in any case.
	So this was really a form of indentured servanthood.
	It wasn't slavery as we think of that term.
	This was actually an anti-poverty program.
	And in some respects, I think it's better than what we have in modern Western culture, which destroys families, ruins people's self-respect because they're not working.
	Whereas in ancient Israel, a man retained his self-respect, he worked for an income, he paid his debts, he kept his family together.
	And to call that slavery is just a gross misrepresentation.
	Now, the first thing you mentioned, I've forgotten.
	Homosexual marriage.
	Same-sex marriage.
	With respect to some of these other moral questions, I think we need to remember the first premise of the moral argument.
	If there is no God, Then there are no objective moral values and duties.
	Everything is socio-culturally relative.
	So who's to say that the moral values of a society that discriminates against people and oppresses people is worse than one which is liberal and tolerant?
	We just sort of assume that the liberal values are the ones that would be objective, when in fact they're just as relativistic As any of the other ones on atheism.
	So, if we need God to be the anchor point for objective moral values and duties, we cannot escape the question, when thinking of moral right and wrong, well, what does God think of this?
	And if God proscribes something, it seems to me that's entirely within his right.
	If God were to say, thou shalt not eat beans, or thou shalt not eat pork, that would be our moral duty, and we should obey it.
	That is his prerogative as the moral lawgiver and the supreme good.
	And so if God says, my plan for human sexuality is heterosexual marriage, that's his prerogative.
	And there is no basis for calling that, I think, into question.
	So let's talk about the evolution of morality.
	And I want to go back to slavery for just a second.
	So it is true that Hebrew enslavement, the Jewish enslavement of others is really more indentured servitude.
	And there's a whole section in, I believe it's Numbers or Leviticus, I think it's Leviticus maybe, where it speaks specifically about the slave who doesn't want to leave and you're supposed to pierce his ear on the doorpost as a punishment for him not wanting to leave and all of this.
	But by the same token, enslavement of people who are not inside the Israelite, inside the Jewish kind of tradition, that's not proscribed.
	So the idea of war captives is obviously taken into account and not banned.
	So certain things are banned in the Bible, certain things are not banned.
	Now the way that biblical believers have practiced over time is that very early in the church's history, they're already starting to eliminate slavery, although not for people who are captured.
	And then over time, the West is the first place to eliminate slavery altogether.
	Specifically citing the sections of the Bible that talk about human freedom and the innate value of every human being.
	So, is that an evolution of morality, or is that a realization of a fundamental principle that was originally given to people who couldn't necessarily understand the full extent of the principle?
	Oh, I think it's the latter, and I love the way you put it.
	I think that's nicely put.
	Jesus said something very much like this with respect to Old Testament regulations on divorce.
	They asked him whether or not it was lawful to divorce a woman for any reason, and Jesus said, Moses allowed you to write a certificate of divorce, but it was not so from the beginning.
	And he cites then the creation story of Genesis of Adam and Eve and said what God has put together and let not man put asunder.
	So what Jesus was saying there was that the law of Moses was a temporary prescription accommodating the hardness of heart of the people at the time, but it didn't represent the perfect will of God for human marriage, which was grounded in the creation story.
	So how exactly do we determine when we have moved beyond the biblical text in terms of the evolution of that morality?
	When are we fulfilling a broader goal that was kind of held back by temporary constraints, and when are we moving utterly beyond it?
	And again, here I'm thinking of same-sex marriage.
	So when it comes to same-sex marriage, the argument is now being made by people in liberal churches, including Pete Buttigieg, who's running for president, that basically Jesus was seeking equal respect for everyone.
	He cared about the least of these.
	And the prescriptions on homosexuality were really more, and homosexual activity were not eternal precepts, but were really attempting to crack down on the promiscuity of the time, or they were temporary expedients.
	Yeah, I think that's clearly false.
	When you look at these regulations, both in the Old Testament and then they're repeated in the New Testament in the strongest terms in Romans chapter 1.
	There's no doubt that Paul is thinking of this as a moral law that has abiding significance, and it's grounded again, I think, in the creation story, that God has created
	Human sexuality has created man and woman in such a way that the fulfillment of that relationship will take place within the safety and security of a heterosexual marriage, and that outside of that, Sexual activity is not to be indulged in, and this is a law that God has given us for our good.
	So I do not think that this is capable of simply being relativized to time and culture.
	So when you argue with students, when you talk with students and discuss with them, what do you find is the best way to approach them when it comes to the precepts of traditional Judeo-Christian morality?
	Do you come at it from the natural law perspective, or do you come at it from the biblical perspective?
	I guess I share with them the moral argument that I shared earlier in our interview.
	This moral argument is very powerful with students because, on the one hand, they've been taught relativism.
	They are scared to death of imposing their values on someone else.
	So it seems right to them that if God does not exist, that objective moral values don't exist.
	They think they're subjective, person-dependent, and relative.
	But then secondly, the premise also seems true to them that objective moral values do exist.
	They think it's objectively wrong to impose your moral values on someone else.
	And the values of tolerance, open-mindedness, and love have been deeply ingrained to them.
	And so, they believe both of the premises, but have just never connected the dots.
	to see what logically follows from it.
	And this can lead to some bizarre conversations.
	I remember with one fellow, when we would talk about premise one, he would agree with it and deny two.
	So when we talk about premise two, he'd agree with that and then deny one.
	And so we went back and forth, back and forth with this poor fellow flailing to try to escape the logical conclusions of what he himself believed.
	So I find approaching it through this moral argument is the best way.
	One of the things that's been fascinating to watch is people broadly accepting the efficacy of the precepts of religion without accepting the underlying truth of religion.
	So here I would Point to my friend Jordan Peterson who talks a lot about the practices of basically what are religious practices.
	The idea of make your room, do the moral thing, duty.
	But he doesn't talk in specifically religious terms, he speaks in Jungian terms.
	He talks about the idea of deeper precepts that are embedded in myth, which is really embedded in the human psyche.
	He doesn't make the kind of truth of religion argument.
	He instead makes the, if you want to get ahead, you're going to have to do this stuff argument.
	If you want to be happy, you're going to have to do this stuff argument.
	And that has tremendous cultural appeal.
	Do you think that that is beneficial?
	Do you think that that is enough?
	How far do you think that goes?
	I think it's beneficial, but it's not enough.
	When I had a dialogue in Toronto last year with Jordan Peterson, rather than attack his position, what I tried to do was to be invitational and say, look, you and I both affirm the objectivity of moral values and meaning in life.
	I want to offer you something.
	I want to offer you a grounding for those values that we both hold dear.
	Because for him, as you say, Ben, they're just sort of floating in the air.
	They don't have any metaphysical ground in his worldview.
	So he's got the right values and meaning by and large, but he has no basis for them.
	And I'm still hopeful that he will come to embrace God as an objective metaphysical reality who will provide a basis for those values and meaning in life.
	I mean, one of the things that I've found really fascinating is, as I say, so many people are embracing fundamental principles of religion, and even the sort of quasi-pantheistic idea, but the religious idea nonetheless, that there is a moving force behind the universe or implicit in the universe, and yet, the minute you say God, people tend to run for the hills because they immediately identify their boring Sunday school class.
	So how exactly do we bridge that gap for folks who may have been alienated from religion by a sort of simplistic view of religion that they got growing up?
	How do you re-educate people in the precepts of religion?
	Well, as you probably noticed in talking with me, Ben, I don't lead.
	With the Bible, I lead with philosophical arguments, beginning very generally.
	There's a creator of the cosmos.
	There's a designer of the universe.
	There is an absolute moral good which furnishes a basis for moral values and duties.
	And then I begin to ask, well, who is Jesus of Nazareth?
	What did he claim?
	Why should we believe what he said?
	And then finally, and ultimately, I'll try to make the personal application and say, what difference could this make in your life?
	And sometimes I'll share then my story, personally, of how I, raised in an unbelieving family, came to believe in Christ at the age of 16 and had my life completely upended and turned around.
	And so, by beginning Philosophically, I think you can lead into then a more religious and personal faith that people will feel comfortable with.
	Well, maybe you could share that story.
	So what made you religious?
	I'm religious since birth.
	I grew up in a Jewish home.
	We were fairly religious from the time that I was young.
	We became fully Orthodox when I was 11 and was with my parents, my whole entire immediate family.
	But how did you become a religious person?
	I don't think of myself as religious, but I understand that you're using the word in a neutral sense.
	In high school, I was going through a deep existential crisis, looking for meaning in life, the meaning of my existence, who I was.
	I later discovered existentialist philosophers were asking the same questions, and I never knew it.
	So I was filled with Darkness and despair as I saw my impending death, the impending death of the universe, and no meaning to it all.
	And I walked into my high school German class one day and I sat down behind a girl who's one of these types, you know, that is always so happy it just makes you sick.
	And I tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned around, and I said to her, Sandy, what are you always so happy about anyway?
	And she said, it's because I know Jesus Christ is my personal Savior.
	And I said, you what?
	I said, well, I've gone to church.
	And she said, well, that's not enough, Bill.
	You've got to have Him really living in your heart.
	And I said, well, what would he want to do a thing like that for?
	And she said, because he loves you, Bill.
	And that just hit me like a ton of bricks.
	Here I was so filled with despair and anger.
	And she said there was someone who really loved me.
	And who was it but the God of the universe.
	And that thought just staggered me to think that the God of the universe could love me, Bill Craig, that worm down there on that speck of dust called planet Earth.
	I just couldn't take it in.
	Well, I went home that night and found a New Testament.
	And for the first time in my life, I opened it and began to read it.
	And as I did, I was absolutely captivated by the person of Jesus of Nazareth.
	There was a wisdom about this man's teachings that I had never encountered before, and there was an authenticity about his life that I couldn't deny.
	And as I read the New Testament, I saw why God seemed so unreal to me.
	It was because my sin, my moral wrongdoing, it created a separation between me and God, so that I was alienated from Him and couldn't experience that love relationship that He had created me to have, but that He had sent Christ to atone for those sins and that through Christ I could have forgiveness and a restoration of that relationship.
	And so, after about six months of the most intense soul-searching that I've ever been through, one night I just came to the end of my rope and cried out to God.
	And I felt this tremendous infusion of joy Like a balloon being blown up and blown up until it was ready to burst.
	And I rushed outside.
	It was a warm, Midwestern September evening.
	And as I looked up at the sky, I could see the Milky Way from horizon to horizon.
	As I looked up at the stars, I thought, Come to know God!
	And that moment changed my whole life.
	Because I had thought enough about this during those six months to realize that if Bill Craig ever became a Christian, I could do nothing less than give my entire life to spreading this message among mankind.
	Because if this is really the truth, if it's really the truth, it's the greatest news ever announced.
	And so my call to Christian ministry was simultaneous with my conversion experience and I've never looked back.
	So in just a second, I want to ask you one final question, which is, in a world where it seems like religion, as you say, seems to be waning more broadly, even if it's being held more dearly by a smaller number, do you see people filling the void with sort of ersatz meaning?
	And where do you see the gravest threats to civilization coming from?
	I'm going to ask you that question in just one second, but if you want to hear Dr. William Lane Craig's answer, you actually have to subscribe over here at Daily Wire.
	To subscribe, go to dailywire.com, click subscribe, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
	Dr. Craig, thank you so much for stopping by.
	I really appreciate your time, I really appreciate your work, and if you go check out more of Dr. Craig's work at reasonablefaith.org.
	I think you're going to find a lot there that is edifying.
	Thanks so much for stopping by.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Ben, I've really enjoyed our conversation.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
	Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
	Associate producer Mathis Glover.
	Edited by Donovan Fowler.
	Audio is mixed by Mike Karamina.
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	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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