William Lane Craig Quotes & Sayings

But the argument is still unsound, because the first premise is false: there are other unmentioned alternatives, for example, that Jesus as described in the gospels is a legendary figure, so that the trilemma is false as it stands. — William Lane Craig

my favorite is the cosmological argument. But cosmological and teleological arguments don't touch people where they live. The — William Lane Craig

The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist. As Dostoyevsky said, All things are permitted. — William Lane Craig

Today there is virtually a consensus... that Jesus came on the scene with an unheard of authority, with the claim of the authority to stand in God's place and speak to us and bring us to salvation. With regard to Jesus there are only two possible modes of behavior: either to believe that in him God encounters us or to nail him to the cross as a blasphemer. Tertium non datur. [There is no third way.]2 — William Lane Craig

By setting such strong, harsh dichotomies God taught Israel that any assimilation to pagan idolatry is intolerable. It was His way of preserving Israel's spiritual health and posterity. God knew that if these Canaanite children were allowed to live, they would spell the undoing of Israel. The killing of the Canaanite children not only served to prevent assimilation to Canaanite identity but also served as a shattering, tangible illustration of Israel's being set exclusively apart for God. — William Lane Craig

If true love came at a price, the price would be all worth while if i was spending it on you. — William Lane Craig

This is reality in a universe without God: there is no hope; there is no purpose. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot's haunting lines:
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
What is true of mankind as a whole is true of each of us individually: we are here to no purpose. If there is no God, then our life is not fundamentally different from that of a dog. — William Lane Craig

I am not offering God as a theory to compete with scientific theories about the universe. Rather I am saying that those self-contained, secular theories provide evidence for theologically neutral premises in philosophical arguments leading to a conclusion that has theistic significance. — William Lane Craig

The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology, that branch of theology that seeks to prove God's existence apart from divine revelation. — William Lane Craig

In order to receive forgiveness, we need to place our trust in Christ as our Savior and the Lord of our lives. But if we reject Christ, then we reject God's mercy and fall back on His justice. And you know where you stand there. If we reject Jesus' offer of forgiveness, then there is simply is no one else to pay the penalty for your sin
except yourself. — William Lane Craig

Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis fails to become a Christian because of a lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with god. — William Lane Craig

I am an Orangeman first and a politician and member of this parliament [Stormont] afterwards. — William Lane Craig

Given AC as a rival to naturalism, there is an additional burden of proof for a naturalist ontology that quantifies over sui generis emergent properties such as those constitutive of consciousness. After — William Lane Craig

It's the combination of improbability with an independently given pattern that discredits chance. — William Lane Craig

Faith is trust or commitment to what you think is true. — William Lane Craig

Left to himself, natural man would never come to God. — William Lane Craig

Thus, although arguments and evidence may be used to support the believer's faith, they are never properly the basis of that faith. — William Lane Craig

THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: A SIMPLE FORMULATION — William Lane Craig

Ask a physics teacher: Why do elementary particles exist? Is it impossible for them not to exist? (Be prepared for the possibility that your physics teacher doesn't want to have this conversation.) — William Lane Craig

The mere possibility provides no warrant for denying what I clearly grasp. — William Lane Craig

It's no longer enough to teach our children Bible stories; they need doctrine and apologetics. — William Lane Craig

If God is dead, then man is dead too. — William Lane Craig

Mere duration of existence doesn't make that existence meaningful. If man and the universe could exist forever, but if there were no God, their existence would still have no ultimate significance. — William Lane Craig

We have seen that multiple lines of historical evidence indicate that Jesus' tomb was found empty on Sunday morning by a group of his women followers. Furthermore, no convincing natural explanation is available to account for this fact. This alone might prompt us to believe that the resurrection of Jesus is the best explanation. — William Lane Craig

The Bible says all men are without excuse. Even those who are given no good reason to believe and many persuasive reasons to disbelieve have no excuse, because the ultimate reason they do not believe is that they have deliberately rejected God's Holy Spirit. — William Lane Craig

If you're sincerely seeking God, God will make His existence evident to you. — William Lane Craig

The gospel is never heard in isolation. It is always heard against the background of the cultural milieu in which one lives. A person raised in a cultural milieu in which Christianity is still seen as an intellectually viable option will display an openness to the gospel which a person who is secularized will not [as such] part of the broader task of Christian scholarship is to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women. — William Lane Craig

If God does not exist and there is no immortality, then all the evil acts of men go unpunished and all the sacrifices of good men go unrewarded. But who can live with such a view? Richard Wurmbrand, who has been tortured for his faith in communist prisons, says,
The cruelty of atheism is hard to believe when man has no faith in the reward of good or the punishment of evil. There is no reason to be human. There is no restraint from the depths of evil which is in man. The communist torturers often said, 'There is no God, no Hereafter, no punishment for evil. We can do what we wish.' I have heard one torturer even say, 'I thank God, in whom I don't believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.' He expressed it in unbelievable brutality and torture inflicted on prisoners. — William Lane Craig

Something is objective if it is independent of people's opinions. If it holds or is true independently of what anybody thinks then it is objective. It is subjective if it is dependent upon people's opinions. — William Lane Craig

The most popular form of atheism is a philosophy called naturalism. Naturalism is the view that science and science alone determines what exists. What exists is what our best scientific theories of the world require. If something is not required by our best scientific theories of the world, then it does not exist. But this is devastating for ethics because moral values are not required by science. Science is morally neutral. You cannot find moral values in a test tube. So it follows immediately, from the perspective of naturalism, that moral values do not really exist. They are just subjective illusions of human beings. — William Lane Craig

Catching the apple doesn't overturn the law of gravity or the formulation of a
new law. It's merely an intervention of a person with freewill who
overrides the natural causes operative in that particular circumstance.
And that is, essentially, is what God does when he causes a miracle to
occur. — William Lane Craig

Even if the disciples had believed in the resurrection of Jesus, it is doubtful they would have generated any following. So long as the body was interred in the tomb, a Christian movement founded on belief in the resurrection of the dead man would have been an impossible folly. — William Lane Craig

When you're going through hard times and God seems distant, apologetics can help you to remember that our faith is not based on emotions, but on the truth, and therefore you must hold on to it. — William Lane Craig

The idea that we live in a post-modern culture is a myth. In fact a post-modern culture is an impossibility; it would be utterly unlivable. Nobody is a post-modernist when it comes to reading the labels on a medicine bottle versus a box of rat poison! You better believe that texts have objective meaning! — William Lane Craig

In a world without God, who's to say whose values are right and whose are wrong? There can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. Think of what that means! It means it's impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can you praise generosity, self-sacrifice, and love as good. To kill someone or to love someone is morally equivalent. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist - there is only the bare, valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong. — William Lane Craig

To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, is to say that the holocaust was wrong even though the Nazis who carried it out thought that it was right, and it would still have been wrong, even if the Nazis had won World War II and succeeded in brainwashing or exterminating everybody who disagreed with them, so that everyone in the world thought that the holocaust was right and good. To say that the holocaust was objectively wrong, means that it's wrong regardless of the outcome of World War II. The premise is that if there is no God, then moral values or duties are not objective in that sense. — William Lane Craig

We can formulate Plantinga's version of the ontological argument as follows: 1) It is possible that a maximally great being exists. 2) If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world. 3) If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world. 4) If a maximally great being exists in every possible world, then it exists in the actual world. 5) If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists. 6) Therefore, a maximally great being exists. — William Lane Craig

For the assertion that "There is no God" is just as much a claim to knowledge as is the assertion that "There is a God." Therefore, the former assertion requires justification just as the latter does. — William Lane Craig

Richard [Carrier] takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, that there was no such person in history. This is a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn't even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship. — William Lane Craig

God exists necessarily and is the explanation why anything else exists. — William Lane Craig

The point is this: If God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent - for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance. — William Lane Craig

J. Gresham Machen solemnly warned, False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the Gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.1 — William Lane Craig

Apologetics comes from the Greek word apologia, which means a defense, as in a court of law. Christian apologetics involves making a case for the truth of the Christian faith. — William Lane Craig

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. — William Lane Craig

So how do you find out what God thinks? The Christian says, you look in the Bible. And the Bible tells us that God forbids homosexual acts. Therefore, they are wrong.
So basically the reasoning goes like this:
(1) We are all obligated to do God's will.
(2) God's will is expressed in the Bible.
(3) The Bible forbids homosexual behavior.
(4) Therefore, homosexual behavior is against God's will, or is wrong. — William Lane Craig

Whereas easy appeals to mystery prematurely shut off reflection about God, rigorous and earnest effort to understand him is richly rewarded with deeper appreciation of who he is, more confidence in his reality and care, and a more intelligent and profound worship of his person. — William Lane Craig

Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence then it is the former which must take precedence over the latter. — William Lane Craig

The way in which I know Christianity is true is first and foremost is the basis of the witness of the Holy Spirit in my heart. And this gives me self-authenticating means of knowing Christianity is true wholly apart from the evidence. And therefore, even if in some historically contingent circumstances the evidence that I have available to me should turn against Christianity, I do not think that controverts the witness of the Holy Spirit. — William Lane Craig

But the Bible says that the unreached will be judged on a quite different basis than those who have heard the gospel. God will judge the unreached on the basis of their response to His self-revelation in nature and conscience. The Bible says that from the created order alone, all persons can know that a Creator God exists and that God has implanted His moral law in the hearts of all persons so that they are held morally accountable to God (Rom. 1.20; 2.14-15). The Bible promises salvation to anyone who responds affirmatively to this self-revelation of God — William Lane Craig

If Christians could be trained to provide solid evidence for what they believe and good answers to unbelievers' questions and objections, then the perception of Christians would slowly change. Christians would be seen as thoughtful people to be taken seriously rather than as emotional fanatics or buffoons. The gospel would be a real alternative for people to embrace. — William Lane Craig

Our churches are filled with Christians who are idling in intellectual neutral. As Christians, their minds are going to waste. One result of this is an immature, superficial faith. People who simply ride the roller coaster of emotional experience are cheating themselves out of a deeper and richer Christian faith by neglecting the intellectual side of that faith. — William Lane Craig

Are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by just social conventions, like driving on the right-hand versus left-hand side of the road? Or are they merely expressions of personal preference, like having a taste for certain foods? Or are they somehow valid and binding, independent of our opinion, and if they are objective in this way, what is their foundation? — William Lane Craig

Atheists themselves used to be very comfortable in maintaining that the universe is eternal and uncaused. The problem is that they can no longer hold that position because modern evidence that the universe started with the Big Bang. So they can't legitimately object when I make the same claim about God - he is eternal and he is uncaused. — William Lane Craig

There are various virtues of what counts as a best explanation, and I imagine familiarity is one of them. — William Lane Craig

The Christian faith does not call for us to put our minds on the shelf, to fly in the face of common sense and history, or to make a leap of faith into the dark. The rational person, fully apprised of the evidence, can confidently believe ... — William Lane Craig

Christians have an unfair advantage in the marketplace of ideas: We have truth on our side! You — William Lane Craig

The Christian religion, [Pascal] claims, teaches two truths: that there is a God who men are capable of knowing, and that there is an element of corruption in men that renders them unworthy of God. Knowledge of God without knowledge of man's wretchedness begets pride, and knowledge of man's wretchedness without knowledge of God begets despair, but knowledge of Jesus Christ furnishes man knowledge of both simultaneously. — William Lane Craig

Popper says that the best way out of the problem of having unconscious points of view is to state clearly one's view and to recognize that there are also other points of view. — William Lane Craig

From earliest times men wholly ignorant of the Bible have concluded on the basis of the design in the universe that God must exist. — William Lane Craig

Successful evangelism involves not only harvesting, but sowing and watering, too. We must never think that because a nonbeliever remained unconvinced by our case that our apologetic has failed. For one encounter is not the end of the story. — William Lane Craig

More often than not, it is what you are rather than what you say that will bring an unbeliever to Christ.
This, then, is the ultimate apologetic. For the ultimate apologetic is: your life. — William Lane Craig

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose. — William Lane Craig

Man's condition ought to impel him to seek to discover whether there is a God and a solution to his predicament. But people occupy their time and their thoughts with trivialities and distractions, so as to avoid the despair, boredom, and anxiety that would inevitably result if those diversions were removed. — William Lane Craig

Scepticism, ironically, draws its life's blood from claims to have a good deal of knowledge. For example, your friends claim to know, 'Since every possible option has not been explored, nothing can be said for certain.' That statement is itself a claim to knowledge! — William Lane Craig

But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong. All we're confronted with is, in Sartre's words, "the bare, valueless fact of existence." Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning. — William Lane Craig

Okay, look at it this way: if the evening news has a very high probability of being accurate, then it's highly improbable that they would inaccurately report the numbers chosen in the lottery. That counterbalances any improbability in the choosing of those numbers, so you're quite rational to believe in this highly improbable event. — William Lane Craig

Reason is a tool to help us better understand and defend our faith; as Anselm put it, ours is a faith that seeks understanding. — William Lane Craig

For a universe without moral accountability and devoid of value is unimaginably terrible. — William Lane Craig

If the atheist believes that suffering is bad or ought not to be, then he's making moral judgments that are possible only if God exists. — William Lane Craig

If there's a supernatural agent that is working in the natural world, then the idealized conditions described by the law are no longer in effect. The law isn't violated because the law has this implicit provision that nothing is messing around with the conditions. — William Lane Craig

G. W. Leibniz, codiscoverer of calculus and a towering intellect of eighteenth-century Europe, wrote: "The first question which should rightly be asked is: Why is there something rather than nothing?"[1] In other words, why does anything at all exist? This, for Leibniz, is the most basic question that anyone can ask. Like me, Leibniz came to the conclusion that the answer is to be found, not in the universe of created things, but in God. God — William Lane Craig

The origin of the Christian faith is therefore inexplicable unless Jesus really rose from the dead. — William Lane Craig

The person who follows the pursuit of reason unflinchingly toward its end will be atheistic or, at best, agnostic. — William Lane Craig

So whom does God wrong in commanding the destruction of the Canaanites? Not the Canaanite adults, for they were corrupt and deserving of judgment. Not the children, for they inherit eternal life. So who is wronged? Ironically, I think the most difficult part of this whole debate is the apparent wrong done to the Israeli soldiers themselves. Can you imagine what it would be like to have to break into some house and kill a terrified woman and her children? The brutalising effect on these Israeli soldiers is disturbing. — William Lane Craig

The simple fact that the Christian fellowship, founded on belief in Jesus' resurrection, came into existence and flourished in the very city where he was executed and buried is powerful evidence for the historicity of the empty tomb. — William Lane Craig