Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
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As we look forward to 2023, we’re anticipating another year, if the Lord wills, of fruitful ministry. I’ll share more about the results of 2022 once we receive our annual reports.
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The Corona virus pandemic had a major impact upon my speaking ministry, leading me to pursue opportunities online rather than in person. What I came to realize is that I could reach thousands more people via online talks, podcasts, and conferences than through in-person appearances—and without ever leaving the comfort of home! So even though the pandemic is largely over, I’ve determined to continue to pursue this online form of outreach.
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But there are exceptions! This past month I accepted the invitation to speak to faculty audiences at five consecutive Ivy League university venues. These events are called Faculty Roundtables and were pioneered years ago by David Thom. I spoke several years ago at the Faculty Roundtable in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and had such a great time that the invitation to do a tour of Ivies was irresistible. These roundtable events are emphatically not Christian faculty club meetings! They typically begin with a cocktail hour (Dave says you’ve got to have a bar to get faculty to attend), followed by two short talks, one by a non-Christian and one by a Christian, and a fine dinner with group discussions around the tables. Then there is an open Q&A period with both speakers up front. The emphasis in these roundtables is on everyone’s having the opportunity to share his views, regardless of what they are. This sort of openness to non-Christian viewpoints attracts many non-Christian faculty to these events, where Christian colleagues can dialogue with them. There is a great diversity of departments and schools represented at these roundtables, so that there is always something to learn.
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I was invited to speak on the question of the historical Adam, a rather unusual topic for these roundtables. The other speaker featured with me on this tour was David Haig, a professor of micro-biology at Harvard and author of From Darwin to Derrida. His subject had very little overlap with mine. It soon became obvious that he is an atheist and moral relativist. Despite the fact that that was not my topic, I found myself repeatedly called upon to respond to his views in the Q&A times. Here are some of my reflections on the various roundtables in which we participated.
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University of Massachusetts (Amherst) Roundtable
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With David Haig.
Photo courtesy of Kari Hutchinson
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| My talk went super well, with great clarity and passion. I had an 18-point outline of my talk which was handed out to every person to follow along. That made it easy to understand. David Haig, on the other hand, I found difficult to understand. He’s a postmodernist who thinks that texts have no objective meaning, including the genetic text encoded in our genome. At my table were seated an atheist microbiologist, a biochemist, and an anthropologist. I asked the biochemist about the possibility of origin-of-life scenarios, which I’m currently studying, and he said that as a result of his scientific studies he has come back to belief in God because he cannot see any plausible way in which life may have originated through random chemical processes. The anthropologist was absolutely fascinated by my suggestion that Adam and Eve may have belonged to Homo heidelbergensis. The atheist microbiologist admitted that on the metaphysical level the entire evolutionary process could be directed by an intelligence even if it proceeds immanently by random mutations and natural selection. The Q&A that followed dinner was scintillating. Almost all the questions were directed toward me, which gave me the opportunity to unfold more fully the richness and interest of the Genesis narrative. For example, one gentleman thought that the image of God in man was physical, so that it has been changed through evolution. I explained to him that since God has no physical body, being created in God’s image refers to man’s spiritual nature, not to his physical nature. Another woman challenged me about North and South American Indian myths of humanity’s origin and their resemblance to Ancient Near Eastern myths. Fortunately I had studied these and was able to explain points of commonality. Another young woman asked about why we should take the Genesis narrative to teach the universal progenitorship of Adam and Eve to the human race, which gave me the opportunity to explain three reasons for that conviction.
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Yale University Roundtable
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Lawn Club at Yale University
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| We drove the next day over to New Haven, Connecticut, for the roundtable at Yale University. Held at the elite Lawn Club adjacent the campus, the Yale event was very different from U Mass. At Yale the questions were more concerned with the meaning of life, and people attempted to force my talk into the mold of answering that question. David Haig went more on the offensive against my realist view of meaning and value. So I had to defend my position as grounded in a theistic worldview. Haig expressed the difference between our views poignantly in a single sentence: “I am Heraclitus, Bill is Plato.” In just six words he epitomized the whole difference between our world views with startling clarity! Unfortunately, most of the audience probably had never heard of Heraclitus or knew what Plato thought. So I explained that for Heraclitus everything is in constant flux and there is no permanence, whereas for Plato ultimate reality is necessary and eternal, goodness and truth are objective, and the world of appearances is founded on it. The odd thing is that we both accurately expressed what Haig believes, only I did so negatively while he did so positively. I said that on naturalism there is no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose in life, whereas he said (cheerily) that we each create his own meaning in life, moral values are human inventions and person-relative, and we each have his own purpose of life. Unfortunately, my impression is that this secular Yale audience buys into this rosy picture of an atheistic world and does not understand the horror of nihilism and relativism in the way the French existentialists did.
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Dartmouth College Roundtable
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At Dartmouth College Roundtable
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| The following day we drove up to lovely Hanover, New Hampshire, for the upcoming roundtable at Dartmouth. David Haig did not join me for this event, so I went solo. We had both “town and gown” represented at our roundtable, plus some African students from Nigeria and Kenya who couldn’t go home for break, as well as some women’s basketball team players. These stayed for an hour afterwards in intense conversations with a pastor. At my table was a political science professor from Egypt, who knew of the Egyptian myths I mentioned in my talk, as well as of Egyptian monotheism under Akhenaten. Because some of the people at the event don’t believe in the Bible, they had difficulty understanding that the way I approach my topic is by asking what my biblical commitments are as a Christian theologian. One English professor, for example, complained that I didn’t consider the viewpoints of other religions. He also said that religion is just an idea in the mind and not an objectively existing reality. That gave me a chance to explain that my talk was just a part of a broader systematic theology, namely, the part dealing with theological anthropology, but that I also deal with the doctrine of God and the arguments for God’s existence. I then listed off about six arguments for the existence of God as an objectively existing Creator and Designer of the universe who is the paradigm of absolute goodness. That unexpected burst of evidence for God seemed to have a pointed effect on the audience. At the end of the evening I was asked where I find meaning in life, and that gave me a chance to share a word of testimony about my relationship with God through Jesus Christ as my Creator, Redeemer, and Lover. It was a dramatic close to the evening.
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Our next stop on the tour was Brown University over in Providence, Rhode Island. The talk went great. Afterwards, one gentleman commented to me on how clear and easy to follow my outline was. Seated next to me at my table was a Hindu heart surgeon and his New Age Buddhist wife, who was very loquacious! The ensuing Q&A was pretty lively. One man got up and announced that he was an atheist and an anthropologist and complained that my talk was too narrowly focused on Christianity. What about all the other religions in the world? That gave me a chance to explain that I approach these issues as a Christian theologian and ask whether my faith commitments are compatible with the best evidence of modern science concerning human origins. I had sought to show in my talk that they are. Someone who belongs to some other religious tradition is free to ask a similar question about his own faith commitments and their compatibility with modern science.
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With David Thom and David Haig
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| I explained that such a person had better hope that his faith commitments are consistent with modern science, otherwise he's got a real problem with his worldview to deal with. Near the end of the evening came what I considered to be the best question: “At the beginning of your talk you spoke of Schweitzer’s quest of the historical Jesus and of your quest of the historical Adam. Which of these quests has made the most progress to date?” I answered that, hands-down, the most progress has been made on the quest of the historical Jesus. I explained that as a result of Richard Burridge’s showing the family resemblances between ancient biographies like Plutarch’s Lives of famous Greeks and Romans and the four gospels that the gospels are now widely regarded as forms of ancient biography. As such, they have a definite historical interest and belong to a different genre than myth. I also explained the Jewish reclamation of Jesus: the renewed realization that Jesus was a first century Jew and should be interpreted against that backdrop, not against the backdrop of Greco-Roman mythology. As a result, the gospels are today regarded as historically credible sources for the life and teachings of Jesus. So great progress has been made in this quest. What a beautiful way to end an evening by pointing to the credibility of the Gospel accounts of Jesus!
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Our tour climaxed with a roundtable that included faculty from a number of schools such as Harvard, MIT, Boston University, Brandeis, Wellesley, U Mass (Boston), etc. It was held at the Harvard Faculty Club, which exudes old world charm with its heavy, dark wood décor. We had a large group with people from all sorts of fields. At our table I sat opposite the Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft, who at 85 is as sharp as a tack! He got into a conversation with a man in Artificial Intelligence who explained the Turing test for detecting intelligence: if we are unable to discern whether the responses to our questions are offered by a person or a machine, then we should infer from such linguistic ability the presence of intelligence. Kreeft retorted, “That seems to me just obviously fallacious.” He pointed out that from the indistinguishability of behavior, one cannot justifiably infer an intelligence behind the behavior. He summed it up by saying of computer intelligence, “There’s no one there!” That pithy comment summed it all up! No matter how good a computer can mimic human behavior, the fact remains that there’s no one there.
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During the Q&A, one table spokesman reported, “Our table had no sympathy for your proposal. We saw no evidence at all to think that all humanity was descended from a single couple.” I answered, “I’m not trying to prove that all humanity is descended from a single couple. How could we possibly prove such a thing? Science has no way of proving that at the foundations of the human race was a single couple. Rather my argument is that there is no incompatibility between my biblical commitment to a single couple and the scientific evidence concerning the origins of humanity. That’s a very modest claim. Your table has simply misunderstood my project.” That answer apparently helped to clarify things for many people.
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In response to another question I was able to explain the difference between my and Haig’s view of the soul. I gave a little overview of philosophy of mind and the central question of whether the mind is an immaterial substance distinct from the body. I explained the difference between anthropological dualism (my view) and anthropological monism or physicalism or materialism (Haig’s view). I explained that “soul” is just the theological word for mind, so that mind/body dualism is soul/body dualism. I pointed out that soul/body dualism is another one of my biblical commitments as a Christian and explained that it is supported as well by good philosophical arguments concerning free will, mental causation, intentionality, and so on.
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Afterward I had a number of personal conversations, including one with a philosopher from U Mass (Boston). He was not a Christian but was absolutely elated to see a fellow philosopher discoursing intelligently about these issues. He did not want to embrace the view that God is the foundation of moral values and duties, even though he recognized that that left him with moral relativism, because he wanted to preserve “human autonomy.” I knew from my friends in Reformed theology that that was a red flag. That was confirmed when he went on to say that he wanted the right to disobey God. When I expressed alarm at such sentiments, he asked why. I replied that it is “dangerous” because it expresses rebellion. God as the ultimate Good deserves to be obeyed; it is our moral duty. I suggested to him that our freedom to sin is all the autonomy we need without denying that God is the basis for moral values and duties. He asked if I held to Divine Command Morality, and when I said “Yes,” he said he disagreed. He asked if I didn’t find the Euthyphro Dilemma problematic. I said, “Oh, no, not at all!” and referred him to William Alston’s article, “What Euthyphro Should Have Said.” He promised to look it up, and so we left at that, with his expressing once again his appreciation for the evening. Just some of the seeds sown!
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Let me share with you a brand-new writing project about which I’m excited. David Hutchings, a British popular science writer, has proposed to write a book summarizing in a popular and engaging way my various arguments on behalf of Christian faith. David is a very talented writer, and I am thrilled to be partnered with him in advising him on his effort. This past month we had a Zoom call to work out some of the central topics that he would include. In response to his request, I sent him a reading list of my works on these various topics so that he could familiarize himself more thoroughly with my arguments before commencing to write.
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Meanwhile, I’m reading material on the origin of life. This is not about biology or evolution. Rather, since it concerns the very origin of life itself, it is entirely about chemistry. So I have a pretty steep learning curve in familiarizing myself with the chemistry involved. One interesting thing about origin-of-life research is that scientists tend to divide into two camps on this subject: what I would call necessitists and contingentists. Necessitists claim that given the laws of nature, the origin of life from chemicals is inevitable. Life is necessary, not in the logical sense, but in the nomological sense, that is, the laws of nature make it unavoidable that life will originate. By contrast, contingentists maintain that the origin of life is an enormous accident, an event so improbable that it is unlikely to have occurred anywhere else in the observable universe. The sufficient conditions for the origin of life on Earth just happened to come together against all odds.
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The contingentists criticize the necessitists as holding to a sort of closet theism: a God has written the origin of life into the very laws of nature. The necessitists accuse the contingentists of making the origin of life into a miracle. So both sides accuse each other of holding surreptitiously to belief in God—which is the mortal sin in these discussions!
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Realizing this distinction between necessitists and contingentists helps us to understand why some scientists speak so confidently about the inevitability of the origin of life from chemicals: they are committed to the view that life is necessary, even though there is no scientific evidence for this claim. Instead, most researchers recognize that the origin of life on Earth is a highly improbable, singular event.
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What’s really interesting about this situation is that both camps wind up appealing to extraterrestrial sources of life! The necessitists say that because life is determined by the laws of nature, it must exist on other planets throughout the universe. On the other hand, the contingentists say that even though the origin of life is incredibly improbable, nonetheless, if there are enough planets in the universe, then it will happen by accident somewhere. Thus both sides are highly motivated to look to outer space to find life!
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I just learned that we succeeded in reaching our goal in our 2022 Matching Grant campaign! We won't have a final tally until a few weeks into January, but we do know that the goal has been reached. Thanks so much to all of you who participated! Jan and I are looking forward to 2023 and wish all of you a New Year in which you walk in the center of God’s will.
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For Christ and His Kingdom,
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Hi Dr. Craig,
Greetings from Singapore! I have been an ardent follower of your apologetic and philosophical work for a few years now and I just want to convey my heartfelt gratitude for all that you do for the body of Christ. Your clear logical reasoning, solid animation videos on YouTube and solid arguments during debates are a real treasure for anyone and everyone who wants to seek the truth. Thank you once again and I wish you good health and blessings for many more years to come. Blessings,
-Mario
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