Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
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March was a busy month for us, highlighted by our teaching at Houston Christian University.
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For several years now I’ve been teaching two classes a year during October and March at Houston Christian University. This time my class was on the doctrine of the Trinity. This was the first time that I’ve taught a class on this subject, using new material from my projected systematic philosophical theology. The class consisted of in-person and online students. In my lectures I discussed from a biblical, theological, and philosophical perspective what I determine to be the biblical doctrine of the Trinity, namely that (i) there is exactly one God and (ii) there are exactly three persons (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) who are properly called God. This is a more modest doctrine of the Trinity than the creedal formulation in the later Nicene and Constantinopolitan creeds. I really enjoyed lecturing on this material and engaging the students in very lively discussion about the issues.
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Our trip to Houston actually began with my participation in a conference on moral philosophy at HCU spearheaded by Prof. David Baggett the week prior to my class. On the night of our arrival we enjoyed dinner with the other conference speakers at the home of President Robert Sloane and his wife Sue. The next day I presented my conference lecture on “Is God’s Moral Perfection Reducible to His Love?”, available now on YouTube, in which I argue that both God’s love and justice are equally fundamental to His moral character and irreducible to each other.
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Then on the weekend I spoke at an apologetics conference at Sugarland Baptist Church which was also organized by Dr. Baggett. I spoke on “Can We Be Good without God?”, a talk in which I argue that only God supplies the foundation for objective moral values, moral duties, and moral accountability. I wrapped up by showing our Zangmeister video on the moral argument before taking questions from the audience. One of the highlights of this conference, which made the whole trip worthwhile for me, was listening to a talk by Paul Copan, in which he shared something that stunned me. In my RSV translation, Jude 5 reads, “Now I desire to remind you, though you were once for all fully informed, that he who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.” Right; that refers to the Lord’s delivering the people of Israel in the Exodus and later judging those Israelites who worshipped the golden calf. But Paul pointed out that the best Greek manuscripts have a different reading, now recognized as preferred by the most recent Nestle-Aland text, the United Bible Society text, and the Society of Biblical Literature Greek text. So the NRSV translates v. 5 as “Now I desire to remind you, though you are fully informed, once and for all, that Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.” Oh, my goodness! I was flabbergasted. Here Jude says that the Lord who delivered the people in the Exodus and later judged the unbelievers was, in fact, Jesus! I said to Paul, “If that reading is correct, that makes Jude 5 one of the most powerful prooftexts for the deity of Christ in the New Testament!” He agreed.
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The Monday morning before my class began I sat for a long interview with Pastor Eric Huffman of a church named The Story which we visited last October. He was eager to talk with me about my book In Quest of the Historical Adam. Although I have done many interviews and podcasts on this book, I was glad to have the opportunity to discuss it with Pastor Huffman because, in contrast to those who find the book controversial and troubling, he believes that it is tremendously helpful and liberating to people in the church who find young earth creationism implausible and are struggling to understand Genesis 1-11. I encouraged him to freely express his own opinions in our conversation, so that other pastors might see just how valuable my treatment of this question can be, and he enthusiastically did so.
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The week after returning from our trip to Houston I sat for an interview with Alex McIlroy for his podcast “Pursuit of Purpose.” What made this podcast worth doing is that Alex is a black minister who is burdened with getting sound doctrine and apologetics into the black church. This is an under reached audience, and so I was eager to lend any help that I could. Then the following week I did an interview with Justin Brierley for his podcast “Unbelievable” out of the U.K. They had billed this podcast as “Ask William Lane Craig Anything!” and so we had people joining live from all around the world, places like Singapore, South Africa, France, the United States, and so on. I had a really fun time answering the viewers’ questions. Finally, I closed out the month by doing an interview for the “Mom Life” podcast with Cynthia Blase which ministers to Christian moms. This was obviously not my usual audience, but Cynthia wanted to talk about biological evolution, which is precisely the subject which I am now studying for my systematic philosophical theology. As you might expect, she had many fundamental misunderstandings of the theory of evolution, which required me to define and explain numerous terms. I tried to make it as simple as possible, though Cynthia kept asking technical questions like “Please give some examples of fine tuning of the universe,” which wasn’t even our topic! So our conversation ranged far and wide, and I tried to help her see that there is nothing about standard evolutionary theory that is theologically objectionable. Rather, the real problem is the philosophy of naturalism, which often needlessly accompanies it.
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Current Research and Writing
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That forms a nice segue to my current study of evolutionary biology. This is a vast and difficult subject, which is hard to get your arms around. I am trying to determine how best to articulate a theological perspective on the evolution of biological complexity. There is no doubt that biological organisms were not created all at once, but appeared gradually over the 3.5 billion year history of life on Earth. Did God, using his middle knowledge, establish laws and conditions that He knew would lead to the evolution of biological complexity through the usual evolutionary mechanisms, or did He intervene miraculously in the evolutionary process to bring about events that would not otherwise have occurred? Stay tuned!
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I love all the little tidbits about biology that I’m learning in the course of this study. For example, Jan and I have often wondered why she floats so easily. You’ve probably seen pictures of people sitting in the Dead Sea reading a newspaper. Well, that’s the way Jan floats in ordinary freshwater. She’s unsinkable. It can’t be due to light bone density or a lack of muscle because she lifts weights and is very strong. Well, in the course of my reading, I discovered that the reason that bony fish (in contrast to sharks and rays) do not sink is because they have inside of them a swim bladder that they can fill with gas that keeps them up. The author commented that the reason we are able to swim is because we have huge lungs that perform the same function as a swim bladder. Suddenly the light came on! As a former athlete and wind instrumentalist, Jan has great lungs, and I’ll bet that’s why she is able to stay afloat so easily, whereas I have to constantly tread water to avoid drowning!
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In April I have the extraordinary opportunity of speaking to the scientists and staff at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, one of the top research institutions in the United States, on the existence of God. I’m really excited about this opportunity and will tell you how it went in our next monthly report.
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For Christ and His Kingdom,
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Hello Dr. Craig! How are you?
I'm from Brazil (so pardon my English, I'm using the translator), evangelical, and I've long had a great appreciation for all your work in theology, philosophy, and apologetics. And I needed to contact you to testify something. I have been working with popular science for a long time, mainly in paleontology, and at the same time I have always dedicated myself to the study of the creation versus evolution controversy, on my own, since 2008 approximately. In my biblical analyzes and comparison with what we have in paleoanthropology, I ended up reaching the same conclusion as you about the identity of the Historical Adam: Homo heidelbergensis! I came to postulate this around 2011 and 2012, and there is even an old post on my blog (with simple arguments compared to today, of course) where I theorize this, and when I learned that your investigation of the historical Adam culminated in the Same conclusion, I was amazed! For me, it was a confirmation that this really is a very plausible path of study, and I have to say that knowing this has empowered me greatly. Glory to God for that!
Best regards and God bless you!!
-Rodrigo
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