Episodes

A listener is troubled by the impression that atheists and materialists have already answered every argument for Christianity, and wonders how belief in God is still possible. Dr. Craig responds by drawing a simple but important distinction, and reflects on why so many people feel overwhelmed by the volume of skeptical material online.

Dr. Craig answers more listener questions from around the world. If Christ paid for the sins of the lost, is hell a double punishment? Was Jesus really separated from the Father on the cross? Is God’s justice only retributive? Could downloading our consciousness offer a kind of digital immortality?

A listener asks Dr. Craig to imagine a possible world filled with free persons, love, moral agency, and a genuine relationship with God, but with none of the cancer, war, animal suffering, or death we see in our own. If a world like that is logically possible, what greater good could justify God choosing a world like ours instead? Dr. Craig takes up this possible-worlds objection and considers whether it really undercuts his view that God permits suffering for the sake of bringing people freely ...

Dr. Craig answers listener questions from around the world. If Christ paid for every sin, why would anyone still face judgment? Could God have made the universe and simply moved on? What should we make of a skeptical historian who says the disciples must have seen something? Plus: when science and Scripture seem to collide, which gives way? Why did God allow Mark’s snake-handling passage into our Bibles? And will the wicked exist forever?

A listener writes that his faith is hanging in the balance. Wherever he looks, from natural theology to the resurrection, he thinks the scholarly consensus seems to be against Christianity, and online critics accuse Christian thinkers, Dr. Craig included, of intellectual dishonesty. Questions about James Tour and the origin of life have only deepened his doubts. Is Christianity a respected position in the academy? Would a naturalistic account of abiogenesis threaten the faith? And how can we tel...

Philosophical theologian Ryan Mullins argues that William Lane Craig’s version of Molinism is incoherent, and the charge comes down to one word: deliberation. If God already knows everything, can he really deliberate about which world to create? And if he can’t, is his choice truly free? Dr. Craig responds to Mullins’s critique, evaluates defenses offered by Tim Stratton and Reasonable Faith's own Tyson James, and explains why Mullins’s proposed fix would come at a steep theological price. Plus,...

If nothing is impossible for God, how can some worlds be “infeasible” for Him? A listener named Howard presses Dr. Craig on a phrase that sounds like a limit on God’s power. Dr. Craig explains the Molinist idea behind it: true counterfactuals about how free creatures would choose narrow the range of worlds God can actually bring about. He then argues why this places no restriction on divine omnipotence.

A viral clip from Fr. Mike Schmitz claims that Protestants who take Jesus’ words in John 6 seriously end up becoming Catholic. Dr. Craig explains why the bread of life discourse doesn’t require eating Christ’s literal flesh, and why that claim overlooks the many non-Catholic traditions that also affirm a real presence. He then weighs in on John Piper and Kevin DeYoung’s friendly exchange over baptizing infants, and asks whether baptism is really the new covenant’s counterpart to circumcision.

If the Son is not eternally begotten of the Father, is it arbitrary which person of the Trinity is called "Father" and which is called "Son"? And what distinguishes the three persons from one another in the first place? Dr. Craig responds to a reader's two worries about his view of the Trinity, drawing on the distinction between the economic and the ontological Trinity and on the observations of Marcellus of Ancyra, one of the orthodox leaders at Nicea.

In this episode, Dr. Craig provides his argument for God's existence that may also help build relationships with Muslims.

Dr. Craig has argued that annihilationism can't be reconciled with penal substitutionary atonement, since Christ was not annihilated on the cross. But a questioner from Spain turns the tables: Jesus didn't suffer eternal conscious punishment either. So is the traditional view of hell in the same trouble? Dr. Craig explains why he thinks the traditionalist has an answer the annihilationist doesn't.

In this episode, Dr. William Lane Craig answers questions regarding the resurrection of Jesus. What do scholars say about the empty tomb? What does prominent scholarship on the resurrection tell us? Does the best New Testament research support the facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus?

An undergraduate philosophy student presses Dr. Craig on his view that God exists timelessly without the universe but temporally once creation begins: if God can timelessly bring about a temporal effect like the beginning of time, why couldn't God perform other timeless acts with temporal consequences too? He argues the lack of an explanation for that is just an open puzzle, not a real problem for the view, and asks what actually motivates Craig's position in the first place. Craig responds by d...

A YouTuber named Jay claims Frank Turek dodged a university student's question: if God is perfect, why didn't He create us perfect rather than flawed? Kevin plays the clips, and Dr. Craig explains why the question is built on confusion. Only God is a perfect being, and God cannot be created, so any created being is necessarily imperfect. Imperfect does not mean morally bad. Adam and Eve were sinless, but innocent rather than perfect. There is also no problem with a world where sin is possible, o...

A listener who's been working through Dr. Craig's Systematic Philosophical Theology asks whether it's more accurate to say Jesus Christ is "the Spirit of the Logos" united to a human body, rather than "the soul of the Logos," pointing to passages describing God as spirit and drawing an analogy to how a human spirit unites to a body. Dr. Craig first corrects the premise: his actual view is that the Logos is the soul of Jesus, not that the Logos possesses a soul. He then explains why he avoids "sp...

A listener from the UK argues that the Kalam cosmological argument has a fatal flaw: even if it proves God created the universe, that doesn't prove God still exists today, any more than a house proves its builder is still alive. Dr. Craig responds by pointing to arguments for a metaphysically necessary being (from the Leibnizian cosmological, moral, and ontological arguments), which by definition cannot go out of existence. He also explains why the Kalam functions as one link in a cumulative cas...

Journalist Jonathan Rauch's Atlantic essay "Let It Be" argued that apatheism, simply not caring whether God exists, is a mark of civilizational progress, making society safer and less prone to religious conflict. Philosopher Paul Copan disagrees, calling it a sign of decline. Kevin and Dr. Craig work through the disagreement: what's actually at stake if the question of God goes unexamined, whether a secular society can sustain objective meaning and purpose without a theistic foundation, and whet...

A listener writes in with a philosophical challenge to the coherence of Christian doctrine: if God knowingly creates the exact conditions under which people will sin, how can he justly hold them responsible for sinning, and how can Christ's atonement make sense as a remedy for a failure that was effectively built into the system? Dr. Craig traces the problem to a hidden assumption in the question: theological necessitarianism, the idea that circumstances which make sin likely also make it inevit...

A clip of Dr. William Lane Craig discussing the eternal generation of the Son went viral a few weeks ago, picked up by Protestia and drawing heresy accusations from across the theological world. In this episode, Kevin puts those criticisms to Dr. Craig directly. Dr. Craig clarifies what he is and isn't claiming: he denies eternal generation is taught in Scripture, but affirms Christ's full deity and the rest of the Nicene Creed. He responds point by point to named critics, including Michael Car...

A reader follows up on an earlier question about annihilationism, asking Dr. Craig to unpack what it means that Christ was "momentarily separated" from the Father on the cross, given that the Trinity is indivisible. Dr. Craig explains this as a relational rather than ontological separation, then argues that annihilationism actually undermines penal substitutionary atonement, since it becomes very hard to see how Christ bore the punishment we deserved without being annihilated himself.

A reader asks Dr. Craig why God doesn't just grant humanity the beatific vision, the direct vision of God, right now, if it's the strongest possible evidence for His existence. Dr. Craig explains what the beatific vision is and why giving it to us in this life would strip away our freedom to believe, making genuine faith impossible.

A pastor trained at three seminaries and formerly on staff at a Dallas-area megachurch has said he is now an agnostic atheist, citing eight reasons for his deconversion. Dr. William Lane Craig responds to each, from the genetic fallacy and divine hiddenness to the historical Adam and the problem of evil, and points out what's conspicuously missing from the video: any engagement with the positive case for Christianity.

A listener working through Dr. Craig's book In Quest of the Historical Adam raises a pointed question about the model's implications: if Cain's wife came from outside the Adamic line, among the non-human hominins living alongside Adam and Eve, what would that mean for their children? Dr. Craig addresses the theological and biological status of such unions directly, explaining why any offspring would not bear the image of God, and why he holds that Adam and Eve remain the sole progenitors of the ...

What's it actually like to exist as a disembodied soul in the intermediate state between death and resurrection? A listener writes in with real existential unease about being "unclothed" from the body, and Dr. Craig turns to philosopher H.H. Price's theory that the afterlife might work something like a dream world, where mental images take the place of sense perception and souls communicate with one another telepathically. Dr. Craig walks through how this secular philosophical framework can actu...