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Craig is the second of three children born to Mallory and Doris Craig in Peoria, Illinois.[4] Mr. Craig's work with the T. P. & W. railroad took the family to Keokuk, Iowa, until his transfer to the home office in East Peoria in 1960. While a student at East Peoria Community High School (1963–67)[5] Craig became a championship debater and public speaker, being named his senior year to the all-state debate team and winning the state championship in oratory.[6] He underwent a dramatic Christian conversion experience at the beginning of his junior year which re-directed the course of his life.[7][8][9] After graduating from high school, Craig attended Wheaton College, an evangelical college[10] west of Chicago, where he continued his debate and forensic activities, majoring in communications, where he was later named alumnus of the year.[1][11][12] At Wheaton, Craig studied under Stuart Hackett, whose Resurrection of Theism (1957) was to exert a major philosophical influence upon Craig's thought. It was his study of Edward John Carnell's Introduction to Christian Apologetics (1948) while at Wheaton that sparked Craig's interest in Christian apologetics.[13] Craig graduated in 1971 and the following year married his wife Jan, who he met on the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ.[14] In 1973 Craig entered the program in Philosophy of Religion at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School north of Chicago, where he studied under Norman Geisler.[15] Craig simultaneously pursued theological studies under David Wells, Clark Pinnock, Murray Harris, and John Warwick Montgomery, graduating with a master's degrees in Philosophy of Religion and in Church History and the History of Christian Thought. In 1975 Craig commenced doctoral studies in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham, England, writing on the cosmological argument under the direction of John Hick. Out of this study came his first book The Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979), a defense of the argument first discovered to him by Hackett's work. Craig was awarded a post-doctoral fellowship in 1978 from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation to pursue research on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus under the direction of Wolfhart Pannenberg at the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität München in Germany. His study in Munich led to a second doctorate, this one in theology,[11][16] awarded in 1984 with the publication of his doctoral thesis The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus during the Deist Controversy (1985).[17] Craig joined the faculty of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in 1980, where he taught philosophy of religion for the next seven years. During these years, he embarked on a long-range research program of a philosophical analysis of the principal divine attributes, beginning with God's omniscience. The initial fruit borne by this study was his Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (1990).[18] In 1982 Craig received an invitation to debate Kai Nielsen at the University of Calgary, Canada, on the question of God's existence. Thus commenced a series of debates on philosophical and theological questions that has pitted Craig against philosophers, scientists, and biblical scholars including Antony Flew, E. M. Curley, Richard Taylor, Quentin Smith, Michael Tooley, Paul Draper, Shelly Kagan, Peter Millican, Paul Kurtz, Peter Atkins, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Francisco Ayala, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, Ray Hoover, Bart Ehrman, and Gerd Lüdemann. After a one-year stint at Westmont College on the outskirts of Santa Barbara,[19] Craig moved in 1987 with his wife and two young children back to Europe, where he pursued research for the next seven years as a visiting scholar at the Katholiecke Universiteit Leuven (Louvain) in Belgium. Out of that period of research issued seven books, among them God, Time, and Eternity (2001). In 1994 Craig accepted the invitation of J. P. Moreland and R. Douglas Geivett to join the department of Philosophy and Ethics at Talbot School of Theology in suburban Los Angeles as Research Professor of Philosophy, a position he currently holds.[7] Thought The Kalam cosmological argument Craig is best known for his resuscitation of a version of the cosmological argument for the existence of an uncaused first cause. In recognition of the medieval Islamic contribution to the development of this version of the argument, Craig coined the name "kalam cosmological argument" (kalam being medieval Islamic theology), an appellation which has stuck. The distinctive feature of this argument is its premise "The universe began to exist," where "the universe" designates the whole of contiguous spacetime reality,[20] a premise which Craig defends both philosophically and scientifically.[21] In The Kalām Cosmological Argument, he formulates the argument in the following manner: Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.[22] Philosophically, Craig refurbishes two traditional kalam arguments for the finitude of the temporal series of past events: an argument based on the metaphysical impossibility of the existence of what modern mathematicians call an actual infinite and an argument based on the metaphysical impossibility of the formation of an actual infinite by a process of successive addition.[23] Granting the strict logical consistency of post-Cantorian, axiomatized infinite set theory, Craig says that the existence of an actually infinite number of things is nonetheless metaphysically impossible in view of counter-intuitive absurdities that would otherwise be possible.[24] One of Craig's favorite examples is the notorious Hilbert's Hotel, which can be fully occupied and yet, through the mere transposition of lodgers, accommodate endless infinities of additional guests. Craig pushes the illustration a notch beyond the original story by David Hilbert by inquiring what would happen if inverse arithmetical operations like subtraction were applied to the hotel. By envisioning different groups of guests checking out of the hotel, Craig says that one could subtract identical quantities from identical quantities and have non-identical quantities as remainders, which is absurd.[25] Stating that the mathematical conventions stipulated to ensure the logical consistency of transfinite arithmetic have no ontological force, Craig concludes that finitism is most plausibly true. Thus, the series of past events must be finite and the universe began to exist.[26] Even if an actual infinite were metaphysically possible, the temporal nature of the series of past events, which has been formed by the successive addition of one event after another, raises peculiar problems. Craig says that just as it is impossible, despite the proponents of "super-tasks," to count to infinity, so it is metaphysically impossible to count down from infinity.[27] Craig says that an inversion of Russell's story of Tristram Shandy, who writes his autobiography so slowly that it takes him a whole year to record the events of a single day, is a counter-intuitive absurdity that could result from the formation of an actual infinite by successive addition. If it be eternal, the universe has endured through precisely such a temporal sequence in order for the present event or moment to arrive. It follows that the temporal sequence must not be infinite and therefore the universe began to exist.[28] Craig's development of this particular argument makes evident what is implicit throughout the kalam argument, namely, his presupposition of a tensed theory of time. This presupposition would later become a major research focus. One of Craig's contributions to the historic kalam cosmological argument is his use of empirical evidence from contemporary astrophysics in support of the universe's beginning. He uses two lines of evidence from current cosmology: the expansion of the universe and the thermodynamic properties of the universe.[29] With respect to the universe's expansion, Craig says that the standard Friedman-LeMaître Big Bang model based on a cosmological application of Albert Einstein's gravitational field equations from his General Theory of Relativity predicts a cosmic singularity which constitutes a past bound to spacetime and therefore marks the absolute origin of the universe in the finite past. According to the model, nothing existed prior to the initial cosmological singularity, in the sense that it is false that anything existed prior to the singularity; spacetime and all its contents come into being at that point.[30] Craig then examines the history of attempts to escape the prediction of an absolute beginning on the part of the standard model and says that these competing models have either proved to be untenable (such as the steady state model and vacuum fluctuation models) or implied the very beginning of the universe they were designed to avoid (oscillating models, inflationary models, quantum gravity models). Craig says that the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem of 2003 requires that any universe which has on average been in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be past eternal but must have a past boundary point.[31] This theorem, which applies both to inflationary multiverse models and to higher dimensional brane cosmologies, holds independent of any physical description of the universe in its earliest phase prior to the Planck time.[32] With respect to the large scale thermodynamic properties of the universe, Craig traces the physical discussion from the conundrum facing nineteenth century physics of why the universe, if it will reach a state of thermodynamic equilibrium or heat death in a finite time, is not now in such a state, given that it has already existed for infinite time. He says that the advent of relativity theory altered the description of the universe's thermodynamic extinction, but did not affect the fundamental question.[33] Indeed, Craig says that the recent discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating only piques the problem by speeding up the universe's disintegration into causally isolated islands destined to a cold, dark death. He says that most physicists therefore take the universe's observed disequilibrium as evidence that the universe is not, after all, past eternal and its low entropy was simply put in as an initial condition.[34] Craig says that attempts to avoid this conclusion by postulating a multiverse of worlds in varying thermodynamic states encounter the problem of Boltzmann brains — that it becomes highly probable for any observer that the entire observable universe is but an illusion of his own brain, a solipsistic conclusion which no rational person would embrace.[35] On the basis of these four lines of evidence, Craig concludes that the premise that the universe began to exist is more plausible than not. Conjoined with the premise that whatever begins to exist has a cause, a premise which Craig again defends both philosophically and scientifically, the cosmic beginning implies the existence of an supernatural cause. By the nature of the case, such a cause must be an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, timeless, spaceless, immaterial being of enormous power.[36] Finally, Craig says, appealing to the "Principle of Determination" described by medieval Muslim theologians, that the only way to explain the origin of an effect with a beginning from a beginningless cause is if the cause is a personal agent endowed with freedom of the will. Thus, he arrives at a personal Creator of the universe.[37] Divine omniscience One of the central questions raised by the classical doctrine of divine omniscience is the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom. The question subdivides into two: (1) If God foreknows the occurrence of some event E, does E happen necessarily?,[38] and (2) If some event E is contingent, how can God foreknow E's occurrence? Craig has addressed each of these questions at considerable length.[39] The first question raises the issue of theological fatalism. Craig attempts to reduce this problem to the problem of logical fatalism, which holds that if it is true that E will happen, then E will happen necessarily. He challenges theological fatalists to show how the addition of God's knowing some future-tense statement to be true adds anything essential to the problem over and above that statement's being true. Craig then examines logical fatalism[40] He says that fatalism must be fallacious because it posits a non-causal constraint on human freedom which is unintelligible. He says that the flaw in logical fatalism is in a mistaken analysis of what it means for an act to be "within one's power," and that logical fatalists misconstrue the impossibility of bringing about a logical contradiction as an infringement of personal ability.[41][42] Returning to theological fatalism, Craig says that fatalists have misunderstood "temporal necessity," or the necessity of the past. Craig says that our intuitions of the past's necessity are rooted in the causal closedness of the past, and that the impossibility of backward causation does not imply that I cannot have a sort of counterfactual power over past events.[43] That is, if God has foreknowledge of a person's acts, then they have the ability to act in such a way that, if they were to act in that way, then the past would have been different. Building on the work of Alfred Freddoso, Craig offers an analysis of temporal necessity according to which many past, historical events are not, at this point, temporally necessary. He says that it is still possible for an agent to act in such a way, that were he to do so, that event would never have occurred, and that from the fact that the event has occurred we can know that the agent will not in fact so act, but it remains nevertheless within his power to do so. One of Craig's contributions to the discussion of theological fatalism is his survey of the rejection of parallel fatalistic arguments in fields other than theology or philosophy of religion. He reviews discussions of backward causation,[44] time travel,[45] the special theory of relativity, precognition,[46] and Newcomb's paradox to conclude that fatalistic reasoning has failed.[47] The second question arising from divine foreknowledge of future contingents concerns the means by which God knows such events.[48] Craig says that the question presupposes a tensed or A-Theory of time, for on a tenseless or B-Theory of time there is no ontological distinction between past, present, and future, so that contingent events which are future relative to us are no more difficult for God to know than contingent events which are, relative to us, past or present. Distinguishing between perceptualist and conceptualist models of divine cognition, Craig says that models which construe God's foreknowledge of the future along perceptualist lines (God foresees what will happen) are difficult to reconcile with a tensed theory of time (though one might say that God perceives the present truth-values of future contingent propositions). He does not similarly challenge a conceptualist model which construes God's knowledge along the lines of innate ideas.[49] The doctrine of middle knowledge is one such conceptualist model of divine cognition which Craig has explored. Formulated by the Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, the doctrine of middle knowledge holds that logically prior to his decree to create a world God knew what every possible creature he might create would freely do in any possible set of circumstances in which God might place him. On the basis of his knowledge of such counterfactuals of creaturely freedom[50] and his knowledge of his own decree to create certain creatures in certain circumstances, along with his own decision how he himself shall act, God automatically knows everything that will actually and contingently happen, without any perception of the world.[51] Craig has become a proponent of Molinism, supporting middle knowledge and also applying it to a wide range of theological issues, such as divine providence[52] and predestination,[53] biblical inspiration,[54] perseverance of the saints,[55] and Christian particularism.[56] Divine eternity Craig's earlier work on the kalam cosmological argument and on divine omniscience intersected significantly with theories of time and the nature of divine eternity. A number of unresolved issues remained to be taken up through an exploration of time and God's relation to it.[57] Differentiating between two senses of "eternal" as either timeless or infinitely omnitemporal, Craig first examines a plethora of arguments aimed at showing either that God is timeless or omnitemporal.[58] Craig defends the coherence of a timeless, personal being, but says that the arguments for divine timelessness are unsound or inconclusive.[59] By contrast, he gives two arguments in favor of divine temporality. First, Craig says that if a temporal world exists, then in virtue of his real relations to that world, God cannot remain untouched by its temporality.[60] Given his changing relations with the world, God must change at least extrinsically, which is sufficient for his existing temporally. Second, Craig says that if a temporal world exists, then in virtue of his omniscience, God must know tensed facts about the world, such as what is happening now, which is, again, sufficient for his being temporally located. Since a temporal world does exist, it follows that God exists in time.[61] Craig says that there is one way of escape from these arguments for a defender of divine timelessness. The first argument based on God's relation to the world presupposes the reality of temporal becoming, and the second argument based on God's knowledge of the world presupposes the objectivity of tensed facts. In other words, both arguments presuppose an A-Theory of time. The defender of divine timelessness can avert their force by embracing a B-Theory of time and denying the objective reality of tensed facts and temporal becoming.[62] Craig concludes that one's theory of time is a watershed issue for one's doctrine of divine eternity.[63] In his twin volumes The Tensed Theory of Time (2000) and The Tenseless Theory of Time (2000) Craig therefore undertakes a thorough examination of the arguments for and against the A- and B-Theories of time respectively. Craig provides the following summary of his case for an A-Theory of Time: I. Arguments for the tensed theory of time[64] A. Tensed sentences, which can neither be translated into synonymous tenseless sentences nor be given tenseless, token-reflexive truth conditions, correspond, if true, to tensed facts. B. The experience of temporal becoming, like our experience of the external world, is properly regarded as veridical. II. Refutation of arguments against the tensed theory of time[65] A. McTaggart's celebrated paradox is based upon the misguided marriage of a tenseless ontology of events or things with objective temporal becoming, as well as the unjustified assumption that there should exist a unique, complete description of reality. B. The passage of time is not a myth, but a metaphor for objective temporal becoming, a notion which can be consistently explicated on a presentist metaphysic. III. Refutation of arguments for the tenseless theory of time[66] A. Temporal becoming is compatible with Relativity Theory if we reject space-time realism in favor of a neo-Lorentzian interpretation of the formalism of the theory. B. Time as it plays a role in physics is a pale abstraction of a richer metaphysical reality, omitting indexical elements such as the "here" and the "now" in the interest of universalizing the formulations of natural laws. IV. Arguments against the tenseless theory of time[67] A. In the absence of objective distinctions between past, present, and future, the relations ordering events on the tenseless theory are only gratuitously regarded as genuinely temporal relations of earlier/later than. B. The claim that temporal becoming is mind-dependent is self-defeating, since the subjective illusion of becoming involves itself an objective becoming in the contents of consciousness. C. The tenseless theory entails perdurantism, the doctrine that objects have spatio-temporal parts, a view which is metaphysically counter-intuitive, incompatible with moral accountability, and entails the bizarre counterpart doctrine of transworld identity. D. The tenseless theory is theologically objectionable, since its claim that God and the universe co-exist tenselessly is incompatible with a robust doctrine of creatio ex nihilo. Elements of Craig's philosophy of time include his differentiation between time itself and our measures thereof (a classical Newtonian theme), his reductive analysis of spatial "tenses" to the location of the "I-now," his defense of presentism on the basis of the presentness of experience, his analysis of McTaggart's paradox[68] as an instance of the problem of temporary intrinsics, his defense of a neo-Lorentzian interpretation of special relativity, and his formulation of a tensed possible worlds semantics.[69] Having concluded that time is tensed, Craig turns to articulating a doctrine of divine eternity and God's relationship to time. Defending Leibniz's anti-Newtonian argument against God's enduring for infinite time prior to creation and appealing to kalam arguments against infinite, past metric time, Craig says that God exists timelessly sans the universe and temporally since the moment of creation.[70] Craig says that cosmic time, which registers the proper time of the universe's duration in general relativistic cosmological models, is the measure of God's time. The universe is, Craig concludes, God's clock.[71] The resurrection of Jesus Craig's two volumes The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Jesus (1985) and Assessing the New Testament Evidence for the Historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus (3d ed., 2002) are said by Christian reviewers Gary Habermas and Christopher Price to be among the most thorough investigations of the event of Jesus' resurrection.[72][73] In the former volume, Craig describes the history of the discussion, including Humean arguments against the identification of the miraculous. The latter volume is an exegetical study of the New Testament material pertinent to the resurrection. Craig summarizes the relevant evidence under three major heads:[74] (1) The tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of his female followers on the Sunday after his crucifixion.[75] (2) Various individuals and groups experienced appearances of Jesus alive after his death. (3) The earliest disciples came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead despite strong predispositions to the contrary. Craig's discussion of the evidence for each of these facts includes a defense of the traditions of Jesus' burial by Joseph of Arimathea, a close exegesis of the Pauline doctrine of the resurrection body, and an investigation of pagan and Jewish notions of resurrection from the dead.[76] Craig then says that the best explanation of these three facts is that God raised Jesus from the dead.[77] This involves him in a critique of rival hypotheses, in particular Lüdemann's hallucination hypothesis.[78] Craig says that the resurrection hypothesis best meets the standard criteria for weighing historical hypotheses such as explanatory power, explanatory scope, degree of ad hoc-ness, plausibility, and so forth.[79] In response to those who would regard a miraculous hypothesis as excessively improbable, Craig says that given the existence of a personal Creator of the universe, as demonstrated by arguments of natural theology, and the higher probability of the evidence on the resurrection hypothesis than on its negation, the resurrection hypothesis cannot be said to be improbable.[80] He says that the probability of a miraculous explanation of the evidence is increased when one locates the resurrection of Jesus in its religio-historical context of Jesus' ministry and personal statements, whose authenticity Craig defends.[81] That context also provides the interpretive key to the meaning of Jesus' resurrection, which Craig says is the divine vindication of the allegedly blasphemous statements for which Jesus was tried and sent to his death.[82] Divine aseity Craig's current research is on the challenge posed by platonism to the classic doctrine of divine aseity or self-existence.[83] In Craig's analysis that challenge stems, not so much from abstract objects' eternality or necessity as from, in many cases, their uncreatability. Rejecting Absolute Creationism, the view that God creates abstract objects, as caught in a vicious circle,[84] Craig defends the viability of various nominalistic perspectives on abstract objects.[85] Stating that the Quine-Putnam Indispensability Argument is the chief support of platonism,[86] Craig criticizes Quine's naturalized epistemology and confirmational holism, which undergirded the original argument, and also rejects the metaontological criterion of ontological commitment at the heart of all versions of the argument.[87] Craig favors a neutral logic, according to which the formal quantifiers of first-order logic, as well as the informal quantifiers of ordinary language, are not ontologically committing.[88] He also advocates a deflationary theory of reference, according to which referring is a speech act rather than a word-world relation, so that singular terms may be used in true sentences without commitment to corresponding objects in the world.[89] If one stipulates that first-order quantifiers are being used as devices of ontological commitment, then Craig adverts to Fictionalism, in particular Pretense Theory, according to which statements about abstract objects are expressions of make-believe, imagined to be true, though literally false.[90] Craig's work in this area is ongoing, so that his final positions are yet to be determined.[91] Other views Unbalanced scales.svg The neutrality of this section is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. Please do not remove this message until the dispute is resolved. (May 2014) Craig is a critic of metaphysical naturalism,[92] New Atheism,[93] prosperity theology,[94] and homosexuality,[95] as well as a defender of Reformed epistemology.[96] Craig maintains that the theory of evolution is compatible with Christianity.[97][page needed][98] Although he does not fully endorse intelligent design,[99] and is opposed to Young Earth creationism,[100] he thinks that intelligent design may be a viable alternative to evolution.[101] He is a fellow of the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture[102] and was a fellow of the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design (ISCID).[103] As a Divine Command Theorist, Craig has expressed belief that God had the moral right to command the slaughter of the Canaanites if they refused to leave their land, as depicted in the book of Deuteronomy,[104][105] has led to controversy.[106][107] William Lane Craig (born 1949) is an American analytical philosopher and Christian theologian. Craig's philosophical work focuses on philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and philosophy of time. His theological interests are in historical Jesus studies and philosophical theology. Craig has contributed to discussions of the cosmological argument for God's existence, divine omniscience, theories of time and eternity, and the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. His current research deals with divine aseity and the challenge posed by Platonist accounts of abstract objects. Craig is an author of several books, including Reasonable Faith.[3] |
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