The seventh Christ on Campus Initiative (CCI) essay is now available: William Lane Craig, “Five Arguments for God” (30-page PDF | HTML).
William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He has authored over thirty books, including Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics and God Is Great, God Is Good: Why Believing in God Is Reasonable and Responsible. Here’s what J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, says of Craig:
It is hard to overstate the impact that William Lane Craig has had for the cause of Christ. He is simply the finest Christian apologist of the last half century and his academic work justifies ranking him among the top 1 percent of practicing philosophers in the Western world. Besides that, he is a winsome ambassador for Christ, an exceptional debater, and a man with the heart of an evangelist. I know him well and can say that he lives a life of integrity and lives out what he believes. I do not know of a single thinker who has done more to raise the bar of Christian scholarship in our generation than Craig. He is one of a kind and I thank God for his life and work.
Craig’s 30-page essay soundly refutes Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Craig concludes,
We’ve examined five traditional arguments for the existence of God in light of modern philosophy, science, and mathematics:
1. the cosmological argument from contingency
2. the kalam cosmological argument based on the beginning of the universe
3. the moral argument based upon objective moral values and duties
4. the teleological argument from fine-tuning
5. the ontological argument from the possibility of God’s existence to his actuality
These are, I believe, good arguments for God’s existence. That is to say, they are logically valid; their premises are true; and their premises are more plausible in light of the evidence than their negations. Therefore, insofar as we are rational people, we should embrace their conclusions.