As a freshman undergrad in a study of religion program at a state university, I was deeply challenged in my faith. Though my adviser was a sort of “Protestant atheist,” liberalism had zero appeal to me. I knew the choices were full-blown Christian orthodoxy or agnostic nihilism, with no ground in between.
God helped me through books like William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith and J. P. Moreland’s Scaling the Secular City. My own approach to apologetics has ended up being a bit different (for an introduction, see John Frame’s excellent book Apologetics to the Glory of God, but there is still tremendous value in the works of philosophers like Craig and Moreland.
Craig has a new, 30-page essay online, which you can read in PDF or HTML. He interacts with Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Craig makes five arguments for God’s existence: (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). So if you’re looking for a concise introduction to these arguments from a first-rate philosopher, this is a great place to start.
Here’s a word from J. P. Moreland about William Lane Craig and his significance:
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.
