Reasonable Faith Podcast

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 distinguishing two models of causation, the medieval idea of a cause that simply exists timelessly versus the modern idea of a cause simultaneous with its effect, and argues his own view depends on the latter: God's causal power is exercised at the very first moment of time, not before it. He grounds his motivation in the case against an infinite past, arguing that even proposals to dodge a beginning by positing "metrically amorphous" time end up looking like timelessness anyway, which is why he holds God is timeless without creation and temporal with it.

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, only with a world where it is actual. Dr. Craig applies Alvin Plantinga's idea of transworld depravity: there may be no feasible world in which free creatures always choose rightly. He also corrects the claim that God can alter the laws of logic, and explains why omnipotence does not mean doing the logically impossible.

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 "spirit" language here, it risks blurring the incarnation with the Holy Spirit's indwelling or even demonic possession, when in fact the incarnation is a unique union unlike either.