Quotes from William Lane Craig

If life ends at the grave, then it makes no ultimate difference whether you live as a Stalin or as a Mother Teresa. Since your destiny is ultimately unrelated to your behavior, you may as well just live as you please. As the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky put it: "If there is no immortality … then all things are permitted.

my favorite is the cosmological argument. But cosmological and teleological arguments don't touch people where they live. The

Gal. 5:22–23). When this relationship is intact, the product in our lives will be righteousness (Rom. 6:16), and the by-product of righteousness is happiness. Happiness is an elusive thing and will never be found when pursued directly; but it springs into being as one pursues the knowledge of God and as his righteousness is realized in us.

Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause"). Second

The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends that life has meaning.

Naturalism Naturalism is the belief that only natural explanations (as opposed to supernatural ones) should be considered. Because a designer is defined as supernatural—beyond nature—naturalism rules out this explanation, regardless of evidence.

if you're a first-century Jew, and your favorite Messiah got himself crucified, then you've basically got two choices: Either you go home or else you get yourself a new Messiah. But the idea of stealing Jesus' corpse and saying that God had raised him from the dead is hardly one that would have entered the minds of the disciples.

J. Gresham Machen solemnly warned, False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the Gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation to be controlled by ideas which prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.1

the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith unceremoniously crowned Stephen Hawking's argument against God in A Brief History of Time as "the worst atheistic argument in the history of Western thought."[3] With the advent of The God Delusion the time has come, I think, to relieve Hawking of this weighty crown and to recognize Richard Dawkins' accession to the throne.

THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: A SIMPLE FORMULATION

Christians find in God a source of moral strength that helps us to lead better lives than those we would have led without Him, still it would be arrogant and ignorant to claim that unbelievers don't often lead good moral lives—in fact, sometimes lives that put ours to shame.

The only way an actual infinite could come to exist in the real world would be by being created all at once, simply in an instant. It would be a hopeless undertaking to try to form it by adding one member after another.

Thus, although arguments and evidence may be used to support the believer's faith, they are never properly the basis of that faith.

Given AC as a rival to naturalism, there is an additional burden of proof for a naturalist ontology that quantifies over sui generis emergent properties such as those constitutive of consciousness. After

Something is objective if it is independent of people's opinions. If it holds or is true independently of what anybody thinks then it is objective. It is subjective if it is dependent upon people's opinions.

Left to himself, natural man would never come to God.

quest for social coherence become independent from one another. This is because on the view of relativism the search for self-fulfillment becomes radically privatized: each person chooses his own set of values and meaning.

A fallacy is an error in reasoning. Fallacies can be either formal or informal. A formal fallacy involves breaking the rules of logic. An informal fallacy involves an argumentative tactic that is illicit, such as reasoning in a circle. The "taxicab fallacy" would be an informal fallacy.

Modern man is the Cosmic Orphan because he has killed God. And, by doing so, he has reduced himself to an accident of nature. When he asks, Why? his cry is lost in the silence of the recesses of space. When he dies, he dies without hope. Thus, in killing God, modern man has killed himself as well.

All historians agree that the gospels were written down and circulated during the first generation after the events, while the eyewitnesses were still alive. In order for the gospels to be legendary at their core, more generations would be needed between the events they record and the date of their composition.

Nor can science overcome the absurdity of life caused by death. Science cannot prolong life forever. It is noteworthy that Eiseley never returns to the question of death, which was awakened in him as a child, to show how science answers this problem. For it cannot. The religion of science has no answer to man's deepest questions.

Multiverse Some cosmologists speculate that our observable universe is just an expanding bubble in a much wider sea of energy, which is also expanding. Since this wider universe contains many other bubbles in addition to ours, it is often called a multiverse. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem also applies to the multiverse as a whole, not just to the individual bubbles within it. Thus, even if there is a multiverse, it cannot be eternal in the past but must have had a beginning.

Premise The steps of an argument that lead to the conclusion are called the premises of the argument.

If each individual person passes out of existence when he dies, then what ultimate meaning can be given to his life?