Quotes from William Lane Craig

Faith is trust or commitment to what you think is true.

Part of the broader task of Christian scholarship is to help create and sustain a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option for thinking men and women.

If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.

It's no longer enough to teach our children Bible stories; they need doctrine and apologetics.

Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of a lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis fails to become a Christian because of a lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with god.

The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist. As Dostoyevsky said, "All things are permitted.

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 life has meaning. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistent—for without God, man and the universe are without any real significance.

When you're going through hard times and God seems distant, apologetics can help you to remember that our faith is not based on emotions, but on the truth, and therefore you must hold on to it.

This is reality in a universe without God: there is no hope; there is no purpose. It reminds me of T.S. Eliot's haunting lines: This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. What is true of mankind as a whole is true of each of us individually: we are here to no purpose. If there is no God, then our life is not fundamentally different from that of a dog.

God exists necessarily and is the explanation why anything else exists.

If God is dead, then man is dead too.

if there's a supernatural agent that is working in the natural world, then the idealized conditions described by the law are no longer in effect. The law isn't violated because the law has this implicit provision that nothing is messing around with the conditions.

So how do you find out what God thinks? The Christian says, you look in the Bible. And the Bible tells us that God forbids homosexual acts. Therefore, they are wrong. So basically the reasoning goes like this: (1) We are all obligated to do God's will. (2) God's will is expressed in the Bible. (3) The Bible forbids homosexual behavior. (4) Therefore, homosexual behavior is against God's will, or is wrong.

I am not offering God as a theory to compete with scientific theories about the universe. Rather I am saying that those self-contained, secular theories provide evidence for theologically neutral premises in philosophical arguments leading to a conclusion that has theistic significance.

Are the values we hold dear and guide our lives by just social conventions, like driving on the right-hand versus left-hand side of the road? Or are they merely expressions of personal preference, like having a taste for certain foods? Or are they somehow valid and binding, independent of our opinion, and if they are objective in this way, what is their foundation?

Whereas easy appeals to mystery prematurely shut off reflection about God, rigorous and earnest effort to understand him is richly rewarded with deeper appreciation of who he is, more confidence in his reality and care, and a more intelligent and profound worship of his person.

It's the combination of improbability with an independently given pattern that discredits chance.

But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong. All we're confronted with is, in Sartre's words, "the bare, valueless fact of existence." Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning.

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man.

It's the combination of improbability with an independently given pattern that discredits chance.