Reasonable Faith Podcast

Dr. Craig answers more listener questions from around the world. If Christ paid for the sins of the lost, is hell a double punishment? Was Jesus really separated from the Father on the cross? Is God’s justice only retributive? Could downloading our consciousness offer a kind of digital immortality?

A listener asks Dr. Craig to imagine a possible world filled with free persons, love, moral agency, and a genuine relationship with God, but with none of the cancer, war, animal suffering, or death we see in our own. If a world like that is logically possible, what greater good could justify God choosing a world like ours instead? Dr. Craig takes up this possible-worlds objection and considers whether it really undercuts his view that God permits suffering for the sake of bringing people freely to know Him.

Dr. Craig answers listener questions from around the world. If Christ paid for every sin, why would anyone still face judgment? Could God have made the universe and simply moved on? What should we make of a skeptical historian who says the disciples must have seen something? Plus: when science and Scripture seem to collide, which gives way? Why did God allow Mark’s snake-handling passage into our Bibles? And will the wicked exist forever?

A listener writes that his faith is hanging in the balance. Wherever he looks, from natural theology to the resurrection, he thinks the scholarly consensus seems to be against Christianity, and online critics accuse Christian thinkers, Dr. Craig included, of intellectual dishonesty. Questions about James Tour and the origin of life have only deepened his doubts. Is Christianity a respected position in the academy? Would a naturalistic account of abiogenesis threaten the faith? And how can we tell legitimate theological development from ad hoc accommodation to science? Dr. Craig responds.

Philosophical theologian Ryan Mullins argues that William Lane Craig’s version of Molinism is incoherent, and the charge comes down to one word: deliberation. If God already knows everything, can he really deliberate about which world to create? And if he can’t, is his choice truly free? Dr. Craig responds to Mullins’s critique, evaluates defenses offered by Tim Stratton and Reasonable Faith's own Tyson James, and explains why Mullins’s proposed fix would come at a steep theological price. Plus, a decades-old atheist argument from Dan Barker turns out to be the same puzzle in different clothes.

If nothing is impossible for God, how can some worlds be “infeasible” for Him? A listener named Howard presses Dr. Craig on a phrase that sounds like a limit on God’s power. Dr. Craig explains the Molinist idea behind it: true counterfactuals about how free creatures would choose narrow the range of worlds God can actually bring about. He then argues why this places no restriction on divine omnipotence.

A viral clip from Fr. Mike Schmitz claims that Protestants who take Jesus’ words in John 6 seriously end up becoming Catholic. Dr. Craig explains why the bread of life discourse doesn’t require eating Christ’s literal flesh, and why that claim overlooks the many non-Catholic traditions that also affirm a real presence. He then weighs in on John Piper and Kevin DeYoung’s friendly exchange over baptizing infants, and asks whether baptism is really the new covenant’s counterpart to circumcision.

If the Son is not eternally begotten of the Father, is it arbitrary which person of the Trinity is called "Father" and which is called "Son"? And what distinguishes the three persons from one another in the first place? Dr. Craig responds to a reader's two worries about his view of the Trinity, drawing on the distinction between the economic and the ontological Trinity and on the observations of Marcellus of Ancyra, one of the orthodox leaders at Nicea.

In this episode, Dr. Craig provides his argument for God's existence that may also help build relationships with Muslims.

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.