New Essay by William Lane Craig: Arguments for God

Owen Strachan:

The Henry Center sponsors a really cool and helpful program called the Christ on Campus Initiative, which produces articles and essays.  The series is designed to provide college students and thinking Christians with apologetic resources necessary to meet the intellectual challenges of the day.  The editorial team for the series is chaired by D. A. Carson of TEDS.


The latest essay is by William Lane Craig, Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology, and is entitled “Five Reasons for God”.  Building off of the five commonly known arguments for the existence of God, Craig engages the New Atheists, showing how they attempted to handle these ideas and how, ultimately, their responses fail.  Whether or not one’s apologetic method includes the five proofs, this essay will make for highly stimulating reading.

Here’s Craig’s conclusion (read the whole thing):

We’ve examined five traditional arguments for the existence of God in light of modern philosophy, science, and mathematics:

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

These are, I believe, good arguments for God’s existence. That is to say, they are logically valid; their premises are true; and their premises are more plausible in light of the evidence than their negations. Therefore, insofar as we are rational people, we should embrace their conclusions.

The Henry Center is glad to make “Five Arguments for God” available for free to all.