Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Christ, Part 50.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

Last time, I argued that the religious pluralist has failed to show any inconsistency between the beliefs that God is all

powerful and all loving and that some people nevertheless do not hear the gospel and are lost.

The religious pluralist has failed to show that there is a world which is feasible for God to create,

which involves universal salvation, but without overriding disadvantages.

And therefore, the pluralist's argument fails.

Now, before we proceed, I want to respond to an objection that was raised on

Facebook by one of our internet members of the class. He said, wait a minute, I can prove that

there is a feasible world available to God in which everyone always freely does the right thing and doesn't have overriding

disadvantages, namely, heaven.

That's what heaven is.

And so God could simply create heaven without all of the run-up to it.

Now, I think that this objection begs the question, first of all, by assuming that there is freedom

to sin in heaven, which is not at all obvious, but that's not the most fundamental problem

with the objection. The fundamental problem with the objection is that it just assumes that you can sort of take a segment

out of a possible world, like the actual world, and create it on its own as a possible world

in its own right, and that all of the same counterfactuals of freedom about how people would behave in the first world will also be true in the second world.

And that is simply a fallacious assumption.

Once you create that segment all on its own in isolation, that's a new possible world.

And it may have a very different set of counterfactuals

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