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

Today, the Doctrine of God, Part 12.

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

We've been talking about divine incorporeality, that is to say that God is not a material body, but rather is spiritual.

And we come now to some practical application of this attribute to our lives.

What practical difference does it make or ought it to make that God is incorporeal? Well, three things come

to mind. First and most fundamentally, it means that that which is ultimate is not material.

The importance of this, I think, is hard to overestimate.

That which is ultimate in life is not material.

Rather, ultimate reality is spiritual, specifically personal.

God is a personal, spiritual being. And so ultimate reality is personal and spiritual.

What that implies, therefore, is that the locus of value is persons. Value is invested principally

in persons, whether these be divine persons of the Godhead

or human persons created in his image.

By contrast, things have value only in relationship to persons. And this is the distinction between something's having

intrinsic versus extrinsic value. Persons have intrinsic value. That is to say, they are ends

in themselves. They are intrinsically valuable in and of themselves.

Things have only extrinsic value insofar as they serve the ends of persons. So, for example,

a person is intrinsically valuable, created in God's image, a person.

And it doesn't matter how gifted that person is, how useful he is to society, that person is

intrinsically valuable simply because he is a person. By contrast, a material thing like a whiteboard or a podium

or a hammer has extrinsic value in that they serve purposes of human beings and therefore

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