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

Today, an excurses on natural theology, part 14.

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

In our study of the doctrine of God, we've embarked upon an excursus on natural theology

or arguments for God's existence.

And so far we've surveyed the proper physicality of belief in God, the contingency argument

for God's existence, and the Kalam cosmological

argument for God's existence. And today we're going to turn to a new argument, the teleological

argument for God's existence or the old argument for design. The importance of this

excursus was brought home to me afresh this week as I watched

a video of a Veritas forum at Ohio State University from last year featuring a Christian

scientist and an atheist philosopher. And the atheist philosopher's main point was that there's just no evidence

for God's existence. And therefore it would be unjustified to believe in Him and therefore

we should simply affirm that God does not exist and that there is no ultimate meaning to

life in the sense of a point or purpose

to our existence.

And it struck me that he made no effort at all to defend his position.

He simply asserted it.

He never examined the position that it can be rational to believe in something not on the basis

of evidence, that there are properly basic beliefs and that in fact the idea that only beliefs

based upon evidence can be rational ultimately leads to skepticism and is self-defeating.

Moreover, he never looked at any of the arguments for God's existence that we've surveyed in this class.

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