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

excurses on Natural Theology, part 28.

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

We've been looking at epistemological objections to belief in God.

The word epistemology comes from the Greek word epistome, which means knowledge.

And so these are objections based upon the fact that God cannot be known to exist for some reason or other.

Last time we looked at the first objection, the objection of verificationism,

which held that the question of God's existence is meaningless.

It's neither true nor false to say that God exists because the question

of God's existence is simply a meaningless question. And we saw that that verificationist

viewpoint was based upon a principle of meaning that was in the first place completely

implausible and then to make matters worse,

self-refuting, and that therefore verificationism has been virtually universally rejected

among philosophers of science and epistemologists today.

We now want to turn to a second type of objection, the what I call the presumption

of atheism, that atheism is in some way a sort of default position that doesn't require

any evidence in favor of that position.

First would be the attempt of many contemporary atheists to redefine the meaning of atheism.

Atheism traditionally is the view that God does not exist. Atheism is a position that there is no God.

But very often atheists today, at least on a popular level,

will put a different spin on atheism.

They'll say something like this.

...