Music Well, congratulations Bill. You've blown up the internet and you've gotten everyone stirred up. This issue comes up every few years. And I've noticed from Facebook comments and other social media that some of our newer listeners to reasonable faith aren't familiar with your views on things

like reformed epistemology, the witness of the Holy Spirit, evidentialism, a lot to it.

And in a recent podcast, you answered a question from Kyle who was having doubts about his faith

as a Christian. He said in essence that the commitment to Christianity was so all-encompassing

that he should perhaps demand a visit from an angel or Mary or Jesus himself in order to make such a commitment. And your response to him is produced multiple response videos, especially from atheists. Bill, what we should probably do is just go back in case our listeners have not heard that question. Let me give the question again and then you also read your answer. We've got the transcript of it. So Kyle says, Hello, Dr. Craig. I've enjoyed your ministry. It's helped strengthen my faith over the years, but I have recently been having troubling thoughts in my mind. My trouble is that one of the things about Christianity is that it requires a lot of work to follow. In order to follow Christ, you have to orient your entire life around him. Christianity is not just a set of propositions that one holds, but it's a faith practice, a way of life. With that in mind, wouldn't the smart thing to do to require very high epistemic standards before one decides they will dedicate their life to Christ? If you're going to live for Christ, then wouldn't it be smart to actually meet Jesus Christ in person or even talk to His mother Mary or an angel? I know you often mentioned the witness of the Holy Spirit as a way that one can have direct access to God, but I have done meditative prayer and deep meditation for years, up on years, and nothing has come up in terms of God speaking to me directly where I know it wasn't just my own imagination. Many of my fellow Christians have had similar concerns on this also. This is perhaps my biggest struggle, and I cannot seem to get it out of my head as it's causing me to abandon the Christian life because I cannot have high epistemic confidence that Christianity is true. Bill, that was the question. And we put you in the hot seat and asked you to answer that. Why don't you read, we have the transcript here, what you said at the time, your answer. All right, I think this will be helpful because having heard these clips that you're going to play, confusion will inevitably result of we don't have this original answer on the table before us. What I said was this, when I first heard the message of the gospel as a non-Christian high school student, that my sins could be forgiven by God, that God loved me. He loved Bill Craig, and that I could come to know and experience eternal life with God. I thought to myself, and I'm not kidding, I thought if there is just one chance in a million that this is true, it's worth believing. So my attitude toward this is just the opposite of Kyle's. Far from raising the bar for the epistemic standard that Christianity must meet to be believed, I lower it. I think that this is a message which is so wonderful, so fantastic that if there's any evidence that it's true, then it's worth believing in. especially when you compare it to the alternatives like naturalism or atheism or other forms of life. If Kyle really knows what it's like to experience the love of God and to have this hope in eternal life and forgiveness of sins, then it seems to me that he will gravitate toward that alternative. It will be so attractive that it would take really, really decisive disproves to make him give up his Christian faith and abandon it. Now, when I talk about the witness of the Holy Spirit, I do not mean God speaking to me directly in the way that Kyle describes. God doesn't speak to me directly either in that sort of way as an inner voice or any other way. I just mean a kind of fundamental assurance that one's faith is true. People often talk about this as the assurance of salvation, and I think that is the privilege of every born-again Christian. I hope that Kyle is more than just a nominal Christian, that he's really come to experience the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit and that he's in dwelt with and filled with the Holy Spirit. Because I think then that removes the huge epistemic bar that he thinks you need to get over in order to become a Christian. Okay, so that was your answer Bill, verbatim.

And we have the transcript there.

We just let you read it as you did.

Let's go to this first clip and see where the controversy

and the problem is and why there's been so much response.

This is kind of typical.

This guy named Reginald got a few highlights

from this one response. Let's go to that one now. Hi, my name is Reginald and I'm here to help you, Christians, overcome your doubts. William Lane Craig has provided a stunning response and I just wanted all of you to have the chance to hear it. Okay, so listen up, doubting Christians. The first thing you need to do is lower your standards. Bring them way down to the ground. If you want something to be true really, really badly, then there's nothing wrong with that. And don't let anyone else tell you otherwise. Second, doubting Christians, you might just need to question your salvation just a little bit. The assurance of salvation, and I think that is the privilege of every born again Christian. So I hope that Kyle is more than just a nominal Christian. Not seriousness, Craig's advice to doubting Christians

like this can be summarized fairly quickly. Lower your standards of evidence and make sure that you're really saved. Maybe it is as simple as he lowers the standards of evidence for things he wants to be true. But let's be as charitable as possible and assume he's just recommending doubting Christians to take Pascal's wager. Okay, but there are lots of problems with that.

And even if there weren't,

it's not clear that people shouldn't just take the wager

for whatever religion seems most plausible to them. doubting Christians to take Pascal's wager. Okay, but there are lots of problems with that. And even if there weren't, it's not clear that people shouldn't just take the wager for

whatever religion seems most plausible to them. A lot of Christians wouldn't be comfortable with that. On the second point, just think of how pastorally bad this kind of gaslighting is. You don't have the assurance of salvation, which, oh, by the way, the assurance of salvation. And I think that is the privilege of every born again Christian.

Also, it's important to realize that doubt is never simply an intellectual problem. Doubt is also I think a spiritual problem. So to recap doubting Christians, lower your standard of evidence. Also you have a spiritual problem and might not even be safe to begin with. Or consider the possibility that Christianity doesn't really make sense. Okay, Bill, a lot to talk about there. You want to unpack some of what I said? Yeah, it's exactly. There's so much there, Kevin. We have here, I think, swirling currents that can easily muddy the waters. And so let me try to clarify things by identifying these different currents. One current of discussion here is the relationship between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification. The other current is the issue of the relationship between the witness of the Holy Spirit and arguments and evidence in support of the Christian faith. Now, let me focus on that first issue, the relationship between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification. Many epistemologists have noted that there are two ways in which a person can be justified in holding a belief. One would be to be epistemically justified. Epistemic justification focuses on providing truth directed reasons in support of your belief. That is to say, it tries to marshal reasons to show that the belief is true. By contrast, pragmatic justification focuses on non-truth directed reasons. Typically, pragmatic justification will be a kind of cost-benefit analysis of believing and will play off the costs and benefits to determine whether a person should hold that belief. Now one of the classic examples in the literature on this is a case in which you are a patient who has just been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. And it looks very grim. You're probably not going to make it. So, if you simply go on the basis of the evidence, you would not be epistemically justified in believing that the treatment is going to be successful successful and that you're going to survive. Epistemically, you should believe that you are going to die. The problem is, Kevin, that studies have shown that cancer patients who believe that they're going to get better, that they're going to make it actually have a much higher rate of survival. Wow. Because having this sort of optimistic, positive attitude is conducive to good health. So that if you believe that you will make it, you actually increase the chances of survival. So in a case like this, you would not be epistemically justified in believing that you're going to make it, but you would have good pragmatic justification for believing that you're going to make it. Now I think as you can already see from the illustration, we have here a phenomenon that epistemologists refer to as the pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic. That is to say, these pragmatic arguments can encroach on the amount of epistemic justification that a person needs in order to rationally hold to a belief. And this is what Kyle believes. Kyle thinks that in view of the costs of following Christ and living the Christian life that he ought to raise the bar for epistemic justification of belief in Christianity. Now my impression is Reginald doesn't think that. Reginald thinks that you should just simply weigh the epistemic evidence and go exclusively on the basis of epistemic justification. And if you want to take that approach, that's fine. I have provided multiple arguments for the existence of God and evidences for the truth of Christianity. So I'm fully prepared to argue that Christian belief is epistemically justified. But then you see you don't connect with Kyle because Kyle doesn't think that you go only on epistemic justification. Kyle believes in the pragmatic encroachment of the epistemic. And the irony of this, Kevin, is that I agree with Kyle. I think that it is legitimate for the pragmatic to encroach upon the epistemic. But what our interlocutors today, these clips we're going to watch don't understand, is that this encroachment of the pragmatic on the epistemic, which Kyle and I both think is appropriate, can work both ways. It can either raise the bar required for epistemic justification, or it can lower the bar required for epistemic justification. Our illustration of the cancer patient illustrates that in lowering the bar for the belief that you're going to get better. Now my disagreement with Kyle then, Kevin, is not on the relevance of pragmatic justification to epistemic justification of Christianity. I think it's relevant. Rather, my disagreement with Kyle is in his cost-benefit analysis. I think Kyle has got a completely wrong in terms of the cost-benefit analysis. The benefit of Christian belief is that if you believe in Christ and it turns out to be true, then you have infinite benefit. You have gained eternal life, a love relationship with God, forever an incommensurable good, and at what cost? Well, let's give Kyle the negative costs of the rigors of living the Christian life and a chewing sin and so forth. Though I wanted to say here parenthetically, Kevin, I don't think the Christian life is like that at all. I think in my experience, the Christian life is a life that is filled with joy, peace, meaning, love, so that I don't count these as negatives at all. I can't think of any better way to live than as a Christian. The blessings of having a clear conscience and of avoiding moral evil and living the ethical life, I think, are just incalculable. But leave that aside. Let's grant Kyle that there are these shortcomings, these costs associated with Christian belief. Clearly these are completely swamped by the infinite benefit of eternal life and the knowledge of God. Now on the other hand, if you do believe in Christ and it turns out that Christianity is false, then what have you lost? You haven't lost anything in terms of eternity because you're just going to be dead. All you've lost is these finite costs of living for Christ. And so when you do a cost-bene, the benefits infinitely swamp any costs that would be associated with Christian belief. And so I think, as I said, that the encroachment of the pragmatic on the epistemic, in the case of Christian belief, serves to lower the epistemic bar

Required for rational belief in Christ now as Reginald recognizes

This is Pascal's wager that's right and I agree with Pascalian wagering

I think that he was correct now what is Reginald's objection to this?

Well, it's the famous many gods objection. Different religions can all say the same thing. But there are two responses that the Paschalian can make to that. One is that if these other alternatives have sufficiently low probability, they can be safely ignored. For example, the probability that Odin or Zeus is really the true God is so negligible that it can be left aside. Secondly, however, if you can reduce the number of alternatives to a tractable number, like say two or three, then you can run Pascal's wager successfully. And in particular, I contrasted Christian belief with naturalism, which is a lifestyle and a worldview that leads ultimately to meaninglessness, valiousness, purposelessness, and I think despair as the existentialist philosophers realized. And when you read Pascal's Paul Sey, what you discover is that although Pascal didn't like arguments for the existence of God, he was a real enthusiast for Christian evidences. There are passages in the Paul Sey, where Pascal, he sounds like Josh McDowell, he's presenting arguments for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, and these are very colorful entertaining passages. So I think Pascal himself was convinced that the alternatives basically come down to Christian theism versus naturalism. And in that case, when you do the cost-benefit analysis that I've just described, then clearly Christian belief wins out. And therefore, I think Kyle is quite wrong to think that the pragmatic encroachment on the epistemic raises the bar rather than lowers it. Bill, Pascal's wager comes up again in another clip here in just a moment when we might can explore that some more. But I'm curious if you have been hearing the term gaslighting a lot lately. And the reason I'm... No, I have a bet what comes from the famous Ingrid Bergman movie Gaslight, where her husband is deceiving her and trying to drive her mad to make her think that she's out of her mind. And frankly, I don't understand the use of that analogy in this context when he says I'm gaslight. I don't understand the analogy. He needs to explain it. On the contrary, what Kyle and I are both talking about is the relationship between pragmatic justification and epistemic justification, and how pragmatic arguments can serve to raise or lower the epistemic bar for rational belief. Yeah just like Pascals of Wager there are definitions and uses of Pascals of Wager that Pascal didn't intend and that are incorrect. Same thing for gas lighting but everybody's using that phrase these days and everybody's accusing others of gas lighting. And that's why what it came up is like, if you try to convince the other person to they're crazy and to they're the one at fault, your gas lighting them. And so if you're having doubts about the Christian faith, well, then it's your fault, not the evidence is false. I's the sense in which he's using it. Now that relates to my genuine pastoral concern for Kyle. Is Kyle actually a regenerate Christian or is he a merely nominal Christian? And I think that is perfectly legitimate question to ask. And I say that on the basis of certain clues in his question. For example, that he says that the Christian life is a lot of work. And it gives me the impression he is talking about a kind of performance oriented Christian life where you try your best to be as good as you can so that God will accept you. And this is not genuine New Testament Christianity, which is a relationship with God that is lived out naturally from the insight out in the power of the Holy Spirit. And so when we get these questions from people that we don't know that we've never met and can't sit down and talk to, I think you've got to raise the question, does this person really know Christ or has he, is he someone who's simply been raised in the church or in Christian environment but has never really experienced the life-changing

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