We have questions from all over the world and we want to ask you to respond to some of these. This from Thomas in the United States. Dr. Craig would you please answer this question or are you not a theistic evolutionist? Yes or no would suffice. Greg Cocoa will ask you this question and I did believe your answer was clearly stated. He said essentially that you wrote in your search for the historic atom, was one way things could have occurred, but does not necessarily reflect what you believe. If I misinterpreted please clarify this for me, thank you, Thomas. All right, Thomas wants to say yes or no answer, so I will say no. My position is that I am agnostic about theistic evolution, depending on how you define it, which Thomas unfortunately didn't do. But I remain open-minded. I am willing to follow the evidence where it leads. What I have said is that I don't think that theistic evolution is in any way incompatible with the Bible. So any reservations that I would have about theistic evolution would be not theological, they would be scientific in some way the theory is scientifically deficient. So the answer is no, I remain agnostic. An anonymous question came in Bill. He says, if logos Christology is wrong, how should we understand Jesus as the logos in John chapter 1? What does logos mean in John 1? The difficulty with so many of our questions is that they don't define their terms. They don't tell us what they mean by say the used to give a Lucian or hear Laugh aus Christology. But I think what he is referring to is my argument that the idea that the second person of the Trinity is eternally begotten by the the first person of the Trinity is not a biblical doctrine, but is a later theological development that is rooted in the Logos Christology of the early Greek Christian apologists. And these thinkers thought that based Just on John 1, that the the Logos was sort of the mind or the intellect of God and That it proceeded forth from the mind of God the Father and became a distinct person Who then became incarnate as Jesus Christ and this Log logos was in some ways a kind of second tier deity, not fully as divine as the Father. And I think that this doctrine is incorrect. It has deleterious consequences. And as I say that it's not biblical. What John 1 is talking about is the lawgoth as it plays a role in so-called middle plateonism. I wrote about this in my book, God Over All. There's a lengthy exegesis of John 1 there. And in the work of Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish Egyptian philosopher, contemporaneous with the New Testament. The Logos is sort of an intellectual principle within God. And for John, this is, I think, the second person of the Trinity. John does not say that the Logos proceeds forth from the or that he's begotten by the Father. He says that he is in the bosom of the Father and then he came into the world, became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. And so in the proper sense, of course, we all affirm La Goss Christology in so far as you are a Trinitarian and you believe in multiple persons in the Godhead, but that does not commit you to this later doctrine that the second person of the Trinity is begotten or proceeds from the first person of the Trinity. Bill, this next question you used as question of the week, number 794, but maybe you can give us a little sneak preview. It says, Dr. Craig, my pastor said all my sins were forgiven, past, present, and future. Therefore, can a born-again Christian actually commit sin, Michael from the United States? Here, I have to respectfully disagree with Michael's pastor. It's often said that God forgives all your sins, past, present, and future. But if you have a theory of time according to which temporal becoming is real and things actually come into and go out of existence, there are no such things as future sins. They have not yet been committed and therefore you cannot be guilty of sins that you have not committed and if you cannot be guilty of sins you haven't committed, neither can you be forgiven of those sins that you have not committed. So I think that the Scripture teaches as we sin and we bring these before God in confession and repentance, God forgives us. And so the promise of 1 John 1 9 is that if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. And this means that we need to keep short account with God as we go through life. We shouldn't allow sin to accumulate in our lives. We shouldn't try to sweep it under the rug, but the minute we sense that we have acted in an unethical way, a way depletely God, we need to confess it, repent of it, claim God's forgiveness, and be cleansed of it and move on. So I don't think that God has already forgiven your future sins because I don't think your guilty of those sins because you haven't committed those sins. Next question, dear Dr. Craig, what do you think of the it from bit hypothesis? It seems to me that it allows for reality to come from nothing. As soon as there is nothing, there is the set containing nothing or the empty set or zero. As soon as we have zero, we have the set containing zero or one. The set containing zero and one is a set with two elements, or two, and so on and so forth. Once you have numbers, you can have binary logic, and the real world is only a subset of the set of logical possibilities. Thanks in advance, one from the United States. Well, where I differ with one is that I am not a platenist. I am an anti-realist when it comes to abstract objects in particular, mathematical objects like numbers and sets. What one's argument is really trying to prove is not that something can come from nothing, but that it's impossible logically to have nothing because you would always have at least these mathematical entities. And I don't accept that these mathematical entities exist. It seems to me that these are simply useful fictions. And I certainly do not agree with one that the real physical world is a subset of the set of logical possibilities. The real physical world is not an abstract object. It's a concrete object and therefore completely distinct from this realm of abstract mathematical objects. So I have a quite different metaphysical outlook than Juan does. This question from Joshua, hello Dr. Khrang, I have a question related to the Kalam Cosmological argument and the tense theory of time. These two seem to be intertwined. How does it make sense to say that the universe or time began to exist? Only things that are in time have a beginning, but time is not inside of itself, or that would be absurd. So how can one say that time began to exist? This also seems to imply that time is a temporal, which would be an argument for the tenseless theory of time. Joshua in the US. Uh-huh. Well, now that would not be an argument for the tenseless theory of time to say that time is all temporal is a contradiction and therefore cannot be true. But in answer to his question, I think we simply need to have an adequate definition of what it means to begin to exist. And I would say that for some entity x, x begins to exist, if and only if, x exists at some time t, and there is no time prior to t at which x exists. That seems to me to be a good definition of begins to exist. Or in more simple terms, x begins to exist if there is a first time at which x exists. And that definition would apply to time itself. Time begins to exist if there is a moment of time at which time it exists and there is no moment prior to that at which time it exists.

So... time begins to exist if there is a moment of time at which time it exists and there is no moment prior to that at which time exists. So in contemporary cosmology, there simply isn't any problem with thinking that space and time themselves began to exist. Another question from the United States, Dr. Craig, is thank you for your work from which I've benefited greatly. I have a question regarding your current stance on the ID movement, especially after your release of your inquest of the historical atom, which I've read. Would you still place yourself within the intelligent design camp, holding to a partial evolutionary framework in reference to Neodar-arwinian theory that holds common descent for all organic species. Place in the beginning of man in the species, Homo erectus, or would you abandon the intelligent design position altogether? Could you perhaps explain more how your position relates to ID or the different ways that your position could relate to ID. Thank you very much for using your gift of philosophy to the benefit of the Church, a faithful listener will. Well for listeners who aren't familiar with the abbreviation ID stands for intelligent design and I certainly am a proponent of the argument for intelligent design, particularly based upon the fine tuning of the universe. I think on the basis of the fine tuning of the universe for embodied conscious observers like ourselves, we certainly are rational in inferring that there is a transcendent, intelligent designer of the universe. And my work on the historical atom only has to do with human development. It really says nothing about where Adam and Eve came from. It simply identifies them not with homo erectus, as Will says, but with homo-hidlebergenzi, who was the most recent common ancestor of Neanderthals and

homo sapiens. My position in that regard really isn't any different from Casey Luskins, who works with the Discovery Institute, who would also place Adam very far in the primordial past, as the ancestor of these twin human species.

Very good, good questions.

Good. very far in the primordial past as the ancestor of these twin human species.

Very good. Good questions? Good answers as usual, Bill.

We'll see you in the next podcast. Thank you.