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Is William Lane Craig’s view still that atheists are at moral fault for not believing?

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I recently took the time to re-read the prelusive words of William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith. This quote stuck with me:
When a person refuses to come to Christ, it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God’s Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God.
A decade after first reading this, I remember I was struggling to understand who he intends the book to be for, and Craig's motivations. If we are not to assume that Craig is not serious or that he is lying about his sincerity, it could be that he is sincere but wrong: in the sense that he genuinely cannot make sense of atheism as an intellectual position. But then it seems to me that he is so caught up in his own religious convictions he cannot fathom the possibility someone could sincerely disagree with his position. An unfortunate position, in my view. The disagreement is also shifted from the intellectual realm of evidence to the moral realm of personal integrity, effectively *faulting the non-believer* for an emotional or spiritual deficiency. It appeals to notions of spiritual deficiency rather than engaging directly with intellectual critiques. The quote makes apologetics seem like its whole purpose is to convince those who already are convinced. I also think this type of argumentation renders the argument difficult to empirically verify or falsify. If non-belief is attributed to an internal disposition (such as a preference for "darkness" over "light"), it becomes impossible to test or refute through evidence. Thus I am curious if Craig has revised these position in recent times, if he has matured as he has gotten older. Questions: 1. Has Craig changed his view or added nuance to his stance? Does he still attribute unbelief primarily to the willful rejection of God rather than to intellectual or evidential challenges? 2. Is evidence still something that, for him, acts only insofar as a dual warrant of one’s Christian beliefs alongside the inner witness of the Spirit? 3. Has he acknowledged intellectual or evidential factors as genuine obstacles to faith? 4. What role does he currently assign to evidence and objective methods in relation to the work of the Holy Spirit?
Asked by Markus Klyver (139 rep)
Jul 15, 2025, 03:30 PM