From: William Lane Craig <info@reasonablefaith.org>Subject: Question of the Week - Circularity and Evidence for Jesus' Resurrection

Date: June 4, 2012 6:35:09 PM GMT+08:00To: lowellgomezperez@aol.com

Reply-To: William Lane Craig <info@reasonablefaith.org>

#268

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Circularity and Evidence for Jesus' Resurrection

Question:

Hello Dr. Craig,

I am a second year undergrad student at UCLA and have been an avid reader of your work since highschool. I cannot express to you how powerful it is the work you are doing for the Kingdom. The exampleyou have set in glorifying the Lord with your mind has been a source of great encouragement for me.

The lack of intellectual rigor that has pervaded the church saddens me deeply. Too often I find thatChristians adhere to their belief purely through emotional experience. While they may be justified in thisbelief by the witness of the Holy Spirit, when tasked with explaining their belief to skeptics or appealingrationally to seekers, they are either unable to defend their beliefs with evidence or caught in the cycleof circular reasoning by using scripture to prove scripture.

I am a part of the Intervarsity leadership team here at UCLA and I hope to introduce and defend yourapologetics work through seminars in the near future.

On to the actual question..

1. In your defense of the question "Does God Exist?", one of your standard five arguments from thetheist point of view is "The Resurrection of Jesus". In this argument, you explain that the historical Jesuscame on the scene with an unprecedented sense of divine authority and that Jesus claimed to be Godand carried out a ministry of miracle working. You say that the supreme confirmation of Christ's claimwas his resurrection from the dead. If Jesus really did rise from the dead, then it would seem that wehave a divine miracle on our hands, and thus evidence for the existence of God. You explain threeestablished, historical facts that you contend are best explained by the resurrection of Jesus and thusprovide evidence for the existence of God. If this argument is sound, it would seem that the resurrectionof Jesus is evidence for God's existence.

2. In some of your work (and I believe most recently in your Defenders: Doctrine of Christ (Part 24)podcast), you defend the Resurrection Hypothesis, that is, the hypothesis that God raised Jesus from thedead. As part of your argument for this hypothesis, you use probability calculus to show that while theResurrection Hypothesis based on the background information alone is very improbable, once we aregiven the specific evidence, the Resurrection Hypothesis becomes much more probable. One aspect ofthe specific evidence you give is the probability of the existence of God. While it is highly improbablethat Jesus rose from the dead naturally, if God exists then it is not at all improbable that God wouldraise his son from the dead to fulfill his plan for the universe.

So for the first argument stated, you contend that the resurrection of Jesus serves in itself as evidencefor God's existence. In your Resurrection Hypothesis, you appeal to the evidence for the existence ofGod as a part of the specific evidence used to show that the Resurrection Hypothesis is more probablethan not.

Are these arguments not then circular reasoning?

Please point out to me if I am wrong in my conclusion here, but if I understand these two argumentscorrectly and they do indeed use circular reasoning, it would not follow that the Resurrection Hypothesisis invalid, rather it would just show that the resurrection of Jesus could not in itself be evidence for theexistence of God.

Again, thank you for everything you are doing for the Kingdom through your work and I want you toknow that the impact of your work has significantly influenced me and eventually, I hope, the UCLAcampus.

In Christ,Jason-- USA

Dr. Craig responds:

I realize that I’m partly to blame for the confusion concerning the place of evidence for Jesus’resurrection in Christian apologetics. In my published work, I clearly distinguish between NaturalTheology and Christian evidences. The arguments of Natural Theology aim to demonstrate the existenceof God generically conceived and are common property of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Deists.Christian evidences provide grounds for believing in God’s special self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth.Here one moves beyond generic theism to Christian theism. I include the evidence for Jesus’resurrection in Christian evidences. (See Five Views on Apologetics, ed. Steve Cowan)

My studied view, then, is that one first establishes theism on the basis of the arguments of NaturalTheology like the cosmological, teleological, axiological, and ontological arguments, so that when onecomes to explaining the facts pertinent to Jesus of Nazareth, one may include as part of one’sbackground information the existence of the God of Natural Theology. You misunderstood theDefenders lectures. There I challenge the assumption that the probability of the resurrection on ourbackground information Pr (R|B) is very low precisely because we can include God’s existence as part ofour background information. We’ve already completed our Natural Theology before we come to anexamination of Christian evidences.

So why do I frequently present the resurrection as part of a cumulative case for God’s existence indebates? Well, the reason, frankly, is evangelistic. I don’t want to leave students with just a generic Godcommon to all monotheists but with some warrant for believing in the Christian God, the God revealedby Jesus of Nazareth.

Now if one includes the resurrection itself as part of the evidence for theism, as I often do in debates,one cannot include God’s existence as part of the background information (though one could stillinclude evidence like the beginning of the universe, the fine-tuning of the universe, the reality ofobjective moral values, etc.). What one will say in this case is just that we’ve got no reason to think thatPr (R|B) << 0.5.

So I hope you’ll find that I’ve been consistent in including God’s existence in the backgroundinformation only in cases in which I am not using the resurrection as part of a case for theism. Whenusing the resurrection as part of a theistic case, one should simply say that the resurrection has notbeen shown to be improbable on the background information because we’ve not heard any goodarguments for atheism.

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