Reasonable Faith Podcast

A listener asks Dr. Craig to imagine a possible world filled with free persons, love, moral agency, and a genuine relationship with God, but with none of the cancer, war, animal suffering, or death we see in our own. If a world like that is logically possible, what greater good could justify God choosing a world like ours instead? Dr. Craig takes up this possible-worlds objection and considers whether it really undercuts his view that God permits suffering for the sake of bringing people freely to know Him.

Dr. Craig answers listener questions from around the world. If Christ paid for every sin, why would anyone still face judgment? Could God have made the universe and simply moved on? What should we make of a skeptical historian who says the disciples must have seen something? Plus: when science and Scripture seem to collide, which gives way? Why did God allow Mark’s snake-handling passage into our Bibles? And will the wicked exist forever?

A listener writes that his faith is hanging in the balance. Wherever he looks, from natural theology to the resurrection, he thinks the scholarly consensus seems to be against Christianity, and online critics accuse Christian thinkers, Dr. Craig included, of intellectual dishonesty. Questions about James Tour and the origin of life have only deepened his doubts. Is Christianity a respected position in the academy? Would a naturalistic account of abiogenesis threaten the faith? And how can we tell legitimate theological development from ad hoc accommodation to science? Dr. Craig responds.

Philosophical theologian Ryan Mullins argues that William Lane Craig’s version of Molinism is incoherent, and the charge comes down to one word: deliberation. If God already knows everything, can he really deliberate about which world to create? And if he can’t, is his choice truly free? Dr. Craig responds to Mullins’s critique, evaluates defenses offered by Tim Stratton and Reasonable Faith's own Tyson James, and explains why Mullins’s proposed fix would come at a steep theological price. Plus, a decades-old atheist argument from Dan Barker turns out to be the same puzzle in different clothes.

If nothing is impossible for God, how can some worlds be “infeasible” for Him? A listener named Howard presses Dr. Craig on a phrase that sounds like a limit on God’s power. Dr. Craig explains the Molinist idea behind it: true counterfactuals about how free creatures would choose narrow the range of worlds God can actually bring about. He then argues why this places no restriction on divine omnipotence.