William Lane Craig

Fellow, Center for Science and Culture

William Lane Craig is a Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Birmingham, England, before taking a doctorate in theology from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany, at which latter institution he was for two years a Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. Prior to his appointmant at Talbot he spent seven years at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the Katholike Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He has authored or edited over thirty books, including The Kalam Cosmological Argument; Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom; Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology; and God, Time, and Eternity, as well as nearly a hundred articles in professional journals of philosophy and theology, including The Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, and British Journal for Philosophy of Science. He currently lives in Atlanta with his wife Jan; they have two children, Charity and John.

Archives

Naturalism

A Critical Analysis
Robert C. Koons, William Lane Craig, William A. Dembski and J.P. Moreland
April 9, 2014
This impressive volume contains critical essays on naturalism from the perspectives of theology, ethics, cosmology, ontology, and epistemology. Various Discovery Fellows make contributions including Robert C. Koons, J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and William Dembski. Koons, a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, begins by noting that there is a simple correlation between existence and the requirement of some non-natural first cause. He observes an irony that science thinks it requires naturalism, when our very ability to practice science, due to the orderly, reliable, and predictable behavior of the universe implies a non-natural intelligent cause. Scientific dependence upon naturalism is self-refuting. J.P. Moreland, a noted philosopher, quotes Plato to reveal …

The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition

An Encyclopedia
William Lane Craig, William A. Dembski, Stephen C. Meyer, Richard Weikart and Robin Collins
June 13, 2000
This comprehensive volume covers the history of science and religion in Western Civilization with dozens of contributions from leading scholars. Discovery Fellow Stephen C. Meyer authors the entry “The Demarcation of Science and Religion,” where he notes that some theologians have defined religion as the study of God through revelation, while science is the study of the natural world. Meyer recounts how one court testing creationism in the 1980s accepted the testimony of philosopher Michael Ruse to define science as “(1) guided by natural law, (2) explanatory by natural law, (3) testable against the empirical world, (4) tentative, and (5) falsifiable” (pg. 22), but that this definition was subsequently repudiated by various philosophers of science. Indeed, by …

Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology

William Lane Craig
September 28, 1995
Contemporary science presents us with the remarkable theory that the universe began billions of years ago with a cataclysmic explosion, the “Big Bang.” But was this explosion created by God? The question of whether Big Bang cosmology supports theism or atheism has long been a matter of discussion among the general public and in popular science books, but has received scant attention from philosophers. This book sets out to fill this gap by means of a sustained debate between two philosophers. In this volume, William Lane Craig, a Discovery Institute Fellow, and Quentin Smith defend opposing positions in alternating chapters. In Part I, Craig argues that the past necessarily is finite and that God created the universe, and Smith presents his criticisms of these arguments. …