QUESTIONS FOR RESTLESS MINDS

How Do We Know God Exists?

William Lane Craig

D. A. Carson,

Series Editor

How Do We Know God Exists?

Questions for Restless Minds, edited by D. A. Carson

Copyright 2022 Christ on Campus Initiative

Lexham Press, 1313 Commercial St., Bellingham, WA 98225 LexhamPress.com

You may use brief quotations from this resource in presentations, articles, and books. For all other uses, please write Lexham Press for permission. Email us at permissions@lexhampress.com.

Print ISBN 9781683595274

Digital ISBN 9781683595281

Library of Congress Control Number 2021937706

Lexham Editorial: Todd Hains, Abigail Stocker, Jessi Strong, Mandi Newell

Cover Design: Brittany Schrock

Contents

Series Preface

1. Introduction

2. The Cosmological Argument

3. The Kalam Cosmological Argument

4. The Moral Argument

5. The Teleological Argument

6. The Ontological Argument

7. Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Study Guide Questions

For Further Reading

Series Preface

d. a. carson, series editor

The origin of this series of books lies with a group of faculty from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (TEDS), under the leadership of Scott Manetsch. We wanted to address topics faced by today’s undergraduates, especially those from Christian homes and churches.

If you are one such student, you already know what we have in mind. You know that most churches, however encouraging they may be, are not equipped to prepare you for what you will face when you enroll at university.

It’s not as if you’ve never known any winsome atheists before going to college; it’s not as if you’ve never thought about Islam, or the credibility of the New Testament documents, or the nature of friendship, or gender identity, or how the claims of Jesus sound too exclusive and rather narrow, or the nature of evil. But up until now you’ve probably thought about such things within the shielding cocoon of a community of faith.

Now you are at college, and the communities in which you are embedded often find Christian perspectives to be at best oddly quaint and old-fashioned, if not repulsive. To use the current jargon, it’s easy to become socialized into a new community, a new world.

How shall you respond? You could, of course, withdraw a little: just buckle down and study computer science or Roman history (or whatever your subject is) and refuse to engage with others. Or you could throw over your Christian heritage as something that belongs to your immature years and buy into the cultural package that surrounds you. Or—and this is what we hope you will do—you could become better informed.

But how shall you go about this? On any disputed topic, you do not have the time, and probably not the interest, to bury yourself in a couple of dozen volumes written by experts for experts. And if you did, that would be on one topic—and there are scores of topics that will grab the attention of the inquisitive student. On the other hand, brief pamphlets with predictable answers couched in safe slogans will prove to be ...