Episode 140 Sean McDowell and William Lane Craig missed the point on rets deconversion.

This is Matthew, and in this episode of Still Unbelievable I will review Sean McDowell and William Lane Craig being shitty about Rets deconversion.

When Christian apologists review the deconversion of a high profile Christian, it's a given that they will miss the point on the things they say and misdirect their adoring Christian fans on the negative aspects of Christianity that cause the person to leave.

This conversation is no exception, and I'm going to have fun highlighting all the predictable and unsurprising ways that Sean and WLC achieve this.

As always, links to the relevant items will be in the show notes, starting with link one taking you to the Sean McDowell interview with William Lane Craig and link 2 going to the Alex O'Connor interview with Rhett.

I find it very interesting that Sean does not provide the link to Alex's show in his YouTube notes.

What is he afraid of?

Doctor Craig, there's a combination here, I think, of important lessons for the church and apologists.

Sean introduces William Lane Craig with a promising teaser.

As well as a few points that I think it'd be helpful for people if we offer our responses.

And immediately follows it with a caveat.

I told you they were going to be shitty.

Are you ready to look at 10 clips together and give me your reaction?

Are you ready for 10 carefully cultivated clips that in no way whatsoever omit important context or skip over the wider point?

Remember the original interviews are in my show notes if you want to check.

I certainly am.

I'm looking forward to interacting with Rhett on these questions.

You're not interacting with Rhett though, are you?

You're interacting with fellow apologist Sean McDowell.

You're responding to cherry picked clips of what Rhett said.

Perfect.

Well, let's take a look at the first clip.

Certainty is really important aspect of religious faith and especially Christianity and especially evangelical Christianity.

Rhett is right.

Certainty is a very big thing in Christianity, and it is especially big in evangelical Christianity.

That is why the phrase cocaine of certainty caused the stairway that appeared in the book.

Still, unbelievable.

Certainty is important and doubt is a problem.

Christians fear, doubt, and certainty is the cure.

Any church worth it's sought has a we believe place on their website, right?

Being certain and being right about these things comes at a premium.

It is really, really important.

So I thought that being certain was very important.

Here's really the question, Bill How central is certainty in the church today, and how important should it be for Christians?

I think that being certain is not important, Sean.

I think what's important is to know these truths.

But certainty is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge.

Are you certain about that?

Interesting that he mentioned truth and knowledge and not faith.

How can I claim to know something if I have no certainty?

Maybe it's just me, but if I am not certain about something, I don't claim it as knowledge, I claim it as an opinion.

Craig is being philosophically nuanced here and using certainty as a sliding scale from tentative to absolute.

What he means is that absolute certainty is not required to claim knowledge about something, and sure, he might be right from a philosophical perspective.

However, if you gradually degrade your level of certainty about something so your ability to claim it as knowledge also declines, there will come a point at which you can no longer affirm knowledge.

On the topic of Christianity, this is the point at which deconstruction begins.

So while Craig may be technically correct when it comes to the practical working out of one's Christian faith, reduced certainty puts one in a deeply uncomfortable place.

We can know things on the basis of probabilistic evidence.

Indeed, this is the way we know anything in history.

Oh yes, not just any evidence, but probabilistic evidence.

The kind of evidence that is not conclusive but instead gives room for interpretation.

The kind of evidence that allows one to claim it supports the conclusion that they have already decided upon.

Did you also notice how Craig said know anything in history and not know anything in science?

I wonder why the scientific method challenges the idea.

Any idea that is not conclusive.

Meanwhile, history is notoriously difficult to access.

Uncertainty can be difficult, even impossible.

Historians will suggest conclusions tentatively because of this very issue.

This is especially true when all that is available is written records from people who are not there.

Historians will affirm what is written, but caveat it with they don't know if what is written is the truth.

But you won't hear Craig acknowledge that.

Neither is certainty sufficient for knowledge, because some are terribly, terribly certain are desperately wrong.

This is true.

It is possible to be absolutely certain and still be absolutely wrong.

The obvious question then is how does 1 validate the knowledge they think they have to ensure that it is correct?

So I I think that it's simply a mistake to prize certainty as something that's really important in the Christian life.

The writer of Hebrews will be very disappointed.

And yet, as Rhett accurately stated, certainty is a feature of many expressions of Christianity.

In many churches, certainty is the goal and doubters are often disparaged.

The world of deconstruction is littered with hurt people who dared to express the lack of certainty.

Craig ignored that truth and it is usual philosophical juggling act.

Maybe Sean has some wisdom on this.

I have a lot of sympathy with Rhett for this because I think there's a huge segment of the evangelical church that basically considers faith equivalent to certainty, and this can be devastating to faith.

I wrote a whole book on deconstruction.

I've had countless conversations with people who've deconstructed, deconverted their faith, and this theme comes up regularly.

Yes, it does come up an awful lot.

I see it a huge amount in the deconstruction community, and while I appreciate Sean recognizing the issue, he has stopped short of calling it out as a harmful practice that it is belief.

Is to hold something with varying degrees of confidence.

You can believe something 51 percent or you can believe it 99%.

They're both beliefs different psychological confidence like you said.

Whereas certainty is the psychological state of having no doubt being 100% confident something is true.

That's not the definition of certainty that Craig gave, Sean.

If you're going to address the issue of certainty, it would be useful if you could both use the same definition.

And I think when we do this in people's minds, then they associate doubt with unbelief.

Sean is frustratingly close to getting it.

Not only are there many churches where this is a real issue, these are the churches that are driving people away from Christianity and they are the churches that are guilty of causing issues of low self esteem in believers.

This is a philosophical point that the nature of knowledge does not require or imply psychological certainty.

How can you claim to know something if you're not certain that you know it?

And I think biblically, too, Jude 122 says have mercy on those who doubt.

They're not unbelievers.

They're people who believe and have faith and yet have doubt.

Blessed are the doubters, for they shall inherit the ability to question and to test everything.

Let's take a look at the second clip.

I can agree that God preordained a certain number of people to be his children, which definitely means that a certain number of people are not predestined to be his children and they're going to be in hell.

But doesn't that kind of make God an 0?

Yes, yes, it does make God an asshole.

So I was having thoughts like that at like 20 years old.

I wish I had had those thoughts at 20 years old instead of 35.

It would have saved me a world of pain.

Essentially, here's the question Bill is God morally reprehensible for creating a world in which most people will not believe in Him?

Yes, yes he is, because he has the power to orchestrate those people to believe the right things so they do have a glorious eternity.

But he doesn't do that, and he's the only one who can.

And how can Christians live with cognitive dissonance of this kind?

Well, I have to say that I don't agree with rat that people are unilaterally preordained to salvation or damnation by God.

I don't think that the Bible teaches that at all.

But millions do, William.

So who's right, you or them?

How do we tell the difference on probabilistic evidence with no certainty?

What the Bible teaches is that election is primarily a corporate notion and only secondarily an individual notion.

So, for example, in the Old Testament, the object of God's election was not individual persons, it was a people.

It was a nation, the nation of Israel.

And God said, you are my chosen people and I will bless you.

If God chosen, doesn't that mean they're preordained?

Those promises to the corporate group Israel were not guaranteed to every individual person in Israel.

But they were certainly denied to those who were not of Israel.

Those persons could fail to live up to the demands.

This so fascinating, but it's Old Testament.

Can we get on to the New Testament in the current church distraction by philosophical mumbo jumbo?

You move that into the New Testament.

Thank you.

It is those who place their faith in Christ Jesus who become the heirs of these promises.

So what God says is I want everyone to be saved and He gives sufficient grace for salvation to every person that He creates, and then He leaves it up to us.

But it clearly is not sufficient, because not only are there people who do not believe, there are people who used to believe and then moved away.

So our salvation lies in our own hands, and God is not to be blamed.

And there it is, the victim blaming bullshit has arrived at clip #2 God gave you enough, therefore it's your fault for not accepting it.

Utter rubbish.

If God gave me enough I would believe it really is that simple.

It is precisely this level of pious shittiness that makes me intensely dislike William Lane Craig and every other apologist that talks like him.

Fuck the lot of them.

When we critique hell as being unjust.

That's not what he said.

Sean Rhett didn't say hell was unjust.

Although the issue of eternal punishment for a crime is highly questionable, what Rhett said was a preordained determination of who was in and who was out.

Makes God an asshole.

When you dodge the point Sean, it makes you look bad.

That doesn't answer it then.

Why say it the?

Other thing, and this is a big piece to me, but why believe in something like hell when it's all said and done?

I'm convinced because I think Jesus taught it.

Belief in hell is irrelevant to Rhett's point.

Rhett's point was about God predetermining in groups and out groups.

The same argument works for annihilationism.

Hell is not the point of this comments.

Jesus Christ.

I don't think in one sense God sends anybody to hell.

Who created the rules that determine people go to hell?

Rather, people send themselves by irrevocably and freely separating themselves from God forever.

Who created the rules, William?

And anyway, how does a temporally limited being do something that lasts eternally?

But I took it that Rhett's objection was that people's fate is preordained.

Hurrah, one of them got it.

And I I just disagree with that.

That's not the way I read the the Bible.

Followers of Calvin do though.

Billy boy, there are lots, thousands, millions maybe of churches out there that teach exactly that.

All right, good take.

Let's move to clip #3.

Jesse, my wife, who did come from like a young earth creationist background, like that's you know, that that's what she was taught growing up when I came home and I was like, we need to talk about something.

And I and I said I am thoroughly convinced that evolution is true and that we are related to every other animal.

This was a big thing for me, too.

It was also a big thing for Andrew.

It's a big thing in the deconversion community.

We all know it's possible to be a Christian and also accept evolution.

We know that and we get that.

Many of us tried to be that kind of Christian too.

The thing is, evolution being true means humans are the lucky ones at the top of the pile.

We're only special by a quirk of happenstance.

We are not special by some supernatural act.

It is this that makes evolution the Achilles heel of Christianity.

At that point I realized how wrong I could be about something so fundamental, and I never ever considered that I might be wrong about something so fundamental.

This point deserves emphasizing.

Learning you're wrong about something so big opens the door to questions of what else can you be wrong about?

It permits the deep questioning of every other fundamental belief that you hold.

Learning that you're wrong about creationism encourages questions about the very existence of God.

What's more, the mental shift to accepting evolution after years of creationist beliefs shows us that changing fundamental beliefs is possible.

And it does not have to be world ending.

It's a metaphorical small hole in a big dam.

Not only was I wrong, but all of these Christian apologists who are so sure about their critiques of evolution, they had missed the boat so significantly on this that suddenly I was like, can I?

Can I trust anything else they've got to say?

I.

Wonder if Sean and WLC will really get the significance of this point.

When people you have looked up to for so long are shown to be wrong with such certainty, it does shatter trust, not just in the people but in the process that they promote.

It demonstrates that there is a more reliable way to truth than faith and that means that everything, literally everything, that has been arrived at through faith is questionable and must be scrutinised.

How big of a domino in one's faith is evolution, and what lesson should Christian apologists learn from rats experience?

I think that the evidence in favor of common ancestry is good.

Interesting pause there.

I didn't edit the tin, it's there in the original.

I wonder how much it hurt you to say that, would you?

Especially the evidence of microbiology.

But the question of common descent is not a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith.

It is tangential and therefore 1 can easily change one's mind about this, as many people do and I think very helpful.

Here is the philosopher WVO Quine's notion of a web of beliefs.

See link 3 for more on this topic.

The basic summary is that our belief system can be viewed as a spider's web.

Core beliefs are those at the centre of the web and are fundamental to its structure, while less fundamental beliefs are at the edge and are not structurally significant and so are more readily changeable.

From Rhett's testimony and from my own, you can learn that the creationist belief, or more specifically the belief in the specialness of humans, is a core central belief.

This means that the change to accepting evolution and humans being part of the animal family is a threat to the structure of the web.

My point is that your views about common ancestry are in no way part of the core of one's beliefs.

It's tangential and therefore easily change.

Did you notice how Craig can't say evolution?

He has to say common ancestry.

So when he says that one's views about common ancestry can change.

So when he says that one's views about common ancestry can change, is he referring to evolution or some form of intelligent design?

It's not clear.

And this flip flop of terminology does not add clarity, it's obfuscates.

Now I think the difficulty is that certain young Earth creationists, like apparently Rhett himself, at one time have a distorted understanding of the web of beliefs.

Or it is the great WLC who has a distorted view of how the conflict with evolution is so heavily taught in certain churches and denominations.

They think that right at the center of the web.

Is belief in special young earth creationism, and therefore if that's given up, it has enormous repercussions throughout the web of belief.

Christianity teaches that humanity is special, and evolution undermines that theology.

This is where the problem of evolution lies.

It's not just a creationism problem, it's a Christianity problem.

It's disappointing, but not surprising that Craig won't acknowledge this.

Atheism is not built upon the theory of evolution.

Correct, it's not.

Christianity is not built upon the foundation of special creationism of.

Genesis 1, anybody?

Exactly the reverse.

It would be that if you are an atheist then you have to be an evolutionist or if you were a Christian then you would believe in in creation.

Contradiction alert.

Damn, I need another klaxon.

Sorry, wrong one.

Someone who has that sort of system of beliefs, apparently as Red Dead, is going to find the abandonment of young Earth creationism to be incredibly disruptive and personally shattering.

The reason why, Craig, if you actually listened to what Rhett said, it's because creationism builds a house on the sand of literalism, which means that once you question that, it opens the door to questioning everything else.

And that means that the weakness of the resurrection narrative comes into focus.

It's not that evolution killed his Christianity, and nor did it kill mine, but the consequence of the deeper questioning that it led to revealed the shockingly weak foundation of the whole of Christianity.

But I get why people like Sean and WLC will intentionally skip that point.

Giving grace on this point doesn't suit the story they want to tell.

Much better for them to twist Rhett's words to say something entirely different.

Here, But I think you're right.

The core issue is, can naturalism, itself a naturalistic mechanism, account for all the complexity and diversity of life?

Yes, yes it can.

That's why I think the question of common descent is very different than the kind of concern we would have for a purely naturalistic process of evolution.

And there you have it.

Evolution is purely naturalistic.

You can't have evolution and God belief.

Craig said it, Sean said it.

If you learn to accept evolution, your Christianity dies.

They just said it.

But one thing that I say to my students is specifically, and these are my students at Biola, even if evolution were true, it can't explain some of the most important worldview questions that every belief system needs to.

And again, Sean is denying the fact of evolution, but he has to because his job depends on it.

See the links at 4:00.

But more importantly, evolution is not the place to go for answers to the questions that Sean is referring to.

Evolution is how we got here, not how we should act or what we should believe.

Evolution is not a world view, it is a fact of science.

Naturalism and humanism are world views, and each of them accepts evolution is true.

I'd have thought that a university lecturer would know this and would make an effort to be clear on this.

It's dumb statements like this from someone who ought to know better that gives Christianity a bad name.

Let's move to clip #4.

There was 0 curiosity about whether or not I might be wrong.

Yeah, you know, that wasn't even up for debate.

There's no, there was full confidence and no curiosity.

And I am in a very a very different place.

I think those two things have reversed at this point in my life.

Right.

Right, very low confidence in my perspective and high curiosity for all of this stuff.

Oh man, I love this point.

Rhett, if you ever hear this, please get in touch.

I'd love a chat.

I resonate so much at this point.

I get it.

Christianity discourages curiosity because everything outside of Christianity is the world.

It's sinful and forbidden.

The expression be in the world not of it is the cause of so much bullshit.

I love being curious and I love knowing that I know fuck all.

It's literally the best place to be intellectually.

Really, the question here is how do you balance confidence and curiosity about your faith?

I've got to say that I am also amazed as Red is at people's lack of curiosity about things.

Some people have no interest at all in how the universe began.

That wasn't what Rhett said, though.

Was it William?

He said, curious about how they might be wrong.

Or moral values and duties.

Or the reality of the soul.

Yes, Bill, we get that you're confident that you're right about those things, but are you at all curious about whether or not you might be wrong?

That was the point, and you're proving it.

And so I find among unbelievers a great deal of in curiosity about these important things.

Wow, WLC really did try to flip this one round and make it about the unbeliever.

He is so confident in his faith and so incurious about whether or not he might be wrong that he is completely missed the point again.

Let's move on to the next clip, but.

Why would the disciples die for a lie?

And then when I really looked into that, and then I found that, well, I don't think I can actually historically defend that anyone died for something that they knew to be a lie.

Like I think that this can be explained by them being deceived right?

They could just be wrong about what they saw or their perspective.

Is it reasonable that the disciples were simply wrong for what they claimed to have seen about the risen Jesus?

Could they have been deceived and then, you know, willing to die for something that was false?

I was surprised at what Red said here.

No one died, he says.

For what they knew to be a lie.

Well, that's exactly the point.

Well, technically the point is that you can be prepared to die for something that is wrong without knowing that it is wrong.

You can firmly believe something that is not true now.

They died, or were willing to die for what they believed to be the truth.

No one would die for what he knew to be a lie.

I know you get it, dear listener, and I know Craig will never listen to this, but this expelling of unnecessary hot air over the distinction between believing something that's not true and knowing something that is a lie is perfect for putting me in a bad.

Mood.

So what that implies is that the disciples were either deceivers or deceived.

Well, deceivers would mean they died for a lie, wouldn't it?

So.

Now if they weren't deceivers, then what hypothesis would appeal to their being sincerely mistaken about Jesus resurrection?

It means that someone made shit up.

My preferred explanation, which will be alluded to later, is that the stories grew and evolved over time.

This is seen in the gospels as each later gospel is more dramatic than the previous, and also seen in the stories of how the apostles allegedly died.

These are all accounts written many decades, even centuries later, by people who could not possibly have known.

Well, it's pretty hard to think of one, Sean.

How?

Very incurious.

The only ones I can think of would be the wrong tomb hypothesis or it would be the hallucination hypothesis.

Really.

Are those really the only possible ideas that you are able to consider?

Curious.

The problem is, even if the disciples were deceived, you still have the conversion of James, still have the conversion of Paul, and the evidence for the empty tomb that are all going to require some explanation.

Evolved narrative that progressed over time.

That's where the disciples being deceived alone is not going to get us there.

You're right, it won't, Sean, But maybe if you actually address the point that Rhett brought up, we might get onto something worth talking about.

But instead said you've dodged that and got onto your own preferred pet apologetics talking point.

All right, the next clip.

It began to dawn on me that I don't know exactly what happened.

And this is the biggest sticking point of them all.

We do not know what really happened.

Written biography in those days was not the meticulous fact checked process that it is today.

But apologists ignore that and treat the Gospel accounts as though they are unquestionably accurate.

They are not, and it is a mistake to treat them that way.

When you are overconfident about what the Gospels say and incurious about how you might be wrong, then you are destined to come to incorrect conclusions and never know it.

I don't know, but what seems to be pretty clear to me is that it's almost certain that there's some explanation for how it all started that isn't that he would actually raised from the dead in my in my compulsion to believe that he raised from the dead.

It is a religious position.

It is a faith position.

It's not an historically defensible position to the degree that these Christian apologists make it out to be.

Is there a good reason to doubt the crucifixion and burial of Jesus?

Yes, I was really surprised here that Rat would call into question what happened to the body of Jesus.

Overconfident.

The evidence that the vast majority of New Testament historians find can forpes was in fact interred in a tomb by a member of the Jewish Sanhedrin named Joseph of Arimathea.

And the question I'd like to ask her at is where is your curiosity?

Well, that's a little bit ironic.

He says that he's almost certain that there is an explanation of how it all started that does not involve Jesus resurrection.

There is several, in fact.

Now this is just amazing to me.

He said that the more curious he is, the less confident he is.

And yet here he says he is almost certain that Jesus did not rise.

Now that betokens an incredible lack of curiosity on Rhett's part.

Oh for fuck's sake, this is straight out of the Greg Kirkel playbook.

The more curious Rhett became about how he might be wrong in his confidence in the biblical accounts, the less certain he became in its truth.

This is my journey too.

But in his high and mighty incurious confidence, WLC fails to grasp the point.

Again.

Virtually all skeptical scholars today say that they have no idea how this movement got started.

There is no naturalistic explanation.

Oh dear, Oh dear.

This is Craig shooting himself in the foot.

For someone who is allegedly A meticulous and well researched philosopher, this is a serious oversight.

He's either deceived by the lie that there are no secular explanations, or he's deceiving his loyal followers so that they can be confident.

Good job.

They too are incurious.

Otherwise, they might find out the truth.

That is accepted by a significant number of scholars.

Curious technicality.

I suspect he means by Christian scholars, because we all know that they would not accept any secular naturalistic explanation.

But that is cherry picking at its very worst.

How does he explain this lack of curiosity on his part?

But I don't think this confidence comes from the evidence.

Since the man who literally only a few minutes ago gave good confidence for his belief in Christianity being true based on ignoring evidence?

Bloody hell.

All right, let's look at the next clip.

I'm pretty sure that there is a development as the Gospels go on about the description of the team.

So like in in Mark's Gospel, presumably, I think it just says that Jesus is put in a tomb and in Matthew's Gospel it becomes a new tomb.

And then I think by Luke, it's a new tomb in which no one had been laid.

Or maybe that's John.

I I can't remember the details, but as things that you wouldn't notice that I I'd never come across this idea before.

If the empty tomb is an important apologetic to Jesus resurrection.

Well, we know that the tomb was empty.

In order to know that the tomb was empty, you need to ensure that Jesus was probably the only person laid in there, because otherwise he could have been mixed up with someone else or something like this.

And so there is this hint at evidence of an early apologetical motive to make the tomb a new tomb, which means there's no other bodies in there, and then specifically a new tomb in which no one had been laid.

So that when they say there's an empty tomb, nobody can come along and say, well, Are you sure, you know, it wasn't somebody else or someone saw the body or it got lost or something?

No, it has to be an empty tomb.

And so.

See, the evidence for later progression is right there in the biblical text if you read it.

Those those little questions, are we sure that he was taken down from the cross and laid in the tomb in the way that it's described as you start to notice apologetical motivations potentially in those various stories starts to undermine the historicity a little bit, like how Matthew's Gospel is the only one that mentions the guards of the tomb.

See the links at six for my own episodes on the progression of the resurrection narratives.

Right.

Basically, the question is, is there a development in the Gospels regarding the story of the empty tomb that suggests an apologetic angle that undermines its historicity?

Right.

Yes, yes there is.

First, Mark's account of the empty tomb is striking precisely because of the absence of such apologetic.

Mark being the first one is the simplest with the least detailed.

All the others add on to that.

Did you even listen to what Alex just said?

How would it help to say that it was a new tomb in which no one had yet been laid?

Alex just explained that.

Bloody hell.

These details tend to be in the secondary circumstantial features of the narratives and not in their historical court.

How convenient he downgrades the importance of anything that is contradictory so that he doesn't have to address it.

And that's why the vast majority of scholars.

Christian scholars who are already committing to believe the authenticity of the narrative.

Treat the empty tomb narrative fundamentally historical, even though you you have these additional details in the later gospels that you don't have in Mark.

I don't think it even follows that it's unreliable, if there's an apologetic angle at all.

Sean can't comprehend that motivated individuals would alter texts so that their preferred narrative is the one that is written down.

There really is none so blind as those who will not see.

We got three more clips, Bill.

Let's take a look at clip #8.

There was this, there was this one summer that some Mormon missionaries, like I was out, I was out of the country doing some missionary work and Link was still in Raleigh and there were more missionaries that came to talk to him.

They ended up coming back like four or five times because Link, the time is especially the time wasn't controversial.

It wasn't confrontational.

He was just like, yeah, you guys.

So he like they went through the whole spiel or whatever.

And then when I got back, I was like, you let them come like 5 times.

You didn't ever challenge them.

He was like, well, I was just kind of waiting.

I ended up writing this like pamphlet.

I would do this all the time.

I would write like little papers or pamphlets or whatever.

And there was one that was like, this is what you need to say the next time the, the Mormons come to your door, right, Because you can, you can take apart their, their theology and their history in a much it's, it's so recent, right?

So that was my perspective and I find it so interesting that the average Christian apologist.

He's talking about you, Sean and Bill.

The level of scrutiny they apply to criticizing Mormonism, if they would just for a moment turn that level of scrutiny on their own story, you'd be like, guys, come on, do you see what you're doing or like, And if you if you had been born in a Muslim country and you were of the Muslim faith and you and you didn't believe that Jesus actually raised from the dead, what was your Muslim apologetic about the resurrection be like, do you really think these arguments are strong or is it just you need them to be true?

Yeah, It's so foundational to who you are.

You need this to be true.

Really, the question is here, do apologists fail to put the same level of scrutiny on their own beliefs as they do on, say, Mormonism or Islam?

Yes, Oh yes, I do.

15 years of dealing with this kind of nonsense really has showed me that that is true.

And do apologists, you know, need Christianity be true and thus have a double standard they apply to their own faith?

Also yes.

I think this is just manifestly false.

New Testament scholars like NT Wright, Dale Allison, Michael Lacona do exactly that.

They apply the same sort of scrutiny and they determine that these are credible accounts to be believed.

By all means, name some apologists who are less guilty of this, William, but what about you?

How guilty are you?

For example, Mike Lacona, who you mentioned, publicly, questions the ridiculous account in Matthew 27 about other people rising from their graves, but Craig endorses it as true because he has trapped himself into a place where he has to.

He he also asks if you were a Muslim, what would be your apologetic against Jesus resurrection?

Well, we know the answer to that question because there are so many Muslims.

A A popular level Muslim will typically say that Jesus never really died, that he was never crucified and therefore never buried.

Thanks for proving the point, Craig.

A Muslim takes that view because that is what they are taught in Muslim school.

You recite your take on the events because that is standard in Christian School.

That is exactly the point, and you have enthusiastically charged right into the accidental trap that has been set for you.

Bravo.

You know, Bill, I think it's certainly true that some apologists do this.

Careful Sean, it's nice that you're honest, and I do like that generally you are actually one of the more honest ones.

But careful, you might admit to doing it yourself.

When I was doing my work on the apostles, I distinctly remember Michael Kona said to me, he goes, OK, Sean, you've got to be critical.

Ask yourself, would a Muslim scholar or an atheist scholar accept this?

Great question and a great attitude from Mike Lacona.

If those who have a different world view to yourself don't accept your conclusion, then that should be taken as a sign that your process may need to be evaluated to ensure that it is sound.

This is why an independent methodology for testing is always a good idea.

Clip #9.

We're sitting here having this conversation in the context of 2025 where we have access to all this scholarship and all this scholarship and all these discussions about these issues are such a recent phenomenon.

You believe that Jesus rose from the dead if you're a Christian, Probably because your parents told you.

Like 90% because your parents told you.

And my teachers and missionaries I grew up with, and literally every single white adult that I grew up with, when I look back, it's actually really sad.

And then you got into a movement where it's continually confirmed by people who come in and they say some smart stuff about it, and This is why you can trust it.

So even if it did happen, it doesn't feel like a really penetrating investigation into the historical circumstances is what's going to like, oh, make it click and be like, oh, it did happen.

I I looked under the last rock of history and I found the resurrection.

Like it doesn't seem like God intended for that to be the way if.

That's right.

It this is clearly some sort of this is a revelation.

Yeah, the facts are not there for Mr.

Average to find.

It requires somebody already committed to the belief to tell us what to believe.

This is a secret.

This is like God's secret information that you can choose to believe.

And then this, your life is transformed.

I'm like, well, I still think that you're, I think this is a psychological phenomenon.

I just find it so interesting the way that some of these apologists go so hard on trying to prove it.

He's talking about you again, Shawna William.

Right, so this question really is about whether or not people are encouraged to undergo an extensive investigation of Christianity with tools that are only recently available.

And does apologetics actually change anybodies mind?

He says it's not as though people come to faith through historical investigation.

And I think that's absolutely true.

Most people who believe in Christ do so because they've had a personal experience of the risen Lord.

Exactly how would someone know that William?

How does 1 validate that the experience they have had is of your God and not due to something else?

And there's nothing at all irrational about that.

Unless, of course, you're attributing it to a God that you already believe exists and not actually doing due diligence to check if it belongs to something else.

Then Red asks why do some apologists go so hard trying to prove this?

He's talking about you and Sean again, William.

I think the answer is because they love people.

They mislead them into believing bullshit because they love of them.

OK.

And want them to come to know the joy of knowing Christ.

My earlier question still stands.

How do they know?

Apologetics helps to shape a cultural milieu in which the gospel can be heard as an intellectually viable option.

How does that work when there is contradictory evidence and pretty much zero evidence to confirm?

What the arguments and evidence do is they give people the intellectual permission to believe when their hearts are moved.

What the fuck does that even mean?

I think a lot of apologists are motivated by trying to figure out, you know, they have their own questions and doubts and want to know if this is reasonable as well.

How wonderful it would be if that were true.

But when and where and how are they digging into the actual evidence to confirm what they wish to be true?

I don't see that, Sean.

Final clip here.

Hurrah.

Nearly there.

You know, religion works.

I definitely believe that we created it, but we created it because we needed it to some degree to for the ritual, the community, the sense of all these things that are essential to the human experience that I do think you can experience outside of our religious community.

But for most of history, religious communities have done that best.

And when you have kids and you're raising a family and you're looking for purpose and meaning and structure, you can choose to like hodgepodge, create that on your own, or you can plug into a community that has a set of shared myths.

Sure, religious communities do offer support and structure, and to a certain extent they serve a purpose beyond the belief system.

I have been part of that and I have witnessed that.

But that always came at the cost of conformity.

Stop conforming and you lose the community.

In today's age of rigorous scrutiny, the beliefs have been exposed to be based on myth and untruth.

The side effect of that is the community that religion wants offered is dying.

Here's really the question, Bill.

Did we create religion because we needed it?

You know, you might as well say that an internal combustion engine created gasoline because it needs it.

Well, that was dumb.

Our needing God is exactly what you would expect if God did create us to know Him, so this is not at all surprising.

I'm not sure Craig actually understood what RIP was getting at.

This wasn't about innate desire for God, it was about desire for shared human community.

You know, I think some religion could be explained as being invented.

There's certain things for power and control, but I have no interest in defending religion per SE.

I I find within Christianity some powerful things that are so unlikely to have been invented.

Like again, the crucifixion, they'd never invent that as a as a death.

And so dishonorable.

How inconvenient that humans actually did invent the atrocity of crucifixion.

The Romans did it to hundreds, thousands even of people, and that was what was popular at the time that Christianity burst onto the scene.

Really, Sean, is this the kind of stupidity that you're prepared to sink to?

The idea that if you have a thought of anger or a thought of lust, you're guilty of murder or you're guilty of adultery.

Even the idea of grace is beautiful when we understand it.

Is it is the idea of grace given only to those that worship you really that beautiful?

Some of the early writers could have invented words to put in Jesus's mouth to settle controversies, and they don't.

Instead, they created them like those things that Paul supposedly said about women.

And so I just don't think we find the marks of invention within Christianity that we do in so many other faiths.

Sean, this is you being guilty of exactly what Rhett was describing.

You apply to other religions the appropriate scrutiny and skepticism that you utterly failed to apply to Christianity.

Bill, thanks for weighing in here.

Any final thoughts or reflections on watching this that we maybe miss?

I found Rhett to be a very amiable and likable fellow, and honestly, my heart just breaks for him, Sean, when I see how he's a rejected Christian faith so unnecessarily based upon a distorted web of Christian beliefs and so incurious about things like resurrection of Jesus.

I I hope that maybe as a result of our interview today, if he watches it, that he might be provoked to to look into some of these things more deeply and to ask himself if it really could be true.

Wow, the great William Lane Craig is so blinkered that he can't see the irony and hypocrisy in the words he has just vomited out.

Rhett arrived at his position because he became curious by the things he saw and after challenging his belief, he found them wanting.

Craig is so blind to that that he actually thinks he's the curious one and that Rhett is the incurious.

It's so sad that I actually pity Craig at this point.

Well, I appreciate you coming on.

Always appreciate your compassion and thoughtfulness, Bill.

That's a shame because I find William Lane Craig to being.

Neither.

Let me know if these kind of reaction videos are helpful.

I've done a few recently.

I don't run primarily reaction video channel, but now and then videos come up.

I want to give your feedback on it.

So is this format helpful?

Would you like to see more in this channel?

I'll certainly be here at the other end doing some reaction, reaction, chain reaction.

I think that needs a Jingle.

Maybe next time.

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