I never thought that my encounter with William Lane Craig in 2015 would resonate with so many people. I also never imagined it would help me become Catholic.
As a high school sophomore, I fell into agnosticism because of the problem of natural evil. The dreary, evolutionary history of life, full of violence and mass extinctions, appeared irreconcilable with a good and all-powerful God. I found the task of reconciling my faith with natural evil to be exhausting and eventually impossible. William Lane Craig was the only Christian intellectual I knew of who could address my agnosticism.
And, let me tell you: he demolished my doubts.
I don’t recall where I first learned about Dr. Craig. It must have been through a YouTube video or an apologetics group. But I was energized as a young Christian to see him defending Christ’s resurrection on intellectual grounds, understanding contemporary science, and making sense of Christian doctrine. The way he dismantled Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins helped me see through the bluff of New Atheism. His debates with Shabir Ally and other skeptics continually demonstrated the robustness of Christianity.
My father, a Baptist minister, happily bought me Dr. Craig books when I was a kid. I began with On Guard and then progressed to Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview and The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Dr. Craig opened the rest of the Christian apologetics world for me. I learned about Michael Licona, Gary Habermas, J.P. Moreland, Alister McGrath, John Lennox, and many others.
The most profound lesson he taught me from his online ministry was to remain calm during rhetorical flourishes from skeptics. A college student claimed during the Q&A portion of Dr. Craig’s debate with John Shook that God’s nonexistence is unprovable. Half of the crowd burst into applause. Rather than becoming upset, Dr. Craig asked him to repeat his assertion for the sake of Craig’s recollection. The student spoke a few words before Dr. Craig stopped him and calmly refuted his silly thesis. The other half of the audience erupted in cheers.
Although Dr. Craig taught me to remain focused on the arguments and not my own unruly emotions or people’s colorful rhetoric, I succumbed to these things in high school. I wanted to be a theologian and evolutionary biologist to show the harmony between science and religion. The atheist scientists I watched online and read, however, stressed that evolution refutes religion, and it made me feel ashamed to be Christian. Although their arguments were unsound, I began to believe them. The problem of natural evil had especially reawakened an old childhood wound.
An age-old problem for belief
My family came to the United States from India in 2001. My father was studying to become a Baptist minister and seeking a better life for his family. Since I didn’t have my biological grandparents growing up, there were people in my Baptist church who filled that role. Their lives profoundly shaped my walk with Christ, but their deaths also left a deep impact on me. My adopted grandmother lost her memories of me before passing, and my adopted grandfather died of a stroke. I thought I had already dealt with my grief, but it returned in high school as I wrestled with these doubts.
I went to Reasonable Faith, Craig’s website, and typed a query in its “Question of the Week” inbox, hoping for Dr. Craig’s help:
I would like to first off thank you for all the work and encouragement you brought to me when I was a Christian. It’s only been about two days since I openly claimed to be agnostic, and I guess it’s weak and fresh enough to be torn away, but Dr. Craig, something destroyed my faith.
I explained the intellectual side of my doubts:
The evidence shows that humans evolved. That there was always death and suffering, that in every generation we have lived, we were afraid and alone in the universe. I either had to throw out Genesis and turn toward a faith whose main core had been removed (the fall of man) or I had to accept a view that God intentionally created the universe bad. He wanted and did create a universe in which humans would die and suffer, regardless of if we sinned. To me that seemed preposterous. I chose neither of the two and instead chose agnosticism.
I was happily stunned when Dr. Craig responded. He began with a gentle punch: “I certainly hope that your agnosticism is ‘weak and fresh enough to be torn away,’ Suan, because, it seems to me, you’re overreacting to the concerns you raise.”
He then addressed my chief objection:
Now you think it “preposterous” that God “wanted and did create a universe in which humans would die and suffer, regardless of if we sinned.” Well, now, hang on! Don’t jump to conclusions. The view being rejected is that physical death and disease is the result of sin and the fall. Rejecting that view does not imply that God would have created a universe in which humans would die and suffer even if there were no sin. Perhaps God knew that a world of mortal creatures would be the most appropriate kind of place for a creature who would eventually fall into sin. It might be that such a universe is the best arena in which the human drama of God’s plan of salvation, including Christ’s death on the cross, would be played out. This world is a sort of vale of decision-making in which we mortal creatures determine, by our response to God’s initiatives, our eternal destiny. Suffering and death may not be the result of man’s sin, but it may anticipate man’s sin.
He also spent time chastising how I allowed peer pressure to get the better of me:
You say that because you “wanted to show that Christians were not scientifically illiterate,” you began reading books by Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, and Richard Dawkins! What were you thinking? Why weren’t you reading the works of eminent Christian scientists like George Ellis, Christopher Isham, or Francis Collins, or even better the works of eminent Christian philosophers such as Alvin Plantinga, Robin Collins, or Del Ratsch about science? That is where you would have learned about the scientific literacy of Christians, not from the spurious attacks of its detractors.
I informed Dr. Craig a few days later that I no longer found my doubts intellectually compelling. I had never fathomed how God might have anticipated human evil such that the fall didn’t need to radically alter the laws of physics and chemistry 6,000 years ago. Rather, nature’s beauty and terror could serve as the proper stage for the “the human drama of God’s plan of salvation.” Perhaps God had endowed nature with the openness to manifest either life or destruction, reflecting humanity’s freedom to choose good and evil.
Dr. Craig’s approach opened my mind to other ways of doing biblical theology and reconciling Genesis with contemporary science. I learned not to react in a kneejerk fashion but first to consider other possible ways of interpreting the data of Scripture and science. He taught me to be a careful thinker.
New ways of thinking
This experience of being dismantled by William Lane Craig gave me the courage I needed to face my doubts. They had, after all, been so thoroughly exposed. As time passed, I eventually learned how to listen to my emotions without letting them overwhelm me. I realized that emotions have an inner logic to them that can guide us to truth. Perhaps we have a distorted view of God, and our emotions are simply revealing that the heart senses something the mind hasn’t precisely grasped yet. Emotions then are actually guides (albeit imprecise) to truth.
I also learned how to avoid the other extreme of trying to prove everything as if faith is unnecessary or somehow irresponsible. The universe is incredibly complex and mysterious. I simply do not have the knowledge to tell God how he should have created the world or to think that I could have done any better if I had his power. All I know is that Christianity promises a final restoration of the cosmos, a new heaven and a new earth, and that I will see my loved ones again in resurrected bodies if Christ has been raised.
Atheism, on the other hand, promises only the inevitable death of everything. Life would, as Craig has argued, be absurd without God. For example, my experiences of love and beauty, of something seemingly beyond this world, would be nothing more than “molecules in motion.”
But it seems absurd that I would greatly desire justice and hope if there is in fact none to be found. Why would we evolve to have these infinite longings? For instance, we long to discover moral truths and how to justly order society; we seem hardwired for religion and need it to maintain purpose-driven lives and civilizations; we also certainly act as if we have purpose and are more than just material objects. The atheist alternative, however, seems interested only in explaining away these things as childish delusions.
On the other hand, Christianity seems to see the world as it is, mysteries and all, and humans in their dignity and uniqueness. I could no longer be agnostic when looking at these two alternatives—one side that affirms the dignity of the human person and satisfies the appetite of reason, and the other side that is destructive of meaning and even reason itself. On deeper reflection, the Christian view of the human person simply made more sense of reality.
I began to fall deeply in love with Christ again as not only the savior of my soul but as the good king who will one day set everything right. I truly began to have a Christian worldview, seeing everything in light of the resurrection.
I am still keenly aware of this world’s finitude and brokenness. Nonetheless, there are remarkable features of reality, such as its contingency and finitude, that rationally demand an unmoved mover, a creator of unlimited power. The existence of God simply appeared inescapable when I followed the depths of reason and the human heart.
The long climb to Catholicism
As I look back, these insights also paved the way for my conversion to Catholicism. The first hill I had to surmount was Catholic morality. Many of my high school peers endorsed the progressive ideology on marriage and abortion, and so we had all assumed that conservative Christians were simply prejudiced and stupid. Everything changed when my Christian friend Charles confronted me via text on the issue of abortion, since I was pro-choice at the time.
Charles, like Dr. Craig, calmly but thoroughly dismantled my position. His arguments took hold of me, and I began asking my pro-choice friends tough questions. For instance, why were they opposed to infanticide if the person-making property of “self-recognition” occurs only months after a child is born? Some of them were stumped, whereas others accepted infanticide as a consequence of women’s rights. These responses were so unsettling that I quickly became pro-life. I realized that human rights could not be grounded in “consciousness” or “self-recognition” or “viability” but simply in being human.
Aside from Dr. Craig, Catholic thinkers such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Robert P. George, and Ryan T. Anderson further convinced me of biblical morality from natural-law theory. Although it was emotionally difficult for me to accept the truth about marriage, since I had many LGBTQ+ friends, I followed the evidence while also remaining gracious and sensitive. I saw that in loving Christ, the Truth himself, I could love my friends properly. Many of them were, of course, shocked when they heard of my shift. Difficult conversations followed, but I finally had the courage to be Christian. This courage gave me the ability to love even in the face of mockery and ridicule.
Rather than allowing these experiences to foster resentment, I saw them as avenues to empathy. The way I felt rejected and unheard, as Christ did in his own hometown, and as my friends felt around other Christians, helped me adopt Dr. Craig’s rule that the primary focus of apologetics is ultimately winning people for Christ.
The courage to follow Christ
I began a preaching ministry to prepare other Christians to evangelize. The question of how we arrived at secularism, in a situation where organized religion is frowned upon and belief in God appears counterintuitive, filled my sermons. This question followed me into college and inspired me to take a political science course on this very topic.
The answer of academic historians and philosophers stunned me during my freshman year: the Protestant Reformation led to the unintended disenchantment and secularization of society. I began to see the necessity of a teaching authority on doctrine; the goodness of institutions; how sola scriptura leads to factionalism and hyper-individualism; how traditions are stabilizing and unavoidable starting points of interpretation; and how the loss of a sacramental worldview led to the rise of materialism and atheism.
I saw how the accusation that Catholics are superstitious for obeying authority and tradition eventually became weaponized against Christianity and conservative morality in general. What emerged was the idea that every generation has the right to recreate itself through the power of its reason alone, unbounded by tradition and authority.
My Catholic classmate and friend Olivia invited me one day to Sunday Mass, and I gladly accepted. I attended Mass every Sunday until the end of the semester and spent my summer praying that God would keep me fair and open-minded toward Catholicism. I simply wanted to pursue the evidence wherever it led and to have the courage to follow Christ even if I’m mocked and rejected.
When school began again in the fall, I posed my questions to Olivia and later met Andy, my eventual confirmation sponsor, to talk through my objections to Catholicism. These conversations alongside deep prayer, study, the intercession of Our Lady and St. Thomas Aquinas, and, most importantly, Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, led me to the Catholic Church.
Dr. William Lane Craig provided me with the prerequisite intellectual skills and maturity I needed in order to fairly investigate the claims of the Catholic Church. He played an immense role in giving me the confidence to be a Christian and have a Christlike heart for people. His method of first establishing the resurrection of Jesus and the existence of God to justify other Christian beliefs animated my investigation of the papacy and the magisterium to see if the rest of Catholicism follows.
I could list so many other ways in which he has influenced me, but I simply want to thank Dr. Craig for his life, helping me through my doubts, and spreading the precious name of Jesus into the corners of the earth.