In a sequence of carefully timed speeches and rejoinders, the two men clashed over whether we need God for there to be moral laws. Harris delivered most of the better one-liners that night, while Craig, in suit and tie, fired off his volleys of argumentation with the father-knows-best composure of Mitt Romney, plus a dash of Schwarzenegger. Something Harris said during the debate might help explain how Dawkins reacted: He called Craig “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.”

When, during a conversation in a swank hotel lobby in Manhattan, I mentioned to Richard Dawkins that I was working on a story about William Lane Craig, the muscles in his face clenched.

“Why are you publicizing him?” Dawkins demanded, twice. The best-selling “New Atheist” professor went on to assure me that I shouldn’t bother, that he’d met Craig in Mexico—they opposed each other in a prime-time, three-on-three debate staged in a boxing ring—and found him “very unimpressive.”

“I mean, whose side are you on?” Dawkins said. “Are you religious?”

Several months later, in April 2011, Craig debated another New Atheist author, Sam Harris, in a large, sold-out auditorium at the University of Notre Dame. In a sequence of carefully timed speeches and rejoinders, the two men clashed over whether we need God for there to be moral laws. Harris delivered most of the better one-liners that night, while Craig, in suit and tie, fired off his volleys of argumentation with the father-knows-best composure of Mitt Romney, plus a dash of Schwarzenegger. Something Harris said during the debate might help explain how Dawkins reacted: He called Craig “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.”

In the lobby afterward, the remarks of students seemed to confirm this. “The apologist won because his structure was perfect,” one said. “Craig had already won by the first rebuttal!” A Harris partisan lamented, “Sam kinda blew it.”

Well-publicized atheists like Dawkins and Harris are closer to being household names than William Lane Craig is, but within the subculture of evangelical Christians interested in defending their faith rationally, he has had a devoted following for decades. Many professional philosophers know about him only vaguely, but in the field of philosophy of religion, his books and articles are among the most cited. And though he works mainly from his home, in suburban Marietta, Ga., he holds a faculty appointment at Biola University, an evangelical stronghold on the southeastern edge of Los Angeles County and home to one of the largest philosophy graduate programs in the world.

Surveys suggest that the philosophy professoriate is among the most atheistic subpopulations in the United States; even those philosophers who specialize in religion believe in God at a somewhat lower rate than the general public does. Philosophers have also lately been in a habit of humility, as their profession’s scope seems to shrink before the advance of science and the modern university’s preference for research that wins corporate contracts. But it is partly because of William Lane Craig that one can hear certain stripes of evangelicals whispering to one another lately that “God is working something” in the discipline. And through the discipline, they see a way of working something in society as a whole.

The enormous kinds of questions that speculative-minded college students obsess over—life, death, the universe—are taken unusually seriously by philosophers who also happen to be evangelical Christians. To them, after all, what one believes matters infinitely for one’s eternal soul. They therefore tend to care less about disciplinary minutiae and terms of art than about big-picture “worldviews,” every aspect of which should be compatible with a particular way of thinking about the fraught love affair between God and humanity—or else.

The debates for which Craig is most famous live on long after the crowds are gone from the campus auditoriums or megachurch sanctuaries where they take place. On YouTube, they garner tens or hundreds of thousands of views as they’re dissected and fact-checked by bloggers and hobbyists and apologists-in-training. Such debates have an appealing absence of gray area: There are only two sides, and one or the other has to win. By the time it’s over, you have the impression that your intelligence has been respected—you get to hear both sides make their cases, after all. The winner? You decide.

“I believe that debate is the forum for sharing the gospel on college campuses,” Craig told an audience of several thousand at a seminar about “Unpacking Atheism” in a suburban Denver church last October, simulcast at other churches around the country. Compared with the rancorous presidential debates happening at the time, he added, “these are respectable academic events conducted with civility and Christian charity.”

Openly Christian faculty are perched in many of the major departments in the discipline.

Craig generally insists on the same format: opening statements, then two rounds of rebuttals, then closing statements, then audience. He prepares extensively beforehand, sometimes for months at a time, with research assistants poring over the writings of the opponent in search of objections that Craig should anticipate. He amasses a well-organized file of notes that he can draw on during the debate for a choice quotation or a statistic.

In the opening statement he pummels the opponent with five or so concise arguments—for instance, the origins of the universe, the basis of morality, the testimony of religious experience, and perhaps an addendum of evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. Over the course of the rebuttals he makes sure to respond to every point that the opponent has brought up, which usually sends the opponent off on a series of tangents. Then, at the end, he reminds the audience how many of his arguments stated at the outset the opponent couldn’t manage to address, much less refute. He declares himself and his message the winner. Onlookers can’t help agreeing.

Craig comes by his mastery of the formal debate honestly; he worked at it on debating squads all through high school and all through college, with uncommon determination.

From birth he has suffered from Charcot-Marie-Tooth syndrome, a neuromuscular disease that causes atrophy in the extremities. He walks with a slight limp, and his hands often look as if they’re gripping an invisible object. Growing up, he couldn’t run normally.

“My boyhood was difficult,” he says. “Children can be very cruel.”

Since varsity sports weren’t an option, he discovered debate. High-school competitions took him all over Illinois. The subject matter was never religion—rather, the usual debate-team fodder of public-policy questions—but religion was meanwhile starting to matter more and more to him personally.

“My folks sort of believed in the man upstairs,” he says. “He’s sort of up there watching out for you, and that’s sort of it.” In high-school German class, an especially radiant girl sitting near him told him about what Jesus Christ had done in her life. That got him reading the Bible, and the Jesus he found there took hold of him. “For me it was a question of personal, existential commitment: Was I prepared to become this man’s follower?”

He went on to attend Wheaton College, a well-regarded evangelical institution in Illinois, where he continued debating and searching for his calling. Not until years later, though, after establishing himself as a philosopher, did he begin to be asked to debate publicly in defense of his faith. It came as a surprise, but a welcome one.

“I was just thrilled to be able to do it again as a means of fulfilling this vision of sharing the gospel,” he says.

By then, Craig had come under the influence of the theologian Francis Schaeffer, who from his refuge in Switzerland called on American evangelicals to reclaim Western culture’s Christian heritage, and who helped orchestrate the rise of the religious right during the Reagan years. Debate, then, served as both a philosophical exercise and a part of a growing movement.

Paul Draper, of Purdue University, is one of the leading nontheist philosophers of religion today, and though he has debated Craig, he doesn’t see these debates as having much philosophical merit in and of themselves. He does see value, however, in studying them closely with students in a classroom: “It helps them learn to distinguish persuasive arguments from good arguments.” Draper has recently co-written a paper, “Diagnosing Bias in Philosophy of Religion” in The Monist, alleging that the work of Craig and his ilk exhibits “a variety of cognitive biases operating at the nonconscious level, combined with an unhealthy dose of group influence.”

This line of questioning—about whether William Lane Craig is merely persuasive or actually correct, an honest philosopher or a snake-oil evangelist—arises every time another one of his bouts hits the Internet. Anyone can see that he is good, but is he for real?

In the mid-1970s, Craig was looking for a place to do his Ph.D., on the cosmological argument for the existence of God. He was finishing master’s degrees in church history and philosophy of religion at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, near Chicago, where he argued against Kant and Hume that observation and reason could form a valid basis for religious belief. With the cosmological argument—which deduces God’s existence from what we know about the nature of the universe as a whole—he hoped to put that groundwork to use.

At the time, this was a rather unpopular kind of project in philosophy departments, which were still recovering from the positivists’ doctrine that religious concepts are too incoherent to be worth even meddling with. It couldn’t have helped that Craig was a seminary graduate who’d worked for Campus Crusade for Christ.

“I couldn’t find anybody in the United States who would supervise such a dissertation,” Craig recalls.

So he and his wife, Jan, packed their bags for the University of Birmingham, in England. Craig’s proposal was welcomed there by John Hick—one of the best-known philosophers of religion of his generation and also one of the most liberal-minded. Hick, who died last year, counts Craig in his memoir as among the top three students of his teaching career, even while describing Craig’s “extreme theological conservatism” as in at least one respect “horrific” and generally indicative of “a startling lack of connection with the modern world.”

Yes and no. On the one hand, the dissertation Craig produced in Birmingham was a retrieval of the “Kalam cosmological argument”—a way of reasoning about the cause of the universe developed by Muslims and Jews between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. On the other, he updated the argument with more recent scientific notions, such as the Big Bang and the laws of thermodynamics. The dissertation was soon published in the form of not one but two books, which went on to become influential and widely discussed in the philosophical literature.

Hick, a pioneer of religious pluralism and nonexclusivist approaches to Christianity, was taken aback by this brilliant student’s single-minded ambition: to persuade more people everywhere to make professions of faith in Jesus Christ.
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