William Lane Craig’s Philosophy of Scripture: A Review of Vol 1 of Systematic Philosophical Theology

I joined the launch team group for William Lane Craig’s Systemic Philosophical Theology and was given access to a preview chapter as a reward. In joining the group, I agreed to buy a copy of his book and post a review on sites such as Amazon, Goodreads, and so on. So quite clearly at this point I’ve been adequately bribed, and my opinions and commentary are suspect. I’d originally intended to finish this a couple of weeks ago and post it before the book came out, but thanks to the most snow I’ve ever seen in Missouri my kids were out of school for a whole week and that really set my timetable back. As of the time I write this the book is technically out but is back ordered most places, so there is a significant wait to get a physical copy. So maybe this will still be a preview as you might read it before you can get a physical copy. I won’t bury the lead. If the rest of Craig’s book is of the same quality as his chapter of Scripture (and I see no reason to think it’s not) you should get it as this is an excellent work of high scholarship that you will learn a lot from. Thanks to how Craig has organized his arguments and discussions, this is true even if you think he is wrong about every position he takes. Here’s why: Craig uses the same style/format as he has in his other higher-level, academic work. He lays out what he is going to talk about and explains why it is important. He typically highlights a key issue or problem that he will focus on. Then he works his way through the topic by way of a selective survey of the relevant literature. Here Craig typically picks one primary interlocutor and then follows that interlocutor’s ideas and arguments while Craig comments on, critiques, and rejects or accepts those ideas and arguments. During this process he will also frequently bring in other thinkers and/or experts on the topic. After this he states and/or argues for his own opinion and moves on to the next topic. This is an exceptionally informative format as the reader is exposed to both the interlocutor and Craig’s ideas and arguments. Further the sources Craig uses are virtually always influential and good thinkers who have made important contributions to the field. Craig seems to have knack for avoiding bad sources. I suspect this is both a natural talent and because he has been doing this for a long time. So suppose you think Craig is just wrong about nearly everything. I don’t, but suppose you do. You should still read this book as you will walk away from it better informed about not just what Craig thinks but also what all of the interlocuters he picked think. And since he picks interlocuters like Swinburne, Plantinga, McGrew, Newman, Aquinas, and Warfield, Craig is basically handing you the good stuff on a platter. You don’t have to go reading through literally thousands of pages to get a good sense of what all these great Christian thinks have to say on a topic (in this case the nature and philosophy of Scripture). Craig has done most of the work for you. You just have to read the book. So my chief point here is that even if you think classical apologetics is foolish, Molinism is a waste of time, and John Calvin was a better Christian than Christ Himself, you should still read this book. You’ll walk away much better informed and it will have been an efficient use of your time. And of course you should also read it if you are fan of Craig’s philosophy and work. There is only one caveat I’ll offer in this recommendation. This is a high-level work that is clearly not intended for beginners or as an introduction to these topics. Craig does assume his reader has a certain level of theological and philosophical knowledge. I don’t think this is a bad thing and I welcome it. However, someone who is just starting in theology and philosophy of religion will frequently have to stop and look up the various terms, concepts, and issues that Craig makes liberal use of. For example, Craig does not explain the internalist / externalist distinction in Epistemology when he is discussing Swinburne’s views on justifying belief in Scripture. So if you haven’t studied Epistemology enough to know about this distinction is . . . well you might be lost. Now again I like this but it’s worth cautioning that if you are new or just starting in these subjects, you’d be much better off looking at some introductory books designed for beginners. Craig himself has written some. Also his writing style here is dense, but not in the typical pejorative sense of “dense.” He’s not hard to follow and understand nor is Craig lost in his own world (these are the more normative uses of dense). Frequently higher-level philosophy and theology is dense in these pejorative senses, but not here. Rather what I mean by this is that Craig often packs a lot into just a sentence or two. He will frequently work with three, four, or even five complex concepts in just a sentence or two. So you will frequently have to read carefully. Broadly there are three main issues/questions he explores in this chapter. What is revelation, how does it relate to inspiration, and what is the epistemological (and to a small extent metaphysical) foundation for such things. What is inerrancy, how do we justify it, and why do we need it? And finally what is the justification for believing in the truth of the Scriptures? This is far from all that he talks about, but those seemed to be the primary questions to me. Now I doubt anyone is reading this for my opinion, but I found most of Craig’s reasoning and arguments persuasive and broadly agree with his conclusions. I will not even attempt to summarize and comment and everything he says as that would just be too long. Rather here are somethings that jumped out at me.

Revelation and Scripture.

Craig appeals to Molinism to solve the problem how both God and the human authors exercised control and/or authorial intent in the compositions of the scriptures. Given that Molinism entails that God knows the truth of all counterfactuals, it follows that God knows what Paul would write if he was in Rome and also what Paul would write if he was in Jerusalem. God wants parts of the New Testament to be what Paul would write if he were in Rome, so God arranges the world such that Paul would be writing in Rome. Hence Paul writes freely, and God has exercised His sovereign control over the scriptures. “Thus, God knew, for example, that were he to create the apostle Paul in just the circumstances he was in around AD 55, he would freely write to the Corinthian church, saying just what he did in fact say. It needs to be emphasized that those circumstances included not only Paul’s background, personality, environment, and so forth, but also any promptings or gifts of the Holy Spirit to which God knew Paul would freely respond.” Now this is the most unsurprising thing I read in the whole chapter. Anyone who has listened to Craig’s lectures or read his work knows he ascribes to and makes liberal use of Molinism to address philosophical and theological issues. It’s not like he’s been hiding the ball here. While one might not personally subscribe to Molinism, it is a viable solution in that, given the truth of Molinism, the problem is solved. This works. At the least (and I wish the critics of Molinism would just admit this) it works as well as--

if not better than

--many other proposed models for making sense of divine providence. I’ll also go further and say it’s a superior solution to some of the other proposed models.

Inerrancy

While I dislike some of the ways Craig describes inerrancy, I’m in broad agreement with him that the scriptures are inerrant and most of the disagreements are more like caveats or other areas where I think objections and problems hold more weight than Craig does. For example, Craig asserts that: “We have seen that, far from being the late creation of modern fundamentalism, this doctrine has been universally affirmed throughout church history and is implicit in the traditional doctrine of biblical inspiration. Today this doctrine is widely but needlessly despised.” But this depends on what you mean inerrancy. Some things that pass for inerrancy clearly do go back to the apostles and writers of the NT, but others are modern inventions. I’ve written on and debated this subject. It’s surprising that a philosopher of Craig’s caliber doesn’t address this issue of the competing definitions of inerrancy. This is not to say that Craig doesn’t define what he means by inerrancy, he spends the rest of this section doing just that. Rather it is simply a fact of the matter that different Christians do mean different things by ‘inerrancy.’ And some of those understandings are fundamentalist overreactions to things like German higher criticism of 19

^th

century. For example, Micheal Bird said that a strong version of inerrancy “has not existed for all time and in every place where evangelical churches have confessed that Jesus is Lord.” Some of these understandings are clearly not universally affirmed throughout church history, but it is equally clear that some others are. But with that said it seems to me that Craig takes a reasonable and mostly moderate position on inerrancy. He is not throwing the whole thing away, but neither is he denying the

prima facie

difficulties entailed in affirming inerrancy. To his credit he attempts to address them head on. He says that we need inerrancy as without it the,

“Christian faith would surely be seriously compromised with respect to many doctrines–for example, justification by grace through faith–without an infallible teaching authority . . . . Since an important part of Christian doctrine cannot be established independent of Scripture, the fallibility of Scripture in doctrinal matters would seriously undermine Christian faith.”

But I don’t see how this follows. We would be left needing to evaluate and weigh many factors and issues and it would no doubt throw some doctrines into doubt and make others less likely, but it seems to me this is much the same as what we already do with other matters of philosophical and historical interest. Craig’s own apologetic work on Christ’s resurrection where there he treats the gospels as historical sources instead of inerrant scripture serves as an example. There are indeed some Christian doctrines that would be difficult to support or argue for if we always treated the scriptures as we do other historical documents, but it also seems clear to me that the core of Christian theology (Christ is the divine second person of the Trinity who died for our sins and was raised on the third day) would carry on just fine. So I think Craig overstates the danger here. And he and I are closer here than it initially appears as later on he says, “the Gospels and Paul are adequate for a full formulation of Christian doctrine.” Craig also addresses the worry that inerrancy is unfalsifiable. “Now the worry arises that such a doctrine is almost meaningless, since one is always at liberty, when confronted with a demonstrable error in the text, to deny that it belongs to the teaching of Scripture.” It’s great that he confronts this problem head on, but I find his dismissal of it lacking. Among other things he says, “falsifiability is at best relevant to the truth-assessment of a particular position (though not necessary even for that), which is irrelevant to our concern, which is determining what Scripture teaches about itself, not determining whether what it teaches is true.” This response seems pedantic to me as supposing that we could establish that Scripture teaches something false, even granting that we have also established that Scripture claims inerrancy and authority for itself, we still then have a defeater for inerrancy. It’s akin to if a man claims to be an expert in world history but then also claims the United States was founded in 1919. Even though the man claims expertise we now have a defeater for that man’s claim to expertise. Likewise it is in some technical sense OK to bracket off the proposed problems with Scripture’s individual claims when we are considering what Scripture teaches about itself, but if we find something like the 1919 problem in Scripture we now have defeater for inerrancy, regardless of what authority Scripture claims for itself. Craig anticipates this type of problem and argues; “Some sort of persuasive argument will be required for convicting Scripture of falsehood in any given case, and the inerrantist may present defenses of Scripture’s truth in that regard. Failing that, the inerrantist may deny that the falsehood belongs to the teaching of Scripture and marshal exegetical arguments in support. The problem of the truth of the doctrine will arise only in case some statement of Scripture belongs incontrovertibly to the teaching of Scripture and is demonstrably false.” This is just too slippery as it leaves too much room for an

ad hoc

rescue when a ‘problem’ is found. The devil is in the details here as most, if not all, proposed errors in the Scriptures do not survive scrutiny and appropriate qualification (i.e. what it actually teaches), but this still in practical effect makes Craig’s version of the doctrine unfalsifiable and unfalsifiability in empirical theories is nearly always a sign that something is wrong. Craig needs to supply an additional criteria to avoid this problem. Perhaps a way of distinguishing ‘what it teaches’ from ‘what it does not’ would suffice.  Otherwise the practical effect of inerrancy becomes us constantly moving the goal posts as we tell skeptics, “I know that’s what it says, but that’s not what the Bible really means.” It's to Craig’s credit that he attempts to address the very problem that I see here, but I don’t think he quite overcomes the problem. Nonetheless the variant of inerrancy he describes is sophisticated and while on the conservative side still quite reasonable and moderate. More so than I was expecting.

Why believe in Scripture?

Craig takes two approaches to justifying belief in the Scriptures. He argues that we can regard belief in Scripture as a properly basic belief and that we can believe in it in virtue of the fact that Christ believed in it. Both are plausible but I take a minor issue with the first. He said, “On this account belief in Scripture as God’s Word is what epistemologists call a properly basic belief, grounded in the experience of hearing Scripture as God’s speaking.” If God speaks to you that probably is a properly basic belief (at least in as much as anything can be a properly basic belief) but hearing God within the Scriptures is not as easy as it depend on other things, like the ability to read (or hear), the perception of the language, the cultural context through which you understand and interpret, and so on. Scripture comes through these mediums, and it is difficult to see how something you get through multiple mediums can itself be properly basic. I strongly suspect that Craig has a broader understanding/definition of properly basic beliefs than I do as he also writes:

 “but experiencing Scripture as God’s Word in a properly basic way no more requires that such a belief be self-evident than testimonial, memory, and perceptual beliefs must be self-evident in order to be properly basic. The inspiration of Scripture need not and should not be understood along the lines of prophetic utterance as claiming to be “the word of the Lord” or to have self-evident authority. Second, a properly basic belief in Scripture as God’s Word need not be indefeasible. As I have indicated, ostensible defeaters need themselves to be defeated if belief that Scripture is God’s Word is to remain properly basic.”

So is it broadly logically possible that a person could read the Scriptures and simply perceive “this is the Word of God?” Well yes and I’m pretty sure I’ve met some people who claimed to have experiences like that. But since I’m working with a more restricted and ‘conservative’ understanding of properly basic beliefs I would argue this doesn’t meet that criteria. Nonetheless I would still say that it is possible for such people to be justified in their belief in Scripture as in the absence of a defeater you should typically believe what your experiences tell you and what you perceive. So if your experience and what you perceive is that the Scripture is the Word of God you should believe that unless you are given good reason to think otherwise. But that seems to me to be something like epistemic conservatism, not a properly basic belief. Craig also takes a ‘curious’ approach on historically justifying belief in the scriptures as he first establishes Christ’s high view of the Jewish Scriptures (a fact which is extraordinarily well established and should be uncontroversial) and then appeals to Christ’s claims to His own authority. Essentially if Christ claimed the authority of God (and He did), and Christ treated the Scriptures as the Word of God (and He did), then we should too. This is sensible and reasonable enough and I only call it ‘curious’ as it’s not the typical way I’ve seen Christian academics attempt to justify belief in the scriptures. Rather the approach I’ve seen more often is one of appealing to evidence. i.e. the scriptures make claims A, B, C and D. We are unable to check and confirm D, but D seems broadly logically possible, and we can confirm A, B, and C so isn’t it reasonable to accept D as well? Now of course this approach of appealing to evidence and abduction is not in any way contrary to Craig’s approach (in the process of justifying his approach Craig also appeals to abduction), the two can go together. While I found this approach surprising, I did enjoy working through a different method of justifying belief in the Scriptures, and it seems to be a perfectly reasonable approach to me. The only downside I see is that it will have a very limited application for apologetics as it seems to me that bringing a non-Christian to believe in Scripture -- by Craig’s method -- will be much more difficult than using a more evidence and abduction-based approach. But perhaps I’m wrong about that. Craig has been doing this a lot longer than I have. I also really enjoyed the section where he undoes/ undermines the probabilistic challenge(s) to this idea ala Plantinga and Crisp. The trouble here is that probabilities are typically thought to go down as more steps are added. It’s akin to the engineering principle that the more parts a machine has the more places it can break. The more steps your non-deductive argument has the more places it can go wrong. So if step one has a 90% probability, step two has 80%, step three has 75%, and step four has 95% we might calculate that the argument has a 51.3% chance of being correct. This is an objection that Plantinga raised to this style of argument and Craig engages with the literature to take it down. And his take down is quite effective. But even without engaging with the probabilities and the literature it should be obvious that there is something wrong with this style of objection (as Craig also notes). If witnesses are testifying in a trial we should not assign anyone of the them a truth probability of 100% (at least most of the time). So, for example, assign five trial witnesses all a truth probability of 75%. If you run the simple math on that you end up with 23.7% which means you should think it’s unlikely the witnesses are telling the truth, and if more witnesses testify your confidence should go down. But intuitively we know that this is wrong. If five witnesses at a trial all claim that they saw the defendant commit the crime the defendant should be convicted as (absent other considerations or defeaters) that is good evidence that the defendant committed the crime. So, even without all the probabilistic work that Craig does here, it’s just obvious that this type of argument is wrong as if it were correct it would lead to absurd results. While this is quite an enjoyable read (it’s quite fun to watch/read Craig take this style of argument apart) and it has a lot of uses quite apart from philosophy of religion, I question how appropriate it is to even use statistical probability in this area as it ultimately it forces us to make some arbitrary decisions. Probability statistics like this work if we can assign numbers to the things in question (at least with a reasonable variation). This is why (again with some variation) they can typically call the election results in most counties and states quite early on in US elections. That really is simply dealing with numbers and while there is a level of error at work, once the votes start coming in it’s well-known which way most counties and states will go. That really is just a practical use probabilities. However when we are dealing with questions like, what are the odds that Christ claimed the authority of God (quite high), that He treated the Scriptures as if they were the Word of God (also quite high) and therefore we should too (again this seems quite high), there is an inherent arbitrariness to how we assign the numbers. Does

quite high

mean 80%, 90%, or 95%? If you pick 90%, why not 89% or 91%? The trouble is that even when you run the numbers with the much better method that Craig argues for it still makes a difference if you pick 89% or 91%. And hence there is an arbitrariness that is built in when we attempt to use probability in this way for most things (but not all things) in philosophy of religion, theology, and apologetics. I recognize that I’m in the minority among contemporary analytic philosophers, but I’d argue that most of time we should simply stop trying to use probability this way as it leads us astray and gives us unwarranted confidence in our arguments. It sounds better to say, “I did the math and the odds are 86.79%,” than it does to say, “the argument indicates that this is very likely,” but the first is often hiding a host of numbers that are arbitrarily assigned. Now don’t take the fact that I picked at a few of Craig’s positions here as an indictment of his work. It’s simply much more interesting and fun to engage with places where I find some issues (and relatively minor ones at that) than it is to simply say, “Yes I agree and that’s a great argument.” There were many places in this chapter where I did say that, but how boring would that be for you to read? This is also only a selection of everything that I engaged with. I had nearly twenty pages of notes from this chapter of scripture alone. If I had attempted to write out every thought that Craig’s chapter on Scripture brought out in me this would be way longer than it is now. Bottom line: get this book! It’s very much worth your while. The only possible exception is if you have little to no prior experience in reading philosophy and theology. In that case get started elsewhere and then come back to this book. I fully intend to cover the other chapters Craig’s

Systematic Theology

as I work through them.

Notes

Also my copy came before I finished this preview. I have not read every academic work that Craig has produced, but this is the structure he uses in the ones that I have read. I say selective here not in a pejorative sense. Rather it’s just a fact that most of the topics Craig explores have a vast literature such that it simply wouldn’t be possible for him to include everyone. As such he must make selections. Perhaps this is always the case, but I like to hedge my bets. Thus he knows the literature on these topics quite well. And this is just in the chapter on Scripture. William Lane Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I, Prolegomena, On Scripture, On Faith

, (Wiley-Blackwell, 2025), 175. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

134-141. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

138. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

150. I’m under no illusion that Craig is aware of what I did in this area, nor should he be. Rather I offer this up here so that you can look more into what I argued if you want to. Phil Kallberg and David Van Bebber

, Is Inerrancy a Scale or Range of Concepts?

Springfield, MO, January 6, 2020. Phil Kallberg,

“Misleading Doctrines of Inerrancy: How we Impose Contemporary Understandings of Error on Scripture,”

Paper presented at the Society for Pentecostal Studies Conference in Hyattsville, MD, March 2019. Micheal Bird, “Response to Albert Mohler Jr.” in

Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy

. Eds. J. Merrick and Stephen M. Garrett, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2013), 66-67. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

154. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

197. It’s possible this is an inconsistency, but if so, it’s a pretty minor one. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

167. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

167. Of course this would not necessarily be a defeater for other lesser claims. i.e. suppose we simply claim that Scripture is generally reliable and gets most things right. Such a problem would not be a defeater for that claim. Since inerrancy is necessarily a universal claim one counter example is all that is needed for a defeater. This is, I think, why many people think of inerrancy as weak(er) doctrine that is easily discarded. The bar for it’s defeat is simply much lower than that of many other Christian doctrines. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

168. I’m well aware of the fact that many times we do need to do this as skeptics frequently fail to give the Scriptures their due. But none the less, without an additional criteria that allows us to say something like “Scripture teaches

X

and not

Y

” it’s difficult to say how a skeptic would be able to give any defeater wherein we cannot simply adjust our interpretations and claim, “but that’s not what it really means.” I argue that this pushes Craig’s variant of inerrancy into unfalsifiability and that is bad for empirical theories. It must be at least broadly logically possible for the Scripture to make a false claim for a doctrine like inerrancy to have any real meaning. I’m quite persuaded that Scripture makes no such claim but I think it must be possible for it do so. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

172. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

174. And to reiterate what I said above I don’t think there is a ‘good’ reason to think otherwise. At least I’m yet to see one that both survives scrutiny and also creates enough trouble for key Christian doctrines so that it qualifies as a defeater. i.e. the fact the Luke seems to tell contrary accounts of Paul’s conversion seems to survive scrutiny, but it in no way undermines key Christian doctrines. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

182-189. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

189-199. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

190. Craig uses astronomy as an excellent example of this same point. Craig,

Systematic Philosophical Theology. Volume I,

190. Rather than copy and paste the whole page I wrote my own example.