This is the weekly Q & A blog post by our Research Professor in Philosophy, Dr. William Lane Craig.

Question

Dr. Craig,

I must say I feel completely defeated and I could use your help and insight. I had a discussion over God's existence tonight and totally botched it!! I feel I did a dis-service to the reasonableness of the Christian worldview.

I've been studying apologetics for quite some time. I felt I knew the material pretty well. Now I'm not so sure. Dr. Craig, I know you're one of the great Christian debaters. When you were younger, did you ever feel you completely botched a debate and felt like a failure? That is how I feel right now!!

My wife and I met some friends for dinner and one of the young ladies we were eating with brought along her new boyfriend. I strike up a conversation and he tells me that he is a crime analyst. We started discussing laws and deviant behavior. That got me thinking about morality. I asked him if he thought there was objective morality from a creator or if all morality is simply a social construct. He proceeds to tell me he is an atheist and we went on to discuss what is faith, if belief in God is reasonable, etc. unfortunately, I did not do the best job of making my case for Christianity. In retrospect, he was always leading the discussion and I was constantly on the defense. He used much rhetoric and would try to poke holes in my points but he never actually defended his claims. He always asked me "why" when I should've been asking him "why". I should have put the burden of proof on him to defend his own claims. He kept saying things like there's no way to know if there's absolute truth. Or why do I even care to prove that there is. He said not knowing is okay and we should be more willing to accept uncertainty. He asked why do I feel the need to even believe there is a creator? (I wanted to tell him that I don't feel the "need" for a creator for its own sake but I do want to know the truth and that's what drives me. I wanted to say "without a creator, objective morality and goodness there's ultimately no meaning or real purpose to our lives!! Unfortunately, I would get tongue tied and freeze up).

He would answer my questions in analogies or with another questions but never in detail. My other friend told me later that they feel he had the upper hand and walked all over me. He was able to make me seem foolish with his wit but he never gave one single argument in favor of his worldview. He just continued saying there's no real evidence for the existence of God. I began to point out cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments. I tried to explain in depth the argument from contingency but he just ignored it