The Dr. Jeff Show Ep. 32 – William Lane Craig

Episode 32: Summary & Transcript

Disclaimer: Please note that this is an automatically generated transcript. Although the transcription is largely accurate, it may be incomplete or inaccurate in some cases due to inaudible passages or transcription errors.

Episode Summary

In this episode, Dr. Jeff interviews Dr. William Lane Craig, a Christian apologist and philosopher. The conversation begins with Dr. Craig’s personal story of coming to faith as a teenager and how his background in competitive debate led to his work in public apologetics. The majority of the interview focuses on the arguments in Dr. Craig’s book, The Quest for the Historical Adam. He explains the theological necessity of a historical Adam for doctrines like the inspiration of Scripture and the omniscience of Christ.

Dr. Craig then details his argument that Genesis 1-11 should be understood as “mytho-history,” a genre that is compatible with modern science. He contrasts the Genesis account with other ancient myths, highlighting its unique desacralization of nature, and proposes a scientific model where Adam and Eve could be identified as Homo heidelbergensis, the common ancestors of both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, whom he argues were also fully human.

Episode Transcript

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:00):
Thanks for tuning into the Dr. Jeff Show. This show is available on Apple, Google, Edifi, Spotify, Overdrive, Liftable and wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show. On this show, I interview major thought leaders from many fields of influence to show how worldview changes everything.

I’ve read several books by today’s guest. He is one of the foremost Christian apologists and the head of Reasonable Faith, an organization that seeks to provide an articulate, intelligent voice for biblical Christianity in the public arena. Put on your seatbelts as they say we’re getting ready to go deep and it’ll be a lot of fun. Please welcome William Lane Craig to the show. Dr. William Lane Craig, welcome to the Dr. Jeff Show.

Dr. William Lane Craig (00:50):
Thank you. Good to be with you.

Dr. Jeff Myers (00:51):
I’ve really been looking forward to this conversation. You’re one of my favorite philosophers, one of my favorite Christian apologists. I was first introduced to your work years ago when you did a debate about God’s existence at Willow Creek Church in the Chicago area. That video, it’s before the internet, but that video went viral in the sense of people ordering VHS cassettes and showing it to their church. It was amazing.

So you’ve been a debater for a long time, being willing to engage in dialogue, conversation with top atheists and people who believe all different kinds of things. But I’d love to have our audience just to get to know you a little bit. How did you come to Christ and how did you get into Christian apologetics to begin with?

Dr. William Lane Craig (01:48):
I wasn’t raised in a Christian family, Jeff, or even a church going home, though it was a good and loving home. But when I became a teenager, I began to ask the big questions in life. And to make a long story short, I sat behind a girl in my high school German class who was a radiant Christian and who shared with me the love of God for me. And I had never heard this before, the idea that God could love me. And that sparked something in my soul.

I began a six-month search reading the New Testament from beginning to end, beginning to pray, to seek God’s faith. I read Christian books, attended meetings. And at the end of that six months, I just yielded my life to Christ and became a Christian. And for me, I had realized during those six months that if this were really the truth, I could do nothing less than devote my entire life to spreading this message among mankind. So for me, my Christian conversion was simultaneous with my call to vocational Christian ministry.

Dr. Jeff Myers (03:07):
And you went from high school, you went into your academic career and you attended, and even through graduate school at some of the top secular universities in the world, what was your experience like as a relatively young Christian in the academic setting?

Dr. William Lane Craig (03:25):
Well, when I went off to Wheaton College, I was only two years old in the Lord. And I have to tell you, Wheaton was like heaven on earth to me. Here was a Christian college where professors began in prayer before the class started, where guys in the locker room weren’t swearing and telling filthy jokes. It was unreal for me being in that Christian atmosphere. And for four years at Wheaton, I learned how to integrate my faith with my education so as to have a Christian perspective on philosophy, on history, on literature, on the arts and so forth.

And it was while I was at Wheaton, that the vision captivated me of sharing the gospel in the context of giving an intellectual defense of the Christian world and life view. And that vision then was realized through my further studies in seminary and then especially my doctoral studies in Europe at the University of Birmingham and at the University of Munich in Germany.

(04:39):
And by that time, I was solidly established in my Christian faith and so did not have difficulty in doing really what I thought was first rate work at these secular institutions that won the respect of my doctoral advisors.

Dr. Jeff Myers (04:59):
Bill, how did you get to the place where in giving an intellectual defense of the Christian faith, you decided that you would begin engaging in dialogue and debate with people who believed the opposite?

Dr. William Lane Craig (05:12):
Yeah. Well, I had been in eight years of high school and intercollegiate debate competition. I had no ability in athletics, but I could compete for my schools on the debate team. And so we traveled all over the country debating other schools. And when I graduated from Wheaton, I thought my debating days were over and done with forever, but what I discovered was that I began to receive invitations from Christian university groups in Canada to debate subjects like humanism versus Christianity or does God exist?

And what I discovered was that whereas a few scores might come out and hear me give a talk, hundreds or even thousands of students would come out to hear a debate between a prominent opponent of the Christian faith and a proponent of the Christian faith. And so it became very clear to me that evangelism was best conducted in this forum of debate on university campuses.

Dr. Jeff Myers (06:26):
I would be curious if you have any advice based on your debate experience in high school and the university and debating people. And I appreciate you, you take seriously people who believe differently. And in your books, you do the same thing. You have a deep level of knowledge of their arguments ahead of time and engagement. But I think a lot of people who are watching and listening right now might be thinking, “I’m so glad that he does that, but how can I have better dialogue around the water cooler or at coffee or in the residence hall at night?”

Dr. William Lane Craig (07:03):
Well, I would encourage folks to have a kind of case for the Christian faith that they have memorized and that they can present to someone at the drop of a hat. So for example, I have four or five arguments for God’s existence that are very simple to memorize. They’re only three steps or so each. And when someone asks me, “Why do you believe in God?” I can say, “Well, I can think of at least three reasons God exists.” And at that point, he’s got to say, “Yeah, like what?” And then I roll them out.

And if he says, “Well, that doesn’t prove the Christian God,” then I’ll say, “Well, I believe that we have good evidence for thinking that God has revealed himself decisively in Jesus of Nazareth.” And I’ll begin to talk to them about the evidence for the resurrection, specifically for the empty tomb, the postmortem appearances of Jesus, and the transformation in the earliest disciples.

(08:05):
And so if you’ve got these arguments and evidence under your belt, you’re not going to be intimidated by unbelievers. On the contrary, you will really enjoy getting into conversations about these sorts of things. And I predict what you’ll find is that the average unbeliever has never thought very deeply about these things, and you will easily be able to carry the day in terms of the argument and evidence you present.

Dr. Jeff Myers (08:36):
Which gives you a tremendous sense of confidence when you know what you’re going to say. And what appears to be spontaneous never is. I remember looking at the transcript of the plan for a political convention once and it said, after the candidate’s acceptance speech, there will be a spontaneous five minute applause. There’s nothing spontaneous about it. You plan carefully, you think of what you would say so that when you give an answer for the hope that you have, it’s not just off the top of your head or what first comes to your mind.

Dr. William Lane Craig (09:10):
And that’s what 1 Peter 3:15 says we should do. It says, always be prepared to do this, which requires preparation in advance.

Dr. Jeff Myers (09:21):
Yeah. I’d like to turn our attention toward what I think is your most recent book, The Quest for the Historical Adam. And I’d love to dig into it. I know that all kinds of people watch this show, people who have been, their thinking has been framed by old age creationism, theistic evolution, young age creationism. And so there are lots of different viewpoints. And I love the fact that you opened the book, The Quest for the Historical Adam, with this quote from Richard Everbeck. “No matter what you say or write about the early chapters of Genesis, you are in trouble with a lot of people.”

Dr. William Lane Craig (10:01):
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And that’s what I’m anticipating, but so far the reactions have been pretty good.

Dr. Jeff Myers (10:09):
Well, if I could summarize the argument of the book, I would say that you frame it theologically. So there’s a theological component to there’s a philosophical component, there’s an anthropological component to it, there’s a paleo neurological component to it. I mean, in other words, you had to really know a lot about a lot of different fields of study to bring all of these things to bear on this question of whether Adam really existed.

Dr. William Lane Craig (10:37):
Yes. It was a real education for me, Jeff. I learned so much about paleo neurology and paleoanthropology and paleogenetics and all the rest of those things, but the order in which you listed those topics I think is important. It begins with what the Bible teaches. That’s our authority, that’s where our bedrock is. And then having determined what our biblical commitments are as Christians, then, and only then do we turn to the question of whether or not this is compatible with the findings of modern science.

Dr. Jeff Myers (11:20):
Yes. And I know we could spend hours probably talking about this, but I’d like to begin with a question I think is probably on the minds of some of the people who I know are listening and watching the show. So why is it important theologically that Adam and Eve actually existed as people and not just metaphorically as a representative of human evolution?

Dr. William Lane Craig (11:47):
Well, for many Christians, say in the Catholic or Orthodox or Protestant reformation traditions who hold to the doctrine of original sin, the historicity of Adam is absolutely crucial because if there was no such person, then the doctrine of original sin is just a fiction and we can be held neither culpable for Adam sin nor corrupted by it if there was no such person as Adam.

Now for me, Jeff, that’s not a very important consideration because I don’t think that the doctrine of original sin, as it’s classically understood, is taught in scripture. I don’t think it’s there in Genesis three, the story of the fall or in Romans five, but I do think that Paul commits us to the historicity of Adam in that Adam was the floodgate, as it were, through which sin and evil entered the human race and then spread to all people.

(12:52):
So it seems to me that we are committed to the historical Adam, not only by Genesis 3, but also by what Paul says in Romans 5. Now, if you then deny that there ever was such a person, this is going to have a major impact upon your doctrine of inspiration and upon the person of Christ, it will affect your doctrine of inspiration because now you’ve got to say that the Bible teaches falsehoods, that the Bible teaches that there was a historical Adam and there wasn’t.

And so how are you going to adjust your doctrine of inspiration so as to allow that? That’s a difficult process that I’d rather not go through. The other thing is Christ himself. If Christ is divine, then he must be omniscient. And that means among other things, that he cannot hold any false beliefs, but I think it’s very clear that Jesus believed that Adam and Eve were real historical persons.

(13:59):
So if you say that Jesus was wrong in this, that he held false beliefs, how do you preserve his omniscience? And if you can’t preserve his omniscience, how do you preserve his deity? So if we deny the historical Adam, I think this is going to cause major reverberations in our doctrine of scripture and in our doctrine of Christ.

Dr. Jeff Myers (14:28):
So it’s so hugely important from a theological perspective, for Christian doctrine, for our understanding of Christ’s omniscience. And I know people who are in the sciences are now saying, “Okay, I get that theologically, but what I learned with my biology training was that that’s not how history went.” Is that really where the conflict is for most people?

Dr. William Lane Craig (14:55):
Oh, I feel certain that it is. I think that most people think that the first 11 chapters of Genesis, including the stories of Adam and Eve, should be read literalistically as a straightforward historical narrative. And if that hermeneutical approach to Genesis one to 11 is right, that puts Genesis in massive conflict with modern history, linguistics, and science, and therefore occasions a real crisis for the truth and rationality of the Christian faith.

Dr. Jeff Myers (15:36):
So this really helps set up the case that you’re making in the book, which is as you look at theology and philosophy and various sciences to help people understand how the biblical account of Genesis, I don’t know if this is the best way to put it, is consonant with what has been the case for scientific investigation over the last hundred years or so that people have been thinking about this.

Dr. William Lane Craig (16:05):
Yes. I like that word consonant or compatible. One isn’t trying to prove the historicity of Adam and Eve, rather one is saying, given the biblical teaching that there were two and only two universal progenitors of the human race on this planet, is that in any way ruled out by the findings of modern science or is that compatible with what we know of human origins on earth? And the argument in the book is that that is compatible with what paleoanthropology and the sciences of human origins tell us.

Dr. Jeff Myers (16:50):
There’s a lot to engage with in the book. And I would say it’s written at a level where this is not your average bedtime reading book. Is that fair to say?

Dr. William Lane Craig (17:04):
I suppose so. Ben Witherington is a New Testament scholar at Asbury Seminary, and he wrote a review of the book and he said, “I had to laugh when on page 320, Craig says that this is a popular level book.” He said, “This is not a popular level book.” He said, “Youth theology students in particular are going to need to bone up on your science if you’re going to understand and appreciate this book.”

So it’s a book that is written for non-specialists, but I try to explain everything that I deal with so that those of us who are non-specialists can understand it if we take the time to work through it. So it doesn’t bombard the reader with a barrage of technical scientific vocabulary that’s unintelligible if you’re not a scientist. I try to explain what each of these concepts means in a straightforward way so that I could understand it, not being a scientist myself.

Dr. Jeff Myers (18:13):
Yeah, that’s really good. And I think that’s a fair way to put it. I read some passages aloud to my wife, Stephanie, as I was going through it, and she said, “This is not my book.” I said, “But this is my book. I love this.” Because it’s so meticulous and you treat seriously the people who would disagree with your position. You outline their view and then you respond to it very much like you learned to do in high school debate.

Dr. William Lane Craig (18:44):
The section in the book dealing with the origins of the flood story in Genesis 1-11, and its relation to earlier flood stories in the epic of Gilgamesh and the Atrohazis epic, that is extremely meticulous and extremely up to date. By the way, any other authors, some of these potential parallels in ancient Mesopotamian literature to the flood story. So that would just be one illustration of the care with which I try to handle these difficult questions.

Dr. Jeff Myers (19:27):
Yeah. Well, let’s try to talk about the argument a little bit. I feel like I just talked a bunch of people out of reading the book and I want to talk them into reading it, but you’ve got to take your time through it. It’s not the kind of book where you can just sort of flip through the pages very quickly and absorb the argument. There are a lot of things we need to understand in the world of theology and philosophy. And later in the book, you get into mind-body dualism and the nature of the soul.

(19:56):
And what it means to bear God’s image. Those are hugely important things. But let me start more toward the beginning of the book because one of the terms, you used the term myth in describing these ancient creation stories and also apply to the first 11 chapters of Genesis. And when a lot of people hear the word myth, they immediately think of a made up story. How are you using that term?

Dr. William Lane Craig (20:26):
I make it very clear in the book that I’m using the word myth in the sense in which it is used by students of folklore and classical literature to talk about a traditional sacred narrative that is regarded as authoritative in a society that seeks to ground present realities and institutions and values in events in the primordial past. And I think you would agree that Genesis 1 to 11 fits that description to a T. And so I’m not using it in the popular sense where we talk about the myth of the low calorie diet or the myth of the self-made man.

I recognize that the use of a word like this is potentially misleading, but I believe, Jeff, that as scholars, we need to be straightforward with our people, with our laity, and not try to mince words and use euphemisms as some Old Testament commentators and scholars do, but rather we ought to be straightforward about what we’re saying and then define our terms very carefully so as to preclude misunderstanding it.

(21:49):
And that’s what I try to do. The view that I’m laying out in the book is actually not uncommon among Old Testament scholars, people like Bill Arnold at Asbury Seminary or John Walton at Wheaton or Gordon Wenham in his commentary on Genesis, but they just don’t use the same terminology. They use euphemisms like proto history or imagistic history where I try to use the technical terminology that is actually used by students of ancient Asseriology for this kind of literature.

Dr. Jeff Myers (22:30):
And as you do that, as you make the case, and I loved this part of the book where you arrive at the conclusion that what you read about in Genesis differs significantly from the other proto myth stories, say the Egyptian or the Babylonian account. And I’d love for you to talk a little bit about that because I just thought that was so significant that biblical history is heading in a completely different direction with completely different purposes.

Dr. William Lane Craig (23:02):
Thank you for that, Jeff. I’m afraid that my claim that Genesis 1-11 is mytho-history will be eclipsed by a much longer discussion in the book that these stories in Genesis 1-11 are not based on or derived from myths of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. And frankly, as I worked on this subject, I was scandalized by the sloppiness of so many of our Old Testament scholars and commentators in thinking that, just for example, because in Egyptian mythology, darkness, primordial darkness is mentioned, that that therefore means that Genesis 1:1 is borrowing from these Egyptian myths.

And you’ve got to do a lot more to show literary dependence than just find parallels plucked out of context. When you look at myths throughout the world, the motif of primordial darkness is everywhere in ancient myths, in the South Sea Island Pacific myths, in South American and North American Indian myths, and yet it would be absurd to say that the author of Genesis 1 borrowed this motif from them. So there’s a lot of real sloppiness here that needs to be corrected with respect to the degree to which Genesis 1-11 is dependent upon ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian myths.

Dr. Jeff Myers (24:45):
What are some of the other things that we learned from the Genesis account about God, the nature of nature and humanity that we wouldn’t pick up from reading some of these other accounts?

Dr. William Lane Craig (24:56):
Oh, well, one certainly would be the transcendence of the creator God of the universe, the stars and the moon and the sun, the plants and animals. They’re not gods, they’re just things that God has made. And so one of the claims I make in the book that I think is very interesting is that what the author of Genesis one did was to desacralize nature. He turned nature into a purely natural phenomenon, which God transcends.

And I credit the author of Genesis rather than the early Greek philosophers with that accomplishment of desacralizing nature. And I argue that in that respect, the worldview of the ancient Hebrew author of Genesis one is much closer to modern views of the universe than it is to these polytheistic views of ancient Mesopotamian Egypt in which all things were full of Gods. So that would be one really important difference.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:14):
So nature is good, but it’s not God.

Dr. William Lane Craig (26:16):
Right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (26:17):
And therefore, a lot of things flow from that. We can study nature because it’s objective outside of ourselves. It’s knowable, it’s not chaotic.

Dr. William Lane Craig (26:26):
Yes. Oh, absolutely. I get so impatient with these Old Testament scholars who say that Genesis one: one teaches that originally there was a primordial chaos out of which God formed an orderly world. That is completely false. The scene you have in Genesis one: one and two is of an ocean at night with no stars, no moon. It’s in darkness, but this is normal water. It has a surface, it has certain properties like liquidity. It has land underneath it.

When the water drains away, that land will appear. That water will one day fall from the skies as rain and water the plants and the animals. This is not a chaos at all. And perhaps one of the best proofs of that is that when the flood occurs with the story of Noah, it returns the earth to this primordial condition, and certainly that was not a chaos.

(27:35):
In the Greek sense, there was a boat floating on the surface of the waters. There was marine life in the waters, birds in the air above. This is not a chaos in the Greek sense. And so again, a corrective is in order here to a lot of sloppy statements that Old Testament commentators make in this regard. And let me say one other thing too, Jeff, since you got me on a roll here. You made a very good point about since nature is desacralized, that means that it authorizes us as human beings to exploit nature, to discover its secrets.

This is a ratification of the project of modern science in contrast to this polytheistic world, which is shot through with divination and trying to placate the deities in order to try to get along in the world. One of the most striking differences between Genesis one to 11 and these ancient Mesopotamian myths is that the arts and crafts, technology, even things as primitives as the hoe, were given to man by the gods.

(28:50):
They were gifts of the gods. But in Genesis, it’s people who discover herding, agriculture, viticulture, winemaking, metallurgy, music. These are just human creations. Why? Because nature has been desacralized.

Dr. Jeff Myers (29:13):
Wow. I had not thought about the development of technology in quite that way. I think that’s a really interesting observation. It goes back to the question of how do human beings bear God’s image. God, as a creator, humans are creative and it’s fascinating to see how so much goes back to Genesis. I know we always have a limited amount of time for discussions like this, and I wish that we didn’t, because I love this kind of thing.

But I’d like to talk a little bit about how science, when I grew up and was getting training in biology, there was always a distinction made between humans and our pre-human ancestors. I remember that term being used frequently. You really bust that idea down in this book. I’d love for you to explain some of what you found as you studied about Neanderthal Man and so forth.

Dr. William Lane Craig (30:17):
Yes. Well, I think one of the central insights of the book is that we should not identify humanity with homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is the species to which we belong. But in the past, there were other species of human beings like Neanderthals. And in the book, I present what I think is just absolutely convincing evidence that Neanderthals exhibited all of the same sort of cognitive human behaviors that homo sapiens did. And they had a brain case size that was even larger than homo sapiens.

And so frankly, Jeff, I am just not willing to write Neanderthals out of the human race. I think to do so would be a kind of racism, a sort of dehumanization of these people who were in the image of God just as we are. And what that means then is that if Adam and Eve are the universal progenitors of mankind, they have to be earlier than Neanderthals and homo sapiens.

(31:35):
And the most recent common ancestor for both Neanderthals and homosapiens is called Heidelberg Man. And so I suggest that Adam and Eve can be plausibly identified as belonging to this species, homo Heidelbergensis or Heidelbergman.

Dr. Jeff Myers (31:57):
And this is really significant. What’s occurring to me in my mind is we have to remember that the idea of species as we think of it today was also a product of scientific writing and thinking and categorization.

Dr. William Lane Craig (32:10):
Sure.

Dr. Jeff Myers (32:10):
To then take our categories and impose them backward on history would preclude a lot of people from arriving at the conclusions that you have.

Dr. William Lane Craig (32:21):
Yeah, it could because typically species don’t interbreed, right? But we have decisive evidence that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens did interbreed with each other. They could be man and wife and sire children. And so in our genome today, Jeff, we carry Neanderthal genes.

When I first learned this, I was just absolutely astounded that 2 to 3% of my genes are derived from Neanderthals. And in some parts of the world, it’s an even higher percentage than that. So there was inner breeding among these human beings. They were all human, all part of the same broad human family, but they had some anatomical differences.

Dr. Jeff Myers (33:11):
I’m trying to think of some of the questions that people might be thinking as they’re at this point of the discussion. If they’re still with us, they’re dialed in on probably a couple of things. And one is, then when did the image of God appear?

Dr. William Lane Craig (33:28):
I think that a person is not a human being. In a way, that’s a misstatement. I think that an organism or a hominin is not a human being unless and until it is in the image of God. And that means it has to have a rational soul in order to be fully human. So whenever the first person created in the image of God, having a rational soul and able to know God appeared on this planet, that would be the beginning of humanity and the proper sense of the word.

And that’s why I don’t believe that there are other people in history, even in prehistoric times, who were human, but not descended from Adam and Eve. In order to be human, you had to be descended from Adam and Eve because they were unique as the universal progenitors of all mankind. They were created in the image of God, and it was their children then that carried that image forward.

Dr. Jeff Myers (34:40):
Can you talk a little bit about, in Genesis 2, when God created man and he became a living soul? Because I was taking a psychology class once and it occurred to me, my professor is studying psychology, the study of the soul, but he does not actually believe in the soul.

Dr. William Lane Craig (35:05):
Right.

Dr. Jeff Myers (35:05):
So what are we studying here? And he said, “We’re studying the self.” Can you talk about the soul a little bit and sort of why that’s really significant to a Christian reality?

Dr. William Lane Craig (35:18):
Well, I don’t see body, soul dualism exegetically in Genesis one or two. I think you have this very clearly later on in the Old Testament, certainly in the intertestamental period. And then by the time you get to the New Testament, the body soul dualism language is just everywhere. And the fact that Paul can talk about an intermediate state between the death of the body and its resurrection from the dead at Christ’s return shows that the soul can and does exist independent of the body. And I think that commits us to body soul dualism.

So in order to be the seat of a rational soul, the body has to have a nervous system and a brain that is sophisticated enough to provide the sort of substratum for thinking and rationality and moral agency and all the rest. So I would imagine that when God formed Adam and Eve, if he didn’t do so just de novo out of the dirt, but if he formed them out of preexisting hominids, there would have to be a sort of biological and spiritual miracle take place that would equip them to be rational beings in God’s image.

Dr. Jeff Myers (36:51):
I’d like for you to talk briefly about language in that sense, because that’s another area I’ve always thought is a real problem for if you have a strictly naturalistic evolutionary mindset, the appearance of language and that symbolic phonetic language is very difficult to arrive at. But in Genesis 3, the people are talking.

Dr. William Lane Craig (37:20):
Yeah. You’re absolutely right that language is a dead certain indicator of humanity. You can’t have language properly speaking without human persons. And here I do a study in the book on supposed animal communication systems, very interesting the way animals alert one another by their cries and so forth. And these are not properly speaking language because the sounds have no reference. See the discussion in the book.

So the question is, when does language first appear in the history of the earth? Well, it’s very difficult to tell because obviously until you have writing, how can you tell whether or not they were speaking? So what you look for would be manifestations of symbolic thought that would be sufficient for language.

And here, the presence of cave art is very significant. When you have cave paintings, which represent via the use of colors and images, things like horses and a pride of lions and a rhinoceros, then you know you’ve got the sort of symbolic thinking that allows that person to represent those things with words, as well as with paint on the wall of the cave. And so part of the book explores when we first see this sort of cave painting going on in the past.

Dr. Jeff Myers (38:58):
I thought that was fascinating too. And you put the pictures in the book, which was really helpful to me because I had never thought before that these cave paintings weren’t just stick drawings of things. They were animals that we would recognize, and they were animals doing things. There was action, there was motion.

Dr. William Lane Craig (39:15):
And they’re gorgeous. When I look at these, I think if you were to ask the average man, draw for me a cartoon of a pride of lions, can you imagine what it would look like? These stick figures? I mean, it would be horrible. The average person has no artistic ability. And you look at these cave paintings of lions and they’re breathtaking. They are so beautiful. And they’re even better, Jeff, than the pictures in the book because unfortunately the pictures in the book are only in black and white. Look at those things online in color and they are dazzling.

Dr. Jeff Myers (39:55):
Wow. Well, this has been a really fun discussion. And I think if I were to draw a conclusion from it, it’s that if you believe in Adam and Eve and you trust scripture as your authority, you’re not crazy from a scientific or philosophical standpoint. And whether people agree with the conclusions you arrived at or the way you arrived at them, that’s a huge contribution to biblical theology. Thank you.

Dr. William Lane Craig (40:24):
Well, thank you, Jeff. And thank you for this interview today. It’s been so interesting to me because you have asked about things that the average interviewer doesn’t raise. And I’ve really enjoyed talking about those interesting aspects of the book. And there’s a lot, lot more in the book for interested persons to check out.

Dr. Jeff Myers (40:46):
Fantastic. Bill, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Dr. William Lane Craig (40:49):
Certainly.

Dr. Jeff Myers (40:53):
A special thank you to my guest today, Dr. William Lane Craig, for his insights on Adam as a historical figure. You’re probably going to want to know more. You can visit reasonablefaith.org and on Twitter you can look @RFUpdates.

Proverbs 25:2 says, “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter. To search out a matter is the glory of kings.” That’s what we do at Summit Ministries. We’re searching out all of these matters, teaching young adults to ask questions. Scientific inquiry is one of the methods that we use to discern what is true about the world, to discover all of God’s goodness, keep thinking, keep learning, keep growing, and all you have to do is do that for the rest of your life. God’s blessings on you. I’ll look forward to seeing you next week.

(41:45):
Hey, everyone. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Dr. Jeff Show. It’s a podcast from Summit Ministries, summit.org. Summit is a nonprofit ministry that exists to equip and support the rising generation to embrace God’s truth and champion a biblical worldview.

For nearly 60 years, Summit Ministries has been training students and those who work with students to develop, deepen, and defend a biblical worldview through life-changing conferences, thoughtful church, homeschool, and Christian school, curriculum books, free online resources and more. If you want to live out a biblical worldview in today’s world and you desire to instill a lifelong faith in the rising generation, visit summit.org/thedrjeffshow for more information.