The Sean McDowell Show - 9 Confusing Things about God– Answered By a Christian Philosopher

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

How can God be all-present (omnipresent) and yet be located in the temple and indwell believers? How can God know everything (omniscient) if He doesn't know what it is like to sin? How can God be a necessary Being if it is logically possibly He doesn't exist? These are just a few of the tough, philosophical questions I discuss with William Lane Craig. Find his answers here as well as an update to his latest Systematic Philosophical Theology, Vol 2a: Attributes of God. READ: Systematic Philosophical Theology, Vol 2a: Attributes of God (https://amzn.to/4krfnh2)* Get a MASTERS IN APOLOGETICS or SCIENCE AND RELIGION at BIOLA (https://bit.ly/3LdNqKf)* USE Discount Code [SMDCERTDISC] for 25% off the BIOLA APOLOGETICS CERTIFICATE program (https://bit.ly/3AzfPFM)* See our fully online UNDERGRAD DEGREE in Bible, Theology, and Apologetics: (https://bit.ly/448STKK) FOLLOW ME ON SOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter: https://x.com/Sean_McDowell TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sean_mcdowell?lang=en Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/seanmcdowell/ Website: https://seanmcdowell.org  Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Want to keep God's word with you wherever you go? The King James Bible Study KJV app by Salem Media makes it easier to read, study, share, and pray daily with a timeless KJV translation. Enjoy features like offline access, audio Bible listening, smart search, and tools to highlight bookmark and take notes, all designed to keep your Bible studies simple and organize. Best of all, it's free to download in the Google Play Store. Grow in your faith every day. Search for King James Bible Study KJV and download the app today. How can God be omniscient? what it is like to sin. How can God be a necessary being? And how can God be omnipresent? That is present

everywhere. And yet be particularly located in places such as the temple. These are a few of the questions we're going to discuss with our guest today, Dr. William Lane Craig, who's back to discuss volume two of his systematic philosophical theology. This volume focuses on nine of God's attributes. Bill, thanks for coming back on. I've been looking forward to this. Well, I have two shots. and I'm grateful to you for showcasing my two volumes. Well, I've read both of them in their entirety, and I love them, and they're challenging. And I want people to know up front, I have a master's in philosophy, and there were times where I was challenged to reread and think about this.

So your books are not for lay people, but this conversation is meant to be so. And let's start with the first attribute you discussed in the book, which is related to God being incorporeal, meaning that God doesn't have a body. He is immaterial. Then how would you explain biblical pastures like God's face, his hands, and even God's back described to Moses, which seems to imply he does have a body? There are certainly bodily descriptions of God throughout the Bible. And I think that these are either one of two types. The first would be anthropomorphic. descriptions of God. That is to say, they are simply descriptions of God using human terms. So, for example,

the Bible will say, the eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayer. But it doesn't mean to teach that God has literal eyeballs or ears. Rather, that's an expression of God's attentive concern for his people and his openness to their supplications. Similarly, when the Bible talks about the arm of the Lord, that is a metaphor for his strength or the face of the Lord is his presence. So the Bible is just filled with these anthropomorphic descriptions of God that serve a clear literary purpose and should not be interpreted with a sort of wooden literality. Now, the other type of passage would be what we call theophanies of God. That is to say, there are certain appearances of God envisions in the Old and New Testament.

And these theophanies are mental projections of the Percipient's mind. They are not something that exists in the real world, but rather they are visionary experiences of God. And so, again, they do not claim to portray God as he literally is, because the scriptures are very plain that God is spirit and doesn't have a physical body, but sometimes he can manifest himself in these special theophanies to various things. people. You know, on your first point, it's amazing how in English we do the same thing. I was sitting in a meeting and somebody walked in and whispered to me and said, can I see you? Well, I could have been a literalist and said, well, of course you can see me. What's it matter with you? But what they meant is,

can I talk to you in person outside? So by I see you, they meant something different. And biblically, especially when we look at the ancient biblical culture and Semitic culture, hands and feet and back meant something deeper and we're not meant to be taken literalistically and I think you explain that well. All right. So the next attribute we're going to look at is God being a necessary being. And yet, as I said in the introduction, the proposition, God does not exist, is not a logical contradiction as far as I can tell.

So that would seem to imply that God exists cannot be logically not. necessary. So I guess the question is, how could God be necessary if his non-existence is logically possible? Philosophers distinguish between two types of possibility and necessity. One would be strict logical possibility or necessity. The other would be a sort of broad logical possibility or necessity. It is only in the case of strict logical necessity that the denial of a necessary truth would imply a logical contradiction. But in the case of broad logical possibility or necessity, the denial of a necessary truth in the broadly logical sense doesn't imply a contradiction. So, for example, among the broadly, logically necessary truths would be propositions such as the following. The prime minister is not a prime number, or no event precedes itself, or every colored thing is extended in space, or everything that has a size has a shape.

you can deny all of those propositions without a strict logical contradiction, and yet plausibly they are metaphysically or broadly logically necessary. And as I just hinted, broad logical necessity and possibility is usually interpreted to be metaphysical possibility and necessity. What can be actualized, what can be realized, in the world. And there is no world in which the prime minister is a prime number. That is a metaphysical impossibility, even if it doesn't involve a strict logical contradiction. That's really helpful. Now, not to take us too far astray, but would you agree with this? The idea of something coming from nothing is not logically impossible, but metaphysically impossible. Yes. If you're speaking of logical necessity is strict logical necessity. There is no contradiction in saying the world came

into being uncaused out of nothing. But I think that is certainly metaphysically impossible since out of nothing, nothing comes. So something's logically possible doesn't mean that it exists, but if something's logically impossible, it certainly doesn't exist. So it's a way of ruling something out negatively, practically speaking. Yes, that's correct. Okay, so I want people to understand that you go into so much depth in each chapter on each one of these attributes. What does the Bible say about it?

Is it logical? Is it coherent? Is there an inconsistency? And I'm just pulling out a question tied to each one of these that hopefully is helpful. All right. This third one, I'm really interested in your take on this one, Bill. The Bible teaches that God is self-existent. And of course, what we mean by that, the term is a seity.

God doesn't get his existence from something or someone else. And yet one of the most formidable challenges to this attribute of God is the seeming existence of other necessary and uncreated things such as, say, numbers or some might throw the laws of logic in there. Why is this such a serious challenge and how might Christians respond to this? I think this is an incredibly serious challenge to Christian theism, Sean, that can't be underestimated, because if this challenge is true, if there really are necessary, uncreated things other than God, then God is not the sole ultimate reality. He is just one among an infinitude of infinitudes of uncreated necessary beings.

And this is so contrary to the Judeo-Christian concept of God, which says that God is the sole ultimate reality and the creator of all things other than himself. So, for example, in the prologue to John's Gospel, he says of the Lagos or the Word, who was in the beginning with God, all things were made through him and without him was nothing made that was made. So the Bible is very consistent in affirming the uniqueness of God in his aseity.

And so I think we have to respond to this challenge. Now, you ask how best to respond. Well, in fact, there is a cornucopia of different alternatives, whereby we can respond to this challenge. And the ones that I prefer, among others, would be a sort of what's called neutralism. And neutralism says that when we use terms and language to refer to things, we can say or utter true proposition. without there being extramental objects correlated with each of those terms.

So, for example, if I say parking is prohibited on Biola Avenue, that refers to parking. But I don't think that commits us to some sort of an object or thing called parking. There is no such thing. Similarly, people might say, well, there are. deep differences between Republicans and Democrats. I think that's true. But that doesn't mean that we are therefore ontologically committed to mind-independent objects called differences and that some of them are deep. So we have to be very careful of reifying our language. We all too often take language to be the clue or the guide to ontology, and I think that is a disastrous mistake. I prefer to regard language

as neutral in its ontological commitments, and therefore we can utter truths about differences and parking and hindrances and hours before dawn and problems without thinking that we are thereby committing ourselves to mind independent objects in the world. Bill, I got to give you credit. You're the first person on my channel to use the word cornucopia. Oh, really? Credit for you on that one, but it does capture what you do in the chapter. Yes, you're in this horn with all of these fruits and vegetables pouring out of

and representing these different alternatives. To me, one of the most helpful things in this volume is you repeat that the biblical writers are telling stories. They're not doing systematic philosophy. So some of the philosophical nuances are underdetermined, and there's room for Christians to differ, but of course we have to give plausible, rational means, not just inventing stuff that's ad hoc. And of course, in this case, there's a range of different options that are sufficient to rebut

the challenge, even though you favor one. I think that's all we need to do defensively on this. And your whole chapter, you go through each one of them, strengths and weaknesses, and of course, a common one is that things like numbers and laws of logic and sets and propositions are ideas in the mind of God. And you give a response to that. So I thought that chapter was really, really helpful. But neutralism, as you described it, is one way to rebut this challenge. Yes. All right. Let's keep rolling here. The fourth one is simplicity. Christians have held that God is a simple being, kind of a two-part question. What's the biblical support that simplicity is an attribute of God? And how can we hold it consistently when clearly God has multiple different attributes,

which seems to imply at least some level of complexity? Yes, I'm glad to you say that, Sean, because I wholly agree. There are different strengths or degrees, as it were, of this doctrine of simplicity. It is not a single doctrine. So, for example, we would all agree that God is not composed of separable parts. There is no danger that God is going to literally disintegrate and fall to pieces. God is not composed in that sense. But I think as you do, apparently, that God is nevertheless a very complex being, because he has a multiplicity of different properties. He's omniscient. He's omnipotent. He's perfectly good. And those are not the same property. Clearly, to be omnipotent is not the same thing as being good or being eternal.

So I think that God is complex in that he possesses a range of different properties. And proponents of a very strong doctrine of divine simplicity deny that. They are committed to the view that God, in fact, has no properties, that God is just the pure act of being, subsisting, whatever that means. They admit that that's incomprehensible because the way that we comprehend what a thing is, is by conceiving of its properties. And God on this view doesn't have any property. So God is literally inconceivable. This view ultimately leads to a, I think, an agnosticism about God's nature that I find very troubling where we can.

cannot say that God is good. God is powerful. God is loving because that would be to attribute these properties to God, whereas on this view, God being absolutely simple, literally has no properties. That is so interesting. I was thinking about, as you were answering this, when I took your class philosophy of religion at Talbot, our final was right, without notes, one argument for the existence of God and explain one attribute. And I took simplicity and the cosmological argument reflecting back now. Of course, that's been 25 years. And your thinking is clearly developed even further as expressed in this chapter very, very well. And I know some people are thinking, okay, wait a minute. How can God be simple if God is a Trinity? But you don't deal with God's

triune nature yet until the next volume. So they're going to have to hit pause and come back to that one when we talk about God's Trinity. Does that sound good or do you want to weigh in on that one? That is in volume 2B where we're talking about volume 2A today. Okay, excellent. Good. All right. So here's one for A. I've heard this one on a popular level quite a bit. Now we're moving from God's simplicity to God being omniscient. And one question I remember even back in college, people staying things like how can God be omniscient when he doesn't know what it's like to sin or in my case how could god be omniscient when he doesn't know from a first person perspective what it's like to be married to Stephanie who's my wife so i know what it's like to sin i know what it's like to be married to

stephanie god doesn't so how is god all knowing the traditional doctrine of omniscience is defined in terms of God's propositional knowledge, that is his knowledge of facts. So for a person to be omniscient, for any proposition P, if P is true, then that person believes P or rather he knows P, and he does not believe not P, the opposite of P. So omniscience is defined in terms of of God's knowing only and all truths. He knows all the facts. But the kind of knowledge you're talking about, Sean, how it feels to be a sinner,

what it's like to be married to Stephanie, how a watermelon tastes. These are not examples of propositional truths. Rather, these would be non-propositional truths or facts. And God does not need to have all non-propositional knowledge in order to be omniscient. Indeed, it would be a cognitive defect for God to have all non-propositional knowledge, because in that case, God would have to believe that he is Ronald Reagan, because Ronald Reagan believed and knew that he was Ronald Reagan. So if God had to have all that non-propositional

knowledge, he would believe that he's Ronald Reagan as well as J.P. Morland, which is absurd. So what God needs to have, in order to be omniscient, is to have all propositional knowledge, knowledge of all the facts there are. And then he needs to have that subset of non-propositional knowledge that is appropriate to himself. He needs to know that I am God, that I have sent my son into the world, that I love people. Those would be the kinds of non-propositional truths that God would know. That's so helpful. I give a sermon on John chapter 17, and Jesus says, this is eternal life that they know you, the one true God. And yet in English, knowing, can be I know that 2 plus 2 equals 4

propositional. It can be like knowing how to ride a bike, which is kind of experiential knowledge. Or I think in John, it means a relational kind of knowing. So sometimes we cash out omniscience without clarity

implying everything in English we use the word knowledge for. And yet biblically, you argue in a section we won't walk through and philosophically in the church, it's propositional knowledge. So God believes everything that is true. He knows everything that is true. That's what it means for God to be on mission. So I want people to see that so many objections that come up, if we just have clarity on not first off what the Bible says. And number two, who God is and his

attribute and what we mean by it, then some of the objections really will fade away. And I think that's some of the service of your book bills, you're just saying, all right, what do we mean by simplicity? What do we mean by God being necessary? What do we mean by God being self-existent? And when we have clarity on that, it helps respond to some of these objections. So, yes, I, that's why analytic philosophy is such a valuable tool for systematic theologians. If we are going to articulate carefully what we as Christians believe, philosophy can be a tremendous servant and aid to us, because one of the things that philosophy specializes in is conceptual analysis and clear definitions of concepts. And as you say, Sean, in many cases, it's just a matter of getting your

definitions correct. So we have five more, six through ten, but I wonder if I could ask you just a question related to this, if you agree with my assessment. I was reading through your book. At the same time, I'm preparing a sermon for my home church that I preach at probably quarterly on John 14. And I love analytic philosophy, and it's interesting and it's intriguing to me. It really, it captivates my mind. But there's something about in John 14 when it talks about the spirit of truth. and I get into the character of God that moves my heart in a different way.

So you describe philosophy as a servant to theology. Is that kind of your experience? Like, as you're just breaking this down analytically, you've got to make sure you're just like in the word and worshiping and doing things that fill your heart up to, or would you just disagree with the way I broke that down? No, no, I fully agree with you, Sean. And if you look at the preface for Volume 1 of this,

series, I alert my readers to what I perceive to be one of the dangers of analytic philosophy of religion, that is of Christian philosophy, and that is a tendency to over-intellectualize everything. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I think the philosopher can fall into the trap of over-intellectualizing everything so that his faith becomes sterile and arid and he loses that intimate connection with Christ, did you speak of? So I do think as Christian philosophers, we need to be intentional about minding our own spiritual lives and our walk with God. That's a great caution.

I remember when I started the MA philosophy program, you flew out to California. This is probably the year 99 or 2000. and somebody asked you, what was the advice you would give while studying philosophy? And one thing you said is share your faith. And I'll never forget that. I was like, what great practical advice to be living this out? So that has stuck with me. Now, we're going to get to, here's the five attributes we have left.

So people know, we have God's eternity, omnipresence, omnipotence, and goodness. Now, so I guess if I'm doing the math, that's four. Oh, yeah, because there's nine, not ten. But can I ask you one more question on omniscience? Okay. I've asked you before. You get asked a ton of times, but this just comes up incessantly. And you deal with this in depth.

But maybe in a way that somebody just goes, okay, I get it. Because here's the question that comes up, is how God can know the future decisions of free beings. and if God knows what we're going to choose, how are they not determined and how are we actually free? Those are two quite separate questions. Let's talk about the second one first. Is God's foreknowledge of our actions compatible with those actions being genuinely free? Those who deny the compatibility of divine foreknowledge in human freedom are theological fatalists. They think that if God foreknows what will happen, then everything is fated to happen. That is to say everything happens necessarily. But the traditional argument for theological fatalism is actually logically fallacious. It would go like this.

necessarily, if God foreknows X, then X will happen. Premise 2, God forenows X, 3, therefore necessarily X will happen. And that argument commits a fallacy in modal logic, the logic of possibility and necessity. It does not follow from those two premises that therefore necessarily X will happen. All that follows from those two premises

is simply that X will happen. X will happen, yes. But X could fail to happen, but if it were to fail to happen, then God would have had different foreknowledge instead. So there is simply no demonstrated incompatibility between God's foreknowing what we're going to do and our doing it freely.

To put this, the cookies really on the bottom, shelf, it's sort of like an infallible barometer of the weather. If you had an infallible barometer, then you will know what the weather is going to be like tomorrow. But the barometer doesn't determine the weather. The barometer reads as it does because of the weather. It's the weather that determines how the barometer reads. Well, God's foreknowledge is sort of like that barometer and our future free acts are like the weather predicted by the barometer. So I don't see any incompatibility between divine foreknowledge and freedom. Now, that still leaves the question, well, how does God know the future decisions of free people?

And here I have found it really helpful to differentiate between two models of divine cognition. One would be the perceptualist model and the other would be the conceptualist model. According to the perceptualist model, God's knowledge of the future is something like sense perception. He looks ahead into the future and sees what is going to happen. And this perceptualist model of divine cognition is presupposed when people talk about gods foreseeing the future. And I think that this model is defective, that this is definitely an inadequate model, because the future isn't there to see. The future is completely unreal. It is a realm of potentiality, only future events in no sense exist, and therefore they cannot be the object of any kind of divine perception.

But on the other model, a conceptualist model, the idea is that God simply has inherently knowledge of only and all truths as a facet of his cognitive perfection. This would be a model similar to Plato's idea of innate ideas. Plato thought that every soul that comes into the world is born with a store of innate ideas that it simply knows. And that learning or education is actually a matter of recalling what one already knows but has forgotten. You already have that store of knowledge, but you come to recall what it is. Well, however that might be for a knowledge of human cognition, I think it's a very apt analogy for divine cognition.

God doesn't learn anything. Rather, he, as an omniscient being, a maximally great being, simply knows only and all truths. For any proposition, P, he knows whether P has the truth value true or the truth value. false. And so in virtue of that property, that means that he has knowledge of all true future tense propositions. And so he knows everything that's going to happen. You know, the first question I asked you was about how God can be incorporeal, and yet there's language in the Bible of hands and back and feet. And so sometimes the Bible uses language that's

limited to make a different point. In this case, what we tend to do is take our perception and import it onto God in a way that doesn't actually map on to who God is because of our limited perspective. I think the idea of innate ideas rooted in what it means to be God makes more sense than this perceptualist model, which I think we naturally default to because that's how we understand stuff and we end up making guesses. But that distinction is actually one of my favorite distinctions in the book and in this chapter. I think it's really, really helpful and fruitful, philosophically speaking. Excellent.

All right. So let's shift to God's eternity. And you've written two books on this and a lengthy chapter in the book. But here's basically there's one. view that says God has lived omnitemporally throughout infinite time, say in the past and into the present. The other view is that God could exist eternally by being timeless. So God's relationship to time is different. So two-part question, does scripture kind of answer this or does it leave it open? And which do you lean towards and why? I think that the scripture definitely

tends to speak of God as being omnitemporal. Think of Psalm 90. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst created the earth and the world from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. There God is portrayed as existing from eternity past into eternity future. And so the scripture tends to speak of God in omniportal terms. Nevertheless, there are a few passages in the context of creation, where it talks about God creating the world that does suggest that God created time and that therefore in some difficult to articulate way God existed before time began. That's what it says in Jude 25, in the doxology of that letter, Jude says, now to him be glory, power, dominion authority, before all time, and now and forever. So there Jude speaks about God

existing before time began. So the challenge here for the philosopher is how to our articulate this idea in a coherent way. Clearly, God cannot exist literally before time because the word before is a temporal relation. And so if he were before time, there would be time before time. So the challenge for the philosopher is to find a coherent explication of this view. And so this is one on which the scripture leaves it open, and there are Christian philosophers who take both views and Christian theologians as well. Some think of God as transcending time, being outside of time altogether, but others say, no, no, God exists throughout infinite time from eternity past to eternity future. Oh, and then you ask, how do you decide? Well,

you're going to decide this question, if you can, based upon philosophical arguments. In other words, this question lands not in the lap of the biblical theologian. It lands in the lap of the philosophical theologian. And as I explain in the chapter, I do think there are persuasive philosophical arguments for thinking that at least since the moment of creation that God is, is in time. That's so helpful because there's been a debate and differences throughout the history of the church of God's omnitemporality versus whether he's timeless.

And there's space to explore this and understand this. And of course, in Jude, in case somebody goes, wait a minute, that's a contradiction, time before creation. I would take that as saying God is above time. He's the source of time. there never was a time for which he didn't exist rather than this philosophically rigorous like contradiction that's inherent within it. I think that's reading too much into what Jude is saying. Yeah. Good stuff. And again, you got an extensive chapter on this.

And one of the parts I read multiple times is where you offer a critique of the special theory of relativity. Oh. And we won't go too much into that because of how sophisticated it is. But this idea that all time is relative because of his theory, you gave what I found plausible and my scientific understanding is limited on this issue. So it seemed plausible to me that at least that theory is rooted in kind of an old time verificationism. And he didn't overturn Newton's idea of absolute time. Now, we don't have to go into details about that, but people can read your chapter to unpack it if they want to, about that section was fascinating. Thank you. Yes, let me say that I think good or the best systematic theology will be in conversation with

the modern sciences. And it's a great deficit of contemporary systematic theology that it is so ignorant and silent with respect to what the modern sciences tell us about the world we live in. So anyone who's going to be working on the doctrine of creation is going to need to know something about physics and astronomy and biology, for example. And as you demonstrate, don't be afraid to push back on what is commonly believed that there's good evidence against it either in the science or within scripture. All right, this one I think is going to be really interesting how you answer this one. Now we're into God's omnipresence.

So help us make sense of the tension in Scripture in which God dwells in people and the temple and yet is described as not being confined to temple or particular location. So I guess, in other words, given that God does not have spatial extension, he's a spirit, how can he be omnipresent? This is again one of those attributes on which Christian philosophers differ with one other. Does God transcend space?

Is he a non-spatial being? Or is God in space? It's just parallel to the situation with God and time, similarly with regard to God in space. Is God spaceless? or is he everywhere throughout space? Now, those who maintain that God is everywhere throughout space do not think of God as extended like a thin gas throughout the universe

so that here's a part of God and there's a part of God over there. Rather, they would say that God is wholly present at every point in space. And they would see God's presence in the temple or in the believer through the indwelling Holy Spirit as God's causal manifestation at specific points in space, but they would not maintain that God is entirely located at those locations. They would think of God as existing everywhere. Now, my own position on this is that God does not exist in space at all. I think that God transcends space and that he created space and therefore is inherently spaceless. So I would interpret omnipresence as a kind of derivative attribute from God's omniscience and omnipotence. That is to say, if God is omniscient and omnipotent, then he is cognizant of and causally active at every point in space.

And that's what we mean when we say that God is omnipresent, that he knows what is happening at every point in space, and he is causally active at every point in space, even though he himself is not a spatial being. Okay, so this is probably on me that I'm not trying with you, but you made a connection between God's eternity and time and then God's presence. So your view is that God is timeless Sons creation without creation, but at creation steps into time. Yes. So if God is spaceless Sons creation, then wouldn't God be in space now like he is in time? That is the key question, Sean. And it seems to me that where is the act of creation is inherently a temporal act? Because God acts at that point, the act of creation is not an inherently spatial act, as is, for example, pushing something or pulling

something, those acts are inherently spatial. If you pull or push something, then you must be located in space. But in order for God to cause space to exist, I don't think he needs to be in space. He can be trans-spatial and simply bring space into being. And so I see space as differing from time in that respect. In some sense, it would make no sense to say God is in space to create space because then space would already be there before he creates it, which is a contradiction again. Okay, so that's helpful. So the creation moment, God steps into time because it's necessarily a time-based event. Yes.

But it's not a space-based event in the same way, even though space comes out of it. Okay. All right. That's helpful. I'm not to give that a little more thought, but that distinction at least makes sense of how you land one differently than the other. Okay. These last two are perhaps the most interesting to me. By the way, before we go to them, how did you choose the order of this? Did you kind of choose omnipotence and goodness, which to me are two of the most interesting ones to put at the end? Or do you totally see it different? Like, why did you arrange these attributes as you did? I tried to arrange them, Sean, in terms of their fundamentally to the nature of God. It seemed to me that fundamentally, God is an incorporeal being. He is spirit. And then he is necessary in his existence. He is self-existent. And then the question would arise, is he simple? Whereas when you get to these other attributes, of course, these are essential things.

him, but I guess to me, I just felt like these others had to be dealt with first. Okay. So really, it's more of a logical flow tied to God's character. Like, it may sense God would necessary at the beginning. He's necessarily all knowing. He's necessarily goodness. So that seems to be at least logically kind of a foundation for the rest. So, okay, I could see that. Well, either way, the last two interests me the most because a lot of objections seem to come up about these, at least in practice, doing apologetics and teaching. So let's talk about God's omnipotence. And I'm curious how we can make sense that God is typical understood as being all powerful. And yet he can't lie. He can't change the past. Or given, some would say, given his

incredible powers of persuasion beyond anything that we could grasp, why couldn't he still cause free beings to do good? So if God is omnipotent, Why is he limited, maybe morally, changing the past, and his inability to change what free beings think? In discussing divine omnipotence or being all-powerful, philosophers have very helpfully distinguished between the degree of God's power and the range of his power. The degree of his power would have to do with his strength. the range of his power would have to do with any limits to the states of affairs that he can actualize. And a very simple way to conceive of omnipotence is to say that there is no state of affairs that God is unable to actualize due to a lack of power on his part.

There's no state of affairs that he's unable to actualize due to a lack of power on his part. There's no state of affairs that he's unable to actualize due to a lack of power on his part. That's what it means to say that God is all powerful or omnipotent. So when it comes to things that God cannot actualize that lie outside the range of his power, this will not be due to a lack of power on God's part. It will be due to something in the description of the state of affairs itself. for example, making a rock too heavy for him to lift or other logical contradictions. And I would say there are no non-logical limits to the range of things that God can do.

The only limit on the range of God's power would be purely logical limits. And that's not a limitation on God because the, those logically impossible states of affairs aren't things at all. They're just impossible combinations of words. When you're asking God make a rock so big he can't move it, Bart Simpson once said, could God make a burrito so big he can't eat it? Gets to the same root of the absurdity. If you say yes, he can make it, he can't eat it. If you say no, he can't, he's limited. And the problem is, as you're pointing out, no amount of power could do. such a thing. So God's supposed inability of making a square circle is not a limitation upon God.

It's a recognition that that is something power cannot do. I'll draw this out with students sometimes. I'll say, if you can take this paper clip and bend it into a square circle, I'll give you a free scholarship to buy it. I'll bring a student up. And sometimes they'll try, but they'll quickly realize they can't. And then I'll say, I need the strongest person in the entire audience. Give me a wrestler, bodybuilder, football player. Are they any closer to doing it? And of course, Samson can't do it. But it's amazing, Bill, when I ask audiences all the time, students that doesn't matter,

say how many think God can do anything, 80, 90% of hands fly up because we haven't thought through the particulars of what this means. Yeah, this is where my heart. is so grieved, frankly, at the naivete and ignorance of so many of our Christians. They just haven't been educated in these things, and it's not really their fault. It's the fault of our churches that they don't have good adult or high school education programs to teach Christian doctrine to kids. And so you're absolutely right.

I'll bet most Christians believe that God's omnipotence means that God can do anything. And yet, when I explain it to him, 90% will come along with me when we reflect upon it and talk about it. And actually appreciate that nuance. I had a student saying to me one time, Bill, I think he was a freshman. He goes, okay, wait a minute. So I can lie. God can't lie. I'm more powerful than God.

And it was like this epiphany. And I made the point, I said, no, it's because of God's moral perfection that he can't and he won't lie. And guess what? That's good news. Because God will keep his word and keep his promises and just tried to reframe it for him. Great answer again. When we get back to what's meant by God's omnipotence, it's not that God can do anything. It basically means if power can do it, God can do it.

on a simple level. So careful definition of it makes a big difference. All right. So one last attribute for you, which is tied to God's goodness. And I actually, this was another one of my favorite parts of the book, is that you started talking about liberal theology, which we see today in some progressive Christians, not necessarily all,

but there's this eschewing of the justice and wrath of God in favor of divine love. Why is that problematic biblically and philosophically? And of course, they understand love in a certain way. These theologians think that God's fundamental moral perfection or property is his love. And that is unfortunately one-sided because if God is, God is not holy and not just, then God could be an unrighteous being, an evil being, a sinful being. And so it is vitally important that we affirm both the love and the justice of God.

Biblically, both of these are comprised by the righteousness of God. The attribute of divine righteousness is twofold. It encompasses God's justice or holiness and his love and mercy. And as I say philosophically, both of these are essential if God is to be a morally perfect being and therefore a maximally great being. And losing that attribute is where we can start to lose the importance of penal substitutionary atonement, love and justice meet. So connecting these philosophically are really important biblically, and in that case even practically, and of course you've written that on that elsewhere. One of the objections that keeps coming up is what's called the Uthofro dilemma.

And of course, this is tied to God's goodness. Yes. Can you explain what that is and how you think divine command theory addresses it? Okay. This is a dilemma that was posed in one of Plato's dialogues. Plato or Socrates wanted to know, is something good because the gods will it? Or do the gods will it because it is good? If you say that something is good, just because the gods will it, that seems to make good and evil arbitrary. It's dependent upon the free will of the gods. On the other hand, if you say the gods will something because it is good, then that makes the good independent of the gods, and the gods are not

the basis then for goodness. And divine command theory or divine command morality is an attempt to solve that problem by maintaining that God's very nature is definitive or determinative of the good. God is by nature perfectly just, loving, fair, kind, merciful, and so forth. And so he is the paradigm of goodness. Now, that nature, expresses itself toward us in the form of divine commands, which then constitute our moral duties. Moral obligations and prohibitions arise as a result of commands issued by a competent or qualified authority. And as the paradigm of goodness, God is supremely qualified to issue. moral commands to us that then constitute our moral duties.

And so the theory splits the horns of the Uthro dilemma. It is that something is good because God is good, that God will something because he is good. And so the Uthraud dilemma is really a false dilemma. it's not of the form A or not A, rather it's of the form A or B. And in that case, you can split the horns of the dilemma by proposing a third alternative, C, and that's what Divine Command Theory does. About four or six months ago, I had a debate with Michael Shermer on this. It was a friendly fun back and forth on this channel for about two hours on morality and on the origin of consciousness. And he raised Utherphro dilemma, and of course the two dilemmas of it, either morality is arbitrary, right, or there's some standard outside of God.

And I said, I think there's a way to settle this with divine command theory. If God is the good and the commands express our duties come from his commands. I said, does that adequately solve it? And he kind of paused and said, I think it did. And I was kind of, that's how I felt. I was stunned. I was like, oh, I was expecting some pushback or some challenge. And I've been meaning to make a video and just kind of like cut that and ask other atheists,

do you agree? What are we missing? Have we solved this apparent dilemma? And of course, it doesn't mean God exists. It doesn't mean God is good. It doesn't mean Christianity's true. It means this understanding of God adequately responds to that challenge. So if you're a skeptic or an atheist or a Christian who holds a different view of, you know,

God's goodness and how we might address the youth fraud dilemma, let us know. I would love to know if you make a short video and are like, I'm not convinced. Here's why you and Bill have not answered this. Make it. Tag me. I'll take a look at it. And if there's enough challenges, maybe we'll come back and address it. But if you're a skeptic, tell us what you think and give us a substantive challenge to why you think this doesn't address.

the Youth of Road dilemma sufficiently in the way that Bill did. But that was my response. I was actually shocked. I was like, oh, okay, let's keep moving on. So it was fascinating. All right. So I just got a couple of personal questions for you as we wrap this up. As I look at these nine attributes, somebody's like, if I look at simplicity, I would not be

super motivated to study that personally. Like, I would not get excited about that. But if I saw God's goodness or I saw his omnipotence, I would like cling to that and go, yeah, I really want clarity on this. Did you have a favorite one to study or any that are just like, all right, I got to buckle down for six weeks and just do this? Well, some were certainly more difficult than others. I think I probably like divine eternity the best, Sean, because I'm just fascinated by the subject of time. I think it was Max Black, a famous philosopher, who said,

said no subject is more profound and more difficult to understand than the subject of time unless it were God himself. And so when you try to put time and God together, you have got a subject that you can spend the rest of your life thinking about. And so I really do love that attribute of divine eternity. You can literally spend all the time you have just trying to unpack it. Pun intended. All right. So you say at the introduction of this one, there's a quote from a Lutheran theologian Robert Pruss, hopefully if I didn't say that right, correct me.

Says the doctrine of God is the most difficult locus in Christian dogmatics. Why is the doctrine of God so difficult compared to others? One reason we've already alluded to, and that would be that it is biblically underdetermined. The Bible says that God is eternal, but it doesn't make clear whether he is timeless or omnitemporal. The Bible says that God is omnipresent, but it doesn't make it clear whether he transcends space or is everywhere in space. The Bible teaches that God is not composed of separable parts, but does that mean that he has no complexity at all? these are profound questions that you can't answer just by quoting Bible verses. And so one of the things that I emphasize at the very beginning of this book, and we haven't

talked about today, is that our guides for doing Christian systematic theology are twofold. One is scripture. What does the Bible teach? but then the other is perfect being theology. What is required by God's status as a maximally great being. And so where the Bible is underdeterminative, perfect being theology will say, interpret that biblical attribute to the maximal degree possible,

to exalt God's greatness as the greatest, being conceivable as far as you can. And so those twin guides to doing theology, I think, make the doctrine of God extremely profound. You made the point that I hadn't thought about before, is that, of course, this is kind of like a mullinous systematic philosophical theology in some ways. We didn't even go into that. It's all over this. It's all over this volume. But you say, God who knows, you know, has middle knowledge is greater than one who doesn't. And I had not even thought about that reason to embrace Molinism. Biblical evidence aside, just an interesting point in itself.

Yes, that actually comes out in the chapter on omnipotence in conversation with the philosopher Brian Leftow, where I argue against Leftow that a God who has middle knowledge and can direct a world of free creatures toward his provisioned ends is far more powerful than a God who has to determine everything causally in order to get what he wants. Did you change your mind on any of these attributes in your view as you probed in to study them? Well, I wouldn't say I'd change my mind about divine goodness, but it certainly was deepened and made more profound and nuanced. I learned a lot in that chapter on divine goodness. We haven't talked about it, but that whole section about God's creating the best possible world. And if he creates a world

that is good, knowing that he could have created a better one, does that impugn his moral perfection? That, to me, is very profound section. So that was definitely something that I had learned in doing this. And also the one on omnipotence. I had never run into this concept of omnipotence as differentiating between the degree of God's power and the range of his power. So I definitely learned and deepened my own knowledge in the course of this study. Well, anybody reading it will feel the same. I thought that point about best possible worlds.

It's like, how exactly do we judge and gauge this? There's people coming to faith. There's the expression of God's grace. There's spiritual growth. Are these incommensurate? How do we really determine what is the best? Is such a fair challenge to the idea that God is bound to do so according to some metric we come up with. So that section again was really helpful. Tell us what's next, because when volume 2B comes out, we'd love to have you back, but tell us what you're working on. Volume 2B is in the works.

I've just returned the proofs, and that will include my defense of six arguments for the existence of God, and then we'll finish out with a doctrine of the Trinity, where I lay out my social trinitarian model of God as a tripersonal soul. Well, Bill, I mean this with all sincerity, but I can't wait. I look forward to reading it. I enjoy this stuff. I love it just like I love superheroes and I'm a nerd. I love apologetics and philosophical theology and just keep praying.

God continues to give you just strength and clarity and good health to finish this. I know a lot of folks the first time we had you on said they're just praying that God guides you through this because it's a big lifetime project. Well, we are at the time. You've agreed to come on. So I want to thank you a ton. Folks pick up a systematic philosophical theology. Our guest today, Dr. William and Craig, this is Volume 2A, watched through nine attributes about the character of God and responds to common objections and just nuances what he thinks is the most coherent biblical and philosophical way of approaching God's omnipotence and omniscience and assiety, et cetera.

And while you're at it, make sure you hit subscribe. We've got some other programs coming on, including maybe Bill will come back and do time to talk about volume to B. And if you thought about studying apologetics or philosophy, we would love to have you at Talbot School of Theology. We have a full distance program. Information below. We just hired a new faculty member,

Moretu Guta, just a brilliant young philosopher who's on our staff. and I know you know them as well, Bill. So thanks again for coming on. Folks, we'll see you soon. Hello, hello. Punez Petway here, co-host of the Your Daily Bible Verse podcast. Are you someone who loves to take a deep dive into God's Word,

one verse at a time to explore his will for your life, and desire to draw closer to him? If that sounds like you, I'd love to invite you to head over to lifeadio.com and search your daily Bible verse to tune in and subscribe for daily inspiration, life application, and spiritual transformation through the in-depth exploration of God's Word.