Response (Answers to Tough Questions on God Christianity and The Bible), Moody Publishers 2013, p97.] On most Divine Command theories God possesses His qualities essentially (indeed, that’s just what it means to say they’re part of His nature!). So there is no possible world in which God is not kind, impartial, gracious, loving, and so on. So I don’t think it is possible that Allah is God, since Allah is not all-loving and impartial. [William Lane Craig and Joseph E. Gorra: A Reasonable Response (Answers to Tough Questions on God Christianity and The Bible), Moody Publishers 2013, p98.] Part 2: Questions About God 1 On the Existence of God On Whether God’s Existence Can Be Evident to Every Sincere Seeker God’s existence may not be evident to someone at certain stages of his life but may become evident when and through what means God chooses. If a person is truly seeking God, he will persist in his search and will eventually find God. [William Lane Craig and Joseph E. Gorra: A Reasonable Response (Answers to Tough Questions on God Christianity and The Bible), Moody Publishers 2013, p133.] The problem with such an argument, however, is that we’re just not in a position to look into the human heart and judge a person’s sincerity in this regard. This would require a kind of psychological insight that is not available to us. Only God is capable of doing the spiritual cardiogram necessary for answering this question. [William Lane Craig and Joseph E. Gorra: A Reasonable Response (Answers to Tough Questions on God Christianity and The Bible), Moody Publishers 2013, p134.] if a person persists in unbelief until his death, then the evidence for Jesus’ identity and the truth of His claims gives us reason to think that that person was not as sincere as he imagined himself to be. (…) Notice as well that this answer is not to say that “every non-Christian [who persists until death in unbelief] is lying, either about God’s existence being evident or about being sincere.” Rather such a person may be self-deceived. He imagines himself to be sincere and earnest in seeking God, when in truth
He has no one to blame but himself. [William Lane Craig and Joseph E. Gorra: A Reasonable Response (Answers to Tough Questions on God Christianity and The Bible), Moody Publishers 2013, p231.] Deism and Christian Theism Ayala, though an ardent Darwinian, is very candid that when biologists affirm that “evolution is a fact,” what they are talking about is common descent. But he says that “evolution,” when defined as either a reconstruction of the evolutionary tree of life or as an account of the mechanisms that explain evolutionary change, is very uncertain and a matter of ongoing study. [William Lane Craig and Joseph E. Gorra: A Reasonable Response (Answers to Tough Questions on God Christianity and The Bible), Moody Publishers 2013, p232.] Moreover, you’re persuaded by the kalam cosmological argument for a personal Creator of the universe. This argument gives us an uncaused, beginningless, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful, personal Creator of the universe, who, as we may infer from the design argument above, designed the universe and the Earth to bring forth intelligent beings like ourselves. [William Lane Craig and Joseph E. Gorra: A Reasonable Response (Answers to Tough Questions on God Christianity and The Bible), Moody Publishers 2013, p233.] Now, if such a Creator and Designer exists and has brought us into existence, doesn’t that suggest to you that He would have some purpose in mind which He would want us to know so that we might achieve the ends for which He created us? This consideration ought to make us take the claims of revealed religion, or at least the claims of the great monotheistic faiths that are consistent with the existence of such a transcendent Creator and Designer, very seriously. [William Lane Craig and Joseph E. Gorra: A Reasonable Response (Answers to Tough Questions on God Christianity and The Bible), Moody Publishers 2013, p233.] So why don’t you do what most New Testament scholars do: set aside the theological conviction that the gospels are inspired and look at them as ordinary historical documents about the life of this remarkable man, Jesus