Advertise on podcast: In the Arena: The Debates and Lectures of William Lane Craig

In November of 2018, Dr. Craig was honored to give the Plenary Lecture of the Evangelical Philosophical Society conference in Denver, Colorado. In his lecture to a packed house, Dr. Craig gives a defense of penal substitutionary atonement by outlining its coherence, its justice, and its satisfactoriness.

In March 2015, Dr William Lane Craig was invited to give multiple lectures at the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham in England. In this second lecture, Dr. Craig addresses the challenge of Platonism to God's nature.

Rhett McLaughlin, co-creator of Good Mythical Morning, sat down with Alex O’Connor to explain why he walked away from Christianity. Joining Sean McDowell, Dr. Craig reacts to ten clips from that conversation. Do Rhett’s reasons for leaving hold up under scrutiny? Listen in as Dr. Craig takes them on one by one. Original video: The Sean McDowell Show, youtube.com/watch?v=75gT-lEgRRw

Dr. Craig joins Eric Metaxas on Socrates in the City for a conversation that begins with whether we can know that God exists. Why does Dr. Craig consider apathy a greater obstacle to belief than atheism? What does he think kept Christopher Hitchens from engaging the arguments? The discussion then turns to Dr. Craig's Systematic Philosophical Theology: how Scripture can be both the Word of God and the words of men, what inerrancy does and does not require, and why he tentatively places the historical Adam and Eve some 750,000 years ago, as ancestors of Neanderthals as well as modern humans.

Can there be meaning or morality without God? And what's the real difference between God and the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Dr. William Lane Craig takes on Richard Dawkins' central argument against God, explains what it means to call God a necessary being, and answers hard questions about whether Jesus' story borrows from pagan myth, whether Christianity can be the one true religion, and how heaven can be joyful if loved ones are missing.

Catholic apologist Trent Horn sits down with Dr. William Lane Craig to compare their paths from high school conversions to public debate, then turns to the argument that has defined Dr. Craig's career. Dr. Craig explains how a clearance-table copy of Stuart Hackett's The Resurrection of Theism led to his doctoral work on the kalam cosmological argument under John Hick. He also explains why he sees newer work, including causal finitism from Alexander Pruss, Rob Koons, and Andrew Loke and the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, as strengthening the premise that the universe began to exist. The two discuss Hilbert's Hotel, St. Bonaventure's argument against an infinite past, and theories of time. Dr. Craig argues that the growing block view Trent finds attractive is incoherent. Turning to Catholic and Protestant differences, Dr. Craig offers two pieces of advice. First, he suggests reading the Council of Trent's teaching on justification as describing what Protestants call sanctification, which would make much of the dispute semantic. Second, he urges the Church to abandon infant baptism. He argues that pairing it with baptismal regeneration fills the pews with unregenerate "cradle Catholics." Trent makes the Catholic case in response. Dr. Craig closes with counsel for aspiring apologists: guard your marriage, family, and devotional life, because public success means nothing if those fail.

Is the Trinity Biblical? Is it logically sound, or total nonsense? In this important interview, I ask Dr. William Lane Craig his top 13 questions on the Trinity, such as: "If Jesus is God, and the Father is God, then is Jesus the Father?" This is one you may want to listen to a couple times to really grasp. Enjoy and let us know what you think!

Could Adam & Eve have been real people who lived long before 6,000 years ago? Dr. William Lane Craig defends his historical Adam model. In this in-depth interview, Dr. William Lane Craig defends the central argument of his book In Quest of the Historical Adam: that Adam and Eve were real historical persons, but likely lived far earlier than the traditional young-earth timeline — possibly 750,000 to 1 million years ago. Craig walks through why he came to believe population genetics doesn't rule out a single founding couple, why a 2023 genetic bottleneck study functions as unexpected confirmation of his hypothesis, and why he thinks Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis may have shared in the image of God. The conversation also tackles some of the toughest objections to an ancient historical Adam: animal death and predation before the Fall, the enormous silent gap in Genesis's genealogies, whether Adam and Eve were created mortal, and how parents might explain any of this to their kids. It's a wide-ranging, careful case for taking both Genesis and evolutionary biology seriously — without giving up on a real Adam and Eve. Guest: Dr. William Lane Craig, Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and author of In Quest of the Historical Adam: A Biblical and Scientific Exploration (Eerdmans, 2021). Interview conducted by Colin Barke of Glaube ist frag-würdig ("Faith Is Questionable"), a German podcast on faith and doubt — https://letscast.fm/sites/glaube-ist-frag-wuerdig-96b78fc0/index

Agnostic philosopher of science Michael Ruse and Dr. William Lane Craig conversationally debate one another on theistic concepts, the resurrection of Jesus, the nature of the Gospel accounts, morality, philosophy, Molinism, and more. Special thanks to Bryan Callen for this interview on The Bryan Callen Show.

Is belief in God intellectually defensible or just wishful thinking? In this classic interview with John Ankerberg, Dr. William Lane Craig lays out five lines of evidence he's used for decades to make the case for God's existence against atheism and agnosticism. Whether you're a skeptic, a seeker, or a believer looking to sharpen your own case, this episode is a compact tour of the arguments that have shaped Dr. Craig's public ministry.

Dr. William Lane Craig gives a lecture on a classic Christian controversy, explaining historical positions and biblical perspectives on the nature of Christ.

Philosopher and theologian Dr William Lane Craig tackles one of the deepest questions of the human condition: is faith in God rationally defensible, or just a comforting illusion we cling to because the truth feels unbearable? Speaking to a packed Oxford Town Hall, Craig moves from the honest doubts of thinkers like Bertrand Russell through the cosmological and fine-tuning arguments for a Creator, into the historical case for Jesus's resurrection — before opening the floor to audience questions on suffering, moral truth, and how to know if our hearts are truly open to the evidence. A rigorous look at why belief in God still makes sense in a sceptical age.

Where did reality come from, where is it heading, and does any of it have meaning? Host Jack Symes puts Dr. William Lane Craig in conversation with three strikingly different thinkers: Hindu scholar Jessica Frazier, philosopher Philip Goff, and agnostic thinker Joe Folley — recorded live with support from the John Templeton Foundation. Dr. Craig argues that God is the best explanation for the universe, morality, and human purpose. Frazier challenges Western assumptions about God, matter, and consciousness. Goff opens up about mystical experience, psychedelics, suffering, and his unexpected journey toward a form of theism. And Folley questions whether meaning needs to be objective at all. A wide-ranging debate spanning God, atheism, morality, consciousness, and the story of everything — this episode gives you Craig at his best, testing his case against some of the sharpest and most unconventional voices in philosophy of religion today. Note: this episode contains occasional strong language and adult phrasing, and may not be suitable for all listeners under 18.

Dr. William Lane Craig tackles some of the most controversial questions concerning the first book of the Bible. Was Adam a real, historical person? If so, who was he and when did he live? Drawing on his book In Quest of the Historical Adam, Dr. Craig argues that Genesis 1–11 is best read as "mytho-history": grounded in real people and events, yet told in the figurative, symbolic language of ancient Near Eastern myth — not unlike the way the Psalms or apocalyptic literature aren't meant to be taken literally. Dr. Craig makes the case that Adam and Eve must predate not only Homo sapiens but Neanderthals, whom he argues were fully human, tool-making, dead-burying persons, placing a historical founding couple as far back as 750,000 years ago, among the species Homo heidelbergensis. Along the way, he addresses why he considers young earth creationism a "nightmare scenario" for reconciling faith and science, why the doctrine of original sin doesn't require what most people assume it does, why a real Adam matters for the authority of Scripture and the words of Jesus, and how evolution and a historical Adam might fit together through what he calls a divinely imparted "rational soul."

A panel of scholars offer their evaluations of Dr. Craig's Systematic Philosophical Theology, Volume One at the Evangelical Philosophical Society conference in 2025. In this second part, Dr. Craig responds and the panel takes Q&A from the audience.