I’m grateful for all the time and effort that our commentators have obviously put into their essays. Faced with such a plethora of detailed comments, I don’t want us—especially those who have not yet read the book—to lose the forest for the trees. So I want to take a step back and look at the…

The five chapters in Part 3 of William Lane Craig’s beautifully written book In Quest of the Historical Adam turn to the scientific investigation of human evolution to answer three questions: What are the behaviors that make us humans? When do we first see these behaviors in geological time? What are the scientific objections to…

Bill Craig has presented us with an important book that does something that no other volume has done before, and that is to provide the reader with a comprehensive review of biblical, theological, and scientific data and arguments concerning the historical Adam. As a result, the book makes an important contribution to this (pun intended)…

It is a pleasure to participate in this symposium on Bill Craig’s new book, In Quest of the Historical Adam. But more than that, it is a responsibility: the issues are hardly of secondary importance. Indeed, for all that I think that one’s views on subjects such as whom to baptize, and what happens when…

There is much to like in this new book. For one thing, Bill Craig’s writing is clean as a whistle. His arguments are easy to follow and almost always illuminating. Writing this kind of monograph takes courage—most scholars prefer to hunker down in their silos, but Craig is a man on a mission, straddling multiple…

With In Quest of the Historical Adam, William Lane Craig enters into the current discussion about the historicity of the biblical original couple. At the outset, Craig cautions: People on both the left and the right can be expected to be upset with this book and, unfortunately, its author. All I can do is plead…

“Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.”   —James Baldwin, “A letter from a Region in My Mind” The New Yorker (1962) I appreciate this opportunity to discuss and debate the implications of my book Divine Variations. Many points were raised that I…

René Descartes introduced the modern notion of a “law of nature.” The Medieval Scholastic notion of “natural law” was more of a teleological notion; and in particular with respect to human beings, “natural law” described not how we in fact behave but how we ought to behave—the “unnatural” was, in effect, the deviant. The Cartesian…

Does God break the laws of nature? Having ordained the laws in the first place, God clearly has the ability to do so. And Scripture seems to reveal God breaking such laws in the past, from axe heads that float (2 Kgs 6) to the parting of the Red Sea (Exod 14). Many answers to…

Tempted: I see that I must be placed in the ground and reduced to dust. A bed will be spread out for my body in the grave and therefore I said to that place of rottenness, ‘You are my father,’ and to the worms, ‘You are my mother and sister’ (Job 17:14). Comforter: Do not…

The first instinct of many would be to answer “Yes” to this question. For God to “act in the world,” they suppose, would be for God to “intervene” in the natural course of events. Such divine intervention would be an external supernatural cause that interrupts natural cause-and-effect relations and therefore contravenes the laws that govern…

You may have heard the claim that God cannot answer prayers because that would violate the laws of nature, which determine everything that happens. This view reflects an outdated, but still popular interpretation of the laws of nature. It dates back to the time when people were deeply impressed by the success of Newton’s laws…