THE CITY

Winter 2015
has been made on important issues like the epistemic status of
belief in God, the coherence of theism, and the problem of evil,
so that questions which dominated earlier discussions have been
resolved or have yielded to new questions. For example, the socalled
presumption of atheism, which so dominated mid-twentieth
century philosophy of religion, according to which atheism is a sort
of default position, is now a relic of the past. Similarly, scarcely
any philosopher today defends the so-called logical version of the
problem of evil, which claims that God and the suffering in the
world are logically incompatible. The discussion of the coherence of
theism, which analyzes the principal attributes traditionally ascribed
to God, such as aseity, necessity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience,
and omnipresence, has been an especially fertile field of exploration.
The renaissance of Christian philosophy has not been merely
defensive, however. Rather it has also been accompanied by a
resurgence of interest in natural theology, that branch of theology
which seeks to prove God’s existence apart from the resources of
authoritative divine revelation. All of the traditional arguments for
God’s existence, such as the cosmological, teleological, moral, and
ontological arguments, not to mention creative, new arguments,
find intelligent and articulate defenders on the contemporary
philosophical scene.
Of course, there are replies and counter-replies to all of these
arguments, and no one imagines that a consensus will be reached.
But theists welcome this debate. For the very presence of the debate
is itself a sign of how healthy and vibrant a theistic worldview is
today.
WILLIAM LANE CRAIG, PhD, DTheol, Dlitt,
is a Professor of Philosophy at Houston Baptist
University and Research Professor of Philosophy
at Talbot School of Theology. He has authored or
edited over 40 books.
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