Personal Interlude
Personal Interlude
A Philosopher’s Journey of Faith,
Part One
Having become a Christian during my junior year in high school, I was soon faced with the decision of picking a college to attend. Sandy, the girl in my German class who had shared with me her faith in Christ, suggested that I apply to Wheaton College, where her older brother Paul was a student. Studying at a Christian college really appealed to me as a young believer, so I applied and was accepted.
You have to understand that I had never been a part of the Christian subculture before, so attending Wheaton was for me like a foretaste of heaven—professors prayed before class, there was daily chapel, you never heard swearing or filthy talk in the locker room, and so on. I was bowled over!
But the truly priceless gift that Wheaton gave to me was the integration of my faith and learning. I saw that as a Christian I didn’t need to stick my brains in one pocket and my faith in the other pocket and never let them see the light of day at the same time. Rather I could have a Christian worldview—a Christian perspective on science, a Christian perspective on history, a Christian perspective on the arts, and so on. It was at Wheaton that I caught the vision of sharing my faith in the context of presenting an intellectual defense of the gospel, to appeal to the head as well as to the heart.
Unfortunately, Wheaton was at that time surprisingly weak in apologetics. My theology professor Robert Webber taught us that there are no good arguments for God’s existence and that the traditional proofs had all been refuted. Though I was skeptical about his claim, I more or less bought into what he said on the basis of his authority.
Then just prior to graduating from Wheaton I picked up a copy of a book by Professor Stuart Hackett called The Resurrection of Theism on a clearance table at the college bookstore. I must confess that I wasn’t even sure what the title meant! Later during the fall, when I got around to reading the book, I was absolutely stunned by what I read. In contrast to what I had been taught at Wheaton, Hackett, with devastating logic, was defending arguments for God’s existence and providing refutations of every conceivable objection to them.
The centerpiece of Hackett’s case was an argument that struck a deep chord in me: It is rationally inconceivable that the series of past events be infinite; there must have been a beginning of the universe and therefore a transcendent cause that brought it into being. Reading Hackett’s book was a shocking, eye-opening experience for me. I had to find out if he was right.
During my senior year at Wheaton, a chapel speaker named John Guest had challenged us seniors to take a couple years out after graduation to share our faith full-time with university students while we were still about the same age. That made sense to me, so I decided to put off my plans to go to seminary for two years and joined the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ. I was assigned to the staff team at Northern Illinois University.
One of the other members of the team was a young, single woman named Jan Coleman, a graduate of the University of North Dakota. Vivacious and outgoing, she projected confidence, independence, and strength. She was sold out to Christ and committed to evangelism. Not only that, but with her slim figure, waist-length dark brown hair, and big brown eyes, she was—well, let’s just say very attractive! She even told me she wanted to go to seminary, precisely where I was headed. Well, a girl like this was way out of my league, but I couldn’t help but be attracted to her. Miracles still happen, for as I worked with the guys and she with the gals, we fell in love and were married by the end of the school year.
We then set our sights on the master’s degree program in philosophy spearheaded by Dr. Norman Geisler at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School north of Chicago. One of the program’s entrance requirements was the Graduate Record Exam in philosophy, so over the next year in preparation for the exam I read and took detailed notes on Frederick Copleston’s monumental nine-volume History of Philosophy. It was there that I discovered the long history of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thought about the argument that Hackett was defending. I determined that if I could ever do doctoral work in philosophy, I would write my PhD dissertation on this argument.
We spent two great years at Trinity, studying under men such as Paul Feinberg, David Wolfe, John Warwick Montgomery, David Wells, John Woodbridge, J. I. Packer, Clark Pinnock, and Murray Harris. I earned twin master’s degrees in philosophy of religion and in church history. Our time at Trinity turned out to be a crucial stepping-stone in the path God had set for us.
Jan and I have found that in our life together, the Lord usually shows us only enough light along the path to take the next step without knowing what lies further down the trail. So one evening as Jan and I were nearing the end of our time at Trinity, we were sitting at the supper table, talking about what to do after graduation. Neither of us had any clear idea or leading as to what we should do.
At that point Jan said to me, “Well, if money were no object, what would you really like to do next?”
I replied, “If money were no object, what I’d really like to do is go to England and do a doctorate under John Hick.”
“Who’s he?” she asked.
“Oh, he’s this famous British philosopher who’s written extensively on arguments for the existence of God,” I explained. “If I could study with him, I could develop the cosmological argument for God’s existence.”
But it hardly seemed a realistic idea.
The next evening Jan handed me a slip of paper with John Hick’s address on it. “I went to the library today and found out that he’s at the University of Birmingham in England,” she said. “Why don’t you write to him and ask him if you can do a doctoral thesis under him on the cosmological argument?”
What a woman! So I did, and to our amazement and delight Professor Hick wrote back saying he’d be very pleased to supervise my doctoral work on that subject. So it was an open door! The only problem was, the University of Birmingham required an official bank statement certifying that we had all of the money for all of the years it would take me to complete the doctoral degree. (They didn’t want foreign students dropping out midway through their doctoral programs because they had run out of cash.)
Well, we didn’t have that kind of money! In fact, we were as poor as church mice. Our efficiency apartment at Trinity was so small that lying on our mattress on the floor I could reach out and touch the refrigerator. We used to cut paper plates in half just to keep down expenses! (That led to an embarrassing moment once when we had Dr. Woodbridge over for dessert, and Jan, not even thinking about it, served him his pie on a half of a paper plate! Gracious to a fault, he never said a thing.)
But we really sensed that God was calling us to go to England to do this degree. There were no scholarships for foreign students at that time from the financially strapped British universities. We had to come up with the money ourselves. And so every morning and evening we began to pray that somehow the Lord would supply the funds.
We made an appointment with a non-Christian businessman whose family had supported Jan on Campus Crusade staff, and we laid out for him what we believed God was calling us to do. And this non-Christian businessman gave us—not loaned us—he gave us all of the money we needed to do the doctoral degree under John Hick at the University of Birmingham! It was one of the most astonishing provisions of the Lord I have ever seen. So Jan and I felt as though God had miraculously plucked us up and transported us to England to do this degree.
I did write on the cosmological argument under Professor Hick’s direction, and eventually three books flowed out of that doctoral dissertation. I was able to explore the historical roots of Hackett’s argument, as well as deepen and advance his analysis. I also discovered quite amazing connections to contemporary astronomy and cosmology.
Because of its historic roots in medieval Islamic theology, I christened Hackett’s argument “the kalam cosmological argument” (kalam is the Arabic word for medieval theology). Today this argument, largely forgotten since the time of Kant, is once again back at center stage. The Cambridge Companion to Atheism (2007) reports, “A count of the articles in the philosophy journals shows that more articles have been published about Craig’s defense of the Kalam argument than have been published about any other philosopher’s contemporary formulation of an argument for God’s existence.… Theists and atheists alike ‘cannot leave Craig’s Kalam argument alone’” (p. 183).
We thank the Lord for giving us the privilege of studying this historic argument. In the next chapter I’ll share it with you.