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Dr. Craig, I’m really glad that you’re here today.
And I want to start with a question that may describe what a lot of people in our audience
right now, what they are saying about themselves: What difference does it make if God exists
or not?
Why does it matter?
Many people say that it really doesn’t matter to them if God exists or not.
And you say the most important question anybody can even answer is the question of God’s
existence.
Why?
Dr. William Lane Craig: People who shrug their shoulders and say, “What difference does
it make whether God exists or not,” merely show that they haven’t thought very deeply
about this question.
Even atheist philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, recognize
that the existence of God makes a tremendous difference for man, both collectively and
individually.
You see, if God does not exist, then human beings are just biological organisms, and
like all biological organisms, are doomed to die both individually and collectively
as a whole.
And therefore every one of us has to come to grips with what the theologian Paul Tillich
called “the threat of non-being.”
That is to say, even though I know that I exist—I am real, I’m alive—I also know
that someday I will die.
I will cease to exist.
I will no longer be.
And that thought is staggering.
I remember as a boy when my father first remarked to me offhand that someday I would die, I
was just overwhelmed with this fact.
I was filled with an unbearable sadness and fear.
Somehow, as a child, the thought that I was going to cease to exist, I was going to die,
had just never occurred to me.
And over time I learned to live with the inevitable; as we all do.
But I think that Jean-Paul Sartre’s insight remains true: Whether it’s a few hours or
a few years, makes no difference once you have lost eternity.
And if there is no God, then we have lost any hope of immortality.
We have only this finite existence.
So, for each one of us individually, life ends at the grave.
And this is true not only for us individually, but also collectively for mankind as a whole.
Scientists tell us that the universe is expanding.
And as it does so, it grows colder and colder and colder.
Eventually there will be no light at all; there will be no heat; there will be no life.
There will simply be the carcasses of dead stars and galaxies expanding into the infinite
blackness and the recesses of outer space.
So if there is no God, then mankind is doomed to extinction, as well as each one of us individually
is doomed to death.
And the result of this is that life itself becomes absurd.
The life that we do have is without ultimate meaning, value or purpose.