Show Notes
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
More from In the Arena: The Debates and Lectures of William Lane Craig
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.
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.