APOLOGETICS: FULL William Lane Craig Interview

Friends, it's an honor and a pleasure to welcome our next guest. He is the research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology and professor of philosophy at Houston Baptist University. He's an apologist, a speaker, debater, and the author of over 30 books, including On Guard, Reasonable Faith, and the brand new book, Atonement and the Death of Christ.

William Lane Craig, welcome to our show.

Thank you.

Good to be with you.

Well, it's such a pleasure. You know, in the monologue, I talked about first interacting with your book, Reasonable Faith, and I think I got to about chapter two, which is the absurdity of life without.

God.

And I was immediately struck by how accurate and true your words were. So I'm sure you get this a lot, but your ministry has significantly affected me and my team. It's just a pleasure to have you on.

Well, thank you very much. That chapter was reflective of my own experience as a non-Christian. I felt deeply the despair and the darkness of a non-Christian world, doomed to end in death. So that very much reflected my own pre-Christian experience.

Yeah, it really resonated with me as well. I had a similar experience. But we are interested in just starting out, finding out about your origin story. So maybe we could start here, and you could tell us how you got started in apologetics in the first place.

Was it immediately after becoming saved, or did it take a while?

Well, as I mentioned, I came out of this non-Christian background. So when I did become a Christian my junior year in high school, I was immediately confronted with having to explain to my family and to my friends in high school why I had taken this radical step.

And so right from the beginning, I was involved in giving reasons for my newfound faith. But that interest then became sharpened and deepened through my four years that I spent at Wheaton College. Wheaton is a Christian liberal arts institution which seeks to integrate your faith and your learning to develop a Christian worldview.

And it was at Wheaton that the vision of having a ministry of sharing the gospel in the context of giving an intellectual defense of the Christian worldview really took shape.

Ah, okay. Was there something that struck you that perhaps initiated your path down in apologetics? Was there an argument in particular that just hits you right and you got the bug? How did that go?

Well, not at first. What I think really turned me on to apologetics was a class I took at Wheaton called Conflicts in Biblical Christianity. And as part of that course, I read a book by Edward John Carnell called Introduction to Christian Apologetics.

I had never read a book like this before. Carnell was asking questions that troubled me, like what is truth? How do you test for truth? How do you know that the Christian worldview is true? And I was just enamored with the questions he asks and the answers he gave.

And so it was really Carnell that quickened my interest in apologetics as a discipline.

That's good. Was there like some books that you... So I think of my own experience getting into apologetics initially after becoming saved. I think I immediately discovered Francis Schaeffer, the Francis Schaeffer Trilogy, started reading that.

Were there books also that shaped your views early on?

Well, at Wheaton, Francis Schaeffer in the late 60s and early 70s was something of the darling of the Christian subculture. And so he was very popular at that time. He spoke on campus in Chapel. I heard him myself in person.

But you see, the problem is that Schaeffer only had a negative apologetic for Christianity. His apologetic consisted entirely of showing that if there is no God, then it leads to despair and absurdity and culture and society go down the drain into an unlivable worldview.

So it was very, very effective in showing the negative consequences of Christianity is not true. But he never answered the question, well, how do we know that it really is true? Maybe things really are this awful.

Bertrand Russell once said that only when you understand that the world really is a terrible place are you ready to come to terms with life. And Schaeffer never gave an answer to that problem. And so it was only later then, beginning with Carnell, and then later on that I began to discover positive reasons for Christian belief.

I see. Well, you mentioned Francis Schaeffer dealing with the culture of the time. I remember Schaeffer talking quite a bit. And of course, Schaeffer was in the 1960s and 70s. Was that about it?

Yeah.

And kind of looking out at the cultural landscape and dealing with the end of, I guess, the modern era, moving into the postmodern era. So what was the worldview of the culture like when you got started in apologetics?

How would you describe that?

Well, I don't think that it was all that different than it is today. You see, I don't agree or think that we live in a postmodern culture. I think that our culture in the West remains at heart deeply modernist.

And the worldview is basically that science and technology give us the objective truth about the world, but that religion and ethics are a matter of personal taste and emotive expression. And that was the view back then.

And I think it's pretty much still the same way today. People are not relativistic about medicine, science, technology. They're relativistic about ethics and religion. And you see, that's not postmodernism.

That's modernism.

Right.

No, that's good. So then would you say that just the values have shifted then, if not the worldview of the culture?

Yes.

You know, it's so interesting what we are going through now in the West and particularly in the United States is so reminiscent of the late 1960s in the aftermath or during the Vietnam War, the social unrest, the uprisings, the rioting, the looting, the rejection of traditional middle class values and so forth.

I have never seen a time that is so similar to the 1960s during my student days at college as our contemporary situation. So it was very similar at that time. Great, deep divisions within American culture and hatred and vilification of the establishment.

Very similar to today.

Yeah.

I mean, if it's so similar, and I guess where we're going with this interview is, you know, how do we think about engaging the culture today and in the future? But if it was so similar, then how did we get out of that?

Or did we ever get out of that late 60s mentality?

Well, it's really interesting. The United States seemed to get past the Vietnam War after Nixon developed the all-volunteer army and the draft ended, which was bitterly resentful when it was in place.

And then the Vietnam conflict ended. And slowly, I think there was a rebirth of patriotism and love of country in the United States. The celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the United States produced a great wave of patriotism.

And so there was great healing, I think, after Vietnam. And today, that is one of the great differences today, is that our military today, on all sides, is revered, spoken of respectively, admired. Even the liberal progressives don't dare to vilify the military in the way that they did in the late 1960s, where our men and women in the armed services were hated and regarded as the enemy.

And they returned from Vietnam uncelebrated, in shame, hated. It's very, very different today. So there was great healing that took place. But obviously, there is, at the same time, this deep undercurrent in the United States culture, probably mainly ensconced at the university, but also deeply infecting corporate culture and the entertainment industry, that has now just come bursting forth to the surface again, using racism as the excuse for the protest and the rejection of establishment values, claiming that America is fundamentally a racist nation, and that it's indelibly blotted with systemic racism.

And I think that's a change from the way it was before. I also see a change in that, back in the 60s, the radicalism was mainly at the universities, and that continues today. But today, the corporate culture, the sports culture, and entertainment have been infected with this kind of progressivism and rejection of traditional values.

I'm just really amazed at the degree to which British enterprises have adopted and endorsed the sort of radical progressive movement that sees the United States as fundamentally racist. And I think that what underlies this is a change in the definition of racism.

Racism used to be understood as the view that discriminated against people based on their skin color. If you discriminated against people based on their skin color, then that was racist. But that's not racist anymore.

Today, racism is an epithet that you simply use to bludgeon your political opponents. It basically means that your opponent is an SOB. He's an ignorant SOB, far to the right of me and my enlightened friends, as Alvin Plantinga has said with respect to fundamentalism.

So the meaning of racism has now become almost contentless, except as an epithet that you use to brand those to whom you are opposed politically.

That's a huge change.

Yeah.

In terms of theology and apologetics, have you noted the conversation shifting? I remember when I first got into apologetics, this was probably about 12 years or so ago, one of the big things that everybody I noticed were talking about was the Emergent Church, the Emergent Church.

And over time, that kind of dropped off, and now arguably the Emergent Church has morphed into progressive Christianity. But have you noted the shift in language or maybe even the argumentation? Are we arguing about the same things since the 70s?

No, we're not. But in this respect, we are in a much better place than we were back in the 50s and the 60s. Back when I was a student, as I said, about all we had at that time was Francis Schaeffer. And that was just a negative apologetic.

If you read apologetics, maybe you could get Cornelius Van Til or Gordon Clark, who basically said you presuppose Christianity to be true, and then you can prove it's true, which is reasoning in a circle.

That was about all there was. And now there has been this eruption of Christian apologetics, I think sparked by the Renaissance in Christian philosophy that has taken place since the late 1960s in Anglo-American philosophy.

And so now we are talking about Christian evidences, the historical Jesus, the evidence for the resurrection, for arguments of natural theology like the design argument, the cosmological argument has been raised from the dead, the moral argument is back on the table.

All the traditional arguments of natural theology have come back. When I was at Wheaton, and I'm not kidding, when I was at Wheaton, my theology professors taught me that there are no good arguments for the existence of God.

Wow.

And I thought, oh, surely there are. It seems to me there are good reasons to believe in God. But who was I to question these brilliant professors who surely knew more than I did? And so when they said there are no good arguments for the existence of God, I just sort of accepted.

Them.

All you had was this negative apologetics that if God does not exist, then human culture goes down the drain and we're landed in unlivable despair. And that was all we had. And that has completely changed.

So in that sense, we're in a much better place. And what baffles me, Nate, what I would love some sociologists to address, is why hasn't this revolution in Christian philosophy and apologetics impacted our culture more than it has?

I mean, why is it that these other areas that I talked about have gone so far left, so anti-Christian in many ways? And I think there is a religious component in this. It's not just political. There's a deep secularism, an anti-Christian element to it.

Why has that gone on and been so little affected by what's transpired in Christian philosophy and apologetics? It may be simply that there is a natural lag in the culture from when things happen in the academy and then it filters down to the man in the street.

But it seems to be more than that as well. And I'm puzzled by it.

Yeah.

It's a great pleasure to have you on.

We're very thankful to have you on the show. To get to these middle questions, kind of moving on in some of this worldview stuff, you talked about how we're very similar now in terms of worldview that the culture has to what it was kind of in the 60s and 70s.

And there are a lot of things that are very similar. It seems like though Christians are oftentimes sort of on the back end of catching up with the language of the culture and what worldview they're espousing and coming up with a defense for it and trying to speak that same language.

So with a view kind of towards the future a little bit, what do you think in terms of worldview, what do you think the culture is shifting into in the next 20 or 30 years or so?

Well, I'm probably one of those who is on the back end of change, as you put it, because I don't particularly strive to be relevant or cool or to connect with current fads. I believe that the best defense of the Christian faith is to show, as Carnell said, its logical consistency and that it fits all of the facts of experience, whether these be scientific, historical, personal, or whatever.

Now, in terms of where the culture is moving, I do think that there's a tremendous challenge from religious pluralism that we are having to deal with, namely the idea that there is no objective approach to God, but that it is purely subjective and that therefore all religions are equally valid approaches to God.

And the idea that Jesus Christ could be the only avenue of approach to God is for people today deeply offensive, deeply offensive. And so I do think we need to be prepared to defend the biblical view that Christ and Christ alone is the means of salvation.

I also think we're confronted with a real problem with respect to sexual ethics. It has become normative today that homosexual activity is perfectly acceptable, perfectly moral, and people who would say that a homosexual lifestyle is immoral are again regarded themselves as very immoral people, intolerant, unloving, bigoted.

And this is a real problem because I don't think we can compromise on biblical sexual ethics, which I think says that sexual activity needs to be reserved for the safe confines of heterosexual marriage.

And this makes any Christian tremendously out of step with our culture of cohabitation and homosexual activity. And so that's an area that I don't work in, but I do think we need people who are working in sexual ethics to be able to defend the biblical sexual ethic against the currents of our culture today.

Those are both good points. In terms of us being able to speak out in those avenues, both in the necessity of Jesus as the only way to salvation and also the sexual ethics, do you feel like we are at the doorstep of any sort of persecution in terms of making it illegal in some way to speak out regarding Jesus being the only way?

And when I asked this question, I kind of have the idea of hate crimes now being very popular, legal maneuvering to be able to limit what people can do or what they can even say and calling some things hate crimes.

Do you feel like we're on any kind of a beginning of any kind of persecution in that way?

I think the example of Canada gives real cause for worry in this regard. In Canada, the speech police, which have been so vigorously protested by people like Jordan Peterson, are dictatorial and really do threaten Christian institutions and Christian freedom of speech to express your dissenting opinion, even if you do so in a charitable way.

I have actually been banned from speaking at a couple of Canadian university campuses because of my views on heterosexual marriage, even though I wasn't talking about that. I was going to give a lecture on the existence of God, and yet someone was aware that I had defended heterosexual marriage as God's plan for humanity.

And for that reason, I was deemed unworthy to be able to speak at that university. So this is a kind of thing that could happen. And as I said before, epithets like racism have really lost their content, and anybody can be called a racist because of his conservative views that he might hold about sexual ethics or something of that sort, or he'll be called a homophobe.

These kinds of labels serve useful political purposes, even if they're not accurate. So yeah, I do think that this is a danger that we need to be alert to, and we need to be absolutely adamant in defending freedom of speech.

And that means defending the freedom of speech for those who disagree with us as well. We will be better served if we defend the freedom of speech of those on the far left, the radicals and the progressives, because that will then allow for our freedom to express dissenting opinions as well.

Yeah.

So moving on now, kind of stepping away from worldview a little bit, and sort of big picture question here. What is your favorite apologetic argument? And this doesn't have to be for the existence of God.

It can be some sort of doctrine, the case for Jesus rising from the grave. What's your favorite apologetic argument to step through with somebody, and why is that?

I suppose it would be the Kalam cosmological argument, which is the argument that I did my doctoral work on at the University of Birmingham, and which has kind of become my signature argument.

It has.

And then a close second, the evidence or the argument for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus, which was the subject of my doctoral thesis at the University of Munich in Germany. So both of those are dear to my heart.

So all of us know you very well for the first one you mentioned, the Kalam cosmological argument. If you could go into the other one a little bit, the evidence for the resurrection. What kind of things do you strike you as the best points in that?

And what are maybe some weaker ones? Take us through that a little bit.

Well, I tried to summarize the evidence for the resurrection as I understood it after doing my research at Munich. And it seemed to me that the evidence for the resurrection could be summed up under three broad facts.

One would be the discovery of Jesus' empty tomb by a group of his female followers on the first day of the week after Jesus' crucifixion. The second fact would be the post-mortem appearances of Jesus in various individuals and groups of people.

And the third fact would be that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe that God had raised Jesus from the dead despite every predisposition of the contrary. And what really surprised me, Gene, was the realization that these three facts were not merely the property of evangelical scholars or conservative critics.

These represent the wide majority of critics' views of the historical Jesus today. The wide majority of historical Jesus scholars affirm all three of those facts. And so the evidential base for the inference to Jesus' resurrection, I think, is remarkably firm.

I think that's a good point you raise, that this is not just a Christian scholarly view. This is the view of the majority of scholars, that the discovery of the tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and then the sudden change in the disciples is something that many scholars accept.

I know for a lot of nonbelievers, they will look at the Bible and say, well, that's a biased source. And of course, it says that Jesus rose from the dead and things like this. But it's important to note out that the Bible is a piece of literature.

It's an ancient text. And when examined in the same way as other ancient texts, it comes out very, very strong for the resurrection.

Isn't that right?

Yes, and it's more than that. It's a collection of ancient texts that was only cobbled together hundreds of years later. Originally, you had all of these separate letters and biographies and so forth, all testifying to this historical person, Jesus of Nazareth.

And of course, modern critical scholars are aware of the possibility of bias and have to take that into account. And these three facts that I mentioned are firmly established on the basis of historical scholarship, despite any tainting that might be the result of Christian bias.

Yeah.

Yeah, very, very good. So to be most effective today, a lot of young Christians are getting into apologetics, and there's a wealth of information out there. There's no shortage of people to read about any topic.

Right.

So in light of kind of looking forward to what appears that the culture is kind of bringing down the road and what people will need to be prepared for, what are some arguments that you think young apologists should be focused on today, really kind of sharpening their knives, so to speak, to be able to deal with in the next 10, 20, 30 years?

What are some of the arguments they should be prepared to have?

In terms of presenting a positive case for Christianity, the young apologist has got to have a few arguments for the existence of God under his belt. I don't care which ones he picks. I have my own favorites.

But he needs to be able to present two or three sound arguments for the existence of God. Then on top of that, he needs to have a good historical argument for the person of Jesus of Nazareth, why we think Jesus is special.

And here I think the evidence for Jesus' resurrection from the dead marks him out as God's divine agent and self-revelation. So those would be, I think, the two components of any positive argument. On the negative side, I think that the young apologist needs to be prepared for dealing with the old problem of evil and suffering.

How is it that there can be a loving, powerful God when there's so much pointless suffering in the world? So on the negative side, I think he needs to have an answer to that objection.

You said two to three arguments for the existence of God. We know the Kalam cosmological argument would definitely be one of those. What would be another good argument for that?

Well, another great argument is the fine-tuning argument for an intelligent designer of the universe. And this argument is so helpful because it does an end run around the whole emotionally poisoned issue of creation and evolution by going right back to the initial condition of the universe, the Big Bang, and showing that unless those initial conditions were fine-tuned to an incomprehensible delicacy and precision, that the evolution and existence of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos would have been impossible.

So that's a very powerful argument that supplements the Kalam cosmological argument based on the origin of the universe. And then I think an argument that is almost indispensable for people in our culture today is the moral argument, which says that if God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist.

And this is the point that Francis Schaeffer saw. This is the old negative, apologetic Schaeffer. But then the second premise would be, but objective moral values and duties do exist. The fact is that students believe deeply in objective moral values and duties, even though they may not realize it.

For example, they hold deeply to the value of tolerance. They think that it's objectively, morally wrong to impose your values on someone else. So they're deeply committed to the objectivity of the value of tolerance and love and open mindedness.

And from those two premises, it follows logically that therefore God exists. So this moral argument is a powerful existential argument for existence. And it moreover leads naturally into evangelism because it raises the question, have I done my moral duty?

Have I fulfilled the demands that God's moral law places upon me? And if not, how do I find forgiveness and moral cleansing for the moral wrongs that I have done?

On the problem of evil, this feels to me like something that will maybe never go away. But it also feels to me like something that's been answered over and over and over again. And from my view, of course, I believe it's been sufficiently answered.

Do you feel like this is something that will ever get solved and is something that every generation needs to be prepared for? Do you feel like there's going to eventually be some sort of a proverbial nail in the coffin that will just kind of put this to bed?

It will never go away because it is primarily an emotional objection, not an intellectual objection. The logical version of the problem of evil has been put away. Most atheist and theist philosophers alike recognize that the logical version of the problem of evil is bankrupt in the words of William Alston, a great philosopher.

The probabilistic version of the problem of evil, I think, is quite answerable intellectually. But you see, for most people, it's not an intellectual problem. It's that they are suffering or they see people suffering horribly.

And this just means that even though it's very difficult to believe in God. And so they're rather like Ivan Karamazov in Dostoyevsky's great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Ivan presents the problem of suffering and evil.

But at the end of the day, he says, I would rather stick with my indignation and anger, even if I am wrong. It doesn't matter if there is an intellectual solution to the problem of evil and suffering.

The atheist simply rejects God, regardless of whether or not there is a good answer to the problem intellectually.

Yeah, sometimes those emotional barriers are a lot more difficult to clear than the intellectual ones, even when you have good intellectual answers. And so, like you said, it does maintain throughout the years.

Before I pass you on to Logan here and kind of hinging off the last question, what are some good books, some good materials that young apologists should start reading? If you had a person who knew Christian, is interested in apologetics, and you wanted to give them something to get them through their first one to three years and then their first three to 10 years or something like that.

What's a good path in terms of material to be reading or authors to be following to put a young apologist on?

I think a good place to begin is with Lee Strobel's book, The Case for Christ. Although this is a popular level book and very simple, it is very substantive and it has good arguments and evidence in it.

And so I think beginning with Lee's book is a great first step. And then I would recommend my own book, On Guard, which is a kind of manual for Christians in terms of presenting a positive case for their faith and answering the principal objections against it.

And if you will memorize and master the arguments in On Guard, I can guarantee you, based upon decades of university evangelistic speaking, that you'll be able to deal with 95 of the questions that unbelievers bring against you when you're sharing your faith.

Dr. Craig, I want to echo Jean's and Nate's sentiments. And since you brought up On Guard, I wanted to let you know that that was one of the first apologetics books I read. So the first I read was The Case for Christ.

And I also I read On Guard on the recommendation of a friend when I was in college, and it was extremely helpful. It's a favorite of my wife's, too. I find it interesting in one of your responses, you kind of talked about how the moral argument in particular, how there's a link there between negative apologetics and evangelism.

And I think a lot about different interactions I've had on the evangelistic front. And depending on the tone that I've used, especially in the delivery, some of those exchanges have gone well and some have gone not so well.

And so kind of related to that train of thought, I wonder what your thoughts were on how important the character of the apologist is for our message and how young apologists can, how they can develop a winsome and high moral character and how that might be helpful.

I think it's inestimably important. Every time I go on a debate at a university, I'm acutely aware that I am there as a representative of Jesus Christ and that people need to see his character reflected in me, especially how I respond to insults and personal attacks by my opponent.

We need to imbibe deeply Jesus' admonition. Blessed are you when men persecute you and revile you and say all manner of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, he says, for your reward is great in the kingdom of heaven.

And so when we hear this kind of vitriol, it's so important that we not react in kind, that we smile, that we be kind and calm. And I think that it will help to really disarm the situation if we have our emotions under control and in check.

And I think the best way to do that is to have your arguments down. I have found that when I know the answer to an objection or question, that's when I'm the least defensive. There's just no reason to get your back up because you know what's the matter with what the other person is saying.

And so you can just explain in a gentle and calm way.

So especially on the winsome side of that, I was thinking about what you said about keeping your emotions in check, because sometimes we rehearse things really well in our head. And then when we actually get into the moment, you know, things run away from us and we, you know, emotions rise and that sort of thing.

I was wondering if in addition to knowing the arguments, have you had any recommendations for people? And I was wondering, you know, especially during your when you were first starting to do more like campus appearances and participating in debates.

Did you do any sort of like having people play devil's advocate with you or how did you kind of prepare so that when you got into that situation that it was easier to get those things under control?

Well, I didn't expect our interview today to be such a stroll down memory lane. But since you asked, I was in eight years of a high school and collegiate debate competition. And one of the first things that you are taught as a freshman debater is do not react to what the other team said.

You have a poker face. You sit there passively or impassively and you don't roll your eyes or raise your eyebrows or roll your head. You just sit there calmly and listen. And so this is, in a sense, instilled into me through my debate training that one simply doesn't react in that kind of way.

And so I do think this kind of calmness is an acquired ability that a person can develop by practice.

Cool. That's great to hear. I have some friends that were very involved in debate that I know listen to the podcast. They'll be excited to hear you say that, I think. So the next question I wanted to ask you was that you recently published Atonement and the Death of Christ.

And I know that you are very well known for the Kalam Cosmological Argument. I also know that you put a lot of time into this book, having heard you talk about the process on your own podcast, on the Reasonable Faith podcast.

So I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that book.

This book is a robust defense of the additional Reformation doctrine of the Atonement. Namely, the idea that on the cross, Christ bore the suffering that we deserved as the punishment for our sins, thereby releasing us from liability to punishment and affording us a divine pardon.

Now, it struck me the other day doing a radio interview that this probably sounds very ho-hum to the average Christian. This is what you hear from the pulpit. This is no big deal. And I think the average Christian just has no idea how widely and vehemently rejected this traditional Atonement is.

Even among Christian theologians, even among evangelical theologians, the idea that Christ paid the penalty for your sins, that he died in your place is denounced as an impossibility and an incoherence.

And so to give a defense of this classic Reformation doctrine of the Atonement, I honestly think, Gene, may well be, or Logan, sorry, may well be the most important theological work that I've done.

Wow, that's really cool. Well, and you made a great pitch for the book. So I'm curious too, this could probably be a whole podcast episode in and of itself, but I'm wondering how was it different spending time researching the Atonement as opposed to some of the other work you've done on, you know, apologetics and the cosmological argument and that sort of thing?

You know, it really was odd for me because I felt like I had put Philadelphia on the shelf for a couple of years, and I was immersed in Old Testament studies, studying the book of Leviticus and the Levitical animal sacrifices that were offered in the tabernacle and temple.

I was reading all of this professional Old Testament literature in professional journals, attending meetings at the Society of Biblical Literature in Old Testament studies. It was a very different experience for me, and even in the side parts of the Atonement, what I was reading was an area of philosophy that I had previously known nothing about, and that is philosophy of law.

There is a whole subdiscipline of philosophy devoted to the philosophy of law, and this would be important for people who, say, become judges or lawyers. And so I wound up reading scores of court opinions from the Supreme Court, appellate courts, various federal courts, British courts, and tons of legal literature, law journals.

It was a very, very different sort of experience for me as a professional philosopher to be doing this kind of work. But as I say, I honestly think this may well be the most logical contribution that I have to make as a Christian theologian and philosopher to the Christian faith.

Well, we can't wait to pick it up. I think it's available right now in bookstores everywhere. Would you say, Dr. Craig, that the Atonement is also something that the apologists should be well-versed in for the future?

Not necessarily, unless he's going to be doing theology or philosophy of religion, because, as I say, I don't think the average man is really aware of this debate. This is something that's going on in the academy, but I never well, unless you're doing Islam.

If you're doing Muslim evangelism, you'll hear objections to the Atonement that an innocent third person cannot die in your place. He cannot be justly punished for your sins, and that this is something Allah would never do.