In this article, the Christian philosopher and apologist, William Lane Craig, responds to a question on the fate of those who reject Christ. Craig implies that there is no reasonable unbelief in Christ, at least for those to whom the Gospel has been accurately presented. He states the following:
Wholly apart from the question of whether they ignored apologetic evidence for Christianity, what you need to keep in mind is that, even more fundamentally, they suppressed the witness of the Holy Spirit to them that the Gospel is true. They repudiated God Himself and His testimony to them of the truth of Jesus’ teaching. They have thus separated themselves from God...He did: the witness of the Holy Spirit to the truth of the Gospel. “Many of these people came from Christian backgrounds yet chose not to follow it because the evidence they had didn’t convince them [this is the questioner being quoted].” No, they chose not to follow it because they resisted the Holy Spirit (wholly apart from whether they resisted the apologetic evidence).
Quite frankly, I see this as evidence of how religion can corrupt the mind of even great intellects. Craig has a luminary intellect, but he has, regrettably, deluded himself by orthodox Christianity and its concomitant proclivity towards tribalism. So deeply has he deluded himself that he presumes to psychoanalyze every unbeliever who rejects the Gospel and its evidences (when correctly presented). It seems like Craig is still spiritually immature, and has failed to transcend religious tribalism. By my lights, it is incredible to claim that there is no reasonable nonbelief in Christianity for people sufficiently well apprised of its doctrines and evidences. There are a whole host of things taught by Christianity that can be reasonably assailed by the nonbeliever, and used in a cumulative case against Christianity. Are we really to believe that sufficiently well-informed people cannot have reasonable grounds for being at least agnostic about -- not even outright rejecting -- the Trinity, the Incarnation, the multiple miracles littered throughout the Bible (written at least decades or hundreds of years after the purported events), the genealogies of Genesis (which imply that humans are only a few thousand years old, contradicting the results of modern science), the atrocities in the Old Testament, the fiction in the Old Testament (like angels having sex with humans), the doctrine of eternal hell, etc? Is it really unreasonable to believe, along with such encyclopedically erudite historical Jesus historians as Dale Allison and Wolfhart Pannenberg, that there is substantial evidence Jesus falsely predicted the end of the world would occur in the lifetime of his disciples? Are we really to believe that people like Antony Flew, Quentin Smith, J.L Mackie, William Rowe, Felipe Leon, Bill Vallicella, al-Ghazali, etc., have all suppressed the truth of Christianity in unrighteousness? No -- this is not probable in the slightest. Christian apologists, even ones with three letters after their names, need to start start understanding that there are more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their religion. Life is not black and white. The same evidence can be perceived as having different force by two people who occupy reasonably similar epistemic positions. To acknowledge this is simply to acknowledge the real world which we inhabit. Very epistemically well-positioned theistic philosophers of religion disagree on the force of various arguments for the existence of God all the time, and presumably not out of ill will. Why can't many Christian apologists extend the same grace to nonbelievers? The answer lies in the fact that they lack the requisite intellectual humility to do so. They are human, all to human. And their religious tribalism sometimes gets the better of their reason. This is what I believe is happening with Christian apologists who say stuff like the above.
