In 2008 William Lane Craig shared his personal testimony of how he became a Christian [reproduced in its entirety below, with a link]. I have previously weighed in on the value of Christian conversion testimonies as compared to deconversion/defection testimonies of former believers right here. It's time to look at what Bill Craig says.
Bill tells us he wasn’t
raised in a church-going family. But when he became a teenager in the sixties
he asked typical teenage questions, like “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” and “Where
am I going?” He searched for answers by attending a Christian church, not a Muslim
Mosque, nor Jewish Synagogue, nor Hindu Temple, because he was raised in a
Christian culture which set the limits of answers he could accept. Of this church,
all he saw with his young prudish judgmental eyes were “a pack of hypocrites”
who were “pretending to be something they’re not.” Apparently, *ahem* the young Craig could read
people’s minds. Usually the person claiming to do this is only revealing his
own mind. Regardless, Bill became very bitter and angry toward the people in
that church, and arrived at the fallacious hasty generalization that “Nobody is
really genuine.” People were “all just a bunch of phonies” he
says. So he “grew to despise people” saying “I wanted nothing to do with
them.”
Bill goes on to admit
that he was just as much a phony as they were. “For here I was, pretending not
to need people, when deep down I knew that I really did.” So he became angry at
his own hypocrisy, which is a religious guilt trip he placed on himself, that
led him to falsely say, “I couldn’t see any purpose to life; nothing
really mattered.” This is such an unjustified either/or fallacious conclusion. There can be
plenty of purposes and plenty of things that matter in one’s daily life (like family, friends, and meaningful work), without
needing one single final absolute unchanging purpose in life.
Then Bill met a
girl. Her name was Sandy. She “always seemed so happy it just makes
you sick!” he tells us. Upon asking Sandy why she was so happy, she told him “the
God of the universe loved him and wanted to live in his heart.” Sandy also introduced
him to other Christians. Of them he said, “I had never met people like this!
Whatever they said about Jesus, what was undeniable was that they were living
life on a plane of reality that I didn’t even dream existed, and it imparted a
deep meaning and joy to their lives, which I craved.”