Professor Craig Hazen gave a lecture to a packed room inside the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., on Friday, June 8, 2011.  Representatives from a range of House and Senate offices were in attendance, including about a dozen alumni and friends from Biola University who work in or near Capitol Hill. 

Hazen, founder and director of the Christian Apologetics Program, lectured on “Reasonable Religious Ideas that Sound Ridiculous in Modern Secular Settings.”  He addressed key worldview issues that undergird so much of the United States public policy, making the case that “you cannot make effective legislation governing human beings or human rights if you are really confused about what a human being is.”  He went on to give arguments for the existence of the soul and the plausibility of the afterlife.  Hazen also made the case that we can have real moral knowledge; our moral ideas are not just preferences—akin to preferring peanuts over almonds—but are real, objective and knowable, he said.

He said this is crucial because every bill introduced in Congress has a moral component. 

“We do indeed legislate morality every day,” said Hazen, “so we need to have a foundation of real knowledge about what’s right and what’s wrong—and that knowledge is available to us.”

Hazen took questions from the floor for about 20 minutes and addressed everything from the nature of marriage to how to make a case for the Christian worldview in difficult public settings. Hazen’s talk was carried live as a Twitter-cast through Biola’s Christian apologetics feed @Biolapologetics.

Hazen was able to arrange several more lectures on Capitol Hill in the coming months in order to give elected officials more opportunities to hear high caliber Christian thinkers speak to issues that matter today.  He has enlisted the help of his colleagues, Biola professors J.P. Moreland and Tim Muehlhoff, who will also give lectures on the Hill in the fall and meet with dignitaries and officials in D.C. with Hazen.