Background
William Lane Craig was born on August 23, 1949, in Peoria, Illinois, United States as the second of three children born to Doris Irene Walker, a full-time homemaker, and Mallory John Craig, an executive for the Toledo, Peoria, and Western railway. Craig was raised in a non-Christian albeit loving, middle-class home. Craig’s boyhood sense of curiosity and love of learning were cultivated diligently by his mother. Desiring to be a zoo director someday, Craig was allowed to keep a menagerie of pets (provided he could catch them) at home - from snakes, toads, and katydids to stray cats and dogs, rabbits, and a raccoon. With an eye toward stimulating her children's education, Craig's mother took her children on a variety of field trips, including to manufacturing facilities of all stripes, a dairy, a pig iron plant where scrap metal was melted down, and the enormous hydroelectric dam spanning the Mississippi River at Craig’s boyhood home of Keokuk, Iowa, all of which instilled in Craig an early love of learning.