Seminar on Basic Christian Apologetics

This is a course on apologetics.  That’s kind of a funny word—it makes it sound like we have something to apologize for.  But the basic meaning of the word goes back to the ancient Greek court where defendants were given the right to make an answer for charges that were brought against them.  So in our context, the word simply means a defense of the faith.  Because let’s face it, there isn’t any shortage of attacks against the Christian faith.  But 1 Peter 3:15 says this:  “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.  But do this with gentleness and respect.” So the goal of this course is to help you understand for yourself that you have a reasonable faith, and also to give you some tools to defend it against attacks when those come along. 

God

            We begin at the beginning: does God exist?  Actually, most of this seminar will address Christianity specifically, since the really large philosophical arguments would simply take up too much time to address very well.  But let me just say a few things about the existence of God.  First of all, atheism (the belief that there is not God) used to be considered the fashionable worldview among intellectual elites.  That really isn’t the case anymore, by reason of certain scientific understandings that have come along just in the last century, especially the last few decades.  One is that everything has a cause.  In other words, everything that exists was caused by something else.  To that we add one other thing:  The universe is finite.  Rather than being eternal and something that has always been, science has basically affirmed by now that there was a beginning at some point.  Whether you call it a big bang, or whatever.  Given those two things, however, you are forced to conclude that There had to be a first cause that was not dependent on anything that exists.  That’s the basic understanding understanding of causation: it doesn’t ever work in reverse.  I caused my kids, not the reverse.  And since I did, there is no way there could have caused my existence.  Since everything in the universe was caused by something else, and the universe is finite, then whatever that first cause was is something that lies outside of, and whose existence is not in any way contingent upon what exists.  Today you can pretty much accept that as a scientific assumption.  We call that first cause God. 

                The other key piece of this puzzle is this:  the complex design of the universe.  That is the other key contribution science has made lately.  The better we get at science, and the more powerful the tools we use, the more complex and intricate the universe is revealed to be.  A chance universe may have been theoretically possible when we only understood life at a molecular level.  But we know now that it is much more complex than just molecules.  The simplest building block we know of today is an enzyme.  The chances of something like that occurring by chance in a primordial soup of some kind has been calculated by one scientist at 1 in 10 to the 20^th power.  But it takes 2,000 of them to make even the simplest bacteria—what could sort of be called life.  So the chances of that go to 1 in 10 to the 40,000 power.  1 in 10 to the 50^th power is considered statistically impossible.  Someone has likened it to the chance that a Boeing 747 would be created by a tornado blowing through a junkyard.  Multiply that by how much of that kind of random pairing would have to occur to create everything we see around us and you get the picture.  Then you understand that there are over 25 natural processes in the universe requiring that kind of fine-tuning to even create and maintain the conditions for life to exist, and you see the issue.  That’s why I said a complex design, and not just complex.  There is no other explanation for the universe as we now know it other than to see behind it intelligent design.  And that intelligent design has to be the first cause.  Sounds like God to me. 

The Bible

            Pretty much everything we know and believe about our faith comes from this book the Bible that we say is the word of God.  That means that we need to start with being convinced of the Bible’s accuracy and authenticity as well as being convinced of its credentials when it claims to be the word of God. 

            First of all , the Bible is unique in its design.  There are 66 books in the Bible, written by over 40 authors from all walks of life, including Kings, shepherds, religious leaders, military leaders, fishermen, doctors, etc.  It was written over a span of 1,500 years in a wide variety of locations and situations.  Yet the entire book holds together miraculously in regards to its theme and message.  At the very beginning of the book paradise is lost and at the very end it is regained and everything in between is the story of how that happens, constructed in such a way that no human hand could possibly have put it together even if they had tried.  Just think about taking even 10 different authors from different countries, writing at different times over 15 centuries and have them all write a different book and what would you have if you put them together?  A hodge-podge of writings with little or no relationship to each other.  But the Bible is a flawless, seamless piece of literature with a coherent story in spite of the diversity of its origins.

            The Bible is also unique in terms of its accuracy.  If the Bible is going to be considered the inspired word of God, then we have to ask the question if that word is accurate.  One thing to keep in mind as we discuss this is that with all of the different translations we have these days, we have to believe that the Bible as it was originally written was the word of God, so the questions we have to ask are ones of regarding the reliability and accuracy of the original text. 

            First of all, there is the Old Testament.  This was and is the Jewish Bible and has always been considered the accurate word of God.  One reason for that is the way that it was copied over the centuries, something that is absolutely unique in the history of literature.  The scribes that had responsibility to copy the Jewish Scripture were trained to do so as their life-long careers.  The training started at age 14 and wasn’t completed until age 40.  Just some of the rules for guaranteeing the accuracy of the copying process are:

            -They numbered the verses, words, and letters of every book and then they calculated the middle word and the middle letter of each.

            -They kept track of the verses that contained all the letters of the alphabet and others that contained a certain number of them and double checked them after the copy was completed. 

            -They counted the number of times each letter of the alphabet occurred in each book.

            These are just some examples.  The process was so painstaking that when a new copy was completed it was considered more authoritative then the old one, which was thrown away.  That’s just the opposite of how we think about ancient literature. But that’s how sure they were of the accuracy of the work.

            In regards to the New Testament, scholars apply the same standards to that document as they do to other ancient literature and it comes out heads and tails above anything else you could compare it to.  Since no originals survive, the questions you ask of ancient manuscripts are how many copies survive, how close are they to the original, and how consistent are they with each other?  In regards to the New Testament, there are more than 5,300 Greek manuscripts dating back to within a century of the originals.  If you include fragments of the New Testament, there are over 24,000 dating back to within just a few years of when they were originally written.  Compare this to something like Caesar’s Gallic Wars, for instance, of which we have only nine or ten good copies dating back to within 900 years of the original.  But no-one thinks to question their historicity or their accuracy.  In terms of ancient documents, the work that comes in second place to the Bible is Homer’s Iliad of which we have 643 copies dating back to within 600 years of the originals.  So you can see that by what they call the “bibliographical test”, the New Testament stands alone.  In regards to its consistency, among all of those manuscripts there is only one half of one percent variance in terms of the content of them, all simple spelling or copying errors.  No variant reading has any effect whatsoever on any essential point of doctrine in the New Testament.  Compare that to the Iliad again, and you have fully 5% of the material in the manuscripts in disagreement.

            One of the greatest proofs we have for the New Testament in particular is simply the fact that it was written by eyewitnesses for eyewitnesses.  That’s what is known as “primary source material.”  Luke 1:1-3 puts it well.  (Luke 1:1-3)

            Another test, of course, is the external consistency.  In other words, do the accounts square with whatever else we know about the world it refers to?  Every day more and more archaeological finds joins the thousands that we have which verify the accounts given in the Bible.  The excavation of the city of Jericho has revealed an amazing destruction of the walls of that city, just as described in the Bible.  Many times  scholars scoffed at the existence of things like the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah until they actually found them.  Today, virtually all reputable archaeologists and historians regard the Bible as an important and accurate historical document.  Not everything described in the Bible has been found by archaeologists, but no archaeological find has ever contradicted any account that we have in the Scripture, and more and more keep appearing to confirm its accuracy.

            One of the aspects of the Bible that its divine origin is confirmed by prophecy.  There are over 1000 prophecies in the Bible with 668 known to have been fulfilled and none of which have ever been proven false.  The rest of the prophecies have to do with the end times and the second coming of Christ.  The only way to deny the reality of Biblical prophecy is simply to assume a closed universe where that kind of thing just doesn’t happen and there is no God and no miracles.  But trying to explain them away will be a losing proposition.

            Just one example that is often cited is the prophecies in Ezekiel 26 regarding the city of Tyre.  Ezekiel prophesied that Nebuchadnezzar would destroy the mainland city of Tyre, that many nations would come against her, that they would make her a bare rock, that fishermen would spread their nets over the site, throw debris into the water, and that it would never be rebuilt.  In 573 BC Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the mainland city and most of the people moved off to an island and built a new one.  Subsequently, many nations came against the city until Alexander came along and scraped the mainland city clean down to bare rock in order to build a causeway to the island.  So he threw the debris into the water and destroyed the city which has never been re-built.  To this day if you go to that site you will see fishermen spreading their nets on what used to be the city of Tyre.

            Scholars have taken just 11 of the most obvious prophecies such as this one with specific fulfillments and calculated that the odds of all 11 occurring by chance are one in 5.76 time 10 to the 59^th power.  Basically an impossible number. 

            So the book that gives us the information about our faith can be demonstrated to be reliable and the revelation of God based on the bibliographical evidence, the internal evidence, the external evidence, and the witness of prophecy.  This should make us all feel comfortable in using this book as our guide for faith and life.

Textual Transmission

Since we affirmed that the word of God is inspired and inerrant in it’s original form another question that might be asked is how do we know that we have today what was originally written?  I’m glad you asked that.  Obviously, when these texts were originally written, there weren’t a lot of hard drives and zip discs floating around, not to mention copy machines.  Everything was copied by hand onto scrolls, which to our minds would make them susceptible to a lot of error.  But in ancient times, the faithful transmission of documents was considered critical.  So the job of copying documents was given to scribes.  Scribes were people who knew very well how to preserve an original copy.  And keep in mind that the scribes who copied the Bible were people who were convinced that what they were copying was the very word of God.  So they became pretty picky about how they did things.  From about 500 to 1000 AD the Jewish scribes were called Masoretes.  This comes from a word meaning to count.  Which they did.  They knew, for instance, that in the first five books of the Bible there were 400,945 letters.  And that the word in the middle was “searched” in Leviticus 10:16, and that the middle letter was in the word translated “belly” in Leviticus 11:42.  So when they counted and came up with the wrong letter, they would know that they missed something somewhere.  There are a lot of other little things, some of which we’ll go through in our apologetics seminar.  Suffice it to say that they were so good at copying, the new copy would actually be considered more authoritative than the previous one, which often would just be discarded.  We think just the opposite—the older, the more accurate.  So the best Old Testament text we have is known as the Masoretic text.

I suppose that some of you have heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  In 1947 a Bedouin shepherd boy discovered some caves containing an entire library of scrolls. Included in them was at least parts of every Old Testament book except Esther.  One of them was an entire copy of the book of Isaiah, dated a full 1,000 years earlier than any other copy then in existence.  When it was translated it was found to be exactly like the text we have in our Bibles today. 

In regards to the New Testament, we have much better documentation.  They were still very good at copying, but in addition to that knowledge, we have an incredible amount of manuscript evidence. This refers to the number and accuracy of copies we have of the original manuscripts.  We have no originals of any of the Biblical texts, but more copies that date closer to the originals than any other ancient work by far and away.  We could reproduce virtually the entire New Testament simply from quotes of it made by other authors, if we wanted to.  There is simply no doubt whatsoever that we have what was originally written down by the authors.

Textual Criticism

Just a brief note may be in order in regards to textual criticism.   This became very popular in the 19tha nd 20^th centuries, and basically assumes a naturalistic worldview.  In other words, since miracles can’t happen and prophecy cannot be fulfilled in a natural world where God does not break in, then certain scholars spend a lot of time trying to figure out who else might have written these things when and for what purpose.  What that primarily means for the Old Testament is late dating.  For the New Testament, it assumes authors who created history, rather than recording it.  The best recent example of this was the Jesus Seminar.  This was a bizarre endeavor in which a bunch of scholars got together to decide which were the actual sayings of Jesus in the gospels and what were manufactured by the authors.  The way they finally decided was to vote with colored beads.  At one point one of the sayings came down to a single vote as to whether it was in or out, but that delegate to the seminar was out going to the bathroom, so it stayed out.  That is a good example of deciding on Scripture by committee, a great counterpoint to how the Holy Spirit actually put the Word of God together for us. 

This is all sort of the technical information about how we got the Bible, etc.  But here let me confess my own bottom line to all of this.  I know that the God of the Bible is real.  I know that not just because of my research into the evidence, but my own experience.  I am absolutely convinced of it.  In God’s plan to redeem this fallen world, I hold in my hand the key piece of equipment (the Bible).  This book in its present form is what God has allowed his people to believe to be his inspired Word.  It is very clear that this is how its going to stay until Jesus returns.  All the technical stuff aside, that’s enough for me to cling to this book and devote myself to it.  God knows what he’s doing, and he wouldn’t allow his people to be in error in regards to the most fundamental tool that they have always used to understand God and their place in his plan for this world. 

Jesus Christ

            Having established the reliability of the Bible, we have to go on to the central figure in the book, Jesus Christ.  The Old Testament all points to Christ and the New Testament all proceeds from him.  If we can’t believe that Jesus is who the Bible says he is, then it doesn’t matter how much of the rest of the Bible we can believe.  Everything about Christianity hangs on the figure of Jesus Christ.

            First of all, we have to affirm that Jesus was a real historical person.  Although it has surfaced relatively recently in history, there nevertheless have been some people who have attempted to deny the fact that Jesus Christ even existed.  No serious scholar would try that today.  Admittedly, almost all the information we have about Jesus Christ comes from the New Testament, but we have already looked at the reliability of that document.  There are extra-biblical references to him, however, including the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus who wrote his history of the Jews around the same time as the New Testament was being written as well as Roman authors and historians and, of course, the writings of the early church fathers.  We have as much or more extra-biblical evidence for the existence of Jesus as we have of any other historical figure.  If we deny that he existed we would also have to question whether Julius Caesar did.  The Encyclopedia Brittanica says this:  “These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds by several authors at the end of the 18^th, the 19^th, and at the beginning of the 20^th centuries.”

            So the next question we ask is, what kind of a man was Jesus?  First of all, he was the only religious leader of a major movement to ever claim to be God.  Some have denied this, since the Scriptures never have a quote by Jesus that says “I am God.”  But he clearly claimed to be deity.  In Mark 14:61-64 you see that it is that claim that got him crucified.  It was the charge of blasphemy—of claiming to be deity—that was what made him worthy of the sentence of death.  John 10:30 quotes Jesus as saying, “I and the Father are one” and again, it was considered blasphemy and the Jews picked up stones to stone him because “you, a mere man, claim to be God” (v. 33)  In addition to statements like these, Jesus identified himself as the “I Am” (John 8:58) the Hebrew name for God, and accepted people’s worship of him, something any Jew would know was reserved exclusively for God. 

            Another one of the important things to note about Jesus Christ was that he was a man of miracles.  This is critical, because any other religion in the world could stay standing without them, but Christianity would utterly collapse without the miraculous intervention of God in human affairs.  And Jesus personified that.  The miracles described in the Bible as having been performed by Jesus demonstrate his power over disease, death, demons, even nature itself.  The important thing to note is that these miracles were all done in public, often-times with literally thousands of witnesses, many times in front of his antagonists.  Yet it was never denied that any of them happened, even by his critics.  They were attributed to the power of Satan, but it was never denied that they happened.  Another important point to remember is that the miracles of Jesus were never some kind of showy public display, but always appeared to be a natural outgrowth of who he was. 

            Another aspect of the kind of person Jesus was shows up in the fact that he was a master teacher.  Even the critics of Christianity readily admit that the mastery Jesus Christ showed in his use of different kinds and forms of teaching and the incredible power that his words had to persuade and influence his listeners make him one of the greatest teachers of all time.  A Jewish scholar says this:  “Jesus Christ is the outstanding personality of all time…No other teacher—Jewish, Christian, Buddhist, Mohammedan—is still a teacher whose teaching is such a guidepost for the world we live in.  Other teachers may have something basic for an Oriental, an Arab, or an Occidental; but every act and word of Jesus has value for all of us.  He became the Light of the World.  Why shouldn’t I, a Jew, be proud of that?”

            So Jesus was a real man who lived among us.  He claimed to be God and performed many miracles even his critics did not deny and was in the estimation of many the greatest teacher who ever lived.  In addition to these aspects of who Christ was, we have to add the fact that he was the one man in history to fulfill the messianic prophecies.  In the Old Testament there are over 300 prophecies that have to do with the coming messiah, the savior of the world that they were looking forward to.  Some examples are:

-prophecies concerning his birth.

            -that he would be born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14)

            -That he would be from the lineage of David, of the Tribe of Judah, of the family line of Jesse (Jer. 23:5, Gen. 49:10, Isaiah 11:1)

            -That he would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2)

            -That he would be given gifts (Ps. 72:10)

            -That many children would be killed (Jer. 31:15)

-Other prophecies include that he would begin his ministry in Galilee, would enter Jerusalem on a donkey, be a teacher of parables, have a ministry of miracles, be preceded by a messenger, and many many others.

-Many of the Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in Christ have to do with his crucifixion, including that he would be betrayed by a friend, sold for 30 pieces of silver, be bruised, wounded, smitten, spat upon, mocked, and his hands and feet pierced as well as the fact that he would be crucified with thieves, pierced in the side, his bones would not be broken, and he would be buried in a rich man’s tomb. 

            Some of the objections might be that all the messianic prophecies were written after Christ.  The problem with that is, even we don’t accept the fact that the Old Testament was completed 450 years before Christ, we know for certain that the Old Testament was translated into the Greek language 250 years before Christ.  So post-dating the prophecies just doesn’t work.  Some might say that he fulfilled them on purpose just as a hoax, but many of them were out of his control, including all the prophecies about his birth.  The argument that their fulfillment in Christ might be a coincidence is a statistical absurdity.  The chances of fulfilling just 8 of the most obvious prophecies by chance has been calculated as one in ten to the 17^th power.  That would be like covering the entire state of Texas 2 feet deep in silver dollars, blind-folding a man and having pick just one out of the pile and have it be the one we marked and threw into the middle of all of them.  That’s just 8.  The fulfillment of 48 of the prophecies by chance has been calculated as one times 10 to the 157^th power.  You can see that it is a really impossible number. 

            Jesus Christ was a real man who claimed to be God, performed many miracles, and fulfilled the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament.  We hardly have any other choice other than to believe him to be who the Bible claims that he is.  The classic dilemma is this:  Is he Lord, a Liar, or a Lunatic?  A man like Christ who lived the life he lived, taught what he did, did the things he did, and made the claims he did, leaves us with basically two options.  Either he is the Lord as described by the Scripture, or he is not.  If he is not we have two further choices:  One is that he knew that he wasn’t, in which case he was deliberately perpetrating the greatest hoax in the history of the world making the person who everyone agrees was one of the greatest moral teachers in history out to be a bold faced liar.  The other option is that he wasn’t and didn’t know it in which case he was just another certifiable religious nut.  Even among the harshest of Jesus’ critics, you just won’t hear either one of these options mentioned.  As C.S. Lewis has said, “You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon, or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.  But let not come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.” 

            There is really no reasonable way to assume that the claims that the Bible makes about Jesus are false.  If they are true, we are still left with two choices:  Either we accept him or reject him. 

The Resurrection

            So what we have is a Bible that is the reliable word of God that we can trust.  That Bible in turn revolves around the person of Jesus Christ whom we have seen must be who the Bible says that he is for the reasons we noted.  If the story of the Bible revolves around Jesus Christ, the story of Jesus Christ all hinges on his resurrection.  Even if he was the son of God and a miracle worker and a great moral teacher, none of that means anything to us unless he rose from the dead.  The whole plan of salvation hinges on that one event and without the plan of salvation none of this makes any difference.  It is the one event that makes Christianity different from every other major religion.  A Muslim once told a Christian that in his religion they could point to the body of their founder in a tomb, but you Christians can’t point to anything.  Exactly the point.  Our entire message revolves around an empty tomb.  As the apostle Paul said, if Christ has not been raised, then our faith is in vain. 

            First of all, to believe in the resurrection, we have to confirm that Jesus was really dead.  Some people have suggested that Jesus managed to convince people that he was raised from the dead because he just swooned on the cross and later revived in the cool tomb and walked away. 

            There are reasons that line of reasoning just doesn’t work.  First of all, we have to note the manner of his death.  He was beaten with 40 lashes with a Roman cat-of-nine tails, a whip with 9 leather thongs with bits of bone and metal on the end.  They would dig into the flesh of a man’s back and rip it off, often exposing a man’s bowels because they tore off all the flesh and muscle.  The Jewish law only allowed 39 lashes for humanitarian reasons which is why the Romans administered 40, just to irritate them.  Many time men would die just from the flogging.  He was blind-folded and beaten by burly Roman guards.  He had a crown of thorns which would have been hard 1 ½ “ thorns from the country side put on his head and pounded into it with the Roman’s staffs which were really long clubs.  After staying up all night with no sleep, food, or drink and enduring that torture they strapped the cross piece of the cross on him and tried to make him carry it up the hill which, of course, he couldn’t manage.  Then they crucified him.  Crucifixion was probably the cruelest means of execution ever devised by a people who were very good at cruel executions.  In his beaten and emaciated condition, he was nailed up to the cross and left to the elements. The thirst was unbearable.  You get a hint of it in the gospels when Jesus himself said “I thirst.”  After you hung up there awhile, your muscles would start to cramp up.  The problem was that you could no longer draw a breath unless you pushed yourself up with your cramped up leg muscles which in Jesus’ case had spikes driven through them.  Then you grab a gasping breath, and collapse again.  If you read the gospel accounts you’ll see that Pilate had his guards break the legs of the two thieves they crucified with Jesus.  That was a sure way to get a crucified person to die by suffocation.  But you’ll also see that they didn’t break Jesus’ legs which was not only a fulfillment of prophecy, but an indication that Jesus was truly dead.  Because when Pilate heard that he was already dead, he sent trained executioners to make certain of it, and these were men who knew death very well when they saw it.  Just to make certain, they stabbed a spear into his side.  This was also both a fulfillment of prophecy and an indication he was actually dead.  Because in John 19:34,35 we are told that a flow of blood then water came from the wound.  This account has been examined by medical specialists who concluded that it can only mean that what Jesus actually died from was a burst heart.

            Then there was the burial.  At that time they would wrap people up in clothes layered with up to 100 pounds of spices and then lay them on a stone slab with a cloth over their head.  One theory has said that being in the cool of the cave actually revived him in spite of the torture he had endured and being wrapped up in spices with a cloth over his head so that basically couldn’t breathe and then being laid in a cold, damp cave which would have made his condition worse even if he was alive.   That’s a fantasy.

            Then there was the stone.  This was a stone large that it took anywhere from 3 to 20 people just to move them.  They were placed up-hill from a tomb and allowed to roll into place after the body was put there.

            Then there was the guard.  Just to make sure no-body would steal the body, a Roman guard was placed in front of the tomb.  They also put a Roman seal on the stone.  To break a Roman seal was an automatic death sentence.  For a Roman guard to fall asleep on duty was also an automatic death sentence.               

            The official story, of course, and the one you read about in the gospels, was that the disciples had stolen the body while the Roman guard was asleep.  We have already talked about the probability of the entire contingent of guards falling asleep at the same time.  But just assuming they did, the disciples managed to sneak past them and not wake them up while they heaved this huge stone aside and stole the body.  It just isn’t plausible.  But it’s the only story they could come up with.  The problem with it is this:  The Romans were given this story to explain the disappearance of the body and paid to tell it by promising not to execute them.  But I wonder if anyone ever asked them:  “If you guys were asleep, how do you know it was the disciples?” 

            The other thing you have to cope with are the resurrection appearances.  There were over 500 eye-witnesses to the resurrected Christ, both individuals and groups.  The common explanation was that they missed him so much they hallucinated.  The problem with that is that while one or two people might do that, there isn’t any medical or psychological precedent for a mass hallucination involving 500 people at the same time such as the Scriptures talk about in 1 Corinthians. 

Another issue to keep in mind is that the transformation of the disciples from a cowering band of dis-heartened men to the most powerful and motivated band of preachers the world has ever seen.  

Finally, maybe the best evidence of all is simply the existence of the church.  There just is simply no other way to explain away the beginning of this world changing movement other than that the event which they themselves claimed as the basis for their existence actually happened.  These sorts of things just don’t spring up at random for no reason. 

Other explanations:

            The swoon theory.  The way this theory goes is that in spite of his condition, Jesus had swooned and managed to revive in the cold, damp tomb.  Then he extricated himself from the grave cloths, walked to the stone on his lacerated feet, rolled it aside, overpowered the Roman guard and went out to convince his disciples that he was gloriously risen from the dead.  I don’t think so.

              The other possibility that has been raised is that the whole thing was just a huge hoax  perpetrated by the disciples.  But think about that for a second.  These were men who preached the highest ethical standard in the history of the world.  What’s more, they all ended up dying for this so-called hoax, most of them in very cruel ways.  And all of this was being proclaimed during the life-time of the 500+ eye-witnesses who would have had to have been in on it, any of whom could have avoided persecution by just speaking the truth. 

            The only other theory that has been proposed is that everyone just went to the wrong tomb.  It was early, or dark, or foggy, or whatever and they lost their way.             The bottom line is that this whole annoying new religion could have been stopped dead in its tracks if the authorities would have just gone to the right tomb and produced the body.  But they couldn’t. Because it wasn’t there.  Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.  Our faith rests on that fact and you can be assured beyond any reasonable doubt that it is true.  

Christianity and Science

            This is one of the most talked about and contentious issues when attempting to defend the Christian faith. We have already seen that in our time science has begun to be one of our greatest allies in defending our faith. Nevertheless, let me make a couple of observations regarding this subject.

            First of all, the perceived problem largely stems from a false assumption to begin with: that somehow Christianity and Science have to be reconciled.  It’s a strange kind of turn-around that has happened in this arena, because the fact is that it is Christian thought that gave rise to the natural sciences in the first place.  Compared to the superstition that preceded science, Christianity was an enlightened world-view that was very interested in exploring the wonders of the created order that God had produced for our benefit.  By this time, though, things have flipped on their head and we think that we have to be in a position to try to defend our faith against the claims of science.  We really need to see faith and science as complements to each other, rather than adversaries.  The fact is that they have different goals and use different methods, so any attempt to put the two into some kind of direct conflict is bound to end in frustration.  The Christian religion is concerned with spiritual realities, which by their very nature are not subject to the processes of the scientific method.  At the same time, it is also true that the processes of science can never contradict a spiritual doctrine that is not verifiable by its methods.  A much better outlook would be to see science as providing methods for utilizing nature, and religion as providing the values and goals for doing so.

            First of all, remember that evolution is just a theory, not a proven hypothesis.  In fact, given the scientific method it is really unproveable scientifically since it is not subject to repeat experimentation and observation.  The problem with it is that it has been transformed from scientific theory into dogma.   (secular humanism)  In other words, it has become a system of faith that defines a person’s view of the world rather than a pure scientific issue for debate.  It sees human beings as being the very top of the natural order with no accountability to a higher power or any kind of ethical system other than what is relative to any one person’s personal preference.  Evolution is the foundation for justifying that world-view, and if it can’t be dogma rather than just a scientific theory then the scary thought of actually having to be accountable to something beyond yourself rears its ugly head.

             For those people who feel a need to address the question, the view of the relationship of Christianity to evolution are basically of two different kinds.  One view is progressive creationism.  In this view, evolution is seen as simply the means by which God chose to create, so there is no real discontinuity between Christianity and evolution.  The fact that the creation account is drawn up as a series of epochs, or blocks of time, is used to support this view.  The fact that the Hebrew word for day in the Genesis account probably does not mean a 24 hour period, but simply a span of time in which a certain process occurred, is also integral to this position.  A day is also said to be like 1,000 years to God in the Scripture, but this is also a very common metaphor for a large but undefined block of time to the writers of the Bible. 

            The other more contentious approach is to simply say that evolution is inconsistent with creation. There are certainly a myriad of problems with evolution that those who take it as dogma have difficulty facing. Some examples would be:

            -The chances of even the simplest form of life being generated from non-life, even given billions of years, are statistically impossible.

            -The fundamental processes of nature appear to be tend toward disintegration rather than increasing complexity as evolution would assume.

            -While species do adapt and change, they do so within a very limited range within species and no transitional life forms have been discovered.

            Creationists can quote many other problems with the theory of evolution which this seminar does not have time to address.  Suffice it to say that as believers we certainly do not need to be at all nervous about standing up for a creator God. The fact is that there is nothing in any scientific view or theory that would deny the possibility of an intelligent creator and more and more evidence from science is supporting the view of a supreme intelligence behind the universe. 

The problem of Evil

            The most common question posed by those who question the Christian faith is, “If God is both good and all powerful, how could he allow his creatures to suffer like they do?”  The reasoning is that God may be totally good, but since there is so much evil in the world he must not be able to stop it, therefore he is not totally powerful. Either that or he is totally powerful but refuses to stop the evil in the world, therefore he must not be totally good. 

            First of all it helps to recognize the irony involved in making this argument.  The argument assumes a moral standard.  In order to make it at all, you have to assume the existence of some objective standard of good and evil which would have to have as its source something beyond just a natural world that occurs without divine oversight.  Yet they refuse to believe in God because he isn’t behaving by the standards of good and evil which according to their own view of the universe don’t even exist. 

            The other thing to keep in mind is that God is not the source of evil in the world.  God created the world to be good.  Evil is something that happened as a result of moral choices that were made.  The source of evil in this world could be said to be Satan, or it could be said to be ourselves.  But it cannot be said to be God.  In fact, a study of the Scripture will find God to be largely in the business of turning what looks to be an evil into something positive.  The story of Joseph is a good example of that.  Joseph tells his brothers in Gen. 50:20, “As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive.”  The crucifixion of Christ is the ultimate example of that.

            The problem stems from this dilemma: You cannot have free will without the possibility of evil.  But God’s purpose in creating us was to love him and be in a real relationship with him.  And you cannot have a relationship without free will.   If it was not possible for us to do anything else, that can hardly be said to be a meaningful relationship.  The fact is that although God is all powerful, what is logically impossible is also impossible for God.  He cannot make square circles.  And it is not possible to have a world where there is real moral good but not real moral evil.  And people capable of perfection have to also be capable of sin. 

            One thing to keep in mind when facing this question is that it almost involves some confusion about God’s higher purposes.  The problems we have with suffering all stem from an underlying assumption that the highest and best good is a physical life free from such suffering.  In order to be able to tolerate, even if we cannot comprehend, the existence of the kind of suffering that there is in this world you have to keep in mind a bigger picture.  The worst suffering in life isn’t much in light of eternity.  A study of the martyrs of the Christian faith who  joyfully met the cruelest of deaths are examples of this kind of an attitude. 

            Also, we have to keep in mind that no growth is possible without stress and the problems and pain we go through are often times essential to our growth.

            Finally, it helps to realize that God did not exempt himself from suffering.  It can plausibly be argued that Jesus Christ suffered as much as any human being ever had.  But the result of that suffering is the other important point to keep in mind.  Because of what Jesus Christ did, evil has been defeated.  Although the results of evil in this world are still very evident, the death and resurrection of Christ guarantee that the world will be renewed without the existence of evil.  That is our great hope. 

            “Evil is an enemy to be confronted and defeated, not a problem to be solved.”  (Vinoth Ramachandra)

Bibliography

McDowell, Josh, Evidence that Demands a Verdict (Here’s Life Publishers, 1979)

McDowell, Josh, and Stewart, Don, Reasons Skeptics Should Consider Christianity (Tyndale House, 1986)

Dyrness, William, Christian Apologetics in a World Community, (Inter-varsity Press, 1983)

Lewis, C.S., The Problem of Pain, (MacMillan Publishing, 1962)

Lewis, C.S., Mere Christianity, (MacMillan Publishing, 1962)

Robinson, Wade,  Defending Your Faith  (Eastside Church Ministry Resources)