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March 3 - April 6, 2015
Is Apologetics Biblical? Some people think that apologetics is unbiblical. They say that you should just preach the gospel and let the Holy Spirit do His work! But I think that the example of Jesus and the apostles affirms the value of apologetics. Jesus appealed to miracles and to fulfilled prophecy to prove that His claims were true (Luke 24:25–27; John 14:11). What about the apostles? In dealing with other Jews, they used fulfilled prophecy, Jesus’ miracles, and especially Jesus’ resurrection to prove that He was the Messiah. Take, for example, Peter’s sermon on the day of Pentecost
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What kinds of arguments does Paul use in Acts 17:22–31 to persuade non-Jews that the gospel is true? How are his arguments like and unlike those Peter uses when talking to Jews in Acts 2:14–29? What do you learn about the place of apologetics in evangelism?
In dealing with non-Jews, the apostles sought to show the existence of God through His handiwork in nature (Acts 14:17). In Romans 1, Paul says that from nature alone all men can know that God exists (Rom. 1:20). Paul also appealed to eyewitness testimony of Jesus’ resurrection to show further that Christianity is true (1 Cor. 15:3–8). So it’s clear that both Jesus and the apostles were not afraid to give evidence for the truth of what they proclaimed. This doesn’t mean they didn’t trust the Holy Spirit to bring people to God. Rather they trusted the Holy Spirit to use their arguments and
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Why are these considerations of culture important? Why can’t we Christians just be faithful followers of Christ and ignore what is going on in the culture at large? Why not just preach the gospel to a dark and dying world? The answer is, because the gospel is never heard in isolation. It is always heard against the backdrop of the culture in which you’ve been born and raised. A person who has been raised in a culture that is sympathetic to the Christian faith will be open to the gospel in a way that a person brought up in a secular culture will not. For a person who is thoroughly secularized,
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If Christians could be trained to provide solid evidence for what they believe and good answers to unbelievers’ questions and objections, then the perception of Christians would slowly change. Christians would be seen as thoughtful people to be taken seriously rather than as emotional fanatics or buffoons. The gospel would be a real alternative for people to embrace.
I’m not saying that people will become Christians because of the arguments and evidence. Rather I’m saying that the arguments and evidence will help to create a culture in which Christian belief is a reasonable thing.
I think the church is really failing these kids. Rather than provide them training in the defense of Christianity’s truth, we focus on emotional worship experiences, felt needs, and entertainment. It’s no wonder they become sitting ducks for that teacher or professor who rationally takes aim at their faith.
How dare we send them unarmed into an intellectual war zone? Parents must do more than take their children to church and read them Bible stories. Moms and dads need to be trained in apologetics themselves and so be able to explain to their children simply from an early age and then with increasing depth why we believe as we do.
When you’re going through hard times and God seems distant, apologetics can help you to remember that our faith is not based on emotions, but on the truth, and therefore you must hold on to it.
Studying apologetics is going to take you beyond all that to life’s deepest questions, questions about the existence and nature of God, the origin of the universe, the source of moral values, the problem of suffering and evil, and so on. As you wrestle with these deep questions, you yourself will be changed. You will become more thoughtful and well-rounded. You’ll learn how to think logically and to analyze what other people are saying. Instead of saying sheepishly, “This is how I feel about it—it’s just my opinion, that’s all,” you’ll be able to say, “This is what I think about it, and here
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every person is precious to God, a person for whom Christ died. Like a missionary called to reach an obscure people group, the Christian apologist is burdened to reach that minority of persons who will respond to rational argument and evidence.
this people group, though relatively small in numbers, is huge in influence. One of these persons, for example, was C. S. Lewis. Think of the impact that one man’s conversion continues to have!
When apologetics is persuasively presented and sensitively combined with a gospel presentation and a personal testimony, the Spirit of God is pleased to use it to bring people to Himself.
Now the determined skeptic can deny any conclusion simply by denying one of the premises. You can’t force someone to accept the conclusion if he’s willing to pay the price of rejecting one of the premises. But what you can do is raise the price of rejecting the conclusion by giving good evidence for the truth of the premises.
So in presenting apologetic arguments for some conclusion, we want to raise the price of denying the conclusion as high as we can. We want to help the unbeliever see what it will cost him intellectually to resist the conclusion. Even if he is willing to pay that price, he may at least come to see why we are not obliged to pay it, and so he may quit ridiculing Christians for being irrational or having no reasons for what we believe. And if he’s not willing to pay the price, then he may change his mind and come to accept the conclusion we’re arguing for.
Part of the challenge of getting American people to think about God is that they’ve become so used to God that they just take Him for granted. They never think to ask what the implications would be if God did not exist. As a result they think that God is irrelevant.
The absurdity of life without God may not prove that God exists, but it does show that the question of God’s existence is the most important question a person can ask. No one who truly grasps the implications of atheism can say, “Whatever!” about whether there is a God. Now when I use the word God in this context, I mean an all-powerful, perfectly good Creator of the world who offers us eternal life. If such a God does not exist, then life is absurd. That is to say, life has no ultimate meaning, value, or purpose.
In a world without God, who’s to say whose values are right and whose are wrong? There can be no objective right and wrong, only our culturally and personally relative, subjective judgments. Think of what that means! It means it’s impossible to condemn war, oppression, or crime as evil. Nor can you praise generosity, self-sacrifice, and love as good. To kill someone or to love someone is morally equivalent. For in a universe without God, good and evil do not exist—there is only the bare, valueless fact of existence, and there is no one to say you are right and I am wrong.
“If God is dead, then man is dead too.”
It is inconsistent to say life is objectively absurd and then to say you may create meaning for your life. If life is really absurd, then you’re trapped in the lower story. To try to create meaning in life represents a leap to the upper story. But Sartre has no basis for this leap. Sartre’s program is actually an exercise in self-delusion. For the universe doesn’t really acquire a meaning just because I happen to give it one. This is easy to see: Suppose I give the universe one meaning, and you give it another. Who’s right? The answer, of course, is neither one. For the universe without God
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The point is that if there is no God, then objective right and wrong do not exist. As Dostoyevsky said, “All things are permitted.” But man cannot live this way. So he makes a leap of faith and affirms values anyway. And when he does so, he reveals the inadequacy of a world without God.
Biblical Christianity thus challenges the worldview of modern man. For according to the Christian worldview, God does exist, and life does not end at the grave. Biblical Christianity therefore provides the two conditions necessary for a meaningful, valuable, and purposeful life: God and immortality. Because of this, we can live consistently and happily within the framework of our worldview. Thus, biblical Christianity succeeds precisely where atheism breaks down.
CHAPTER OUTLINE I. If God does not exist, then all human life as well as every individual life will eventually be destroyed. II. If there is no God and no life beyond the grave, then life itself has no objective meaning, value, or purpose. A. Meaning 1. Without immortality your life has no ultimate significance and makes no difference to the world’s outcome. 2. Without God there is no broader framework within which man’s life can be seen to matter. B. Value 1. Without immortality there is no moral accountability, and your moral choices become inconsequential. 2. Without God moral values are
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There are three steps or premises in Leibniz’s reasoning: 1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence. 2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. 3. The universe exists.
That’s it! Now what follows logically from these three premises? Well, look at premises 1 and 3. (Read them out loud if that helps.) If everything that exists has an explanation of its existence and the universe exists, then it logically follows that: 4. The universe has an explanation of its existence. Now notice that premise 2 says that if the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God. And 4 says the universe does have an explanation of its existence. So from 2 and 4 the conclusion logically follows: 5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is
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They’re not caused to exist by something else; they just exist by the necessity of their own nature.
Strictly speaking, a thing could also necessarily exist due to another necessary being's nature. If A is necessary, and A necessitates B, then B exists both necessarily and contingently.
Imagine that you’re hiking through the woods and you come across a translucent ball lying on the forest floor. You would naturally wonder how it came to be there. If one of your hiking partners said to you, “Hey, it just exists inexplicably. Don’t worry about it!” you’d either think that he was crazy or figure that he just wanted you to keep moving. No one would take seriously the suggestion that the ball existed there with literally no explanation. Now suppose you increase the size of the ball in this story so that it’s the size of a car. That wouldn’t do anything to satisfy or remove the
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Once again, we can summarize Ghazali’s reasoning in three simple steps: 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
the claim that something came into existence from nothing isn’t logically contradictory, but nonetheless it’s really impossible.
St. Augustine Why didn’t God make the world sooner? In the early fifth century AD, Augustine of Hippo answered that God did not make the universe at a point in time, but “simultaneously with time.” That is, he believed God had created space and time together. Modern cosmologists have come to agree that he was right about space and time, and therefore it is meaningless to ask why the big bang didn’t happen earlier than it did.
Notice that there’s simply nothing prior to the initial boundary of space-time. Let’s not be misled by words, however. When I say, “There is nothing prior to the initial boundary,” I do not mean that there is some state of affairs prior to it, and that is a state of nothingness. That would be to treat nothing as though it were something! Rather I mean that at the boundary point, it is false that “There is something prior to this point.”
physicists have proposed scores of alternative models over the decades since Friedman and Lemaître’s work, and those that do not have an absolute beginning have been repeatedly shown to be unworkable. Put more positively, the only viable nonstandard models are those that involve an absolute beginning to the universe. That beginning may or may not involve a beginning point. But theories (such as Stephen Hawking’s “no boundary” proposal) that do not have a pointlike beginning still have a finite past. The universe has not existed forever, according to such theories, but came into existence, even
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“At first the scientific community was very reluctant to accept the idea of a birth of the universe.” “Not only did the Big Bang model seem to give in to the Judeo-Christian idea of a beginning of the world, but it also seemed to have to call for an act of supernatural creation.…” “It took time, observational evidence, and careful verification of predictions made by the Big Bang model to convince the scientific community to accept the idea of a cosmic genesis.” “… [T]he Big Bang is a very successful model … that imposed itself on a reluctant scientific community.”[3] —J. M. Wersinger, Assoc.
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something of a watershed appears to have been reached in 2003, when three leading scientists, Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, were able to prove that any universe that has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary.
It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.[4]
there’s actually a second scientific confirmation of the beginning of the universe, this one from the second law of thermodynamics. According to the second law, unless energy is being fed into a system, that system will become increasingly disorderly.
Already in the nineteenth century scientists realized that the second law implied a grim prediction for the future of the universe. Given enough time, all the energy in the universe will spread itself out evenly throughout the universe,
Once the universe reaches such a state, no significant further change is possible. It is a state of equilibrium, in which the temperature and pressure are the same everywhere. Scientists called this the “heat death” of the universe.
The Laws of Thermodynamics The science of thermodynamics is rooted in the work of the German physicist Rudolf Clausius (1822–1888), who is credited with formulating the second law. There are three fundamental laws of thermodynamics: The first law states that the energy in a physical system can be neither created nor destroyed. This is known as the conservation of energy. The second law states that a closed system will tend toward increasing disorder, or entropy, until it reaches equilibrium. The third law states that as a system approaches the temperature of absolute zero, its entropy
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But this unwelcome prediction raised a further puzzle: If, given enough time, the universe will inevitably stagnate in a state of heat death, then why, if it has existed forever, is it not now in a state of heat death? If in a finite amount of time, the universe will reach equilibrium, then, given infinite past time, it should by now already be in a state of equilibrium. But it’s not. We’re in a state of disequilibrium, where energy is still available to be used and the universe has an orderly structure.
The discovery of the expansion of the universe in the 1920s modified the sort of heat death predicted on the basis of the second law, but it didn’t alter the fundamental question. If the universe will expand forever, then it will never actually arrive at equilibrium. Because the volume of space is constantly growing, the matter and energy always have more room to spread out. Nevertheless, as the universe expands, its available energy is used up and it becomes increasingly cold, dark, dilute, and dead.
By contrast, if the universe is not expanding fast enough, the expansion will slow down, come to a halt, and then gravity will begin to pull everything together again in a catastrophic big crunch. Eventually everything in the universe will coalesce into a gigantic black hole, from which the universe will never rebound.
Whether its end will be in fire or ice, the fundamental question remains the same: If, given sufficient time, the universe will reach such a state, why is it not now in such a condition, if it has existed forever?
Today most physicists would say that the matter and energy were simply put into the universe as an initial condition, and the universe has been following the path plotted by the second law ever since its beginning a finite time ago.
The Personal Creator of the Universe The cause of the universe must therefore be a transcendent cause beyond the universe. This cause must be itself uncaused because we’ve seen that an infinite series of causes is impossible. It is therefore the Uncaused First Cause. It must transcend space and time, since it created space and time. Therefore, it must be immaterial and nonphysical. It must be unimaginably powerful, since it created all matter and energy.
Finally, it must be a personal being. We’ve already seen one reason for this conclusion in the previous chapter. Only a Mind could fit the above description of the First Cause. But let me also share a reason given by Ghazali for why the First Cause must be personal: It’s the only way to explain how a timeless cause can produce a temporal effect with a beginning like the universe.
the cause is a personal being with freedom of the will. His creating the universe is a free act that is independent of any prior conditions. So his act of creating can be something spontaneous and new. Thus, we’re brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe but to its Personal Creator.
design is not the only alternative. There are also physical necessity and chance. The key to inferring that design is the best explanation will be eliminating these other two alternatives. Accordingly, we can present a very simple three-step argument: 1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design. 2. It is not due to physical necessity or chance. 3. Therefore, it is due to design. This is a logically valid argument whose conclusion follows necessarily from the two premises. So the only question is whether those premises are more plausibly true than
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The three possible reasons why our universe is fine-tuned for life are: 1. Physical necessity: The constants and quantities must have the values they do. 2. Chance: The constants and quantities have the values they do simply by accident. 3. Design: The constants and quantities were designed to have the values they do.
Notice that by focusing on cosmic fine-tuning this argument does an end run around the whole emotionally charged issue of biological evolution. The argument from fine-tuning, if successful, will show that the evolution of intelligent life anywhere in the cosmos depends upon the design of the initial cosmic conditions. Any design arguments based on the origin of life, the origin of biological complexity, the origin of consciousness, and so on, will simply layer on more improbability, making it all the more unlikely that all this can be explained apart from a Designer.
