United With Christ
Session 2
Today, my plan is to share some things that will strengthen your faith and make you a better witness, better able to interact with your loved ones, neighbors, and friends.
We Christians are called to be witnesses of the Lord Jesus, ambassadors for Him. We’re called to proclaim Him, to share about Him with others. We’ve found new life and hope in Christ, and we just naturally want to share that with everybody we know, so they can experience the same blessings we have experienced. But sometimes that might seem intimidating, if we worry what people will think of us. We might be afraid they’ll see us as religious fanatics or ignorant simpletons. Maybe some of you worry you won’t be able to answer their questions or stand up against any arguments they might have. You’re afraid of being ridiculed for being a believer.
Last week, we looked at 1 Pet. 3:15, which tells us we need to be ready to give an answer, a defense (apologia) to anyone who asks us about the hope we have in Christ, and we need to do it with gentleness and respect. My goal in these next weeks is to help you with that, to help you get equipped, so you can confidently share your faith.
I said last week that the best way to get prepared to give an answer is just to read the Bible every day. That alone will renew your mind and give you a different perspective on life. It’ll enable you to know God and be able to point others to Him. Biblical illiteracy is a huge problem in America today, even among Christians! We all really need to appreciate the Bible God has put into our hands and make sure we make the best use of it. I can’t urge you enough to develop that habit of daily reading, meditating, and studying the Word of God.
But we also noted last week that there are many other great resources out there to help us get prepared or equipped to tell people about Jesus and show why He’s a better way of life. God has given us teachers, authors, experts in all sorts of fields, so we can really learn how to present the gospel.
Today and next week, I want to discuss with you how you can present the truth of God to an atheist or skeptic. I have found some excellent books over the years that have really helped me to do this. Over the next 3 weeks, I want to share with you some of what I found in a couple of them – “I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist” by Drs. Norm Geisler and Frank Turek, and “Stealing from God,” by Dr. Turek alone. I want to urge you to get these books and carefully study them. If you do, it’ll give you some real “ammunition” to strengthen your own faith and help you share your faith with others.
We don’t just believe in Jesus because it comforts us emotionally. We believe because God has impacted our lives and revealed Himself to us, and because we’ve come to see that biblical teaching makes sense. And you know, atheists don’t simply not believe in God. Most of them don’t believe in God because they do believe in something else, another explanation, another way of looking at things. We need to know that, and help them see what they’re believing, and how to examine it in a clear, objective light.
I want to share with you some of the main points from these books that you need to know. But to really make these things your own, please buy the books for your own study and ongoing reference.
I don’t have enough faith was written to show you why it actually takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to be a Christian. That may sound crazy, but it’s really true!
Now why would anyone say atheists have to have more faith than Christians? They don’t believe in God! Isn’t that what faith means? Actually, that’s a bit of a misunderstanding. Dr. Richard Dawkins, the atheist biologist who goes around arguing against God, says faith is “belief in something for which there is no evidence.” As a man of science, Dawkins says he only believes in what can be proven empirically, that is, what can be touched, weighed, seen, measured, etc. To him, faith is like a fantasy, a dream, something we just make up and believe in, like Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, with no real evidence whatsoever.
There’s another way to look at faith though, and we consider it this way, we’ll see that faith is something every human being has and is familiar with. Let me try to explain. Suppose someone you recently met invites you to lunch and offers to drive. You’ve never been in their car. You’ve never ridden anywhere with them. But you’ve ridden in other cars, and you’ve spent at least a little time with this person, so you feel they’re a pretty reasonable and reliable person. So you have faith that things will be ok, and you get in the car. You don’t know for sure this car will work, this driver will be safe. But you’ve done this often enough that you trust it will be ok. In that sense, you have faith to trust this situation.
There are so many other examples we could use of this. You’ve never opened this container of milk before. But you’ve bought milk so many times at this store. You’ve checked the date. It’s always worked out. So you trust this container of milk will be good too, even though you don’t know for sure, and to be honest, every once in a while, you can buy some bad milk. You buy things online, even though you don’t know the people and can’t see the product, because you’ve done it before, and things worked out ok.
None of us knows everything or can be absolutely sure of everything. So we all deal with probabilities, not certainties, in so many areas of life, every day. We think it would probably be good to drink the milk, probably be good to get in the car, probably be safe to fly in an airplane. We can’t prove it would be. Likewise, we can’t prove there is a God, prove that Jesus is His Son, prove He rose from the dead, prove the Bible is the Word of God. But you know what? Atheists and skeptics can’t prove all sorts of things either, but they just believe them. They can’t prove evolution, since no one has ever seen it happen. They can’t prove the universe is billions of years old, but they think that’s reasonable. They can’t prove all life sprang spontaneously from a primordial molecular soup; they just believe it did. They have some evidence for their beliefs, but there are many, many things they accept without any evidence at all.
As I’ll try to show you in the next few sessions, we have lots of evidence which makes us believe in God, His Word, the Bible, His Son, Jesus, and the way of life He’s taught us. We don’t just hope these things are so, without any evidence. Many things have brought us to the place where we believe, many things have pointed us in this direction. God has given us more than sufficient evidence, if we’ll only look for it and receive it with an open mind and heart. That’s why many of us have come to the place where we’re able to say it looks to be true beyond a reasonable doubt. In a courtroom, lawyers can’t usually prove things absolutely. They just have to show them to probably be true, beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s what Geisler and Turek do regarding the Christian faith.
There’s a great quote on pages 26 & 27, I’d like to read to you:
“Faith covers a gap in knowledge. And it turns out that atheists have bigger gaps in knowledge because they have far less evidence for their beliefs than Christians have for theirs. In other words, the empirical, forensic, and philosophical evidence strongly supports conclusions consistent with Christianity and inconsistent with atheism. Here are a few examples of that evidence…
- The scientific evidence overwhelmingly confirms that the universe exploded into being out of nothing. Either someone created something out of nothing (the Christian view), or no one created something out of nothing (the atheistic view). Which view is more reasonable? The Christian view. Which view requires more faith? The atheistic view.
- The simplest life form contains the information-equivalent of 1,000 encyclopedias. Christians believe only an intelligent being can create a life form containing the equivalent of 1,000 encyclopedias. Atheists believe non-intelligent natural forces can do it. Christians have evidence to support their conclusion. Since atheists don’t have any such evidence, their belief requires a lot more faith.
- Hundreds of years beforehand, ancient writings foretold the coming of a man who would actually be God. This man-God, it was foretold, would be born in a particular city from a particular bloodline, suffer in a particular way, die at a particular time, and rise from the dead to atone for the sins of the world. Immediately after the predicted time, multiple eyewitnesses proclaimed and later recorded that those predicted events had actually occurred. Those eyewitnesses endured persecution and death when they could have saved themselves by denying the events. Thousands of people in Jerusalem were then converted after seeing or hearing of these events, and this belief swept quickly across the ancient world. Ancient historians and writers allude to or confirm these events, and archaeology corroborates them. Having seen evidence from creation that God exists (point 1 above), Christians believe these multiple lines of evidence show beyond a reasonable doubt that God had a hand in these events. Atheists must have a lot more faith to explain away the predictions, the eyewitness testimony, the willingness of the eyewitnesses to suffer and die, the origin of the Christian church, and the corroborating testimony of the other writers, archeological finds, and other evidence that we’ll investigate later.
I hope you were able to appreciate the truth of this quote. These are powerful reasons to believe in God! This was just a brief overview of some of them. If you read the book, you’ll see how the authors really make their case for these and many other points, step by logical step. The Christian faith isn’t a fairy tale! It isn’t something we believe just because we’re hopeless romantics or people desperate for something to cling to! No, God has provided a very strong case with lots of evidence if we’re willing to look at it honestly. The truth is, a lot of people just don’t realize how much evidence there is, and what a strong case can be made for faith. A lot of people don’t realize that it really takes more blind faith to be an atheist than a Christian!
I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist makes this case in a systematic way.
In the first sections of the book, the authors look at the subject of truth itself. Is there such a thing as truth? Nowadays so many have accepted the lies of relativism, and believe all truth is relative, it’s like an opinion or a preference, sort of like whether you prefer vanilla or chocolate, and not something anyone can be sure of. They especially believe this when it comes to so-called “religious” or “moral” truth. They think whatever works for you is fine, just don’t try to force it on me. But no one can “know” for sure anything having to do with ultimate reality, morality, and that sort of thing. Have you seen this YouTube clip where the young man interviews young college students on the streets of Wash. State, and they can’t even tell him he’s a man, not a woman, white, not black, and Anglo, not Asian? They can’t even say he’s wrong to claim to be seven years old! This is a huge problem with our society today, and it’s a fallacy, so we’ll join Geisler and Turek as they look at that and try to clear it up.
Next, the book deals with the evidence for God and things we can know about God without even referring to the Bible or any other “holy” book. I’m talking about scientific evidence, from such fields as astro-physics, astronomy, mathematics, and biology. Did you know that kind of evidence exists? It surely does, and I hope you’ll look at it with me.
Then, if there is a God, how would or could He communicate with human beings? And is there any evidence that He has? How do we find that sort of evidence? Can we trust it?
Then the authors look at the evidence we have that the Bible is reliable and trustworthy. So many today don’t realize the real nature of the Bible. They don’t realize how much solid evidence exists to prove it is a Book that has been inspired and has come to us from God. It’s the most reputable book from ancient times that exists! As Christians, our source for faith and practice is God’s Word. We need to be convinced it’s really trustworthy, and this book helps with that. If you can’t trust the Bible, you can’t trust God. You can’t really know Him!
So I hope you’ll join me as we study these things further. We need this, and the world out there needs us to be able to share it with them.
I want to reiterate that we can’t argue people into the Kingdom of God. That’s not why we’re learning this stuff. The truth is, many who are atheists or skeptics don’t want to know the truth, and wouldn’t believe even if it were shown to them beyond a shadow of a doubt. They want to live life their own way, and don’t want God to tell them they’re wrong. Frank Turek likes to ask people when they interact with him at presentations, “If you knew Christianity were true, would you become a believer?” He has found that lots of times people will say, “Honestly, no.” That shows they don’t have a problem with their thinking, but with their wills. They don’t want God!
But there are other folks out there who don’t believe in God or Christianity because they believe there are other explanations which make more sense, or because they believe there are too many difficulties with the Christian view, or because they just don’t know all the evidence that’s out there. These books will show you convincingly that there is really more and better evidence on the side of God. I hope you’ll read and study these things and become fully convinced of that yourself!
Remember, I’d love to hear from you. If you have prayer requests or questions about anything we’ve been discussing, please email me at hwarrenhoyt@gmail.com