Defense of the Faith - Introduction to Apologetics

How many of you have family and or friends that were once Christians and now claim not to be? It's one of the reasons for having this elective which will be for the first six months we'll be looking at defense of the faith and then for the next six months looking at more discernment issues within Christianity. It's a significant issue within families, within the church, that there are people who are bailing on Christianity, bailing on biblical faith, oftentimes because they haven't been given the answers early on.

And so what we want to do is address those kinds of questions. It's helpful in conversations with family and friends if they have departed or are on their way. It's also a help for parents and grandparents who have an influence in dealing with kids. So a really big factor.

In my own case, what has happened is I grew up in a Christian home. I've been a Christian since age four and a half. I have a significant family member who early on in my even preteen years tried to influence me away from biblical faith. And that attempt to influence continued on into my college years.

And so that being a long time ago, since I'm getting older, over 40 years I've been continually studying this subject. I began in college majoring in geology and went a significant way through that. And I spent quite a bit of time studying history, philosophy, biology. I've been out on a number of paleontology field trips and classes, digging up fossils. I studied astrophysics. So there's a whole bunch of different things related to this question. And so let's dig in here.

You've got on the front page kind of a half-page introduction to Defense of the Faith, and then something we're actually going to hold off until the last half of the year, Discernment, that is polemics based on the definition of the faith. We'll just address that briefly here this morning and continue most of our time in Defense of the Faith. Do we need a light on? On this side here, it looks like we're a little dark. Bill's going to get it. Thank you.

So, it says, we live in a world in which the attack on biblical Christian faith is becoming increasingly aggressive on various fronts. Aggressive atheists and agnostics have produced a profusion of books and media publications of various kinds which attack biblical Christian faith on historical, scientific, philosophical, sociological, including gender definition, and moral grounds. Who are some of the skeptics whose names you've run across? Sagan. Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan, right, who's now dead, but he obviously had material. Any other names come to mind of kind of well-known skeptics, agnostics, and atheists? Hawkins. Hawkins, right, is one. Asked him often in a prior time, yeah. You mentioned Hawkins, another one that sounds similar, Richard Dawkins. He's written everything from things about fossils and biological evolution. That is kind of his area of expertise. He's written books like The God Delusion. Books like that.

So he is one of those aggressive atheists. Bart Ehrman is the name of another who he would call himself an agnostic, not an atheist. But he actually went to Moody Bible School in Wheaton, and then went to Princeton, and that's where he basically lost his faith, so to speak. And he's very prolific. Some of these guys you mentioned, I've got a number of their books, as many as dozens of them. So I keep track of what these guys are saying and keep up on what they're writing and what they're about to write and those kind of things. Yeah, Sam?

Who was the lady that started the basic PCLU? ACLU, I'm trying to think. She's basically the one who denied the faith and attacked it. Not Madeleine Murray O'Hare. Madeleine Murray O'Hare, okay, is now dead. Madeleine Murray O'Hare is an atheist, very outspoken, of yesteryear.

And by the way, there are atheists of different spectrums. Some are very outspoken and aggressive. I've even heard of some that take their kids to church. So, I mean, there's a spectrum there, you know. So, yeah, there's quite a range. Anyway, we'll get into that. But I think there's a lot of that. It's increasing. There is an organization that is filing lawsuits to try to push churches off to the side. You know, Freedom From Religion Foundation. So they're trying to essentially marginalize churches. So you've got that. I know of people in various situations, a son of missionaries, who went off in a skeptical direction, influenced by an atheist. So different ones. And we'll talk about some of those. Here's another one.

The aggression of Islam against Christianity and any other non-Muslim or opposing Muslim group has ranged from intellectual opposition to terrorism to military attack. It's very interesting to me that in the first hundred years of Christianity, before Christianity started getting gravitated towards military and political alliances, In the first hundred years of Christianity, where at best Christians were persecuted by governments and by people, I can't think of, and I'm not aware of, one instance where there was some military attack or military action on the part of Christians. Christians were more generally subject to persecution. Within the first hundred years of Islam, it's a different story.

632 AD, Muhammad died. By 732, the Europeans had just turned around and advanced just outside of Paris in Tours, France. And the Muslims had swept across North Africa, and the Muslims had also gone into Asia. and finally got stopped in the Philippines. That's within the first hundred years. So Christianity originally, people will bring up things like the Crusades and whatnot, but Christianity as it was originally founded was not militarily aggressive. Islam, very much the other direction. Very much the other direction.

Okay, and another is, for several decades, Eastern philosophy, religion, practices, and worldviews have been marketed in the Western cultures. See, not just a little bit of influence, marketed in the Western cultures. Yeah, Krishna consciousness, you know, back in the late 60s, early 70s, you know, you had the Beatles lining up with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, you know. and all that, and you've got all these Swamis that started influencing Western culture. So you've had a lot of that.

The next one, group-seeking societal acceptance of unbiblical morals have taken up aggressive action and words to overcome resistance by Christians. And admittedly, some of those within Christendom have been just outright stupid. You know, just the God hates fags signs and all that kind of stuff. Excuse me, Christ died for them. You know, Christ died for them. So this is just unbiblical nonsense. Nonetheless, you know, Christians and churches have been targets some of these, you know, moral and social movements.

It's one of the reasons why we have a policy manual in the coffee room and downstairs in order to have some kind of defense against that. You know, recently here in Colorado, Colorado Baker was told, you know, by the court, you must, you know, do a gay wedding cake. We don't want to get in that spot. So anyway, we have just as a defensive move, put in several things in our policy manual in terms of that, including more recently a statement on marriage. Marriage is only between a man and a woman. So you have that.

Secularization of society has tended to put biblical Christian faith increasingly out of the general public view, which has implied that biblical Christian faith is irrelevant, inappropriate, and unwelcome in the public sphere. The First Amendment has been looked upon as the government shall make no establishment of religion. It has been interpreted as freedom from religion. You can't have any religion. By the way, what that was originally intended to do was to say that the federal government may not establish a religion, because every single one of the states, when that was adopted, had an official state religion. And that continued on, finally dissipating about the middle 1800s, where a particular state would be aligned with a specific denomination. So that's what it was originally intended to do, now it's looked upon as, you know, you can't have religion anywhere. Every single one of our state's constitutions refers to at least God, if not a higher power. So the idea of eradicating all religion was not a part of the First Amendment.

Okay, so then we say, some of the considerations in which these become critical include Christian parenting and education, evangelism, church leadership, and priorities. Think about, in parenting, why is it critical that some of this defense of the faith understanding is a part of parenting these days?

A hard, far-left philosophy says it's necessary to take the children from the parents. Yes, that's right. It becomes a point, are the parents responsible for the children and independent? Or are they really the state's children and you've just got temporary stewardship of them under the state? Under a secular state? Yeah. Yeah, it takes a church to raise your family. Okay. The village may be messed up, right? Yeah, the village may be messed up. Try that in the days before the Great Awakening. Yes.

One of the things that happened in my case, just kind of personal testimony, is I was influenced by my older brother who was trying to persuade me away from Christian faith. So when my older brother left home, I turned around and spent lots of time with my younger brother. Here's what the Bible says, and defending the faith, and those kinds of things. So that's had quite an influence on him.

He's about ten years younger than me, and he's a pastor at a Bible church in California now. But influencing the next generation is key. As we were raising our three kids, spending time talking about these subjects was important. And certainly we have no guarantees, but all three of my kids and their spouses are walking with the Lord and can address a lot of these questions. Now, we want to look at briefly discernment, which we're actually going to put off in great part. Here's discernment, polemics based on the definition of the faith.

Christendom is all of what those on the outside view as Christianity. If you have someone who's not a believer, are they going to look at the Jehovah's Witnesses as Christianity? Yeah, yeah, they're going to talk about Jesus and they'll talk about the Bible and all that. So yeah, they're going to view it as Christianity.

Is it? Yeah, so we're talking about what does someone on the outside looking in count as Christianity? And they'll include Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons and all kinds of different things. Pardon? Catholicism, right? And that is a huge segment of what we call Christendom, right? And what we run into is definitions of key words are really pivotal.

We'll use the same word, but we don't mean the same thing by it. For example, what is the gospel? And what do you need to believe in order to be saved? So what's the gospel? And the definition of that is key. So we'll want to take a closer look at that. How about salvation?

What is salvation? How is one saved? Do you get saved as soon as you're baptized by the right people? Do you get saved if you do all the right stuff? I talked to one fellow, it's almost five years ago now, I talked to one fellow who said, you know, before I got baptized, they told me I had to list all my sins. And I didn't list one, so I'm not saved. So, how is one saved? Is salvation God-centered or man-centered? What is grace and what is mercy?

For example, in the Catholic Church, I'll summarize it, this is their absolute plan of salvation, which we won't look at until a number of months from now. In the Catholic Church, God is merciful and gracious in order to provide you a way, essentially, for you to earn your own salvation.

So that's a big distinction. Yes, only salvation and nothing else. In the Calvinist churches, which includes like Presbyterian, you know, in the Calvinist reform Presbyterian churches, the doctrines of grace are the tulip acronym. And so, yeah, their grace is very constrained. The way I jokingly put it to Brad Mastin, those of you who know him, is grace is something God forces on you. It's irresistible, right? Okay, it's irresistible grace that God forces on you.

Are we under law or not? And if so, which are the laws we should keep? Probably most of Christendom holds to some laws that we have to keep. Upon the ultimate penalty. Yes. Well, and then some of them are not ones out of the Bible. It's things you're not supposed to eat and drink and wear and things like that.

You know, you've got various rules. Is there truth? And if so, how do we know what the truth is? I was talking to one student at Colorado Christian University, whose professor told him, if somebody says that they know what the Bible means, that's heresy. That's not helpful. Anyway, does doctrine matter? And if so, which doctrines? There's a non... how do I say it?

It's a parachurch ministry that I'm aware of. Nancy was talking to the wife of one who was the head of this parachurch ministry, and she told Nancy, you know, you just have to stay away from doctrine. That's just, you know, bad stuff. So this parachurch ministry is a ministry with no name. Well, you know, it has a name, but I don't...

Who is God? Who is God? Now different people come up with different definitions for that, right? Does God know the future and can God change? We had in Colorado Springs a gathering of Christians from mostly across the country but some other foreign countries and there was about a third of them. They had kind of a straw poll and about a third of them have felt that God doesn't know the future and God can change.

Who is Christ and what is his relationship to God? What is his relationship to God? There are at least a couple of major cults that teach that Christ is just really Michael, the Archangel. Nancy had, within the last few weeks, a Facebook conversation with this gal who is very insistent that Jesus is not deity, not God.

What is God's revelation, and can it change, and who's the interpreter of it? Have we got more books we're coming up with? Do we have some special council or group in the church that can come up with new revelations? And who gets to decide what it means?

Yes, plenty of that. Which is priority, truth, mind, feelings, or experiences? See, our culture has been telling us that feelings and experiences, since about the end of World War II, our culture has been telling us feelings and experiences that that holds top priority. That holds top priority. Where and in whom ought we to place our faith? What should we believe? Where should we put our faith?

Open theism is the term. Open theism. No, two words. Open theism. There are a few other terms but that's one of the major ones. So those are some key things and what it amounts to is the definitions of words that are used among Christians. are not universal. We'll talk to somebody about grace and they'll have a different definition.

Yeah, Ruth? In the ministry that I'm doing, a lot of times the children have no clue that Jesus is a real person. Yeah. And that because they've only heard his name as a curse word. Yeah. And so they're like, Jesus, Jesus who? Yeah, no concept at all. Yeah, no concept at all. Yeah.

Part of what's happening is because of the ignorance in the culture, definitions of who's Jesus goes off this way when the reality is the ability to read and understand the Bible and even archaeological discoveries and things of that sort are headed entirely the other direction.

Just a recent find that was well-vindicated was here's the bone box of James, half-brother of Jesus. And it went through a major, major court case over in Israel because the guy who had that bone box was accused of archaeological fraud. And the experts looked at it, and looked at it, and looked at it, and an expert for the prosecution said, if this is fake, I quit. This is the genuine article, every evidence, this is the bone box, the ossuary it's called, of the half-brother of Jesus, James. Yeah?

I think a lot of times faith is used for what faith are you, what religion, or what kind of thing. When you say faith, they say, oh, well, you must believe the church. Yes, and the reality is, and we'll look at this later, the atheist has great faith. The atheist has great faith, the agnostic has great faith. It's where do they put it?

Essentially, I'll put it this way, we are all people of faith. We are all people of faith. Even the one who is most skeptical, the one who tries to be rational and doesn't believe anything unless it's proven, still people of faith. So we'll get into that. Alright, let's take a look on page two. The biblical basis for and the character of defense of the faith. One of the key passages is 1 Peter 3, 13-16.

Who is there to harm you if you prove zealous for what is good? But if you should suffer for the sake of righteousness, you are blessed. And do not fear their intimidation and do not be troubled. This is key. Because you'll have people coming and trying to intimidate you. Making various kinds of of sometimes shaming statements.

Do not fear their intimidation, do not be troubled, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense. Sometimes defense of the faith is called apologetics, and it's based on this word, apologia. And it isn't saying, I'm sorry, I'm a Christian. but it is instead providing a defense. To everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, yet with gentleness and reverence, and to keep a good conscience so that in the thing in which you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ will be put to shame. So the Greek word that's translated defense can also mean argument or an explanation. And there is also a biblical basis for making that defense in the right character, gentleness and reverence.

This last week there was a well-known skeptic that went and tweeted, that's using the Twitter website, and he talked about, you know, long ago there was a guy who was born on December 25th, and you know, we remember his name, and he then says, it's Isaac Newton.

Well, anyway, a couple things that are a little funny about that. One is that Isaac Newton was born during a time when they used the Julian, not as the rest of the world, and we now use the Gregorian calendar. So it lagged by 10 days, the actual birthday, and he was actually born not on December 25th, but January 4th. So that's part one. Wrong date. Secondly, When Isaac Newton, after he developed the various laws of orbital mechanics and things of that sort, went on to write Bible commentaries on Daniel and Romans. So, anyway, for what it's worth.

Nonetheless, my reason for bringing it up is a lot of Christians were horrible in their responses to this guy. It was not with gentleness and reverence that they responded. So that's a key thing, is when we're defending the faith, it doesn't mean we come with some aggressive counterattack, right? Because it's not just our words, you know, in raw form that need to be Christian, but also our behavior and our attitudes. So that's a key thing in defending the faith. We don't come back with a bunch of mudslinging and hard words and accusations, etc. Pardon?

Yeah, we have no real idea when he was born. It was probably not exactly December 25th. And we've got some ways to put some brackets on it, but certainly not to fix a date. And even our Easter date hops around, and it really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. So what we do culturally, both for Christmas and for Easter, is kind of arbitrary. The evidence is mounting increasingly. Jesus was crucified on April 3rd, 33 AD. But the date of his birth is still one that we can at best kind of bracket. Good point. So, the next thing we want to touch on is worldviews.

What happens is people I have a collection of presuppositions. From that they develop a worldview. The atheist, for example, has not gone around and done a bunch of objective study and then arrived at the conclusion that there is no God. The atheist has assumed there is no God and then developed all the thinking and whatnot after that. So it's not a proven conclusion, it is an assumption prior to investigation. That's how you arrive at atheism. It's an assumption prior to investigation. We have here at this church a former atheist, a great case. Very well trained educationally, He used to be an atheist. He's not anymore. Hasn't been for a while. For well over a decade. He's been a believer.

When I was taking philosophy courses in college, I had a course in phenomenology and metaphysics, which I won't go into that, but nonetheless, the professor gave an oral exam as a final. Every student got a different question and you got four minutes. So he gets to me and he says, Mr. Peterman, it's apparent from your papers that you believe in God. You have four minutes to tell us what difference that makes in your life.

And so I did. And then afterwards, a fellow by the name of Vince came running up to me. And I'd never met him before, but he found out I was a Christian believing God. And so he says, well, I'm an atheist. I said, well, that's great. How about if you come over to my place and let's talk about it? And so I had him come over that evening, and we talked for several hours, and he left, and I didn't make any arrangements to talk to him again. But about a year later, I was at church one evening, and I looked over, and about from here over to the window, There's Vince. And I said, Vince, as soon as the service was over, what are you doing here?

You're an atheist. He says, correction, I'm a former atheist. Now, what we have here is kind of expressions of each of these. Here's the atheist. He says, I must explain everything in the past and in the present in terms of the physical world alone, that is, that which can be seen, touched, smelled, tasted, and heard.

There is no spiritual realm. nor are there any spiritual beings, including myself. Physical laws and statistics rule everything. The Bible is man's creation, not God's revelation. There is no afterlife. Everybody only lives once, and what once constituted their body goes back into nature. Yeah, Stan? So it's actually the Sadducees' philosophy? Close. The Sadducees did not believe in an afterlife, right? They believe that there was a God, but when you're done here, you're done. So the Sadducees are getting there, right? Good point there.

The agnostic says, I cannot confirm that there is anything in the spiritual realm, nor that there are any spiritual beings, so I must approach the world as the atheist. So the agnostic is really looking similar similarly to things as the atheist except that it's based on I can't confirm that there's a spiritual realm or spiritual beings or God so because I can't confirm that all I can do is deal with what I can see, touch, taste, smell, etc. Tom? I imagine if you took a typical honest to goodness and if they had an expanded, up to the present time, truthful rendering of unbroken, then you might find a point of view that you could not dispute. Could be.

I have here Eastern religions, and because there are lots of Eastern religions and different variations, like within Buddhism, Mahayana, Hinayana, Theravada, Zen, different groups within Buddhism. I've tried to boil it down and leave out the things that differentiate them.

So, in Eastern religions, life and death are cyclical, resulting in many, many reincarnations. Reality is physical and spiritual, and the spiritual is in everything that is physical. It's pantheism, right? By my own efforts, I can achieve enlightenment and transcend the cycle of life and death. The enlightenment is nirvana in Buddhism and moksha in Hinduism, but similar idea.

What happens when you transcend? You know, it's funny, I had multiple conversations years ago with a religion professor from India. His name was Bhanu Dave. And what he says is, all that we see and all that we experience is a dream of God. And in the end, the dream of God, God will wake up and the dream will go away. That's kind of the way he explained it.

Now we have another one, animism. And by the way, animism is one that has quite a bit of adherence spread throughout the world. American Indians were generally animists. You've got the spirit of the tree, and the rock, and the river, and the mountain, and all those. over in Africa lots of animism the ancient religions of much of the Eastern world in Europe on into the Middle East and on into Asia animism and that is the spirit of the rocks and the trees and the mountains and you know every physical object has a spirit behind it And you're in a position of constantly manipulating different spiritual entities in order to make things go well for you. Get this particular spirit of the river or spirit of the tree in your favor. And when I was over in Uganda, that's one of the things that we ran across.

There is kind of an off-spin of this in this New Age realm. Is New Age more animism? New Age, I would say, is a combination of animism, as you see here, and the Eastern religions. New Age kind of has a large umbrella, but it's a combination of the Eastern religions and this animism. where you're trying to deal with things in the spiritual realm. The American Indian tribes going on up into Canada and into South America, a great deal of animism. Nancy and I had a foster, Native American foster daughter who a lot of animism came out in conversations.

You know, Spirit of the Owl and different things. And different ones will gravitate towards this or that animal as being somehow prominent. In the area where Nancy and I lived for a time and where I went to high school, the Indians in that area particularly regard the coyote. And they even have a flood story, a worldwide flood story that relates to the coyote.

Yes. So I always wondered, how did that, where did that originate? I mean, it's passed down through generations. Yes, yes. But at some point in time, somebody must have said, oh, the spirits in the owl or the spirits in the coyote. Yeah. You know, how far back did that really go? Did somebody just think of it? Well, you think about it. OK. We have things originally starting with Adam and those who descended from him. A great many of those things were wiped out and so you have Noah and Noah's family.

But as they spread away from the ark, they would carry away different things. And one of the things we find is almost universal. Wherever you go around the globe, there are flood stories. But they get degraded the farther away they get from the biblical center. But one of the things that they do is they try to explain the world as they see it.

And so they notice, boy, I had a really bad experience with this river here. This river flooded on me. I've got to keep it calmed down, the spirit of the river. And then they'll say, OK, well, there's an owl. And what does that do for me? Did the owl attack me? I've got to get control of the spirit of the owl.

And so they'll interpret things spiritually. And oftentimes, you know, develops what to us may seem really curious, the idea of making sacrifices in order to appease the spirit of, you know, this or that spirit. It's one of the things that developed. It's interesting, too, how that's affected some of our laws. In fact, if you find a dead eagle, you can't collect the feathers. Yeah. Yeah, they revere the eagle feathers. All of a sudden you can't do anything with eagle feathers.

And now we have biblical Christianity. There is a God who is, certainly we could say more, but there is a God who is personal and infinite, who has created the physical universe and all spiritual beings, visible and invisible, that that God has other unchangeable qualities and has revealed himself in five specific ways.

General revelation is conscience, providence, God's provision and guidance, and nature. Look at nature. A special revelation is Jesus Christ and the Bible. One of the many things that God has revealed is that all mankind has been alienated from God by Adam's sin, but God the Father has sent his Son to be born of a woman, to die for our sins, and to be raised to new life. All who believe in Jesus' death for our sins, burial, and resurrection are reconciled to God and have eternal life. Quick summary on what biblical Christianity is, right?

It's a worldview. The truth is, no worldview can be proven. The atheist cannot prove his worldview because every worldview depends on scientifically unverifiable presuppositions. Every one. Can the atheist prove with absoluteness that there is no God? Can the atheist prove that miracles do not happen? Ever. No. And I can personally testify to several of them. So, no, they can't prove it. It's an assumption, not a scientifically based conclusion. It's this starting assumption that they can never prove.

We'll look at that, a whole bunch of assumptions. So we get to the next one, presuppositions. Mathematics. Kurt Cobell wrote back in the 1930s, an Austrian mathematician and philosopher, Even mathematics starts off with unprovable assumptions. Even math starts with unprovable assumptions. I assume this, and therefore we go on from there. Science, we'll look at it, science has ten, minimum, ten unverifiable presuppositions to carry out science.

And by the way, one of those is, there's such a thing as truth. That's one of them. We'll look at that. Logic. If I assume this, then therefore this and this and this. But I've got to assume something first. Something which is fundamentally unverifiable. And one of the points I made, why must we use logic to arrive at a conclusion?

Now if you answer that, what are you going to do? You're going to use logic. It's circular. And so the support for, you know, why are we going to use logic? You're going to come up with an answer for me. No matter what it is, it's circular. Oh, it's because, and all of a sudden I'm using logic to prove logic.

Right? It is the nature of human beings. We can't get behind those things. The atheist, the scientist, the mathematician, the logician, all of them at some point get to a place where you can't get behind it. And it's assumed. Unprovable. So every person operates on the basis of faith and unverifiable presuppositions. Atheists and skeptics included. They all do. They're people of faith. And you can't get behind it. You can't prove it or demonstrate it. Someone says there is no God. Okay, let's talk about that.

But it's a conclusion before investigation, not a reasoned, researched conclusion that they've drawn upon. A person may be skeptical, rational, logical, mathematically and or scientifically oriented, and may be prone to independently verify everything, but at some point they have faith in a number of unverifiable presuppositions. Yes? That's why data was such a The bottom line we'll get into science more, but the bottom line science is a marriage of two things one is logic and mathematics and Observation. Sensing, touching, feeling, etc. That's what science is.

And the first scientists, first modern scientists, were all Christians. All of them. And we'll discover why. All of them were Christians. What you'll have now is the atheist or agnostic who's aggressive will try to put things in such a way that they're rational and they're the ones who are objective and scientific, and the Christians are the ones who are irrational. All science, modern science, was begun by Christians. Not always the same kind of Christian, but all of them Christians. Kepler. Galileo, Isaac Newton. You go through it, they're all Christians. They're all Christians.

Now, there you might find a little bit of an argument because Freud, I suppose, if they wanted to consider that a separate, unique branch of science, doesn't quite go there. Yeah, well, even those who are in that field would critique Freud in that there is no objectively verifiable basis for an ego and an id. Show me one, right? So frequently, you know, Freud, Jung, a lot of those guys are critiqued even by those in the field now. Because it's not scientifically based. It's coming up with an idea that is unverifiable, right? And when I say originated by Christians, a lot of this is what we're talking about back in the 14, 15, and 1600s. And so Freud would be, you know, more within the last century.

Now, here's the bottom line under this paragraph presuppositions. The specific collection of unverifiable presuppositions in which one has faith define a person's worldview. See that? The particular collection of unverifiable presuppositions define a person's world view. If I am an agnostic or an atheist, that's based on a collection of unverifiable presuppositions, not based on careful investigation and logic and research and that sort of thing.

I assume those things and therefore work from them. The atheist will tell you there's no such thing as miracles. And within my own experience and family, I can come up with about a dozen of them. So, it doesn't fly. But there will be doctrinaire, categorical, there is no such thing as miracles.

I would say, hmm, sit down, let me talk to you a while. Now, the other thing is, these principles we're going to be studying are spiritually useful. Some of the and we say principle by the way I wanted to find that a principle is either a fundamental truth or the way things work or both Okay, and so these these are both Fundamental principles and the way things work so the principles that will be presented this defense of the faith elective are useful for conversations with anyone coming from a non-christian worldview whether they were ever Christians or not Okay So that's one Those principles both help the believer to stand on solid ground and may be a part of what the Lord uses to bring the non-Christian to faith in Christ.

One of the points, for example, for Craig Case, coming to the Lord, and I know I'm okay to say this because he said it here in the elective, One of the things was him looking at evidences of Christianity from outside the Bible. Within the first one or two centuries, the basic teachings of the New Testament can be gotten from others who are not Christians from in the first and second centuries. And that influenced him. He said, wait a minute, this isn't just, you know, here's this book and it's just got whatever stories, but I have independent confirmation of the general outline of the New Testament from non-Christian sources. These principles both help the believer to stand on solid ground and may be a part of what the Lord uses to bring the non-Christian to faith in Christ.

In that sense, these principles are an evangelistic tool. It may be helpful if someone's got objections to say, okay, here's the answer to that objection. And now what's really the issue is, here's the gospel. Do you believe it? Next, these principles are also useful to help the believer to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ and to confidently proclaim the truth of the gospel in whatever realm the Lord has us carrying on ministry. I had a couple of guys ask me, why is it that all the evidences throughout the universe indicate that the universe is old?

I said, well, let's take some time to talk about that. But I think that's a mistaken perception. And that was a year and a half ago and we're still talking. I think the biggest stumbling block they see is that everything started from zero hours, so to speak. You had everything started out at the same levels of non-decay and then starts decaying from the points that they call them.

And here's one of the things we're going to run into. How many of us have the ability to go back in time to verify anything? Nobody, right? And it doesn't matter if you've got PhDs, million-dollar laboratories, Nobody can go back in time and verify anything. Just not happening. We don't have that technology.

And then, by the way, if somebody said they did have a time machine, how would you verify that it is correct? The reality is all that we do is observe in the present and we project back into the past based on scientifically unverifiable presuppositions, right? That's all we do. So you get a scientist, he says, I found a dinosaur bone. We've got dinosaur bones in this state. He says, I found a dinosaur bone. And when you start asking questions, well, is this animal that left these bones related to this one? Well, guess what?

Other than the shape of the bones and things of that sort, in most cases, there's no way to check that. There isn't any way to check it. We can't go back in time and observe, oh, that changed into this. You can't. You can't get there. There are a number of reasons why the conclusions that are being drawn in many cases are questionable.

If I have a 100-plus-million-year-old dinosaur bone, and that dinosaur bone has, remaining after 100-plus-million-years, soft tissue. And soft tissue degrades, even under ideal conditions, a half-life of about 571 years. So, before very long, I don't have any soft tissue left. Not a chance of it.

And then, when I go and do a carbon-14 test on it, it's not 100 plus million years, but it's instead something like, in one case, 23,000 years. And, the carbon-14 test assumes that the earth is old. So, I've got soft tissue with one date. Carbon 14 with another date, but I've assigned a different date to the bulbs. Can I verify any of them? I cannot go back in time to verify any of them to tell which one is true. We're going to be going through these subjects.

I think the thing is, I'm not afraid of anything, you know. Because people will claim to have knowledge they in fact don't have And and in investigating things more carefully You know, there's nothing attacking biblical faith we've run out of time there's people with noses pressed up against the glass so we better close Lord we thank you for this opportunity for us to study and look at these things. We thank you that we can stand upon your word and what you've revealed. And Lord, we pray that you might use this in our own lives, in our families, extended families included, and among our friends and others that you bring along our path. And so we just entrust our time to you and look to you to work in and through us. We pray in Jesus name. Amen.