Apologetics is a rational defense of the Christian faith. It comes from the Greek word apologia, which means “to give a reason or defense”. 1 Peter 3:15 tells us “sanctify the Lord in your heart, and always be ready to give a defense (apologia) to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear”. In Jude 1:3 we are told to “…contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints”. Titus 1:9 makes this work a requirement for qualified elders. “holding fast the faithful word as he has been taught, that he may be able, by sound doctrine, both to exhort and convict those who contradict”

   The Bible clearly tells us to be ready to answer anyone who asks “tough” questions about our faith. If we as Christians do not know why we believe what we believe then how can we explain our faith to those who are lost. Furthermore, a realization that our faith is not irrational or illogical often leads to profound growth in our own spiritual lives.

   I will present here articles on many different topics about the defense of Christianity. I will answer many questions, including “Is there a God?”, “Who was Jesus Christ?” and “Can we believe the Bible?” I hope you all find these articles to be interesting and informative.

   What is truth? Truth is telling it like it is. Truth is that which corresponds to its object. An abstract truth corresponds to abstract reality (2+2=4) and a concrete truth corresponds to concrete reality (place, time, person, etc.).The truth presented in the Bible is absolute. This means it applies to everyone, everywhere, and during every time.

   What is the current attitude towards truth in America? Post-modernism and secular humanism believe that truth is socially constructed and inseparable from the needs and desires of certain people in a certain time and place. Truth is now considered to be “relative” to any specific set of circumstances and is not objective or absolute. Because of this relativistic view of truth, it is now widely believed (often within the Church itself) that all of the religions and philosophies of the world can be equally “true”. It is now taboo and politically incorrect to state that someone else’s beliefs are wrong simply because they do not agree with your own beliefs. This attitude has created a culture were no one is really sure what is right or wrong and that is exactly what the people who deny the existence of truth want. The Bible is under attack because people do not want to live according to the rules that God has made. In a futile attempt to escape the natural guilt that comes when a person breaks these rules some people foolishly bury there head in the sand and say “what rules?”

   Is it true that there is no such thing as truth? If this statement is true than it is false because if there were really no such thing as truth than that would also have to apply to this statement. This statement is self-referentially absurd. To deny truth is to affirm it. If there is no absolute truth then that is the truth absolutely. If someone says that we cannot know the truth then how do they know it is true that we cannot know? In the event that some one tries to convince you that there is no such thing as truth, just ask them if that is the truth. If they say yes, then they have contradicted there previous statement about truth. If they say no then why should you listen to them anyway?

   Is it true that all of the various (and widely contradictory) religions and philosophies of the world can be equally valid? In other words, can Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism all be true even though they all disagree on many basic and irreconcilable issues. For example, the Bible teaches that Jesus Christ was the Son of God and God in human flesh while the Koran states that He was merely a man who was a prophet of God. There is no way that both of these statements are true. Opposites cannot both be true. The law of non-contradiction, first codified (but not invented) by Aristotle states that A cannot be both A and Non-A at the same time and in the same relation. Nothing can posses incompatible properties. Nothing can both be and not be. Nothing can be what it is not. Any factual statement and its denial cannot both be true. To make it very simple, the opposite of true is ALWAYS false.

   Some of you hard cases out there may be thinking “Is the law of non-contradiction true?” Well… for the statement “the law of non-contradiction is false” to be true, it must contradict its opposite, but by doing so it must affirm the duality of truth and falsity which is exactly what the law of non-contradiction states. Basically, this just means that if you want to say that the law of non-contradiction is not true then you have to use the law of non-contradiction to do so. In the words of Francis Schaeffer, “When a man says that thinking in terms of an anti-thesis is wrong, what he is really doing is using the concept of anti-thesis to deny anti-thesis. That is the way God made us and there is no other way to think.” Another one of my favorite quotes on the subject comes from the philosopher Avicenna, who said, “Anyone who denies that the opposite of true is false, just burn them and beat them until they admit that to be burned is not the same as not to be burned and to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten.”

   Therefore, IF Christianity is true then EVERYTHING opposed to it is false.

   There are three major arguments that prove that the theistic God exists. They are the Cosmological, the Teleological, and the Moral arguments. Before we discuss these, let me briefly define what I mean when I say “Theistic God”. Theism is the worldview that an infinite, personal God created the universe and miraculously intervenes in it from time to time. This God exists both over the universe and in it. The three dominant theistic religions are Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.

   The Cosmological argument for the existence of God states that every thing that has a beginning must have a cause. If we can show that the cosmos has a beginning then it must have been caused.

   The second law of thermodynamics asserts that the amount of usable energy in any closed system is decreasing. The first law states that the amount of actual energy in the universe changes form yet stays the same. Essentially, what happens is the dynamic part of thermodynamics (usable energy) is turned into thermos (unusable energy). This means that the universe contains a finite amount of usable energy even though the total amount of energy remains constant. If the universe contains a finite amount of usable energy, and had existed for an infinite amount of time, then that finite energy would have already run out. There is simply no way that the universe has existed for eternity! Therefore, the universe must have had a beginning. If the universe had a beginning then something (or someone) with an awful lot of power had to cause it to come into existence.

   Another piece of evidence that points to a beginning of the universe is the fact that the end of infinite time is impossible. This is a philosophical and mathematical point that deals with the nature of an infinite. To put it in very simple terms, an infinite has no end. An infinite can not be traversed. Today is the end of all time before today, which tells us that there could not have been an infinite amount of time before today or today never would have come to be. Therefore time (and matter) must have had a beginning.

   Yet another piece of evidence that points to a beginning of the universe is the fact that the universe seems to be expanding. In 1915 when Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity he discovered that it did not allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the universe either had to be exploding or imploding. Later in the 1920’s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgium astronomer George Lemaitre developed a model based on Einstein’s theory that predicted the universe was expanding. This meant that if you were to reverse this expansion the universe would logically and mathematically get smaller and smaller until you arrived at a point where there was no universe. The beginning of the universe! Astronomer Fred Hoyle called this the big bang. Latter in 1929 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies seems to be redder than it should be. Hubble explained that this red shift means that the galaxies are moving away from us. The universe is expanding and the only plausible explanation is that it must have had a beginning.

   If the universe had a beginning then it must have been caused by an eternal, uncaused being with freewill and enormous power. Kind of sounds like God doesn’t it? Now some of you are thinking “if everything has to have a cause then what caused God?” this often asked question is based on a misunderstanding of the first premise of the cosmological argument which is “everything THAT HAS A BEGINNING must have a cause” not “everything must have a cause”. The fact that TIME is a part of the universe and had a beginning means that anything that could create time must exist OUTSIDE of time and there for be eternal.

   It should not be to hard to believe that the creator of the universe is eternal since atheist have been trying to convince us that the universe itself is eternal and therefore does not need a cause. But the fact of the matter is that the universe does need a cause because it very clearly has a beginning and is NOT eternal. Any honest examination of the evidence leads us straight to Genesis 1:1 which states “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”.

“The more man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events, the firmer becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered regularity for causes of a different nature than a creator” Albert Einstein: order implies a creator

   The word teleological comes from the Greek word telos which means purpose or design. An early form of the argument used the example of a watch. If you were to find a watch lying in the woods you would have to assume that something intelligent made that watch. It would be obvious that the watch was far to complex to be the result of random chance or natural law. Or to put it another way, a tornado ripping through a junkyard would never produce something complex like an airplane or a car. Natural laws never produce specified complexity. Only intelligence can produce specific and complex things such as books and symphonies and watches. If we can show that life and the universe poses specified complexity, then it must be true that there was an intelligent designer who created them.

   Does life contain specified complexity? Carl Sagan has stated that if we were to take all of the DNA (four letter genetic language) contained in the human brain and put it all in a row, the information would be enough to fill 20,000 volumes of books. The same Carl Sagan also stated that if we were to receive even one sentence from the cosmos, then that would be proof that there were other intelligent beings in the universe because only intelligence could account for even one sentence. If one sentence proves intelligent design, then how much more does 20,000 volumes! Furthermore, just ONE living cell contains enough specific and complex information to equal that of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Once again, only intelligence can produce this kind of information.

   Mathematicians have calculated that the probability of life (just ONE complex, living cell) emerging on this planet without intelligent intervention is 1 in 10 to the 40,000^th power. 10 to the 40,000^th power is more than the total number of atoms in the entire universe! By way of example, let’s say we have a spaceship that can travel at many, many times the speed of light. Now let’s say that we marked one single atom and threw it out into the universe. We will now play a game with our spaceship and our little marked atom. The object of the game will be to speed randomly around the universe in our spaceship while blindfolded (this is a game of chance you know) and see if we can stop at the exact location of the marked atom ON THE FIRST TRY. What do you think our chances are? Well that is the same probability of just one living cell emerging on this planet without intelligent intervention. The only honest, intelligent conclusion that anyone can come to in the light of these astronomically improbable odds is that an extremely intelligent being created life and placed it on this earth. I simply do not have enough faith to believe anything else.

Now let’s examine the cosmos. Does the universe show evidence of design? The Anthropic Principle shows that the entire universe has been precisely “tweaked” to support life on earth. That’s right, the universe was designed and the evidence seems to indicate that it was designed for the sole purpose of supporting life on earth. The word anthropic comes from the Greek word anthropose which means man. The term was coined by Cambridge physicist Brandon Carter in 1973.

   The anthropic principle basically states that all of the seemingly arbitrary and unrelated constants in physics have one thing in common—they are precisely “set” to the values you would need if you wanted to have a universe capable of producing life. Furthermore, it seems that there are a great number of “coincidences” working together in the universe that all aid in supporting the continued existence of earth and its ability to support life. Here are just a few examples.

1: Oxygen comprises 21% of the atmosphere: if it were 25% spontaneous fires would break out; if it were 15% we would suffocate.

2: If the gravitational force were altered by just 1 part in 10 to the 40^th power (that’s a really big number!) our sun would not exist; the moon would crash into the earth or fly out into space.

3: If the centrifugal force did not precisely balance the gravitational force, nothing would be held in orbit and the planets might crash into one another.

4: If the rotation of the earth took longer then 24 hours, then temperature differences would be too great between night and day. If the rotation period were shorter, atmospheric wind velocities would be too great.

5: The average distance between stars in our galaxy of 100 billion stars is 30 trillion miles. If that distance was altered slightly, orbits would become erratic, and there would be extreme temperature variations on earth.

6: Any of the laws of physics can be described as a function of the velocity of light (186,282 miles/sec.). Even a slight variation of the speed of light would alter the other constants and preclude the possibility of life on earth.

7: If Jupiter were not in its current orbit, we would be bombarded by space material. Jupiter’s gravitational field acts as a vacuum, attracting asteroids and comets that would otherwise strike earth.

8: If the thickness of the earth’s crust were greater, too much oxygen would be transferred to the crust to support life. If it were thinner, volcanic and tectonic activity would make life impossible.

9: Surface temperature differences would be too great if the axial tilt of the earth were altered slightly.

10: If there were more occurrences of lighting, there would be too much fire destruction; if there were less, then there would not be enough nitrogen in the soil.

11: If there were more earthquakes, much life would be lost. If there were less, nutrients on the ocean floor and in river runoff would not be cycled back to the continents through tectonic uplift.

12: If the universe were expanding at a rate one millionth more slowly than it is, the temperature on earth would be 10,000 degrees Celsius.

13: If the force strength of gravity were altered by just one part in ten thousand billion, billion ,billion, (yes, that is a real number!) then the gravitational force would be increased by a billion-fold. Animals anywhere near the size of a human would be crushed.

   Scientist have estimated that there are more than 30 physical or cosmological parameters that require precise calibration in order to produce a universe capable of sustaining life. The odds of all these parameters being randomly “set” exactly where they are now and accidentally producing a universe, capable of producing a planet, capable of producing life, are a mathematical impossibility. The universe simply must have been designed. If the universe was designed then there must have been someone who designed it

   Carl Sagan has said that if there is no life other than us in the universe then it is an awful waste of space, but the Anthropic principle shows us that everything in the entire universe is needed to support life on Earth. God designed life and everything in the universe to support life.

   The third argument I will present for the existence of God is the moral argument. This is a philosophical argument that is really just based on common sense. The argument uses the existence of right and wrong to point to the existence of God. Every rule had to be made. Every law has a lawgiver. If we can show that there is an absolute moral law then there must be an absolute moral lawgiver.

   In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis said this about morality. “The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another; you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to the standard more nearly than the other. But the standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real right, independent of what people think, and that some people’s ideas get nearer to that real right than others. Or put it this way. If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of the Nazis less true, there must be something- some Real Morality- for them to be true about.”

   It is a very popular idea these days that there is no such thing as an absolute moral law, that is, a set of moral rules that apply to everybody in every situation. Instead, morality has been replaced by a “what’s right for me is right for me and what’s right for you is right for you” attitude that has left our culture with no real sense of right and wrong at all. Moral relativism turns people into politically correct cowards who are afraid to say anything about the actions of others for fear of being labeled “intolerant”

   But the fact of the matter is that absolutes are undeniable. Everything can’t be relative if there is nothing to be relative to. There must be some independent standard of right and wrong otherwise real moral disagreements would not be possible. There would be no objective difference between the actions of Mother Teresa and those of Hitler. There would also be no real moral difference between you and the terrorist who brought down the twin towers. It is NOT o.k. to fly planes into buildings and kill thousands of people just because it is “right for you”.

   That is the problem with all these moral relativists. They can sit around all day and say that it’s “right for them” to use drugs, or have premarital sex, or lie, or curse but when it’s time to stand up for the actions of a Hitler or Bin Laden they are nowhere to be found. If you are not willing to follow your moral relativism to its logical conclusion and say that genocide was just what was “right” for Hitler and terrorism is just what is “right” for Bin Laden then please just do us all a favor and leave the philosophical discussions to the grown-ups.

   There are some things that even the most misguided moral relativist just has to admit are WRONG. This puts the relativist in an awkward position, because the whole point of their belief system is to eliminate the existence of right and wrong so they can do whatever they want. But they do not want to say that it was o.k. for Hitler to kill millions of people because that was what was right for him. Of course Hitler was wrong! Absolutely wrong. Regardless of what he thought it is ALWAYS wrong to commit genocide for any reason. The same would apply to the 9/11 terrorists. I sincerely hope there is not some foolish person out there who thinks it was alright for those terrorists to fly planes into those buildings and kill thousands of innocent people because “they really believed that it was the right thing to do”. I don’t care what those evil men believed, what they did was absolutely wrong, and any sane person would have to agree. There are so many things that the vast majority of people would admit are wrong. Certain actions like murder, rape, and child molestation are just so evil and obviously WRONG that they make it imposable to deny the existence of an absolute morale code. A real, objective set of rules that applies to everyone.

   This brings me to the main point of the moral argument. If there is just ONE thing that is absolutely wrong for everybody, everywhere, during any time and for any reason then someone had to make that rule. Every law must have a law-giver. There is just no other logical explanation.    Someone very powerful and with a great deal of authority must have made a moral code for humans to follow and even implanted in each one of us the ability to know if we were following that code or not. It would also be necessary that whoever made this moral code be considered to be morally perfect sense they would be the very standard by which all of us are judged. I don’t know about you, but that sure sounds like a description of God to me.

   What is a miracle? A miracle is a special act of God that interrupts the natural course of events. The skeptic Anthony Flew said “ A miracle is something which never would have happened had nature, as it were, been left to its own devices”. Thomas Aquinas defined a miracle as an event that is outside nature’s power, something only done through supernatural power.

   We have already established in the cosmological argument that the theistic God exists and that He created the entire universe out of nothing. If God can perform this grandest of all miracles then there is no reason to doubt that he could turn water into wine, heal the sick, raise the dead or any of the other miraculous things that the Bible says He has done. If there is a God who can act then there can be acts of God. The only real way to show that miracles are not possible is to prove that God does not exist.

   Having said this I would like to present a response to the most popular argument against the possibility of miracles, which was first voiced by the naturalist David Hume (1711-1776) and still has a very strong following. Hume’s argument goes like this.

1: Natural law is a regularly occurring event.

2: A miracle is a rare occurrence.

3: The evidence for the regular is always greater than the evidence for the rare.

4: A wise person always bases his belief on the greater evidence.

5: Therefore, no intelligent person should ever believe in miracles.

   The problem with this argument is with point number three. This point simply is not true, and if it were, it would contradict many of the things that Hume himself believed as a naturalist.

1: Naturalist and most scientists believe that the universe exploded out of nothingness. This was a one-time event that has never happened before or since, yet the evidence overwhelmingly points to this conclusion.

2: The origin of life on earth has only happened one time, but we are here so we know it did happen.

3: According to naturalists (such as Hume), macro-evolution (single-celled organisms evolving into complex life forms) only happened one time.

4: The entire history of the solar system has only happened one time.

   Therefore, not only is it false that the evidence for the regular is always greater than the evidence for the singular, but such a belief is contrary to many of the things that the very people who assert it believe in.

   Now that we know that miracles are possible, why would God work to perform miracles? Miracles in connection with a truth claim are used to confirm a message from God. In previous articles (Is there a God? Parts 1, 2, and 3) we learned that the theistic God is…

1: All-powerful. (Cosmological argument)

2: Infinitely intelligent. (Teleological argument)

3: Morally perfect. (Moral argument)

   If God is intelligent and morally perfect then it would be in His very nature to communicate with us in order to show us His moral plan. When He did speak to us He would want to be certain that we knew it was Him speaking. Therefore He would use a miracle (something only He can do) to confirm to us that it was really Him speaking. To put it another way:

1: A miracle is a special act of God.

2: God is the source and standard of all truth. He can not make a mistake.

3: Nor would a morally perfect God act to confirm something as true that is false.

4: Therefore, genuine miracles that occur in connection with a message confirm that message to be from God.

Miracles confirmed the Prophetic claim. In the Bible, God used miracles to confirm to the pharaoh that He was speaking through Moses. (Exod. 4: 1-5) Later, when Moses was challenged by Korah, a miracle was his vindication. (Num. 16: 5,28-33) Elijah used a miracle to prove that he and not the prophets of Baal was a prophet of the one true God.

   Miracles confirmed the messianic claim. In the New Testament Jesus offered the miraculous sign of his resurrection as proof that he was the Jewish Messiah. (Mat. 12: 38-39) When John the Baptist sent messengers to see if Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus told them to go back and tell him about all the miracles Jesus had performed. (Luk. 7: 20-22)

   Miracles were used to confirm the Apostolic claim. Paul wrote that “signs, wonders, and miracles” were the mark of an Apostle (2 Cor. 12: 12) to prove that their message was from God.

   In the Qur’an, it says, “If they reject thee, so were rejected apostles before thee, who came with clear signs”. (Sura 3:184) So, in principle, all three of the major monotheistic religions agree that a truth claim can be substantiated by miracles.

Miracles are possible and they are an act of God to confirm a message from God.

   Is the New Testament we read today the same as when it was first written? Can we believe that the accounts written by the New Testament authors have been accurately preserved in the Bible we read today? There is actually substantial evidence that the New Testament we read today is incredibly accurate and true to what was written by the original authors.

   First of all, we have more manuscripts of the Greek New Testament than any other writing from the ancient world. There are 5,686 partial or complete hand written copies of the Greek New Testament. This is more than for any other book from the ancient world. Most classics from antiquity survive on only a handful of manuscript copies. Homer's Iliad comes in a distant second with 643 manuscripts. There are only 9 or 10 good copies of Julius Caesar’s Gallic War, 20 copies of Livy’s Roman History, 2 copies of Tacitus’ Annuls, and 8 copies of Thucydides’ History. If we count copies of the New Testament that were translated from Greek into other languages, then the number jumps to over 14,000! What is more, if we compile the 36,289 quotations by the early church Fathers of the second to fourth centuries we can reconstruct all but 11 verses of the entire New Testament. (Most of those 11 verses are from Third John and none of them are related to doctrine.)

   We also have earlier manuscripts. Most of the New Testament is preserved in manuscripts that were written less than 200 years from the original, some from as little as 100 years, and 1 fragment comes within a generation of the first century. By contrast, most ancient books survive in manuscripts that were copied about 1,000 years from the original. It is rare to have, as the Odyssey does, a copy made only 500 years after the original.

   Finally, we have more accurate manuscripts. The New Testament is the most accurately copied book from the ancient world. New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger estimates that the New Testament is about 99.5 percent accurate. By comparison, the Mahabharata is only about 90 percent accurate and Homers Iliad about 95 percent.

   What is the conclusion of all of this? Sir Frederic Kenyon put it this way. “The number of manuscripts of the New Testament, of early translations from it, and of quotations from it in the oldest writers of the Church, is so large that it is practically certain that the true reading of every doubtful passage is preserved in one or the other of these ancient authorities. This can be said of no other ancient book in the world”

In other words, if we cannot trust the reliability of the New Testament, then we cannot trust any other document from the ancient world.

Did the New Testament writers record the event as they really happened? In other words, were they telling the truth? There are numerous reasons to believe that the writers of the New Testament were very meticulous about recording the actual words and deeds of Jesus without adding to or taking away from them. There is absolutely no evidence to support any theory that tries to assert that these events were simply made up.

1: Eleven of the twelve disciples and Paul died for the things that they were preaching and John was banished to an island. While it is true that many people have died for things that they believed that were not true, these men were in a position to know if the things they were saying were true or simply “made up”. If the whole thing were just an elaborate hoax, don&rs