What else should I know about Christian Apologetics?

Scripture Memory - Philippians 2:1-2 - 1 If you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any fellowship with the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and purpose.

Lesson

Evidence is the basis of our faith

Rom 1:22 "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse."

Skeptics accuse Christians of presenting their faith subjectively - that is, from personal experience, without any kind of objective authority. The individual is the only authority of his/her own experiences. While many believers easily accept testimony of personal experience, we cannot expect an honest unbeliever to accept religious truth based only on our own subjective authority. Christianity must offer objective evidence to anyone who is willing to examine it.

Fortunately, evidence for Christianity is readily available for those who question. Does God ask us to believe without evidence in order to have faith? Consider Exod. 4:1-5 , 19:9, Isa. 41:17-20, John 11:15,42, and John 13:19, 14:29.

In a sense, the word "defense" is a better choice than "witness", the religious word used often for presenting God's plan to unbelievers. We cannot be a witness to anything for which there is no evidence. It is a very important part of this course to know that God honors us with free will, and because of this, He does not miraculously appear to each of us and whack us over the head with a 2x4 to announce Himself. We are not puppets, and the Bible demonstrates convincingly that God wants us to choose Him.

We must be given a basis for making that choice, and God gives us what we need as evidence. God gave Moses the rod that turned into a serpent, when Moses asked about what he could do if the people didn't believe him (Ex. 4:1). However, it was God that provided the evidence, not Moses.

No one can "prove" that God exists using the scientific method that we learn about in school. By His very nature, God cannot be observed like a star through a telescope, interviewed like a celebrity, or subjected to tests like a rat in a maze. God, as Creator of the universe, cannot be part of it, and is not subject to the laws of physics He established, unless He chooses to do so.

Fortunately for us, God chose to do this very thing, two millennia ago in the Person of Jesus Christ. We can learn what can be known, and all that is necessary to know, by the record of Jesus given to us in the Bible:

1 Pet. 2:3 His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.

"True religion deals with abstract and mystical concepts having a spiritual meaning or reality that is neither apparent to the senses nor obvious to the intelligence. Yet that does not mean that our religion is based upon intuition, insight, or similar subjective experience. True religion is based upon faith which is the acceptance of physical, historical, and Biblical evidences both internal and external that are short of literal proof. This takes it out of the realm of the fanciful, the imaginary, the anecdotal, the baseless." (emphasis mine)

Cecil Hook, Millennial Musings, Freedom's Ring Newsletter, Jan. 2000