Faith is Not a Four-Letter Word | thebereancall.org

Faith is Not a Four-Letter Word

September 8, 2023
Jay Seegert

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Jay has a passion for helping Christians strengthen their faith, while also offering a gracious challenge to the sincere skeptic.

  • Keynote Speaker and Managing Director for The Starting Point Project (TheStartingPointProject.com)
  • International speaker and author
  • Holds degrees in both Physics and Engineering Technology (Univ. of Wisconsin-Whitewater & John Brown University)
  • Has been speaking on the Authority of Scripture for over 36 years.
  • Married 30 years (Wife: Amy)
  • Two married children: Son (Taylor), Daughter (Tori)
  • Lives in Wisconsin (USA)

Jay’s website: www.thestartingpointproject.com

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Transcript:

Thank you! I won’t go into all the details, but the Lamborghini was related to me saying that I like pancakes, and that has to do with when Tom McMahon and I were in Russia together, I was giving a talk about the flood and talking about how the layers were flat like pancakes, and at one point in Russia I said, “Did I tell you that I like pancakes?” And the next morning, a Russian woman (who didn’t speak English) walked up to me with something that looked like Tupperware. It was Russian pancakes!

And so when I got here, I gave another talk on the Flood. I said, “Look at how the layers are flat straight across, just like Lamborghinis.” So, that’s where that came from. Kind of funny!

Yeah, the talks have all been just incredible, and when they contacted me, they said, “We’ve got all these incredible speakers. We need a clunker, so would you mind, you know, joining us?” [audience laughter]

No, this one should be interesting. It should be very different. This talk will probably be very different than anything you’ve heard before. It has to do with defending the Christian worldview, but it’s kind of in a unique way, and I actually think it’s a very biblical way. It’s called “Faith Is not a Four-Letter Word.” I thought of this title awhile back, and I thought, “That’s kind of cool. I need to make a talk using that as a title.” And then I found out later that youth are not familiar with the phrase “four-letter words.” I didn’t know! I thought everyone had heard that phrase. So they would literally come up to me and say, “Faith is not four letters; it’s five!”

I said, “Yeah, I know, I get it. But if I have to explain it, I guess it’s not a clever title.” But the idea is that four-letter words are bad. They’re swear words. Faith isn’t bad. And faith isn’t a four-letter word. It’s five. So, I guess it’s supposed to be clever, but maybe not, so…. But it has to do with something else called The Myth of Facts vs. Faith, which I’ll explain in a second. For those of you who were here when I spoke yesterday, I already went over my background, but I started feeling really convicted. I need to give you my “real” background.

And here’s my real background: It’s related to 1 Corinthians:1:27, “That God chose what was foolish in the world to shame the wise.” That’s kind of how I feel about myself. I am less than nothing really. I am just thankful that God lets me breathe and God does wonderful things and uses broken vessels along the way.

So that’s how I see myself. But there’s one other verse I relate to as well. It’s John:4:44. “Jesus said, A prophet has no honor in his hometown.” That’s why I travel all the time—because I don’t get any respect…so…. [Audience laughter]

I put this up, and youth are like, “Who’s that? Did you lose weight?”

And I say, “No, ask your parents or grandparents who that is. It’s supposed to be kind of funny.”

So, back to this talk. Faith is not a four-letter word. It has to do with “The myth of facts vs. faith.” See, skeptics tell us that they’re all about facts and proving things. And Christians, we just have faith, which is nothing more than wishful thinking and rainbows and puppy dogs and butterflies and all that. And even many Christians buy into that: “Well, I know Christianity is a faith and you just have to believe it.” Which makes them more hesitant to share their faith, because do you really want to talk to a scientist who’s talking about Carbon-14 dating and amino acids, and this and that, and all these things. And you just say, “Well, you just have to just place your trust in Jesus. Just trust me that that’s the right thing to do.” But that just sounds like a weak approach, which that approach would be weak. 

So, we’re going to dispel this myth of facts vs. faith in a very powerful but a very gracious way as well. Again, the skeptics are all about facts and proving things in their minds and we’re just “all about faith.”

Here’s some quotes regarding faith—what other people think about faith. They believe it’s not a virtue. Faith is gullibility, dishonesty, blindness, absence of reason. Someone said, “Faith should not be respected—it should be detested.” And Sam Harris, one of the leading atheists, said, “It’s time we admitted it, that faith is nothing more than the license religious people give to one another to keep believing when reason fails.”

Christopher Hitchens—one of the leading atheists—passed away a few years ago. He had said, “It’s called faith because it’s not knowledge.”

And then we have Richard Dawkins again—one of the leading atheists. He said, “Faith is a great cop out—a great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of—even because of—the lack of evidence.”

And then one more very interesting one from Skeptical Science. “It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, Mad Cow Disease, and many others. But I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” So again, they do not think very highly of faith. Even Mark Twain said this: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” And “we know it’s not true, but we’re going to believe it anyway. That’s what faith is all about.”

Again, we have a very misconstrued idea of what faith is all about. Not very impressive. But this idea has even crept into many, many churches. Even many good churches.

Here’s a sign outside of one church. It said “Reason is the greatest enemy that faith has.” I think that’s a terrible message to be portraying to people driving by the church. What does scripture say? Isaiah says, “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord.” 

Romans:12:2 does not say, “Be ye transformed by the removal of your mind.” No, it says, “by the renewal of your mind”!

God wants us to use the brains that He gave us.

Here’s another sign: “If your faith is big enough, facts don’t count.”

“Don’t worry about those pesky facts and science and all that. If your faith is strong enough, that doesn’t matter.” Again, just a terrible message to be portraying to people driving by.

So we’re going to be talking about defending the Christian faith. And you compare Christianity down to two basic elements—two fundamental elements: 1) That God exists. 2) You’re not Him!

Actually, that’s not the second one. The second one is that the Bible is the Word of God. So, two things: God exists, and the Bible is His Word.

Every other topic would be a sub-topic of one of these two things. If we could prove these two points, we would be done. We wouldn’t have to prove the Creation account, because if the Bible is the inspired Word of God, creation is true because the Bible says so. We wouldn’t have to prove the flood or anything else if we could prove these two things.

Well, there’s somewhat of an issue with that approach. God doesn’t need you to prove that He exists. And in a sense, you can’t prove that the Bible is the inspired Word of God. Now, you’re probably tracking fairly well, like, “This is going well!” and all of a sudden the wheels fall off. What’s going on? And “Don’t make eye contact with me anymore.” 

But hang in there! I’m going to explain this much further, and these two things are going to be the very core of why it should be very easy to powerfully defend the Christian worldview, even though at this point it sounds kind of strange. Just hang in there a little longer.

Now when you think about the existence of God, probably the first thing that comes to mind is a coil of rope, right? Maybe that’s just me [chuckling]. Okay, here’s the point. Let’s say you go to a hardware store, and you tell the person working there you’d like one meter of rope.

So they walk over to the coil, they cut a piece off and hand it to you. They say, “Here you go.”

And then you ask them, “How do I know that that’s one meter?”

And I say, “I know it’s a meter because I used a tape measure.” 

They’re appealing to a higher authority. It’s not their opinion. They used a tape measure! And you ask them, “How do I know the tape measure is accurate?”

They say, “Well, I know the tape measure is accurate because they make it in the manufacturing plant where they do it just right.” He’s appealing to an even higher authority now—not just his opinion of the tape measure, but the manufacturing plant where they’re making those things. And then you just feel like giving them a hard time that day: “Well, how do I know they’re doing it right in the manufacturing plant?”

They say, “Well, I know they’re doing it right there because they’re using the standards that were established with the General Council of Weights and Measures in 1983, and they determined that a meter is the difference light travels in a vacuum in 1,300th millions of a second.”

A meter truly is that length—because they said so. They established that. It’s the ultimate authority for determining how long a meter is.

So, what just happened here? We kept appealing to a higher authority until we got to the end of the line. At some point, you’re going to get to the end of the line, right? You get that? It makes perfect sense.

With that in mind, think about this: If the Bible truly is the inspired Word of God, then it’s the ultimate authority. But if it’s the ultimate authority, there’s no way to prove it because you can’t appeal to an even higher authority. It’s not that you could appeal to some “mega-god” out there, and the mega-god says, “Yeah, the subservient god that you worship, that’s true and he wrote a book….”

No! You’re at the end of the line at that point. You can’t go any higher. 

So we don’t go about proving God’s existence and that the Bible is His Word. It is our starting point as Christians. That’s where we start, with those two assumptions. 

Now, you kind of get it logically, but you’re wondering “How in the world would I use that to defend my beliefs? It’s just—I can’t hang in there.” 

It’s going to make perfect sense. It should be actually very exciting. 

So, with that backdrop that’s still confusing—don’t worry about that. It should be somewhat confusing. We’re going to attack this myth of Facts vs. Faith. This is a very important point: Everyone, no matter who they are—everyone has to start somewhere with their belief systems. It’s impossible to not start somewhere. We call this our Starting Point. Our bias. Our presuppositions. Our beginning assumptions. Our world view. Everyone has one!

You could ask a skeptic, “What is your starting point?” They probably don’t realize that they have one, but they’re probably going to say “facts.” They’re all into facts and proven things. Even most would say that. They’re all about facts. You have faith! 

Then I would ask them, “Well, what do you mean by ‘facts’?”

They’d say, “Well, you know we’re in the laboratories and we’re proving things. You know, science!”

Okay. “Well, what really is science?” Science is really the thoughts and opinions of other men and women, most of which he’s probably even met. So at this point, he’s not really so much about facts, or even science, he’s trusting the thoughts and opinions of other men and women, again, most of whom he’s probably never met.

So then I would ask him another question: “How do you know you can trust the thoughts of other men and women that you’ve never really even met?”    

He says, “Well, I can tell. I can, you know, think through what they’re telling me, and I can just tell that they’re correct.”

“Oh, so now you’re using your own reasoning to figure out why something someone else is telling you is correct? I’ve got one more question: How do you know you can trust your reasoning?”

“Well, I,...I mean I know I can. It’s worked well throughout my life. It’s been consistent.”

Jay: “Oh, so now you are using your reasoning to tell me why you can trust your reasoning!” (Which is what we call “circular reasoning.”) Then I would say, “That’s okay. You know why? Because everyone has to start somewhere. I just wanted you to better understand. You’re not really about facts. You assume you can trust your own reasoning. But you can’t prove that because you’d have to use your reasoning to try to prove you can trust your reason, which is circular reasoning, so, it’s just your starting point! But it’s okay, because everyone has to pick something. I just wanted you to have a better handle of what yours truly is.”

What about the Christian? What is our starting point? I already mentioned it: We believe that God exists and the Bible is His Word. And then we use that starting point to define everything else—what science and logic are; history; philosophy; ethics; morality—all those things are defined by your starting point.

“You can’t prove that!”

Me: “I’m trying to prove it! Everyone has to start somewhere. You got to pick whatever you wanted. I get to pick something too!”

Now, we’re going to look at this even deeper, but the point is everyone has to start somewhere. And it’s very important, I spend very little time talking to others, secular scientists, about all these intricate facts. I want to know about their starting point. Because they’re going to use that starting point to make sense of those facts. We’ll get to that in just a little bit.

Now a typical defense of Christianity deals with talking about the complexities of DNA, Evidence for the Resurrection, Greek and Hebrew Bible manuscripts. I’ve spent the last 38 years talking about these things. But there is a problem with this. The problem is evidence doesn’t prove anything! You can’t use evidence to prove something. This is not a “Christianity problem.” This is just a logical problem. Evidence doesn’t actually prove something. No one can actually use it as “proof.” And so we shouldn’t try to either.

In my full talk, I think I give Seven Reasons Why We Don’t Use Evidence as Proof. I’ll give you just three of them now. And they make perfect sense. 

Reason number 1: Skeptics may have a different interpretation of the evidence, because, guess what? Facts don’t speak for themselves. Every fact you have ever heard or ever will hear has to be interpreted to give it meaning. Skeptics might have a different interpretation. As an example, we could talk about DNA and have a little talk on it. It’s really, really cool, and what typically happens is, we talk about DNA and the Christian would say, “See, that’s proof that God exists because there’s no way that that could be an accident!”

But then you have an Atheist looking at the exact facts, the same DNA, and they would say, “No, we don’t think that was created by God. We think that… nature can do that over time, particles interacting…. We don’t have all the answers yet, but we’re making great progress. We think those facts are better explained by just what nature does over time.”

So, they’re looking at the exact same facts but they have two totally different interpretations. 

Here’s where it gets even more interesting. A third person—another person, another atheist—looks at the DNA and says to us Christians, “You guys are right! There’s no possible way that that happened by accident. That was designed. You’re right. It wasn’t by your God. It was by aliens!” 

Now, that might sound silly, but you’ve probably also heard of Dr. Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the DNA structure. Brilliant scientist. That was his conclusion. At first I think he thought, yeah, maybe nature could do that, and then he realized there was no way! This was designed! He’s an atheist, but he needed a designer. So he decided there’s intelligent life forms out there somewhere, so far out in the universe we can’t see it, and it was billions of years ago, and designed life in sea form, put it on spaceships, and flew it here, called it Transpermia. 

Is that a silly idea? Kinda! But this is a brilliant scientist! Did he need more facts? No, he doesn’t need more facts. He needs a different starting point to interpret the facts he already knows. 

So this is why you can’t use evidence as proof, because it’s going to be interpreted in different ways. And we have the whole order backwards! Most people think what you do is you take some evidence. You come to some conclusion, and then you figure out which worldview is correct.

It’s just the opposite! You start with your worldview, which is your starting point! What you already believe. You use what you already believe to look at evidence and you interpret it, and you come to some conclusion. You have to start with your starting point or it wouldn’t be your starting point! So, it’s backwards from what you would think.

A second reason why we don’t use evidence as proof is you’re letting the skeptic be the judge. Now, where do we most often hear evidence being presented? It’s typically in a courtroom situation. Lawyers come in, they present evidence and facts to the judge, and he or she then gets to decide the truth of the matter, right?

When you present evidence to a skeptic, you’re presenting evidence to somebody who doesn’t think clearly. Now, that sounds kind of condescending  and disrespectful. I don’t mean it that way at all. So why would I say that? Because of what scripture tells us! In Romans chapter one—it’s been referenced by a number of speakers here: “For although they knew God [talking about the skeptics] they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him. But their thinking became futile, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools.”

This is not name-calling by God. He’s not saying, “Ahh, they’re just fools.” He’s describing their thinking process. They’re thinking foolishly. They’re not able to think correctly because they’ve already rejected all the evidence God has given them to begin with. 

So when we run around talking about DNA and all these things, and they say, “I don’t think that’s evidence for God,” and we say, “How could you not see that?” This is explaining to us why they don’t see this. This is a spiritual issue! It’s not just a lack of facts. I’m not saying we can’t tell them about DNA. That’s fine. But we can’t expect them just to see it clearly, because, Romans 1, it’s kind of helping us as Christians out as to why they’re not always going to see it clearly.

Thirdly, the atheist already knows God exists. There are no atheists on the planet. Never have been; never will be.

[Laughing] Why would I say that? That sounds crazy! Is it because I have interviewed all the philosophers and their books and realized that they’re wrong in their writings? No. Is it because I’ve talked to all the atheists and realized that they’re wrong? No. 

So why would I say that? I happened to be reading Romans chapter one again: “For since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world, God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made so that people are without excuse.”

There are no people on this planet who don’t know God exists. Now! There are many people on this planet who have taken all this information that God has made clear to them, and they have chosen to reject it, and they call themselves Atheists.

In that sense, there have always been atheists; there always will be atheists. But they’re not people who don’t know God exists. They are people who have chosen to reject that knowledge.

So when we run around and try to prove God’s existence, in a sense God is saying to us, “What are you doing? They know I exist!”

This is a spiritual issue. And so I don’t have time to go into it, but I have a new approach that I use with atheists which leaves them like a deer in the headlights, because I show them, “This is a spiritual issue. I’m not going to just tell you about DNA, because I don’t think that’s where the issue is.” A very powerful, very biblical approach in talking to skeptics. So, we need to keep these things in mind as Christians when we are witnessing.

So we don’t use evidence as proof of God or the inspiration of the Bible. The belief in God’s existence and in the inspiration of the Bible are our starting point. We go from there.

Now, again, I haven’t answered everything yet, but we’re peeling the layers of the onion back one at a time.

So, how do we approach the skeptic, then, when we’re witnessing to them? Well, I’d highly recommend you start here with God’s Word. That’s where we start. I think we need to start with the skeptic as well.

The atheist goes to tell you, “Ahh, I don’t believe the Bible’s from God.”

I say, “Oh, I totally get that. You don’t even think that God exists. You certainly don’t think the Bible’s from God then. I’m going to share it with you anyway!”

And here’s why: Do not assume they understand what the Bible is claiming. I have spent many years when I was younger sharing evidences for the inspiration of Scripture (and I still do) and I have convinced some people along the way that the Bible really is the inspired Word of God.

And guess what? It was depressing for them! How come? Because their impression of God in the Bible was that God hated them and He was just waiting for them to mess up so He could smash them over the head and send them to hell!

And now, I come along, and I say, “Yep, it’s true!” That would be depressing, because they have a misunderstanding of the nature of God and Jesus Christ and God’s Word. So don’t assume they understand it, so share it with them, even if they say, “I don’t believe it’s true.” 

“That’s fine. I just want you to have an accurate understanding of what its claims are.” So share it with them, and secondly, we defend why we believe it.

That’s what apologetics is. We are giving reasons for the hope that we have (1 Peter:3:15), we share why it’s the best explanation of everything around us, and there are many ways that we can do that. So what good is evidence? A lot of people at this point think, “What? You’re saying we can’t use evidence anymore?”

I didn’t say that! A lot of people have memorized some really cool things and now it’s useless? I didn’t say it was useless. You can’t use it as proof, because it just doesn’t work that way logically. But you can use it very powerfully. We use it to test different worldviews that are out there, and what we are going to do in the remainder of this talk is we are going to use evidence to just check out two different worldviews: a Christian worldview and an atheistic worldview. And we’re going to take them out for a test drive. How well do they work? We’ll look at evidence and we’ll see which side best explains the evidence that we’re looking at.

I’m going to go over three quick philosophical tests and three scientific tests. We’re just taking out these worldviews for a test drive. Atheistic worldview and a Christian worldview. We’re going to start off with three philosophical tests on these worldviews. 

We’re first going to consider logic. We’re going to think about what logic is, and then we’re going to ask each worldview, “How do you account for the existence of logic?” That’s what we’re going to do. So we’re going to think about what logic actually is.

So, I ask an atheist a number of questions. The first question I might ask is, “Do you believe that logic exists?” And they always look at me: “Of course I do! Why would you even ask that?”

Me: “Just checking. Do you believe there are laws of logic, like the law of noncontradiction—i.e., I can’t be standing here talking right now and not standing here talking right now. Are there laws of logic?”

And they would say  “Yes, I believe there are laws of logic.”

Okay, “Are these laws physical things? Can I take them into a laboratory and wave them and paint them and bend them?”

And they would say, “No, they’re not physical things, they’re non-physical things.”

Okay, “Are they the same everywhere? Are the laws of logic the same in Oregon as they are in Wisconsin, where I live? Or Texas, where Randy is from? Or on the moon? Are they different in different places?”

The atheist will say, “No, they’re not different. They’re the same everywhere.”

Okay, “Do they change? Will the laws of logic be the same tomorrow as they are today? Were they the same 1,000 years ago as they are today or do they change over time?”

And the atheist will say, “Well, no. They don’t change. They stay the same.”

Okay, so let me get this straight. “You believe there are laws of logic that are immaterial, meaning they’re not physical; universal—the same everywhere, and they’re unchanging?”

And they’d say yes.

Then I say, “I just have one more question for you. Where did they come from? Given your worldview there is no God, everything is matter and energy, physical stuff. Where did these non-physical things come from? You’ve never seen a physical thing create a non-physical thing, but you believe that these non-physical things exist. So, using these starting points—the worldview that you chose for yourself, help me understand, Where did these non-physical things come from?”

“And then again, using the worldview that you chose, freely and on your own, you said—what is it in the atheistic worldview that tells you that you know the laws of logic are the same everywhere?”

“And then, lastly, what is it in your worldview that tells you you know that you will never change?”

Guess what? Nothing! There is nothing in the atheistic worldview that can account for laws of logic that are non-physical things. They’re the same everywhere and they do not change.

But the atheist believes in them. They use them, and they expect you to be logical; they demand you to be logical, but their own worldview can’t account for them.

Picture an old Western where there’s a gunfight. You’ve got the two cowboys there and one walks up to the other one and says, “Hey, can I borrow your gun? I’ve got to shoot you.”

It’s like “No! This is my gun. Get your own!”

They are actually borrowing from the Christian world view, which we’ll get to in just a second here to justify atheism, and it’ll be really clear here in just a second. And if you think about it, if you can’t account for the existence of logic, you are done, because you need to use logic to talk about anything else. So, it’s not looking too good at this point.

Okay, it’s only fair to turn the tables. All right, Christian, how do you account for logic and the laws of logic?

I think this is just phenomenal. I think it’s actually beautiful. Christians believe in a God who himself is immaterial, universal, the same everywhere and does not change. That God created a universe that operates under the Laws of Logic, which they themselves are immaterial, universal, and unchanging. They reflect His character. It makes perfect sense within a Christian worldview, but it’s totally antithetical to an atheistic worldview. That’s just one test. It hasn’t gone very well with the atheistic worldview. 

Did we just disprove their worldview? Some might say yes, but even if you said, “Well, but not quite,” it’s not going well, and that’s just one out of six tests that we’re going to take a look at.

I’m going to share one more quote before we go to the second test. If I would have begun my presentation with this quote, I think a lot of you would have been kind of stumped, like “Well, how would you respond to that now?,” you’re going to get a chuckle out of it.

This is again, Sam Harris, one of the leading atheists. This is what he said, kind of arrogantly. “If someone doesn’t value logic, what logical argument would you invoke to prove they should value logic?” I think that your worldview can’t even account for logic. It is illogical. You cannot account for its existence. The Christian worldview is the only one that can account for logic, and we use logic, but it’s the atheist who wants you to think they’re logical, we’re irrational. But in reality it’s just the opposite. Philosophical test number 2.

We’re going to talk about the concept of absolute morality. Why is it that no matter where you go on this planet, everyone just seems to know murder is wrong. You can’t just shoot someone because you don’t like their hat. Now some people do commit murder, but even most people who commit murder, they know that it was wrong, but they wanted to do it anyway.

There are rare occasions where someone does that and it doesn’t even phase them. There’s obviously something wrong in their mental capacity, but in the vast, vast, vast majority of every other case, they know it’s wrong. Why is that? How do you account for that?

“Well, that’s evolution. That’s how we’ve evolved to sense that murder is wrong.” 

Oh, evolution! Yeah. Help me out with that. That’s their whole natural selection thing!

Natural selection—survival of the fittest.

Okay, so if I as a Christian decide just to wipe out all the atheists because they’re getting in my way and I want to survive, you can’t tell me that’s wrong.

Well, no, you can’t kill all the atheists! 

“Why not? That’s natural selection. Survival of the fittest, right? If it weren’t for survival of the fittest, we wouldn’t be here. It’s a good thing. And now you’re all of a sudden saying it’s wrong? I missed the memo on that one? When did it change?”

“Well, no, it’s the way chemicals move in your brain to give you the ‘sensation’ that murder is wrong.”

“Well, chemicals, yes. So if my chemicals move a little differently and I shoot you, you can’t say that’s wrong. It’s just chemicals! I’m not controlling that!”

“Well, no…!” 

There is nothing in an atheistic worldview that can account for murder really being wrong. They can say, “Well, it’s convenient.” 

Yeah, it’s a good thing. 

Well, yeah, it’s wrong. We’ve got laws! 

Yes, we do, but guess what? It wasn’t that we observe murders, like

“Well, what shall we do about that?”

“I don’t know. We could have some laws, and then we could decide that it’s wrong.”

No! We knew, we recognized inherently, that murder is wrong, so we established laws so if it happens we already decided what we’re going to do about it!

We first recognized that it was wrong, and that generated laws. The laws didn’t all of a sudden make murder wrong. It’s just the opposite. 

So an atheistic worldview cannot account for why it is that everyone inherently knows that murder is wrong.

All right, turn the tables. What about Christianity? Christianity: we have the Ten Commandments. It violates the character of God. Thou shalt not kill—murder, specifically.

We are created in the image of God, and it violates His character, and He has instilled in every single human being a moral law. That’s why we all know murder is wrong! It fits in with the Christian worldview but not the atheistic worldview.

The third philosophical test (kind of fun)! The concept of knowledge and certainty. You could ask an atheist, “Is there anything you know for sure? Absolutely you know for sure?”    

“I know I’m here right now.”

“Really? How do you know you’re here right now?”
“Because I’m talking to you.”

“How do you not know that maybe you’re just dreaming that you’re talking to me?”
“Because you’re talking back to me.”

“How do you know you’re not just dreaming I’m talking back to you?”

“Uh, I can pinch myself and feel it.”

“How do you know that you didn’t just dream that you pinched yourself and you felt it?”

Technically, none of us can actually prove that we’re here right now. Now there’s so much evidence that we’re really here. Nobody doubts it! But scientifically, you can’t really prove it, so we don’t really know that for sure. 

One other thing: If I told you my next-door neighbor’s oldest son was 26 years old but I could be wrong, do I know for sure he’s 26? No, not if I just admitted that I could be wrong. You know, if I’ve admitted I could be wrong—I don’t know for sure.

With that in mind, think about this: you can ask atheists, “Out of all the knowledge that it’s possible to know, what percentage do you think you know?”

Well, you’d probably say, “pretty small.” 

And I’d say, “Yeah, me too, but let’s just, for argument’s sake, let’s say they say they know one percent of everything out there. Then you could ask them, “Is it possible—is it even possible—that something in the 99 percent you admit you don’t know would reveal you are actually wrong about what you thought in the 1 percent. Is that possible?”    

And they would have to say, “Yes, it’s possible.”

“If it’s possible you’re wrong about the one percent, do you really know the 1 percent?”

“No, you don’t really know it, if it’s possible you’re wrong. So, you really can’t know anything for sure.”

“Yeah, well you can’t either!”

“Are you sure about that?”

Now, at this point it sounds very juvenile. I get that. I’m not trying to make it that way. We’re just thinking through an atheistic worldview and this is very true—they would have to admit it’s possible that they’re wrong about everything.

Now, it is possible—or is it possible—to be certain about anything or everything? One way you could be certain about something is if you knew everything—100 percent of everything! Then there’s no possibility of being wrong because you already know everything; you’re not going to discover something new that you were wrong about, which you already knew. 

This doesn’t look too good for us. No one knows everything. I used to know everything, but now I know better.

[laughter] 

So this doesn’t work for us, but there’s one other way. There’s one other way you could know something absolutely for certain. And that is if you knew someone who knew everything! And that person chose to tell you some of that in a way you could understand, and they didn’t lie.

That’s the Christian worldview. Christians believe in God, who knows everything and has revealed some of that to us in such a way that we could understand it, and He does not lie. 

Christians have a philosophical basis for claiming to know something absolutely for sure, or, as an atheist, has to admit they could be wrong about everything. 

So, again, we’re just taking these worldviews out for a test drive, and it is not going well for an atheistic worldview, but the Christian worldview is passing with flying colors each time.

That leads us into the last part of the talk. We’re going to do three quick scientific tests of these two worldviews. We’ll start out looking at the origin of the universe. 

Now, these worldviews, they make predictions and they have beliefs about things like the origin of the universe. And then we can look at evidence to see which side the evidence falls into more comfortably. 

Well, an atheistic worldview says that everything came about through the Big Bang, which, again, according to them, is a 100-percent natural event. It’s not that God initiated it. It’s just one of those things that happened. I have, again, a series of talks on that, but according to them, it’s a naturalistic event. There was a Big Bang. That’s how the universe got here.

The Christian worldview, obviously, says, “In the beginning, GOD created the heavens and the earth. Those are two very different worldviews. Let’s just take a very surfac-y look at some evidence. We’re going to look at the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, something called the Fine Tuning, or the Anthropic Principle.    

The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. Those are probably the best laws that we have in science. The First Law, in a nutshell, says “You can’t get something out of nothing.” The Second Law says, “When you do have something, it goes from an ordered state to a disordered state, and the energy goes from being very useful to not being useful at all.” Things are going kind of downhill over time.

Well, how does that match up with these two worldviews? So the atheistic worldview says, “Everything came out of nothing.” Something from nothing, and then over time it got more and more ordered. We call it “The Cosmos,” which means “order.”

So that doesn’t sit well with the best laws that we have in science.

And then we have the “Fine Tuning” argument. For this seminar to be occurring right now, there’s all these factors that have to be just right. You know, I have to have my laptop here, which as to have Microsoft Office on it, which has to have Microsoft and PowerPoint on there, and the battery charger has to be connected to the projector; the projector has to be plugged into a power source, and then all these factors: you take one away and you don’t see the presentation! Nobody thinks this is all just an accident. People came ahead of time and we set it up just right.

It’s the same thing with the universe. There’s all these factors that are so precise. If you change some of them just a tiny, tiny, tiny amount, life’s not possible!

So, did we get lucky? There was this Big Bang, and all those factors fell into place? Or might that be very good evidence that they were set in place because God’s intention was for life to be possible.

That’s the Fine Tuning argument. There’s a lot, lot to it. I’m just going to steal from one of my other presentations. We’re going to look at two factors. One is the Gravitational Constant and something else called the Cosmological Constant, which, if I had time to explain that, it has to do with the energy density of empty space, and it is something somewhat related to the Big Bang. I don’t necessarily believe in that, but I’m saying, Even if you buy into a Big Bang, there’s all these factors that just scream that the Universe is not an accident.

So, I don’t have time to go into all the details. These are just two factors out of many, many, many factors that have to be just right.

So, what are the chances that just these two factors turned out right by accident—no God, no purpose, no creator, no designer. Boom! Just somewhat of an explosion, and everything landed right where it needs to be. They have calculated the chances for just these two. There’s only one chance in 100 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion! If you haven’t studied math or science much yet, that’s a big number! Really, really big! That screams impossibility of just natural forces doing that ever, ever, ever. And there’s a lot more factors. That’s just two out of many that we could look at!

Here’s a quote from Sir Frederick Hoyle. He was one of the world’s leading astronomers and mathematicians. He was an atheist for most of his life. He gave us the term “The Big Bang.” When he heard about this new idea of the origin of the universe, he goes, “What? Like a Big Bang?” He was being sarcastic, and then the name stuck. So, he wasn’t real thrilled with this idea of the Big Bang, but this is one quote that he had: “The common sense interpretation of the facts suggest a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology and that are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”

This came from a guy who was an atheist for most of his life, and he was just looking at Math and Science: “There must be a God.”

And, again, that’s just two factors out of many, so that falls in line very well with the Christian worldview that a Super Intelligent God created this universe, but it goes totally against an Atheistic worldview that there was nothing, and then we got something.

Really, really, really, quick, I’ll just take one extra minute of your dinnertime. How does an atheist get something out of nothing? Well, Lawrence Krouse, one of the leading theoretical physicists, he had to explain that. He said, “You know, when people think about nothing, they think of typically the absence of anything.”

Yeah! (Laughing) I’m with him on that! He goes, “But that’s a philosophical definition.” He goes, “I don’t care what philosophers think about nothing. I care about the nothing of reality. And if the nothing of reality is filled with stuff, I’ll go with that.”

Seriously, he’s a brilliant theoretical physicist, but in order to explain the origin of the Universe, which you can’t get out of nothing, he just redefines nothing to be something! Why don’t we let “nothing” be nothing and “something” be something, but, no, now something is filled with stuff and then the “stuff” could create the universe. So it’s not coming out of nothing; it’s coming out of something, but they’re just going to call it “nothing.” 

And that’s science! We’re being unreasonable as Christians, but that’s science. We should be following that?

So, anyway, that was just a quick, quick sidenote. That’s not normally in this talk.

The second scientific test here are these worldviews. The variety of life, the millions of species we have on the planet today—again, these worldviews have beliefs and predictions, atheistic evolution, or atheist worldview, says that everything came about—all the variety of life—through evolution, which, again, Randy talked about mutations and natural selection. 

The Christian worldview: Ten times Genesis chapter one, says, “God created creatures to reproduce after their kind.” Can you produce a great variety? Oh, yeah! Great variety, but always within limits. Those are the predictions and the beliefs.

Let’s look at some evidence: Today you can breed a dog and a wolf. And you get a wolf-dog. In fact, you could breed dogs, dingos, coyotes and wolves—they can all breed together. And if you picture them, we have that in another talk, they look very similar. They’re the same kind of animals. 

So you can breed a dog and a wolf—you get a wolf-dog. That’s real science and it is consistent with what we would expect from scripture.

But you can’t breed a dog and a hummingbird and get something like that (picture). That one’s not going to happen! 

[Laughter]

And we laugh because we know it’s impossible and the genetics won’t allow for that. There are limits.

And so what we’re seeing in Biology, and this is the tip of the iceberg of scratching the surface—I mean, there’s so much more to the genetics behind this! Yes, variety limits. Yes, just like scripture tells us. So it fits in perfectly with God creating creatures to reproduce after their kind, but it doesn’t go well with an atheistic worldview of Darwinian Evolution: single-cell turns itself into every other lifeform on this planet.

The last scientific test: the origin of information. We’re going to think about what information is and try to see how both sides explains what information is.

So, atheistic worldview: All the information we see in living things came to all through random actions and and molecules and particles, banging together over time, because there’s “no God, no Designer, no Creator.”

So particles banging together—the Big Bang creates some helium, hydrogen, maybe a little bit of lithium; particles are banging together, and here you and I are today. That’s what they really believe!
Christian Worldview: John:1:1: “In the beginning, God created the Word,” Logos. God spoke it into being. He spoke all this information from His intelligence, He spoke that information into living forms today.

Those are the two belief systems of predictions.

Let’s look at the evidence: Well, if you look at a newspaper, it can hold quite a bit of information using paper and ink. Books can hold even more information, again, using paper and ink. A single CD can hold about a hundred-thousand pages, written pages, on a single CD, using some metal, a little bit of plastic. And then we have hard drives, again, mostly metal and some other chemicals and things like that, which can hold even more information.

In each of these cases, the physical materials, they do a phenomenal job of storing information. But in none of these cases did those physical materials create the information. Paper and ink didn’t write the newspaper article. A columnist did. Paper and ink didn’t write the book. The author did. The metal and plastic on the CD didn’t write Microsoft Office software. Software engineers and programmers did all that, and they’re just using those materials to store the information. Same thing with a hard drive. 

You can always, in every single case, trace the information back to an intelligent source—every single time! 

So now you look at DNA. DNA is also made out of physical materials and it does an even better job of storing information! So let’s take a look at DNA very, very briefly. We will first look at the volume of DNA. How much space does that actually take up? Again, if you take the DNA out of the center of just one cell, again, about 6-feet long with super, super, super thin, doesn’t take up much volume. In fact, the volume is 0.00000000000000000—17 zeros, and then a 3-cubic meters. It is a tiny, tiny, tiny volume of space, but yet it has all the information to develop your body from a baby to an adult and help you function as an adult on each one of those strands. That’s pretty phenomenal!

In fact, if you took a single strand of DNA, you could store over 5,000 copies of one of my books on it. That book has about 300 pages. Over 5,000 copies on a single strand of DNA! So the storage capacity is pretty phenomenal.

Let’s look at another analogy. Let’s say you had just a pinhead volume of DNA. So you have that amount of DNA. Very small. What would that storage capacity be like? We already mentioned a single CD can hold 100,000 pages of text. A 4-gig thumb drive, which we use all the time, could actually hold six CDs. That’s 600,000 pages of text on a small 4-gig thumb drive. You could hold 500 thumb drives on a 2 terabyte hard drive. A 2-terabyte hard drive today is roughly the size of my Bible here. That’s pretty impressive! 

You could hold 500 of those 4-gig thumb drives on something this size. Pretty impressive.

What about that pinhead amount of DNA. How much could that store? It could store 2 million 2 terabyte hard drives on a pinhead amount of DNA. 

“Oh, but that just happened by accident! Particles were banging together over time and we got this really cool storage system here.” Again, I have a whole series of talks that go in even much, much more depth here, but this screams Intelligence! Particles banging together don’t create systems like that. In one of my other talks, I talk about the information that’s on the DNA that not only can be read forwards and backwards, but there’s overlapping chapters of information. There are spliced pieces of information. There’s embedded information, encrypted information, and 3-D information, all in the DNA. All these layers of information, particles coming together, banging together, are not going to create an information system that complex. And when you take it, and you make these changes, according to evolution, random throughout nature, you’re not going to make it better and better; you’re going to make it worse and worse every time, because you make one change, you mess up two messages, because it goes forwards and backwards and then overlapping and encrypted and all these… 

That’s my talk called ‘Evolution: Probable or Problematic.” 

So, all we did in this brief talk was we took these two worldviews out for a test drive. How do they work when we deal with the real world? And it didn’t go well at all for the atheistic worldview.

So what I would tell an atheist at that point is “You are more than welcome to keep your current worldview, but if you do, you’re going to run into no end of problems trying to make sense of the world around you. 

So it’s their decision. The ball’s in their court. You can’t force someone to volunteer. Christianity is a volunteering of your will to Jesus Christ. It’s not an academic thing. I can’t tell them about DNA . “Oh, I didn’t know that! Let me go to church and worship Jesus.”

It doesn’t work that way. You can talk to them about DNA to put a pebble in their shoe. You ever walk around with a pebble in your shoe? You’ve got to do something about it. You can’t just keep going.

So, talking to them about DNA might be putting a pebble in their shoe, and then if it’s annoying enough, they might be open to talking about Jesus Christ even more.

So it’s not wrong to talk about these evidences. But don’t expect it to change their mind, because we’re dealing with a heart issue, again, Romans 1 just lays it out so brilliantly. It’s almost like it was inspired by God!

So the two major elements of Christianity are that God exists and the Bible is the Word of God.That is our starting point as Christians, and we use that to then reach out to others and show how this makes perfect sense of the world—the fallen world that we are living in, to share the only hope that exists, which is, again, Jesus Christ.

What I just presented, technically it’s called “Presuppositional Apologetics.” I didn’t tell you at the beginning, because you would all run out of here to watch paint dry, which sounds more interesting. Presuppositional Apologetics—”presuppositions”—those are things you presuppose to be true. You assume they’re true to begin with, and then you use those things to do apologetics, defending the Christian worldview. It’s technically called that, and I just kind of walked you through that. It’s all about your starting point. You start with the belief that God exists and the Bible is His Word, and then we use that as a foundation to make sense of everything else. And we can also dismantle the myth of facts vs. faith. So when a skeptic arrogantly says they’re all about facts and proving things, you might think a little differently here, and approach them and just ask questions.

Really quick—one of the best things you can do, instead of just waiting for them to finish talking and then just launch on them why they’re wrong and they’re bad and the Bible is right, why don’t we actually listen to them to find out what they believe and how they came to that conclusion? And why do they think it’s true, to show them we care about them! And then you’re in a better position to ask followup questions like “Tell me more about this Big Bang. What was it that exploded? Where did that happen to come from?” And they will very, very quickly corner themselves, and they will realize they made a lot of bold “truth claims,” and they’ve got virtually nothing to back it up. And you haven’t said anything yet! You just asked them questions about “tell me more about what it is that you believe. I’m interested. I’m curious.”

And then you can, in a very caring way, share what you do believe, starting with scripture and going from there, knowing if they ask you tough questions about: “Well, how could people live to be 900 years old?” “What about all the violence in the Old Testament?” “What about the strange dietary laws?” “What about the evil in the world today?” “What about dinosaurs?” “What about carbon-14…?” Even if you don’t know the answers right away? That’s fine. You can get back to them. But don’t hesitate to share the Gospel message, because that’s where the power is. It’s in the Word of God. 

And, really quick, just before (I’ve already shown you our resources), this is really important. I’m feeling God telling me to share this right now: You can read the Bible cover to cover, and I hope you do. There is nothing—absolutely nothing in there that says, “If you tell people how complex DNA is, that’s going to change your mind.” Again, God sovereignly can use that as part of the story of your conversation. That’s fine. But there’s no guarantee.

But there is a guarantee in here that if you share God’s Word with someone, it will never return void: Isaiah:55:11. God’s Word will never, ever return void, and the way I see that working, when you actually share the Words of God, it will either be used to convict and convert them, which is what God wants, but He won’t force it on them. Or it will be used to condemn them, meaning they heard the truth, but they chose to reject it. And it’s just up to us to share God’s Word in a very gracious way. It’s not about pointing out that they’re wrong. It’s about pointing out why there’s such a struggle and how much God loves them and Jesus Christ’s sacrificed on that cross for their lives, sharing scripture. Even if they say, “I don’t believe it,” say, “Okay, that’s fine. I just want to share these verses anyway.”

So, the power is in God’s Word, not in our clever arguments. So, even a lot of the stuff I shared, it’s fine. We should understand it, but it’s your job to know God’s Word, believe it, live it out, and then if people don’t see Christ in us, nothing we say matters. So, share God’s love through His Word as well and pray for those opportunities.

So again almost everything we have on our table is free, we have 34 videos—including this video called Faith is Not a Four-Letter Word—it’s free along with those other 34 videos. The podcast, those are all free… there’s a bunch out there. A new one just came out… today? Today is Friday, yeah a new one just came out today. And again our free email newsletter that you can sign up for, question of the month articles, free new videos, that little pocket guide... we still have some pocket guides out there that give you four categories of evidence for How Do We Know the Bible is the Inspired Word of God?... you don't need to prove it to people, but you do need to share God's Word and then have example evidences of why you have chosen to believe that it is what it claims to be. The Inspired Word of God. And then there's a whole 5-part video series that we have for free on the Inspiration of the Bible, three books that are out there. I already mentioned the Grand Canyon tours, most of you were probably already here to see that promo so I'm going to skip through the promo and just get to the website at the end. And we do have room on our October tour and the brochures are out there on the table and you can always get ahold of me at TheStartingPointProject.com. If you want me to speak at some other conference or your church you can get ahold of us, I do get kind of busy—up to 190 talks a year—but! I go wherever God wants me to go and again we don't charge anything. We do ask that travel expenses be covered but there's never a charge for the actual talk so if you want to get ahold of us for a potential talk sometime just let me know. And I'm going to again close in a word of prayer, and pray a word of prayer for God working in and through your lives and the lives of others. So bow with me in prayer: 

Dear Heavenly Father, just thank You so much for this time that we've had to very briefly take a look at the truthfulness of Christianity and we don't learn these things to win arguments, we learn these things to strengthen our own faith and to help us... make us more gracious as we're going out and sharing the Gospel message with a lost and dying world. And I am praying very specifically God, that this week for everyone in this room, this week You bring someone across their path that You want them to share the Gospel message with that person and that You would let them know that in their spirit. "Yes I want you to speak to this person!" And that You would help them get into that conversation and allow them to let the Holy Spirit do all the heavy lifting. But we pray for those opportunities because that's the only reason we're still here on this planet, and we just thank You for using us, broken vessels, and we pray all these things in Jesus name. Amen!

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