Tag Archives: apologetics

Islam, New Testament Reliability

Did the New Testament Writers Record Fact or Fiction? Part 8

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

In this series of posts, we have shown that the NT writers claimed to be eyewitnesses or associates of eyewitnesses; we have shown that we have multiple witnesses, and we have shown that the eyewitnesses were trustworthy.  How?  They included embarrassing details about themselves  and difficult details about their subject of worship, Jesus; their accounts contain divergent details, just as we would expect from independent witnesses; and they wrote about historical facts that have been thoroughly corroborated by ancient non-Christian writers and modern archaeology.

There is one final piece of evidence that you should consider, though.  I think it is one of the strongest historical evidences we have.

Here it is.  The apostles, some of whom wrote portions of the NT, were all killed for their beliefs, except John.  According to Christian tradition, Paul was beheaded and Peter was crucified upside down – both of them killed in Rome.  James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the Jerusalem church, was thrown off the top of the Jerusalem temple and stoned to death.  The other apostles met similar fates.    Before they died, they were beaten, stoned, imprisoned, mocked, and persecuted, mostly because of their professed beliefs in Christ.

I was having lunch with a couple of bright engineers a few years back, and we started discussing religions, Christianity in particular.  They challenged my belief in the NT documents by saying that many people have created religions in order to gain fame, fortune, and power.  They thought it was quite possible that the NT writers were merely doing the same.  I asked them if they knew what happened to the apostles after Jesus died, and they did not know.  When I shared the facts above, they became silent.  Fame, fortune, and power eluded all of these men while they were alive.  Their lives would have been far easier if they had just kept quiet.

Maybe the apostles weren’t in it for the money, so to speak.  Maybe they had been lied to or deceived.  Maybe they just died for their false religious beliefs like so many other fanatics do.   Many people die for their religious beliefs, don’t they?  The Muslim fanatics on 9/11 certainly died for their beliefs.  Aren’t the apostles just the same?

No, they aren’t.  There’s a fundamental difference between the disciples and the 9/11 extremists.  The 9/11 fanatics died for contemporary beliefs that reflected someone’s modern-day interpretation of the Qur’an, a book which was written 1,400 years ago.  They had no way of knowing if the source of that book, Muhammad, was telling the truth or not.  They weren’t there to see it.  They believed based on what they had been taught by their contemporary religious teachers.

Not so with the disciples.  They all went to their deaths claiming that they saw Jesus risen from the dead.  But they knew this, not based on information delivered 1,400 years after the fact, but based on their own two eyes!!  If Jesus did not rise from the dead and the NT is a pack of lies, then the disciples knew it.  They were there.

But if they knew Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, then we must explain why they willingly went to their deaths.  Many people die for a false belief, but nobody dies for a false belief they know is false, especially not 12 different people!  The martyrdom of the apostles is strong evidence for the truth of the historical resurrection of Jesus.  There exists no other theory which can adequately explain their behavior.

I conclude this series with an extended quote from Chuck Colson, who is often asked about why he believes that Jesus rose from the dead, which is the central event and miracle of the NT.  Here is Colson:

Watergate involved a conspiracy to cover up, perpetuated by the closest aides to the President of the United States, the most powerful men in America, who were intensely loyal to their President.  But one of them, John Dean, turned state’s evidence, that is, testified against Nixon, as he put it, “to save his own skin,” and he did so only two weeks after informing the president about what was really going on – two weeks!  The real cover-up, the lie, could only be held together for two weeks, and then everybody else jumped ship in order to save themselves. Now, the fact is that all that those around the President were facing was embarrassment, maybe prison. Nobody’s life was at stake.

But what about the disciples?  Twelve powerless men, peasants really, were facing not just embarrassment or political disgrace, but beatings, stonings, execution.  Every single one of the disciples insisted, to their dying breaths, that they had physically seen Jesus bodily raised from the dead.

Don’t you think that one of those apostles would have cracked before being beheaded or stoned?  That one of them would have made a deal with the authorities?  None did.

You see, men will give their lives for something they believe to be true – they will never give their lives for something they know to be false.

The Watergate cover-up reveals the true nature of humanity.  Even political zealots at the pinnacle of power will, in the crunch, save their own necks, even at the expense of the ones they profess to serve so loyally. But the apostles could not deny Jesus because they had seen Him face to face, and they knew He had risen from the dead.

No, you can take it from an expert in cover-ups – I’ve lived through Watergate – that nothing less than a resurrected Christ could have caused those men to maintain to their dying whispers that Jesus is alive and is Lord.  Two thousand years later, nothing less than the power of the risen Christ could inspire Christians around the world to remain faithful – despite prison, torture, and death.

Jesus is Lord: That’s the thrilling message of Easter.  And it’s an historic fact, one convincingly established by the evidence – and one you can bet your life upon.  Go ahead researchers – dig up all the old graves you want.  You won’t change a thing.  He has risen.

New Testament Reliability

Are the Gospels Simply a Retelling of the Mithras Mythology?

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Recently, one of the commenters on our blog alleged that the documents of the New Testament simply repeat common themes, ideas, and facts that were widely circulated in the ancient world.  Perhaps you have heard others make this claim, such as the folks who created the Zeitgeist video.

One of the most popular arguments is that the stories about Jesus are just recycled mythology that originated from the Mithras legends.  If it could be shown that numerous specific details in the Christian gospel accounts had been copied from prior mythology, then the promoters of this idea would have something.  But is that the case?  No.

There are many internet sites and books that debunk this idea, but I commend this article at PleaseConvinceMe.com to those who want a brief, but highly informative response to this challenge.

Evolution, Intelligent Design

Do We Need Darwinism To Advance the Biological Sciences?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Dr. Philip Skell (now deceased), in an article posted on Forbes.com, says “no.”  Skell correctly separates the study of origin science from experimental sciences in the world of biology.  These are two distinct realms which Darwinists have become completely blind to.

Skell writes that Darwinists “overstate both the evidence for Darwin’s theory of historical biology and the benefits of Darwin’s theory to the actual practice of experimental science.”

Experimental science, in biology, has “dramatically increased our understanding of the intricate workings within living organisms that account for their survival, showing how they continue to function despite the myriad assaults on them from their environments.”

These advances, however, have little or nothing to do with explanations of Darwinian origins.  They “are not due to studies of an organism’s ancestors that are recovered from fossil deposits.”  The study of fossils “cannot reveal the details that made these amazing living organisms function.”  Skell summarizes the point:

Examining the major advances in biological knowledge, one fails to find any real connection between biological history and the experimental designs that have produced today’s cornucopia of knowledge of how the great variety of living organisms perform their functions. It is our knowledge of how these organisms actually operate, not speculations about how they may have arisen millions of years ago, that is essential to doctors, veterinarians, farmers and other practitioners of biological science.

Darwinian evolution, as a study of the origins of species, cannot make specific predictions about the future of any species.  The theory can only tell us that species will pass on helpful genetic traits which further survival.  Ask a Darwinist to tell you in which direction an animal or plant will evolve, and they are rendered speechless.

No matter how a plant or animal changes in the future, a Darwinist will always claim that it is evidence for Darwinian evolution.  There is no change in biological organisms that could ever falsify Darwinism, because the claim will always be made that whatever change occurs must have furthered survival fitness.  But the truth is that the theory cannot make useful predictions.  Skell notes this failure of Darwinism:

For instance, we cannot rely upon ruminations about the fossil record to lead us to a prediction of the evolution of the ambient flu virus so that we can prepare the vaccine today for next year’s more virulent strain. That would be like depending upon our knowledge of ancient Hittite economics to understand 21st-century economics.

Skell argues that the fantastic findings of the 20th century owe nothing to Darwinism: discovery of penicillin, discovery of the structure of the double helix, the characterization of the ribosome, and the mapping of genomes, to name a few.  Skell goes so far as to say that “studying biohistory is, at best, an entertaining distraction from the goals of a working biologist.”  He cites examples from his own professional career where he has discussed these very issues with experimental biologists, who agree.

One must be careful in taking Skell’s point too far, however.  It is true that in the field of biology, the importance of the Darwinian theory has been vastly oversold to the public, who are told that all of biology will collapse if we fail to accept Darwinism.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The study of origins, though, is important in determining the way a biologist approaches an experimental study.  If he believed that an organism is undesigned and produced through chance and selection, he may make assumptions that significant portions of the organism may be “junk” or useless.

This is exactly what happened when biologists labeled portions of DNA, “junk” DNA.  They could not initally find a function for it, so they figured it must be a useless pile of genetic material left over from long years of evolution.  Today, we know that “junk” DNA is not junk at all, and it does have purposes (e.g., genetic switching).  The acceptance of the “truths” of Darwinism delayed these findings because scientists, for the most part, weren’t interested in studying something their colleagues relegated to evolutionary garbage.

On the other hand, if the biologist believed that DNA is designed, he would be far less inclined to draw such a conclusion, and, in fact, proceed with great effort to discover the designed function of all DNA.  In this sense, biologists’ beliefs about origins do matter.

Even though the debates over the origins of biological life will not ultimately derail the methods of experimental biology, they are still important.  After all, we would all like to know the truth about what happened millions years ago in the earth’s history.  Unfortunately, we may never know for sure, and as Dr. Skell correctly argues, the march of experimental biology will continue.

New Testament Reliability

Did the New Testament Writers Record Fact or Fiction? Part 7

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Continuing from part 6, we will examine more evidence for the trustworthiness of the NT writers.

A fourth question about the NT writers’  integrity: are any of the historical facts they mention corroborated by other sources?  Here the NT writers really shine.  During the first and second centuries, there were many historians who were writing books and letters.

We still have many manuscript copies of these writings.  Not only do we have copies of ancient documents, we also have archaeological finds from this time period.  Since some of the NT writers described people, cities, languages, landmarks, and topography, we could check these things out to see if the NT writers were accurate.

First, the book of Acts contains numerous historical facts that can be checked out.  One researcher, Colin Hemer, found that at least 84 historical facts found in Acts can be confirmed by independent evidence.  84 facts!

According to modern-day Roman historian A. N. Sherwin-White: “For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming. . . . Any attempt to reject its basic historicity must now appear absurd.  Roman historians have long taken it for granted.”  In other words, the book of Acts is used by professional historians to study Roman history.

In that same book of Acts that contains rock-solid history, Luke also records 35 miracles.  We need to give Luke the benefit of the doubt, don’t we?  Using other sources to check his facts, Luke has been proven a first-rate historian, so it is eminently reasonable to believe the miraculous accounts he recorded in the days of the early church.

Luke’s reputation as an historian carries over in the Gospel of Luke.  Just read Luke 3:1-2  and tell me Luke didn’t care about getting the facts right.  He practically begs his readers to check his facts.  World-famous historian William Ramsay studied Luke’s historical accuracy for 20 years and concluded: “Luke’s history is unsurpassed in respect of its trustworthiness.  Luke is an historian of first rank.  [He] should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.”

Now pay close attention.  Luke’s account of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection contain all the same general facts as Mark, Matthew, and John.  Therefore, they should also be trusted.  In fact, the Gospel of John has also been dissected for historical accuracy and was found to have at least 60 independently corroborated historical facts correct.

There’s more.  We have copies of manuscripts from 17 ancient non-Christian writers who corroborate many of the basic historical facts mentioned in the NT.  These include people who were hostile to Christianity.

Additionally, archaeologists have discovered the ruins of virtually every major biblical city and we actually have the ossuary (bone box) that contained Joseph Caiaphas’ bones!  He was the high priest who sentenced Jesus to death.  Volumes have been written which chronicle the archaeological evidence matching the names of people and places recorded in the Bible, but we don’t have space to discuss it all.

The bottom line: wherever we can check the historical facts written into the books of the NT, they show themselves trustworthy.  Does this prove everything the NT authors’ claim?  Of course not.  But it is still strong evidence that they were reliable recorders of what they saw.

In this series of posts, we have shown that the NT writers claimed to be eyewitnesses or associates of eyewitnesses; we have shown that we have multiple witnesses, and we have shown that the eyewitnesses were trustworthy.  How?  They included embarrassing details about themselves  and difficult details about their subject of worship, Jesus; their accounts contain divergent details, just as we would expect from independent witnesses; and they wrote about historical facts that have been thoroughly corroborated by ancient non-Christian writers and modern archaeology.

There is one final line of evidence that will conclude this series of posts.  You won’t want to miss it.

New Testament Reliability

Did the New Testament Writers Record Fact or Fiction? Part 6

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

From part 5, we are still examining whether the eyewitnesses who wrote the books of the NT are trustworthy.  Previously we noted that the eyewitnesses recorded embarrassing details about Jesus’ disciples.  We concluded that embarrassing details would not be included in a fictional work meant to emphasize the greatness of the first followers of Jesus.  But there are additional points to consider.

A second point to examine is that the NT writers included hard-to-explain details and sayings of their Lord and Messiah, Jesus Christ.  Again, if you were creating a new religion for selfish reasons, you would not include some of the following details about Jesus because they don’t portray a simple, straightforward version of Jesus, but a more complex version.

For example, Jesus’ family thought he was out of his mind (Mark 3:21).

Jesus was deserted by many of his followers (John 6:66).

Jesus was almost stoned to death several times because of what he said.

Jesus was accused of being a drunk in Matt. 11:19.

In John 6:53 Jesus encouraged his followers to eat of his flesh and drink of his blood.  This was difficult for many non-Christians to understand during the early years of the church (Jesus was speaking symbolically, not literally); some accused Christians of being cannibals!

To cap it all off, Jesus’ moral teachings were incredibly challenging.  He told his disciples to love their enemies (Matt 5:44-45) and he said that if a man just thinks seriously about adultery, then he is guilty of it.  Just our thoughts are enough to break the moral law.

Why include these facts about Jesus if you’re making up a new religion to gain power and wealth?

A third point about the NT writers is that they include divergent details about the life of Jesus.  Imagine that 5 teenagers attended a church retreat at a camp one weekend.  After the weekend was over, I asked each of them to write a one-page essay about what they did over the weekend.  All five gave me their essays and they were all virtually word-for-word identical.  Each teen wrote about the same events, included the same details about those events, commented on the same people they saw at the events, and even mentioned the color of the shirt worn by one of the counselors.

What should I conclude?  Obviously, the five teens all got together and agreed on the story before writing their essays (they colluded).  Probably one of them wrote down the events and the rest copied her.

Likewise, when a judge listens to several witnesses talk about one event, he is watching for collusion.  Witnesses that do this cannot be trusted, can they?  They don’t seem to be interested in telling the truth, but in getting their stories straight, in conspiring.

In fact, one way we know witnesses can be trusted is if their stories don’t match on all the details.  If the five teens mentioned the same general events of the weekend camp, but gave differing perspectives of those events and wrote about different details, then it is more likely they can be trusted to be telling the truth, and thus we have more confidence in the events they’re describing.

This is exactly the case we have with the NT writers.  They all talk about things like Jesus’ birth, his miracles, his crucifixion, and his resurrection, but they tell about all these events in different ways and they include different details.

For example, Matthew’s account of Jesus’ early years include his parents traveling to Egypt to escape King Herod.  Luke, in his gospel, does not mention the trip to Egypt.  Why?  Is it because Jesus never went to Egypt and Matthew made it up?  No, it’s probably because Luke was not so interested in the trip to Egypt while Matthew was.  Matthew was writing his gospel to Jews and he realized that the family’s move to Egypt fulfilled an Old Testament prophecy that would convince the Jews of Jesus being the Messiah.  Luke was not likely writing to a Jewish audience, but to a Gentile audience, so he left it out because it wouldn’t mean as much to them.

There are many other examples of divergent details in the gospel accounts, but they can be explained along these lines.  These different details actually serve to prove the integrity of the writers, not the other way around.

In the next post, we look at even more lines of evidence that bolster the trustworthiness of the NT writers.

General Apologetics

Are There Bad Apologetics Arguments?

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Yes, there are, and C. Michael Patton points out a few on his latest blog post, 14 Examples of Really Bad Apologetics.  His conclusion is that the evidence for the resurrection is the most important apologetic argument, and I agree that the evidence for the resurrection is very strong.  However, I think there are many other apologetic arguments (e.g., having to do with the existence of God) that are also powerful.  Hopefully you will see some of them here!

Morality, Philosophy

What Do We Know About Morality? Part 3

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According to ethicist Francis Beckwith there are at least seven aspects of morality that appear to be true, based on mankind’s common moral experience.  In the previous post, we discussed the first four.  In this post, we will discuss the final three.

The fifth aspect of morality is that when we break a clear moral rule, our conscience bothers us.  Francis Beckwith explains that “when we break a significant and clear moral rule, it is usually accompanied by feelings of painful guilt and sometimes shame, for we are cognizant of our moral failure and realize we deserve to be punished.  Only sociopaths succeed in overcoming their conscience completely.”

Sixth, morality is characterized not just by an action or outward behavior, but by motive.   If a young man were to shove an elderly woman to the ground, we could not judge the morality of his action without knowing his motive.  If he were shoving her in order to steal her money, then his act is clearly immoral.  However, if his motive was to save her life because she was about to step in front of a bus, then we would judge his act to be morally righteous.  Motive, then, is a necessary component of any ethical system.

There is a seventh element that must also be part of any moral calculus, and that is intent.  There is a well-known parable within the bioethics community where two men separately intend to kill a young boy to get his inheritance.  One man sneaks into the bathroom and drowns the boy while he is bathing.  In the case of the other man, he sneaks into the bathroom with the intent to kill the boy, but the boy had accidentally hit his head and drowned just before the second man arrived.   It should be apparent that even though the second man did not actually murder the boy, his intention to do so makes his act morally reprehensible.  We would not say that the second man did nothing wrong, because his intent to kill, although not acted upon, is still evil.  Intention, then, is the seventh necessary component of morality.

If you put the two previous posts on morality together with this one, we have made a case for the following: 

  1. moral norms can be objectively known
  2. moral norms are immaterial
  3. moral norms are a form of communication
  4. moral norms are prescriptive
  5. moral norms affect our conscience
  6. moral norms include motive
  7. moral norms include intent

Now, armed with this basic understanding of the nature of morality, we can now evaluate ethical systems by judging whether they adequately account for the seven aspects of morality.  If they do not, then we have good reason to reject those accounts of morality.

In future posts, we will indeed put to the test various ethical systems that derive from naturalism and Darwinian evolution.

[quotation references can be provided on request]

Morality, Philosophy

What Do We Know About Morality? Part 2

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According to ethicist Francis Beckwith there are at least seven aspects of morality that appear to be true, based on mankind’s common moral experience.  

First, objective moral standards are known.  Any form of total moral skepticism (a view that would deny the concrete knowledge of any moral truth) cannot be true because this view would deny the obvious fact that we do indeed know some unambiguous moral truths.

Second, moral norms are not physical, but immaterial.  We do not know moral norms by using our five senses (see, hear, touch, taste, or smell) or by empirical science.  We know them by intuition, or moral common sense.  This fact counts strongly against any philosophical worldview of naturalism or materialism which denies the existence of all non-material entities.  The epistemology of naturalism (naturalism’s theory of how we know things) dictates that knowledge can only be gained through the five senses, so if we have indeed discovered knowledge (moral norms) without the use of the five senses, we have dealt a serious blow to naturalism.

Third, moral rules are a form of communication and communication can only exist between two minds.  Moral judgments are found in commands, imperatives, and descriptions.   It is nonsensical to think of communication from an irrational or unintelligent agent to an intelligent and rational agent.  Both the transmitter and receiver of communication must be rational, intelligent agents.

Fourth, there is an “oughtness” to morality.  Moral rules make claims on us before we ever act and we feel their force before we make a moral decision.  Morality is prescriptive, not descriptive; it does not tell us only the present state of affairs, but it also tells us how we ought to act in the future.   Philosopher Norman Geisler notes that “a purely descriptive ethic is no ethic at all.  Describing human behavior is sociology.  But prescribing human behavior is the province of morality.”

There are three more aspects of morality that appear to be true, and we will discuss them in the next post.  After we establish these seven aspects of morality, we will use them to evaluate systems of ethics derived from evolutionary theory.

Hang in there!

[quotation references can be provided on request]