TheBigQuestions

The Reliability of the Bible

2012-02-18T06:10:00.000-08:00

Bertrand Ramm wrote, "No other book has been so chopped, knived, sifted, scrutinized, and vilified. What book on philosophy or religion or psychology or belles lettres of classical or modern times has been subject to such a mass attack as the Bible? With such venom and skepticism? With such thoroughness and erudition? Upon every chapter, line and tenet? The Bible is still loved by millions, read by millions and studied by millions."(Protestant Christian Evidences)

The Bible is filled with prophecies that were written hundreds of years before they took place, yet were fulfilled precisely as written. Even names of people -- including foreign kings like Cyrus -- are mentioned in books that were written long before these people were even born.

The miracles of Jesus, including his resurrection, were witnessed by thousands. After his death and resurrection, over 500 people saw Jesus alive at one time. The Jewish historian Josephus wrote in the first century that Jesus was a man who lived, performed miracles, was crucified by Pontius Pilate and was reported by his thousands of followers to have risen from the dead. English Scholar Brooke Foss Wescott said, “Taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no historical incident better or more variously supported than the resurrection of Christ.” (The Gospel of the Resurrection)

No written works refuting any of these accounts about the life or resurrection of Jesus exist. Dr. Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University, concluded that “No shred of evidence has yet been discovered in literary sources, epigraphy or archaeology that would disprove [the resurrection account].&rdqyi;(Independent Press Telegram, April 21, 1973)

Millions of lives have been changed by Scripture and continue to be changed, proving that the words of the Bible transcend time and cultures. People from all walks of life are transformed, from homeless people on inner city streets to leaders of nations. Thousands living in hostile cultures are changed so completely that they give their lives for the cause of helping others discover eternal life through Christ.

Archaeology also proves the Bible to be true in its account of historical events. Not one archeological find has been discovered that refutes the biblical records. F.F. Bruce wrote, “Archaeology has confirmed the New Testament record.” (The Old Testament -- An Introduction) Reformed Jewish scholar Nelson Glueck has affirmed, “It is worth emphasizing that in all this work no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a single, properly understood biblical statement.”(Christianity for the Tough Minded)

From the Pocket Testament League

This prayer will change your life

2009-07-17T06:03:00.001-07:00

I received the message above in an ad on blogspot. I clicked on a box and it lead me to this website address:

http://www.jesus2020.com/?gclid=CN_n2a3m3JsCFUdM5QodP1iS_A

Check it out.

Y-Jesus.com

2008-07-02T17:35:00.000-07:00

I've tried to answer a number of questions in this space about the larger issues of life. If you would like an in-depth but easily accessible presentation of why faith in Jesus Christ makes sense, please check out http://y-jesus.com/ At y-Jesus you'll find excellent presentations on several topics, like:

Was Jesus a real person?

Can Jesus Bring Meaning to Life?

Did Jesus claim to be God?

Is Jesus God?

Are the gospels true?

Did Jesus rise from the dead?

Is Jesus relevant today?

Does Science Point to a Creator?

The God Question

2006-05-01T08:22:00.000-07:00

Three books have been written recently by three atheists. The authors are Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. You can find these at any bookseller like Amazon. Alistair McGrath, an Oxford professor, has written a critique of the most substantial of these assaults on theology, the book by Dawkins. This too you can find at Amazon.

It doesn't take a lot of time to notice that human beings are incorrigibly religious. It has always been so. Given our religiosity, it is hard to escape the question of whether or not there is a Supreme Being. The question of divinity has significant import for us as we wrestle with the big questions related to finding meaning and significance for our lives.

Dr. Don Bierle, a scientist and former college professor, uses an illustration that gets at the issues involved in the big questions surrounding the purpose and meaning of human existence. He proposes that we consider the entire universe as nothing more than soil. There is nothing else besides soil. He suggests that if all there is happens to be soil, then soil has no reason to be. But if grass began to grow in the soil, we could say that the purpose of soil is to support the life and growth of grass. But, what is the purpose of grass?

If we added cows to this universe of soil and grass, we could say that grass exists to support the life of cows. But, what purpose do cows have? Cows can produce milk, but what would the milk be for? For the soil or grass? That doesn't fit our usual understanding of the purpose for milk.

If we were to add intelligent beings, like humans, for example, then we could say that soil, grass and cows support intelligent life. Further, human beings can cultive the soil and care for the cows. The soil and cows will help sustain human life, but is this all enough? Does this scenario answer the big questions concerning human meaning and significance? One could affirm that it does in a utilitarian way, but is this enough?

For most people on earth, this is not enough. Of the 6 billion plus people in the world today, 99% of them have some form of religion. Religion provides meaning and significance to the vast majority of people who have ever lived. An important question is then, what is true? Is there any way that we can know whether there is a true faith, a true religion.

The Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths claim that a Supreme Being has communicated truth in the form of sacred Scriptures. These writings are considered sacred because they are believed to be communication from God to people for their benefit. The Scriptures of these faiths claim that they are revelation from God, but how do we test this claim?

One approach in answering this question is to evaluate whether a faith's sacred writings correlate with reality. Do the sacred writings make sense in terms of our experience of the world? Our experience of reality includes a number of elements that have been the subject of previous posts, for example,beauty. Let's add goodness, kindness and love. Of course, we will need to add evil to reality as we experience it, but this was the subject of an earlier post.

A perspective rooted in human experience and the Christian Scriptures would challenge the notion that humanity is improving through education or some other means. The Bible is unflinching in recounting the failings of humanity, and world history since biblical times adds numerous human failings including wars, the holocaust, terrorist attacks, cruelty to men, women, children and animals and other atrocities. In all that history shows us, where is there room for optimism about the human capacity for moral improvement?

The Christian Scriptures point to one reason for hope - God has stepped into our reality in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. According to the New Testament of the Bible and other sources outside the Bible, Jesus Christ is a historical figure. In fact, His (I use an upper case H to signify what the New Testament tells us about Jesus - that He was divine) life is attested to in a number of ancient sources. If you'd like to know more about Jesus Christ and investigate for yourself whether His claims to be the divine answer to human problems I suggest that you read the New Testament. Begin with the Gospel of Mark (the shortest gospel) and if you want more, take in the Gospel of John. If you have questions, you can put it in the comment section of this blog or email me (tseel at stny dot rr dot com).

Start at the beginning

2006-05-01T08:20:00.000-07:00

This is just a suggestion, but this blog is built sequentially and it makes sense to begin at the beginning.

The Human Problem

2006-04-04T10:25:00.000-07:00

Evil comes in many forms, and it isn't only a human problem. While there are different ways to categorize evil, one simple way that ethicists use is to separate natural evil from moral evil. Natural evil has to do with natural disasters like floods or hurricanes and also disease. Moral evil is the wrong that is done by a human being. This form of evil can be against another human being, the world or themselves. This form of evil is the basis for the human problem.

I've given a short explanation of the problem of evil earlier on this blog, and if you accept that the misuse of free will is the basis of the problem of evil for humanity, let's see if we can go a little further with this. Evil is a problem, and if we can understand human evil as a misuse of free will or freedom, then we have to say that we have a human problem of our own making. Moral evil actually presents us with a few problems.

One is the destructive force that we exert when we participate in moral evil. It is common to separate our wrongdoing into sins of omission and sins of commission. We can harm others, the world, or ourselves, by overt acts of evil or by withholding the power we have to do good. One classical way to categorize our wrongdoing is the seven deadly sins, yet we must realize that there are far more ways to the human problem than those seven!

Psychiatrist Karl Mennninger offers a list sins that goes well beyond the seven so-called deadly ones. There are sins of sensuality: lust, fornication, adultery and pornography. There are sins of anger, violence and aggression. There are the sins of envy, greed, and selfish affluence. There is dishonesty in many forms, three common forms being lying, cheating and stealing. There is cruelty, betrayal, and sloth. There is waste, hate, and theft. There are what we could call sins against the environment. The granddaddy of all sin may be pride. As you must recognize, even this is not an exhaustive catalog.

As I have alluded to above, the destructive power of moral evil is not only directed outward; it also harms the perpetrator. As Menninger writes in his book, Whatever Became of Sin?, "Sin must be dealt with in the private courts of the individual heart, sometimes with self-indulgence, sometimes with symbolic cancellations, sometimes with stern self-punishment" (p. 209).

How does evil in its many forms fit into our view of reality? For Christians, evil is real and has consequences that reach beyond the negative effects on us in this present life. From a Christian perspective based on what the Bible says, evil destroys our relationship with God. This cosmic consquence means that evil separates us from the One who has created us, who has the power to assist us in this life, and who can grant us life forever. The Christian answer to the human problem is that God has provided a way out for us.

That way out is called divine forgiveness. Divine forgiveness is free to us, but it was not free to God. Justice requires that wrongdoing receive an adequate punishment. That penalty was Jesus, the Son of God, dying on a cross outside of Jerusalem nearly 2,000 years ago. Evil done by human beings is the human problem; the solution given to us by God is to accept the gift of His Son's life on the cross as the necessary payment for our sins. We do this by acknowledging our sins to God through prayer (prayer is simply talking to the God who is always present with us). Second, we ask for God's forgiveness and accept His Son as our Savior (the One who paid the price for our sins). This is God's solution to the human problem, and as one who has received God's forgiveness, I can say that God's solution works.

Have you ever asked Jesus Christ to be your personal Savior? If you will do so, Jesus Christ will accept you and give you the power to live a better life. The power that Jesus gives to all His followers is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is God's presence that comes and lives in all of God's people. If you would like this power in your life, pray a simple prayer to God. A simple prayer to receive Jesus Christ as your Savior might look like this (and you can use this prayer if it expresses what you want to say to God):

Jesus, I acknowledge that I am a sinner. I have sinned in thought, word and deed, in the wrongs that I have done and the good that I have failed to do. I realize that I have no power in myself to make myself acceptable to you. I ask for your forgiveness for my sins. I want to live my life in a way that is pleasing to you, and so I ask that you will come into me by your Spirit and change me from the inside out. Come, Lord Jesus, and be the Lord of my life. Amen.

If you prayed this prayer, or a prayer like it of your own devising, please let me know. You can email me at: tseel at stny dot rr dot com.

The Problem of Beauty

2006-03-28T08:11:00.000-08:00

Never thought of beauty as a problem? Well, consider this: where does beauty come from? Beauty is defined in my dictionary as “that combination of qualities which is pleasing to the eye or ear." We often think of music and the visual arts as conveyors of beauty; the form and order of a musical composition or a sculpture are what makes for beauty. Disorder and chaos are not normally thought of as beautiful. We find beauty in nature because of the form and order that we see in it. The Grand Canyon or the ocean, an otter or a Gold Finch, have qualities that are pleasing to the eye. The chirping of a bird can be pleasing to the ear. The bursting colors and sounds of Spring are an annual highlight of natural beauty.

But, where did all this beauty come from? Is it a product of uncreated matter and uncreated energy? Or is there someone or something that created all things? This gets back to the syllogism of the second post:

1. If something exists,

2. something must be eternal, unless

3. something comes from nothing.

Since something quite obviously exists, there must be something (or someone) that is eternal. The best evidence suggests that the universe had a definite, if hard to pinpoint, beginning. What or who is the cause of the universe?

When we experience beauty in the arts, we can point to a creator of that beauty - an artist or composer. Doesn't it make sense that there is a creator of the universe, rather than believing that the world is the product of uncreated space, time, energy and matter?

One of the classic explorations of this issue is John Wisdom's invisible gardener. Wisdom taught at Cambridge University in England, and he posited two people finding a garden that had obviously been long neglected. The garden had observable form and order, but there were also weeds in it. One of the observers believed that there was an invisible gardener who brought form and order to the garden, while the other observer believed that no invisible gardener exists. Who is right?

When you observe the garden that is the universe, what do you see? Do you see order, form, human life, intelligence, morality and believe that there is a creator? Or do you see disorder in nature, human life and morality and believe that there is no creator? Maybe you can frame the questions better than I have here. Have at it!

Faith without Certainty

2006-03-25T10:26:00.000-08:00

We live in a time when the only ones who have certainty are fundamentalists. If we can admit that up front I think that we can get to a good place with respect to faith. This is not to say that there aren't thoughtful fundamentalists, but it is to say that just about everyone else recognizes that none of us have a perfect hold on what we could call universal truth. Perfect knowledge is beyond all of us, but even so, faith is possible. The syllogism that I used in the second post about whether there is a God does not prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is a God. But I hope that it does get us to a place where we can have an intelligent belief that God does exist. Faith makes sense in a world that is devoid of certainty, but faith in the intellectual environment in which we live still needs to be based on something more than personal desires or intuitions.

Christian faith, along with Judaism and Islam, is based on revelation. Christians, Jews and Muslims agree that God has revealed Himself (in the classical forms of these three faiths, God is rendered in the masculine gender). The test that intellectuals pose for these faiths is whether or not their beliefs make sense in the reality that we all experience. I believe that Christianity can measure up to the standards of reality as we experience it. What do you think?

This test by reality is what I will be writing about in subsequent posts.

Is There Any Proof for God?

2006-03-17T06:55:00.000-08:00

It's interesting enough to note the reports of the famous atheist and intellectual Antony Flew becoming a theist. Flew has confirmed these reports and while he has not accepted the Christian view of God, he has come to believe on the basis of the complexity of DNA that there must be a divine creator. Others find other reasons for believing in the existence of God. A pragmatic basis for belief in God is that God, particularly the God of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures gives us a definite meaning for life. More than just meaning, the God of the Bible gives us hope. An atheist might argue, as Flew did for many years, that Christian faith gives people false hope. So, this might cause us to say that the pragmatic basis is insufficient for a solid faith. But there are other cases that can be made.

Another base for faith in experience. Millions of people throughout history attest to religious experience. The Bible gives several testimonies to direct human experience with the divine. There are two weaknesses that I see for the experiential base for faith. First, religious experience is not universal. Every man, woman and child cannot say that they have experienced the presence of God. Second, reported experiences of the divine are disparate. On the basis of religious experience alone, we would have to conclude that there are many different Gods. Maybe we should hold on to this possibility at this point. In popular forms of Hinduism there are many gods and goddesses. At this point in our conversation, we can't rule this possibility out.

A third foundation for faith is the cosmos. The universe in all its majesty, mystery and complexity raises questions concerning the big questions. For the ancient Greek philosophers the universe raised questions about metaphysics. Metaphysics is a field of philosophy that considers matters concerned with existence and ultimate significance.

Some scientists today wrestle with a theory of everything (toe, for short), and these kinds of big questions end up in metaphysics. Whether we consider the design of the universe, the human brain, the human body, or DNA, we arrive at levels of complexity that are difficult to explain from a non-religious standpoint. For example, where does intelligence come from?

If we are willing to concede that God is at least a possibility, then another big question is whether or not we can know God. If God is a reality, indeed the basis of reality, how can we know Him (or her, if we need to use gender terms to speak about this subject)? This is the topic for another post titled "The Human Problem."

The problem of evil

2006-03-12T15:13:00.000-08:00

If there is a God, is this God good? This question rests at the base of the problem of evil. Most folks (I am guessing here) can look around and see much good in the world. The earth itself is beautiful, animals are fascinating, the produce of the earth in all its varieties is beneficial to humanity, and humanity has created many goods from the earth and from our own inherent creativity (like music and the visual arts). So, first of all, where did all this good come from? If we posit a supreme being that created good, then we have to ask about the converse side of things - where did evil come from?

Before we go any further, we better define evil. We could simply say that evil is the opposite of good, and then we are left with the work of defining good. Another approach would be to say that evil is that which is morally bad, but then we have to find a way to define what we mean by morally bad (I take a stab at this below). We could say that evil is that which is harmful to people or the natural world, but there are limitations to this explanation as well.

On the other hand, even if evil is difficult define, we know it when we see it. One kind of evil is called natural evil. If a hurricane, tornado or a tidal wave wipes out towns full of people, we recognize this as evil. The evil may be from nature, but it is still evil and if we believe that nature is the creation of God, then we are back to the problem of God and evil once again.

Another kind of evil is moral evil. Moral evil is the wrongdoing that human beings perpetuate against each other. Moral evil is another basis for questioning the existence of a good God. If God is good and we are created by God, as Christians, Jews, Muslims and others believe, why is there so much evil done by human beings?
Doesn't any kind of evil call into question the notion of a God, or at least, the idea that God is good?

If God is good it would seem to follow that either God would not allow evil, or that God is not powerful enough to stop evil. One answer to this dilemma is to say that what we consider evil is really good in disguise. This answer suggests that if we could see the big picture as we presume that God does, we would understand that evil really is part of a greater architecture that turns out to be good. What this answer does is ask us to suspend judgement upon evil based on our limited knowledge of all things. Many people do not find this suspension of judgement to be satisfactory, so we are pushed for another more satisfying solution.

The classical Christian explanation for evil grounds itself in free will. In this understanding, God is all-powerful and could decide to not permit evil, but to do so would violate the free will that He has given to His creatures. In order to give His creatures freedom, God has decided not to use His power to elimate the choices of evil that His creatures can make. This answer is also unsatisfactory to some, and so, we are left to say that while there are plenty of reasons to believe that God is good, for some, the problem of evil will always be a difficulty.

The biggest question of all

2006-03-11T18:14:00.000-08:00

Is there a bigger question than whether or not there is a God? If there is, let me know and we'll look at it.

To think about whether or not there is a God, I start here:

1. If something exists,
2. something must be eternal, unless
3. something comes from nothing.

It is obvious that something exists, so the question is, did something come from nothing? I see no evidence that something ever comes from nothing, so I must posit that there is something that is eternal.

What is eternal? Not the world. Scientists tell us that the world is very old, but in most theories, there is a starting point for it. If the physical universe has a beginning, there must be something older than it (the eternal something). This something could be Aristotle's prime mover. The eternal something would appear to be the cause of everything else. I want to carefully use this next possibility because it carries some baggage that I don't want to carry myself, but this primary mover or cause appears to be an intelligent designer. The universe is a place of order rather than chaos with physical laws that govern it and can be discovered. I will suggest that the intelligent designer behind this order is who we call God.

Why is this the biggest of the big questions? Mortimer Adler, one of the great thinkers of the 20th century said, "More consequences for thought and action follow the affirmation or denial of God than from answering any other basic question" (Great Books of the Western World, 2:561). He explained that there is either a supreme being above human beings or we are left to do as we please. God or no God is a question that affects how we live.

So, how do you answer the biggest of the big questions? Obviously, this is a short piece on a subject that fills library shelves, but I write it as a conversation starter. What do you think?

What are the big questions?

2006-03-11T07:42:00.000-08:00

Good question, and if you have an answer to it, please respond via the comments section. Otherwise, I'll be presenting my thoughts for your reflection and comments in this space.