I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist LIVE from Colorado Mesa University

so yes okay so so thank you so so no yes we're just gonna go over here all right good evening if you guys wouldn't mind taking your seat i know some people are still coming in that's perfectly okay but we're going to start our time together um so my name is summer i am the president of rocho christie at cmu and i have the privilege of kicking off our event tonight um this afternoon when i met um dr turek i spilled my entire starbucks drink on the ground and he said quote this is why we can't have nice things so despite me introducing this evening i'm sure that we are going to have a very nice time together but i want to begin by saying a huge thanks to cmu and student life for their help facilitating this event they've just gone to great lengths to make this happen and we're super thankful for them i also want to thank all the other clubs on campus that have helped promote this event namely nate and matt from sca brandon from tnl master plan eric and lydia from intervarsity madison from young life and brian from truth matters and every other club and individual that helped get all these people sitting here we are super super thankful for you also julie brown sarah mulcongi and paulette bourget they helped in getting the community to this event so if you are not a cmu student you can thank them for helping get you to this event tonight they were a huge help with that elizabeth sharp who is our wonderful faculty advisor she helps us be able to be a club on campus and then the individuals that have supported racial christie financially it's because of your generosity that we're able to do events like this among other things and last but not least john vanderbilt and karen vanderbilt our directors want to thank them yeah um it's because of your guys's faithfulness and a dedication to the mission that god has given you um that you've helped so many of us here as members of rachel christie um not be a part of the 75 percent of students that leave their faith behind in college um and so that's really why bostio christie exists um it's to give students philosophical historical and scientific reasons for following jesus and so without further ado we would like to welcome frank turek to the platform good evening mavericks i want to go back to september 29th 2006. that's when petty officer michael monsoor is the united states navy seal operating in ramadi iraq monsoor is standing on a roof in ramadi and he's standing in front of a doorway to this roof he has two navy seal teammates lying in the sniper prone position next to him they've already taken ak-47 fire and a rocket-propelled grenade but they're not exactly sure where the enemy is there's a bit of a lull in the fighting insurgents have blocked off the streets in ramadi and there's someone on the loudspeaker in the town mosque yelling kill the americans as monsoor and his team are looking for the next attack an insurgent from an unknown location throws a grenade up on the roof it hits monsoor in the chest and it falls to his feet due to the length of the throat there's no opportunity to pick it up and throw it back he has only a split second to make a decision he can leap through the doorway behind him and save himself but if he does his two teammates lying on the roof will surely die monsoor yells grenade but instead of jumping backward to save himself he jumps forward chest first onto the grenade it detonates 30 minutes later 25 year old michael monsoor is dead his two teammates lying on the roof receive only minor injuries because monsoor's body muffled the blast one of the survivors said at montsour's funeral mikey looked death in the face that day and said you will not take my friends i will go in their stead i've never seen a united states president cry until april of 2008 that's when president george w bush invited monsoor's parents into the east room of the white house to give them their son's medal of honor posthumously the president couldn't even get through the citation without breaking down since then monsoor's high school in garden grove california built a new stadium they named it michael a monsoor memorial stadium the golden trident insignia that the seals wear dominates the 50-yard line january 2019 north island california just outside of san diego the united states navy commissioned the uss michael monsoor the newest guided-missile destroyer in the fleet zumwalt-class this is monsor's mother sally being escorted onto the ship named in honor of her fallen son now why did they do this because michael monsoor literally sacrificed himself to save his friends there's no greater love than to sacrifice yourself to save your friends said jesus of nazareth before he went to the cross michael monsoor sacrificed himself to save his friends the question is would anyone sacrifice himself to save you and the answer is someone already has his name is jesus of nazareth but in today's culture many people don't think the story is true they think it's invented they think it was made up by religious people because we know religious people embellish things and it's got miracles in it like a resurrection we don't believe in miracles anymore how can we believe in such a story well i actually think it's true and i think it's actually easy to show that it's true you only need to answer four questions in the affirmative to show that it's true in other words if you investigate these four questions i think you'll realize that the answer to these four questions is yes and if the answer to these four questions is yes then christianity is true what are the four questions here are the four questions that is actually from our tv show which is on wednesday nights on directv channel 378 so it's on tonight actually it's on right now because it's 9 p.m eastern time it's obviously not live uh we're also on roku if you have directv it's channel 378. we're on radio every saturday mornings around the country but you can listen to it podcasted so it's on a podcast here if you tried to listen to that it would be what 8 a.m if you're a college student on saturday you don't get up to the crack of noon so forget that okay the the podcast is called i don't have enough faith to be an atheist and we present evidence for christianity and we cross-examine ideas against it that's our website right there cross-examined.org now why are these the four questions truth god miracles in the new testament and this is going to serve as our outline here tonight we're going to go through these four points or four questions what does truth exist why is that important because you hear people saying there's there's no truth or you got your truth i got my truth or all truth is relative right you've heard all these claims well if there's no truth quite obviously christianity can't be true of course if there's no truth atheism can't be true either right in fact if there was no truth would you even go to school why would you be here at colorado mesa university if there was no truth you're here to learn truth right so we're going to deal with that question first second question does god exist obviously christianity can't be true if there's no god but i hope to show you tonight that there really is a theistic god what's a theistic god that's a spaceless timeless immaterial powerful moral personal intelligent creator who created all things and sustains all things and whose every attribute is infinite we're going to look at three arguments for this being these arguments are taught in the bible but you don't need the bible to know them in fact we're not even going to refer to the bible in question two you can show god exists without any reference to any religious writing third question are miracles possible obviously christianity can't be true if miracles are not possible but i hope to show you tonight that not only are miracles possible but the greatest miracle in the bible has already occurred and even atheists are admitting the data for this miracle we'll see that here tonight then we're going to get to the key question is the new testament true the new testament doesn't have a prayer if there's no truth no god or no miracles but if truth exists if god exists if miracles are possible then we can see if we have reliable enough evidence from the new testament documents to tell us if one particular event from the ancient world took place what would that event be the resurrection right because if the resurrection occurred if jesus really rose from the dead game over christianity is true of course if jesus didn't rise from the dead game over you might as well sleep in on sunday and do what you want the rest of the week because if jesus didn't rise from the dead christian your faith is in vain as even the apostle paul said in his letter to the corinthians forget it so in other words you can verify whether or not christianity is true by seeing if jesus rose from the dead okay now those are the four questions we're going to go through and we can't cover all of this in great detail due to the limited time so if you want to go further we have the book available on the book table as well as a 12-part dvd series we have another book over there called stealing from god why atheists need god to make their case i've noticed that when atheists are arguing against god they're actually stealing aspects of reality that would only exist if god existed in order to say he doesn't exist in effect they have to sit in god's lap to slap his face in my view anyway now all the proceeds in the sale of the books and the dvds will go to feed needy children mine okay just so you know all right actually you don't need to uh you don't actually need to buy a book to get what i'm going to say to you because i want to send you the entire powerpoint presentation even slides i can't show you if you text the word evidence to 4422 text the word evidence not not with quotes on it just the word evidence to 4422 and i'm going to send you this entire powerpoint presentation in a pdf format now if you miss it i'm going to put this up at the end so don't worry about it all right all right so we got to get moving here we got to start right here at point one does truth exist are you guys ready to go all right now whenever you start talking about truth you always have to start with jack nicholson right because tom cruise had him on the witness stand and he said to him colonel i want the truth and nicholson said only one guy got it right mavericks come on he didn't say it that way if he said it that way the movie would have gone nowhere you can't handle that that's not how he said it here's how he's what the truth you can't handle the truth [Applause] now that felt better didn't it that was worth coming out here tonight wasn't it we could go home feeling better right now well there's a lot of people that can't handle the truth they're saying you got your truth i got my truth all truth is relative well if you don't get anything outside of what we talk about here tonight this is going to be the most important thinking skill we're going to talk about and i don't care whether you're an atheist a muslim a christian a hindu whatever you are it doesn't matter this is going to be worth thinking about because this thinking skill is so critical it will help you avoid a lot of pain why because this thinking skill will help you discover what is false and half the battle in life is trying to discover what is false so you can avoid it and concentrate on what is true now this thinking skill is so simple but to show you what a dimwit i was i was 33 years old i already had a master's degree and i didn't know this and the easiest way of showing this to you is to demonstrate using this thinking skill suppose someone were to come up to you and say something like there is no truth you should ask that person a question what should the question be yes is that true is it true that there's no truth because if it's true that there's no truth to claim there is no truth can't be true but it claims to be true did i say that right can everybody see that this is known as a self-defeating statement what's a self-defeating statement a self-defeating statement violates the law of non-contradiction or a self-defeating statement doesn't meet its own standard and the way you can identify a self-defeating statement is to turn the claim on itself turn the claim on itself so if i were to say i can't speak a word in english what would you say to me yeah you're using english right now you turn the claim on itself you're using english obviously that's self-defeating or if i were to say my parents had no kids that lived right you'd say hey or my brother is an only child right you go these words don't make sense they're self-defeating well there's a lot of phrases in our culture today that don't make sense they're self-defeating and i want to show you several of these and show you how to turn the claim on itself now people don't always go around saying there is no truth they say it in different ways like they might say something like all truth is relative if someone were to say that to you and you were to turn the claim on itself what would you say back to him yeah if some somebody says there's all truth as relative say is that a relative truth no that's an absolute truth claiming that all truths are relative you see that it's like saying i can't speak a word in english sometimes people say it this way there isn't the truth only my truth right i get to live my truth you get to live your truth all that there isn't the truth just my truth and just your truth now what would you say to somebody who says this if you turn the claim on itself you would say is that just your truth or the truth right because if it's just your truth it's just your opinion it doesn't apply to anybody else right but if it's the truth it defeats itself do you see that i know this is going to sound shocking but really there's no such thing as my truth or your truth there's just the truth now there are claims or truths that apply just to me and not to you like my name's frank and maybe your name's bill or mary or something yeah we get that but it's objectively true that my name's frank and your name is bill and your or your name is mary it's objectively true but that applies to you those are objective truths it's it's it's it may be just your opinion that chocolate tastes better than vanilla right but it's objectively true that if you like chocolate more than vanilla that's objectively true so all truth is objective truth uh sometimes it isn't said either of these ways sometimes it's said this way it's true for you but not for me somebody says it that way what would you say to him this is the interactive portion of the program turn the claim on itself this is also self-defeating it's just a little bit more subtle if somebody says it's true for you but not for me say hey is that true for everybody it's true for you but not for me true for everybody because it's true for you but not for me it's true for everybody then true for you and not me can't be true because it's true for everybody did i say that right i know that can give you intellectual constipation if you think about it long enough but that's because it's self-defeating it's like saying i can't speak a word in english actually there's a more fun way of dealing with this if somebody says it's true for you but not for me share go try that with a police officer who pulls you over like say say you're going 100 on highway 70 out here cop sees you pulls you over walks up to the car knocks on the glass he says you were going 100. it's easy to get out of a ticket you simply say that's true for you but not for me and you speed away no if it's true you were going 100 that's just true when it when talking about you at that time at that place i go to a lot of churches i normally ask people do you think christianity is true and most people will say yes and then i'll ask them why do you know what an answer i get more than any other because i have faith is that a good answer does your faith change whether or not god exists or jesus rose from the dead no i mean you have to believe something to make it true do you have to believe in gravity to stay on the ground to people who don't believe in gravity float away hey look there's another one hey if you believe you'll come back no that's not the way it works you say why is the bible always talking about faith then because there's two kinds of faith there's belief that and then there's belief in belief that is getting evidence that god exists that jesus rose from the dead that's what we call apologetics doesn't mean you're saying you're sorry it means you're giving evidence for what you believe but all the belief that in the world won't get your moral transgressions forgiven for that you got to go from belief that to belief in you know james the half-brother of jesus who wrote that little book in the new testament called you guys are a sharp group tonight james said even the demons believe that god exists but they tremble do you realize that the demons know that god exists better than we do yeah but they don't trust in him why because they don't want to trust in him there's a difference between belief that and belief in and we know this in relationships don't we when i first met my wife 36 years ago i got evidence that she would be a good wife but all the evidence in the world didn't make her my wife i had to take a step of trust in her to ask her to be my wife and in a momentary less of judgment she said yes that's the difference between belief that and belief in and what most of the time when the bible's talking about faith it's talking about the second kind belief in and what it really means is trusting in what you have good evidence to believe is true that's what faith means trusting in what you have good evidence to believe is true yesterday when i flew from charlotte i got evidence that the pilots were well trained but i didn't really trust in them until i got on the plane right there's a difference between belief that and belief in and if you don't want to go from belief that to belief in you don't have to god is not going to force you into heaven against your will how about this you hear this a lot too there's no truth in anything but science turn the claim on itself somebody says this what are you going to say to him yeah yeah is that a scientific truth can you go in the laboratory and prove that no that's a philosophical claim you can't prove that in the laboratory in fact in the book stealing from god we have a chapter on science this is the title of the chapter science doesn't say anything scientists do do you notice that whenever you see some reporter saying science says this or science says that you go time out science doesn't say a word why do you think you get conflicting advice on covid why do you think that no matter what you think about it you might think something different than your neighbor why because science doesn't say a word scientists say things see all data needs to be gathered and all data needs to be interpreted and who does that scientists now sometimes they have the same data but they interpret it differently sometimes they have different data and that's why they get a different result sometimes the data isn't good enough to get the result they want and so they're going to say it anyway so science doesn't say a word and philosophy undergirds science if you're not a good philosopher you're not going to be a good scientist as einstein himself said he said the man of science is a poor philosopher in fact you can't even read the bible without philosophy everything you do is based on right thinking if you can't think rightly which is what philosophy is about you can't do anything well when it comes to academics and by the way if you think about it all truth doesn't come from the most important truths in life don't come from science honey do you love me yeah why i don't know let's run an experiment no how about this you hear this a lot you should doubt everything this is skeptical claim yes if somebody you turn the claim on itself you say hey should i doubt that why are skeptics skeptical of everything but skepticism they don't seem to doubt that now i don't care whether you're a christian atheist or anywhere in between in this room right now how many people in here regardless of what you believe sometimes doubt that what you believe is true look if you don't have your hand up right now you're probably not thinking much right i mean i've written books on this stuff and sometimes i wake up in the morning and i go i don't even know if this is true you ever do that but then i start thinking about my doubts and i realize that my doubts are emotional they're not intellectual in other words the evidence for christianity is really good we're not having a good day everything looks fine bad day don't know good day fine bad day don't know good day fine bad day don't know what's changing me or the evidence i'm going up and down sometimes i'll meet former christians they'll say frank i'm a former christian but now i'm an atheist because i lost my faith now i don't mean to be unkind but since i'm originally from new jersey sometimes i am when they say that i want to say when they say i lost my faith i want to say so so are you telling me because your psychology changed god has popped out of existence are you telling me because your psychology is different than it was last year that jesus is now back in the tomb you see your psychology is not going to tell you whether christianity is true or anything is true your psychology is not going to tell you whether it's safe to get on an airplane either you may be scared to death to get on an airplane but it's the safest way to get from a to b anywhere psychology is not going to tell you the truth the evidence will tell you the truth so if your psychology is going up and down put that on the back burner and say what's the evidence say you see because if you start doubting your doubts because they're emotional they're not intellectual then you're back to knowing something for sure have you guys ever thought about doubting your doubts i doubt it all right how about this this is the big one in our culture you ought not judge that jesus said don't judge why are you judging you hypocrite all right what's the problem with this claim turn the claim on itself somebody says now judge what are you going to say yeah you're going to say hey isn't that a judgment or you might say then why are you judging me for judging because it's a judgment you might say wait a minute frank jesus said don't judge nope never said it sure he did he said it in matthew chapter 7 verse 1. all right i know this is going to sound a little weird but it's true there are no verses in the bible there are no verses in the bible you think when matthew was writing his biography of jesus he said here's chapter seven verse one no when were those chapter and verse divisions put in about 500 years ago to help us navigate the text which is a good thing right because it's a real long series of books it'd be hard to find your way around without numbers the problem is we tend to think if there's a number in front of it we can take it out and make it say whatever we want this is a problem because when jesus said judge not he didn't stop there did he what did he say he said judge not last you be judged by the same standard you judge others you'll be judged by that standard so before you try and take the speck out of your brother's eye you hypocrite which is a judgment by the way take the log out of your own eye first and then you'll be better able to help your brother right is jesus telling us not to judge here no he's telling us to take the speck out of our brother's eye that involves making a judgment he's simply saying if you've got that problem in your life get it out of your life first then go help your brother in other words this is not a command not to judge it's actually a command on how to judge don't judge hypocritically if you've got that problem fix it and then go help your brother but it would be completely ridiculous to say don't make judgments why number one it's a judgment itself and number two you'd be dead already if you didn't make judgments you made a hundred judgments just getting over here tonight now you're questioning every one of them this guy's crazy what's he talking about right everybody makes judgments atheists make judgments what what judgments do they make there's no god jesus didn't rise from the dead bible is not true these are all judgments the question isn't whether or not you can make judgments the question is are your judgments true i will say this though jesus did save a very stern rebuke for people who were judgmental and who were the judgmental ones in his day pharisees who were the pharisees they were the religious and political leaders of israel they helped run israel some of them were on the sanhedrin the jewish ruling council to whom rome delegated a much of the legal authority to these were the religious politicians and jesus went after them are you telling me jesus got involved in politics yes and he went after the politicians and he wasn't so nice doing it if you think jesus was a sweet guy who's never said a bad word about anyone you have not read john chapter 2 john chapter 8 or matthew 23. what happens in john chapter 2 jesus makes a whip and he goes and he jacks people up in the temple what sweet and gentle jesus did this yes and then in john chapter 8 he's having the same argument with these pharisees and gets the point in the conversation where he says your father is the devil jesus you can't say that that's not very christ-like excuse me i am christ can you imagine you're having an argument with somebody and you stop and you go your father is the devil never do that with a sibling by the way and then in matthew 23 jesus says to these same pharisees woe to you scribes and pharisees you hypocrites you strain out a net and swallow a camel oh you look great on the outside you're whitewashed tombs but on the inside you're full of dead men's bones you go a mile to make a convert and then once you make them a convert you make them twice as much a son of hell as you are how will you avoid being condemned to hell what sweet and gentle jesus said this yes jesus was not barney can't we all get along boys and girls no i came to bring a sword it's going to divide mother and daughter father and son jesus was tough in fact why did they kill jesus because he claimed to be god which was blasphemy to the jews and sedition to the romans and number two he spoke truth to power and got himself killed because neither the romans or the jews wanted him to succeed particularly the jews if they succeed if jesus succeeded they were out of business they actually know jesus he raised lazarus from the dead and what does caiaphas say right after that better one innocent man die than all of israel go down so don't buy into this idea that jesus jesus was a a he wasn't he was tough by the way i've noticed one other thing about judging you ever notice when you compliment somebody which is a judgment nobody gets upset you know if you say to your best friend i really love you you're such a wonderful person i wish i could be like you you think your friend's gonna go who are you to judge no he's never going to say that why you see i've noticed that people don't have a problem with judging they just have a problem with judgments they don't like in fact if you tell somebody something that's true and they get mad at you you just help convict them as augustine said we love the truth when it enlightens us we hate the truth when it convicts us a few military people in here by the way i was in the navy which stands for never again volunteer yourself and i have two sons in the air force anyway for you military people you always get more flack when you're over the target if you start telling somebody the truth and they're shooting back at you you're over the target they don't want their evil deeds exposed as jesus said men love darkness rather than light now we could go through many more of these in our culture we don't have time we got to move on but can everyone see that this statement right here shoots itself can everyone see that okay all the other statements we just went through shoot themselves too they're self-defeating so don't believe them they're faults now there is objective truth out there that's why there are universities that's why there are schools and teachers and educators and you can know it so if our reasoning is good to this point that means if truth does exist that relativism and post-modernism are false why because they say it's true that there's no truth all right now you can't get away from truth actually you can get away from it temporarily and let me just say if if you're not a believer here and you've come thank you for coming when we get to questions later i want to warn you that if you're an unbeliever i may ask you a question and it's not fair me to do that without giving you a warning okay here's the question i might ask you because i ask you of a lot of people if christianity were true would you become a christian i've had atheists stand at that microphone in front of hundreds of people and say no no how's that reasonable you're not believing something that's true of course it's not reasonable the problem isn't in the head the problem's in the heart they don't want it to be true they don't want there to be a god why because they want to be god of their own lives they think god is going to get in the way of what they want to do they're not on a truth quest they're on a happiness quest and christians half the time we are too aren't we we're suppressing truth just like everybody else because we want to do our own thing the truth is inconvenient so ask somebody if christianity were true would you become a christian if they hesitate or say no the problem is not intellectual the problem's emotional or moral they don't want it to be true all right anyway let's now move on to point two and we're gonna spend most of our time on point two points three and four go quicker but let's talk about point two does god exist and i mentioned there are three arguments for a theistic god the first is from the beginning of the universe known as the cosmological argument now cosmological comes from the greek word cosmos which means world or universe and it says if the universe had a beginning it must have had a beginner the second argument is the argument from design known as the teleological argument now telos is a greek word meaning designer purpose and it says if there's design in the universe and design in you life then there has to be a designer now these two arguments have some scientific evidence behind them we'll see some of that as we go here tonight the third argument doesn't have any science behind it yet it's the argument we've all intuitively understood since we were very small children and it's the argument from morality known as the moral argument and it says that there's one thing really morally wrong out there just one like it's wrong to torture babies for fun or it's wrong to murder six million people in a holocaust then there has to be a god why because if there is no standard of righteousness that we're obligated to obey that's beyond us then everything's just a matter of opinion that would just be your opinion against the baby torturous opinion or your opinion against hitler's opinion well we know these things aren't a matter of opinion so there must be a standard beyond us that we're obligated to obey we'll get to that later we've got to start right here at point one or argument one the cosmological argument now you got to admit it was worth coming here tonight just to see god do that wasn't it some of you missed it let's see it again some of you have said i've never seen god move oh really look at that right there now this is the argument that many say points back to the big uh frank you know where chris is in here and uh we don't believe in the big bang you guys don't believe in the big bang i believe in the big bang i just know who caused the big bang in fact the big bang is so well accepted that even atheists are admitting it stephen hawking who was probably the top physicist in the world until he died uh four years ago as you know he had als he was kind of a medical miracle als normally kills people in a few years hawking had it for like 40. okay but here's what hawking said about the beginning he said almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the big bang that space time and matter literally came into existence out of nothing there was no space-timer matter and then it came into existence out of nothing now hawking tried to come up with another explanation other than god he failed but he's admitting the data in fact you know what you know do you know what his explanation was in the last book he wrote called the grand design this is on page 181 here's what he wrote remember how i said science doesn't say anything scientists do here's what hawking said about how the universe got here he said because there is a law like gravity the universe can and will create itself out of nothing john lennox a brilliant christian mathematician and philosopher from oxford university said about that when brilliant scientists say nonsense it is still nonsense okay because gravity doesn't create anything and gravity didn't exist anyway gravity was created was was created with space-time continuum now it wasn't just hawking who said these kind of things agnostic cosmologist alexander vellenkin from tufts university put it this way he said with the proof now in place cosmologists and by the way a cosmologist is not someone that puts on your makeup all right that's somebody that studies the universe cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past eternal universe there is now no escape they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning now it's unusual for scientists to use the word proof why because science is tentative but hawking i mean um valencian sees so many uh points of evidence pointing in one direction toward a beginning that he labeled it a proof now why is it a problem that there's a cosmic beginning because if space time and matter literally had a beginning whatever created space-time and matter can't be made a space-time and matter in other words the cause must transcend space-time and matter nature can't be the cause of the universe because nature is the effect it's not the cause now what is the evidence for this we're not gonna go through it tonight why number one we don't have time number two it's all in the book chapter three i don't have enough faith to be an atheist and number three it's not controversial atheists are admitting it so we're just going to jump to the bottom line here's the bottom line if the universe had a beginning it must have had a beginner we've got two options either no one created something out of nothing which is the atheistic view or someone created something out of nothing which is the theistic view now which view is more reasonable i was at texas a m uh 15 years ago when i put this slide up and one atheist said i think number one is more reasonable i said number one let's look at number two for a second number two says someone created something out of nothing now that's a miracle right but at least you got a miracle worker you got someone number one is a miracle with no miracle worker that's clearly absurd do you realize that everyone believes in at least one miracle christians believe in more than one but we believe the first miracle was someone created something out of nothing the atheists believe that no one created something out of nothing at least many of them do anyway like lawrence krauss who wrote a book called the universe from nothing where he tries to make this case he doesn't work but no there has to be an uncaused first cause and if the universe had a beginning it can't be the universe as having the uncaused first cause or the universe can't be the uncaused first cause now think about this ladies and gentlemen if space-time and matter literally had a beginning out of nothing then whatever created space time and matter can't be made a space-time and matter in other words the cause must be spaceless timeless immaterial powerful to create the universe out of nothing personal in order to choose to create why personal because to go from a state of nothingness to a state of creation someone had to make a choice and only persons make choices also the being would have to be intelligent to have a mind to make a choice now when you think about a spaceless timeless immaterial powerful personal intelligent cause who do you think of god you say well how do you know it's the christian god frank we don't yet i mean this could be allah or some other theistic god right we've got to see if jesus rose from the dead to see if this is the christian god but once we investigate that we're going to realize that the same being that walked out of the tomb 1988 years ago is the same being in whose divine nature created the universe out of nothing but this argument doesn't get you all the way to christianity it gets you six attributes of god but not all of them all right so a question that leibniz asked a great philosopher a number of years ago he said this if there is no god why is there something rather than nothing at all if there is no god why does anything exist think about it we don't have to exist right we all had beginnings the universe had a beginning there must be something outside the universe that didn't have a beginning and by the way if the cause of the universe is timeless did the cause of the universe have a beginning no he's outside of time so he doesn't need a cause so the question who made god doesn't make any sense he's the uncaused first cause he's the unmade maker he's the uncreated creator he is what aristotle might call the unmoved mover now as they say there's a lot more in the book on that but we got to get to the design argument the teleological argument there's two aspects to this the universe appears designed and life appears design let's start with the universe in recent decades scientists have discovered the universe is fine-tuned what does that mean that if you were to change any one of a number of factors about our universe virtually imperceptibly there would either be no universe or no universe that could support life and even atheists admit this again stephen hawking here's what he said about the expansion rate at the beginning of the universe he said if the expansion rate of the universe was different by one part in a thousand million million a second after the big bang the universe would have collapsed back on itself or never developed galaxies if the expansion rate was that infinitesimally different at the very beginning none of us would be here now you can't come up with any sort of evolutionary explanation for this you can't say well the expansion rate evolved to this point by chance whatever that means right why because this is how the expansion rate started at the very beginning seems to me the same being that created space-time and matter is the same being that designed the expansion rate to be precisely what it needed to be for this universe to exist also the gravitational force if it were altered by more than one part and 10 to the 40th power we wouldn't exist what's one part and 10 to the 40th power that's one part in one with 40 zeros following it you say frank i can't get my head around that number i know neither can i so let me give you an illustration take a tape measure and stretch it across the entire known universe that's a long way you can't get that tape measure at lows set the gravitational force at a particular inch mark on that tape measure i realize gravity's not measured in inches but this is just give you a scale idea in your mind if the strength of gravity were different by one inch in either direction across the scale as wide as the entire known universe we wouldn't be here that's one in 10 to the 40 precision i don't have enough faith to believe that that value just landed there by chance and oh by the way does chance cause things is chance a cause who caused this chance he was just here no chance is not a cause chance is a word we use to describe mathematical possibilities chance doesn't do a thing when scientists use the word chance you know what they really mean um we don't know that's what they mean look there's only two explanations for that value being where it is it was either designed to be there or it wasn't which do you think is more reasonable it was designed to be there now it's not just our universe and we could go through a dozen of these change any one of them this universe doesn't exist okay but let's look at our solar system because our solar system appears to be designed with us in here mind are a little bit further not too cold away is that's a lie it's too hot here in the sun okay uh size and distance of the moon from us change that slightly we don't exist if jupiter right here was not in its current orbit we couldn't exist here on earth why not what does jupiter do for us its gravitational force is so strong it attracts most of the meteors and space junk to it rather than us it's a cosmic vacuum cleaner in fact if you take a close-up look at jupiter you know what these dark marks are those dark marks are comet fragment strikes that are bigger than the earth thank god for jupiter because if jupiter wasn't there we wouldn't be here same thing is true with saturn it directs stuff away from us as well in fact you want to see the size of the planets here they are you got jupiter saturn uranus neptune earth looking for pluto down here you know pluto recently has been demoted as a planet i don't know about you but i think it's size discrimination take a look at this you can hardly see pluto take a look at this that's arcturus that's another star in our galaxy here's the sun over here jupiter is one pixel in size on this scale earth is invisible pluto forget about it all right all right keep an eye on arcturus now where's arcturus now you see it way over here way over here here's arcturus way to the right that's antares that's another star in our galaxy the sun is one pixel in size on this scale jupiter is invisible earth pluto forget about them in fact if the earth was the size of a golf ball beetlejuice here look i don't name the stars okay if the earth was the size of a golf ball beetlejuice would be five or six empire state buildings high the heavens are awesome and the average distance between stars in our galaxy is 30 trillion miles and all that distance is necessary for us to exist here on earth now 30 trillion miles how far is that far take you at least two tanks of gas and a toyota prius to go 30 trillion miles a number of years ago my wife and i took our sons to the desert museum outside of tucson arizona if you ever get to go to tucson south side of the city they got this desert museum out there and we were out there on a dark clear night and on one of those nights you can see thousands of stars in the sky so we're out there one night and the guide says hey if we look up at 903 we'll see the space shuttle in orbit it was orbiting the earth at the time i said come on we're not going to see the space shuttle it's only 120 feet long it's 350 miles up oh me of little faith at 903 the guide goes look and we look up in the sky about 70 degrees above the horizon there's an object streaking out of the western desert sky relative to us about like this i mean it's really cooking when it got right about here it disappeared i don't know whether scotty beamed it up or what actually what happened was despite the fact that we were in total darkness the space shuttle was so high up that the sun was still reflecting off of it and when it got out of the range of the sun we couldn't see it anymore now when the space shuttle was in orbit the space shuttle was traveling at about 18 000 miles an hour that's five miles per second you got trouble getting to school in the morning take the space shuttle right you five miles a second well i did a little calculus calculation to try and figure out how long would it take us if we could get in the space shuttle and go from our star the sun to another star in our galaxy an average distance away 30 trillion miles how long would it take us if we could go five miles a second how long do you think it would take us a long time you must be a math major it would take us 201 450 years that means if you got in the space shuttle at the time of christ and started at our star of the sun and started to travel to another star in our galaxy an average distance away you've been going five miles a second for 2 000 years you would be less than 100th of the way there right now and we're going to explore space no we're not we're not going anywhere in space we can hardly get out of our solar system it took us nine years to get to pluto now the psalmist has something to say about the size of the universe you know what he says he says for as high as the heavens are above the earth so great is his love for those who fear him as far as the east is from the west so far as he removed our transgressions from us as high as the heavens are above the earth that's how great god's love is for us now how high are the heavens above the earth well the hubble space telescope has helped us discover just how massive this universe is number of years ago they trained the hubble on 124 millionth of the sky for like 11 days what's 124 millionth of the sky go out tonight put a piece of rice on the end of your finger hold it up that piece of rice represents about 124 millionth of the sky and this is called hubble ultra deep field you can google this the video i'm about to show you is in the public domain i don't know if you can see this this is a little washed out here but the bottom of this are mountains okay this is the southern hemisphere and when they trained hubble on 124 millionth of the sky they took a number of pictures so i'm going to play this video for you when you see the video come up you're going to see the constellations come up and then hubble is gonna zoom in on 124 millionth of the sky there's no audio it's just video are you ready all right here we go hubble ultra deep field there are the constellations let's see what's in 124 millionth of the sky what you're looking at are nearly 10 000 galaxies in one 24 millionth of the sky how many stars are in a galaxy they say billions how many stars are there in the universe researcher searchers at the university of hawaii figured it out here's their estimate the number of stars in the universe are about equivalent to the number of sand grains on all the beaches on all the earth times one hundred thousand and to go from one star to another star just in our galaxy going five miles a second will take you over two hundred thousand years now you know what it means when it says for as high as the heavens are above the earth so great is this god's love for those that fear him now you know what it means when it says the heavens declare the glory of god ladies and gentlemen i don't ever want to hear any of you here at colorado mesa university call anything awesome other than god awesome shirt dude awesome shot dude awesome tick tock video no what word are you going to say for god now do you feel insignificant you shouldn't why because as awesome as the heavens are they're not made the image of god but you are in fact this is you in the womb at 11 weeks question is this animal mineral vegetable or human that's human not only are the heavens designed so were you in fact let's go back earlier than 11 weeks let's go back to when your mother and your father got together to conceive you have you guys had this talk before i see some younger and younger people in here so i'll try and be discreet i also see some older people in here so i'll try and be discreet as well just in case you've forgotten how this works okay when your mother and your father got together to conceive you your mother unconsciously perfumed her egg to attract your father and then your father sent the entire population of the united states 300 million soldiers toward your mother's egg and then there was a race and you won don't let anyone ever tell you you're not special you beat out 300 million others you have blown away anything michael phelps has ever done now seeing some of you in here limping here earlier makes it hard for me to believe you were the fastest soldier in the gene pool but you were now your soldier was 20 to 30 times smaller than a grain of salt yet it contained half of the 3.2 billion letter genome your dna software program that makes you you all those letters in the right order and your mother's egg was about the size of a period at the end of a sentence in an average book and it contained the other half of the 3.2 billion letter genome dna software program that makes you you and when your soldier and your egg came together a new 100 genetic human being was created you know you have not received any more genetic information from this point to right now your genetic information has just duplicated itself in fact there were only four things separating you from adulthood time air water and food those are the same four things that separated two-year-olds from adulthood does this have implications on the abortion issue yeah i think it does we don't kill the two-year-old why do we kill the unborn child in the womb genetically it's the same you say wait a minute frank you can't legislate morality all right no extra charge for this this was the subject of our first book creatively titled legislating morality all laws legislate morality every law declares one behavior right and the opposite behavior wrong you can't think of a law which doesn't legislate morality the only question is whose morality will be legislated and when people say don't legislate your morality on me i say why not would that be immoral and why are you imposing your morality on me right now you're saying i ought not impose law of knots but you're imposing that ought not on me you're doing the same thing you claim i can't do actually there's a better answer when people say don't impose your morality on me i say this this isn't my morality i didn't make this stuff up i didn't make up the fact that murder's wrong that rape is wrong that abortion's wrong that theft is wrong that men were made for women and women were made for men and the best way to perpetuate and stabilize society which is the reason the government's involved in marriage to begin with is to legally recognize the man woman relationship over every other relationship i didn't make any of this stuff up this isn't my morality this isn't your morality this just happens to be the morality the one that thomas jefferson said was self-evident the one the apostle paul who said in romans chapter two the gentiles are not the law of the law written on their hearts everybody knows this morality but some people just don't like it so if you have a problem with demorality you don't have a problem with me you have a problem with the creator upon whose nature this morality is derived all right no extra charge for that let's go back to this from this point till right now a construction project of astonishing complexity began taking place cells began multiplying at a rate of 4 000 cells per second brain cells began multiplying at a rate of a hundred thousand cells per second for mostly anyway some cells became brain cells others lung cells others heart cells some cells went so far across you to become what they needed to become that it would be equivalent to you today walking across the united states alone and that construction project continues to this very day you just made four million new red blood cells you just made another four million new red blood cells you just made another formula knock it off are you thinking about this are you going wait a minute frank time out i got to concentrate new blood new red blood cells coming up no this is just happening how's it happening aristotle discovered something about 2 400 years ago he didn't know anything about blood cells but he noticed that everything in nature is going in a direction for example why does an acorn if it's properly nourished always go in the direction of becoming an oak tree why doesn't it become an elm tree or a birch tree or a sea horse you say well it's programmed to become oak well who programmed it and is an acorn conscious is an acorn in the ground going all right what do i have to do to become an oak tree no but it reliably goes in the direction of becoming an oak tree and here's what aristotle recognized if it doesn't have a mind of its own yet it reliably goes in a direction there must be an external mind directing it toward an end thomas aquinas came along in the 1200s and said this is going to be my fifth way to argue for god that all of nature is going in a direction it's going toward a final cause in other words nature is orderly if it's orderly there must be an order by the way ladies and gentlemen this is why we can do science because nature is orderly nature presupposes order and cause and effect or science presupposes order and cause and effect where does order come from comes from an orderer where the laws come from law givers so the point here if you want to look more into this this is in the book stealing from god but the main point here is aquinas and and aristotle aren't talking about a cause way back when like a big bang cause they're talking about a cause every single second of existence because everything maintains its order this is why the apostle paul comes along and says in christ we live and move and have our being and christ holds all things together and the writer of hebrews says god sustains all things by his powerful word this is a sustaining cause right now god is to the universe what a band is to music if a band were up here playing music it would be creating and sustaining the music right what would happen the second the band stopped playing music's over same thing is true with god he creates the universe he creates you he creates the natural laws and he sustains you in the natural laws so you don't just get a designer you get a sustainer from this argument now we've got to keep moving here we got to move to the moral argument let me ask you a question how do you know that your quarterback throwing a touchdown is better than your quarterback throwing an interception not just rules you've got to know the purpose of the game right if there's no purpose you can't say that your quarterback throwing a touchdown is better than your quarterback throwing a pick six right you've got to know the purpose of the game now notice in football the purpose of the game comes from outside the game in other words the players aren't making up the rules or the purpose that's established before they ever take the field now the commissioner and the owners get together and sometimes every year they change the rules a little bit right now the rules of football are arbitrary the rules of life are not why because outside this game there's a bean who created everything and has given us a purpose what is the purpose what is the purpose of life why are we here why are we here where does it say that is our purpose just to do the right thing is that why we're here jesus tells us the purpose in john chapter 17 when he's praying about us to the father he says this is eternal life that they meaning us may may know you god the father and jesus christ whom you've sent the purpose of life is to know god not just believe that he exists but trust in him to know god and then to make him known the great commission that's why we're here that's why you can see that certain ways of living are good and other ways of living are bad because you know the purpose same thing in a football game also let me ask you this what does this word mean what does it mean to submit no one likes that word let's break the word into what does sub and mission mean what does mission mean mission means we have a goal we have a purpose we're going somewhere right and when you put yourself under that mission and say i want to be a part of that you're submitting yourself to the mission if i'm on a football team and i'm a diva wide receiver and i say man keep throwing me the ball come on give me the ball more and the coach goes time out man if you get the ball too much we're going to lose we got to spread the ball around that's the way we're going to win now if i say okay you're right coach i want to win so i'm going to submit myself to you to that mission then i'm submitting myself for the good of the team for the goal for the purpose if there's no god there's no ultimate mission there's no purpose so there's no right way to play the game or wrong way to play the game everything is a matter of opinion but we know that's not the case don't we do you know that if there is no god the nazis were not wrong why that's just our government against their government if there's no standard beyond our government how could we have said at the nuremberg trials the nazis were wrong we couldn't but we appealed to a standard beyond our government international law also known as nature's law from the declaration of independence c.s lewis called it the moral law it's god's nature it's what paul refers to in romans 2. if there's no god love is no better than rape oh you may like love better but it's not better than rape it's just your preference if there's no god there are no human rights on a college campus we have a very heightened sense of justice people are asking for rights and demanding rights but do you realize if there's no god there are no rights to anything there's not only no right to natural marriage there's no right to same-sex marriage there's not only no right to abortion there's no right to life there's no right to anything if there's no god it's just your opinion in fact if there's no god racism isn't wrong slavery isn't wrong if there's no god if there's no god tolerance is no better than intolerance by the way are christians commanded to be tolerant no christians are actually commanded to be loving tolerance is too weak tolerance says hold your nose and put up with them love says reach out and help them and sometimes you can't tolerate what is unloving if you do tolerate what is unloving or harmful you're not loving does love require approval no every parent knows every kid knows how many here are former children okay you know too right if your parent approves of everything you want to do are you loving is that parent loving no unloving and of course you can't complain about the problem of evil if there's no god why because evil proves god does exist there would be no such thing as evil unless god existed not because god is doing evil but because he's the standard of good which would make evil even possible what do you mean well c.s lewis found this out c.s lewis was an atheist early on in his life he said there can't be a good god because there's too much injustice in the world and then one day he had an epiphany and he realized that objection didn't work and he wrote it in the book mere christianity here's what he wrote he said as an atheist my argument against god was that the universe seems so cruel and unjust but how would i got this idea of just and unjust a man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line what was i comparing this universe with when i called it unjust see you wouldn't know what a crooked line was unless you knew what a straight line was you wouldn't know what unjustice was unless you knew what justice was something can't be not right unless something is something can't be immoral unless something is so evil doesn't disprove god evil may prove there's a devil out there but evil can't disprove god because evil requires a standard of good you see evil is like cancer if you take all the cancer out of a good body you got a better body what happens if you take all the body out of the cancer there's nothing there right in other words evil is a privation or a lack in a good thing you have to have something good in order for evil to exist at all in other words the shadows prove the sunshine in order to have shadows you gotta have sunshine oh you can have sunshine without shadows you can have good without evil but you can't have evil without good you can't have shadows without sunshine so if evil exists and we all know it does then god exists i know that sounds counterintuitive but it's true now we can ask questions and maybe during the q a we can ask well why does god allow certain evils we can do that we have time to get into it now but if evil exists it means actually that god does exist not that he doesn't all right now some of you are going wait a minute frank let's let's review these three arguments cosmological teleological moral what what attributes do we get from these three arguments we get a spaceless timeless immaterial powerful personal intelligent moral creator who created all things and sustains all things to this very moment this is the god of the bible and we haven't even opened the bible yet how do we know it's the god of the bible for that we got to go to the next question but before we do some of you are going to say frank atheists have to have arguments against this if they do they don't work why nobody said anything better than c.s lewis so stick with me this two-page quote from c.s lewis he points out that if atheists are using reason to say that god doesn't exist they're defeating themselves here's what he said check this out you got to follow it suppose there were no intelligence behind the universe in that case nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking thought is merely the byproduct of some atoms within my skull but if so how can i trust my own thinking to be true you with him so far now he says but if i can't trust my own thinking of course i can't trust the arguments leading to atheism and therefore have no reason to be an atheist or anything else unless i believe in god i can't believe in thought so i can never use thought to disbelieve in god boom as john madden would say what else can you say right you have to steal reason from god to say he doesn't exist if your brain was put together by natural forces that didn't have its end in mind why would you ever trust it the reason you can think is because your mind is made in the image of the great mind god now this doesn't show the christian god yet for that we've got to go to the third question are miracles possible now number three is the shortest of the three so you guys are going how is he going to get through all this he doesn't have much time left don't worry here we go we know the truth exists and god exists are miracles really possible well a lot of people think miracles are impossible like for example noah all right christians don't let don't let this leave this room okay it's being streamed too late all right can we all just agree that noah and the ark is crazy thank you and a resurrection how many people in here have seen someone rise from the dead none of us have seen someone rise from the dead yet every one of us has to believe it as a christian we have to believe that someone rose from the dead even though it's something we don't see how rational is that and for some reason the big problem miracle in the bible is jonah is that a whale of a tale or a tale of a whale what's the deal with jonah can you really believe in jonah how what is the greatest miracle in the bible no the resurrection is easy the greatest miracle in the bible is i got some of you a second time the greatest miracle in the bible is the first verse in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth if god can create the heavens and the earth out of nothing can he do whatever he wants that's not logically impossible inside the universe of course he can well here's the interesting part even the atheists are admitting the data for the first miracle so if genesis now obviously hawking didn't think it was god but what else could it be his answer didn't work gravity if genesis 1 1 is true if god can create the universe out of nothing can he do whatever he wants it's not logically impossible inside the universe of course of course he can raise jesus of course noah is crazy unless god exists of course jonah is nuts unless god exists of course people don't rise from the dead unless god exists now a lot of people will say i can't believe in miracles because i've never seen one that is not a good reason to disbelieve something why because you believe in a lot of things you've never seen like what your mind have you ever seen it you're using it right now i hope love have you ever seen love oh you may have seen someone loved or you may have loved somebody you've never seen love it's an immaterial reality grounded in the nature of god a number of years ago i had a couple of debates debates with christopher hitchens remember christopher hitchens he was a brilliant british atheist who sounded more brilliant than he was because he had a british accent and in our second debate which you can see on our youtube channel some athei or some student asked the hitchens this question christopher what is love and christopher being a materialist eventually said love is a chemical and i said don't tell that to your wife honey do you love me yeah why because i got the chemical today love is not a chemical it's an immaterial virtue grounded in the nature of god you've never seen justice oh you may have seen justice done or injustice done but it's not something you see with your eyes it's grounded in the nature of god you've never seen gravity oh frank come on there it is right there nope you're not seeing gravity what are you seeing you're seeing the effects of gravity by the way that's how we know god exists we know god by his effects if somebody says how do you know god exists i know god by his effects there's a creation that's the effect there must be a creator the cause there's design that's the effect there must be a designer the cause there's a moral law written on our hearts that's the effect there must be a cause known as a moral law giver jesus rose from the dead that's the effect there must be a being that can raise somebody from the dead that's the cause so we're reasoning from effect to cause that's what scientists do you've never seen george washington yet you believe he existed why because he's left effects behind that are best explained by the person known as george washington the same thing is true of jesus now by the way if miracles do occur by the way there doesn't need to be one miracle since jesus and the apostles for christianity to be true i do think miracles occur today by the way just look at craig keener's hernia inducing two two-volume set called miracles where he looks into all the data for this but the point here is is if miracles do occur they have to be rare why because if miracles occurred all the time they wouldn't get our attention yeah they wouldn't be merrick imagine if people roast in the dead routinely what would the resurrection of christ mean to us nothing you go to somebody you go jesus rose from the dead to prove he was god and the guy goes so what uncle carl just rose from the dead two weeks ago now i got to give the inheritance back no it's got to be a rare event if it's going to get our attention so yes miracles are possible because god does exist now we just need to see if the grand miracle in the new testament has occurred that's what we're going to look at briefly before we go to your questions and there are several lines of evidence that the new testament writers are telling the truth about this i'm going to list them but we're only going to look at two i'm going to list eight they all begin with the letter e we have early sources very early sources that comprise the new testament documents there are eyewitness details throughout the new testament and you can get the book i don't have enough faith to be an atheist to see what they actually are there's embarrassing stories i'll explain that as in a minute as well as excruciating deaths we're going to get to that embedded confirmation what is that this is the best evidence you've probably never heard of that the new testament writers are telling the truth i call it embedded confirmation but if you google these two words you're going to get a wealth of information on it just google undesigned coincidences undesigned coincidences in fact lydia mcgrew at western michigan university wrote a book a few years ago called hidden in plain view it's about undesigned coincidences i don't have time to explain what they are but as soon as you start reading these you're going to go oh yeah how could they have made this up they couldn't expected predictions that deals with old testament prophecy if i had just one old testament prophecy to make my case on it would be isaiah chapter 53 written 700 years before christ go read it tonight and say who is this about written 700 years in advance extra biblical writers there's about 10 ancient non-christian sources within 150 years of jesus's life who mention jesus and the apostles briefly and when you add up all their references together you get a story congruent with the new testament who are these people household names like josephus so sutonius dallas flagon these are people you read every morning i'm sure okay they mentioned jesus and the apostles and finally the explosive growth of the church out of jerusalem which is really hard to explain if jesus hadn't risen from the dead why what could the jews or the romans do to squash christianity immediately go show the body go to the tomb take the body out here he is he's dead stop all this nonsense talk about the resurrection they couldn't do that why because he was still using his body all right now let's just take a look at a couple of these quickly the first is embarrassing stories what are embarrassing stories there's a principle that historians use when they're trying to discover if a writer is telling the truth or not it's called the principle of embarrassment it goes like this if there's something embarrassing to the author or authors it's probably true why because you're not going to invent details that make yourself look bad right you might make them that make you look good but not bad in fact let me ask you guys a question how many people in here have ever lied to make yourself look good if you don't have your hand up right now you're lying to make yourself look good and it's not working we know you're lying all right how many people have ever lied to make yourself look bad no you don't do that you don't do that you might lie to make yourself look good but you won't lie to make yourself look bad well the new testament writers and this is true of the old testament too but we're just going to look at the new testament the new testament writers have filled the narrative with embarrassing stories that make them look bad that's why we call this the dove factor they're not making this up notice for example peter their leader is called satan by jesus do you think they invented this do you think mark who wrote this down at one point said to peter hey pete i'm gonna make this a real interesting story i'm gonna have the lord called you satan what do you think peter would have said have him call you satan it's embarrassing i'm the leader and then peter says lord i'll never deny you what does he wind up doing he winds up denying him three times this is embarrassing and at the crucifixion all of the disciples maybe with the possible exception of john they all run away this is like a monty python movie run away they all run away and who are the brave ones the women the women are the brave ones now who wrote the new testament down men now what man is going to invent that he was hiding for fear of the jews why the women went down discovered the empty tomb would any man here invent that i mean if i was there and i invented it i'd make myself look good wouldn't you i'd write down let's see we marched right down there and we overpowered that elite roman guard yeah that sounds pretty good john said get out peter roundhouse kicked him philip said we'll be back and then on sunday morning we march right down to the tomb and we saw jesus who congratulated us on our great faith and then we went and comforted the trembling women i would never say i was mr sissypants why the women went down discovered the empty tomb oh by the way why would you never say the women were not the first witnesses in that culture forget about the fact it was embarrassing to men it was but why would you never say that independently yes because a woman's testimony was not considered on par with that of a man so if you're making up the new testament story you'd only have the men be the first witnesses yet all four gospels say the women were the first witnesses which is telling us what they were i actually had a woman come up to me once she said i know why jesus appeared to the women first i said why and she said because he wanted to get the story out i said that is an excellent point i had not thought of that cause ladies when your man comes home from work does he say much there could have been a nuclear explosion down at the plant he's not going to tell you you'll see it on the news before you hear it from him you'll be watching the news going hey hot what oh yeah i forgot to tell you the nuke blew up i've been hot for three days what's for dinner right he's not gonna tell you i can't even believe this next verse is in the new testament but it is at the great commission where jesus says go therefore make disciples of all nations notice how he doesn't say make believers right there's a difference make disciples of all nations he's there giving his disciples his final instructions and right there in verse 17 it says some believed but some doubted he's standing right in front of them resurrected and they're doubting it's like they're going you see that guy over there yeah that guy over there is jesus no i'm telling you it can't be jesus he would just kill not long ago i'm telling you it's him look the romans killed him he's dead it's him spear went in his side blood and water came out i'm telling you jesus it's dead it's him it can't be it is how do you know the women told me [Laughter] they're not making this up there's even potentially embarrassing details about jesus in there in john chapter 3 it says his own family came to seize him and take him home they thought he was nuts they thought he was out of his mind you may have heard the scholars say oh the new testament writers embellish jesus to be god oh really then why is mark chapter 3 in there which is almost universally recognized to be the earliest gospel that's embarrassing jesus is called a drunkard he's called demon possessed you think they made that up he has his feet wiped with the hair of a prostitute which easily could have been seen as a sexual advance and oh by the way notice there are two prostitutes in jesus's bloodline who are they rahab and tamar do you think matthew and luke when they were writing down the genealogy said you know what i really think we ought to spice up the messiah's bloodline a little bit let's put a couple of prostitutes in there rahab timon no they're just telling the truth in fact there's a lot of shady people in the bloodline of the messiah judah from where we get the term jew not a good guy read about him in genesis david david a man after god's own heart yeah but he's a liar adulterer and a murderer yeah i guess there's hope for the rest of us then huh bathsheba's in there you know when matthew gets to her name in the genealogy he won't write her name down you know what he says instead uriah's wife ooh he's telling the truth but it's islam why who is who's uriah's wife bathsheba was married to uriah and david had uriah killed so he could have bathsheba he's telling the truth but it's a slam you don't find this stuff you don't even find this stuff on the news right on the news what do people do they hide their embarrassing stuff the new testament writers and even the old testament writers they put it in they go no we're sinners we're falling there's only one who isn't he's the savior now there's much more in the book on that we got to do one more and that is excruciating deaths and this is the piece of evidence that says these men who are in a position to know whether jesus had risen from the dead or not died excruciating deaths when they could have saved themselves by simply saying it never happened now it's important as we look at this that all the writers of the new testament we need to understand all the writers of the new testament with the exception of luke were all jews luke was the only gentile every one of the writers was a jewish believer in yahweh they thought they were god's chosen people why would they invent a resurrected jesus they didn't think somebody could be god claimed to be god that was blasphemy and they didn't think someone could rise from the dead in the middle of time they thought somebody would rise from the dead at the end of time but not in the middle of time why would they make this up in fact you could ask what did the new testament writers have to gain by making up a new religion what did they what did these jewish people get by saying jesus was god and he rose from the dead they got kicked out of the synagogue and then they got beaten tortured and killed last time i checked that was not a list of perks we're going to start a new religion we are yeah what's it going to get us we'll first get kicked out of synagogue then we'll get beaten tortured and killed well sign me up what a great idea why haven't we thought of this earlier in fact they had every motive to say the resurrection did not happen not every motive to say it did i get the question a lot maybe you do if you're a christian are there any non-christian writers that talk about jesus and the apostles yeah i just mentioned them briefly a few minutes ago but you know what is underneath the question are there any non-christian writers you can't really trust the new testament writers because they had an agenda right see they were religious people they embellished thing if you think about that for more than 10 seconds you realize how silly that objection is what did these people have to gain by saying it was true nothing they had everything to lose temporally by saying it was true my friend jay warner wallace has been on dateline five or six times because he's a cold case homicide detective he's been on that program more than any other cold case homicide detective and he says that when he finds a dead body that he knows has been murdered he says there's only three reasons why that guy's dead not a thousand reasons there's just one of these three or a combination of the three there was either a sex issue a money issue or a power issue sex money or power now those are three good things but they're so good that we'll often take shortcuts to get them that's why we're motivated to do evil to get good things and so if you're going to say that the new testament writers invented this you've got to find at least one of these three motives to say they invented it ladies and gentlemen did the new testament writers get real popular with the ladies for saying jesus had resurrected from the dead no did they get money for saying he resurrected no they're not 21st century prosperity gospel preachers did they get did they get uh power by saying jesus had resurrected from the dead no they got persecuted they got the opposite paul had power as a persecutor when he becomes a christian then he's persecuted they had no motive to make this up and then why would they die for a known lie you say wait a minute frank if you're going to say that martyrdom proves christianity don't you have to say that martyrdom proves islam no why there's a lot of differences between the muslim martyrs of today and the new testament martyrs of new testament times but let me just give you the main difference for our purposes here the muslim martyrs martyrs didn't witness anything to show them that islam is true they just have faith that it's true the christian martyrs on the other hand saw jesus with their own eyes rise from the dead they saw jesus they touched jesus they ate with jesus they verified that jesus had risen from the dead from their own senses many people excuse me will die for a lie they think is the truth nobody will die for a lie they know is a lie and the new testament writers when a position know whether it was a lie or not and they went to their deaths anyway now what i'm about to say in conclusion here for you christians who believe the bible's inerrant is going to sound like heresy for a minute but it's not stick with me because i believe the bible's inherent too christianity is not true because a series of documents we put under one binding we call the bible says it's true in fact christianity would be true if the bible never existed say how can that be do you realize there were thousands of christians before a line of the new testament was ever written why there were eyewitnesses was paul a christian before he wrote the book of romans of course he was why was he a christian because he witnessed a resurrected jesus with john a christian before he wrote the gospel of john of course he was why because he witnessed the resurrected jesus was matthew a christian before yet why because you get the idea right in other words christianity did not originate with a book christianity originated with an event the resurrection in fact you could put it this way the new testament writers did not create the resurrection the resurrection created the new testament writers there would be no new testament documents written by jews in the first century unless jesus rose from the dead why would they get themselves beaten tortured and killed for a lie that they knew was a lie no they knew it was true because they witnessed it themselves that's why they wrote it down thankfully they did write it down so we could order our lives according to it but it would have been true even if they never wrote it down all right so there's more in the books you can go there let's sum the whole thing up does truth exist someone says there's no truth you're going to say is that true does god exist three arguments first argument cosmological argument second teleological third moral are miracles possible yes the greatest miracle in the bible is creation the first verse even atheists are admitting the data for that is is the new testament telling us the truth about the resurrection sure seems to be we got all those lines of evidence and we only looked at two of them now if you want to go further the books are available back there including the dvds don't forget to type the word evidence to 44222 also we're now teaching online courses just go to crossexamine.org and click on online courses you'll see them there we're on youtube twitter and facebook in fact we're streaming this this is clint by the way who is our video master here he is clint bolin ladies and gentlemen um you guys are all youtube stars now because this is being streamed on youtube or on instagram as well by the way we're so into youtube twitter and facebook that we've actually combined these three into one social media platform we call it you twit face okay so you may want to sign up for you twit face it's kind of a jersey thing all right don't forget about the podcast it's called i don't have enough faith to be an atheist we're on directv as well and you can get all this by downloading the cross-examined app two words in the app store cross examined two words in the app store it's got all this on there it even has a quick answer section that you can go to when you're talking to people so you can say when someone says something you can say hey hang on i'm getting a text hey what about this all right now this is not the end of the road because on the 11th of november rachel christie in this room is going to have the great fuzz runner here and he's going to talk about humans 2.0 what is the future of humanity and so if you want to be a part of that you definitely want to be here on november 11th in this room now rachel christie meets tuesday nights john and it uh all the details on where they meet what they do is apologetics like this all the details on where they meet are on that table out there so go out there and get some information they meet once a week on tuesday nights and also it's a 501c3 organization everything that you see here is put on by donations if you want to bring the truth of christianity to campus see john or anybody at that table back there about how you can donate tax deductible donation because people like fuzz run are going to come in and others and you're going to be able to shore up a group of believers here all right now last thing before i get to your questions this appears to be true the question is so what well you know what the best news of all this is is that somebody actually did die for you it's true someone did now when i was in the navy we earned a golden wings i was in aviation and they were hard enough to earn but there's nothing more difficult virtually in any military to earn than the golden trident that's what the seals earn very few people that start seal training make it through those that do make it through wear that trident with pride it is their identity when michael monsoor was buried in rosecran cemetery in san diego california just about every navy seal on the west coast showed up for his funeral and when they passed his casket they took off their tridents and pressed them into his casket they took their identity and put their identity in the one that died for them in the one that saved them that's what we're supposed to do but our culture says oh no put your identity in your political party or put your identity in your ethnic group or your race there's one race the human race or put your identity in your sexual orientation or your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your major your bank account or even your school no none of those things are ultimate ladies and gentlemen we're made to put our identity in your s in our savior the savior who didn't just die he also rose again now i don't know about you well i do know about you i can tell you about you you have violated moral standards just like i have in fact there's not a day that goes by where i don't everyone in this room believes in justice don't you what does that mean for you and me uh-oh is right we deserve punishment but what the god of the universe did is he came into this space-time continuum that he created and he allowed those who rebelled against him to torture and kill him so he could save them from the evil they did the evil we did now why wouldn't you accept that why wouldn't you say he did that for me i'll take it why wouldn't you repent of what you've done and simply say that's why i'm here to know god through jesus christ and to make him known the only reason i can see somebody not doing it after they look at the evidence is they don't want to submit to the greatest mission of all time all right with that we're going to go to your questions and we have a mic set up for questions and no one likes to ask the first question so we're going to move right on to the second question all right and uh is that mike on clint all right okay all right so you can ask a question about anything that we've covered here tonight or anything else you want and um normally this is q a but i think tonight i'm going to do all q no a all right so everyone can ask a question it takes all the pressure off me all right all right once the first one gets up there we'll uh we'll start come on up to the mic if you would we have to have some questions i couldn't have covered everything perfectly yes sir what's your name uh justin hey justin go ahead um from your experience what would you say if if there is one the most effective of the apologetic arguments well it depends i think today probably for most it's probably the moral argument because about 70 of the questions that i get on a college campus are related to morality because that's where we live every day right wrong good and bad justice injustice i mean people can not think about the beginning or the design it's really hard to not think about right and wrong in morality because we deal with it every day so i think morality hits people between the eyes more than anything now this is where you're going to get the most pushback too because people are going to ask questions about well is god immoral for killing people in the old testament you know these kinds of questions now that all presumes a moral standard the question is where does that moral standard come from and what was god doing when he was doing those things in the old testament was it arbitrary or was there a reason for it so i think morality is probably the most powerful argument uh for most obviously it's person dependent what do you think is the most the most persuasive i'm honest not sure that that makes a lot of sense to me i i've only within the last couple years discovered apologetic so i was kind of curious just from from what you um because you've been doing this for decades so uh yeah i was just more curious i'm really not sure of myself all right okay well thank you though all right appreciate it justin yes sir what's your name uh my name is riley hey riley uh first of all i just want to say thanks for being here love all your content helped a lot with my evangelism that i've done personally so first of all well thank rachel christie and and john and karen right behind you there there they are right there they made it happen all right um so i love the cosmological argument um something i've used a lot um but i have this metaphor meta philosophy class right now that i'm taking we're kind of talking about how how do we know logic and reason work you know and we know logic and reason work by checking it with logic and reason and kind of talking about how we can't um know anything outside of um perceivable senses you know and so um we didn't really apply it to this conversation but it he kind of talked about it in a way about how how do we know logic and reason work for that argument applying it to something outside of our universe if we only know that logic and reason work within our universe so i just not quite kind of like just how would you respond to that well he may be if i'm hearing this right he's saying how do we know the law of causality applies to the metaphysical not just the physical is that what he was saying okay so like you know if you hit a cue ball into an eight ball it's gonna move the eight ball right um and that's a physical causation right there but how do we know that an immaterial being created a material universe do we have any sort of parallel in our world to say that that's what happens okay i would say to that that causality is not just a physical principle it's also a metaphysical principle why because if if it's not a metaphysical principle logic wouldn't work think about it this way let's take the classic logical syllogism all men are mortal socrates is a man therefore socrates is mortal notice there is no physicality between the two premises and the conclusion yet it still goes through those two premises in effect cause the the conclusion and there's nothing physical going on here secondly i would say our ability to think our thoughts even though we're using a physical brain our thoughts are immaterial so if i were to say to you two-ton pink elephant suddenly a 210 pink elephant pops up in your head but not literally if it was i just killed you right you can think of a two-ton pink elephant in your head and it's not physical the thought isn't physical even though we're trafficking in physical things with our brain but the thought itself is not physical it's an immaterial thought that you're having right now when i say two-ton pink elephant so i think physicality i think causality works from on physical things and metaphysical things here here's a third example the placebo effect you know the placebo effect right people can take medicine you got one group of people taking real medicine another group of people taking a placebo but they think it's the real medicine and the placebo effect has been shown to actually help people get better if they just think they're getting the good medicine right now is it the same as getting the medicine itself no but they still get some degree better here's an instance where a thought affects the body right a thought is affecting the health rather than the physical chemical medicine affecting the body you have a thought affecting the body and right now when i when i say to myself raise my right hand that immaterial thought is causing a physical reaction in my physical body and if causality wasn't metaphysical i couldn't even do that i guess that was a pretty good response but like part of the conversation we had was that that only works within our perceptions of reality um and we don't know what is outside of our perceptions and i guess that's kind of more the law line of questioning i was asking okay if causality works in the universe and it works in logic and it works between physical and non-physical things in our own experience why should we doubt causality from an immaterial god to a physical universe what what possible reason would we give to say i'm not gonna go with the odds on favorite i'm gonna say no we just don't know no i think the odds on favorite is an immaterial mind can create a physical universe just like our immaterial mind can do things to our physicality right here it's basically saying it's a smart inductive leap in a way yes well i do we know for sure yeah well no there's we know very few things for sure but the odds on favorite is yeah if if cause and effect works physically and metaphysically in this universe why would we expect it not to work from god to this universe it seems to me there's something else going on here there's some sort of resistance that this person might have towards saying god exists probably yeah well thank you very much all right thank you thanks riley yes sir what's your name i wanted to point out and you had an old testament scripture up there earlier the second part of that says your sins are from us as far as the east is from the west yes because you go east and it never becomes west west it never becomes east but north and south north edge becomes south south becomes north so i'd say that was one scripture that proves the bible just there because people believed the flat earth at that time or didn't really have any idea of a spherical earth and that's that you know the concept that you could get on a train and go around the world east it's never going to be west and it could go east i mean west it's never going to be east now north will eventually be south south would be north so it it is a phys it is a figure of speech they're using there but the point is is well taken as far as the east is from the west well that just means nothing yeah there's no they're not connected at all that's how far away our or that that's how far away our transgressions are from god's mind he's put them out of his mind he's separated our transgressions from us because he's imputed us he's not only forgiven us for what christ has done he's given us christ righteousness all right okay thank you sir yes sir what's your name hi there um my name is chad hey chad um so i do have a question so this is not in the perspective of being an atheist but uh this question is um so after the death of the apostles and all the early witnesses of jesus and christianity so the start of the early church is it possible that the bible has been uh tampered with or things have been taken out to the point where maybe a couple hundred years later we would need some sort of restored gospel because the bible is not the fullness of god's word okay good question by the way for those of you that have a phone if you wouldn't mind taking a short survey just text the word event to that number so you can help us improve what we're doing here my friend jay warner wallace the guy i mentioned a minute ago a few minutes ago cold case homicide detective has a section in his book cold case christianity that he calls the chain of custody now in police work and we have some policemen in here and police work if you find a piece of evidence at a crime scene you have to document that evidence and it has to if it goes to somebody else there has to be a chain of custody so everybody knows where that evidence went along the way and nobody could tamper with it right well jim relates that since he's a cop to the chain of custody that we discover with the storyline of the new testament that the apostles all had people that followed them and wrote about what they learned from the apostles and then those people had mentors that they mentored and then they had people that they mentored and they had people that they mentored so there's a chain of custody of what the new testament said independent of the documents themselves and when you look at that chain of custody you wind up with the same basic storyline that you have in the new testament documents so it doesn't seem plausible that somebody could change the storyline of the new testament documents when you have this continual three or four or five chains of custodies all saying the same thing through the early years of the church okay thank you all right appreciate it by the way jim has a book that just came out too that you're going to want to get immediately it's called person of interest it is the most unique most amazing apologetics book i think you might ever pick up there's over 400 drawings in it and it shows the impact of jesus even if the if the bible never existed what kind of impact did jesus have you could reconstruct most of what's in the bible just by looking at six areas that jesus says impact some of the six include education literature music art science and world religions and he shows how jesus's impact is unprecedented of any person in human history and you can reconstruct the entire storyline of the bible just in those six areas anyway go ahead sir what's your name mark hey go ahead mark um so you mentioned love versus tolerance yes and i just kind of want to see what you would say as far as how how can we distinguish between those and how can we discern okay well tolerance is just the idea that although i may disagree with you i know you have a right to believe what you believe and express those beliefs and i will treat you with respect and i would encourage you to do the same for me right that's just tolerance but tolerance isn't enough according to christianity if i see that you hold a belief that i think is harmful and god has said is harmful then love would call me to not only try and tell you it but try and care for you and help you uh stop engaging in that activity not just to go well i tolerate you i don't care what you believe okay you can believe that uh you're wrong but i'm not gonna have anything to do with you love says i'm gonna try and reach out to you and try and help you see the truth so there's a difference there right love seeks what's best for the other person let me show you something that thomas soul said you guys know thomas soul is thomas soul is a hang on a second thomas soul is a 91 year old economist easy for me to say here he is look look at what soul said about just how we should treat one another about what they want to hear said when you when you want to help people you tell them the truth when you want to help yourself you tell them what they want to hear a lot of christians will not reach out to people who disagree with them and maybe people in their family they'll just go along with what they're doing because they don't want to take any consternation from the person they don't want to take any blow back from the person they just want to keep the peace so they just tell them what they want to hear yeah what you're doing is fine i'm i'm cool with it right you're not helping that person you're helping yourself when you say that the way you're helping yourself is you're just preventing yourself from hearing any consternation or getting any blowback if you truly wanted to help that person you would tell them as gracefully as you could the truth even though they may hate you for it why because you love them in fact here is what paul says about love love always protects love rejoices in the truth love always perseveres by the way this is a passage that everyone reads at their wedding but nobody obeys this is first corinthians 13. this means that if we're going to love people we can't just look the other way when they're doing wrong we have to care about them enough to bring them both grace and truth and that's hard but we have to do it to love them all right thank you thank you yes ma'am what's your name my name's chrissy chrissy go ahead um i'm kind of new to this whole christian thing so this is the first like apologist thing i've gone to but by the way this is you are eons ahead of most christians because most christians have never heard the word apologetics right you at least sat through one event go ahead yes um what are your thoughts on the idea of there being a divine mother what do you mean by divine mother the idea that god has a wife and a counterpart that is female i would ask people what evidence is there for that i haven't seen any evidence for that i haven't seen any evidence of that from the scriptures i i do know that god made made both men and women in his image okay now image isn't a physical thing it means that we're god's representatives here on earth okay we have mind emotion and will and that we know we feel we want we can make moral choices and we can be his ambassadors but i haven't seen any evidence in christianity certainly and i think christianity is true because god exists and jesus rose from the dead and you might say well how does that show that christianity is true because if jesus rose from the dead then he's god and whatever god teaches is true jesus taught the entire old testament is the word of god and he promised the new testament because i just have a personal policy if somebody rises from the dead i just trust whatever the guy says okay so i don't see any evidence from jesus the new testament writers or the old testament writers about a divine mother okay all right do you think such a person exists absolutely 100 why because i'm a girl and if god's a guy where did i come from well because god is so powerful he can create both sexes you don't it there doesn't need god doesn't have genitalia he's just he's just called a father because he has fatherly qualities he's a protector he's a creator he's a provider so he just decided on a whim to make reproductive systems the necessity of male and female yes male and female why because we are imaging god here and we are creating as imagers not in the same way god creates because god creates just from his power we create by procreating with someone of the opposite sex saying the power that god uses to create is different than the power we used to create oh yes god is wholly different than us we're we're just we're we're we're just no we have a line sir you can get in line if you like we are um in a situation where uh where was i going with this um god created males and females so we could create and be imagers of god we could create offspring and that's what we're supposed to do as imagers but god himself is an immaterial being he doesn't have genitalia and one way we know this other than the scriptures is just think about uh any being that is created like us we're composed right we have parts and if we're composed somebody must have composed us but you can't go on an infinite regress of composers at some point you're going to get back to an uncomposed composer that composed everything else and that's who we are we are composed but god is uncomposed he doesn't have parts he's immaterial spaceless timeless powerful all those attributes we talked about before if that's really true would you be a christian i am a christian but i don't believe that well it's kind of an essential of the faith to believe who god is that's what we're here to do we're here to know who god is what's that i guess i'm not a christian then oh well if it were true would you be a christian i guess if you're defining something that is true that is christian if it was true then i'd be a christian well this is one seminar right there's a lot more to read a lot more to study are you a student here no are you local could you could you come to the rashio christie and learn more the event on tuesday nights i could but i have karate that night so well you could still get together with these people and learn you don't have to meet tuesday you can meet other times with them just pursue the truth follow the evidence where it leads that makes sense right okay all right thank you christy god bless you sir what's your name hi my name is corbin i just want to say thank you again um i find it i would just you said earlier that for miracles to still be happening it would be a rare occurrence right um because that's it's an attention getter right but we see in the i i find it weird because in the the bible we like when jesus shows up miracles are happening like crazy i mean pre that it's it's kind of a rare occurrence and then we have his his disciples miracles are happening like crazy prophetic and and all these healings peter's walking down the street and people are getting healed uh by his shadow why why is that not happening today okay one i didn't have time to get into this due to the length of the thing already but how many how many miracles are there in the bible there's about 250 okay depending upon how you count them some of them are bunched or there's multiples going on at the same time or let's just take the round number 250 and let's take it from abraham to jesus that's about 2 000 years if you have 250 miracles spread over to 2 000 years how often do you get a miracle you get one miracle every eight years so when we're reading the bible we think miracles are happening all the time they're not but do they happen every eight years do you get a miracle and eight years later you get another one and eight years like no where do they happen in the bible miracles occur in three basic periods where god is doing miracles through people moses elijah and elijah and jesus and the apostles why because these people have new revelation that needs new confirmation moses says why is pharaoh going to believe me moses you're going to be able to do some miracles pharaoh will eventually see the point right same thing is true with elijah and elijah the same thing is true with jesus and the apostles there are periods in the bible where there's hundreds of years there are no miracles because there's no new revelation that needs new confirmation that's the main purpose of a miracle in the bible new revelation needs new confirmation we're not getting new revelation today that we're adding to our bible so we don't need people that have the gift of those miracles to do those things now i think miracles do occur today but i think god does it when he wants to in certain areas for certain reasons but he's not confirming new apostles he's not confirming new revelation and that's why we don't see that same kind of thing happening like they did at those periods if those things happened all the time what would be the the uniqueness of moses elijah and elijah and jesus and the apostles they wouldn't be does that make sense yeah um what about like paul tells people to eagerly desire like the gift of prophecy like i would consider prophecy a miracle like people uh kind of reading your mail or whatever that might entail um what do you think about that well first of all profit we think of prophecy we think of telling the future most of the time in the bible prophecy means speaking the word of god into someone's life like preaching teaching those kind of things okay now can people do that today this is what christians argue over i don't take a firm position on it okay there is a website that can give you the pros and cons of the arguments on each side it's called got questions there's an app got questions if you type in that app and got questions and type in prophecy is it for today you'll probably get five or six articles on it read those articles and see what you think all right thank you so much all right thanks corbin yes ma'am what's your name hi i'm erica hey erica um i just had a couple uh just a question about a certain bible verse that always kind of stumps me when i read it it's john 20 23 and it says and when he had said this he breathed them and said receive the holy spirit if you forgive the sins of any they're forgiven they are forgiven them if you withhold forgiveness from any it is withheld and he's talking the apostles for that and so i kind of just have a question okay so john 20 23 this is just bef just after thomas is that where we are uh yes okay so what's the what's the question just what it's talking he's telling the disciples to go and forgive other people and i'm just wondering what like you're like what you think of that because when every time i read that i'm kind of just like jesus is the only like god should be the only one to forgive people you know so like i just i just wonder if someone sins against you you can forgive them and should forgive them that's what he's saying is a generic question what's that he's just saying that i mean that's a generic instruction to it well to really dive into this i'd have to read the whole passage and read around it and i don't have that committed to memory right now so okay but this is consistent with jesus elsewhere saying how many times do you have to forgive your neighbor 70 times seven right it means just forever just keep forgiving that's what we have to do so but i'd have to look at more of the context to see exactly if there's any kind of peculiar angle to this verse it just seems straightforward to me we ought to forgive people who who wrong us okay okay all right all right thank you all right thanks erica yes sir um earlier you spoke uh what's your name sir oh david go ahead dave yes uh earlier you spoke of inerrancy of scripture and i believe in the inerrancy of scripture literally word for word god's word god breathed i just want to help out the young lady back here a little bit when we look at words in scripture they have they have great meaning sometimes beyond what our english translation gives us uh for example when god creates man and woman he's using certain words hebrew words that when we look those up they have they have many things attached to each word example the word image when god says he created us in his image and likeness the word image is a masculine word the word image also has a physical idea to it as well as non-physical the word likeness the hebrew word is feminine and the word likeness also carries the idea of the mental picture so he's using these various words when he creates man and woman he says let us make man in our image and in our likeness so he's he's speaking of his characteristics that he's creating us in and those characteristics have both male and female attached and they have they have oh they have so many things attached uh so like he said how many times did you see truth up here on the screens and hear him speak the word truth a lot of times because truth is what we need and the world needs god's word carries that truth and it carries it deeply for all of us to to study and grow i'm hoping that helps a little bit uh if you want to talk more sure no problem thanks for letting me oh sure david thank you yeah there's also a distinction to be made we can show that the bible i think beyond a reasonable doubt is true it's god's word but that's only halfway there yes god has spoken now the next question is what has he said and now that's a whole nother level of of of study called hermeneutics how do we figure out what it means and so you could study a lot more as you pointed out there david as to what the words mean and what god is communicating there so my job here mostly is to show you that the bible's true then you've got to take the next step okay what is it said and how can you deal with these questions that come up regarding what what god's gender is go ahead ma'am i'm noelle hey noel everyone else kind of rushed through that and forgot to say their names did you say no well no well yes go ahead yes um so i this might actually be more of a hermeneutics question okay within the definition that you just said there so grew up home school christian non-denominational and then as i have grown seeking out answers for myself i'm not just going with my great education and understanding of things but what is what does this mean within my personal relationship with christ and not just you know a sunday school answer um something that i've begun to notice that has been a little disheartening is seeing all the divisions um in the church i mean even from one christian to another in my own church and how that can really we can wound and hurt one another with those things um so i do believe there is absolute truth but i think how we interpret it can sometimes be different the bible sure for example yeah of course how do we do that in love but also know that there has to be some kind of standard somewhere because we can call into conviction and like well i i feel like i can watch this movie or hang out with these people what we do is we read romans 14 because that's exactly what paul is talking about in romans 14. and if i had to sum up romans 14 it would be don't major in the minors on these secondary and tertiary issues don't put your conviction on another brother or sister and don't let them put their conviction on you on these secondary and tertiary issues we're not talking about the essentials of the faith like we're saved by grace through faith there is a god we are not him we're all sinners christ is going to come again christ imputes us his righteousness christ is a member of the godhead all these things those are the essentials of the faith but whether or not you can go to movies or whether or not you know it's really exactly i mean you can look at a lot of things but things that churches split over i mean we see that consistently and constantly and it's devastating sad if we're supposed to be christians known by our love that's right so how do i mean sometimes maybe it is a i mean there are divisions over sure they're right and there shouldn't be but that's because we're human beings and we're messed up agreed yeah and that's why we need a savior yes okay so we should expect these things to happen yes don't be don't be alarmed when people act like people yeah right so maybe you can direct people back to romans 14 and study that passage because that's really what paul is talking about cool awesome all right all right thank you carl hey well i was hoping somebody else would ask this just so i'm just going to softball it to you let you expand on it because i think that it needs expansion why do you have to have god have morality because sam harris of course one of the four horsemen of the neo-atheist apocalypse um likes to say that through genetic evolution we have come to a point where morality while it may not mean anything on this spiritual level it is good for the herd it is good for human survival it is uh it is ingrained in people now genetically and through evolution to not kill each other because we we genetically want to perpetuate the species so i i would just i want you to speak on that a little bit more because i know that there's people in here who have that uh in the back their mind and i just want to yeah i'll expand on that let me see if i can just can evolution account for morality there you go okay first of all we need to point out that moral laws are not chemical or biological they are immaterial and they come from personal agents so there's no mutating genetic code that has any authority to tell you or me or anyone else how to behave right secondly chemistry and biology are descriptive they're not prescriptive evolution describes what does survive it doesn't tell us what ought to survive so why humans why not dolphins or roaches or kangaroos you know he's what sam harris is doing is he's smuggling a moral law into his system to get it to work right he's trying to assume that human beings are valuable and we ought to treat one another to promote human flourishing well i i generally agree with sam harris that's what we ought to do but only a theist can justify that he can also should we rape to survive if survival is our end as some evolutionists will say then if we can propagate our genes by raping why shouldn't we do that we could also ask the question should we murder the weak to help others to survive that's that's hitler's agenda there hitler in his mind was trying to do a good thing the tyrants are always trying to do good things right i mean thanos wants to knock out you know half of the population right to do a good thing you know that by the way we're having a book come out next year called hollywood heroes how your favorite movies reveal god look for it anyway um perfect should we murder the week to help others if evolution is true why not and since evolution is the process of change then morals must change rape may one day be considered good according to evolution and then finally they say well we just got to do it to cooperate well why cooperate when not cooperating often helps you survive like for example stalin didn't have to cooperate he had a bunch of henchmen he killed millions of his own people and then took their stuff and lived comfortably until he died on his death bed at the age of 74 shaking his fist at god one last time so there's so many problems with this there is no ontological big word meaning being there's no ontological ground for morality outside of god himself everything else would just be sam harris's opinion against hitler's opinion so you need god for morality you also need god to set purpose because without purpose as we talked about earlier there's no way to determine whether acting a certain way is good because it's taking you toward that purpose or bad taking you away from that purpose morality requires purpose just like football requires purpose otherwise you wouldn't know what a good play was and what a bad play was and and of course i agree with you you know that right i just i wanted you to be able to expand on that and just sure and i think it just it makes sense that just like a lion who kills a gazelle there he did nothing morally wrong if we are made up of the same stardust the same mutated evolutionary atoms but have no moral grounding there would be no difference between a lion killing a gazelle and another person killing another person that morally it's the same that's right yeah that's right thanks carl josh hi frank nice to see you um thank you for coming to our campus we really appreciate it um so i was hoping for as a christian uh strategy or some advice to deal with someone who's using circular logic or an incoherent or illogical like statements to to sort of keep proving the same point when you're trying to bring more coherence have you asked the person is this person a non-christian yeah well most the people i've talked to have you asked the person if christianity were true would you become a christian and yeah and i run into different answers like what well yes or no yeah what do they say well like you said it depends if they say no or they hesitate no then it's a moral issue it doesn't matter how much evidence you give them right it doesn't matter they don't care they want to do their own thing they're they're looking for god as much as a criminal is looking for a cop so just is it prayer then prayer love them as best you can sometimes what will happen because it happens to all of us that there's some tragedy that strikes and then your phone is going to ring and that person's going to be on the other end they're not going to call their atheist buddy what's the atheist buddy going to say there's no rhyme or reason to this stuff just happens they're going to call you a person of spiritual depth if you've earned that right up to that point but no not even god can steer a parked car if they don't want to go anywhere it doesn't matter what you do you can't just beat them with a bible yeah yeah that's right all right thank you very much all right thanks all right yes sir what's your name hi i'm eric i'm just asking a question for someone that i know okay they claim to be agnostic um why is so if god were real why is he making it so hard for people to discover him so jesus says seek you'll find knock will be answered seek the kingdom right so it's all this verbage about seeking if he is the one true god and the god of the universe for example the picture that you showed of the thousands of galaxies why does jesus let's bring it down to christianity why does he make it so hard for him for us to find him now so he appeared two thousand years ago and then aft before that as well through signs and wonders but in this particular age why doesn't he just go what's up buddha get out of the way you know muhammad stay dead you know like all that stuff why doesn't he just like show up so it's more like a hiddenness of god question like why is god hidden and why doesn't he just clear everything up well let's go back to the belief that belief in does god is god just concerned about us putting another thought in our belief system oh yeah god exists got it no he's not just concerned about that he wants to make sure that we go from belief that to belief in apparently it's not all that hard to know that god exists because most people do believe he exists right but a lot of people know he exists intellectually but they won't go the next step and trust in him soren kierkegaard the danish philosopher has a good story about this he says suppose there was a a king or a prince in a in a given jurisdiction and he sees a beautiful young virgin maiden in his jurisdiction who he sees and he immediately falls in love with and he goes to his father the king and he says dad i love that girl but she's not royalty uh how how can i earn her hand in marriage and the father says you can't go to her as the prince because she may just then come with come to you because of your power and prestige and everything she's going to get one day she could possibly be the queen you won't know if she really loves you she won't know if she really loves you she might just be overwhelmed with all the power so if you really want to love her what you need to do is you need to renounce the throne go into the village as a peasant and win her as a peer so he did that's exactly what jesus did for us he came into this space-time continuum as a peer and he allowed us to actually torture and kill him so he could save us but if he had if he came in on a white horse and said i'm god and you better get on board or else are we really going to go willingly are we really going to have a love relationship no god has to descend in order for us to accept him as a peer and he did now i think enough belief that so we know that he exists and that jesus rose from the dead but to go from belief that to belief in that's a matter of the heart and a lot of people don't want to do that caiaphas himself knew lazarus was risen by jesus and what did he do let's kill this guy and kill lazarus too right so again it's not a matter of enough evidence it's a matter of the will it's not a matter of the evidence for god's existence it's a matter of the evidence of our resistance we don't want him does that make sense yes all right thank you yes sir ben keenan keenan this guy here look like you as ben anyway go ahead fair enough well that man is not me all right um so i wanted to play i agree with you on on pretty much what we've gone through today uh including arguing morality from a perspective without god is near impossible but i wanted to play devil's advocate a little bit here yeah and get your thoughts so you mentioned without god should we rape to survive obviously rape can propagate new life there's conception there's birth there's a new child well could the argument be made that because even though there's a new life this new life is now often raised in a home without a father often raised with a mother that does not love them as well and therefore are not as cooperative with society that a child who came out of rape is now often a harm to society in many ways because they were not raised well could the argument be made that evolution accounted for this and created a pseudo-morality because to not rape because children of rape typically become more of a harm on society but you see all that presupposes harm and it presupposes that people are valuable which doesn't exist in an atheistic worldview you would need to steal that from a theistic worldview to say people are valuable to begin with and we ought not rape them and we ought not murder them and we ought to do what helps them flourish but that presupposes that people are valuable more valuable than roaches more valuable than dolphins more valuable than giraffes right because survival is in order for us to have a necessity to survive we must have a worth to survive even evolutionarily well i'm just saying from an evolutionary perspective without god they are smuggling in these words and these concepts like harm and benefit and good and bad and flourishing and non-flourishing as if human beings have value they don't buy their own world view human beings are just a bag of chemicals more complex than a bag of chemicals in a dog but they're the same there there there's there's no way to differentiate in value between them because there's no value in evolution there's no value in an atheistic worldview we're just on a planet that's uh ultimately going to go to heat death and it's all going to be over what's the point first have a nice day all right thanks for your thoughts all right thank you we can only allow maybe one more question because we've actually only got the space till nine so all right yeah this will be the last one then okay sorry go ahead yes um so i've had a non-believing friend ask me elena yeah elena go ahead all right there you go well she said if god just wants people to love him and he made a universe that people would just bow down and worship him then why would he give us free will so i wanted to hear your take on it well because free will is necessary for love remember if go back to the hitchens example if if we're just chemicals if we're moist robots can we really love no we can't love requires free will and so if this world is just a group of moist robots walking around we are not lovers we're just robots we're not haters either there's no moral capacity if there's not free will so go back to the original question again though what was the implication of the question yeah she just was confused about like if all that god wanted was a world where people would bow down and worship him and love him then yet why would we have free will because worship requires free will and god doesn't need our worship look god's an infinite being you don't add to him by worshiping him you don't subtract to him by cursing him we're the ones that get the benefit of worship and we're the ones that get the detriment of cursing god god doesn't need us he's infinite we're the ones that need god so why does he want him to worship us for our benefit that's why he wants what's god a cosmic ego no he doesn't need us we need him that's the point all right all right perfect thank you all right folks thank you so much thank you thank you hey uh if you would john tell people where you're meeting on tuesday if you would at the mic huh meetings are escalante 2 43 at 6 45 escalante 243 645 on tuesdays i'll see you at the board anyone wants to talk thanks for watching folks

Channel: Cross Examined

Views: 27,839

Keywords: Frank Turek, Christianity, Atheism, Apologetics, God, Theology, Bible, Religion

Id: FeFmHo0eNN0

Length: 152min 9sec (9129 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 23 2021