I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist LIVE from North Carolina Wesleyan College

my [Applause] oh oh i'm so happy that you guys came out here tonight i uh one one little bit of uh some housekeeping things or two things actually if you were sitting in the back little section if you don't mind kind of sliding up up here to to the front part up here do what yes gregor get him great them gregor i'm just kidding i'm kidding don't get them um and then the other thing too is if if i was told to if you guys have a face mask with you uh if you don't mind uh putting that on just while you're in here if you have it with you that'd be great um i'm jonathan tyndall i'm a college pastor here at wesleyan college with covenant campus ministry and it's been my honor and my privilege just to have you guys come and uh to be a part of this event with dr frank turek cross-examined um he's the author of i don't have enough faith to be an atheist which we have books out front for sale that you can pick up afterwards um and it's so worth the read i highly recommend it um and so with no further ado i want to give the the mic to dr frank turk everybody give him applause thanks jonathan good evening bishops is that all you got come on good evening bishops and folks watching on youtube let's 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 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 throw 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 colleagues 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 receive only minor injuries because monsoor's body muffled the blast one of them 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 to 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 monsoor'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 mansour 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 there are many people in our culture today that don't think the story's true after all it's got miracles in it we don't believe in miracles anymore and it's written down by religious people we know religious people tend to embellish things they make things up so how could you believe in such a fantastic story well i actually think it's easy to believe that christianity is true you only need to answer four questions in the affirmative 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 [Music] [Applause] [Music] now that is some pretty grooving music isn't it yeah that is actually from our tv show on wednesday nights on directv channel 378. it's also on roku if you have roku just look for nrb we're also on radio every saturday mornings the show is called i don't have enough faith to be an atheist but if you're a college student i know you don't get up until the crack of noon on on saturday so it's podcasted you can listen to it anytime you want and what we do is we present evidence for christianity and we cross-examine ideas against it based on our website right there cross-examine dot 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 first question does truth exist why is that important well you hear people saying there's no truth you got your truth i got my truth all truth is relative if there's no truth obviously christianity can't be true of course if there's no truth then atheism can't be true either right of course there's truth we're going to deal with it in fact if there wasn't truth why would you be at college i mean what are you here to learn you're here to learn truth right so we're going to deal with that question first second question does god exist i hope to show you tonight that a theistic god really exists what's a theistic god that's a spaceless timeless immaterial powerful moral personal intelligent creator who created all things and sustains all things to this very moment we're going to look at three arguments for this being these arguments are in the bible but you don't need the bible to know them in fact we're going to try and establish the existence of god without any reference to any religious writing or doc or or or uh argument that comes from a religious book third question are miracles possible obviously christianity can't be true unless miracles are possible and a lot of people don't believe they're 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 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're going to see if the evidence from the new testament documents are reliable enough to let us know if one particular event from the ancient world took place what would that event be the resurrection right because if jesus rose from the dead game over christianity is true of course if jesus didn't rise from the dead game over it's false now some of you are going well how do how does that show that the bible's the word of god well if jesus really is god as the new testament documents claim he is now that's a big if but if he is whatever god teaches is true jesus taught the entire old testament as a word of god and he promised the new testament look i just have a personal policy if somebody rises from the dead i just trust whatever the guy says all right so the resurrection here is the key now we can't cover it in a lot of detail tonight so if you want to go further the book is available out that way not not this way out that way in that lobby and there's even a 12-part dvd series out there there's a newer book out there called stealing from god why atheists need god to make their case i've noticed that when atheists are arguing there is no god they actually have to steal 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 now i want to i want to point out that all the proceeds from the sale of the books and the dvds will go to feed needy children mine okay just so you know actually you don't even really need to buy a book if you just want the overview of the argument all you need to do is text the word evidence no quotes on it just the word evidence to that number four four two two two and if you're watching on youtube you can do it as well text the word evidence to four four two two two and i'm gonna send you this entire powerpoint presentation in a pdf format uh it's actually more slides than i can show you right so if you text that uh word evidence to 4422 i'll send it to you and i'll put that up at the very end as well what we're going to do here is start right here it does truth exist we're going to go through these four questions and then we're going to get to your questions and uh you think we're we're going to do q a but actually tonight i think we're going to do all cue no way all right so everyone can ask a question takes all the pressure off me all right all right you guys ready to go all right let's start right here at does truth exist and 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 bishops if he said it that way the movie would have gone nowhere you can't handle the truth that's not how we said it here's how we said it i want the truth you can't handle the truth all right let's try that again i want the truth now that felt better didn't it didn't that feel better 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 certainly in the next five minutes gonna be the most important thinking skill we're going to talk about and it's so important that even if you're an atheist a christian anywhere in between you're going to find this valuable because it's a thinking skill that can help you avoid believing things that are false because this thinking skill will help you detect statements that are false and 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 what i'm about to show you now and it's so simple you're gonna go frank how could you have missed this all right here's the thinking skill and the easiest way of showing you the thinking skill is to demonstrate using it suppose someone were to come up to you and say there is no truth you should ask that person a question what should the question be yeah if somebody says there's no truth you say hey 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 a self-defeating statement what's a self-defeating statement a self-defeating statement doesn't meet its own standard it violates the law of non-contradiction if i were to say i can't speak a word in english what would you say yeah you just use english to say it or if i were to say my parents had no kids that lived you'd say well that's self-defeating or my brother is an only child or everything i say is a lie some of you will get that tomorrow or all generalizations are false some of you will never get that one all right these are known as self-defeating statements and you can get real good at identifying self-defeating statements by doing one thing what you do is you turn the claim on itself turn the claim on itself this is the thinking skill you got to get good at using again whether you're an atheist christian anywhere in between because you don't want to believe things that are false right and so many things out there are false and they're easily demonstrated as fault if you have this thinking skill let's do a few more of these suppose someone comes up to you and says all truth is relative if you turn the claim on itself what would you say back to the person yeah is that relative is that a relative truth no that's an absolute truth right there claiming all truth is relative if someone says there are no absolutes what are you going to say to them yeah are you absolutely sure right that's an absolute truth claim right there now sometimes it's it's said some you know people don't come out very frequently and say there's no truth they'll say it this way or sometimes they'll say it this way there is indeed truth only my truth you've probably heard that right i get to live my truth you live your truth there is indeed truth there's just my truth and your truth what would you say to somebody who says this this is also self-defeating what were you going to say my truth says your truth isn't true yeah then you just have a war of opinions at that right actually if you say this is that just your truth or the truth because if this is just your truth it's just your opinion why should i believe it's really true but if it's the truth then the claim there isn't the truth is false it defeats itself you seeing that so sometimes it said that well you know the real truth of this i know it's going to sound a little weird but there's no such thing as my truth there's no such thing as your truth there's just the truth you say wait a minute frank there are things that are true of you that are not true of me yeah okay my name's frank your name's bill or julie or something right but it's still objectively true that my name's frank and your name is bill or julie or whatever it is right it's still objectively true even if the truth only applies to me remember truth is what corresponds to its referent yeah my name's frank your name's bill or julie or whatever the referent is what tells you who the truth is about and it's objectively true that my name is frank and your name is something else it's not a relative truth it's objectively true sometimes it's said this way it's true for you but not for me somebody says that what do you say to him 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 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 have not been not for 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 say sure go try that with your bank teller yeah go to your bank tone and say i had like a hundred thousand dollars out of my account the bank tell elixir accountant says i'm sorry i only have six dollars and 14 cents in your account you must be a college student right and if you want to get the money what do you say back that's true for you but not for me give me the 100 grand right no if it's true you're there's only and fourteen cents in your account that's true for all people at all times in all places when referring to you at that time it's just true actually 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 and they'll say 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 your faith doesn't change a thing about those things i mean you have to believe something to make it true do you have to believe in gravity to stay on the ground do 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 well why is the bible always talking about faith 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 the bible writers are telling the truth but all the belief that in the world by the way we call this apologetics it doesn't mean you're saying you're sorry it means you're given evidence for what you believe but all the belief that in the world won't get your moral transgressions forgiven for that you've got to go from belief that to belief in james the half-brother of jesus who wrote that little book in the new testament called you guys are a sharp group tonight he says even the demons believe that god exists but they tremble do you know that demons know that god exists better than we do yeah they believe that it's true but they don't trust in him there's a difference between belief that and belief in in fact 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 lapse of judgment she said yes that's the difference between belief that and belief in belief that is of the head belief in is not only of the head but of the heart in fact john an eyewitness of jesus wrote a biography of jesus we call the gospel of john and in the 20th chapter toward the end he said these things were written down so that you may believe jesus is the savior and by trusting in him you may have life in his name there's a difference between belief that and belief in and if you don't want to go from belief that the belief in you don't have to you have the free will to do whatever you want god will not force you into heaven against your will if you don't want them now you're not going to want them in eternity you're also by the way going to hear this there's no truth in anything but science how many have heard people say this you've heard people say there's no truth in anything but science if you turn the claim on itself what would you say back to that person what's that yeah but isn't science true or you might say it this way is that a scientific truth right this is not a scientific truth you can't go in the laboratory and prove that that's a philosophical claim and you can't do science without philosophy science is built on philosophy which is right thinking about reality why am i saying that because all data needs to be gathered all data needs to be interpreted in fact in the book stealing from god out there we have a chapter on science this is the title of the chapter science doesn't say anything scientists do you ever notice why you're getting different scientific opinions about covid you understand why that's going on because all data needs to be gathered all data needs to be interpreted and that's done by who it's not done by science it's done by scientists and sometimes scientists have different data which causes them to come to different conclusions sometimes they have the same data and they interpret the data differently sometimes they have a political bias or some other bias that causes them to interpret the data differently and that's why you get different scientific opinions so whenever you hear someone say science says this you need to say time out science doesn't say a word it's scientists that say things let's look at their data and see if it's gathered rightly see if it's good data see if it's interpreted rightly before we say here's how we ought to live so science doesn't say a word scientists say things and what you think about it the most important things that you know about in life have nothing to do with science honey do you love me i don't know let's run an experiment no how about this you can hear this too you should doubt everything someone says this you turn the claim on itself what are you going to say back yeah should i doubt that why are skeptics skeptical of everything but skepticism you ever notice they don't doubt that now how many people in here whether you're an atheist christian anywhere in between how many people in here sometimes doubt that what you believe is true look if you don't have your hand up right now you're probably not thinking very much i've written books on this stuff and sometimes i wake up in the morning and i i go i don't even know if this is true you ever do that but then when i start thinking about it i realize that most of my doubts are emotional they're not intellectual in other words the evidence for christianity is really good and if i'm having a good day everything's fine bad day don't know good day fine bad day don't know good day fine bad what's changing me or the evidence me i'm going up and down in fact sometimes at these venues i'll see people and they'll say hey frank i used to be a christian but i'm an atheist now i lost my faith now i don't mean to be unkind but since i'm originally from new jersey sometimes i am and when they say i lost my faith i want to say to them so so are you telling me because your psychology changed that god has somehow popped out of existence because your psychology changed jesus didn't rise from the dead do you realize that your psychology is not going to tell you whether or not anything's true the evidence will so your psychology can go up and down all day what you need to focus on what i need to focus on is the evidence because the evidence will tell you whether or not it's true not your psychology in fact there's a lot of people that are afraid to fly psychologically they can't do it but do you realize that that doesn't fit with the facts that by far the safest way to get anywhere is to fly but people don't want to do that because psychologically they think it's dangerous when the facts show it really isn't so your psychology is not going to tell you whether or not something's true about anything the evidence will tell you so concentrate on the evidence and if you concentrate on the evidence i think you'll realize that you ought to start doubting your doubts because if you start doubting your doubts then you're back to knowing something for sure you guys thought about doubting your doubts i doubt it oh how about this one you're going to hear this a lot too this is probably the granddaddy in our culture right now you ought not judge first of all what's the problem with the claim someone says you ought not judge you turn the claim on itself what do you say back hey isn't that a judgment or you could say then why are you judging me for judging because that's what they're doing he said wait a minute frank didn't jesus say 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 bit strange but it's true there are no verses in the bible there are no verses in the bible do you think when matthew's writing his biography of jesus we call a gospel he said here's chapter seven verse one no when were the chapter and verse divisions put in about 500 years ago to help us navigate the text which is good right because if you go to church one sunday and then if the pastor said open up two-thirds of the way through the book and let's see if we can find where where we are no you need numbers right it's gonna help you the problem is we think if it has a number in front of it we can just take it out and make it say whatever we want matthew 7 1 says judge not but what does it say right after that judge not lest you be judged by the same standard you judge others you'll be judged by that standard so before you try and take the spec out of your brother's eye you hypocrite which is a judgment take the log out of your own eye first then you'll be better able to help your brother is jesus telling us not to judge here no he's telling us to take the spec out of our brother's eye that involves making a judgment he's simply saying get that problem out of your life first so you can better help your brother so 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 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 number two you'd be dead already if you didn't make judgments you made 100 judgments just getting over here tonight and now you're wondering was that a good judgment i don't know this guy's kind of crazy you make judgments all the time between good choices and bad choices safe choices and dangerous choices everybody makes judgments atheists make judgments what judgments do they make there's no god jesus didn't rise from the dead bible's not true there is no meaning to life when you die you're going to become worm food it's hopeless have a nice day those 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 who were they pharisees what did the pharisees do they were the religious and political leaders of israel they helped run israel rome delegated much of the law making authority and the governance to the sanhedrin the jewish ruling council on whom some pharisees were so these were the religious and political leaders and jesus went after them are you telling me jesus got involved in politics yes and he wasn't so nice doing it in fact 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 chapter 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 an argument with these pharisees and he 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 say your father is the devil never say that to a sibling by the way okay in matthew 23 he's going after these pharisees again what does he say woe to you scribes and pharisees you hypocrites you strain out a nat 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 it a sword it's going to divide mother and daughter father and son jesus was tough read this read the the accounts for yourself he didn't suffer any fools in fact why was he killed number one for claiming to be god because that's blasphemy to the jews and sedition to the romans and number two he spoke truth to power particularly the jewish authorities who knew if he succeeded they were out of business in fact caiaphas himself the high priest saw that jesus had resurrected lazarus from the dead or people that were there saw it and told him and you know what he says he says we got to kill jesus and got to kill lazarus too because it's better that one innocent man died than the whole nation perish they knew he was doing miracles and they still wanted to kill him so jesus made judgments and we have to make judgments without being judgmental somebody put it this way evangelism is just one beggar showing another beggar where the food is we're no better than anybody else without jesus 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 going to go who are you to judge no never going to say that i've noticed that people really don't have a problem with judging they just have a problem with judgments they don't like in fact if you tell somebody the truth and they get mad at you you just helped 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 and years ago i was in the navy which stands for never again volunteer yourself for you military people in here you always get more flack when you're over the target if you tell 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 we love darkness rather than light so don't buy into this idea you can't make judgments you have to make judgments you'd be dead already if you didn't make judgments you just have to make judgments without being judgmental now we could talk about many more of these self-defeating statements we don't have time for that but can everybody see that this statement right here shoots itself can everybody see that and all the other ones we just went through they're all truth is relative there's no the truth just my truth it's true for you but not for me the only truth comes from science you ought not judge all those they're all self-defeating which if our reasoning is right here it means that relativism and post-modernism are false why because they claim it's true that there is no truth so truth does exist the next question is is it true that god exists now before we move on i got to say one thing because when we get to the q a i may ask you a question and it's not fair for me to ask you a question without giving you fair warning okay here's the question i will ask you especially if you're not a christian the question is if christianity were true would you become a christian i've had atheists stand at that microphone in front of hundreds of people on college campuses and they say no no i thought you claimed to be reasonable i thought you claimed to be rational how rational is it that you wouldn't believe something if it were true it's not rational the problem is in here the problem's here 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're not on a truth quest and this is true of christians too many times we're not on a truth quest we're on a happiness quest right we're just going to believe whatever we think is going to make us happy here's the problem you can make yourself happy over the short term doing a lot of fun but ultimately destructive things yet over the long term this is a disaster and anyone in here who's over 40 knows what i'm talking about because many of us have tried it ourselves the only way to get contentment is to go straight through truth and jesus is the truth now let's spend most of our time here on point two because this is an important point does god exist i mentioned there are three arguments and oh by the way that's a question you should ask anybody if christianity were true would you become a christian an atheist could ask if atheism true would you be an atheist a muslim could ask if islam was true would you be a muslim right see if people are really open or not anyway what are the three arguments first argument from the beginning of the universe known as the cosmological argument cosmological comes from the greek word cosmos which means world or universe it says if the universe had a beginning then it must have had a beginner the second argument is the argument from design known as the teleological argument telos is a greek word meaning design or purpose and it says if there's design in the universe and designing you life there must be a designer now these two arguments have some scientific evidence behind them we'll see some of it here in a minute the third argument doesn't have any science behind it yet it's the argument we've all known since we were very small children and it's the argument from morality known as the moral argument and it says if there's one thing 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 beyond humanity then everything's just a matter of opinion that's just your opinion against a baby torturer's opinion or your opinion against hitler's opinion well we know those aren't really just matters of opinion so there must be a standard out there a standard of goodness righteousness and justice that we're obligated to obey and any deviation from that standard is what we would call evil that's what all theists mean by god's nature we'll get to that later let's start right here at the cosmological argument now you got to admit it was worth coming out here tonight just to see god do that wasn't it i mean some of you have said i've never seen god move oh really check this out now this is the argument that many say points back to the big now some of you christians in here are going uh frank you know we're christians here 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 banged it in fact the evidence for the big bang is so good that even atheistic scientists are admitting it stephen hawking who was the top physicist in the world probably until he died about four four years ago you may remember hawking he had als normally also kill you in a few years he had it for over 40. he was kind of a medical miracle but here's what hawking said he said almost everyone now believes that the universe and time itself had a beginning at the big bang hawking tried to come up with another explanation other than god for the beginning but he failed yet he's admitting the data what's the data that space time and matter literally came into existence out of nothing what is nothing aristotle had a good definition of nothing he said nothing is what rocks dream about that's nothing no space no matter no time alexander velenkan a russian cosmologist an agnostic 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 cosmologist 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 i want to highlight two words in this quote the first word is the word proof scientists rarely use the word proof because science is tentative but with valencian who's not a believer he just sees so many lines of evidence pointing toward one conclusion that space time and matter had a beginning that he's admitting that it constitutes a proof also it's a problem why is it a problem they have to face the a cosmic beginning because if space time and matter had a beginning then there must be something outside of space time and matter that brought it into existence in other words nature can't be a co you can't you can't find a natural cause for all of nature nature is the effect it can't be the cause now the lincoln is actually a believer in the multiverse you've heard about the multiverse there are many versus universes out there and we just happen to be be the one that by luck we we got here uh actually there's no evidence for this multiverse and there are other problems with it but valencian even admits even if there's other universes out there the whole show the whole thing needs an absolute beginning so it seems to me you don't get rid of the need for an absolute beginner now we're not going to go through the evidence for this why number one we don't have time number two it's all in the book chapter three and number three it's not controversial atheists agnostic scientists are admitting it let's just jump to the bottom line if the universe had a beginner or had a beginning it must have had a beginner the evidence leaves us with one of the following 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 what do you think number two right someone created something out of nothing 15 years or so years ago i was at texas a m and a student who was an atheist said oh i think number one is more reasonable i said hold on let's look at number two first 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 in fact do you realize that everybody believes in at least one miracle christians believe in more than one but we certainly believe in this one but atheists believe in one too they believe at least some of them do that no one created something out of nothing which one takes more faith do you think in fact i said to the audience that night at texas a m i said to show you how seriously we all take the law of causality and by the way the law of causality doesn't say everything has a cause the law of causality says everything that comes to be has a cause everything that has a beginning has a cause there has to be an uncaused first cause it's either the universe or something outside the universe that has always existed because you can't create yourself so i said to show you how seriously we all take the law of causality that things don't pop into existence out of nothing buy nothing there is nobody in this auditorium here tonight who is currently worried that as you sit here a hippopotamus has appeared out of nothing by nothing in your dorm room and is currently pooping on your pillow right you're not worried about that why because you know that things don't pop into existence out of nothing by nothing without a cause and if they did if the whole universe could do that why don't why doesn't everything pop into existence out of nothing by nothing without a cause why don't teslas pop into existence out of nothing buy nothing without a cause you wake up one morning your hyundai is a tesla you go how do i charge this thing why don't macbook pros pop into existence out of nothing buy nothing without a cause could have saved me four grand if you're hungry after this you want to have a pizza does it make sense to order one or should you just sit in your kitchen wait and hope one pops into existence out of nothing by nothing without a cause no it seems to me the atheists have all the faith in fact here's a question ask an atheist if there is no god why is there something rather than nothing at all that's leibniz's question philosopher a couple hundred years ago there is no god why is there something rather than nothing at all now think about this ladies and gentlemen if space-time and matter literally had a beginning out of nothing which is what the evidence seems to be pointing to then whatever created space-time and matter can't be made of 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 because to go from a state of nothingness to a state of creation someone had to make a choice and only persons can make choices the being would also 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 but if we keep going through the questions 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 we haven't gotten there yet all we can say is we have some of the attributes of god from this one argument a spaceless timeless immaterial powerful personal intelligent cause now we got to move on to the second argument the design argument the teleological argument and there are two aspects to this the universe appears to be designed and life appears to be designed let's look at the universe first this is known as the fine-tuning of the universe scientists in recent decades have discovered that the universe is so fine-tuned 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 certainly no universe that could support life we'll start again with an atheist stephen hawking who put it this way about the expansion rate 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 collapse back on itself or never develop galaxies if the expansion rate was that infinitesimally different from the very beginning none of us would be here now you can't make any sort of evolutionary explanation for this you can't say oh the expansion rate evolved there by chance whatever that means why because this is one of the initial conditions of the universe it didn't evolve to a point it started there seems to me the same being that created space-time and matter is the same being that fine-tuned the expansion rate so we could be here also the gravitational force if it were altered by more than one in 10 to the 40th power we wouldn't exist what's 1 in 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 lowe's all right set the gravitational force at a particular inch mark on that tape measure i realize gravity's not measured in inches 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 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 who caused this chance he was just here no chance is not a cause chance is a word we use to describe mathematical possibilities when scientists use the word chance you know what they really mean uh we don't know look there's only two reasons that value is where it is it was designed to be there or it wasn't what do you think's more reasonable somebody designed it to be right where it is and you could say this about about a dozen other factors about our universe change any one of them imperceptibly we're not here and it's not just the universe that appears designed our solar system appears to be designed with us in mind let's take a look at the solar system here for a second here we are third rock from the sun if we were just a little bit closer to or a little bit further away we couldn't survive a little bit closer to we burn up a little bit further away we'd freeze it's called the goldilocks zone it's not too hot it's not too cold it is that's a lie it's too hot here in the summer axial tilt 23.5 degrees change that slightly we don't exist earth rotation 24 hours change that slightly we don't exist the size and distance of the moon from us change that slightly we don't exist if jupiter was not in its current orbit we couldn't exist here on earth why what does jupiter do for us jupiter's gravitational force makes it a cosmic vacuum cleaner it attracts most of the meteors in space junk to it rather than us in fact if you take a close-up look at jupiter these dark marks are common fragment strikes that are bigger than the earth thank god for jupiter because if jupiter wasn't there we wouldn't be here same is true of saturn it's a cosmic vacuum cleaner as well in fact take a look at the planets here you got jupiter saturn uranus neptune earth look at poor 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 it's another star in our galaxy here's the sun jupiter is one pixel in size on this scale earth is invisible pluto forget about it all right keep an eye on arcturus now where's arcturus now way over here right of the white star regal that's antares that's another star in our galaxy not outside our galaxy 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 this is just in our galaxy 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 how far is 30 trillion miles 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 were out at the desert museum in tucson arizona and if you ever get to go to tucson go on the south side of the mountain range there and in this desert museum if you go there at night and it's a clear night you can see thousands of stars in the sky so we're out there this night and the guide goes if we look up at 903 we will see the space shuttle in orbit i said oh come on we're not going to see the space shuttle it's only 120 feet long it's 350 miles up we're not going to see it oh me of little faith at 903 the guide goes look 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 you'll be here five miles a second think about how fast that is well i did a little 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 an average distance away in our galaxy not outside our galaxy how long would it take us to go from one star to another start going five miles a second how long do you think it would take us to go these 30 trillion miles anyone that's a little long what would you think years yeah a long time you must be a math major yeah it would take us 201 450 years that means if you got in the space shuttle at the time of christ and started traveling from our star the sun to another star in our galaxy an average distance away you've been going five miles a second for two thousand years you would be less than one hundredth 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 and just how high are the heavens the psalmist writes in psalm 103 for as high as the heavens are above the earth so great is his love for those who fear him how high are the heavens above the earth the hubble space telescope has helped us discover that i'm about to show you something from hubble ultra deep field what's hubble ultra deep field they trained the hubble space telescope on 1 24 millionth of the sky what's 124 millionth of the sky go outside 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 so they trained hubble on that and what i'm going to show you is the ultimate picture they took this little video you can find on google just google hubble ultra deep field it's in the public domain and this video i don't know if you can see this but these are mountains here you see that this is the southern sky once i start the video you're gonna see the constellations come up and then hubble's gonna zoom in on 124 millionth of the sky there is no audio it's just video you want to see what they found here we go there are the constellations now let's zoom in on 124 millionth of the sky what you're looking at are nearly 10 000 galaxies in one 24 millionth of the sky each galaxy with billions of stars how many stars are there in the universe researchers at the university of hawaii think they think they figured it out the number of stars in the universe are about equivalent to the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on all the earth times 100 000. and to go from one of those stars to another star just in our galaxy at five miles a second will take you over two hundred thousand years now you know why the bible says the heavens declare the glory of god ladies and gentlemen i don't want anybody here to ever again use the word awesome unless you're talking about the heavens or god awesome shirt dude awesome shot dude awesome tick tock video no none of that's awesome this is awesome what are you gonna say for the heavens what are you gonna save for god if you throw awesome around too often as high as the heavens are above the earth so great is his love that though to those that fear him the verse doesn't end how does it continue 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 the god of the universe not only created and sustains this entire universe he loves his creation he loves you as high as the heavens are above the earth as high as the stars from a hundred thousand earths sand grains of a hundred thousand earth spread out over an unimaginable distance now when you consider something like that do you feel insignificant yeah you shouldn't why because as beautiful and amazing as the heavens are they're not made in the image of god but you are so the second aspect of design is the fact that you're designed in fact this is you in the womb at 11 weeks question is this animal mineral vegetable or human that's a human being right there in fact let's go back even 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 young 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 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 done now seeing some of you limping here earlier makes it hard for me to believe you were the fastest soldier in the gene pool but you were your soldier was 20 to 30 times smaller than a grain of salt yet it contained half of the 3.2 billion letter software program we call your genome all the letters in the right order it contained that half and that microscopic little soldier 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 software program we call your genome 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 till right now in fact there were only four things separating you from adulthood time air water and food those are the same four things that separate a two-year-old 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 comes from 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 that doesn't legislate morality the only question is whose morality will we legislate in fact when people say don't impose your morality on me i go why not would that be immoral actually you're doing the same thing you're saying i ought not impose ought not yet you're imposing that ought not on me why do you get to impose your morality but i don't get to impose mine actually the better answer is this when people say don't impose your morality on me i say this isn't my morality i didn't make this stuff up i didn't make up the fact that murder's wrong that abortion's wrong that rape is 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 thomas jefferson said was self-evident the one the apostle paul said the gentiles are not the law of the law written on their hearts everybody already knows this morality but some people just don't like it in fact if you have a problem with demorality you don't have a problem with me you have the problem with the creator upon whose morality or 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 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 how did they know how to do this nobody knows 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 day you just made 4 million new red blood cells you just made another four million new red blood cells you just made another four million knock it off how is this happening are you thinking about this are you going wait a minute frank time out got to concentrate new red blood cells coming up no this is just happening how is it happening you know aristotle recognized something 2400 years ago of course he didn't know anything about blood cells but he did notice that all of nature's going in a direction for example why does an acorn if it's properly nourished always become 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 an oak tree but who programmed it and is it acorn conscious is an acorn in the ground going all right what do i have to do become an oak tree no if it doesn't have a mind of its own and it doesn't yet it reliably goes in a direction there must be an external mind directing it toward that end aristotle called this the unmoved mover thomas aquinas came along in the 1200s a.d and said this is going to be my fifth way to argue for god that all of nature's going in a direction he called it final causality it's going toward a target a goal it has the products of a mind but it's not conscious so there must be an external mind directing all these things toward an end the apostle paul comes along and he 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 what does all this mean in other words this argument is not a it's it's not a cause about a big bang cause way back when this is a fact aristotle mistakenly thought the universe was eternal he's saying you need to cause every single second of existence to keep everything going in the direction it's going this is a sustaining cause not a first cause a sustaining here and now cause in fact god is to the universe and to us what a band is to music if a band were up here playing music the band would be creating and sustaining the music what happens to the music the second the band stops playing music's over same thing is true with god he creates the universe he creates you and the natural laws that govern it and he sustains the universe and he sustains you in the natural laws that govern you if all of us if god decided that this was it we'd all go out of existence now there's a lot more in the stealing from god book about that but we've got to move on to our final argument now you're probably wondering well how is he going to get through these two other points the other two points go much quicker but the moral argument let me ask you guys a question how do you know that your quarterback throwing a touchdown is better than your quarterback throwing an interception how do you know that what do you have to know in order to make that judgment not just the rules you have to know the purpose of the game right if there's no purpose to the game you can't say a touchdown is better than an interception the only way you can say a touchdown is better is because it takes you closer to the purpose rather than further away there has to be a purpose for you to know whether a play is good or a play is bad now notice in football the purpose of the game comes from outside the game the players don't make up the rules the commissioner and the owners make up the rules and they tweak them every year right and so when the players get on the field they know how the game is played and how they're going to try and win they know what a good play is from a bad play because they know the purpose now the rules of football are arbitrary the rules of life are not but they come from outside the game they come from god's nature if there is no nature if there is no standard if there is no purpose you can't say one way to live is better than another way also let me ask you guys a question what does the word submit mean what does it mean to nobody likes this word submit let's break up the word sub mission what does mission mean means we have a goal we have a purpose and sub means you're putting your purpose underneath that purpose look if i'm a diva receiver and i say keep throwing me the ball i need the ball more and the coach goes look if we're going to win we can't keep throwing the ball to you you'll get your shot but we got to spread the ball around otherwise we're not going to win now if i go okay coach i got it i'm going to submit my purpose to the team's purpose now i'm submitting to the overall mission which is a good thing do you realize if there is no god there is no overall mission there's no purpose to life but if there is a god you ought to submit your personal mission to that because that is the ultimate mission god's will is the ultimate mission if there is no god nothing's ultimately going to last anyway there is no mission if god does exist what could be greater than putting your own personal mission under the mission of the eternal being who created you and wants a relationship with you realize if there is no god the nazis were not wrong how can you judge the nazis wrong they were just following their government well if there's no standard beyond governments you can't say the nazis were wrong by the way that's how we convicted them at nuremberg they said we're following orders and we said you had a moral obligation to disobey immoral orders because there's a standard beyond your government it's called international law thomas jefferson called it nature's law the declaration of independence c.s lewis called it the moral law it's god's nature if god doesn't exist you can't say the nazis were wrong you can't say that love is better than rape love is no better than rape objectively oh you may like love better than rape but it's not better because there is no best if there is no god there are no human rights on a college campus we all have a very developed sense of justice and we're saying we got a right to this and we got to write to that do you realize if there's no god there's no right to anything there's not only no right to same-sex marriage there's no right to natural marriage there's not only no right to abortion there's no right to life there are no rights it's just your opinion the only reason rights make sense is because there's a being who is the standard of rightness and he's endowed us with his image and that's why we're valuable without that there are no rights which means racism isn't wrong if there's no god slavery isn't wrong rape isn't wrong murder isn't wrong it's all a matter of opinion if god does not exist tolerance is no better than intolerance if there's no god by the way are christians commanded to be tolerant no tolerance is too weak tolerance says hold your nose and put up with them love says reach out and help them and if you truly love people you won't tolerate the evil they want to do in fact let me ask you guys a question in our in our culture people think that love means approval if you love me you'll approve of what i do ladies and gentlemen how many people in here have parents oh good how many people in here are former children okay good this applies to all of us then if your parents approved of everything you wanted to do growing up would they be loving no of course not they need to stand in the way of evil if they truly love you and the way you love people sometimes is to say no i love you too much i'm going to stand in the way of this it's not tolerance that's love and you can't complain about the problem of evil if there's no god because actually evil proves god does exist what i mean evil proves god does it because a lot of atheists say well i can't be a good god because there's too much evil in the world and c.s lewis thought that for a while until he realized he had a big problem he ultimately wrote it in the book mere christianity here's what he said he said as an atheist my argument against god was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust but how had i got this idea of just an 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 right something can't be immoral unless something is moral in other words evil is a lack in a good thing evil doesn't exist on its own 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 doesn't exist evil is like rust in a car if you take all the rust out of a car you got a better car what happens if you take all the car out of the rust it doesn't exist evil doesn't exist on its own you could put it this way the shadows prove the sunshine in order to have shadows you got to have sunshine in other words in order to have evil you have to have good oh you can have good without evil you can have sunshine without shadows 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 good must exist but if good exists that means god exists because god is the standard of good without god everything's just a matter of opinion now we can still ask the question well if there is a good god why does he allow certain evils to occur that's another question we don't have time to get into here we can talk about it during the q a if we want but we can't say evil disproves god because evil actually shows god does exist now what can we say about these three arguments that we have a spaceless timeless immaterial powerful personal intelligent cause who created all things and sustains all things and is a moral being we've got like nine or ten attributes of god and we haven't even opened the bible yet this is called natural theology you can show that a theistic god exists just by looking at nature now some of you are going frank atheists have to have some retorts to this and they're probably pretty good actually they're not and if anyone wants to bring up some during the q a we can i just want to point out something c.s lewis said about this that atheism itself makes reason impossible because if we're molecular machines we shouldn't be able to reason and most atheists today are materialists they think everything's made of molecules here's a two slide quote from lewis i can't say it better than him so check this out here's what he said follow this 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 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 you can't say it any better than that atheism itself makes reason impossible so if you're going to try and refute some of these arguments by what system are you using what you're using reason how can you reason when your mind wasn't created you don't think your mind was designed why should you believe anything your mind tells you then we could talk more about that but we got to move on to question number three are miracles possible and this is the shortest one we know that truth exists we know that god exists and now the question is are miracles possible and a lot of people think miracles are impossible for example noah and the ark all right christians by the way is this this being recorded yeah it's actually being streamed right now let's just try and keep this between ourselves christians christians christians can we just agree on one thing here that noah and the ark is crazy thank you it is and a resurrection how many people in here have seen someone rise from the dead no one yet for christianity to be true we have to believe something that no one here has ever seen 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 i mean what does it deal with jonah can you really believe in jonah and the whale i mean come on actually what is the greatest miracle in the bible not yet it's not the resurrection the greatest miracle in the bible is i got some of you a second time yeah the greatest miracle in the bible is the first verse in the beginning god created the heavens and the earth if that verse is true every other verse is at least possible right if it's true that god created the universe out of nothing can he do whatever he wants inside the universe of course he can and here the atheists are admitting the data for the first miracle stephen hawking is admitting space time and matter had a beginning out of nothing well if that if that's true and god created the universe out of nothing then maybe these other verses are true of course noah's crazy unless god exists of course resurrections can occur unless god exists of course jonah is silly unless god exists in fact jesus referred two of the most controversial miracles in the old testament to his own life noah and jonah do you think he thought they were hysterical or historical he thought they were historical now a lot of people won't believe in miracles because they've never seen one that's not a good reason to disbelieve something why because you believe in a lot of things you've never seen you believe in your mind have you ever seen it you're using it right now you believe in the laws of non-contradiction or law the laws of logic and the laws of math have you ever seen them no it's not something you see you've never seen justice yet you believe in justice oh you may have seen people being treated justly or unjustly but you don't see justice in itself it's not a physical thing it's an immaterial reality grounded in the nature of god you've never seen love oh you may have been loved you may have loved somebody but you've never seen love a number of years ago i had a couple of debates with the atheist christopher hitchens you guys know christopher hitchens was he was a brilliant british atheist who sounded more brilliant than he was because he had a british accent and in one of our debates a student at the college in new jersey asked christopher this question he said hey christopher what is love and christopher being a materialist had to give a materialistic answer he said love is a chemical and i said don't tell that to your wife i mean honey do you love me yeah why well cause i got the chemical today right tomorrow i won't have the chemical cat love is not a chemical love is a immaterial virtue grounded in the nature of god all of us believe in it and we've never seen it you've never seen gravity oh frank come on look there's gravity 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 asks you how do you know god exists you say i know god by his effects this is what scientists do they reason from effect to cause if there's a creation there must be a creator the effect is creation the cause is a creator if there's design that's the effect there must be a cause of designer if there's a moral law written on their heart that's an effect there must be a moral law giver so we're reasoning from effect back to cause 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 even though you've never seen him same thing can be true of jesus he's left effects behind in fact if miracles do occur and by the way miracles don't have to occur now for christianity to be true if no miracles occurred since jesus and the apostles christianity could still be true but even if miracles occur today you ought not see a lot of them why because miracles by definition have to be rare if miracles occurred all the time they wouldn't get our attention would they we'd go hey this stuff happens all the time it's no big deal i mean imagine if people rose from the dead routinely what would the resurrection of christ mean to us nothing you go to somebody go jesus rose from the dead to prove he was god and the guy goes so what uncle leroy just rose from the dead two weeks ago now i got to give the inheritance back no it's gotta be a rare event if it's gonna get your attention they can't be miracles happening all the time because miracles in the bible are used to confirm a message from god there that the sign confirms the sermon they got to be rare events although i submit to you there's a lot of things that happen routinely every day that if they didn't happen routinely we'd call them miracles how many women in here well how many moms do we have in here you you've seen your own children born how many dads have seen your own children born now when you see that which it happens every day when you see that you don't go evolution right you go wow this is amazing how does this happen but it happens every day do you realize for atheism to be true every single spiritual experience and miracle claim in the history of the world has to be false is that possible yeah it's possible is it reasonable no so miracles are certainly possible if god exists last point is the new testament true we know the truth exists god exists miracles are possible but did god do a miracle about 2 000 years ago the miracle known as the resurrection because if he did then christianity is true if he didn't it's not now i'm going to give you eight lines of evidence they're telling the truth we don't have time much time here to cover any of them we're just going to look at two of them very briefly but i'll list them they all begin with the letter e to help you remember them they have their early sources the new testament's written early and it has early sources there are eyewitness details throughout the text this is all in chapter 10 if i don't have enough faith to be an atheist there's embarrassing stories i'll explain that in a minute and as well as excruciating deaths we're going to look at those two three and four number five there's embedded confirmation this is the best evidence you've never heard about that is telling you that the new testament writers are independently witnessing the same historical events i don't have time to explain it right here but if you want to read about it just google two words undesigned coincidences undesigned coincidences in fact a scholar from western michigan university lydia mcgrew wrote a book on this about three or four years ago called hidden in plain view when you see these undesigned coincidences you're going to go yeah these new testament writers had to witness the same events they couldn't have made this up also expected predictions that deals with old testament prophecy if i only had one old testament prophecy to make my case on it would be isaiah chapter 53 written 700 years in advance there's extra biblical writers those are people like uh josephus suetonius dallas flagon household names i know that live within 150 years of jesus's life and they reference jesus and the apostles and what happened to them and when you add up their brief references you get a story congruent with the new testament finally there's the explosive growth of the church out of jerusalem which is really hard to explain because christianity could have been squashed immediately by the romans or the jews who wanted it squash by simply doing one simple thing what could they have done taken the body out of the tomb everybody knew where the tomb was they didn't do that they couldn't do that why because jesus was still using his body he had resurrected but you could have stopped christianity easily by saying stop all this nonsense talk about the resurrection he's dead here's his body couldn't do that now as i say we only have time to cover a couple of these let's just cover embarrassing stories embarrassing stories what's that this is a principle historians use to try and discover if a writer or group of writers is telling the truth 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 things that make yourself look bad right you're not going to embarrass yourself in fact let me ask you guys this 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 in here have ever lied to make yourself look bad 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 have filled the new testament with embarrassing details that make themselves look bad and that that look that looks bad right there i don't know how that happened what happened there you saw it all stand by okay well i actually don't need the the the powerpoint for this right here so hang on a second stand by for vectors victor call for clearance clearance boom that's why we call this the dove factor they're not making this up i mean think about this peter their leader is called satan by jesus 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 call you satan what do you think peter would have said have him call you satan look i'm the leader here this doesn't look good and then peter says lord i'll never deny you what does he wind up doing he denies him three times and then at the crucifixion all the disciples 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 in here invent that no if i was there i'd make myself look good wouldn't you i'd write something down like this let's see we marched right down there and we overpowered that elite roman guard 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 it was mr pants while the women went down discovered the empty tomb and oh by the way why would you never say the women were the first witnesses in that culture forget about the fact it was embarrassing to men it was but why would you never invent that little detail anyway 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 really were as embarrassing as it was they're just telling the truth i actually had a woman come up to me once she said frank 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 hadn't thought of that because 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 han what the oh yeah i forgot to tell you the nuke blew up i've been hot for three days what's for dinner he's not gonna tell you i can't even believe this next verse is in the new testament but it is this is the great commission you know the great commission go therefore make disciples of all nations notice he doesn't say make believers right there's a difference anyway as jesus is giving his disciples to great commission before he's about to ascend to heaven i mean this is it it says that they're standing there and some of the disciples believed but some doubted this is matthew 28 17. some believe but some doubted they're standing there going you see that guy over there yeah that guy over there is jesus oh no it can't be jesus i'm talking he was killed not long ago no i'm telling you it's him look jesus is dead the romans killed him it's him look the spear went in his side blood and water came out they crucified him he's dead it's him it can't be it is how do you know the women told me they're not making this up there's even potentially embarrassing details about jesus in there jesus is called out of his mind by his own family who want to seize him and take him home this is in mark chapter 3 his own family thinks he's nuts you may have heard the scholars say 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 they think he's crazy he's out of his mind jesus is called a drunkard he's called demon possessed 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 doing 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 tamar no [Music] in fact there's a lot of embarrassing people in the bloodline judah from where we get the term jew not a good guy read about him in genesis also david david a man after god's own heart yeah but he's a liar adulterer and a murderer gee i guess there's hope for the rest of us bathsheba's in there do you know that matthew when he gets to her in the genealogy won't mention her name you know what he says instead uriah's wife that's islam right who was uriah husband of bathsheba whom david had killed so he could have bathsheba he's telling the truth but it's a slam this is embarrassing you wouldn't find this in the pharaoh's bloodline the pharaoh would never let his historian say that he was the product of a prostitute would he no but the jewish messiah is he's just telling the truth there's more embarrassing details in the book but we've got to do one more and that is excruciating deaths and this is the argument that says that these men who are in a position to know whether jesus had risen from the dead or not died brutal deaths when they could have saved themselves by simply saying it never happened now it's important to keep in mind that all the writers of the new testament with the exception of luke were all jewish believers in yahweh they thought they were god's chosen people they had no motive to invent this in fact what did the new testament writers have to gain by making up a new religion what did they get by saying jesus had resurrected 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 so first we get kicked out of the synagogue then beat and tortured and killed well sign me up you know what a great idea no i don't think so in fact they had every motive to say the resurrection did not happen not every motive to say it did sometimes i get this question are there any non-christian writers to talk about jesus and the apostles i mentioned them briefly a few minutes ago there are but you know what is often underneath that question an illicit assumption what's the illicit assumption you really can't trust the new testament writers because they were religious people and we know religious people embellish things you can only trust the secular writers if you think about that for more than 10 seconds you realize how stupid that is why what did these people have to gain by saying it was true nothing they had everything to lose by saying it was true my friend jay warner wallace is the cold case homicide detective you may have seen on dateline he's been on dateline more than any other cold case detective because he solves murders that are decades old and jim says that whenever 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 hundred reasons just three or a combination of these three there was either a sex issue a money issue or a power issue sex money or power those are the three things that cause people to commit crimes and they're the three things that cause many of us to do evil as well they're all good things sex money and power but they're so good we'll take shortcuts to get them so if you're gonna say that the new testament is some sort of conspiracy you've got to find one of one or more of those three motivators to make that plausible question did the new testament writers get real popular with the ladies by saying jesus had resurrected from the dead did they get money no they weren't 21st century prosperity gospel preachers did they get power no paul had power as a persecutor of christianity and then he became the persecuted once he became a christian they didn't get any of that no they had everything to lose and they did lose everything temporarily by saying it was true they never would have invented this and then why would they die for a known lie they wouldn't you say wait a minute frank if you're going to say martyr improves christianity don't you have to say 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 one major difference for our purposes here the muslim martyrs of today haven't witnessed anything that tells them that islam is true they just have faith the new testament martyrs on the other hand were eyewitnesses they saw jesus they touched jesus they ate with jesus they verified with their own senses that jesus had risen from the dead many people 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 martyrs were in a position to know whether it was a lie or not and they went to their deaths anyway now what i'm about to say to those of you that believe the bible's inerrant like i do is going to sound like heresy but it's not stick with me 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 you say how can that be do you realize there were thousands of christians before a line of the new testament was ever written how how could that be question was paul a christian when he wrote the book of romans of course he was why because the risen jesus appeared to him was john a christian when he wrote the gospel of john of course he was because jesus appeared to him was matthew a christian before wrote the gospel of course he was why because he witnessed something they were christians and then they wrote it down not the other way around because you see christianity did not originate with a book christianity originated with an event if they never wrote it down it would still be true although we wouldn't know much about it in fact you could say it this way the new testament writers did not create the resurrection the resurrection created the new testament writers you wouldn't have jews in the first century who thought they were god's chosen people and didn't think a man could be god that was blasphemy and didn't believe in a resurrection in the middle of the time only at the end of time you would never have them invent this and then go die for it what they're writing down is what they saw and that's why you can trust it there's no motive to invent it every motive not to say it was true but they said it anyway now there's a lot more evidence that we don't have time to cover but let's cover the whole thing again real quick does truth exist if someone says there's no truth you're going to say is that true does god exist first argument we went through cosmological i know it was like four hours ago right cosmological second argument teleological third moral from those three arguments we get a spaceless timeless immaterial powerful personal intelligent cause that created and sustains all things and is also moral are miracles possible what's the greatest miracle in the bible the very first verse and even atheists are admitting the data for that they don't think it's god but what else could it be and did jesus rise in the dead we just saw two of eight lines of evidence that he did so if you want to go further the books are and dvds are available out the back door text the word evidence again to 44222 and we'll send you this powerpoint presentation we're now teaching online courses i teach some others teach them where we go live on zoom so we can do q and a together check out our website for those we're on youtube twitter and facebook in fact this thing is being actually streamed on on youtube and facebook and instagram right now so check out our youtube channel there's over a thousand short videos from the college campus that you can check out in fact by the way we're so into youtube twitter and facebook we've actually combined these three into one social media platform we call it you twit face okay it's kind of a jersey thing you may want to sign up for your twit face don't forget about the podcast it's called i don't have enough faith to be an atheist directv on and roku on wednesday nights and then finally if you don't do anything else download the cross-examined app two words in the app store cross examined it's got the podcast on it the tv show it's got a quick answer section and it's free all right before we get to your questions final two minutes it's true but so what if it's true what does it mean we know what this means it means that somebody actually did die for you that's what it means now when i was in the navy i was in naval aviation we had to earn golden wings which were fairly hard to earn but there's nothing more difficult in the united states navy to earn than a golden trident that's what the seals earn very few people that start seal training make it through those that do wear that trident with pride it is their military identity when michael monsoor was buried in rose crane cemetery in san diego california just about every seal on the west coast showed up for his funeral and when they passed his casket they took off their tridents and they pressed them into his casket they took their identity and put their identity in their savior the one that died for them that's what we're supposed to do but no our culture says put your identity in your ethnic group or put your identity in your race there's only one race the human race or put your identity in your boyfriend or your girlfriend or your sexual identity or your vocation or your bank account no none of those things are ultimate ladies and gentlemen you were meant i was meant to accept our identity from our savior and in christianity you don't achieve your identity you receive your identity if you have to achieve your identity you're going to forever be frustrated why because someone can always do it better than you and you're never going to know if you measure up enough an eyewitness of jesus who wrote a biography we call the gospel of john said he has given you the right to become a child of god and be adopted into his family which means you're an heir of the fortune why wouldn't you accept that that's your true identity that can never be taken away it's nothing you earn you don't achieve it you simply receive it because he actually died for you but he didn't just die he rose again and by trusting in him you can have all your moral transgressions forgiven and you can be given his righteousness what could be better than that you're given his righteousness there's got to be some questions about this so if anyone has any questions this is the great clint bolin ladies and gentlemen he handles all the video that's being streamed everywhere hand for clint if you would and those are the people out there watching and since no one likes to ask the first question we're going to move right on to the second question second question just come right down to the mic so people out in youtube land can hear you and it can be on anything we've covered here or even stuff we haven't covered so jump right in right now after the first person starts everybody will will start coming down let me also say that if you want to uh we'd really appreciate it if you would actually rate the event here oh stand by by going to this text the word event to 855-909-0582 if you text the word event there uh we're just going to ask you like two or three questions on your cell phone and that'll help us improve what we're doing here so if you don't mind doing that yes sir go ahead hey what's your name my name is rick hey rick go ahead hey frank i have followed you for a long time and i really enjoy you thank you but i've got a question for you yes sir i've got to get your perspective on something it appears to me to be an inconsistency um and i know you have probably come across it before but in matthew um when the the crowd is asking for a sign and you talked about it earlier um jesus says there'll be no sign except the sign of jonah um the son of man will be in the belly of the earth for for three days and three nights okay well in other places he says the son of man will rise on the third day and if if he's crucified on friday and he rises on sunday then that's two nights so so how do you explain that or how do you reconcile that yeah it's a good question it's a jewish idiom because in judaism they would consider any part of the day to be a part of a day and a night so three days and three nights is just a phrase they would use to represent any part of any of those three days so if he went into the tomb on friday and came out on sunday morning that would still be considered three days and three nights it's a jewish idiom okay all right can i ask another sure yeah that's it you're done go ahead i i watch you uh weekly okay and and you always have an answer i knew you'd have an answer for for that question what question have you been asked that you that you said hey i'm gonna have to get back to you on that one i mean you you always seem to mean from a student or my wife uh uh from from a student okay one that you didn't have an immediate answer for well there's several things i i don't know if i can think of one off the top of my head but people always ask what are the hardest questions to answer and in reality you hear the same questions over and over again because we're all similar people and we have the same questions we want answers to the hardest thing is not necessarily answering questions it's answering questions in two minutes because you can't cover the waterfront i mean if you came up here and said why does god allow certain evils right or what good is evil what what are the good things evil does we could we could talk about that for hours and so i can't give a complete answer no one can i like what john lennox says the brilliant uh oxford professor who happens to be a christian when he's answering questions he says i don't have a complete answer for you but i have a doorway to an answer right people write books on this stuff if you go through all the scriptures you could spend hours and hours on the question of evil and so for somebody to in two minutes cover that it's impossible so i think that's the hardest thing about answering questions is you can only give a real brief answer a doorway to an answer not a complete answer especially on big issues like evil right those are the really hard ones all right thank you thank you rick appreciate it all right anyone else by the way you don't have to wait till somebody sits down you can just stand up behind him if you want yes sir what's your name my name is curtis hey curtis go ahead sir uh the canon as we know today consists of 66 books um over time that's changed evolved books have been added taken back out added taken back out revelations was come and gone a lot um my question is i mean there's some bibles that have the apocrypha in it today still so my question i guess would be is it worth exploring other books or is that um something that should be avoided okay let's talk about the canon for a second because what book should be in the bible is an important question and uh you people here's an example you get the question a lot right so you have a slide for it people go is this a stage question no this is a common question so we have slides for it because i can't even remember all this stuff myself right okay uh first of all what book should be in the bible and one point i want to make before we get started the canon which means the standard is not required for proving the resurrection okay you don't need uh to discover which books were inspired to know whether jesus rose again even if the books weren't inspired jesus has risen from the dead based on the evidence okay but anyway the canon i like what bruce metzger said at princeton he said the canon is a list of authoritative books more than it is an authoritative list of books what does he mean by that what he means is the church did not determine the canon the church discovered the canon the church didn't determine what books would be in the bible the church discovered what books should be in the bible which were inspired and how did they do that what they did is they tried to figure out was it written by a prophet of god was the writer confirmed by acts of god i.e miracles or someone who was confirmed as an eyewitness for example paul confirmed luke although luke was not an eyewitness paul confirmed him and actually said uh or quoted from luke's gospel it seems when he was talking about the uh the last supper also was it accepted by the people of god these are the tests they use now i would quibble a little bit with with how you characterize the question about the canon has changed books were taken out not taken out i don't think that's necessarily true early on there were some questions about whether say james should have been in there and revelation should been in there but once you got into the fourth century the 300s a.d when christianity became tolerable then you had those councils that got together and discovered what books should have been in the bible and there really wasn't a lot of dispute by that point in fact by even prior to that by about 108 a.d 108 a.d 25 of the 27 books we call the new testament had already been quoted by early church fathers as being authoritative okay but here's a few other things to consider what book should be in the bible gospels and acts are cited during the lifetimes of the apostles so we know that they're early they're quoted as authoritative and unique they're collected early in one volume called a codex it looks like a book that we have now it was they were publicly read and expounded commentaries were written on them the opponents admitted the gospels were written by the disciples and no other gospels were treated this way okay now why does the catholic church have a different old testament than the protestant church i'll give you the answer as i understand it and my co-author dr norman geisler wrote a book called roman catholics and evangelicals agreements and differences i think it's still an excellent book even though it's 25 years old even roman catholics have endorsed the book and i was brought up catholic because i'm from new jersey and it's the law i went to catholic high school okay but as as i see it it seems to me that the additional books of the old testament that were added by the roman catholic church at the council of trent beginning in about 1546 were books that the jews did not consider part of their old testament why are the catholics putting it in their old testament it seems to me because they were trying to counter luther and luther wanted to reform the church he didn't want to break away from the church he wanted to reform the church and when he did when he tried to do that the roman catholic church dug their heels in and said now we're adding these books or we're going to say these books have always been a part of the old testament because those books uh particularly i think it was second maccabees affirmed the idea that you could pray for the dead which was which is what indulgences was all about which is really what a riled up luther that you know you're giving money to the church so your mother soul can pop out of purgatory where are you getting that from second maccabees oh okay second maccabees isn't in the bible it is now right now roman catholics may dispute that but i think that's the best explanation as to why we have different old testaments now is it worth reading these works sure in fact first and second maccabees has some really good historical information in them i just don't think they're part of the inspired canon and even if there is a dispute remember while it's important it is the old testament christians are under the new covenant not the old covenant i 100 agree with everything you said i um i just know that there's some of the books uh uh in enoch for example which is pretty far-fetched when you read it you're like whoa how can this be possible but um so i wonder if your opinion might have been and i agree with you that um our bible now is a god-inspired book but i wondered if maybe you thought maybe some of those more far-fetched or i think that lunacy would be taken out by an individual well enoch uh i i am not an expert on the book of enoch but my friend michael heiser is and if you look up michael heiser h-e-i-s-e-r and go to his website you can read some articles he thinks enoch gives us some some good information about the jewish mindset at the time even though it's not an inspired book so these are books worth reading okay okay thank you thank you very much all right anyone else yes sir what's your name i'm jason go ahead jason how are you mate you signed this book for my bob uh yes of course i will do you want me to sign it now or later it doesn't matter let me do it later that's all right thank you jason actually clint has better penmanship he can sign it all right no yes sir go ahead gary's name um there's always a controversy between new a new world and old world uh-huh i don't understand why i'm kind of an old world or old because you look at the stars you can see that sometimes it takes millions of years for the light to get to us and the word says in the beginning god created the heavens which is both heaven and the universe and the earth and then it starts on the six days and the last in the in the last day it says god rested on the seventh day i would consider that we're still in the seventh day yeah i think that's probably true uh when people ask me how old is the universe i say i'm absolutely convinced that it's at least 59 years old okay all right i'll throw my mom in there it's at least 80 i'm 70. i'm seven all right well at least at least 70. okay when god created is not the issue that he created is and uh it depends on what is meant by genesis 1. i personally think that genesis 1 is a the creation story is a polemic against the egyptian creation story because in the egyptian creation story they have these gods who are inside the universe they're unexplained as to how they got there whether they were uncreated whether they were self-created which of course we know is impossible or they've always existed and they bring order the chaos yahweh's story is no no no no no god doesn't have to fight anybody to bring order to chaos god's outside the universe he creates everything and he brings order to chaos because look genesis 1 is written to people who just came out of egypt they've been there for 400 years they're walking through the desert right they're not asking the question i wonder how old this place is you know that's that's not their question they want to know is yahweh the true god or is are they the egyptian gods the true god and it seems to me that that's what that creation story is about and as you know there's poetic elements to it you've got first three days that are creating the next three days are filling day one and day four are congruent day two and day five day three and day six and as you just mentioned day seven seems to be when god rests and we're still in day seven now according to this account he's still resting in fact the word yom in hebrew can mean 24 hours it can mean 12 hours he called the light day the darkness night it could mean an indefinite period of time like if i were to say that peyton manning was a good quarterback in his day you wouldn't think he was good for just 24 hours right or it could mean an unending period of time and so the word day means several different things and in genesis 2 4 which is kind of a summary statement of the creation in genesis 1 it says in the day the lord created and that word de yom is referring to all six creation days so you're making assumptions no matter which way you go if you're trying to judge that it's old or young you're making assumptions you can't prove um a lot of the church goes back to some guy in ireland okay that came out with six thousand years you talked about the schofield reference bible yes yes i think it was him or bishop usher bishop okay yeah and that's what people go by i don't understand that's not a biblical well it's some guy's opinion some guy's opinion yeah that's what most of the church goes by well it might be look the earth could be old it could be young i think the better evidence is it's old and it doesn't really matter at the end of the day because when you get to heaven god isn't going to say did you think it was old or young no he's not going to he's going to say what you do with jesus so i agree with you okay thank you yes sir what's your name uh my name is maurice hey maurice the raiders are 3-0 aren't they yeah i don't even know man you don't even know you're wearing the raiders hat hey this is for fashion baby i'm just throwing this on oh this is fast i like it yeah i'm just being real with you not saying keep it funky all the time but uh i'm i'm curious so in our cultural landscape we tend to see a lot of um adjusting and movements especially when you think about uh people purportedly leaving the faith so a common no is two common notions you know the first is uh decolonization of your faith right meaning recognizing that global colonial expansion suppress the dignity and whatnot of other people groups but on the other side is so a desire to deep decolonize your faith seems to want to get back to something that's a little more pure purer than its current it's contemporary expression that's the first but then the second would be the idea of deconstructing your faith right so if your faith is constructed on the basis of a colonial ideology or framework many people are supposedly leaving the faith that they claim they once held for the sake of decolonizing or deconstruction so i'm curious as to your thoughts on on that uh it seems to me that deconstruction people are trying to arrive at their faith because they believe that that the faith had some sort of immoral aspect to it or it was used for immoral ends sure well that's true actually that christians did use their faith for immoral ends some christians bought into slavery some christians bought into segregation some christians bought into the crusades some christians bought into the spanish inquisition but you don't judge a religion or a philosophy by its heretics you judge a religion or philosophy by whether or not it's true sure and so i think what we need to do is look at the evidence and see whether or not it is true that god exists and jesus rose from the dead and if he has then he's god all we need to do then is to try and discover what jesus said and try and order our lives according to it whether or not people have used it for immoral ends is another question we got to be concerned with whether or not it's true sure in a follow-up um excuse me a follow-up i'm curious as to how you would counsel people who are in currently in that stage of hey i've recognized some of the discrepancies and historical brokenness or um unethical acts christians have perpetuated yet i want to maintain my faith in jesus but i cannot abide the things that have happened so one thing that i've always said is again you know i'm not out to to defend christians uh-huh more so i want to defend the faith yes rather i i think we have to contend or at least address some of the ethical challenges that christianity or people who claim to be christians have reported especially when you think about matters of justice and whatnot exactly but it seems to me that the only world view that is going to solve injustice is the christian worldview because we all believe that we're all one in christ and that there's no such thing as a caste system there's no such thing as racism there's no such thing as any of these negative things that have been done in the past illicit use of violence right these are all things that christians have done illegitimately by not following christianity and it seems to me maurice what some people don't recognize is if they're going to leave christianity for some other world view if they're going to deconstruct their faith here they're going to reconstruct some other faith over here and the people that adhere to that have also done evil because we've all done evil amen right we're all evil that's why we need a savior none of us have been pure in history so thank god there's jesus because without him none of us are making it right i figured i'd throw a little lob up there thanks brother god bless you nice hat oh thanks yes ma'am what's your name hi elena elena go ahead elena um so i've heard two arguments over the years the first of which is you cannot lose your salvation or the once saved always saved yes and the second one is salvation is something that must be maintained or you can lose yourself do you mind but taking the mass down just for this yeah yeah so i can we can hear better because start over again i've heard two arguments over the years the first of which is uh you cannot lose your salvation or the once saved always saved and the second one is salvation is something that must be maintained or something you can lose um an argument i've heard for the first one is there's a verse that says no one can take you from the palm of my hand and one of the many arguments i've heard for the second one is the parable of the talents so my question is what do you believe and what is your greatest defeating argument i think the parable of the talents is talking about the um it's talking about judgment based on the gifts that god has given you i don't think it's talking about whether or not someone's saved um because in the end it says that they go to the person who gave them the talents in the end and he says um depart from me i never knew thee oh okay i see what you're saying that that aspect of it i'd have to go back that's luke 12. i i don't all right i'd have to go back and look at that that is interesting though but at the end what jesus does in the judgment is he takes a talent from the guy who did nothing with it and he gives it to the guy who did more with it and actually doubled his talent and so he takes from the least and gives to the guy who had more this is the opposite of what's called equity this is called justice right he's giving it to the one who worked because this guy didn't work so it has to do with justice and judgment but i don't know if the parable of the talents has much to do with whether or not you're saved i personally think once saved always saved but i realize christians disagree with that and one of the reasons i think once saved always saved is when jesus says in john 5 24 he says he who believes has passed from death into life in other words you get eternal life when you believe you don't get eternal life when you die if you get eternal life when you believe and it's eternal by definition you can't lose it now what you can do is you can't lose your sanctification because see there's two aspects of this there's justification which happens immediately as soon as you believe and then there's sanctification which is an ongoing process where hopefully you're becoming more like jesus this sanctification thing can go up and down but once you're justified you're justified and what you can't what you don't gain by moral effort you can't lose by moral ineptitude can i ask another question go ahead yeah um i do know in the uh also in other places in the new testament it it lists several sins and it'll be like adulterers fornicators et cetera et cetera they do not enter into the kingdom of heaven so um i realize we all sin yeah i'll send daily right um but if a person accepts jesus as their lord and savior but they go back to those ways those sinning ways and they become an active person in that sin um what okay well you're talking about first corinthians 6 and also first corinthians 5. first corinthians 6 paul lists all the things that separate us from god and this is one of the clobber verses that people who believe that same-sex behavior is okay will point to and say that's a clobber verse and it's basically saying homosexuals and others will not inherit the kingdom of god but what people don't read about that is every one of us is in that list it's not just homosexuals it's covetous it says everyone in this room is covetous what paul is laying out is he's laying out all these sins are going to keep you out of the kingdom but then after that he says but that is what some of you were but you've been washed you've been sanctified all of us are on our way to hell unless we're sanctified regardless of our sexual behavior because we've we we've committed at least one of those sins probably a lot more of those sins in that list he mentions there so he is saying that same-sex behavior and covetousness and adultery and all these other things he stealing theft all this thing they're all wrong but all of us have done at least one of those things and maybe are doing them now now regard you regarding the second part of your question where you're saying what if somebody claims to be a christian but then slides back into sin and thinks the sin is okay is that what you're asking uh yeah and they become an active person okay well this is going to sound harsh but this is paul in 1st corinthians 5 he says expel the immoral brother hand him over to satan so that satan may teach him a lesson that's what he says in first corinthians 5. then if you read second corinthians if you're reading between the lines it seems that the guy that he sent out of the congregation in first corinthians has come to his senses and is now back in the congregation what was that guy doing he was sleeping with his father's wife and he thought it was okay and paul says kick the guy out do you realize that everybody is welcome in the in in the church the only person welcome not welcome in a church is someone who claims to be a christian and denies known sin as sin that person paul says kick out because a little bit of leaven can get into the entire loaf and he's kicking the guy out not only to protect the congregation but to hopefully bring the guy to his senses so is that person saved or is it just his own opinion so his salvation based off of what you think you are because i can't judge whether the person's saved but i would be very very concerned about that person you might also go to first corinthian i'm sorry first john 3 which talks about stain and known sin okay it's not where any of us want to be do we all sin yeah we all do but if we're now advocating sin we might not be saved to begin with okay make sense yes sir thank you thank you yes sir um what's your name my name is gabe hey gabe um so there's this uh theory of existence that's been somewhat popularized by figures like elon musk and joe rogan this idea or theory called simulation theory and the idea is that all of our existence or our existence is like a simulation or something run by higher beings right something like that i'd like to hear your thoughts on that well if my mind is being run by a higher being it wouldn't matter right there would ultimately have to be a god at a point but um i guess the the point of that theory is to draw away from that and i guess it's a somewhat of an excuse to to draw attention away from yeah it can be gay basically what they're saying is we're living in the matrix yes right and well there's no way of disproving that it could be that we're in the matrix and that this alien being has played with our minds to make us think that we have memories that aren't really true i mean is that possible yeah it's possible i just think it's silly right there's no way of disproving it there's no way to disprove you're in the matrix without getting outside the matrix it's just like there's no way to know you're having a dream until you do what until you wake up you got to get outside the illusion to know it's just an illusion so elon musk and others may say that but what evidence do they have for it there is no evidence okay it's just a speculation so you don't have to refute something that has no evidence behind it you just need to say what evidence do you have for it see when someone says something it's not your job to refute what they say it's their job to support what they say so if someone says we're just in this big simulation what evidence do you have for that excuse me and see what they say how did you come to that conclusion why do you think that's true it's just it's just a fairy tale which could be true but there's no way you know whether it's true or not okay right yep all right thank you thank you yes sir what's your name i'm stephen hey stephen go ahead everyone thank you for being here thank all these youth for being here i don't know if you all doing this for a great if you're just good christians but hey yeah happy to see you all here man but uh go ahead sir i was just wondering if you believe we are saved by faith or saved by works or if it's both who's more saved is it a man that has god in his heart and accepts jesus but then liz lives sinfully and does no good works or is it someone that maybe does a bunch of good works as a smoke screen for all the evil they're trying to cover up have no belief in jesus but they do a bunch of good works yeah i think it's neither i think we're saved by grace through faith to do good works as paul says in ephesians chapter two that we're prepared to do good works martin luther said something about this where he said that we're saved by faith alone but our faith is not alone in other words when we accept the free gift of salvation out of gratitude for what christ has done for us we should therefore live a life of good works but the works don't save us the works are the fruit they're not the root of our salvation the root of our salvation is grace acquired through faith but the fruit of our salvation are good works that god prepared us in advance to do ephesians chapter 2 verse amen you can't see the light but you can see what the light shines on yes sir amen thank you stephen oh what you guys can't stay for four hours what's wrong with you i mean come on thanks for coming yes sir what's up frank my name is jack hey jack my question revolves around free will yes and i just wanted to uh hear your take on free will so okay god is in control of everything so i'm sure it was his plan when he sent christ to earth to die for us um he knew that was going to happen and if he's in control and if he controls everything and if it was it was his will for him to send christ to die for us judas had to uh judas betrayed jesus and in order for that to happen judas would have had to do you believe that judas made the choice to uh betray jesus or is it god that made it happen is their free will yes it's both when god elects to create this universe he knows how it's going to turn out he knows that judas is going to betray him but that doesn't mean he's causing judas to betray him he knows he will but he's not causing it uh illustration a a a new mother puts her baby down at night and she knows at some point during the night that baby's gonna wake up and want to eat she knows that but because she knows that is she causing the baby to wake up no no knowledge does not necessarily imply causation since god is all-knowing no matter what we do he's going to know we're going to do it but that doesn't mean he's directly causing us to do it he's not taking our free will away he's observing what we're doing and he in effect brought it into existence because when he elected to create this universe he elected the outcome because he's all-knowing and when he creates the universe he knows how it's going to turn out but that doesn't mean he's taken away our free will this is why my co-author dr norman geiser wrote a book years ago called chosen but free we're still chosen but we're also free okay thank you all right thank you all righty anyone else is that it ladies and gentlemen all right couple things i just want to mention first of all thanks for coming out tonight thanks for the people watching out there on youtube and facebook and instagram uh a friend of mine has written a new book that you want to get i'm not talking about my books out there but jay warner wallace the cold case homicide detective just wrote a book called person of interest trust me you want to get this book it's got over 400 drawings in it that augment what he's trying to tell you and when you see the kind of impact jesus of nazareth has had on culture you're going to be blown away it's an amazing book person of interest for those of you watching out there will be at marshall university next monday night so hope to see you there and if any you want to tell anybody about it tell them about it this is also going to be up on youtube probably in about 10 minutes once this stream stops so if you want to go back and see any of the points again or any of the q a again you can alright folks thanks so much thanks for being here god bless

Channel: Cross Examined

Views: 14,300

Rating: 4.8917699 out of 5

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

Id: PeFYLzlcBIs

Length: 137min 3sec (8223 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 29 2021