AnswersBlog | Christianity and Reasons for Faith – by Wayne R. Spencer

September 29, 2012 I attended a great conference in Dallas called Contending with Christianity’s Critics. It was at Watermark Community Church in Dallas (click for Watermark church website). It was a great conference. It makes me think about the fact that as Christians we have been given so much but the unbelieving world has no idea what they are lacking. Too often Christians have to pursue studying apologetics outside their own church because it is not taught inside the church. Apologetics is thought of as answers to the challenges from nonchristian scholars and atheists. But, usually the skeptics are not really looking for answers, the Christians are. Christians are looking for answers because they’ve heard the skeptics and aren’t sure what to think about what they’ve heard. Christians are sometimes a little rattled by challenging questions from nonchristian scholars. Questions from friends or even kids can be just as challenging also. It is a bit disturbing some of the ideas we hear from our culture today, often proposed deliberately to make people question Christianity. The nonchristian skeptics do need the answers, but it seems to take a miracle to get them to look for the answers or be open enough to seriously consider them. There aren’t many nonchristian skeptics who go to apologetics conferences, though there may be a few. It is the Christians who go to them. It was said that there were over 3,000 attenders at the Contending with Christianity’s Critics conference in Dallas. It was great to see such a turn-out. The email I got before the conference said they were sold out. So, we Christians need to find ways to pass on reasons for our faith to nonchristians around us who do not go to where the answers are.

Today people have become so skeptical of there being any truth people can rely on. But there seems to be a resurgence of interest in apologetics. There is a whole new slate of individuals who are great speakers on apologetics. At the Dallas conference here is a list of the speakers and their topics.

Todd Wagner, “The Importance of Apologetics for Every Believer and Every Church”
Greg Koukl, “Bad Arguments Against Religion”
Dan Wallace, “How Badly Did the Early Scribes Corrupt the New Testament?”
Frank Turek, “If God Exists, Why Does He Allow Evil?”
John Stonestreet, “Defense and Offense: The Call to Care for Culture”
Ravi Zacharias, “The End of Reason: A Response to the New Atheists”
William Lane Craig, “Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God’s Existence”

I’ll just point out some highlights. Todd Wagner, pastor of Watermark Church, was good in pointing out that love is more important than knowing answers. It should lead back to the gospel and to what people really need.

Greg Koukl, from the ministry Stand to Reason , had a lot of good points that could be of practical help in talking to nonchristians. I like the way he described how faith works. Evidence gives us knowledge (such as knowledge about planes for instance). Then based on the knowledge you act in trust (such as getting on a plane). So Biblical faith is not a “blind” leap, but a step taken with knowledge of what you are doing. Another good thing from Koukl was what if someone says “Christians are stupid.” What do you say to that? How about this? “Ok, so let’s grant for the sake of the argument that Christians are indeed stupid (they certainly can be).” Now, so what? That doesn’t deal with anything. The question is, is Christianity true? The truth of Christianity does not really depend on how good or how smart Christians are.

Dan Wallace is an expert on textual criticism and New Testament manuscripts. He showed some reasons why we can have confidence in the New Testament. One thing I didn’t realize was about when the King James Bible was written compared to what we have today. Some skeptics will try to claim that because of all the variant manuscripts and copying errors in the Greek New Testament, we can’t know what the original really said. But consider this. In 1611 the number of Greek manuscripts the translators had to go on was only seven manuscripts! Today, we have over 5800! So this means you can figure out where the copying mistakes were and know real well what the text should really say. He also talked about the famous “number of the beast” in Revelation, about the antichrist. Wallace says there are some Greek manuscripts that say the number is 616 instead of 666. He said he has personally examined some of these manuscripts and he is not sure which number it should be. He kind of left this as a mystery. There are a few things like that about the New Testament manuscripts. But they don’t create serious problems.

Frank Turek spoke about answering atheism. He is from crossexamined.org and ImpactApologetics.com . He dealt with a number of things but what I thought was especially good was about the question, “Why doesn’t God take away evil?” If God took away all evil, that would mean humans would not have free will. We’d be like robots, which God does not want. So God gives people time to respond to him and then eventually he will put an end to all evil. But our sin has to be dealt with first.

John Stonestreet is from the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. See Breakpoint.org or colsoncenter.org. I had not heard Stonestreet before. He reminded me a lot of Chuck Colson and Francis Scheaffer. He addressed the loss of values in our culture and how the truth is sort of drowned out by many other things. I like something he said, “Christianity is a way of being human in God’s world.”

Ravi Zacharias and William Lane Craig were some of the “big guns” of the conference. Both were top notch. It was a privilege hearing Ravi Zacharias in person. He described our society as without shame, without reason, and without meaning. His talk was much deeper than just this but this stood out to me. William Lane Craig did his presentation with an empty chair for atheist Richard Dawkins, similar to Clint Eastwood at the Republican National Convention. Dawkins would not really have sound answers to the arguments for God’s existence. Dr. Craig is very knowledgable about philosophers ideas on the subject of God’s existence. No wonder Dawkins hasn’t debated Dr. Craig.

I’d recommend these speakers, though I would not agree completely with William Lane Craig about the Big Bang or Genesis. Young age creationism is usually left out of apologetics conferences. I think this should not be. But I am glad these men are out there. They are doing a lot of good.

Recently on August 23rd 2012 Bill Nye, known for his PBS TV program “The Science Guy” posted a video on YouTube called “Creationism is Not Appropriate for Children.” I would much commend Nye’s efforts to get kids interested in science. His TV program was meant to get kids interested in science and present it a way that made it fun. Bill Nye has spoken about evolution before. However, he made some statements against creationism that I would say are unrealistic. He has also told parents not to teach their kids creationism. I would say Nye’s comments are unfortunate and they reflect several common miconceptions about creationism.

One major misconception from Nye is that evolution is only questioned in the United States. Boy, is this wrong! Several nations, other than the U.S. have sizable creation ministries, including Russia, Britian, Australia, and South Korea. These are just the larger ones. These organizations would all be likely to have some full time staff, including well qualified scientists. Some of them may have hundreds of people involved, including people with science degrees. The Creation Research Society based in the United States has over 600 voting members. A voting member must have a graduate degree in a field of science. I’ve heard the organizations in Moscow and in South Korea are also large but I don’t have numbers. Creation Ministries International (CMI) is out of Australia and they have a large readership in their technical peer-reviewed journal and their nontechnical magazine. CMI has offices in Canada, Britian, and United States. Then there are probably hundreds of smaller creation groups, some of college students, some not. These are not just in the United States, though it’s true the U.S. probably has more of them. There has even been several European conferences on creationism where people come together from all over Europe.

The home school movement has also had a big part in “spreading” the creation message, for parents who do not agree with Bill Nye and actually want their kids to be exposed to creationism and intelligent design. Home Schooling is not done only in the United States either. Home schooled kids often are a bit better at critical thinking, I think partly because of the different points of view they are exposed to in their home education.

I could tell stories that suggest that in some places in Eastern Europe and Russia, there may actually be more openness to creationism than in the United States. So I would say there is great promise of creationism growing in acceptance around the world. This is not just true among scientific lay people, but also among people trained in science. Knowing more science does not necessarily make someone more likely to believe evolution.

Nye also makes a statement to the effect that to reject evolution makes things complicated for you because there is so much science understood to support evolution. Well, there are indeed implications that if creationism is true, there is much about origins science that needs to be completely rethought! But creationists have answers to the questions that come up, depending on the research they have done. Some questions still need more research and there are things we may not have enough evidence to be sure about. But the answers from creationism are better than the answers from evolution. Nye mentions fossils, radioactivity, and starlight as evidence for “deep time” (billions of years of time). I’ve been studying these questions for a long time and evolution does not deal with the evidence nearly as well as scientists generally think. Creationists do not have definitive answers to everything, but creationism can handle the questions at least as well and often better than evolutionary science. In the articles on my website (creationanswers.net) I try to glean from the best work from creationists and make it understandable for readers. If Bill Nye wants to find out about the creationist view on these questions, he would have a lot of study to do. While scientists have been saying for years that creationists don’t do research and don’t publish in peer-reviewed journals, creationists with a science background have been doing a lot of research. There is a lot of published peer-reviewed technical material from creationists that goes back to the 1960’s. If anyone wants to know how to get this information they can ask me I’ll tell them.

In the video, Bill Nye says parents should not teach their kids creationism because that would make their kids illiterate. This is completely wrong and parents know better than this. It is not illiterate or ignorant to reject evolution. Some believe evolution and some don’t but you cannot infer that those who reject it do not understand it, or that they do not know enough science. What Nye apparently cannot fathom is that many people reject evolution with full accurate knowledge of it. There are thousands of people around the world who at one time were people who taught evolution, were well informed about evolution, and promoted evolution but who changed to a creation viewpoint because of the scientific evidence. I’m not just guessing when I say thousands because of what I know about creation organizations; but I wouldn’t have exact numbers. But there are very few, in comparison, who were well-informed creationists (of the young age literal Genesis perspective) who promoted creationism but then rejected it and started promoting evolution because of the scientific evidence. Note that I do not consider college students starting college believing Biblical creation to be “well-informed.” So I would not include them in this. Why would this be so, about the lopsidedness of well-informed people changing views?

Bill Nye says that creationism, which he refers to as a world view, in a couple of centuries will no longer exist. I hope Nye isn’t holding his breath for this to happen. Creationism has grown in its acceptance by more and more people over the last 30 years, in spite of being shut out of public schools and universities. I think the unfair discriminatory treatment of people questioning evolution tends to make more of the general public reject evolution and move to a creation perspective. The dogmatic way evolution is often taught in public schools is also a factor in people accepting creationism. There are various views on creation from Christians, Jews, and Muslims. (There is also a Muslim creationist organization by the way in Turkey.) I wish Nye would take the time to seriously investigate creationism, but from the best sources.

Christianity and Reasons for Faith – by Wayne R. Spencer