Adam Johnson

What if evolution is true? This is the second part of an article where I’m attempting to answer this question: does evolution prove that Christianity is false? I’ve chosen to write about this subject because I’ve encountered many people who have rejected Christianity because they think evolution is true; in other words, they think these two beliefs are mutually exclusive. In the first part of this article, I began by stating the obvious: if evolution is false, then it surely doesn’t prove that Christianity is false. I went on to summarize the strongest argument against evolution that I’m aware of. Now, here in part two, I’ll argue that even if evolution is true, this still doesn’t prove that Christianity is false.

Does the Bible condone the use of apologetics? The intuition found in the first cause, design, and moral arguments for the existence of God seem to be affirmed in Romans 1 and 2. Many cultures concluded that a supreme being exists based on general revelation alone, and this is not a coincidence. This is confirmed by Paul’s speech in Acts 17. Arguing that Jesus is God is also confirmed by the Bible when Jesus tells people to use a “miracle test” and look at His miracles to know if He is really God. In the Old Testament, God gives Moses miracles to prove a message was given to him by God. Moses said to test claims to have messages from God by evaluating the evidence, and the Bible affirms that we should use historical investigation to see if its claims are true. However, some Christians still object to the use of apologetics. Modern philosophy has influenced the church to separate faith from reason and look down on reason and think of faith as uncertainty. Thomas Aquinas used faith and reason together and did particularly well in balancing general and special revelation properly. It can be said that philosophy is the study of general revelation and theology is the study of special revelation. Many verses that Christians use to try to say that the Bible opposes using reason to ascertain truth are not interpreted properly in context. Yes, the Bible is both self-sufficient and self-authenticating, but we must be careful about what we conclude from the meaning of those terms.

How do we know what is a message from God and what isn’t? We know by miracles, which authenticate that something is really from God. There were three unique time periods when many miracles took place, and these were the times that major parts of the Bible were being written: the time of Moses, the time of the prophets, and the time of Jesus and the apostles. There is good historical evidence that the apostles did miracles to back up their claims, so the New Testament should include the books that the apostles said were from God. The early church did the historical research necessary to conclude that the 27 books in the New Testament were really messages from God and that books like the so-called "Gospel of Thomas" were not. Early church councils like the Council of Nicaea didn’t make the Bible; they merely verified which books were really affirmed by the apostles. An apostle’s affirmation of a book was more important than its authorship, because not all books (Mark, Luke, Hebrews) were written by an apostle. For the Old Testament, we can look at the development of the Hebrew canon and what Jesus and the apostles affirmed to determine what books should be in the Old Testament. There is disagreement among Christians about the “apocryphal” or “deuterocanonical” books. Catholic and Orthodox Christians accept some of them while Protestants reject all of them. Even though we disagree on this, if God exists and Jesus is God, then Christianity is true, even if we’ve made minor mistakes about which books should be included in the Bible.

What reasons and evidence do we have to believe that the Bible is really from God? Our main source of evidence for this is that those people who wrote the Bible, who had messages from God, were able to do miracles to prove or authenticate that their messages were from God. Jesus and His disciples claimed that the Old and New Testaments were from God, and then they did authenticating miracles to back up those claims. However, the Bible is a collection of documents written by human beings, not by God Himself. The doctrine of inspiration tells us how God used human beings to communicate His messages. Even though the Bible is from God, there are two senses in which it can be considered true: it can be true for all major historical events but may have small errors with minor details, or it can be completely correct in all details. This latter sense is called the doctrine of inerrancy, the claim that the Bible contains no errors. Christians believe the Bible is inerrant because God inspired the text of Scripture, and God cannot lie. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy was written in order to explain what Christians do and don’t mean when they speak about the Bible being inerrant. However, even if we’re wrong about inerrancy, Christianity would still be true, because God still exists and Jesus is still God, even if the Bible contained some minor errors.

Anybody can claim to be God, but how do we know Jesus really was God? One of the ways we can know this, of course, is that He did miracles. That is probably the strongest piece of evidence we have for claiming that Jesus is God, but there are other pieces of evidence that can support this conclusion. Jesus is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, moral teachers. According to the historical sources we have about Him, Jesus seems to have lived up to the moral standards He taught. Jesus is one of the most, if not the most, influential persons in all of world history, and He accomplished this by merely being a poor, itinerant teacher for three years. Jesus also fulfilled many prophecies about a coming Messiah which we can confirm were written hundreds of years before He lived. Two of the most outstanding of these are the Messianic prophecies from Daniel 9 and Isaiah 53. Finally, Jesus was resurrected from the dead. Paul says that our entire Christian faith depends on Jesus’ resurrection. It is the key miracle which validates Jesus’ claim to be God. One of the ways to demonstrate Jesus’ resurrection is to use the “Minimal Facts Argument,” which puts forward Jesus’ resurrection as the best explanation of the well-attested historical facts about Jesus that many critical scholars affirm.

Sometimes it can be hard to know if a person is telling the truth, but there are common indicators we often use to determine if someone is probably telling the truth and has the facts straight. By applying these criteria to the New Testament, we can see good evidence that the New Testament authors told the truth. This evidence includes the fact that the New Testament writers gave their testimony soon after the events took place. Through historical analysis, we can verify that their testimonies include may accurate historical facts and are confirmed by non-Christian historical sources. In addition, the New Testament authors include embarrassing details in their accounts that make them look bad. Since any differences between the gospel testimonies turn out to be small and reconcilable, it increases the credibility the accounts. Finally, the fact that the New Testament authors were wiling to suffer and die for their testimonies indicates that they believed they were telling the truth. Overall, these reasons can give us confidence that what the New Testament writers told us about Jesus is what they believed to be the truth.

If Jesus’ miracles are good evidence to believe that He was God, how do we know that Jesus performed miracles in the first place? The New Testament contains much of the evidence of Jesus’ miracles, but can we trust the New Testament? Does the text we have today accurately represent the original New Testament? Bart Ehrman, a New Testament scholar, says there are some problems with the accuracy of the New Testament. Another New Testament scholar, Bruce Metzger, believes that the copy of the New Testament we have today is highly accurate. Two main criteria considered when looking at the accuracy of ancient documents are the number of copies we have and the length of time between the original the copies that survived. When we compare the New Testament to other ancient documents such as writings of Aristotle, Herodotus, and Homer, we find that there are many more and much earlier copies of the New Testament than almost all other ancient documents. We have over 6,000 surviving Greek copies of the New Testament, some written within 150-200 years of the original. According to Bruce Metzger, we can recreate the original New Testament text with 99.5% accuracy.

If the arguments for the existence of a God are valid, the next logical question is this: whose description of God is correct? Christians claim that Jesus was God, but is this true? We know that Jesus existed in history and that He claimed to be God, but how can we know that His claim was true? One of the key pieces of evidence that Jesus was God is that He performed miracles to back up His claims to divinity. A miracle is when an act of God suspends the laws of nature, and miracles are crucial in establishing whether someone truly has a message from God or not. However, David Hume said we should never believe a miracle claim, but is this true? Hume made the mistake of discounting evidence for miracles because they are rare, but just because something is unlikely doesn’t mean it should be disbelieved. It can be prudent to be skeptical of unlikely events, but you still must weigh the evidence. In the case of Jesus’ miracles, the historical evidence far exceeds that of any other miracle claim. Using miracles isn’t an airtight way to prove something with absolute certainty, but miracles can provide evidence that something is from God, since only God can do miracles.

The first-cause, design, and moral arguments for God demonstrate that a supreme being exists. From these, we can infer that this supreme being is spaceless, timeless, immaterial, incredibly powerful, extremely intelligent, morally perfect, and personal. But who is this supreme being? Which religion or culture’s description of this supreme being is correct? The Greeks believed in a form of henotheism that recognized the existence of a supreme being behind the world, like Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover.” The Persians held to a monotheistic religion called Zoroastrianism which affirmed a supreme being. Jewish culture was monotheistic as well and believed in the existence of Yahweh, a supreme being. Ancient Indian cultures, such as the Nyaya tradition, also posited the existence of a supreme being. Arabic thinkers, such as al-Ghazali, used philosophy to argue for the existence of a supreme being. However, whose description of this supreme being is correct? To determine this, we have to examine the evidence. Christians think that the strongest evidence seems to be that Jesus of Nazareth is this supreme bring; that is, He was God. By studying history, we see that Jesus actually existed, He claimed to be God, and He did miracles to authenticate His claim to be God.

The problem of evil is something we probably all struggle with at one time in our lives. If there really is a good God out there, then why is there so much pain and suffering in this world? There are two ways to look at the problem of evil: the logical version and the probability (or evidential) version. The logical version argues that if God is all powerful and all good, then evil wouldn’t exist because God can and would want to eliminate it. Thus, since evil does exist, it is impossible for God to exist. In response, Alvin Plantinga has proposed the free-will defense, which says that God allowed human beings to have free will, and no matter how God could have created us, there would always be a way we would choose to do evil. This is known as “transworld depravity,” and it sufficiently responds to the logical problem of evil. But since all this evil exists anyway, isn’t it the case that God probably doesn’t exist? This is called the probability version of the problem of evil. Christians have offered various explanations, called “theodicies,” of why God would allow evil. Examples of these include the Greater Good theodicy or Adam’s own Divine Love theodicy, which says that God allowed evil because he wanted to create beings who could love like He does, but love requires free will. In order to allow His creatures to truly love Him and love each other, they had to have the free will to do so. God can’t force us to love, because then it’s not truly love.