Exploring The Truth

Worldviews

Naturalism Worldview

• There is no absolute truth
• There is no God
• Man evolved from bacteria which started as a chemical reactions
• Death is the end

Christian Worldview

• God Created everything that was created
• Man: God Created Man in His image as a superior to all creation for a purpose
  • Man has a freewill
  • Man has a conscience
  • Man has a soul/spirit that are eternal
  • Man is accountable to God for his actions
• Fall: Man failed to obey God and sin entered the world
• God has a plan to save Man from eternal condemnation and give him eternal life

Does God exist?

From Norman Geisler book Chapter 3 Chapter 3: The Theistic God Exists

1. Which God are We Talking About?
2. Does A Theistic God Exist?
3. The Cosmological Arguments for God’s Existence
4. The Teleological Arguments for God’s existence
5. The Moral Argument
6. The Argument from Religious Need
7. Answering Some Important Objections
8. Evidence of God's existence are everywhere
9. Can you afford to assume? What if you are wrong?
10. Evidence is overwhelming

The True God of the Bible

• True God is not same as other gods
• To believe in God, you need to understand the full picture
  • Creator
  • Satan
  • Sin
  • The Fall
  • Time (our life)
  • Eternity
    • Heaven
    • Hell

Is the Bible true word of God

Internal Evidence

• Understanding the Bible
• Everything becomes logical once you belief, with out nothing makes sense
• Where did Jesus Claim He is God

External Evidence

History

• Evidence for Exodus
• The Historical Jesus

Manuscripts

• Evidence for the authenticity of the Old Testament
• Evidence for the authenticity of the New Testament

Objections

Why so many people don't believe in God?

• Natural Reason not to believe
  • To free ourselves from outcome
  • To justify our actions
• Significant Opposition
  • Da Vinci Code
  • Charles Darwin
  • Richard Dawkins
  • Stephen Hawking
• Common among them
  • Motivated by hate
  • Based on lies or false assumptions
  • they do not present any valid alternative, only doubt

Objections: Religion is source of all Evils

• Religions and the True God
• Atheists are far more evil
• Atheism can't reward good or punish evil

Objections: I don't believe in Miracles

Geisler Book Chapter 4: Miracles are Possible

Geisler Book Chapter 5: Miracles Can Be Used to Confirm a Message from God

Objections: Why there is pain and suffering

• Health and Death
• Injustice and Wars
• Natural disasters

Other Topics

From the Book Reason for God

the first section including

the Cosmological Argument

(Chapter 1),

The Moral Argument

(Chapter 2),

interaction with the presence of suffering

(Chapter 5) and 

responses to the argument from evil

(Chapter 6). Anticipating the next section on science, chapter 4 attempts to repudiate the philosophy/worldview of naturalism as being insufficient to explain the origin of a complex universe (p. 29), and of being unable to prove itself as being true (p. 30).

The second section attempts to prove the existence of God through science by attacking the ability of evolutionary process to explain the origin of the world, and mainly through the vehicle of Intelligent Design (ID), which can be succinctly defined as the theory that living organisms and their components are too complex to have come about via normal evolutionary processes. This lies within the field of one of the editors, William Dembski, who contributed two essays here—Chapter 20 which is an introduction to the theory of Intelligent Design, and Chapter 26 which outlines a strategy of how to use arguments from Intelligent Design to persuade people that “their defense of evolution and opposition to ID are prejudicial, ideologically driven, and above all unjustifiable on the basis of the underlying science” (p. 132). This section would not be complete without one essay by the founder of the ID movement, Phillip E. Johnson, who in Chapter 15 writes a situational assessment of the ideological battle between ID proponents and evolutionists.

Sections three and four deal with the questions of Jesus and the Bible respectively, along traditional apologetic trajectories. The typical issues related to Jesus’ existence, his messianic claims, his death and resurrection are dealt with, along with issues regarding the one way of salvation and whether those who have never heard the Gospel can be saved. The section ends with Ben Witherington III addressing the question of whether Paul invented Christianity.

Section four deals with the issue of textual transmission and translation of the biblical text, and then ends by addressing the challenge of various apocryphal books like the Coptic Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter and the more recent Gospel of Judas.