Eph 5:11:"…have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”.
Amos 3:7 “…God will do nothing, but he revealeth his secret unto his servants the prophets.”
Why this post?
To provide the main apologetic arguments but then commence with the most important of them all.
Introduction
The term “apologetics” is derived from the Greek word “apologia”, which means defense, and today it’s mostly associated in the Christian context, but obviously this exists in all religious traditions.
I would argue that Atheists and Agnostics defend their position too.
Truth
I am very comfortable with the notion that there is truth and that it matters. It’s just hard to find, or perhaps more accurately, it’s hard to believe that absolute truth exists. Whether I am right or wrong, does not matter anymore, I’d really like to know what is true.
For now, we are left to weigh the evidence…
Evidential argument
Since factual proof cannot be provided, it is a problem of evidence BUT using evidence to live one’s life by is nothing new. We do it all the time, albeit unknowingly:
The idea that humankind will continue to advance, solve problems, and improve living conditions is a belief in progress;
We often have to trust that others are being honest and act in good faith;
The placebo effect in medicine demonstrates that belief in a treatment's efficacy can sometimes lead to positive outcomes;
We raise our children with faith that our efforts will lead to positive outcomes;
We trust that doing the right thing will have positive consequences;
While we can observe laws and societal norms, the fundamental belief that certain actions are right or wrong, or that justice will ultimately prevail, is based on faith; and
Falling in love with someone and committing to a romantic relationship often involves a leap of faith.
Atheists cannot prove their position either, they to weigh the evidences.
Categories
Several great arguers abound with very insightful evidences and those are huddled into these categories:
Cosmological Argument - existence of the universe requires a cause;
Teleological Argument (Argument from Design) - complexity and order;
Ontological Argument - conceive of great being, then such must exist in reality;
Moral Argument - objective moral values and thus moral lawgiver;
Historical Evidence - archaeological findings, eyewitness testimonies, and ancient texts;
Experiential Argument - personal experiences of God or transcendent phenomena;
Presuppositional Apologetics - belief in God is a necessary foundation for rationality and coherent thought;
Scriptural Apologetics - draw from scripture; and
Theodicy - existence of Satan.
I am by no means a CS Lewis on any of these, but I do feel that there is an argument so strong, that it supersedes all of those. And neither Google nor ChatGPT assigns it a category.
Allow me to digress before getting to the bones of this post. The next few sections are noted and no proper evidences provided. Those are not hard to find and I urge the reader to dig into it. I have for a long time, until I found the unlisted category.
First, I shall list several apologists. Then, I’ll touch on groups of arguments and finally I shall submit the category I find, by far, the most overwhelming…
Apologists
Herewith a list of apologists that frequently argue across the above categories:
I’d argue (without arguing here :) ), that each of the prophets and reformers are all apologists, but I think they would not fit the modern definition;
Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, John Knox, Ulrich Zwingli, Thomas Cranmer, John Wesley, John Wycliff, Jan Hus, Jerome of Prague, Johannes Gutenberg, Wessel Gansfort, Girolamo Savonarola, Johann von Staupitz, Desiderius Erasmus, Johann Oecolampadius, Andreas Karlstadt, Thomas Cranmer, Thomas Müntzer, Martin Bucer, Wolfgang Capito, Caspar Hedio, Katharina Schütz Zell, Katharina von Bora, William Tyndale, Jan Łaski, John Knox, Martin Chemnitz;
Especially, all the unnamed Waldensians that resided amongst the Alps for 400 years. Some of the books that refer to them aren’t available on Amazon:
The Waldensians: The Hidden History of Italy's Forgotten Evangelical Movement; and
The Waldenses: Rejections of the Roman Church: Blueprint for a Reformation Movement.
Modern day apologists are:
C.S. Lewis, William Lane Craig, Ravi Zacharias, Walter Veith, Kent Hovind, John Lennox, Scott Petty, Alvin Plantinga, NT Wright,Timothy Keller, Lee Strobel, Justing Brierley, Amy Orr-Erwing, Chip Ingram, Gary Habermas, Gregory Koukl, Denis Alexander, Alister McGrath, Johan Erasmus, Louise Mabille, Sy Garte; and more.
Again, I do urge the reader to find those noted above and do your homework.
The dark side
There are so many followers of the dark side with evidences and rumours of secret societies and sects and cults and horrible rituals of child sacrifice and more. It’s often linked to the music business and celebrities who sold their soul to become successful and famous. I recall anecdotes from Angie Jolie and Lady Gaga and many other prior to them. The heavy metal world abound these accusations and I rarely ever see a defense to deny the label. Even videos of GW Bush with his Skull & Bones rituals.
Just look at the insane images at the recent eurovision:
Calm down, it’s just art.
Let me not give power to it and move along swiftly, but suffice to say, there is substantial weight to support the dark, and if there is dark, then rather likely, there is light.
If you prefer not to sleep, you can start with a docu-series part 1 of ten dating back to 2020 which eventually lead to a new series and it’s still going today:
Channel: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/ws4fMTn6yNc7/
It al started here: https://www.bitchute.com/video/uWCEnegjL5Hl/
Historical evidence
The amount of evidence that supports the Biblical narrative and events grows over time. Often, arguments are made against it, but a few years later, evidence is found. From the flood, to kingdoms, to specific rulers and much more.
Again, this is useful, but still, I do not find it the strongest of evidences. It support the Bible, which helps. Anyway, I am of the opinion that one should not argue from the Bible, unless you want to debate which religious model is the most accurate.
Please note, that once this post is over, all I’ll be doing is digging into the Bible, but using it as an Atheistic defence, is not ideal.
Experience
Those that lean toward religion far outstrip those that fall in the Agnostic or Atheist slice of the pie. That’s only 1.2billion out of the 7.8billion that do not ascribe to some sort of religion, but yet they run the TV shows, the news channels and all main stream media. The point is that those who do “experience” something, is 8.5 out of 10 and yet more time is spent on proving there is something rather than the nature of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations
Cosmological
How does something arise from nothing? The big bang argument is fairly fresh in terms of man’s existence. We all know there is absolutely no known process that takes nothing into something. Scientists delineate the first billionth of a billionth of a second, but not the part that precedes it. How can they?
I recently had this debate with an AI: Religious: 1 - My Christian debate with AI
We are not aware of any process by which a single cell entity can spontaneously be. This is contrary to thermodynamic laws (entropy), that’s quickly refuted based on the principle of open/closed systems, but even the basic concept of the conservation of energy or mass does not hold. Unless one wants to argue beyond the realm we consider physical, but that would be against the rules of the scientist and favor faith.
Nature of the universe
What I do find fascinating is this: The last few hundred years, there as been a fascination with particles which gave rise to the wave-particle duality problem that I’m not expounding here.
I remember reading Einstein, Brian Greene, Hawking, Kaku on relativity. The first bunch of pages I followed along just fine, and then I find this one page where everything logical is let go off and a stretch to the supernatural occurs. My mind could never make that jump and perhaps my intellect cannot sustain such mastery.
Later in life I read a little about Tesla, how he made leaps and bounds in discoveries, how his ideas, businesses and patents were stolen and how he died a poor man.
This is the man who pretty much got us into the electrical era, who could light bulbs with no wires and was able to rock an entire building by having a device find the resonant frequency.
There is something there.
Most notably he said that if one is to find the secrets of the universe, one should think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. Not sure if he actually said this.
Also, remember that an electron is not a particle. As per definition, it’s a field.
So, if you change your thinking away from particles, then many of the Biblical events are not so far-fetched. How does one heal a leper if it’s made up of particles? How does one raise people from death if they are all particles? How does one take up a mountain and cast it into the sea if it has the weight the smart ones bombard us with? How do angels manifest in a particle oriented world?
Thanks to modern platforms, those that appose relativity, string theory, dark matter and black holes are getting their voices heard, but that will take time.
Did the Bible not note that people would run to and fro, and that knowledge would increase?
Ape
There are many apologetic arguments focused on evolution. For me, there is a basic problem that I don’t see being answered: If we have been around for millions of years, we certainly should have dug up an ocean of interspecies beings.
We haven’t. One or two skeletons are not evidence of such. Hardly. In fact, we all know species cannot pro-create having fertile offspring of their own. And most species need the male and female at the same time. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I don’t see Ligers running around eating Mules.
Human timeline
How I loved the Matrix movie. Agent Smith seeing humans as a virus. How apt. But the population growth models are problematic.
The author of the following site have graphically illustrated the genealogy from Adam to Jesus by reviewing various sources. He also refers to a population growth formula. If one assumes a timeline of millions of years, then the human population should have been orders of magnitude more than the 8 billion we have today.
The formula only makes sense if there was a cataclysmic event around 4000 years ago.
If you’d like a physical copy, I can hook you up.
Teleological
Second last angle of attack is the inherent complexity of biology of living creatures. For the sake of brevity, which I fail miserably at, I’ll list the questions with limited evidence so that we can get to the apex of this post.
The Bible coins the term in 1 Tim 6:20: “… and oppositions of science falsely so called“.
If evolution of life started with low diversity which increased over time, why does the fossil record show higher diversity in the past and lower as time progressed?
We are very much aware of how many species are fading away not even mentioning an entire category (mammal-like reptiles) that disappeared.
If evolution of necessity should progress from small creatures to large creatures over time, why does the fossil record show the reverse?
They found intact skins of giant sloths. That’s not that long ago.
This applies to mammals, insects and very importantly to humans as well. Lots of diggings with huge human skeletons. Every biblical scholar knows that the Bible makes reference to giants.
Natural selection works by eliminating the weaker variants, so how does a mechanism that works by subtraction create more diversity?
Why do the great phyla of the biome all appear simultaneously in the fossil record, in the oldest fossil records, namely in the Cambrian explosion, when they are supposed to have evolved sequentially?
“…, evidence obtained by sequencing the 18S ribosomal RNA (molecules that aid in the synthesis of proteins) from various species suggests that many of the phyla appeared almost simultaneously, …”
Consider this magical transition with no evidence:
Or these found in the same layer:
Why do we have to postulate punctuated equilibrium to explain away the lack of intermediary fossils when gradualism is the only plausible explanation for the evolutionary fossil record?
If natural selection works at the level of the Phenotype and not the level of the Genotype then how did genes, mitosis and meiosis with their intricate and highly accurate mechanisms of gene transfer evolve?
The process of crossing over during meiosis is an extremely sophisticated mechanism that requires absolute precision; how could natural selection bring this about if it can only operate at the level of the Phenotype?
How can we explain the evolution of two sexes with compatible anatomical differences when only the result of the union (decreased diversity in the offspring) is the subject to selection but not the cause?
The evolution of the molecules of life all require totally different environment conditions to come into existence without enzymes and some have never been produced under any simulated environment conditions, then why do we cling to this explanation for the original of the chemical of life?
Moreover, the reactions that have been simulated produced left and right handed molecules but life can only use the left handed racemic molecules and there is no random mechanism that allows for this.
The early atmosphere would have to be a reducing atmosphere devoid of oxygen, but if water is essential for the evolution of life, then in the absence of an ozone layer, cosmic radiation would split the water into hydrogen and oxygen radicals and the atmosphere could never have been a reducing atmosphere.
e.g. Bacterial flagellum, chloroplast, gene crossing over etc.
If the probability of any of these mechanisms coming into existence by chance (given their intricacy) is so infinitely small as to be non-existent, then does not the theory of evolution qualify as a faith rather than a science?
The apex argument
I’m not an academic, but I’ve often pondered the most fundamental argument of them all. I believe I’ve found it. It existed for centuries, I just met it rather late. It offers a sense of calm in the face of all the counter arguments.
It’s called PROPHECY, and not the nonchalant slinging from a pulpit.
It’s so profound, that the remainder of this entire stack is devoted to it.
whydoneit?
Why is the design a problem of faith?
Free will.
How do you know if it’s true love, if it’s not set free? (Yes, I lifted the notion from Indecent Proposal.)