By Timothy W. Massaro on Sep 05, 2017 in God, Q&A God is a genocidal maniac. The God revealed in the Bible is not reducible to the attributes of love or mercy. God is a righteous, holy, and just God. He must punish evil. If God didn’t have reasons for doing so beyond our comprehension, he would not be worthy of worship, let alone belief. We would never praise a judge who chooses to let convicted thieves, murders, and rapists return home without justice. Even if a judge did this … [Read more...]

February 18, 2016  By Tim Stratton  Why are you a Christian? As a full-time church youth pastor and a part-time adjunct professor at a Christian college, I like to ask this question to all of my students. In fact, I ask this question quite often to many active churchgoers these days. The answer I typically receive in response to my simple question is nothing but a blank stare. After a little coaxing, sometimes I get answers like, “because my parents were Christians,” or, “’cause I was born in … [Read more...]

When I left the ministry due to my skepticism, one of the factors involved in my departure concerned the reliability of the New Testament documents and the resurrection of Jesus. The folks from the Jesus Seminar had me second-guessing whether I could trust what the New Testament said and if I could truly accept the literal bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. In July of 2005, my life changed. I entered the Lifeway Christian Bookstore in Winston-Salem, North Carolina and read three books … [Read more...]

January 30, 2016 J. Warner Wallace On the final page of the paperback edition of Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman famously listed the “Top Ten Verses That Were Not Originally in the New Testament.” In an effort to discredit the reliability of the New Testament text, Ehrman offered this list to demonstrate the existence of many late insertions in the text. He found this reality troubling as a young man, and eventually walked away from his Christian faith as a result: “The Bible began to appear … [Read more...]

By James Bishop| My intent here is to briefly touch on the troubles that a universe with a beginning has for atheists, especially for their proposed explanations. The beginning of our universe is evidently troubling for atheists judging by their responses. For a start, philosophical reasoning shows that it is not possible to have an infinite regress of past events. Couple that with persuasive scientific evidence from cosmic expansion and the second law of thermodynamics, and we needn’t doubt … [Read more...]

This blog post is based on the Minimal Facts argument for the Resurrection of Jesus by Dr. Gary Habermas, and it one of the strongest arguments that I have seen for the resurrection. Dr. Habermas is an American historian, New Testament scholar, and philosopher of religion, and he has been studying the resurrection for around 40 years now. During this time he has been cataloging the accepted facts of the resurrection by every New Testament scholar he can find, regardless of their belief. He … [Read more...]

Former Muslim Nabeel Qureshi explains how his search for the truth about Jesus in scripture led to his conversion. Contrast is the mother of clarity. So says author Os Guinness, and this principle is what ultimately led me away from Islam and towards the gospel. As a young Muslim in the West, our community very intentionally defended me against Christianity, the majority religion. The first verses of the Koran that I and the other young children at our mosque memorized proclaimed that God is … [Read more...]

Posted on October 27, 2016 by Mark Farnham Worldview is a concept that has become more common over the last few decades. One of the reasons for the growth of its use in intellectual and religious conversations is that it allows us to understand why people believe the things they do. Understanding a person’s worldview allows you to trace the logical outcome of their heart commitments, and to discern inconsistencies and contradictions when people don’t remain coherent in their … [Read more...]

“It is much more reasonable to believe that materialistic accounts of life are false.” In his groundbreaking book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False, philosopher Thomas Nagel identifies consciousness as a problem for not only the materialist (one who believes only physical/material things exist), but also the evolutionist. He makes the case that consciousness cannot be simply reduced to physical processes like brain synapses firing … [Read more...]