Episode 141 – Truth and Proof – Part 1 – Defending the Faith Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God. Script: While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. Acts, Chapter 17, verses 16 and 17, New International Version ******** VK: Hello and Happy New Year! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re excited to be with you at the start of this New Year and we pray that this year will bring joy and blessings to all our listeners, especially the joy of having a closer fellowship with our Lord Christ Jesus. Today on Anchored by Truth we’re going to start the new year with a new – and frankly challenging – series of discussions. As just about everyone knows, the Christian faith in America has been subjected to more challenges in the last decade than probably in the first two centuries of the country’s existence. So, as we open up this New Year we want to tackle a subject that has particular relevance in our day and time –being able to demonstrate that the Christian faith has a firm basis in reason and evidence. To help us get started on addressing this very important topic we have RD Fierro, author and founder of Crystal Sea Books, in the studio today. RD, why are we undertaking this series? RD: We live in an age where our historical cultural consensus has shifted. Some commentators have said that we are now living in a “post-Christian” world. For people who are not believers this means that they live in a world that has gone “beyond” the constraints and “narrowness” of Christianity. Fewer people, as a percentage of the population, belong to churches than in generations past, and many of the mainline churches are experiencing declines not only in membership, but in influence on society, government, education, family, and the culture as a whole. As we look around us we see that young people are far more consumed by the death of an entertainer than the death and resurrection of Jesus. We also see that more people are consumed by concern for temporary pleasures than their eternal destiny. It seems that everywhere our societies are all about money, entertainment, personal freedom, free expression, anything goes – everywhere it’s Babylon: the city of Satan, where it’s “all about me.” This is obviously is dangerous to individual destinies but it is also dangerous to the destiny of our communities and nation. VK: And this danger has been recognized for quite a while now, hasn’t it? In their 1994 book, Handbook of Christian Apologetics, Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, who are both professors of the philosophy of religion at Boston College, said the following: “Western civilization is for the first time in its history in danger of dying. The reason is spiritual. It is losing its life, its soul; that soul was the Christian faith. The infection killing it is not multiculturalism – other faiths – but the monoculturalism of secularism – no faith, no soul. Our century has been marked by genocide, sexual chaos and money-worship. Unless all the prophets are liars, we are doomed unless we repent. . .The church of Christ will never die, but our civilization will. If the gates of hell will not prevail against the church, this world certainly won’t. We do apologetics not to save the church, but to save the world.” RD: Exactly. People within the church have been warning of the danger we’re facing for decades. So, we’ve titled this series “Truth and Proof” because in it we want to point people back to the eternal truth that there is a God and that God has a plan not only for people but for communities, nations, and the world. But we don’t want to just proclaim the truth, though that is obviously where we must start. We also want to explain the evidence and reasons behind our belief. That’s the “proof” part of the series. It’s not uncommon to hear people say in this day and age something like, “you trust in faith, but I trust in logic, reason, and science.” In doing so they are trying to trying to set logic, reason, and science in opposition to faith. As we’ve said many times on Anchored by Truth, that is a false dichotomy that tries to say that if you are a Christian and you believe in the Bible you have abandoned a reliance upon logic, reason, and evidence. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Some of the greatest thinkers of the last two millennia and some of the greatest scientists of all time ...
