Defending Your Christian Beliefs With Evidence

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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Defending Your Christian Beliefs With Evidence

April 24, 2022

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

How can you get started with discussing your faith? In this podcast, Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss best practices for defending your faith. We compare what the Bible teaches to the view of faith that is popular among Christians and churches. We explain the approach we’ve used in our workplaces. We describe who we think has done the best job of promoting Christianity in hostile environments, such as the university. Finally, we recommend two new apologetics resources. Please subscribe, like, comment, and share. Show notes: https://winteryknight.com/2022/04/24/knight-and-rose-show-episode-2-becoming-bulletproof-on-the-battlefield

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight & Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out on authentic Christian worldview. Today’s topic is, Why Use Evidence and Reason When Sharing Spiritual Truth? I’m Wintery Knight. And I’m Desert Rose.

Okay, so let’s get started and see what the Bible says about this. Do you know of any Bible verses that apply to this evangelism topic? Yeah, actually, the first one that comes to my mind is one of my favorite passages. It’s from 1 Peter 3.15. It says, "In your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and respect." So, we are to always be ready to give reasons for the hope that we have, for what we believe, for what we know to be true.

Yeah, I like this first because people sometimes say to me, "I don’t have to learn how to give a defense for my Christian beliefs because either nobody asks me any questions or, you know, I don’t have friends who know about science or history." So, you know, they kind of use the fact that, you know, the people they are around don’t really know or respect science. But I think that this verse basically says that you have to be ready to answer anyone. And there’s a lot of people out there in the places where we live who do reject Christian truth claims on the grounds of science or history or philosophy.

So, I like this verse because it really charges Christians with being ready to communicate with people who are educated, who have university degrees, who are working in their workplaces, you know, people who do have intellectual questions. So, you can’t just say, "Well, nobody asks me," or whatever. I think God gives people work to do when they improve their skills.

I don’t know if that’s ever happened to you, you know, that you learn something and God gave you an appointment the next day with someone who asked that question. Yeah, that actually happens all the time. And I think people end up giving me more credit than I deserve because sometimes it comes across as if I just kind of know everything and that’s absolutely not the truth at all.

But what happens is that I read something and yeah, just like you said, I mean, the next day somebody will ask about that thing. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Neat. Okay. Good.

Give us an example of where like Jesus uses reason and evidence when responding to questioners. Well, one of the passages that I bring up all the time to demonstrate this to people is in Mark 2. And that was where a group of friends brought their paralyzed friend to Jesus for healing. And there were a lot of people, there was a big crowd, so they couldn’t just walk right up to Jesus and ask for healing.

So they lowered their paralyzed friend through the roof. And Jesus' initial reaction, response was that he saw their faith and he said to the paralyzed man, "Son, your sins are forgiven." So this was Jesus' concern. His biggest concern was to forgive this man of his sins.

But then, yeah, but then Jesus knew that the scribes around him were doubting him and accusing him in their hearts of blaspheming. And they were thinking, "Well, who can forgive sins but God alone?" This man is, he sounds like he's claiming to be God. What on earth? This is blasphemy.

And Jesus knew what they were thinking and his response was, he says, "But that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. I say to you, rise, pick up your bed and go home." Oh, so they get some evidence to confirm the theological claim. Yes, exactly.

It was not Jesus' first priority to necessarily heal the man physically. He knew that the man needed forgiveness and eternal life more than he needed this temporary healing. But as evidence that Jesus had the authority to forgive sins, he gave the miracle.

And he does this repeatedly throughout Scripture. Yeah, very interesting. So is that when you want to use reason and evidence just to deal with people who are antagonistic or asking questions or is it good for anything else? Well, there are actually several reasons.

I encourage people to learn apologetics, to learn evidence for what they believe. But another reason that comes to mind is it's really common for people to have doubts, especially when things don't go our way. And so knowing the reasons for what we believe, knowing the evidence for what we believe to be true is really beneficial to us when we encounter those times when we have doubts.

Yeah, have you ever encountered somebody in your own personal life where they had doubts they didn't have the evidence to work through it? Yeah, actually, this has happened a lot because I used to hear people give their personal testimonies all the time about how they had become Christians through basically asking God for some sort of favor and then getting what they wanted. And so then they concluded it must be because Jesus is real. It must be that God is real and Jesus is Lord.

So sure, I'll be a Christian. Yeah, that's not going to last. That's not going to work out in the long term.

The normal Christian life is experiencing challenges being called and being found faithful. Exactly, exactly. So I'll give you an example of one young lady who comes to mind.

We were friends in our 20s and she shared that she had become a Christian because she was at risk of failing out of the Air Force Academy because she couldn't get herself to jump off of a high diving board. And so she was, yeah, so she was so scared of heights and of, I think it was heights that she was scared of. But anyway, so she, you know, in her desperation to get her bachelor's degree, she was given one more chance to go off the high dive board and she prayed, God, oh my God, help me.

I can't do this. I can't do this. And a friend of hers pushed her off the diving board and she, she fell into the water and that counted.

And so she was coming to her rescue. Yes, that's what she concluded. And she decided to become a Christian as because God gave her what she really wanted, which was a bachelor's degree.

Yeah. So that's God's job now. God's job is to make everything work out for you, give you a gold medal in the Olympics or whatever.

And that's a sign that He exists. That's nothing like what we just saw in the Bible. Right, exactly.

And I'm sure you won't be shocked when I tell you that this particular person who, this friend of mine who decided to follow Jesus because he gave her exactly what she wanted, decided not to follow Jesus anymore a few years later when God didn't give her exactly what she wanted a couple of times. So, you know, she, she experienced some disappointment. She had some hard times in life.

She decided, oh, well, maybe God isn't real or maybe, maybe He's, He's real, but He just doesn't care about me because He's not giving me what I want. And now she's actually practicing paganism and witchcraft. So that's the problem.

Wow, that's bad. Yeah, I've actually seen this sometimes with people in my own life as well. Like they get into Christianity because God's giving them this, you know, life enhancement and that's what makes it true.

It's that I get what I want as if Christianity is about like the life of Jesus clearly shows that God's job is making people happy, you know, giving them the marriage they want, the career they want, the money they want, the car they want. This is, this is nowhere in the Gospels. It's nowhere, it's nowhere in the Pauline Epistles either.

Yeah, that doesn't, that's, that's not going to work out in the long term and it really makes me wonder, you know, whether the church is doing a good enough job of preparing people for the life of suffering. One quick thing, I wanted to go back to something. Do you think that when believers encounter difficulties and they experienced doubts, do you think that, that the use of evidence is a good way to defend against that? Is that anywhere in the Bible? It's in several places.

One place that comes to mind is John the Baptist. So he had known Jesus his whole life, right? Since from the time they were in the womb, they were cousins. So and John had baptized Jesus and heard the Father's voice from heaven and saw the Holy Spirit descend on Jesus like a dove and had experienced so much with Jesus, then he found himself in prison.

So that wasn't part of the plan, I don't think. And so as John the Baptist is, is, is locked up in prison, probably most likely unexpectedly, he starts to question and doubt and wonders what is going on. So he sends word through his disciples to Jesus and says, are you the one we are supposed to be expecting or should we be looking for another? Jesus responded with evidence.

He said to those disciples, go and tell John what you hear and see. The blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers or clans, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news for each of them. So yeah, he is just replying with, with all kinds of evidence.

I absolutely love this. Yeah. See, for me, like from a personal point of view, I think everybody who becomes a Christian finds something personally attractive about it.

And for me, I'm always being discounted, you know, at least when I was younger, and didn't have the skills to back it up. You know, I felt I felt like that people didn't expect that I could do things. I'm probably because of my skin color.

It's really neat to read in the Bible, where somebody, you know, says, Are you really the person who can do this? And Jesus says, I'm doing it. You know, right. So it just strikes me, you don't expect me to be able to do this, because you're expecting someone else.

But I'm the person who can do it. And I just, it's just subjectively speaking, that's one of the things I like about Christianity. And I it doesn't surprise me, you know, that that that's something that you value within Christianity, because I've seen you live this out.

And I know that you have a lot of experience having conversations about Christianity with smart people, and accomplished people in your workplace. And so, you know, I think it'd be valuable for you to share what you have found. I use this approach all the time in the workplace.

And you're right. Initially, you know, people look at me and they go doesn't look like you would know this stuff, you know, but I think it's a very challenging environment in the workplace. Because when you're working in information technology, the first job I got was in a startup.

And a lot of the people there had master's degrees, one guy had a PhD from Northwestern, it was a very challenging environment. And these are not people who are struggling in life, they're married, they have children, they have homes paid off homes, they're wealthy, they're stable, their lives are stable, but they don't have any interest in Christianity, they may have grown up as Christians, but they're not interested in Christianity, especially now that their lives are going so swimmingly well. So if you don't have any kind of felt need to, you know, capitalize on to start conversations, then really a wonderful way to get along with this is to focus on truth and just say, Oh, well, I'm not here to hear about the terrible situation that you're in.

I'm not offering Christianity to deal with that. And besides, you don't even have that. But what I am offering Christianity as is truth.

So if you're interested in knowing the way the world really works, I can give you some evidence to show you that you should consider Christianity and the Christian worldview as being true. Right. So that works a lot better when you're dealing with strong, educated, successful people.

Excellent. Excellent. So could you give an example maybe of a situation like that? Oh, sure.

So we had we had a guy in a career occupation that I worked in this, this guy was like a senior director type person. And he had a reputation of yelling at people threatening them with firing. He didn't like conservatives, he would talk about how conservatives were always in an echo chamber and stuff like that.

And we went out to a company outing, like a company dinner, you know, and he was at the table with me, I sat down with him, he sat down at the table after I sat down. And he started saying, Yeah, there's a lot of people in the office who don't really talk about their real views. They're really quiet all the time.

And I felt he was taking a shot at me, because I'm very careful about who I talked to in the office. So it may have gotten around that I was willing to talk about my views, just not with him, because he was a bully. And so I said, Okay, I'll start.

And so I said, Yeah, so you have to be really careful. I said to this guy, his name is Matt. I said, Matt, you have to be really careful in the in the office if you have the views that I have.

So I'm more conservative, I'm right of center. And I'm a Christian, I'm outspoken about it. A lot of people don't like that.

And so they get really upset. But I feel like if I can explain how I arrived at these views, by evidence, then it would be better. And he was like, like, how? And I said, Well, I've actually changed my mind, I was raised in a very liberal country.

And initially, I had very liberal views on things like healthcare, and gun policy, and energy policy, and education policy. And I actually came to America and read a whole bunch of books on this. And then I changed my mind on each one of these topics.

And then explaining to him the process by which I changed my mind because of the evidence, I won him over. And he said, Oh, so you didn't start off a redneck fundamentalist in the American South. You apologies to anyone who is that.

Salt of the Earth, you came to your positions by reading books and gathering evidence. And that's, that's a lot better way to get along with an office bully. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, that's been my experience too. Can you give an example of a like a book that changed your mind on a particular issue? Yes. So when I when I was, you know, as early out in my career, I would read books on a board on abortion by like Frank Beckwith, you know, politically correct death, or on healthcare by Regina Hertzlinger, I think hers is called consumer driven healthcare.

Yeah, different different books on on for education, like reading about teacher unions and school choice and daycare. But one of the ones that I talked to Matt about was john Dr. john lots books, he's an economist and he writes about gun policy. And Matt actually likes guns.

He's a hunter. So I said to him, well, I used to, I came from a country where they didn't allow you to own guns. And when I read john lots book, what he did is he looked at concealed carry laws in all the 50 states and violent crime rates.

And what he was able to show is that as states adopted concealed carry and allowed law abiding citizens to undergo training and background checks to allow them to carry weapons in public, if they passed all these tests, that criminals stopped committing crimes, because they never knew which person was carrying a gun. And so they didn't want to get shot in the commission of a crime. So violent crime rates went down as states adopted these concealed carry laws.

Yeah, that's an excellent example. So I changed my mind because of the evidence. Right, right.

On that position on that thing. I thought banning guns was great before I read that guy's book. That reminds me of a conversation I had not too long ago at the gym with a woman, leftist woman who heard me say something about how a lot of my friends were leaving California.

And because of bad policies, and she was really confused because she thinks, oh, California, that's like the utopia land where, you know, where socialist policies are in place and things like that. So she asked me, what are you talking about? Like, what do you mean people are, why are people leaving California? And what, what do you mean policies? Like, what, what policies, what reasons? So a few of the reasons that I mentioned were, well, first of all, it's too expensive. Secondly, the homelessness problem is growing exponentially.

Oh, yeah. Another is that crime is way up due to leftist policies. I've seen videos of this on Twitter.

People are just walking into stores. Apparently they can't prosecute you if you steal $800 or less. Yes, exactly.

So I said that to her. I said, I said, you know, you've seen these videos, right, where people walk into a store in broad daylight with a bag and a calculator and they just put a whole bunch of stuff into their bags and walk right out of the store, just making sure that they don't steal more than $800 worth of stuff because the law now in California is, I don't know if it's statewide or if just certain areas, but where crime is skyrocketing, there are policies that you can't be prosecuted. Did she know about the policies? What are the policies? No, she said, she didn't know anything about this.

She said, no, that I haven't heard anything about that. And I, and I, so I, you know, I, I encouraged her to maybe think about broadening her sources of news if she hadn't seen that because I had seen dozens of videos like this. Yeah.

And she, and she said, well, why do you think homelessness is up? Why do you think it's expensive there and, and things like this? So, so I brought up, you know, the decriminalizing of criminal behavior, like I just mentioned. Cash bail. You can, you know, yep.

Right. Exactly. I brought up, um, rank control, minimum wages, policies like this.

She thought these were all great policies. She's like, why would, why would rank control or minimum wage contribute to problems? Those are great policies. I used to think, I used to think that too.

I used to think rent control was good and high minimum wage was good. Then I read an economist named Thomas Sowell. Yes, exactly.

Yeah. So I referred her to him. Actually I explained, um, why rent control results in less available housing, crummy options in so far as they do exist and then higher prices for the housing.

And, you know, explained all of that. I explained why minimum wage leads to people being out of work and then, you know, living on the streets and, and, uh, being replaced by technology and things like this. And she just kept saying, that doesn't feel right.

No, I don't think you're right. Cause it doesn't feel right. To me.

I had an experience like that with a liberal philosopher in Seattle and she was telling me, she was a philosophy student, not even a real philosopher. And she was saying to me, um, when we raise minimum wage, everyone's going to be able to live off these salaries. And I said, you know, what's going to happen is that businesses like bookstores and restaurants that are operating on a 4% margin right now, when you increase their wage expense by 10 to 15% for all these benefits, they're going to go out of business.

She said, no, they're going to get the money from somewhere. And of course you can look up stories in the Seattle newspapers about all these businesses that that closed, uh, because of this. Anyway, the main point we're making is we're getting, we're getting into too much policy, but I mean, this approach of changing your mind with evidence, this is how you present Christianity to people.

You say to them like I investigated these Christian truth claims and I ended up looking at a lot of evidence and this is, this is how, how it works in the Bible is when you ask me questions, I give you the evidence. I think we need an example. Have you got a good story to show how you were able to do this specifically on a Christian topic? Yeah.

So one of my favorite stories to recall is, um, when I was working at a church with a progressive Christian pastor, I mean, he actually wasn't a Christian at all. What? But, um, you know, people use that term, because they don't want to get rid of the label Christian, but they, you know, they don't believe any, you know, much of anything that the Bible says. And he worked in a church? Yes.

He was a pastor. He, yes. Ordained by the United Methodist denomination.

And he was using his position to try to draw people away from Christianity. Wow. He would come to me with, he had decided that I was a great, uh, target for, um, trying to convince me to leave Christianity.

So I was, he was, he was on offensive, you know, on offense, you coming at me with, well, the Bible, you know, contradicts itself all over the place. The Bible, uh, not trustworthy and all these different, you know, miracles are not possible. And so I would respond to him, to each of his, uh, objections.

But one day I decided, you know, this is, I'm tired of being on defense. I'm going to go on offense. And so I went in to work and asked him, tell me something, what do you do with the minimal facts regarding the life, death and apparent resurrection of Jesus? This is an argument for the resurrection based on the core historical facts that are admitted by a wide range of scholars left, right, and center.

You, you get, you, um, you surface these facts using standard historical criteria like multiple attestation, enemy attestation, early attestation, and so on. Everyone agrees to these facts based on historical methods. And then you make an inference that the resurrection is the best explanation of these facts.

So this is the argument you're using with him. Yes, exactly. Yes.

Great summary. Exactly. So I asked him, you know, because I knew that he was well read on the people who agreed with him about why Christianity is not true.

So I asked him, I was sure he had, he was familiar with these facts and I asked him what, how he explained what the disciples concluded was a resurrection from the dead. Right. And his response was, well, something happened.

And so that was his response. That was his response. I said, well, of course something happened, but what do you think happened? And he said, well, fortunately, I don't have to know.

And I, you know, I was just kind of laughing. I said, well, you can't just, you know, attack Christianity for having to either deny one of those minimal facts, right. Or he has to propose a naturalistic, non-supernatural explanation that accounts for those facts better than the resurrection.

Yep, exactly. That's his job. Exactly.

And he was unable to do any of that. And I pointed that out to him and I, and he said, well, fortunately, unlike you, I don't feel the need to know everything. I said, well, don't you think that if there is one thing you should seek out the answer to, it would be this question.

I mean, you're, you know, if there's any chance at all that Jesus was who he claimed to be, uh, the stakes are pretty high here. And he kind of looked down and, uh, and then, you know, trying to think of something to say to come back at me. And he goes, he goes, get out of here.

Get, just go, go, go, go, get out of my office, close the door. And it was, it was absolutely hilarious. I was laughing so hard.

It was hard for me, you know, to leave. This reminds me of a scene from American Sniper where the main character, uh, is explaining how in the world there are sheep and there are wolves and there are sheepdogs. So this guy is busy wolfing around in the office, you know, uh, uh, uh, scaring all the sheep.

Yes. And, and you step in there and give him this argument. What happened? Like, what was the net result of this? Yeah.

So, you know, a lot of, I think a lot of Christians think that the reason that we share truth is just, um, in hopes that people will come, will become Christians. And if they, a person doesn't become a Christian, then we've just failed miserably or something like that. But what I actually saw from this experience was that this guy did not become a Christian.

He was, he had, he was very hard hearted. He was determined to be the, the Lord of his life and do things his way. He was, um, uh, very, very far left on all issues and he did not want anyone telling him how to live his life at all.

Certainly not God. Um, so he did not become a Christian, which didn't surprise me at all. But what happened was he gained some respect for evangelical Christianity that day for, for historical Christianity.

And he actually stopped trying to pick on and, and draw people away from Christ for as long as I was around. And so, you know, he didn't, yeah, he didn't become a Christian, but a lot of sheep who were not going to learn the evidence for themselves were protected for the remainder of the time that I knew him all the way until he retired, uh, because he knew that if he brought up some sort of attack against Christianity and I was around, which I always was because we worked together, that he was going to get buried in evidence. Yeah, that's fantastic.

So some people are going to reply to what you just said and say, that's not good enough. We need to actually change people's worldviews. So can reason and evidence do that? Yeah.

So that, I mean, that's another reason, of course, to share evidence. People actually do become Christians as a result of the evidence. It is simply not true that no one becomes a Christian through evidence or arguments for Christianity.

I can name a whole bunch of people who have, but, um, uh, one of my favorites is David Wood. So David was an atheist. He, his, his testimony is on YouTube.

I would encourage everybody to watch the whole thing, even though it's quite long. It's, uh, it'll captivate you, but he was an atheist. I agree.

Yeah. He was an atheist. He, it's excellent.

Everybody should watch this video of his, his conversion story. Yeah. He had actually tried to kill his own dad by hitting him in the head over and over with a hammer, just because he thought it was interesting to watch someone die.

And, uh, as an atheist, he was in prison. He had a roommate or, um, cellmate who was a Christian and he just thought it would be fun to kind of destroy this cellmate's worldview. So he started studying the evidence in order to crush his cellmate and David ended up becoming a Christian himself and he has had a tremendous impact on the world.

Oh yeah. Yeah. He's a famous Christian apologist who has a huge effect with his podcasting and so on.

Yeah, exactly. He's on YouTube. Um, well, they, his, his videos get banned about as quickly as he can make them, but then he appeals and they, and they usually get restored.

But, um, yeah, his video, he, he speaks out against Islam and atheism and he's, he's absolutely excellent. Right. So let's talk, let's talk about another benefit of this.

So I was, I was talking about in the workplace. You can, you can, uh, definitely stand up, you know, to bullies in the workplace. If you explain using evidence, how you got to the positions that you hold, um, people tend to respect that more even in information technology.

They, they, their caricature of you is that you're a fundamentalist, right? But if you explain how you arrived at your view and that you previously held another view and that you considered many views, then they tend to be less aggressive. So does that work culturally? Does that apply in the broader culture? Are Christians, should we be learning how to make a case using reason and evidence in order for the culture to consider the Christian worldview a live option? Absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, one of the, really my, one of my main goals, usually when I share evidence for the truth, when I share the truth and then I give evidence for it, um, one of my main goals is to demonstrate to people that Christianity is a reasonable, rational, evidence based worldview for which there are reasons to believe it is true. You know, we live in a time when Christians are being pushed out of the public square, silenced on social media, fired from their jobs for being Christians, for being conservatives, being silenced all over the place. There are all these claims that, that we are anti-science, that we are anti-intellectuals, that we shouldn't be taken seriously.

The reality is that it's a very rational worldview. And I believe that if Christians were able to give a couple of reasons of evidence based reasons for why Christianity is true, we could really change that stereotype of Christians and people would realize, some people would realize, I mean, of course there are, there are radical leftists who just hate truth, who hate light and who want darkness to dominate. But there are a lot of people kind of in the middle who are just following the, you know, the zeitgeist kind of of the day and who are being persuaded because of the Christians they interact with that it is an irrational worldview.

We have an opportunity to demonstrate otherwise that we do belong at the table of ideas. We do belong in academia. We do belong in the scientific fields.

We're going to have to get over, you know, being all upset and offended when someone calls us a name. That's going to be part of it. It always has, it always will be.

This reminds me of a paper I read by William Lane Craig where he talked about, he entitled this in intellectual neutral. He actually did it once at the Wheaton College, like there was this big gathering chapel. And I was there.

I was actually visiting for, unheard of him deliver this. It's a very stirring account where he says Christians need to get to work on, you know, studying and in order to be able to give a defense and an explanation of the Christian worldview. And I would say that nobody, you know, has made a bigger difference in the university than Dr. Craig with all these debates that he does.

Although when I had him debate at my university, I was the timekeeper, the organizers. Yeah, they organized this as a surprise for me, all my friends from crusade and they brought Craig out to debate at my university and I was a timekeeper. I remember afterwards we had a chaplain on campus and he said, you know, debates don't change anyone's mind.

What do you think about that? You know, do these debates work? Does using arguments and evidence, you know, get us a hearing in the culture? Do people show up for these debates? That's actually really funny that without that William Lane Craig said that people don't change their mind. Was it, was it Dr. Craig you said who's Oh, no, no, no, no, the progressive chaplain. Oh, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry. At my university after the debate, he said, you know, these debates don't change anyone's mind because he had been, he had been there for I did my bachelor's degree there and he'd been there for four years. He had never seen this many people show up for any kind of Christian event.

And he had all kinds of John Dominick Crossen and Marcus Borg, both, you know, the Jesus seminar people. This guy was a real leftist, possibly an atheist. Yeah.

And he was annoyed. I think that we had packed in several hundred people, you know, into a room. Yeah.

So that reminds me of one of my favorite stories. Lee Strobel was talking to a friend of his who was like the director of like atheist for America or something like that. And Lee Strobel had the idea of having a debate with between a Christian scholar and an atheist scholar.

Lee's atheist friend was like, Oh yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. Oh my goodness.

That's such a good idea. You know, thinking, we're just going to put this ridiculousness of Christianity to bed. And so of course the Christians chose William Lane Craig.

The atheist chose a man named Frank Zindler. And yes, what happened was almost 8,000 people showed up in person to attend this debate. It was Willow Creek church in Illinois.

Yes, really happened. Yes, yes, exactly. And it ended up being broadcast as, as people were sharing about the upcoming debate.

It ended up being broadcast live by 117 stations coast to coast. And what happened was 82% of the non-Christians in attendance said in their, their form that they filled out after the event that the evidence presented for Christianity was stronger than the evidence presented for atheism. So this is 82% of non-Christians saying the evidence for Christianity presented was stronger.

And 47 people that night who were in-person attendees became Christians. 47 people from one, from a two hour debate. I mean, to say that this doesn't change anyone's mind, it may not frequently change the mind of the person you're debating, but it does have an impact on the people who are listening.

People do show up for these. They do make a difference. Debates are a wonderful, wonderful thing that I would like to see happening in every church in America.

Yeah. And at least they could be showing the DVDs of these debates. I remember when I was a college student, a undergraduate, I was reading on leadership university, leaderu.com, L E A D E R U.com. I was reading all the William Lane Craig debate transcripts.

And then I was ordering the VHS tapes on the audio cassettes of all his debates as a student. So, you know, this is how I got to be where I am today. I like watching debates as well.

I actually tend to prefer to watch them like playbacks, you know, after they've been recorded more than I like to watch them live, because then I can hit the pause button and take notes. I'm not so much of an oral learner. I'm a visual learner.

So I take notes on debates and then kind of review my notes. And as I see my notes, I'm learning the material. But this also, in addition to having an impact on my mind with the information, it's also been really beneficial for my character to watch men disagreeing on the most critical topics that you could disagree on, but doing so with calmness and collectedness and respect the way Dr. Craig does.

They're absolutely phenomenal. I also read a lot of books as a visual learner. So, you know, these are a couple of the ways that people can learn this information, whether they watch debates, read books, what are some other ways that you learn evidence? Dr. Justin Marchegiani I like to listen to debates and lectures.

I have like, maybe like a hundred audio lectures from places like Veritas Forum, Stand to Reason, Access Research Network. They have amazing resources on design and evolution and intelligent design at the cosmic level. Actually, I'm reading a book right now that is, I have it in print, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith.

Dr. Craig Oh, yeah. That just came out recently. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, and it's a book for beginners.

Like it's got short chapters, 15-page chapters by on a whole bunch of different topics by a whole bunch of different authors. I really love Jay Richards and Stephen Meyer and Michael Behe, Guillermo Gonzalez, Bruce Gordon. Dr. Craig Mm-hmm.

Dr. Justin Marchegiani So I'm listening to that. I like to listen to audiobooks when I drive, you know, and also do chores around the house like mowing the lawn or something like that. Dr. Craig Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's such a great idea. Well, you really answered my question. I was gonna ask you, you know, if there's a new or updated book that you would really recommend to equip Christians to have evidence-based conversations.

You mentioned The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith. So maybe I'll just go ahead and add a recommendation. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Yeah, give one.

Dr. Craig Mm-hmm. Dr. Justin Marchegiani Stephen Meyer has recently come out with The Return of the God Hypothesis. He kinda summarizes his previous arguments in his excellent books.

His arguments for the origin of the universe, fine-tuning, origin of life. And he kinda, you know, takes it a step further in his newest book and reveals, you know, who he thinks this intelligent designer might be using just a ton of scientific evidence. And really, I think, I think Stephen Meyer is someone that everybody, someone who everybody should be familiar with.

And especially his excellent work. He's really just about, you know, the best that we have. I'm a huge fan.

Dr. Craig Mm-hmm. I agree. I agree completely.

He's definitely the man for our times and someone that every Christian should know. All right. I think it's a good time for us to end this episode.

So everyone listening, if you like the content, please like, comment, and share. As always, you can find the references for this episode on winterynight.com. That's W-I-N-T-E-R-Y-K-N-I-G-H-T.com. We appreciate you taking the time to listen and we'll see you again in the next one.

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