Answers to Arguments Against Christianity By Mike Warren 1. Problem of Evil: If God is all-powerful, and He is all-good, meaning He would remove evil to the extent of His power, then evil should not exist: Straw-man argument. The Bible does not teach that God is good in the sense that He removes evil to the full extent of His ability (cf. Rom. 9:17). Without this definition of goodness, God’s goodness does not contradict God’s omnipotence and the existence of evil. God is good in the sense that He is the ultimate standard of goodness. Since there is no standard higher than God that could bring Him into judgment, if God allows evil to exist, it necessarily follows that God has a morally sufficient reason for allowing it to exist. Some atheists argue that, by any decent human standards, God should not allow as much suffering and evil into the world as He does; but this is just begging the question of atheism - that human standards While the Christian is said to have a problem with the existence of evil, the atheist has a problem with goodness. He has no basis for saying that evil exists, since he has no absolute standard of goodness to judge it by. Thus the atheist must rely on the God of Christianity to even make this objection.[1] 2. If God is all-powerful, could He create a stone too big for an all-powerful God to lift?: Straw-man argument. It is not the Christian view that God is all-powerful in the sense that He can do any absurd thing that might enter into your head. He is omnipotent in the sense that He can do whatever He wills, but He can only will that which is according to His character. God cannot lie (Heb. 6:18), and He cannot deny Himself (2 Tim. 2:13), which imply that He cannot do logically contradictory things. As all-powerful, he can lift a stone of any size and weight. Even if the assumption of this objection is granted, it presents no barrier to God lifting the stone. If God can do one contradictory thing, which is to be an all-powerful God yet not powerful enough to lift the stone, then He can do a second contradictory thing, which is to lift the stone too big for Him to lift. 3. If a sovereign God exists, man is determined, not free: Atheism has its own problem with determinism vs. free will, so this issue can’t be used to choose atheism over Christianity. But in fact the Christian solution to this problem is better than any atheist solution could be. Atheists say that the human will is subject to the fate of environmental determinism, which is law without any sense of free will, or a product of randomness, which is freedom without law. A few atheists, like B.F. Skinner, have been courageous enough to embrace determinism; but most claim that the human will is spontaneously free. This is inconsistent with their commitment to naturalistic evolution. But whichever view the atheist holds, the human will is a product of the impersonal and amoral. There is no more moral significance to randomness than there is to materialistic determinism. Either way, the atheist view excludes the possibility of the existence of moral laws that humans have the moral freedom to obey or disobey. At least in the Christian worldview, morally responsible humans are a creation of an absolutely moral personality. There is a distinction between God’s being and man’s being, whereas the atheist denies that humans have a distinct nature from the impersonal, amoral sources that gave rise to humans. An exhaustive explanation of how God creates morally responsible creatures is impossible. We haven’t even discovered a cure for the common cold, so how can we expect to exhaustively understand something as mysterious as the human will? 4. The Inquisition, witch trials, crusades, etc. where Christians unjustly killed others: Ad hominen. Just as Marxist philosophy is not invalid simply because some Marxists have acted inconsistently with Marxism, so the Christian philosophy of life is not untrue just because some Christians have acted in an un-Christian manner. Furthermore, the argument can be reduced as aburdity as reason to choose Christianity over atheism because officially atheist governments in the 20th Century slaughtered tens of millions more innocent people than Christian governments ever did.[2] And last, when atheists kill innocent people, they are being consistent with the atheist worldview, because if human beings are just bags of molecules, they have no value. At least ethics is possible in the Chrisitan worldview. There is an absolute standard that allows us to say that it is immoral to slaughter innocent humans. Prior to Christainity, it was practically unheard of to criticize one's own nation's treatment of foreign nations because foreign nations were assumed to have a lower moral status, or even less of a human status. Christian nations were the first to criticize their own nation's ill-treatment of foreign nations.[3] 5. God’s commands in the Old Testament were cruel. Hell Begging the question. To call God’s commands cruel is to assume that there is a standard of goodness higher than God. In the Christian worldview, what God commands is right by definition because there is no standard by which God can be judged. Let’s put the show on the other foot. What if a Christian said that atheism cannot be true because its ethical teachings are contrary to the ethics taught in the Bible? Has atheist ethics been proven wrong by this statement? No, the Christian has merely made an assertion that assumes the truth of Christianity, not an argument that proves its truth. Ditto for this objection of the atheist. 6. If God defines what is right and wrong, then He could arbitrarily change what He declares to be right and wrong: Everybody has some ultimate standard of right and wrong. If that standard is not absolute and self-sufficient, then definitions of right and wrong can be changed arbitrarily. The Christian God is an absolute, self-sufficient being. He is unchanging in His moral character. His commandments are a reflection of His moral character. The atheist bases ethics on a universe of purposeless flux, thus the atheist has the problem of arbitrary ethics. 7. Christians are arrogant and arbitrary to claim that they are right and everyone else is wrong: This view is self-refuting because the atheist is claiming to be right in rejecting the truth of Christianity and that Christians are all wrong. As Alvin Plantinga says, “These charges of arrogance are a philosophical tar baby: get close enough to them to use them against the Christian believer, and you are likely to get stuck fast to yourself.”[4] Non-judgmentalism is self-refuting: If it is wrong to say others are wrong, then it is wrong to say that it is wrong to say others are wrong. Christian humility does not mean saying that everyone else is right and the Christian is wrong; it means submitting to God’s revealed word and proclaiming God’s word to others as He commands. 8. All religions are basically the same. Christianity cannot claim to be the only way There are similarities between Christianity and other religions, but there are also differences. To look at the similarities but ignore the differences is intellectually dishonest. It amounts to the fallacy of equivocation. For example, several religions command people to love, but love is defined differently. Buddha commanded love for your neighbor, but not because your neighbor has any value, but merely as a means to destroy your own individuality and be absorbed into the oneness of the universe. In Hinduism, heaven is a big sex orgy. Is that truly love? There are legends in other religions of resurrection from the dead, but the fact these religions teach that those who were resurrected are products of an ultimately impersonal universe in which all being is ultimately one, as opposed to the Christian teaching of Christ’s dual nature and the absolute distinction in being between Creator and creation, gives a very different meaning to those resurrections. Very few religions are, in fact, theistic. Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism are atheistic. Hinduism has many gods, but impersonal forces ultimately control the universe. The only religions that teach a personal and sovereign God similar to Christianity are Judaism and Islam. But they have their origin in the same Biblical revelation; thus the truth of each one can be evaluated by their conformity to that common revelation. And the Christian would argue that Judaism and Islam do not consistently hold to the concept of an absolute God, such as in their view that salvation is by human works rather than by God’s grace.[5] 9. Isn’t it unfair to send people to Hell who have never heard about Jesus?: People are condemned for sinning against God. Rejecting Jesus is merely one of many sins. The fact that some criminals are pardoned does not change the fact that those who are punished are getting their just consequences. Also, even though everyone in the world has not heard about Jesus and the way of salvation, God and His law are known to everyone in creation through the facts of creation (cf. Rom. 1-2). Every fact of man’s environment, including man’s own consciousness, is a God-created fact and thus revelational of God. The depth of man’s rebellion against God is seen in the fact that man is confronted with God’s revelation every moment of his existence, yet so many people still refuse to acknowledge and obey Him. 10. By appealing to the Bible to prove the Bible, the Christian is guilty of circular reasoning: Not necessarily. There is a difference between demonstrating the internal consistency of a belief system and the fallacy of arguing in a vicious circle. In fact, atheists are often guilty of begging the question when they raise this objection because they are demanding a naturalistic (i.e. “scientific’) explanation for a Christian claim rather than considering the possibility that a supernatural explanation is the true explanation. 11. The Bible cannot be an objective guide to truth because so many people disagree on the right interpretation of it: a. Just because students give different answers to the same question on a test does mean that there is no right answer. Most likely it means that many of the students did not study enough. To use another analogy, if people disagreed about the shape of the earth, that would not mean that the earth is therefore shapeless. b. There are difficult teachings in the Bible, but its central message is clear enough for anyone with normal intelligence to understand. Those Christian denominations that believe that the Bible is the sole rule of faith (sola scriputura) may have their disagreements, such as whether to baptize babies or only adults, but there is enough agreement that they call each other brothers and sisters in the faith. The greatest disagreements come when other authorities are said to be equal or higher than the Bible (e.g. Roman Catholicism and church tradition, Mormonism and the Book of Mormon, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Watchtower Society). c. And has anyone noticed the disagreements that exist between atheists and the right interpretation of atheist philosophical writings? If I am going to be an atheist, should I follow Plato or Aristotle, Sartre or Skinner? Both atheists and Christians are in the same boat as far as having internal disagreements. 12. The Bible is not a book that was dropped out of heaven. So it is absurd to claim that it is infallible. The Bible was written by fallible humans, conditioned by the cultures in which they lived. Any sort of revelation would be distorted because the interpretive activity of the human mind intervenes between God’s revelation to a person and that person’s act of writing the revelation: Begging the question. This argument assumes that the mind of man is autonomous from God. The mind of man presents no barrier to God’s communication because it has been created by God. God created humans to communicate with Him. As a creation of God, the human mind is itself revelatory of God. Sin does not negate man’s creaturehood. Christians can admit that the human writer’s personality shows in the writing. God can use the writer’s personality, while suppressing any sin associated with it, to write what He wants written because man’s personality is itself God’s creation. (Infallibility is, in fact, an inescapable concept – see 17 below.)[6] 13. All the contradictions in the Bible:[7] a. First, the more superficially one reads the Bible, the more “contradictions” will be found. If I said, “It is raining,” and then said, “It is not raining,” I have contradicted myself only superficially. I could have been talking about two different times, or places, or even used “raining” in two different senses. Thus, there is a sense in which interpretation must precede logical analysis. b. Second, the Christian handles apparent contradictions in the Bible the same way that an evolutionist handles problems that arise in the theory of evolution. If an evolutionist cannot solve some minor problem in the theory (i.e., how the human eye evolved, gaps in the fossil record), does he abandon the whole thing and become a creationist? Not likely. He simply chalks it up as a minor mystery that can possibly be solved by further research, or he may even admit the possibility that the difficulty will never be solved because the fossil record is incomplete. Why? Because 1) he thinks that despite this problem there is tons of other evidence in favor of evolution, and 2) creationism is not an option because he thinks that commitment to the naturalistic worldview is necessary for the very possibility of science and reason. In the same way, the Christian regards apparent contradictions as minor mysteries that might be solved with further research, or may never be solved because the archeological record of Biblical times is incomplete. Why? Because the Christian is making an irrational, blind leap of faith? No. Because 1) despite some apparent contradictions, there is tons of other evidence supporting the reliability of the Bible (which includes the Bible’s own claim to be infallible – cf. John 10:35), and 2) abandoning the Bible for atheism is not an option because the existence of an absolutely rational Creator as described in the Bible is necessary for the very possibility of logic, science and ethics. c. Both the atheistic evolutionist and the Christian recognize, at some level, that as finite creatures, humans can never have all the facts. Consequently, apparent contradictions, or “difficulties,” are inevitable in any belief system. As atheist evolutionist Richard Lewontin correctly observes about his compatriot’s arbitrary double standard, “What seems absurd depends on one's prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity ‘in deep trouble.’ Two's company, but three's a crowd.”[8] The only way to really decide between opposing belief systems is not pointing out minor mysteries in other systems, but looking at the most basic presuppositions of the belief systems, what is claimed to ultimately determine the nature of the universe. The winner in the dispute will be able to demonstrate that his system of belief provides the preconditions for human rationality, so that science, logic and ethics are even possible. Having rejected an eternal relation between laws of logic and particular facts in the mind of an omniscient God, the atheist must believe that logic, as a principle of unity abstracted from particular facts, ultimately determines the nature of the world (e.g., rationalists like Parmenides and Plato), or the atheist must believe that unrelated particular facts are the source of everything that exists (materialism), or the atheist will believe in the ultimacy of both abstract universals and abstract particulars (Kantianism). In any of these cases, because logic and facts begin in exclusion from the other, there is no basis for them to later become related to each other in the human mind. An abstract unity (a blank) and an abstract particularity (chaos) are both irrational (cannot be objects of knowledge), and trying to create the rational from irrational is like adding two zeros and expecting to produce a positive number. Thus existence of an absolute God, as the source of both the unity and particularity of the world, is necessary for the very possibility of human rationality and knowledge .[9] 14. “God” is a meaningless term, like the term “blich”: Straw-man argument, begging the question. This assumes that God exists in something like Kant’s noumenal realm as an empty abstraction. Kant’s God is not the Christian God. The Christian God has a concrete character, and that character has definite implications for human life (heaven, hell, sin, creation, etc.). If God had other characteristics, there would be other implications. 15. Saying “God did it,” does not explain anything. I want to know how God made a cow!: As finite creatures, exhaustive explanations of anything are impossible. What evolutionist has exhaustive knowledge of the evolutionary process? Does that mean that evolution is no explanation? The issue between Christianity and atheism is that the possibility and existence of science, logic, and ethics at least makes sense in a world created by an absolutely rational, absolutely moral God; whereas a worldview in which the universe is ultimately determined by impersonal, amoral, non-rational matter cannot make sense of science, logic, and ethics. With Christianity, you'll never know how God made a cow, but at least science is possible. 16. Belief in religion may be emotionally meaningful, but it is not rationally meaningful. Faith and reason are independent of each other: Begging the question. This is not the Christian view of faith and reason. When the Christian appeals to faith, he is not appealing to the non-rational but to an absolutely rational God.[10] It is the atheist, believing that the finite human mind is the most advanced mind in the universe and that the universe is ultimately non-rational, who is appealing to the non-rational when he believes something that has not been grasped by the human mind. Thus, the view of religion assumed in this objection is actually a description of atheist spirituality and faith rather than Christianity. (See below for more on science and religion.) 17. To believe in religion is to be closed-minded and believe things on empty authority. The atheist and agnostic are open-minded skeptics; they believe only on the basis of evidence, and are willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads: As a famous philosopher has observed, “doubting itself presupposes certainty.”[11] To be skeptical of everything would mean that a person has no beliefs, like a vegetable. You should not be so open-minded that your brains fall out. One cannot be skeptical of the truth of something unless one accepts a standard of truth by which other claims can be judged. Infallibility is an inescapable concept. Everyone has some ultimate standard of truth. If God is rejected, another ultimate standard will take His place, an idol. As ultimate, there is no higher standard that can criticize it. The State (Hobbes, Hegel), the Communist Party, nature (Marquis de Sade), the will of the majority (Rousseau), experience (Hume), the artistic impulse, academic freedom, and many other aspects of God’s creation have served as infallible idols for modern society.[12] Both the Christian and non-Christian have an ultimate authority that they will not question and in terms of which they judge (are skeptical of) other claims to truth. The atheist’s universe is closed to God. The atheist is close-minded in rejecting the possibility of God from the outset, as when they define science as a search for naturalistic explanations, which means that it is a foregone conclusion that they will never discover evidence for the supernatural. Thus when they claim to believe things only on the basis of “evidence” and will follow the evidence wherever it leads, they have rigged the game by defining “evidence” from the start to exclude God. They are being close-minded to the very possibility of finding evidence for Christianity. The atheist position is logically self-refuting, for it amounts to an absolute claim that there are no absolutes. It is an absolute claim that the Bible and Christianity cannot be true, and that “science,” which can give only probabilistic truth, is the source of all genuine knowledge. Not only is it self-refuting, but the atheist’s ultimate standard undermines the possibility of rationality because that ultimate standard is non-rational. On the basis of the wholly non-rational the rational cannot arise and cannot be explained. To be skeptical in a way that is morally and logically sound, one must have a rational, absolute standard of truth by which to judge other claims. Only in terms of the ultimacy of an absolutely rational God and His revealed absolute word, can a person be rationally and morally open-minded and skeptical. 18. Creationism is a pseudo-science because science is, by definition, a search for naturalistic explanations: Begging the question. This definition of science assumes that the world can be explained without God, which is the very point in issue. By excluding supernatural explanations from the outset, it is a foregone conclusion that the In this sense, the only possible science is creation science. This is not saying that every literal word of Genesis could not have been otherwise without undermining the possibility of science. Maybe God could have used evolution to form life to some extent; whether He did nor not is an exegetical issue. Also, this is not to say that atheists cannot make great contributions to science, but it means that when they do so, they are being inconstistent with atheism. They are working from borrowed capital from the Christian worldview, especially as derived from the history of Western Civilization, in which Christianity provided the presuppositions necessary for the birth of modern science.[13] 19. Christian faith is an irrational wish-fulfillment by primitive, ignorant minds that our mysterious and dangerous world be governed by a loving, wise divine Father. As science and reason advance, the need for religion will fade away like the smile on the Cheshire Cat: Begging the question, straw-man. Just because something is desired does not prove that it is not true. Furthermore, it is not the Christian view that humanity has evolved from non-rational ooze into rational minds. The atheist is actually describing the irrationalism inherent in the atheist worldview. Since man is the highest rational being on that view, appeal beyond the human mind to faith must be an appeal to the non-rational. The Christian view is that man has always been in contact with an absolutely rational God. The Christian appeal to faith is not a leap beyond reason but an appeal to the absolutely rational Creator. The claim could be reversed: Atheism is an irrational wish-fulfillment that there be no God whom the atheist must obey and be judged by. Whether one or the other view is the product of an irrational desire depends on an objective argument that that view is not true. The Christian argument against atheism is that, given its view that the universe is ultimately non-rationality, rationality could never arise from it. 20. Science unites people because it is objective, observable and testable so that everyone can agree on it. Religion divides because it concerns subjective, untestable beliefs so that there can never be resolution between groups who hold different beliefs: Straw-man. This mischaracterizes both science and religion, at least the Christian religion. One of the great myths of the modern age has been that “facts speak for themselves.” The reality is that all facts are interpreted facts. In the twentieth century many philosophers tried to develop a theory of knowledge based purely on sense experience, but their failure is now widely acknowledged in philosophical circles. Laws of logic, mathematical concepts, and other abstract concepts, for example, are not observable entities. Experiments cannot conclusively falsify a particular proposition, because any one person holds a large network of beliefs. Faced with apparently unfavorable evidence, a person could choose to abandon one of his other beliefs in order to protect a more cherished one (like deny that the instruments recorded the event accurately). Furthermore, Christian religious belief is a belief in objective truths. God’s existence is a fact, even if no human acknowledged it. The Bible endorses empirical tests to determine whether an alleged revelation from God is genuine, such as the test for fulfillment of prophecy (Deut. 18:22). And there are objective, rational proofs for the existence of God, proofs which involve the necessity of an absolutely rational, moral, all-knowing Creator in order to account for the possibility of human reason, morality and knowledge. Ultimately atheism reduces to pure subjectivism because truth is ultimately judged by the human mind. Truth becomes whatever the individual person decides it is. Only Christianity can account for objective truth because there is a transcendent, absolutely rational, unchanging God who is the ultimate standard of truth.[14] 21. Whether religious claims are true should be tested by scientific standards because science is a standard that everyone can agree on: Beyond the argument above (20), this objection is begging the question. It assumes that sense experience is the only source of truth. As such it excludes the possibility of the supernatural from the outset. It attempts to unite all people by requiring Christians and any other people who believe in the supernatural to become born-again liberals. Liberals are a small, elitist sect who can’t seem to get along with any other groups of people who hold a different belief system. 22. Infinite regress, and all the other problems of the traditional proofs for the existence of God: I don’t subscribe to those arguments, so I can’t be saddled with their problems. 23. The fact that atheists have been unable to solve certain mysteries is no argument for the existence of God. Any appeal to God as an explanation for the physical universe is an illegitimate appeal to the "god of the gaps." Atheists claim, on the one hand, science (which they wrongly assume is the same as the naturalistic worldview) has been extremely successful at solving mysteries, at producing knowledge hand over fist. On the other hand, they say, an appeal to God stops all further inquiry. The materialist methodology is a knowledge producer, and theological methodology is a knowledge stopper. The problem with this argument by the atheists is that it shows a lack of awareness of the transcendental necessity of the existence of God for the possibility of knowledge, which I explain in my essay "Christian Civilization is the Only Civilization – In a Sense of Course." Assuming naturalism, knowledge is not possible, science is not possible. An appeal to God to explain science is not an appeal for the purpose of simply plugging some gaps in the materialistic scheme. Rather, it is an appeal to that which is logically necessary for the possibility of science. The naturalistic worldview does not merely have gaps that need to be plugged; it is one big hole that cannot account for the intelligibility of anything in life. On the basis of an ultimately non-rational universe, rationality is not possible. An implication of Christian theism is that there are some things that humans will never know. We will always remain finite. There are miracles on occasion, preventing the possibility of following a chain of material causation as an explanation. But the regularity in nature that is the norm could only be possible on the assumption that God rules the universe. Only because an absolutely rational God is the Creator of humans and nature is a rational investigation of nature by humans possible. Lack of knowledge of some things is a small price to pay for the possibility of humans having knowledge at all, and for all the fruits that God-ordained science can bear for life on earth. That some events are miracles and thus beyond scientific inquiry does not mean that science is not possible in all other circumstances. The God of the Bible has, in actuality, promised that He will maintain uniformity in natural processes as a general rule (Gen. 8:22). Admittedly, an absolute, self-determined God could, in actuality, perform miracles so often that no regularity of nature would be discernable; but if the argument for Christian Civilization above is sound, the existence of such an absolute, self-determined God is necessary for the possibility of science. Excluding a miracle-performing God does not leave one with a world of uniform natural law, but a world of either pure chaos or a unity devoid of all content, or an insoluble mixture of both. While the theistic view puts the processes of miraculous events and all other knowledge that God chooses to withhold from humans beyond the capability of human discovery, these things are ultimately rational, having their origin in an absolutely rational God; whereas, in terms of non-theistic worldviews, any lack of unity must be regarded as irrational, having its origin in irrational chaos. Scientist Arthur Jones makes some good points: It is commonly claimed by secular scientists that creationism is a "science stopper." The contention is that to ascribe anything (e.g., the origin of living organisms) to the direct action of God is to cut off all scientific inquiry. This seems such simple common sense that it has been very persuasive. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to show that the argument is fallacious. A number of general points can be made. First, the argument is based on ignorance of all the different ways in which Christian faith can enter into science and of how fruitful these have been. After all, many of the great scientists of the past were committed Christians and many of those were consciously exploring the implications of their Christian faith for science. Second, whereas the direct action of God may cut off one type of explanation, others will remain and may even be enhanced. To say that God created the different kinds of animals and plants certainly cuts off explanation in terms of evolutionary continuity. However, it leaves wide open scientific investigation of every other pattern of relationship (ecological, developmental, etc.) between these kinds. Scientists have been so indoctrinated in the belief that all patterns can only be explained historically in terms of the happenstances of Darwinian evolution that many wouldn't even know to look for explanations in other terms. Third, there is abundant documentation of the fact that evolutionary naturalism has often stopped scientific research. To take just one example, the evolutionary assumption that certain organs or features are vestigial has often long delayed the (fruitful) research into their functions.[15]

[1] Note that I do not give the response to the problem of evil that has become standard now days: God had to create humans with the possibility of choosing evil, otherwise humans would be life robots, incapable of expressing love. An atheist could still say that giving humans free will has been too high a price to pay for all the suffering and evil in the history of the world. Also, in heaven no one ever can sin, yet people love God freely, not robotically; so why didn’t God create that situation at the beginning? Ultimately, the Christian response must be that God’s wisdom is higher than ours, whether we understand His ways or not. See Greg Bahnsen, “The Problem of Evil,” in Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith (Texarkana, AR: Covenant Media Foundation, 1996), pp. 163-75, available at www.cmfnow.com under “Articles;” and see tapes GB239 and GB240 in the Philosophy of Christianity course at cfnow.com. [2] See Gil Elliot, Twentieth Century Book of the Dead (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972) and Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (New York: Harper & Row, [1983] 1991). According to one-time Russian exile Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-), at the height of the Spanish Inquisition (late Middle Ages) about ten persons per month were executed. During the eighty years before the Russian revolution, seventeen persons per year were executed. In the first two years of Lenin's revolution more than one thousand persons per month were executed without due process of law. At the height of Stalin's terror an estimated forty thousand persons per month were executed. See Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, "America: You Must Think About the World," Soizhenitsyn: The Voice of Freedom (June 30, 1975), p. 9. [3] Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief ( New York : Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 444. [4] Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief ( New York : Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 444. [5] See Rousas John Rushdoony, The Biblical Philosophy of History (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1969), p. 67. [6] For more on the inspiration of the Bible see the following under “Articles” at www.cmfnow.com: Dr. Greg Bahnsen, “Autographs, Amanuenses and Restricted Inspiration” and “The Inerrancy of the Autographa”. Also see the seminar by John Piper: The Inspiration, Inerrancy, and Authority of the Bible. [7] For answers to specific Bible difficulties, see Gleason L. Archer, Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1982). [8] Richard C. Lewontin, “Review: Billions and Billions of Demons,” The New York Review of Books, . [9] See Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith (Philadelphia, PA: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1955), pp. 42-43. [10] See Cornelius Van Til, An Introduction to Systematic Theology (Phillipsburg, NJ: The Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co., 1974 ), p.12-13; and Greg L. Bahnsen, Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith (Texarkana, AR: Covenant Media Foundation, 1996), pp. 193-201. [11] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), § 115. [12] See Rousas John Rushdoony, Infallibility: An Inescapable Concept (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1978). [13] See "The Light Has Come!: Quotations on the History of Christian Contributions to the Progress of Civilization" [14] See Greg Bahnsen, “Pragmatism, Prejudice, and Presuppositionalism” in Gary North, ed., Foundations of Christian Scholarship: Essays in the Van Til Perspective, (Vallecito, CA: Ross House Books, 1976), pp.289-90. [15] Arthur Jones, Chapter 25 in In Six Days: Why Fifty Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation ( Green Forest , AR : Master Books, 2000) pp.241-42. Last revised 10/12/2004