[00:00:00] You know, more than 200 times every second around the clock, someone is asking an online search engine about God. Sometimes with, Is God Real? Does God Exist? Google, for example, answers that query with 3.7 billion results in two-thirds of a second.
[00:00:42] But I think we need a little better answer and certainly we have our atheist friends saying there is no evidence for God, there is no evidence that there's life after death, there is no evidence that we have an objective standard for right and wrong.
[00:00:56] But if you've been listening to this program any length of time, you know that we believe that there is very good evidence and we are dedicated to presenting that. That's why I'm excited about this new book. It is just out.
[00:01:07] You probably will be able to find it in your local bookstore in the next day or two. But if not, we certainly have information about it on the website. It is entitled, Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life.
[00:01:19] It's written by our good friend Lee Strobel, of course a former award-winning legal editor with the Chicago Tribune, also a New York Times bestselling author. More than 40 books in curriculum, about 14 million copies in print.
[00:01:36] And of course more recently we've talked about the fact that he was the founding director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics at Colorado Christian University near Denver. Has his degrees from the University of Missouri and Yale Law School.
[00:01:51] And Lee Strobel, it is always great to have you on the program. Well Kirby, it's always great to talk with you. I wish we'd talk more often. You know I do it every time I have a book come out, but I sure enjoy chatting with you.
[00:02:03] Well we'll see if we can increase the frequency. But anybody that is not familiar with your books, this one is in the theme of so many others, A Case for Christ, A Case for Faith and others.
[00:02:13] And that is a 250 page book published by Zondervan, who has been your publisher all these years, in which you then, in this particular case, have six chapters where you spend some time setting forth the case and doing interviews with people we've had on this program.
[00:02:29] William Lane Craig, Stephen Meyer, Doug Grotise, Chad Meister, and people like that. And then two final chapters on challenges about suffering and the hiddenness of God. And again, we benefit from your expertise, but as you've always done in many of your
[00:02:46] books in the past, take us to an expert who can share some really great insight about how that particular area of their expertise once again reemphasizes and confirms the existence of God. Yeah, I see my role as kind of a conduit between the academic world, the scholarly
[00:03:06] world and the everyday world. Because I'm a journalist, and so I'm not a scholar, I'm not an academic, but I'm comfortable with going to these world-class experts with PhDs from Cambridge and all these prestigious
[00:03:18] universities and interviewing them and asking the tough questions I had when I was a skeptic, when I was an atheist, and kind of, as somebody once said, put the cookies on the bottom shelf. In other words, to then produce something that the average person like myself can understand
[00:03:34] some of these lofty academic answers that these scholars give. So I find it quite exciting to be able to interact with these famous and profound thinkers with the quest of saying, how can I make this understandable to me? And if I get it, then anybody can get it.
[00:03:52] Well, again, one of the things I love about this is, of course, you have this inquiring mind, you're a great interviewer. But even before we get into some of the key chapters, I might mention that you put a section
[00:04:02] in there not only talking about how you were a skeptic that came to belief, but you tell the brief story of a number of people we've interviewed on this program, like Jay Warner-Wallace and Michael Brown and a number of others.
[00:04:15] If nothing else, if you were to hand this to an individual saying, okay, well, I'm glad that you eventually decided to become a Christian, but are you an exception? And you actually point out, no, there are a lot of other people that have traveled down
[00:04:28] the same road that you've traveled down. Yeah, it's funny you mention that because I got a bullet point of the brief stories in the introduction to the book, and these are only people I know.
[00:04:39] So if I were to look at the wide range of skeptics and atheists and agnostics who've come to faith in Christ, largely because they examined the evidence, you'd have an even bigger universe to draw from.
[00:04:53] But these are folks who just are in my sphere of influence, and there's so many of them, as you say, who have found that as they have investigated the evidence, as they've sincerely pursued the case for Christ, they've found that it's substantial and makes sense and is persuasive.
[00:05:09] Well, let's see if we can get through this. And again, for people that maybe want to follow along, sometimes I'd like to take some notes, number one to eight, but we're going to look at the first six as we go through this.
[00:05:19] The first is the cosmos requires a creator. Now that goes all the way back to Aristotle and the idea of cause and effect, but you remind us of the fact that if indeed we are talking about this huge thing called the universe,
[00:05:35] the cause has to be, first of all, outside of the universe, outside of space and time, has to be more powerful. But in the midst of this, then you take us to an interview you did with an individual
[00:05:45] that I've known for many years, oftentimes have moderated some of his debates, had him on the program, and that is Dr. William Lane Craig. Right, exactly. And as Dr. Craig points out, this idea that the universe had a beginning and therefore needed a creator has been traced back.
[00:06:02] This argument that he uses called the Kalam Cosmological Argument actually is traced back to Islamic theology in the medieval times. And now we know because of scientific discoveries over the last 50 years or so about the expansion of the universe that our universe did have a beginning.
[00:06:19] For centuries, scientists believed the universe was static, it was eternal. And now we know, no, no, no, it wasn't. It had a beginning. And so this leads to the argument that whatever begins to exist as a cause, we now know that
[00:06:33] the universe began to exist at some point in the past, therefore the universe must have a cause behind it. And then as you say, you look at what kind of a cause can bring a universe into existence. Must be transcendent because it exists apart from creation.
[00:06:48] Must be immaterial or spirit because it existed before the physical world. Must be timeless or eternal because it existed before physical time was created. Must be powerful given the immensity of the creation event. Must be smart given the precision of the creation event.
[00:07:02] Must be personal because he had to make the decision to create. Must be creative because look at the beauty of the universe. Must be caring or loving because he so purposefully crafted a habitat where we can flourish in.
[00:07:14] And then the scientific principle of Occam's razor would say that there would be just one creator. So you look at that and you go, wait a second, transcendent, spirit, eternal, powerful, smart, personal, creative, caring, loving, unique. That's a description of the God of the Bible. So well done.
[00:07:36] We're going to take a break but I might just mention as we're going to the break that one of the things I get to do once a year is to teach on creation at a Bible school.
[00:07:43] And there's a section in which I kind of take people through kind of how you talked about this because in Romans 1 it talks about the fact that they are without excuse. In other words, there is evidence of the creator in the creation.
[00:07:56] And I said just working from what we know from science, you could come to the conclusion that this cause had to be eternal, it had to be outside of time. It had to be omnipotent. It certainly had to be also omnipresent.
[00:08:12] It also had to be certainly understanding some of those very fundamental issues. So it had to be intelligent, had to be creative. And I make the case that certainly the argument made sense in the first century when the apostle
[00:08:26] Paul in Romans 1 talks about the evidence of creator in the creation. But we now know even more from our scientific endeavors that that makes some sense. So that's just the first chapter. We will come back and talk about if indeed a cosmos requires a creator, what about the
[00:08:45] fine tuning in the universe? We'll be back right after this. This is Viewpoints with Kirby Anderson. One book that documents the Judeo-Christian foundations of America is the book On Two Wings written by Michael Novak.
[00:09:08] He is the author of more than 30 books and was awarded the million dollar Templeton Prize for progress in religion. In his preface he says, although I've wanted to write this book for some 40 years, my own ignorance stood in the way.
[00:09:21] It took me a long time, time spent searching up many byways and neglected paths and fighting through a great deal of conventional but mistaken wisdom to learn how many erroneous perceptions I'd unconsciously drunk in from public discussion.
[00:09:34] He concludes that most of us grow up these days remarkably ignorant of the hundred men most responsible for leading this country into a war of independence and writing our nation's constitution. The way American history has been told for the last century is incomplete.
[00:09:49] Secular historians have cut off one of the two wings by which the American eagle flies. The founding generation established a compact with the God of Israel and relied upon this belief. The idea of faith is an indispensable part of their story.
[00:10:02] One example can be found in yesterday's discussion of the Declaration of Independence. While secular historians point to John Locke as the source of ideas embodied in Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, they usually fail to note the older influence of other authors and the Bible.
[00:10:19] Before Locke was even born, the pilgrims believed in the consent of the governed, social compacts, the dignity of every child of God, and political equality. By forcing a secular interpretation on America's founding history, these secular historians ignore the second wing by which the American eagle took flight.
[00:10:36] It's time to look at the two wings of our history. I'm Kirby Anderson and that's my Point of View. Go deeper on topics like you just heard by visiting pointofview.net. That's pointofview.net. You're listening to Point of View. Continue your conversation today with Lee Strobel.
[00:11:05] Let me just mention his new book just out, Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life. And we're going to look at two chapters all having to do with design.
[00:11:15] First we're going to look as we look in our telescope at the heavens, do we have see and actually observe design in the universe? And then we'll look again in the microscopes at the small dimensions of life and see if
[00:11:30] we have design in the small dimensions in biology. But Lee, certainly one of the very important verses that relate to this idea of a universe that has a fine tuning is the fact that Psalm 19 says the skies declare the work of his
[00:11:47] hands or the heaven declare the glory of God. And there's I think a real important principle here that we've always sort of thought there was a design in nature. But as you do an interview with Dr. Michael Strauss, we are seeing more and more evidence
[00:12:04] of the fine tuning of the universe in ways that we would not have imagined until astronomers began to look for those. That's exactly right. I mean one of the striking discoveries that scientists have made in the last 50 years
[00:12:17] or so is that the numbers that govern the operation of the universe, in other words physics, these numbers unexpectedly conspire in an extraordinary way to make the universe habitable for life. In other words, as you say, the universe is finely tuned on a razor's edge so that life
[00:12:35] can exist. It's like if you're, right now I'm in Colorado and if you go up to the mountains in the summer in Colorado and you look up at the sky and you see all the thousands of
[00:12:45] stars, but what if you looked up at the sky one night and instead of seeing thousands of stars you saw 50 to 100 giant dials in the sky. And each one of these dials could be calibrated to one of trillions and trillions of possible
[00:12:59] settings and yet every one of these dials is absolutely perfectly calibrated so that life can exist. That is the picture that modern physics gives us of our universe. And it defies the explanation that all this could happen by chance.
[00:13:16] I talked to a famous physicist about this and I said, well, I mean given how finely tuned it is could this have happened by chance? He said, well you know we scientists have a term that we use for that likelihood. I said what is it?
[00:13:27] He said ain't gonna happen. And so you look at these and one dial would be the representative of gravity, the force of gravity. We know all what force of gravity is. You drop something it's going to hit the ground.
[00:13:40] And yet force of gravity, the value of it is set at the exact right place so that life can exist. How exact is it? Well if you took a ruler across the entire known universe, 15 billion light years, this
[00:13:54] ruler broken down in one inch increments, that represents the plausible range along which the force of gravity could have been calibrated. And yet it's set at the exact right place so that life can exist. What if we change it?
[00:14:07] What if we change it by one inch compared to the 15 billion light year width of the universe? All of a sudden intelligent life becomes impossible anywhere in the universe. And that's just one example.
[00:14:18] In my book, A Biblical Point of View on Intelligent Design, we give you some of those numbers but you use the same numbers because at one point they're talking about looking at all of these parameters together because some people say well maybe we just hit the cosmic
[00:14:31] lottery, you know, just got lucky. And we're talking about 10 to the minus 304th power and it would take me a better part of another minute to talk about the million, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion and it just goes on and on and on for that.
[00:14:46] And at that point you can say no, we're not talking about improbable, we're talking about impossible. And those are I think very helpful because even in your book you talk about this and
[00:14:58] the next person we're going to talk about is an individual we've had on this program before, Dr. Stephen Meyer, in his book dealing with the return of the God hypothesis they point out that because these numbers are so big and because they are so improbable people are
[00:15:14] coming up with alternative theories which you address as well, you know, for example the multi-universe theory and things like that without any observational evidence but it shows the level of desperation you have to go to in order to be an atheist these days.
[00:15:29] Yeah, in fact just recently there's a German theoretical physicist quite a prominent named Sabine Hossenfelder and she's one of the most prominent German physicists that there is. She's an agnostic by the way, she doesn't believe yet that God exists but she said this
[00:15:47] idea that there's an infinite number of invisible universes that we have no evidence of and if you spend the dials in all those universes, you know, certainly it'll come up positive in one of them and that's us, we won the cosmic lottery.
[00:16:01] She said her words were, that is a waste of time, those are her words from a scientific perspective. She said that idea that there's an infinite number of universes for which we have no physical evidence whatsoever, she said that's popular among the media but true scientists, very few
[00:16:18] of them buy into it. I like what Richard Swinburne said, he's the former philosopher at Oxford University, he said, you know, to postulate a trillion, trillion other universes rather than one God in order to explain the orderliness of our universe seems to be the height of irrationality.
[00:16:35] Besides which I'll add one other thing, if one universe requires an explanation then an infinite number of universes requires an even bigger explanation and that points even more powerfully toward a creator. So well said, again that's just chapter two so just before we take a break let's talk
[00:16:54] about chapter three because now as we look at our microscopes we have so much evidence now because we recognize that there is code in the DNA which is as complex, actually more complex than anything a computer programmer would write and Dr. Stephen Meyer has written
[00:17:15] about that in the Signature of the Cell and of course the book I just mentioned a minute ago, The Return of the God Hypothesis but if you think the arguments from the universe are powerful the ones as we look into the cell are even more powerful aren't they?
[00:17:29] I agree, I mean when you look, we have a hundred trillion cells in our body, if you were to open just one cell and unwind the DNA, the strand of DNA, it would be six feet tall and
[00:17:39] embedded in that DNA is a four letter chemical alphabet that spells out the precise assembly instructions for every protein out of which our bodies are made. So that means inside every cell in your body is more information, more words than you would
[00:17:56] find in 200 years of the Sunday New York Times. Where does that come, where does information come from? Nature can't produce information, it can produce patterns. I mean you know the famous example is if you're walking down the beach at dawn and in the wet
[00:18:11] sand you see ripple marks, you would say oh nature can do that, the waves created that pattern those ripples in the sand. But if you're walking down the beach and in the sand you see John loves Mary with a heart
[00:18:23] around it and an arrow through it, you wouldn't say oh the waves made that because whenever you see information whether it's a computer code, whether it's a book, whether it's a painting on a cave wall, whenever you see information without exception there's always an intelligence behind it.
[00:18:41] Let me just say again that this book is just out and there's a whole section where there's a guide for reflection and group discussion because I know Lee you have such a heart for
[00:18:52] evangelism this is not only a book that I could hand to my non-Christian friends that maybe are at least seeking but it's also a wonderful way you've already created in the book to have kind of a small group Bible study, an evangelistic Bible study and as people
[00:19:08] begin to work through the first six chapters and then obviously they'll raise some questions in some of the other chapters having to do with the challenges to Christianity you can really have a great discussion with some of your unsaved friends, neighbors, co-workers even family members.
[00:19:23] Yeah absolutely I mean that's why I designed that as a way to reach out to people and have a discussion. You could do it just with believers as a way to deepen their faith and equip them to share
[00:19:34] Jesus with others more confidently but I love the idea let's get together some friends who are maybe spiritually curious they don't know what they believe and you can go through the book together you can go through the discussion questions and my prayer is that people realize
[00:19:49] not only God is real but he is the God of Christianity and we can know him personally for eternity if we receive this free gift of grace through Jesus Christ. The book is entitled Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life.
[00:20:03] First of all we have a link to LeeStrobel.com so you can of course find out about the book there I think you'll be able to find it in your local bookstore but if not of course we have a link there as well.
[00:20:14] There's some great material that certainly you could use in an evangelistic study or something that would reaffirm your faith and we've looked at just a few of the chapters so far the cosmos requires a creator the universe needs a fine tuner and then just
[00:20:29] briefly we talked about our DNA demands a designer. This point some of you might be saying okay can we get off the science and get into some other issues and we will because then we will look at a chapter Easter shows that Jesus
[00:20:42] is God then a whole section on experiencing God and then an important question as well which God is real and before we're done we'll try to answer at least briefly two of the
[00:20:54] challenges that is okay if God is real why is there suffering a topic we've had so many times here before and then another one which we've talked about recently with Doug Grotise
[00:21:04] if God is real why is he so hidden and some great resources that are all part of this book it is about 250 pages published by Zondervan written by Lee Strobel and we will come back
[00:21:17] and start our way into some of those other chapters and we'll be back right after this. There is an old military saying if you don't have communications you don't have anything good information is the key to success not only for those in the military but for all
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[00:22:41] RTS on Twitter Point of View will continue after this you are listening to Point of View the opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station and now here again is Kirby Anderson continuing our conversation
[00:23:14] today with Lee Strobel I just might mention again that we have a link to Lee Strobel dot com and the book is entitled Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life we've looked at some of the scientific arguments let's look at some of the more historical
[00:23:28] and theological issues Easter showed that Jesus is God now first of all I'd have to say Lee you could interview yourself because you have become quite a scholar on that or you could have interviewed Gary Habermas I remember that interview you did with him I
[00:23:42] think going all the way back to the case for Christ but one of the other real experts is Michael Lacona of course I know you have crossed paths with him when you were at Houston Baptist University but the argument for the resurrection is a very significant argument
[00:23:59] and it's well attested by history Yeah absolutely when I was an atheist and my wife became a Christian I figured how do I get her out of this cult that she's gotten involved in I
[00:24:08] figured I could do that if I could use my journalism training and legal training and disprove the resurrection of Jesus because even I as an atheist recognize that is the linchpin of the Christian faith Apostle Paul said you know if Christ has not been raised
[00:24:23] your faith is futile you're still in your sins it's the ballgame why because Jesus made transcendent and messianic and divine claims about himself he claimed to be the son of
[00:24:32] God at one point he got up before a group and he said I and the father are one and the Greek word for one there is not masculine it's neuter which means Jesus was not saying
[00:24:42] I and the father are the same person he was saying I and the father are the same thing we're one in nature we're one in essence and the audience got it we were what he was saying
[00:24:50] they picked up stones to kill him because they said you you're just a man and you're claiming to be God so Jesus claimed to be God but so what I could claim to be God you
[00:24:58] Kirby could claim to be God anybody could claim to be God but if Jesus claimed to be God died and then three days later rose from the dead that's pretty good indication he's
[00:25:08] telling the truth and so the resurrection as you say is the key and I like to use four words to begin with the letter E to kind of summarize the evidence for the resurrection
[00:25:17] I could do it quite quickly obviously the book goes into more detail but you know the first E is for execution that Jesus was truly dead and no less of a source in the Journal of the American Medical Association which is a secular scientific peer-reviewed medical journal
[00:25:31] carried an investigation into the death of Jesus and their conclusion was clearly the weight of the historical and medical evidence indicates that Jesus was dead even before the wound to his side was inflicted I mean even the atheist scholar Garrett Luderman
[00:25:45] will say it's indisputable that Jesus was dead after he crucified second E stands for early accounts we have a report of the resurrection of Jesus in the form of a creed of the early
[00:25:56] church that has been dated back by scholars to within months of his death and this creed mentions these well it contains the essence of Christianity says Jesus died why for our sins he was buried on the third day rose from the dead and then it mentions the specific
[00:26:12] names of eyewitnesses and groups of eyewitnesses to whom he appeared including skeptics including 500 people at once that dates back to within months of his death too early to be a legend that developed over you know 100 years after his life. Third E is for empty tomb and the
[00:26:28] strongest evidence there that the tomb was empty is that even the opponents of Jesus implicitly admitted the tomb was empty because when the disciples began proclaiming that Jesus had risen what the opponent said was oh well the disciples stole the body well they're conceding
[00:26:43] the tombs empty they're trying to explain how it got empty so everybody's conceding the tomb was empty and the issue is how did it get empty you know the Romans weren't about to steal the
[00:26:54] body they wanted Jesus dead the Jewish leaders of the day weren't about to steal the body they wanted Jesus to stay dead the disciples weren't about to steal the body they didn't have a motive
[00:27:03] the means of the opportunity and I found seven ancient sources six of them outside the Bible that confirmed that the disciples lived lives of deprivation and suffering as a result of their
[00:27:13] proclamation that Jesus had risen why would they do that because they knew it was true and that leads to the fourth E which is eyewitnesses you know most of what we accept as being true about
[00:27:23] the ancient world is based on one source of information or maybe two sources of information if we're really lucky maybe we have three sources of information and yet for the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the resurrected Jesus we have no fewer than nine ancient sources
[00:27:40] inside and outside the New Testament confirming and corroborating the conviction of the disciples that they encountered the risen Jesus I mean that is an avalanche of historical data I love how you
[00:27:52] end it to with NT Wright he's been on the program with us before it is no good falling back on science as having disproved the possibility of the resurrection any real scientist will tell you that science observes what normally happens the Christian case is precisely that what happened
[00:28:09] to Jesus is not what normally happens and again we recognize it's a miracle and I might point to again some of your other works one in particular on that whole idea of the case for miracles but
[00:28:20] you go into more detail but it's a it's the linchpin and you could stop there but given the fact that you've given us a few other chapters let's talk about this idea of experiencing God
[00:28:30] and I thought that was really interesting because one of my former colleagues Doug grow tights we used to be on probe staff together is an individual that you have interviewed and I will be interview
[00:28:41] again a little bit later and you first interviewed him when his wife Rebecca who I knew was dying of a brain condition and in some respects you use that interview that you used on the whole idea
[00:28:54] of the case for an afterlife and that to also help people understand that there is a whole idea of experiencing God and I thought that was a really helpful chapter not one that people might
[00:29:06] normally have expected in a book on apologetics yeah you know I'm fascinated by this and I tell some stories in there about people who I personally known who have had profound experiences of God that led them to faith for instance you remember Nabeel Qureshi the Muslim a medical
[00:29:26] doctor who because he was challenged by a Christian began to investigate the evidence for the faith but he does supernatural dream an experience of God in a dream in which this dream was a reflection
[00:29:39] of a passage of scripture that he had never read and that was this dream was was one of the steps that led him into his faith in Christ and then my friend Evel Knievel the famous motorcycle daredevil
[00:29:53] writer who lived a sinful life my goodness he was a womanizer he was a drunk he was a gambler he would once beat up a guy with a baseball bat went to prison I mean this guy was a bad dude and he's
[00:30:05] standing on the beach in his later years and God spoke to him he said I didn't hear with my ears I felt it on the inside and the voice said Robert I've saved you more times you'll ever know now
[00:30:16] you need to come to me through my son Jesus and he he was flabbergasted so he called the only Christian he knew Frank Gifford the former sportscaster and said Frank you're a Christian
[00:30:28] I had this experience I didn't know who God is and or any Jesus is and and Frank said well get the bookcase for Christ that'll kind of explain it all for you so he got my book you read and Evel
[00:30:38] Knievel was one of the most radically born-again people I ever encountered 180 degree turn in his life he became on fire for Jesus Christ when he was baptized he shared his story with such power
[00:30:53] and such childlike honesty and sincerity that at the end of that the pastor ripped up his sermon and said you all have heard the gospel if anybody wants to come up right now and receive Jesus be
[00:31:06] baptized on the spot go ahead and do it this is a church that never had had an altar call and 700 people came forward in two services were baptized on the spot and when Evel died about a year later
[00:31:20] at his request on his tombstone it says believe in Jesus Christ now I didn't have that experience Evel Knievel had that experience but you know even at even so I find that encouraging in my
[00:31:33] spiritual life that that there are these people who have had these profound experiences often with external corroboration like the dreams that many Muslims are having in closed countries in the Middle East where the gospel cannot be shared and yet they're having dreams of Jesus and in these
[00:31:49] dreams Jesus points them towards someone who will explain the gospel to them and they wake up and then they later encounter that other person from the dream who shares the gospel with them that's an external corroboration of an internal experience that they had so I'm fascinated by
[00:32:06] this whole thing let me again mention that you could also go to the books the case for heaven and the case for miracles even the case for hope and find some of that but we do need to take a
[00:32:15] break and when we come back you might at this point say okay you've made the case for the idea that there's a supernatural maybe there's a god but how do we know that there's really one god
[00:32:25] and in the sense which god is real and that is an interview you did with Chad Meister has been on the program with us because there is always the idea that okay I believe in a god I believe in
[00:32:37] theism but what about that there are different views of God and how to think that through and then real quickly we will of course also mention there are chapters on if God is real
[00:32:49] why is there suffering which is a really important question that deserves obviously an entire hour and then the other question as well and that is well if God is real why does he seem so hidden
[00:33:01] so we'll try to at least cover the very important chapters in this book but as I mentioned just a few minutes ago if you find yourself saying well I'd like to know a little bit more about Lee Strobel
[00:33:11] let me encourage you to go to his website leestrobel.com I'd be remiss if I did not encourage you to especially for your young person to consider going to Colorado Christian University
[00:33:23] I have a neighbor whose daughter is going there next year and of course when you go there there's the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics and all sorts of other great programs
[00:33:33] there as well so you can find out more about all of that by simply going to our website pointofview.net or go to leestrobel.com directly and we'll be right back new data from the Gallup organization
[00:33:58] finds just less than half of U.S. adults describing themselves as religious in the same survey 33% say they are spiritual but not religious and 18% are neither it's increasingly apparent that we live in a post-christian society evangelist Sam Chan explains this is why evangelism is so scary and
[00:34:17] awkward what worked in the age of christianity seems ineffective in our post-christian age in his book how to talk about Jesus without being that guy Dr. Chan suggests listening closely to people to hear where they're coming from culturally emotionally and existentially
[00:34:33] and then appropriating their language to show them that Jesus is the one they're looking for the apostle Paul did that act 17 recounts his speech to the Areopagus these were Athenian philosophers who would gather at a hilltop called the Areopagus or Mars Hill this place for
[00:34:49] discussion was the marketplace of society where men traded in ideas like Paul we should think about evangelism as beginning where people are physically and also intellectually and spiritually our guide through Greece David Sparks emphasized that our message should be captivating relevant to the times
[00:35:07] and to each person's needs and mindset Paul told the Areopagus he could see they were very religious he mentioned their altar bearing the inscription to the unknown God he proceeded to explain who this
[00:35:19] God is that he is our creator and that he is actually not far from each one of us Pastor Sparks said Paul used an old and frequent pattern in the Greek language when he proclaimed in him
[00:35:30] we live and move and have our being Paul's love for people fueled his concern that they were trapped in the idolatries of the day today our idols are different we must be sensitive as we point them
[00:35:41] out we can follow Paul's pattern for evangelism in a pagan society for Point of View I'm Penna Dexter you're listening to Point of View your listener supported source for truth privileged to have with
[00:36:01] us for just a few more minutes Lee Strobel the book is entitled Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life and of course we have a link to leestrobel.com so you can find out more and Lee
[00:36:11] I thought again a lot of people might say okay you've made the case for the fact that there's a God or there are gods but which God is real and that's important because in the conversation you
[00:36:23] have with Chad Meister you talk about the fact that there's really a clash of three isms atheism theism and pantheism and then do a test to show that atheism and pantheism don't really answer
[00:36:36] that question but this is one I know you and I have all run into over the years people say we've made a good argument for the existence of God but which God and so how do we answer that I think
[00:36:46] there's a two-part answer I think first part is to say the resurrection is what points us to Jesus being the unique son of God and therefore Christianity being true and then what Chad does and by the way
[00:36:57] Chad I don't know if you know this Kirby but back when I was a pastor in Chicago and Mark Middleburg and I were heading the evangelism ministry there Chad was a volunteer for us and this is before he
[00:37:09] even got his master's degree and now of course he's a world famous philosopher the PhD and just written numerous books anyway what he does is fascinating he walks me through what he calls
[00:37:21] the apologetics pyramid which if you picture a pyramid is just the idea you start at the broadest question and then you taper it as it gets more specific so you start the broad question
[00:37:32] what is truth and we go through that and truth of course is that which corresponds to reality and then as you say there's only the next level is worldviews there's only three possible world
[00:37:41] views pantheism everything is God atheism there is no God or theism there is a God and the test that we use to try to determine which is correct is a test of livability and the test of logic
[00:37:54] so in other words if one of these world views is internally illogical if it contradicts itself then it can't be true and if it's not livable like for instance atheism which says that there
[00:38:07] is no absolute foundation of right and wrong we can't really live that way if you really believe that that that wrong is and right or just whatever we decide is we're going to accept as being right
[00:38:19] or wrong independent of any absolute foundation so we go through those and determine that theism is the only survivor there then we analyze theism and why it makes sense and then we look at the
[00:38:31] revelation at scripture and to say that God has given us revelation of nature as we talked about earlier but also the bible and we compare that to the quran and and if the bible is true the quran
[00:38:44] is therefore false because they contradict each other so we make the case that that the christian scriptures are reliable and then that that leads to the resurrection and why the resurrection points
[00:38:54] toward jesus being a unique son of god and that takes us to the gospel which is the peak of the pyramid but i love the way that um that chad with his you know he's a former engineer i i love
[00:39:05] engineers because their minds are so logical and so you know that and and he just plows through that evidence in such a profound way that you walk away going yeah there is only one logical
[00:39:18] and livable conclusion and that is that theism is true and therefore because of the resurrection uh christianity is the form of theism that can be trusted and again i just love that pyramid level
[00:39:31] one is on truth level two is on world views and then you start testing those and you get into the other levels which are theism and the fingerprints of god and revelation and ultimately of course you
[00:39:42] get to the resurrection and the rest but i would be remiss if i didn't mention that you do have two chapters on some of the vexing questions one if god is real why is there suffering and that one
[00:39:55] of course is one that we've covered before and we'll continue to do so because it is a very important question both philosophically and extensionally but it's also i think helpful
[00:40:07] that you put in this one which i'm starting to see more and more if god is real why is he so hidden and you really have talked to two very key individuals and whether it's the issue of
[00:40:19] suffering or whether it's the idea that well why doesn't god reveal himself i think which is oftentimes a problem with the here and not the transmitter but those are in there because you've run into those as well haven't you absolutely and kirby you're right this question of the
[00:40:34] hiddenness of god has become i think the number two objection raised by non-believers the first one being suffering the existence of suffering and what happened in our culture a couple of years ago in 2020 john steingart who was the well-known christian singer of a rock band called hawk nelson
[00:40:51] very famously walked away from his faith because of this problem he said with the hiddenness of god and it's really become i think the number two objection and so i interviewed kenneth samples
[00:41:03] who you know kenneth is a with reason to believe ministries and teaches on philosophy of religion at various universities and i thought he did a great job of kind of unpacking that it's a
[00:41:15] complicated issue but it's an important issue and it's one that not only do non-believers wrestle with but believers also wrestle with it as well when i was on my deathbed 11 years ago or so back
[00:41:29] in 2000 when was that 2011 i guess it was you know i would love to have had jesus walk in the room and and hold my hand and tell me everything's going to be okay and remind me of all and you know he didn't
[00:41:45] and you know so um the hiddenness of god is something i think all of us at some point in our life we wonder where is god look at the psalms that talk about that and um and yet and yet i think
[00:41:57] ken provides some good perspective on that well again i might just mention we had him on just a few months ago on divine hiddenness and of course most of these individuals that
[00:42:07] you have interviewed lee strobel we've had a chance to interview as well and you got to love our job we get to talk to some of the smartest people and i get to talk to you as well which i
[00:42:16] think is one of the smartest people i know but just before we run out of time because i want to leave some time for you to talk about how people can use this because you have this whole section here
[00:42:27] first of all recommended resources and then a whole guide for reflection and group discussion i know that you want people to read the book but i know you'd also like people to use it in some kind
[00:42:37] of evangelistic outreach exactly my hope is that people will read the book it'll deepen their faith it'll encourage them to reach out to others and then i hope they give the book away i hope they
[00:42:47] give it away to a neighbor or a friend or a colleague at work or a family member who's spiritually curious or doubting or whatever and say you know why don't we uh once you read this
[00:42:57] i've read it and there's discussion questions why don't we kind of talk it through and see what conclusions we can come to um you know i meet so many people who are saying their son or their
[00:43:10] grandson or granddaughter or daughter have walked away from the faith and um you know i wrote this book so this is something give as a christmas gift or something to them and just say hey you know
[00:43:20] i know we we think differently right now we believe different things but um i believe that the christian faith is rational it makes sense we have a rational god he's formed us as rational people
[00:43:31] and i know you're rational and would you be willing to look at the evidence to convince an atheist like lee strobel that god is real again i just love the way you've put it together again that
[00:43:42] guide for reflection and group discussion is something that you can begin to use and it is ready to go so get the book uh certainly you can go to his website or our website you can find it
[00:43:52] in your bookstore and put it to good use and i know lee you will be much more encouraged not only that people will buy the book but they are going to use this in a way to advance the gospel so as
[00:44:03] always we thank you not only for writing this book but for writing so many other books over the years because in many cases we've had i think the first time you and i interviewed was on god's outrageous
[00:44:14] claims oh my goodness that goes before the case for christ so yes when you're a guy like me you meet some of these people on their way up but it has been fun to watch how god has blessed you
[00:44:26] richly and it is such a great opportunity for us to spend time with you so thank you for joining us today here on point of view thank you kirby great to be with you as we texans say i appreciate
[00:44:36] you well let's again just encourage you one more time to find some of the material it is available on our website at point of view dot net and really points to god's existence and answers many of
[00:44:48] these very important questions one of the most asked questions on search engines is is god real well that's the title of the book i would encourage you to get a copy of it get multiple copies of it
[00:45:01] get it out make a difference in your sphere of influence and you've been listening to point of it almost seems like we live in a different world from many people in positions of authority
[00:45:16] they say men can be women and women men people are prosecuted differently or not at all depending on their politics criminals are more valued and rewarded than law-abiding citizens it's so overwhelming so demoralizing you feel like giving up but we can't we shouldn't we must not as winston
[00:45:38] churchill said to britain in the darkest days of world war ii never give in never give in never never never never yield to force never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy
[00:45:53] and that's what we say to you today this is not a time to give in but to step up and join point of view in providing clarity in the chaos we can't do it alone but together with god's help
[00:46:07] we will overcome the darkness invest in biblical clarity today at point of view dot net or call 1-800-347-5151 pointofview.net and 800-347-5151 point of view will continue after this