The Journey We Must All Take: The Credibility, the Prominence, the Way of Christianity

Contents

Prologue The Journey Begins

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART 1: Answering the Questions

Chapter 1

There Are So Many Religions; How Can We Know Which One if Any Is the True Religion?

Chapter 2

Is the Allah of Islam and the God of the Bible One and the Same?

Chapter 3

What Proof Do We Have That the Bible Is True? Or Is It Myth and Fiction?

Chapter 4

Wasn’t Jesus Just a Good Man and a Good, Moral Teacher?

Chapter 5

What Is a Christian?

Chapter 6

Do Mormons, Catholics, and Protestants Have the Same Beliefs?

PART 2: The Basics

Chapter 7

How We See and Understand the World

Chapter 8

Defining Truth

Chapter 9

Everyday Truth

Chapter 10

A Basic Law of Physics

PART 3: Belief Systems

Chapter 11

Atheism—There Is No God

Chapter 12

Pantheism—There Are Many Gods

Chapter 13

Monotheism—There Is One God

Chapter 14

A Comparison of the Major Belief Systems

PART 4: Christianity

Chapter 15

The Bible—Myth, Fiction, or Truth?

Chapter 16

Jesus—A Good Man, a Good Teacher, a Prophet, or God?

Chapter 17

The Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John

Chapter 18

The Resurrection—Did It Really Happen?

Chapter 19

The Christian Life

Chapter 20

Conclusion

References

Endnotes

To my mom, dad, wife, four sons, and five grandchildren—

Julius,

Colden,

Rowan,

Connor, and

Leighton—

my inspiration.

Prologue

The Journey Begins

Everything has a beginning, and although the beginning of our journey may be quite innocuous, it soon changes.

The Journey starts almost instantly after fertilization. The egg splits, then splits again, and then unnoticeably, quietly, and compassionately, He appears, hovers over the rapidly multiplying egg transforming into an embryo, smiles lovingly at it, and gently breathes life into this little miracle. So it begins, the journey that will take this breath, which is now a soul, a soul within its growing temporal body, into eternity.

The belief that life is sacred and the soul is eternal is central to Christianity, which according to many in our current culture is just one of many religions. But is it? What is Christianity? How does it differ from other major world belief systems? Do they really differ? Or do all religions eventually lead to the same mountaintop? Common sense makes it very difficult to believe that opposing views could all be right.

Is there one true religion? If there is, it is certainly prudent that we know which is the true one because regardless of who we are or what we believe, each of us is on the segment of our journey we call life. This earthly life will end. Then what?

Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have.

—1 Peter 3:15

Preface

Several years back, one cool, crisp, country morning, I was sipping coffee and watching the first rays of the sun break through the treetops. It started as a gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach; the feeling grew and exploded into the realization I was approaching retirement age. What had happened to the years?

As my mind wandered, I began to recall the seminal events in my life. Having been raised in a Christian home, at seventeen, I left Texas and entered college in California. I enlisted in the air force, where I finished college through graduate school. I started a family, earned an officer’s commission, went to war in Vietnam, became a commercial pilot, taught Park College undergraduate courses and Golden Gate University graduate business law, and became a practicing CPA.

Now that I’ve retired, it has been hard for me to rationalize the many blessings my family—now consisting of a wife, four sons, and five grandchildren—and I have received. Among all the material goods and personal and family accomplishments, there was still a sense of incompleteness. This empty sense began to draw me back to Christianity. For many years, my wife, a cradle Catholic, had wanted to get remarried in the Catholic Church. A dear friend, the late Monico Cisneros, sponsored me through the year-long Roman Catholic Indoctrination for Adults (RCIA) class. We subsequently did remarry in the church.

This experience was but a starting point. It was the beginning of a ten-year and ongoing exploration and study of the Bible, Christianity, and various major religions.

The exploratory phase of my studies included many discussions with theologians, lay pastors, and many regular, everyday folks, some of whom attended church regularly and a few who had never darkened the threshold of any church. A significant portion of this book, part 1, provides lay answers to questions raised by these folks.

So what is this book about? It is basically an apologetics book that compares Christianity to the other major world belief systems. Most of the comparison is from a secular, lay perspective. The objective is to provide useful information that will help us get through this journey we call life and into that which awaits us.

Acknowledgments

I thank the many people who helped me put this effort together, including my sons and friends who contributed the questions addressed in the first part of this book, and my wife, Wilma, whose experience as a schoolteacher was invaluable in bringing this effort to fruition. Special thanks to Harry Koch, a personal friend and family member, who spent countless hours proofreading and helping with corrections.

Introduction

Humanity has always been inquisitive; in its constant search for knowledge, human beings have unraveled many mysteries and have made much progress in the search for answers. Yet to this day, most of us have struggled to obtain satisfactory answers to some questions.

• Where did I come from?

• What am I doing here?

• What will happen to me after I die?

How do we go about finding answers to these questions? Some look to science, others to philosophy, and still others to other disciplines, yet throughout history, people have most often looked to some form of religion for answers because nothing else has provided reasonable answers and because we are driven to believe in something or someone outside ourselves. If this need is denied, we experience a void, an incompleteness. Even hard-core atheists who claim they are complete unto themselves have to work to try to convince themselves, but if they are honest, they will not succeed. The various religions represent our attempts to fill this void.

This presents its own problem. There are so many religions in the world; most claim to be the only true religion and that all others are pretenders, cults, or just plain false religions. So are they all right, or is there only one true religion? This is the core question we will try to answer.

To initiate the exploratory phase of our journey, we will address a few interesting questions concerning religion. We will then look at some tools that will help us review the major religions. Our journey will then move on to a review of these belief systems with short analyses. We will conclude with a more in-depth review of Christianity.

All biblical references (unless specifically indicated otherwise) in this book are to the New International Version (NIV) of the Bible.

Part 1:

Answering the Questions

Chapter 1

Columbus, Ohio, August 2007

I thanked my daughter-in-law for the great meal my wife and I had just shared with my oldest son and his family. After some small talk, my son asked if I would be interested in going for a short walk to burn off calories and perhaps stop at a coffee shop for a cup of coffee.

As we walked and visited, I guided the conversation toward church and religion. After some overly general discussion on various religious topics, we stopped. I looked at my son and asked him if he believed in God. He thought for a moment and rather hesitantly answered yes, he did, but there were so many different beliefs, so many different churches, and so many different religions out there that he wasn’t sure which one was the right one. How could any religion claim to be the only valid one when everybody had what they considered to be the real truth?

There Are So Many Religions; How Can We Know Which One if Any Is the True Religion?

To answer this question, it will be necessary to understand the following three concepts. The first concept, worldviews, will help us understand why different people often arrive at different conclusions when observing or analyzing the same information. This occurs because everyone interprets data received by their senses through a filter, his or her worldview, which is based on presuppositions, which in turn are based on truth claims. The following examples should help us better understand what truth claims are.

I remember an aging male fifth-grade schoolteacher explaining to the class that men with receding hairlines were naturally smarter than those with full heads of hair; that was a truth claim. A next-door neighbor, a highly successful businessperson, said he would never hire young women in responsible positions because they were too high maintenance; that was a truth claim. An ardent pro-abortionist believes a three-month-old fetus is not a life; another truth claim.

The validity of any worldview is entirely determined by the validity of the truth claim(s) on which it is based. Once we understand the truth claims, we can establish the appropriateness of the worldview if we have an objective understanding of truth.

The second concept we need to get a handle on is to get a clear understanding of truth: What is truth? How can anyone claim to know the truth when there are so many differing viewpoints?

Most people probably believe that defining truth is a difficult proposition. However, to understand and define truth, we must move beyond political correctness and go back to the basics: truth is what is real; it is the way things are regardless of what we think or what we want them to be. This concept is what is known as the correspondence theory of truth. To more directly paraphrase this concept, if it is real, it is true, and if it is not real, it is not true. There is no equivocation to this concept; it is or it is not.

I must point out that absolute truth is rare; the overwhelming number of decisions we make every day are based on the probability the information we are relying on is true.

For the third concept, we will take a look at two laws of logic. These principles will help us deal with the following argument. Muslims, Mormons, and Christians (among others) claim that their respective religions are the one true religion. Could they all be right?

Of the various principles of logic, we will concentrate on the two that most directly assist us in addressing the above argument.

The first one is the law of noncontradiction, which states that something cannot be two different things at the same time and in the same sense. If contradictions could exist at the same time and in the same sense, black could be white and up would be no different from down.

The second one is the law of inference, which states that if you can verify the truthfulness of your premise, you can derive logical and/or true conclusions. You do not have to verify the truthfulness of the conclusion, just its premise. In the following example, you can easily identify the premises and should be able to undoubtedly accept their truthfulness. That being true, the truthfulness of the conclusion is unquestionable. Example: All humans are mortal. I am a human. Therefore, I am mortal.

Let us then address the question, There are so many religions; how can we know which one if any is the true religion? I won’t spend too much time addressing atheism because the question is concerned with which religion is the true religion, not that there is no religion. The one exception to atheism not being a religion is secular humanism, which claims to be a religion that doesn’t believe there is a God but that humanity is the ultimate supreme being.

So now we have an atheistic religion that believes humanity is the supreme being, religions such as Hinduism that believe in many gods or that everything is God, and religions that believe there is only one God, such as Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. The law of noncontradiction tells us all these claims cannot be true. They could all be false, but no more than one can be true. So how can we determine which one is true?

If you tend toward the supremacy of humanity, you believe there is nothing past the material, that nature, hence natural law, accounts for everything. But natural law cannot explain the creation of matter or its transformation into living, breathing beings. Absent any outside force, nature tends toward disorder, so natural law cannot explain the orderliness of the universe. Again, absent any outside force, nature tends toward decay while evolution requires continual improvement; natural law cannot account for this disparity. Natural law states that everything that exists has a cause, but matter exists, so what caused it? Natural law cannot explain its causality. The list goes on and on. All of these phenomena cannot be accounted for by natural law; since they did occur, they must have occurred outside natural law, in other words, supernaturally. Atheists deny the supernatural; hence, they deny themselves. This conclusion is supported by the natural law of logic, the law of inference.

If you tend toward the belief that everything is God, things get really murky. Of all the religions that believe in multiple gods or that everything is God, only Hinduism has a significant historical record in the Vedas, a collection of hymns, prayers, and some liturgical formulas believed to have been written around 700–800 BC. Otherwise, most of these religions are a potpourri of ideas and beliefs with relatively short histories and limited written contemporary records. The worldviews on which these religions depend are themselves difficult to assess because their truth claims are unverifiable; they must be taken strictly and completely on faith.

If you tend toward the belief that there is only one God, you are in the company of Muslims, Jews, and Christians. In 2005, Christians accounted for 33 percent of the world’s population, while Muslims accounted for 21 percent. These two belief systems represent the majority of the people in the world.

Jews and Christians have a written history dating to approximately 1250 BC. The Muslim religion started some 1,800 years later, about AD 620. The Muslims have the Qur’an as their primary religious guide, while Jews and Christians have the Bible. The Hebrew Bible is for all accounts and purposes the same as the Christian Old Testament.

The Qur’an is based on information received by Muhammad over approximately twenty years, while the Bible was written by some forty men over approximately 1,400 years. Information in the Bible has been proven to such a degree that almost all its truth claims have been shown to be true. Those truth claims that have not been proven are those outside the realm of scientific scrutiny. The logical law of inference has given a great degree of credibility to these truth claims.

Postmodernism (PM) is a relatively new phenomenon (within the past forty to fifty years) that deserves our attention. This rapidly expanding belief system has taken the Western world by storm. PM rejects people’s ability to reason their way to truth. The reason is simple—postmodernists believe there is no truth. According to PM, truth is subjective and comes from human ideas and experience interpreted through our culture. In other words, truth is relative.

Our political correctness, the blurring of the lines between right and wrong, the degradation of the sanctity of marriage, and a similar degradation of the sanctity of life itself, demands for complete tolerance for their belief system but not for opposing beliefs. Other similar and recent social changes were for the most part initiated by secular humanists and were accepted and heartily championed by postmodernists. Whether this belief system is a religion or not is still open to interpretation; it is probably more a lifestyle than a religion. However you classify it, it is certainly a force to be reckoned with.

So in answering my son’s question and carefully using only natural law and reasoning while refraining from using any spiritual thought processes requiring faith outside the natural, I believe I have provided sufficient information to help you decide which religion you believe is the true one. I believe the secular evidence overwhelmingly supports the Christian claim of being the one true religion.

Chapter 2

Lockhart, Texas, November 2009

Calmly, in military uniform, Major Nidal Hasan entered the U.S Army military post’s outprocessing center, unholstered his weapon, and loudly proclaimed, Allahu Akbar (Allah is great) and started shooting. Ten minutes later, thirteen soldiers lay dead and twenty-nine were wounded.

Shortly after the terrorist attack, a few friends and I were watching a news channel that featured a panel of experts discussing the attack. After the usual pointing of fingers and attempts at assessing fault, one of the panelists asked, Why all the terrorist attacks? Are they really doing it because that is what Allah wants them to do? Another panelist said he wasn’t sure but that up until recently, he had always thought that the Allah of the Muslims and the God of the Christian Bible were one and the same. Of course, this confused the issue even more. Shortly thereafter, and without the panel reaching any conclusive position, the program signed off.

We sat silently for a few minutes. One of my friends looked at me and said, You’re a churchgoing person, what do you think? Is the God of Christianity and the Allah of Islam the same God? Prior to his question, I had been trying to come to grips with the panelist’s question. Hesitatingly, I stammered that I hoped not. I had not given the issue much thought, so I resolved to try to find out.

Is the Allah of Islam and the God of the Bible One and the Same?

In Arabic, the word for god is Allah. Before Muhammad started his new religion, most Arabs worshipped 360 gods, one