How can we be sure that Christianity is true?
This
post is a response to a classic meme that we have all probably seen. We have
seen the posts from popular atheist and anti-Christian forums that post this
meme that goes something like this “There have been thousands of gods throughout
human civilization, but don’t worry, only yours is the real one.” At first
glance, this statement may hold some water, but when we take a look closer, we
see that they are throwing out the baby with the bath water, so to speak. The meme
tries to discredit Christianity because there are so many false religions out
there. Really what they should be asking is, “how can Christianity claim to be
true when other religions claim they have the exclusive truth?” What I want to
do is to take a look at these questions and show how we can know that not only
Christianity is true, but how we can see how other worldviews fail under the
same criteria.
Many
religions are exclusive in their claims to truth, this fact itself refutes a
new age idea that there are many paths to God. So we need to be able to lay out
each religion and see how they can answer the 4 following questions.
1.
Origin, where did we come from?
2.
Meaning, why are we here?
3.
Morality, what is good and what is bad?
4.
Destiny, where are we going?
In addition, the answers these
questions must pass two tests, correspondence to truth through empirical
findings or logical/philosophical arguments, and coherence to itself. This
means that each of the answers to the 4 above questions has to hold up to
scrutiny and present supporting evidence. This evidence can be historical, scientific,
or philosophical. For example, Christianity has a plethora of external
historical evidences to support that the person of Jesus existed, that Jesus
did miraculous works, and that the early church believed that Jesus was
crucified and resurrected on the third day. The Quran claims that Jesus did not
die, but rather just appeared to die. So we also have opposing claims in religions
over historical details. In addition, these answers must be coherent with each
other within that worldview.
We can also frame the argument
that our religion of choice has missed something, that there is another
worldview out there that can answer our above questions better than the one of
our choice. We can generalize how a worldview looks at God and the Universe and
work through our classifications pretty quickly. Our three questions are as
follows.
1.
Only Universe (mass/energy) exists (Atheism and
Naturalism)
2.
Only God Exists (Many Eastern Religions)
3.
Both God and the Universe exist (Judasim,
Chrisitanity, Islam)
So we can also present
philosophical cases to show that both God and the Universe exist, and that we
aren’t part of some universal consciousness, which may be a future post.
So this post I wanted to write as
a quick response, but I admit much of my material was inspired form Dr. Ravi Zacharias’
video which I have linked below. I plan to do some more research and update
this to make it more my own. God bless and have a good rest of your week.
References:
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