Evidence We Can Point To

Apologists gotta apologize.

You can’t blame them, really. It’s how apologists are made, and the body of Christ would not be complete or anywhere near so well defended if we didn’t have them. But sometimes, no matter how hard we want to demonstrate that some assertion we disagree about in scripture is intellectually, historically, scientifically or factually defensible, we are going to hit a wall.

The Apologist Makes His Case

Scott Stein at Prepared to Answer isn’t terribly keen on the notion that there are answers out there we might not be able to get our heads around or our hands on, and I’m not surprised:

“Was Jesus really born in a manger? Did his birth really take place as Matthew and Luke recorded? The popular skeptical reply is ‘of course not … everybody knows that!’ And so writers like Ripley write Jesus’ birth off as myth, and the popular culture accepts this.

How does the Christian reply? Unfortunately, and all too often, we simply apply the resolution to continue believing it, no matter what anyone says. But shouldn’t we do better than that? Doesn’t our testimony go beyond just saying ‘I just believe’ to saying ‘I know this is true’? Well, if Jesus’ birth is a fact of history, then there must necessarily be evidence we can point to to support that fact and counter claims to the contrary. And, there is.”

Stein goes on to give solid historical evidence for the Augustine census documented in Luke, a statement of fact challenged repeatedly by unbelievers. In this case, Stein has done the necessary research, got his historical documentation and assembled it persuasively. Good for him. That’s the Christian apologist at work.

But does that mean there is always that sort of “evidence we can point to” when our beliefs are contested by skeptics and haters? I don’t think so. In fact, I know there isn’t.

Answers from a Greek Papyrus Fragment

Think about it. Stein points to a Greek papyrus fragment of a Census Edict for Roman Egypt dated to 104 CE and discovered in 1905, currently housed in the British Museum in London, as evidence that citizens of the Roman Empire were ordered to return to their ancestral cities to register for the census, as Luke claims. That’s great, isn’t it … for every Christian who lived at some period after 1905 and had access to that information. Too bad about the 1,875 years’ worth of believers who didn’t have that evidence at hand and couldn’t produce it if challenged. If their personal faith in the truth of scripture or their ability to preach the gospel convincingly to skeptics depended on having evidence to counter protests about the reliability of Luke, well, that’s just hard luck for them, I guess.

Every extra-scriptural fact a Christian produces to counter the assertions of unbelievers about history was a complete unknown for some period, perhaps a lengthy one. The very existence of archeological evidence in the present is proof of its absence in the past; to the extent we can identify exactly when somebody dug it up, we can also get some sense of how long it was in the ground, out of sight and out of mind, while the so-called experts believed something else entirely. We may not need to take Luke’s census on faith because we can go see evidence of it in a museum, but millions of Christians believed Luke for almost two millennia without any such proof of his reliability to which they could point.

Should they have been able to “do better than that”? Of course not. It wasn’t possible. So what was their answer to the skepticism they encountered? Something like “I just believe.” And they did. Sometimes that worked and sometimes it didn’t. Remember, we have always had skeptics. The first century was full of them.

Being Prepared and Doing the Impossible

Now, just because these Christians weren’t favored with the same access to the facts that we have today, it doesn’t mean they all failed to do what Peter instructed his readers when he wrote, “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you”. Many of these were surely as prepared as they could possibly be given what they had available to them. But when Peter told his fellow believers to be prepared to make a defense, he didn’t mean Christians are dependent on hanging over the shoulders of archeologists and historians hoping for new discoveries we can cite in our favor. All such evidence is ephemeral at best. It will stand for a few years until a new critical objection t0 faith is raised. Fifty years after that, more evidence for our side will be found, and back and forth until the Lord returns to take us home.

At the root of it, our ability to answer our critics does not turn on our ability to provide an answer to every question that might be raised. Those questions are potentially endless, and no human being, including John Lennox, William Lane Craig or Scott Stein can answer them all. What we are asked to provide is a reason for the hope that is in us.

Evidence that is Not Primarily Intellectual

The reason for our hope need not be intellectual, though it may be. It may be as simple as “I tried what the Bible teaches here and it works.” It may be something like “The person who taught me this truth was the most loving, patient human being I’ve ever met. Any faith that turns out that sort of person is something I want in my life.” It may be “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” It may be a deep distrust in the alternatives proposed by the world, and the ability to sow doubt by demolishing their arguments with common sense. It may be “I love everything about the character of Jesus Christ, and if the Old Testament was good enough for him, it’s good enough for me.” It may be “I lived by faith for seventy years and the Lord provided for my needs every moment of the way.” It may be “I studied all the religions of the world, and this is the only one that gave me real peace.” It may be the consistency and conviction of a Christian friend in time of need that screams “This is real.”

There are many different kinds of evidence in the world. Some of it will convince one person, some will convince another, and some people will not be convinced no matter what evidence you produce.

So yes, there’s always evidence we can point to for what we believe. It just doesn’t come out of the ground or out of the writings of historians. That stuff is really a bonus.