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One of our Undeceptions listeners asked me about a pretty heated Twitter exchange she saw. Christian Judeo-Western culture is responsible for 99.9% of all scientific, medical and artistic progress.

Hard to tell if this guy is genuinely ignorant or trolling as he types this using a pagan Roman alphabet and Hindu decimal numbers. Seems to forget that while his Christian Judeo ancestors were living like ignorant peasants in Western Europe, science in Islam was flourishing. Observing this back and forth, Mundy asked, Is the Islam was the source of all modern science etc. comment true or is there more to this?

It's a good question. Welcome to our own question and answer edition built out of your questions. I'm John Dixon and this is Undeceptions. Music

Every week we'll be exploring aspects of life, faith, history, culture or ethics that are either much misunderstood or mostly forgotten. With the help of people who know what they're talking about, although this week maybe not, we'll be trying to undeceive ourselves and let the truth out.

This episode, we asked for your questions. And like Monday, many of you responded. We'll be looking at your questions relating to this season's episodes, as well as a few extras thrown in because we really just like the question. We've had plenty of ideas for next season as a result of some of these questions. So thanks heaps for helping.

Now back to answering Mundy's question about science and Islam. In episode 6 of Undeceptions, I sat down with renowned theoretical physicist Ahad Louie, who spoke to me about many things, including the Christian origins of modern science. So let's start there. Modern science has deep Christian roots. It comes from a Christian theological understanding of a world that's loved and sustained by God and

Therefore, you might expect there to be repeatable, regular rules that you could discover. That's what motivated the first scientists. And we may now just assume that's true as a kind of brute fact, but it's not obvious that it would be that way. Look, it is a little difficult to talk about this sort of topic because it can sound like Christians just saying, huh, we invented everything. And that would be unfair and a bit silly.

I think it's genuinely accepted that Islamic culture gave the West some pretty important things. I mean, the zero used in mathematics came into the West via Islamic culture or Arabic culture. The preservation of Aristotle's great works on physics and metaphysics can be attributed to Arabs, some Christian Arabs, some Muslim Arabs.

In the Middle Ages, these writings came back into the West. They'd almost been forgotten in the West. And that created a massive revival in our understanding of the natural world and of an interest in explaining the world. So I don't think we need to be exclusive about it. However, there is a very wide consensus that what we call experimental science

really came out of Christian Europe and for reasons that are quite dependent on the Christian faith. In the build-up to the 16th and 17th centuries, what we normally call the scientific revolution, there was this increasing theological outlook based on what's called Augustinianism. This is a view from St. Augustine which said that the human mind itself is fallen, that our morals are fallen but so is our intellect.

And in the 14th century, there was this feeling that we can't simply look at the world and intuit what is real about the world, which is precisely what the ancient Greeks thought you could do. You could look at the world, take observations about nature, and then just intuit rationally what was true about the world. But because of this revival of Augustinianism,

People in the West began to think, no, we probably can't just rationally look at the world and decide what makes it tick. We are fallen. So what we have to do is invent tests, experiments, to check our rational guesses about what's going on in the planets or in the eye or in light. Check that against actual experiments that may prove us false. After all, we are fallen.

Now, as weird as that sounds, this stuff is laid out in incredible detail in a volume by Peter Harrison, who was a professor at Oxford and now the University of Queensland. And his book gives pretty strong evidence that it was out of Christian Europe and in particular out of this idea of the fallen mind needing experimental verification.

that we get the modern notion of science. This isn't to dismiss the wonderful technology and philosophy that was going on in the Arab world, in the Chinese world and elsewhere, but experimental science really did grow out of Christian Europe.

Josh asks, I read the book Case for Christ a number of years ago and learned lots of historical evidence that suggests Jesus' resurrection is likely to be the most plausible explanation to make sense of all the well-acknowledged historical facts that happened in the first century, such as Jesus' empty tomb, disciples' willingness to die for their faith despite the death of their leader, and the embarrassing details in the Gospels.

But why do many well-informed and educated historians today still reject the idea of resurrection despite that evidence? Are there really any academically credible theories out there that can well explain what happened before and after Jesus' crucifixion if he didn't rise from the dead?

Well, it's right that there's a long scholarly interest in the resurrection and that there's a widespread agreement that there was an empty tomb and that people saw Jesus, or at least thought they saw Jesus, alive from the dead. And this is accepted by people who aren't Christians. I'm thinking of someone like Geza Vamesh, the great Jewish professor from Oxford University, Pincus Lapid,

Even Ed Sanders from Duke University, who would describe himself as an agnostic about the resurrection. All of these scholars and plenty of others would say that we have enough historical evidence to conclude that from the very beginning,

There was probably an empty tomb and plenty of people who thought they saw Jesus alive from the dead. But as historians, they can't really go beyond that point because history itself is incapable of proving a miracle.

To prove a miracle, you need not only solid, early, widespread testimony, you need to believe that a miracle is possible in the first place. So although secular scholars will say, yeah, sure, there was probably an empty tomb and plenty of people thought they saw him and they sincerely thought that since they gave their lives for the claim, that doesn't actually give you the resurrection.

Now, I know there are some people who disagree with that, some Christians who want to push it further than that and say, no, no, no, no, we can conclude from history that Jesus rose again. I actually don't think that's true. We can only conclude that there was an empty tomb and people thought they saw him. How you interpret those two pieces of evidence really comes down to a philosophical and theological view.

If you don't believe in God, if you don't believe there's a God who can work through the laws of nature, then of course a resurrection is impossible and no amount of evidence could prove it. But if you do believe there's a God who can work in and through the laws of nature, then you could be open to something like a resurrection if the evidence was strong enough.

And it's on that philosophical basis that I would say Jesus rose again. It isn't simply a judgment of the historian. It's a judgment of the historian plus the philosophical belief that God could raise the dead. The only question is, is there good enough evidence? And I think there is good enough evidence.

I've often thought that what if we were dealing not with a miraculous resurrection, but with some strange claim at the basis of the Christian faith. So like Jesus was the strongest man in the Roman world and he was crucified by the Romans, but because he was so strong, he got better in the tomb, rolled away the tombstone, killed all the Roman guards and went and lived in Alexandria. A very happy long life where his followers, you know,

supported him in various raids of Roman garrisons. Now, that evidence, that event would be unique in ancient history. So it'd be absolutely a standout. But because it's not miraculous, if it had the same level of historical support that we have for the resurrection, I'm pretty sure no historian today would doubt strongman Jesus.

And that illustrates that it's actually not the historical evidence that is the problem with the resurrection. It's that the resurrection presses us to work out whether we believe there is a God in the world who could raise someone from the dead. If you think that's a possibility, well, we have the kind of historical evidence you would expect.

So I guess in a long-winded way, I'm saying there's a good historical method reason why scholars would reject the resurrection, or at least say we don't know what explains the resurrection. We're only historians after all.

But the other thing to point out is, of course, if the resurrection is true, it has a massive claim on your life. And so even good objective historians are going to be confronted by the implications for our soul if Jesus rose again. And that maybe puts pressure on people not to accept where the evidence leads. Boudicca asks, would you want fellow Christians that believe for bad reasons to have doubt about those reasons?

Yeah, I like this question, actually. Would I want fellow Christians to believe for bad reasons? Uh, no.

I'd rather they doubted those reasons because in the end, someone who thinks they're a Christian should think truth matters. And so if there are terrible arguments that prop up the Christian faith, you should get rid of those terrible arguments, those terrible ideas. So I'm totally with the sentiment behind this one. And I mean, I can give an example, actually. When I was first a Christian as a 16-year-old,

I went to a series of talks by someone who was presenting as very scientific, and they pointed to a passage in the book of Job, can't remember which one now, that basically sounded like radio waves, or at least the way he read it and the way he explained it to us made it sound like Job in the ancient world had already worked out how radio waves work. And I remember sitting there going, awesome! You know, God was doing science before the scientists came along.

And now looking back, I'm super embarrassed because that's dumb. And I wish someone had taken me aside like that very day and said, can you just see how silly this is? This has nothing to do with the arguments for God. There's no way Job was talking about radio waves. So that's one example. I'll give you another one from my own sort of discipline. I have often had to bat away lovely Christian people who come up to me after things I've spoken at.

And they've asked, is it true that there's more evidence for Jesus Christ than there is for Julius Caesar?

They ask me this because they read somewhere that there are more copies of the New Testament in the ancient manuscripts, the sort of thing that we dealt with in episode one, than there are manuscripts for Julius Caesar's wars. And that's true. We have just a handful, literally just a handful of manuscripts for Julius Caesar's wars. And we have hundreds, if not thousands, for the New Testament. And somehow people got it in their minds that this means there's more evidence for Jesus

than there is for Julius Caesar. And I had to try and work out ways to be really kind to my fellow Christians and say, no, actually, that's a really bad argument. All that means is that the evidence we have in the New Testament is copied over and over and over and over and over. That's not extra pieces of evidence. That's just a piece of evidence copied back

many times. I mean, Julius Caesar has coins and inscriptions and other writers. There's no way there's more evidence for Jesus than there is Julius Caesar. And I wouldn't want a Christian to go around thinking that there is. Now, there's more than enough evidence for Jesus for us to know an awful lot about his life, but there's no point depending on really dodgy arguments like that.

Christopher asks, Hey John, I've listened to the first episode and loved it. You referred to P46 as a manuscript of the Pauline epistles and noted that it has Romans followed by Hebrews. I wondered how much bearing you and Dr. Haug think should be placed on early manuscript evidence with regard to the authorship of Hebrews.

I gather many, if not most, scholars don't give much weight to the inclusion of Hebrews and P46 as evidence of Pauline authorship. P46 goes from the book of Romans straight into the book of Hebrews. And that would suggest that the Christian communities that were responsible for P46, so we're in the second century,

believed that Hebrews was part of the collection of Paul's letters. That is a fair assumption. And it's quite possible that the early church very widely believed that Hebrews was written by Paul and got into the Christian New Testament canon for that reason.

But as the years and centuries have rolled on, most scholars think it is incredibly unlikely that Paul wrote Hebrews.

Hebrews does look to be a very early first century text written by some Jewish Greek Christian like Paul, but probably not Paul, most scholars say, because the language in Hebrews is so radically different from the language that we find in Paul's definitely authentic letters.

So, you're right. Most scholars say nope. But what does this manuscript evidence suggest? Well, look, my own view is this. I have pause about this one. I have adopted the normal scholarly view for most of my professional academic career. Paul didn't write Hebrews. But...

There's some real overlap between Paul and whoever wrote Hebrews, because you only have to look at the last chapter of Hebrews to see that some of the same colleagues...

that you find in Paul's circle of colleagues up here in Hebrews. So there's a real connection. And that alone may explain why this got into the New Testament canon, because it might not have been written by Paul, but by someone very close to Paul. And the basic rule of the ancient church was if a text was written by an apostle or a colleague of an apostle, it got in. But I sometimes wonder whether our statistical analysis of how Paul wrote

might not be as robust as it should be. We only have 13 letters of Paul. That's a pretty small corpus. And if you do a statistical analysis of the words he uses, sure, Hebrews does seem like a massive outlier. But it's such a small statistical sample. Who's to say if we had...

50 letters of Paul, we wouldn't actually find that Hebrews falls within the band of the way Paul might write.

I sometimes think of the letters I've written. The letters I have written to people who are just exploring the faith is one way I write. But I've also written letters to Christian colleagues in ministry about quite technical issues. And of course, I've written letters and emails to other professional scholars. And if you compared the letters that I wrote to people who are just exploring the faith with those I've

I write to people who are professional scholars. You might actually think these are two different people writing these letters, which is all to say I am only, let me say, 63% confident Paul didn't write Hebrews. I could be persuaded that he did.

And the fact that it appears immediately after Romans in the oldest collection of Paul's letters makes me think that people who were fluent in this Greek language didn't think there was any problem thinking the same author produced both texts.

Ross asks, Christians are sometimes accused of over-spiritualising everyday events. How can we know that God has moved to make a thing happen in response to prayer and not be guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy?

Well, I instantly love this person because of the West Wing episode reference, post hoc ergo proctor hoc, after a thing, therefore caused by a thing. It's a good question. And I think Christians live in God's world as if everything comes from God's hand.

And so we're never actually going to make this mistake. All things come from God's hand. Every particle is held together because of God's grace. Every breath I take is because of God's grace. So in a sense, all happy events and sad events actually happen.

we can see as God's mysterious working in the world. And we turn all of this back to God in worship, at least a Christian does. But of course, if you've prayed specifically for a thing and you see it happen in your life,

you're not making a mistake to say, thank you God for answering my prayer, because everything that's happening is happening because of God's providence in the world. So whether or not you have specifically moved God to give you the thing you prayed for isn't really the issue. The

The issue is, is God ultimately responsible for all these things that come to us? And I think the answer is yes. So we thank him for the beautiful things. We can thank God for the sad things, but we can also cry out to God for the sad things that happen in our life because ultimately he is responsible.

In fact, there was a remarkable interview on CNN just very recently where Anderson Cooper, the anchor for CNN, asked Stephen Colbert, the famous comedian, about the tragedy in Colbert's life. And Colbert just made the most...

amazing response where he basically said that even the hardships that have come into his life, he's able to see as gifts from God. He's able to see God's grace even in the pain. I was very struck by it. You told an interviewer that you have learned to, in your words, love the thing that I most wish had not happened. You went on to say, what punishments of God are not gifts? Do you really believe that? Yes.

It's a gift to exist. It's a gift to exist. And with existence comes suffering. There's no escaping that.

It's the Q&A episode for Season 1 of Undeceptions. I love questions and I'd love to hear more of them. If you've been listening to this first season and have a question you'd like answered, head to undeceptions.com where you can upload your question. Leave us a voicemail on plus 612 9870 5678 or find me on Facebook or Twitter and send me a question there.

We're going to take a short break and we'll be back with more questions, including whether there's any evidence for the miracles that happen throughout the Old Testament. And I'll be honest, there's not much. But there are a few things we can say. Stay tuned.

This episode of Undeceptions is brought to you by Zondervan Academics' new book, ready for it? Mere Christian Hermeneutics, Transfiguring What It Means to Read the Bible Theologically, by the brilliant Kevin Van Hooser. I'll admit that's a really deep-sounding title, but don't let that put you off. Kevin is one of the most respected theological thinkers in the world today.

And he explores why we consider the Bible the word of God, but also how you make sense of it from start to finish. Hermeneutics is just the fancy word for how you interpret something. So if you want to dip your toe into the world of theology, how we know God, what we can know about God, then this book is a great starting point. Looking at how the church has made sense of the Bible through history, but also how you today can make sense of it.

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You can pre-order your copy of Mere Christian Hermeneutics now at Amazon, or you can head to zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions to find out more. Don't forget, zondervanacademic.com forward slash undeceptions.

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Let's press pause. I've got a five-minute Jesus.

A significant part of Jesus' ministry is taken up with Q&A. Really. Skeptics ask him questions, sincere people ask him questions, and some of his students ask questions.

So, for example, here's one from a skeptic. We're told that the Pharisees and Herodians get together and ask him a question. Now, the Pharisees are religiously focused. The Herodians are more politically aligned. And they ask a pretty tricky question. It goes like this. Should we pay taxes to Caesar or not? This is in Mark 12 if you want to look it up later.

This is pretty punchy because Jesus has to think about the politics here. He has to think about the religion here. And he gives, I think, an awesome reply. He says, why are you trying to trap me? Bring me a denarius. That's that silver coin. I've got one around my neck right now. Bring me a denarius. Let me look at it. They brought him the coin. He asked them whose image is on it and whose inscription. They replied, Caesar's.

Now, I reckon you've got to pause and say, bravo, Jesus. That is a pretty cool reply. But there are two dimensions to it. There's a political dimension, for sure. Jesus is as good as endorsing some kind of separation of religion and the state.

Because he says there is a realm that Caesar does own stuff and we owe taxes and so on. And religion is a different focus of life. I don't think he completely separated them. But I think there's the basis of a pretty interesting theory of political theology here. But there's also a spiritual dimension to what he's saying. Because ultimately he's saying don't get distracted by politics and by taxation and those things. And miss the most important thing. Give to God what is God's.

Don't focus on the stuff of Caesar and forget God. Okay, here's another example. This is also from Mark 12, as it turns out. It's a sincere inquirer who comes to Jesus and asks the question many in his day were asking each other. It goes like this. Of all the commandments, which is the most important?

Now, the religious leaders had counted up the commandments of the Tanakh or Old Testament and came up with the number 613. I've not gone back and checked that they're right, but I trust them. And they often discussed which is the most important one. And Jesus goes like this. The most important one is this.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength. And the second is like it. Now that's really pretty interesting because Jesus was not asked for two. He was asked for one. But Jesus isn't letting him get away with this. The second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these two things.

Love God, love neighbor. That's the good life as far as Jesus is concerned, which of course leaves no room for either the religious hypocrite who loves God but not neighbor or the moral agnostic who loves neighbor but not God. Jesus says love God and neighbor. I mean, we rightly condemn the religious hypocrite who loves God but not neighbor. It's disgusting. We hate it. But I just want to pause and say from Jesus' perspective,

The flip side of that is just as ugly. To care for human beings and neglect God, the source of every breath, is, from Jesus' perspective, just as ugly as religious hypocrisy.

The third example of Q&A comes from his own students. It's the last night he's with them. And he starts to tell them that he's going away. So of course, if you had questions left over from your three years with Jesus, this is the night you'd pull them out. And they start to ask.

So Simon Peter asks him, Lord, where are you going? And Jesus gives a bit of a reply and not quite satisfied with that. Thomas says to him, by the way, this is in John chapter 14, if you want to look it up. Thomas says to him, Lord, we don't know where you are going. How can we know the way? It's a good question. How do we know the way to this God, to this heaven or whatever? And Jesus' reply is,

is, I think for Christians, a little too cliched because we know this passage, we've written songs about this passage. And so I reckon people who don't believe, people who aren't used to the Gospels, will see how odd Jesus' reply is. It goes like this, I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

It's odd. I mean, imagine you asked me, what is the way to Cabramatta Road, Mossman, where I grew up? And I said, I am the way. It's really confronting. Jesus isn't just claiming to point the way to God, to teach the truth about God, to offer life on God's behalf. He's claiming to be the way, the truth and the life.

It's one of those uncomfortable moments, right, where we love the teacher, Jesus, and all that, you know, love and be kind stuff. And then you get to this confronting statement about himself. The same person who said, love your neighbor, also said that he is the way, the truth, and the life. Anyway, Philip listens to all of this, and Philip's got his own question. Actually, it's more of a plea. Lord, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.

He's exasperated. And I have no idea what he expected in reply because every Jew knew you can't see God. So why is Philip saying, show me God, that will be enough? Whatever he expected, I'm pretty sure he didn't expect what Jesus said in reply. Don't you know me, Philip? Even after I've been among you such a long time, anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. He's claiming to fully disclose God's

And in some ways, this is the answer to all the questions for those who are interested in Christianity. Christ himself. I mean, you can ask all the skeptical or sincere or searching questions and that will take you to a certain point. And I do think Christianity has excellent answers to difficult questions. But Christianity also says the ultimate answer is a person. When you see Christ in the Gospels, you see, you can press play now.

Joshua asks: "Is there any evidence for the miracles in the Old Testament, like God helping Israelites pass the Red Sea, or the Passover night? My impression about those stories is that they are generally denied by modern historians because of a lack of evidence, especially given that there aren't many independent sources written in those days that confirm the occurrence of those events. The only reason I personally believe them is because Jesus treated these stories as part of Scripture.

So, if Jesus has indeed risen from the dead, it gives credit to his word and therefore credibility to the Old Testament stories. But I struggle to find anything that can directly support the historicity of Old Testament miracles. Can you please help address this? The same thing applies to Old Testament miracles that applies to New Testament miracles, to miracles in general. History can't prove a miracle. It doesn't matter how much evidence you have for a particular miracle taking place.

If you don't believe in God already, you're not going to believe it. So the first thing I'd say is history doesn't prove a miracle in any case at all, including the resurrection of Jesus. As I've said before, we can determine historically there was an empty tomb and that plenty of people thought they saw Jesus alive from the dead. But even that doesn't

doesn't give you the resurrection. It just gives you the kind of evidence a resurrection would leave behind if it really did happen. How you interpret that evidence really depends on other philosophical factors. Now, all of that applies to the Old Testament, but there's an added factor. There is almost no ancient verification for the things in the Old Testament. And that isn't a

a problem of the Old Testament itself, it's a problem of the remains of our sources. So just take the New Testament period for a second. The evidence that we have in our hands today, the sort of written materials of the ancient world,

probably accounts for less than 1% of what we know was written in this period. So we're dealing with just a tiny fraction of what's left over. Still, from 1%, you can tell a whole bunch of things. But once you start going back 1000 BC or 1300 BC, there's very little data about anything that

In fact, we wouldn't have 1% of 1% of the stuff that was written in the ancient world still in our hot little hands today.

What that means is if there's no corroboration for something the Old Testament says, that doesn't mean you chuck it in. Because actually, we have very little corroboration for anything in the ancient world. So I think the basic maxim that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence holds, especially in the case of the Old Testament.

Now what that means is you're absolutely right there isn't corroborating evidence for the exodus, for the miracles, for the plagues of Egypt and all that sort of stuff. So we just have to say that evidence is missing because 99.9% of the data from that period is also missing. That said

The curious thing is, every now and then, there are crazy, random discoveries that do verify odd bits and pieces of the Old Testament, which at least tell us we're not dealing with a fairy tale. So just in the early 1990s, we discovered our first evidence of a house and line of King David.

Before then, there were scholars who thought the whole King David thing was invented, that there was no house or dynasty of King David. And then an inscription was found in the north of Israel, which makes a clear reference to the house of David.

And suddenly the line of David is back into play as a genuine historical thing. Now, that's totally random. And it only happened the other day as far as history is concerned. The other cool one is at the end of Two Kings, the Book of Two Kings.

There's a reference to the king of Israel and his sons being deported to Babylon and having to live off the rations provided by the Babylonians just for his daily food and drink. Well, by a sheer fluke of history,

Now that is mind-blowing.

but it absolutely verifies the final scene of the history of Israel in 2 Kings. Much more can be said, but my basic thought is we can verify very little, unfortunately, from that period of the ancient world. And so I'm with you, Joshua, when you say, look, really all you can do is say, well, if Jesus is the Lord and he loved the Old Testament and trusted it, I'm with him. Ben asks,

How do apologetics and apologetic arguments work with evangelism? Does apologetics work with evangelism at all? Obviously it aligns itself with 1 Peter, always be prepared to give an answer. But do you think apologetics for the faith can work in an evangelistic way as well? And if so, how can it be done well in evangelistic ministry?

Hey Ben, thanks for that very in-house question, but I think relevant to our Undeceptions project here.

I'm a little bit of an outlier when it comes to apologetics. I get into trouble a little bit by saying that I'm not a great fan of the whole thing of apologetics. It's true that 1 Peter 3.15 says, always be prepared to give an answer. And Peter uses the word apologia from which we get apologetics. But he would never have imagined there'd be this whole industry and you could walk into your local Christian bookshop and see a whole wall, you know, for apologetics.

In my sense of this word, it's come to mean, at least for a lot of skeptical friends, kind of just trying to prove your faith without really good evidence. So it's not about doing good history. It's just about faith.

finding historical arguments that might support the faith. It's not about doing good science, it's about trying to use science to promote the faith. That's mere apologetics. So there's my personal view. I'm not a fan of the language of apologetics. Maybe I'm raising more questions than I'm answering. I just, I'm a fan of doing good science, good philosophy, good history, and so on. Now, if we want to call that apologetics, fine. Here's how I think it contributes to

to the task of what you call evangelism, I call public Christianity, the task of bringing the Christian faith to the person who doesn't yet believe. I reckon that this task of offering good scientific, philosophical and historical arguments is all about giving people a reason to consider the faith for themselves. I don't think you can prove the Christian faith. I don't think you can intellectually argue people over the line to accept the Christian faith.

But I do think you can take away bad arguments against the Christian faith so that people who are a bit skeptical for not very good reasons can at least take a second look at the Christian faith. So people may have thought there's absolutely no reason to believe in God. Maybe they watched some documentary or read some book where someone dismissed all the arguments for God in a matter of paragraphs. I'm thinking of Richard Dawkins' account of all of this. And then just imagine there was no substantial argument in God's favor.

In that sense, you can actually point out there are very powerful arguments for God's existence. Will this convince someone to trust God? Nope. But it may give them a reason to think more deeply about God. Again, you may find someone who read somewhere that the Gospels are just ancient fiction like a modern novel.

I think giving good historical arguments in favor of the Gospels will at least lead someone to the point where they say, hey, maybe I could read a Gospel for myself. And when they do that, they encounter the person of Jesus. So this whole project of arguing for the faith, what some people call apologetics, does have value. It takes away bad arguments and gives people a reason to take a second look at the Christian faith. And when they do that, wonderful things can happen.

Clive asks:

Yeah, fair enough. And lots of people have asked this. I'm not sure I'd make an argument from the parable of the prodigal son because that parable is really just about God's willingness to forgive and forget. It doesn't really say anything about the way God forgives and forgets. Part of the answer to the question, I think, is that most modern people actually don't think they're very sinful. Right.

Maybe in different periods of history, people had a real sense of their own guilt and shame. And so the idea of there needing to be some recompense made sense. We have sort of moved into a culture that thinks we're pretty good through and through. And it's only the occasional slip up that maybe we need a little bit of forgiveness for. So the idea of anyone having to die for us just seems ludicrous. I do think that is part of it. We don't take our own forfeits.

fallenness and foibles and failures as seriously as I think is logical. But there's more that you can say. If God really did just forgive and forget without any display of justice...

I wonder whether actually the question you ask might be pointed in a different direction. You might be asking, how is it that God can forgive and forget without any justice? I mean, take the human traffickers that we discussed in episode eight when we talked with the people from International Justice Mission and the terrible cyber trafficking going on in different countries. Can you imagine that?

If one of those traffickers asked God for forgiveness and God forgave them without any justice, what does that say about God's own heart, about God's own feeling toward the wrongdoing that's been done? If he just lets people off the hook, it'd be a little bit like a judge in a courtroom who pronounces someone guilty and then says, hey, don't worry about it. There's no fine today.

I'm in a good mood and just forgives and forgets. No, the Christian faith says God sees all these things and he will not forgive and forget without a price. And that price is Christ's death, where we see simultaneously the love of God, because through Christ we can be forgiven, but also the justice of God, because the human traffickers' sins are

have been dealt with, Jesus has borne that punishment. And if I can get to the point where I see my own wrongdoing as maybe not at the degree of the human trafficker, but profound nonetheless, then I think I can appreciate that God is not just in the business of forgiving and forgetting as if wrongdoing doesn't matter. He forgives precisely because he has shown his justice in Jesus Christ.

In episode two of the season, I traveled to Green Bay, Wisconsin, and spoke to some of the guys from my favorite American football team. I told the story of how since 2011, I've been going back there to talk to the Green Bay Packers, to attend games, and generally find myself wowing over this incredible sport. Anyway, here's a question about all of this from Tim Goldsmith.

I'd love to know about the culture of Christianity in the NFL. It's super prevalent, but at the same time, people like Antonio Brown call themselves Christians, but behave in ways manifestly inappropriate all the time. Is it a mile wide, but only an inch deep? What does maintaining one's faith look like as a wealthy athlete, surrounded by people who only want to say yes to you?

Yeah, look, it is hard in lots of contexts to live out the Christian faith. And the temptations are going to be different in every circle we find ourselves in.

Having spoken to some of these people over the years, I think I can have a go at this. I mean, there is an incredible Christian culture in these places. I mean, my own experience is of the Green Bay Packers, where there are not only chaplains. There are prayer times midweek. There are Bible studies. Wives of the players have their own special Bible studies. It is quite a serious thing.

but it's true that they face temptations around money and about adulation that, um, aren't the regular, uh, Christian problem. And sure, uh,

they would be the first to admit they sometimes fail, just as all of us fail in various ways. But to the question of what does maintaining one's faith really look like for these guys, I think the core thing is what Mason Crosby actually mentioned in that episode, that the Christian life really has to be led by the guiding principle that our identity is in Jesus Christ.

that how he kicks from game to game, season to season, is not who he is. And he told that lovely story about how his worst year as a kicker

was actually his best year as a teammate and as a Christian because he slowly learnt that year not to pin all of his identity on being a kicker, but instead to see himself as a child of God, as a friend to other teammates and so on. And he said by the end of that year,

he was more alive as a Christian than he'd ever been. And so I think that is the thing that is probably most difficult for these players, but is actually the key for these players living the Christian life, to see themselves not as great dependent on their performance, which is a crushing way to judge yourself, but as loved as a child of God, because in Christ, that's exactly who you are.

Hi, John. I have lots of questions for you, but let's start with this one. Can you do a podcast on evolution versus creation? The Christian position. Evidence for each? More to come. Thanks. Hey, thank you. Well, you know, I am just back from the US doing a bunch of things, going to football games, but actually doing some work too. And while I was there, I interviewed Jack Collins, who is a

His first degrees were in science from MIT, but then he did his PhD in ancient Hebrew. And he is a world authority on those early chapters of Genesis and has written a fabulous couple of books, but one in particular, about how to interpret Genesis. And it deals with all of these questions about evolution and creation. So the answer to that simple question, can you do a podcast on evolution and creation? The answer is, yep.

Coming next season, watch this space.

As for the broad topic of creation and evolution, this is one of those fraught things where I think Christians have to agree that you can come to different views on this and still get along. I admit that I have in the past, as someone who is not a young earth creationist, been too, I don't know, heavy-handed and critical of my young earth creationist, six-day creationist, uh,

friends and you know I looked down on them and talked to them talked about them in arrogant tones and so I've had to learn to apologize for that actually and develop friendships with six day creationists and I've come to feel that actually many of them really know what they're talking about and they've got a deep respect for the Bible and so on but it still hasn't budged my position I am very confident that

that the early chapters of Genesis were never meant to be read in a literalistic, concrete way. And because of that, we have the freedom to interpret the science whichever way the scientists take us.

So I think if science discovered that the world was only 6,000 years old and the world was made in six days, there's the freedom on the basis of Genesis, obviously, to believe that. But if the science tells us that the universe is 13.8 billion years old and that human beings are part of a long process of biological evolution, then I think that's perfectly in accordance with Genesis because I don't think Genesis commits us to any particular view. Where it will...

be important is the notion of whether the whole thing is accidental.

And I think one of the great fears of people who take the Bible seriously is that if you go too far down the evolutionary track, you're left thinking the whole thing was accidental. It could have, you know, people could have evolved one way, could have evolved another way. Whereas the early chapters of Genesis give an impression that God is an ordered God and that he is in command of the whole thing and that there's a beauty in orderliness to Genesis 1 itself. So to think the whole thing is random just doesn't feel right.

I get the sense of that. I feel the force of it. But the really interesting thing is that some of the scientists we've spoken to for this series, you think of Ahad Louie or John Lennox, are adamant, actually, that there is an orderliness built into the very structure of matter itself, that the more we know about matter and about the history of the universe and evolution, the more convinced we are

that the elegant mathematics of the universe

lie behind everything, including the evolutionary process. It's now far more widely agreed that evolution is not an entirely random thing, that the solutions that evolution by natural selection finds to certain life problems are actually mathematically driven, that there's a rationality even behind what we think of as random mutations.

We'll deal with more of that in another episode, but I think the basic idea is God's orderly mind can be seen in the universe even if one adopts a position of evolution by natural selection. In my own life, I'm constantly asking questions about Christianity.

It's like road testing the arguments against Christianity to see if any of them get traction. And while I find myself intellectually incapable of sustaining doubt in light of the explanatory power of Christian theism, I'd be lying if I said there weren't always more questions. I often feel that there's nothing I firmly believe today that I haven't at some point really doubted.

And over the years, I've learned not to be so worried about doubts and to be calm, knowing that there's probably some answer somewhere to the most difficult questions. This is episode 11 of Undeceptions. Next week is going to be our last for the season. And we're busy planning the second season for early 2020. So I've been thinking a lot about the types of questions I've had and who to speak to to get some answers. I hope you stay with us. See ya.

Undeceptions is hosted by me, John Dixon, produced by the wonderful Kayleigh Payne, and directed by Mark Hadley. Our theme song is by Bach, arranged by me and played by the fabulous Undeceptions band. Editing by Bella Ann Sanchez. Head to the all-new Undeceptions.com. You'll find show notes and everything else related to this episode.