Twelve points that show Christianity is true

The claim that truth cannot be known destroys itself, because it is offered as a truth about reality. The same goes for the claim that logic does not apply to reality — that statement is itself a non-contradictory claim about reality.

• Only three positions are available: logic does not apply to reality, logic may not apply, or logic does apply.
• The first two are sayable but not affirmable — like saying "I cannot utter a word in English."
• So the third must be true. Reality is intelligible, and truth about it can be known.

Three laws govern thought: non-contradiction (A is not non-A), identity (A is A), and excluded middle (either A or non-A). Of the three, non-contradiction is the most basic — without it, nothing could be identical to itself, and any one thing could be another.

What this rules out: the popular idea that contradictory religions can all be true at once. They can all be false. They cannot all be true.

This is the long step, and Norm built it out of things that cannot be denied rather than things that must be assumed.

• Something exists — I do. Denying it takes an existing person to make the denial.
• My existence is contingent — I change, I learn, I am located in space and time. A necessary being could do none of those things.
• Contingent beings are composed of what they are and the fact that they are — essence and existence, potential and actual.
• Whatever is composed is caused by something outside itself. Nothing causes its own existence; that would require being prior to itself.
• The chain cannot regress forever, because every cause of present, here-and-now existence is simultaneous. An infinite series of simultaneous borrowers with no lender explains nothing.
• So there is an uncaused cause — uncomposed, necessary, changeless, eternal, unlimited, pure actuality, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and personal.

Whatever is all of that is what people mean by God — and being unlimited, there cannot be two of them.

If a God exists who causes and sustains the natural order, then that order is not a closed box. Nothing created is inviolable when its Creator is holding it in existence.

The standard objections all share one move. Spinoza argues from immutable natural law; Hume from the weight of regular experience; Flew from unrepeatability; Bultmann and Troeltsch from the limits of history. Each has to assume naturalism is true in order to conclude that naturalism is true.

Norm's reply is not that miracles are common — only that a wise person weighs the evidence for what did happen rather than ruling in advance on what can.

A miracle is not just an oddity. Norm gave it four marks: it catches the gaze (highly unusual, no known cause), it has grandeur (it fits the world rather than fighting it), it brings good, and it brings glory to God.

That is what separates a miracle from an anomaly, from magic, and from a sign that draws attention only to itself. And it is why a miracle functions as evidence: God would not confirm a false claim.

Before asking whether the New Testament is inspired, ask whether it is accurate as history. On that question it outperforms every other document from the ancient world.

• Over 5,300 Greek manuscripts, against roughly a dozen for a typical classical work.
• Copies begin a generation after composition, not a thousand years later.
• Written by eyewitnesses and their contemporaries, while most witnesses were still alive to object.
• Written by men who faced death rather than retract, and who distinguished carefully between Jesus' words and their own.
• Repeatedly confirmed by archaeology.

Not once, and not vaguely. He forgave sins — something only God can do. He claimed equality with the Father. He accepted worship instead of refusing it. He claimed authority to raise and judge the dead. He applied the divine "I AM" of Exodus to himself.

His closest followers said the same about him, and so did the writers who knew him: John, Thomas, Matthew, Paul, the writer of Hebrews.

Three confirmations, not one.

• Prophecy. More than fifty Old Testament predictions about the Messiah — where and when and how he would be born, how he would be rejected, betrayed, executed, buried, and raised — written centuries before, and fulfilled in one life. Most of them were outside any human power to arrange.
• Character. A life no accuser could convict of sin, attested by the people closest to him and conceded even by critics.
• Resurrection. He said in advance that he would rise, and then was seen alive over forty days by more than 500 witnesses on at least eight separate occasions — eating, talking, showing his wounds.

The alternatives — swoon, stolen body, wrong tomb, mistaken identity, hallucination — each fail to account for the empty tomb, the appearances, or the transformation of frightened men into martyrs.

He fulfilled prophecy, he claimed deity, and God confirmed the claim by raising him from the dead. A God who cannot lie does not miraculously endorse a fraud.

Note the shape of the argument: this is not "believe and you will see." It is an ordinary historical claim, tested the ordinary way, with an extraordinary conclusion.

If Jesus is God, and God cannot teach as true what is false, then everything Jesus affirmed as true is true. Teaching error would be a moral imperfection, and a being of unchangeable perfect character cannot act against his own nature.

The Old Testament: he called it unbreakable, said not one stroke of it would pass away, contrasted it with the traditions of men, used it to settle disputes and to establish his own credentials, and affirmed as real the people and events scholars most often dispute.

The New Testament: he promised the apostles that the Spirit would guide them into all truth and gave them authority to teach in his name — a promise the early church treated as fulfilled in the apostolic writings, which were read as Scripture alongside the Old Testament.

Norm also noted what makes the position falsifiable: show that God does not exist, that Christ is not the Son of God, that Jesus never taught inspiration, or that there is an unquestionable error in the original text — and it fails.

And whatever the Bible affirms, God affirms — in theology, ethics, history, and everywhere else it speaks.

Notice where you have arrived and how you got there. The Bible was not the starting point of this argument; it is the conclusion. That is what makes the chain worth walking with someone who does not yet accept it.