Why I believe
By Steve Yates

Steven Yates has a Ph.D. in Philosophy and is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (ICS Press, 1994).

"You don't really believe that stuff, do you?"

I sometimes get asked this since returning to the Christianity I professed when I was younger. It is worth pondering.

Why have I concluded that Christianity is credible and that the Bible really is God's revelation to mankind? Consider the Bible a moment. It is a book with many human authors, its origins spanning millennia. Yet once we look past the myriad details, the life stories of hundreds of people and the rise and fall of dozens of kingdoms and empires, the Bible tells a single, consistent story: man's creation by God; man's fall because he rejected God and tried to put himself in God's place (including repeated attempts to reach Heaven on his own, from the ancient Tower of Babel to communism in our time); and God's plan of redemption for man through Jesus Christ. Then, it asserts that while some would believe, by and large man would continue to reject God's plan, leading eventually to the End Times when God's followers will have to battle Satan's forces.

Many writers have argued in detail that we have almost reached the onset of these End Times. Of course, no one can prove this. But if we want evidence for the credibility of the Bible, there is plenty at hand. Consider passages like the following. "In the last days perilous times will come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemous, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy; without moral affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof" (2Timothy 3:1–5). Is this or is this not a good description of the America of today? If so, the New Testament got it dead center--roughly 19 centuries before the events it describes.

Other prophecies are astonishing in their detail. The Old Testament book Daniel predicts "a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased" (Daniel 12:1,4). People today "run to and fro" to a degree that could scarcely have been imagined in Daniel's time. The same goes for our scientific knowledge and technical know-how. Did the prophet Daniel simply make an amazingly good guess?

Finally, the New Testament provides an even more startling prediction of the materialist secularism that took over modern science during the 19th and 20th centuries: "There shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, and saying, 'Where is the promise of His coming? For ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.' For this they are willfully ignorant of, that by the Word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, whereby the world that was then, being overflowed with water, perished" (2Peter 3:3–6).

The Bible isn't a scientific tract, of course. But we do have empirical findings that support it better than will ever be taught in secular colleges and universities. To cite a few examples, alluded to in 2Peter, there is evidence that a very old civilization existed and ended suddenly--as if erased by the very sort of global catastrophe Genesis describes. It was probably seafaring, because it had mapped portions of the globe. This is suggested by the fact that certain Mediterranean peoples had maps of places they had no business knowing about if current theories of history are correct.

Back in the 1960s, historian and cartographer Charles Hapgood wrote a now-classic book entitled Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings. One ancient map, the Piri Reis map, depicts what seem to be portions of the coastline of South America extending inland, with the Amazon River clearly visible.

Hapgood studied other maps dating from around the same period that turned out to offer an accurate depiction of the coastline of Antarctica--before it became covered by ice. This suggests that the Antarctic ice fields are of recent origin--as if they came about as a result of massive climatic changes that would follow a flood of Biblical proportions.

There are also cases of what one might call oops-out-of-place artifacts. These are objects clearly of human origin found in places they had no business being (e.g., metal objects found embedded in solid rock supposedly millions of years old). The disaster itself left traces in other forms, such as wooly mammoths found embedded in Siberian tundra frozen so suddenly that they still had undigested food in their stomachs. The process of fossilization requires sudden burial and preservation. Otherwise, the lifeless animal or plant simply decays without leaving a trace.

There is more, much more, but my point is that a surprising amount of accumulated physical and historical evidence drawn from many different disciplines tends to support a Scriptural view of the world, not discredit it.

Because of the accumulation of these bits and pieces of evidence drawn from diverse disciplines, one's Christian faith need not be blind. Christianity gets a bad rap these days because Christians profess to have at their disposal a number of absolute moral truths. Today's academic orthodoxy rejects the whole idea of truth, much less moral truth. Christians are singled out as intolerant and judgmental. Indeed, the "universal tolerance" so popular today means tolerance toward every belief system and idea except those of Christianity. The Bible predicted this, too, as it did dozens of other prophecies, be they about the birth, life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ--or about our own times.

Jesus never coerces anyone into following Him. He merely makes Himself available. "Behold, I stand at the door, and knock," He says. "If any man hear My voice, and open the door, I will come in to him" (Revelation 3:20). Jesus doesn't operate like the BATF. He doesn't, that is, kick open your door and force his way in at gunpoint. One is saved by a personal decision to place one's faith in God's gift of Christ's saving power--and not in good works, following rules such as those passed by a government or even a religious institution, or anything else (Ephesians 2:8-9).

The point of Christianity, which Christians celebrate at Easter with Jesus' supernatural resurrection from the dead, is God's plan of redemption through Jesus, for those who will accept Him as Savior. He promises that all who open that door and call upon His name will be saved (Romans 10:13; Acts 2:21). This is the core message of Christianity.