Recently I had a dialogue with a skeptic in the Christian Beliefs chat room on AOL. It basically went like they all go... He denied the reliability of the Bible, specifically the New Testament, and I provided supporting evidence for my belief in its reliability. And the result was nothing more than an apparent waste of time on my part. I know that I planted seeds, and I pray another will come along and water them... But in the end it is God and God alone who provides the increase as John 6:44 says that no man comes to Jesus unless drawn by the Father.
But at this point I wanted to just highlight the tactics of the majority of uneducated skeptics (and by this I mean skeptics who are not scholars, i.e. don't hold doctorates and spend the time actually studying and publishing on these issues).
1. The skeptic will never accept the New Testament on its textual merit. In other words, forget that we know without a doubt that we have an accurate account of what the original New Testament writers wrote (and we base this on over 25,000 supporting manuscripts over a number of centuries, in Greek, Latin, Syriac, etc...).
2. The skeptic will never except fulfilled prophecy as a proof, claiming that the prophecies were written after they were fulfilled (even when overwhelming proof to the contrary can be demonstrated).
3. The skeptic will always demand secular history corroborating the New Testament accounts (yet when provided with such they scream that these testimonies are invalid because they are not contemoporary, even when some of them are!).
4. The skeptic will deny all archeological evidence presented even when scholars do not.
5. The skeptic will constantly appeal to authorities while never actually naming any authorities who agree with them (e.g. 'virtually all scholars are in agreement that the NT is a mythical religious document') -- problem being, scholars don't believe this.
6. The skeptic will consistently resort to illogic (e.g. arguing that miracles cannot be proven when the actual argument is the reliability of the NT, which would be a straw man argument)
7. Last but not least (and there are certainly more than 7 points) the skeptic will resort to utter denial. No matter how much historical, archeological, prophetic, textual, scientific, logical, etc... evidence is presented, they will just deny that you have made any argument at all, laugh it off and proceed to mock the God-Breathed scriptures...
This encounter led me to begin writing a mock dialogue which will mirror the one I had with this particular skeptic. The only reason I didn't just post the actual dialogue was because I did not have Power Tools for AOL loaded which allows me to save the entire chat room log. But all the arguments in this mock dialogue will be the same ones I encountered the other night... A link will be posted soon.
May God bless you ALL!!!
B"H
