30 Questions Skeptics Ask

Every question in this paper has been asked in good faith by someone.

That is worth saying first, because skeptics are often treated as enemies to be beaten. They are not. Many of them are people who were hurt by a church, or who were never given a straight answer, or who simply want to know whether any of this is true before they give their life to it. That is a reasonable thing to want.

The Bible does not fear honest questions. When John the Baptist sat in Herod's prison and began to wonder, he sent word to Jesus and asked Him plainly:

“Now when John had heard in the prison the works of Christ, he sent two of his disciples, And said unto him, Art thou he that should come, or do we look for another? Jesus answered and said unto them, Go and shew John again those things which ye do hear and see: The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them.” (Matthew 11:2-5)

Jesus did not scold him. He pointed him to what could be seen and heard. The same God says through Isaiah, “Come now, and let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18). And the Bereans were called “more noble” because they “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11). Checking is not rebellion. It is what the Bible asks of us.

What this paper is

This is a paper of short answers. There are thirty questions in six groups: God, Jesus, the Bible, faith and reason, Christians and the claims of Christ, and suffering and meaning. Each answer opens with a sentence or two you could say across a table, and then gives the reasons behind it in a few paragraphs, with sources in the notes.

The answers are short on purpose. Whole libraries have been written on each of these questions, and the bibliography points to some of the best. A companion paper, Common Objections, goes deeper on many of the same themes and gives guidance for real conversations. This one is meant to be read in a sitting, or one question at a time, and to show that each question has a serious answer.

It argues from the King James Bible first, because if God has spoken, what He said matters more than what we say about Him. Then it brings in history, philosophy and science, and wherever it quotes someone it gives the source so you can check it. Some of the people quoted here are believers. Some were or are firm unbelievers. Where an unbeliever grants a point, that is noted, not because it proves the case, but because it shows the point does not depend on wishful thinking.

A word about me

I was raised Roman Catholic but never really connected — I went through the motions, fell asleep in the pews, and faked being sick to skip Mass.

Eventually I gave up and called myself an atheist. I decided to read the Bible for one reason: to disprove it, so I'd have an excuse to stop going to church for good. It did the opposite. Genesis gripped me. In Matthew I read Jesus' own words and felt the weight of my own sin for the first time. I came to faith in 2022, and my wife came to faith a month later. The whole story is at kylelauriano.com/about.

I tell you that so you know where I stand. I came to disprove God. He met me instead — and I couldn't unsee what time it is. I am not asking you to take my word for anything. I am asking you to do what I did: read the Bible for yourself.

A note on Scripture: every verse here is quoted from the King James Bible. You can read it free in the 1611 Reader at kylelauriano.com/library, and a KJV with Strong's Concordance will let you check every word against the Hebrew and Greek.

These first five questions are about God Himself: whether He exists, why we should think He is the God of the Bible, and how His goodness fits with the evil and pain we see. They come first because every other question depends on them.

1. If God exists, why is there so much evil in the world?

The short answer: Because God made creatures who could really love, and real love requires real freedom, which we have misused. Evil is not evidence that God does not exist; it is evidence that the world is not as it should be, and the Bible says exactly that.

The objection is ancient. The Christian writer Lactantius, around AD 313, reported it in the name of the Greek philosopher Epicurus: God “either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling,” and either way, the argument runs, He is not the God Christians describe.¹ In 1955 the Australian philosopher J. L. Mackie put it in modern form, arguing that belief in an all-good, all-powerful God and belief in evil cannot both be true.²

But the argument assumes that a good God would never allow evil for any reason. That is the hidden premise, and it is not obvious. In 1974 the philosopher Alvin Plantinga argued that if God wanted creatures who freely choose good, He had to make creatures who could also choose evil; even God cannot make a free choice that is not free.³ Many philosophers since, unbelievers among them, have granted that this answers the charge of a strict logical contradiction.

Scripture adds what philosophy cannot. God made a world that was “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Evil came in through a real choice by a real man: “as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). And God has not stood back from it. He entered it at the cross, and He has promised to end it: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” (Revelation 21:4).

There is one more thing to notice. To call something evil, you need a standard of good that is more than your own preference. If there is no God, “evil” is only a name for what we dislike. The objection borrows a moral law that only makes sense if there is a Lawgiver.

2. How can you prove God actually exists?

The short answer: Not the way you prove a sum, but the way you prove anything in history or in a courtroom: by evidence that adds up. The universe had a beginning, it is finely ordered, we know right and wrong, and a man rose from the dead.

Start with the oldest question in philosophy. The German thinker Gottfried Leibniz asked in 1714, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” and answered that the reason for the whole chain of things that need not exist must lie in a being that must exist: “And that ultimate reason for things is what we call ‘God’.”⁴ Science has since given us strong reason to think the universe had a beginning. Whatever begins to exist needs a cause beyond itself. Scripture opens with that cause: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).

Then there is order. The Cambridge cosmologist Martin Rees, who is not a believer, wrote a whole book on six numbers built into physics that must sit within narrow limits for stars, chemistry and life to exist at all.⁵ The astronomer Fred Hoyle, also no friend of religion, said after studying how carbon is made inside stars: “A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature.”⁶ Paul said it long before: “For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse” (Romans 1:20).

There is the moral law. Every human being knows that some things are really wrong: cruelty to a child for fun is not a matter of taste. C. S. Lewis built the first part of Mere Christianity on this, arguing that a moral law points to a Moral Lawgiver.⁷ And there is history, which the next part takes up: the evidence that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified and seen alive again.

None of these forces you to believe. Together they make belief in God reasonable, and unbelief the harder position to hold. One of my guests came to that point by a single question.

Michael Ray Lewis told his story on The King Is Coming Show (TKIC #48): an atheist who mocked Christians, until, in his telling, one question undid him. Watch it in his own words: youtube.com/watch?v=Rd-RdSqeQDk Michael's account of what happened to him, shared as his testimony — weigh it for yourself.

3. Why should I believe in the Christian God instead of other gods?

The short answer: Because Christianity rests on a public event that can be examined: the death and resurrection of Jesus. Most religions rest on private revelations or teachings. Christianity says, in effect, "If this did not happen, throw it all away."

Paul staked everything on one fact: “And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” (1 Corinthians 15:14). No other faith makes its truth depend so openly on a historical claim that its enemies could have disproved. When Paul stood before King Agrippa he said, “this thing was not done in a corner” (Acts 26:26).

The religions of the world do not all say the same thing. They disagree about who God is, whether He is personal, what is wrong with us, and how it is fixed. Buddhism, in its classic form, does not center on a personal Creator at all. Islam honors Jesus as a prophet but denies that He was crucified (Qur'an 4:157).⁸ Christianity says He was crucified and rose. These cannot all be true at once. The question is not which religion makes us comfortable, but which, if any, is true.

Christianity is also unique in what it says about grace. Almost every system of religion is a ladder: do this, and you may climb to God. The gospel says God came down the ladder to us: “For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9).

Steve Kang told his story on The King Is Coming Show (TKIC #49): he chanted eight hours a day to reach nirvana, and then, in his telling, woke up in hell instead. Watch it in his own words: youtube.com/watch?v=46SP1FgXfbY Steve's account of what happened to him, shared as his testimony — weigh it for yourself.

4. If God is all-powerful, why can't He just eliminate suffering?

The short answer: He can, and He will. The question is why not yet. Scripture's answer is that He is holding the door open: “not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

"All-powerful" does not mean God can do nonsense. He cannot make a square circle, or a free choice that is forced. He could end all suffering today by ending all sinners today, and that would include us. The patience that lets the world go on in its pain is the same patience that gives us time to turn.

The Bible also says suffering is not wasted. Joseph, sold into slavery by his own brothers, said to them years later, “ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive” (Genesis 50:20). Paul, who was beaten, shipwrecked and imprisoned, called it “our light affliction, which is but for a moment” that “worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Corinthians 4:17). That is not a man who did not suffer. It is a man who knew where suffering was going.

And the end is fixed. Creation itself, Paul says, waits for it: “Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21). God's power is not in doubt. His timetable is simply longer than ours, and kinder.

5. Why would God allow innocent people to suffer?

The short answer: Scripture refuses to say that every sufferer is being punished, and it shows us God Himself suffering innocently for the guilty. We may not know the reason for a particular pain, but we know the character of the God who allows it.

Jesus was asked this directly. His disciples saw a man born blind and asked whose sin caused it. “Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:3). When people brought Him news of a tower that fell on eighteen men, He said they were not worse sinners than anyone else, and turned the question back on His hearers: “except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:5). Suffering is not a scoreboard.

The book of Job was written about this very problem. Job suffers terribly, his friends insist he must have sinned, and God at the end says they were wrong. God never tells Job the reason. He shows Job Himself: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?” (Job 38:4). And Job answers, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:5).

Above all, the only truly innocent man who ever lived suffered most. Isaiah wrote of Him: “But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5). Whatever the reason God allows innocent suffering, it cannot be that He does not care. He went to the cross.

Christianity is about a person. If Jesus did not live, or did not die, or did not rise, it is finished. These five questions go to the center.

6. Is there any historical evidence that Jesus actually existed?

The short answer: Yes, and almost no historian of the period doubts it. Roman and Jewish writers who had no reason to favor Christians mention Him within a century of His death.

The Roman historian Tacitus, writing around AD 116 about the fire of Rome under Nero, explains the name "Christian": “Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.”⁹ He calls the faith “a most mischievous superstition.” He was no friend.

Pliny the Younger, governor in what is now Turkey, wrote to the emperor Trajan around AD 112 that Christians “were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god.”¹⁰ Suetonius records that the emperor Claudius expelled Jews from Rome because they “constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus,” which most scholars take as a garbled reference to Christ.¹¹ The Jewish historian Josephus, writing in the 90s, mentions the execution of “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James.”¹² The Greek satirist Lucian, in the second century, mocked Christians for worshipping a man crucified in Palestine.¹³

Add to this the letters of Paul, written within about twenty to thirty years of the crucifixion, which speak of Jesus' brother James, whom Paul met (Galatians 1:19), and the four Gospels. Bart Ehrman, a leading New Testament scholar and an agnostic, wrote a whole book defending the historical existence of Jesus against those who deny it.¹⁴ The question among historians is not whether Jesus lived, but who He was.

7. Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

The short answer: The best explanation of the facts that nearly all historians accept is that He did. The tomb was empty, His followers were sure they saw Him alive, and enemies became believers.

Gary Habermas and Michael Licona built their case on what they call "minimal facts": points so well attested that most scholars, including skeptics, grant them. Jesus died by crucifixion. His disciples believed He rose and appeared to them. Paul, a persecutor of the church, was converted. James, the skeptical brother of Jesus, was converted. And, granted by a strong majority, the tomb was found empty.¹⁵

The earliest written record is a creed Paul says he "received" and passed on, which most scholars date to within a few years of the events:

“For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.” (1 Corinthians 15:3-7)

Notice "the greater part remain unto this present." Paul is saying: go and ask them. Even the German scholar Gerd Lüdemann, an atheist who rejected the resurrection, wrote: “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.”¹⁶ He explained them as visions. But visions do not empty a tomb, and grief visions do not convert a hostile Pharisee or a doubting brother.

The British scholar N. T. Wright, after a study of more than seven hundred pages, concluded that the empty tomb together with the appearances is the only sufficient explanation for why the early church believed what it did.¹⁷ The disciples were willing to suffer for this claim. Men may die for a lie they believe; they do not die for a lie they invented.

8. How is Jesus different from other religious founders?

The short answer: Other founders pointed to a way. Jesus said He was the way, claimed to forgive sins against God, accepted worship, and said He would rise. No other major founder made those claims.

Muhammad claimed to be a prophet, a messenger, not God. The Buddha, in the classic sources, taught a path to the end of suffering and did not claim to be the Creator. Confucius taught ethics and order. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

His hearers understood exactly what He was claiming. When He said, “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), taking the name God gave Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14), they picked up stones. When He told a paralysed man, “Son, thy sins be forgiven thee” (Mark 2:5), the scribes said, “who can forgive sins but God only?” (Mark 2:7). When Thomas fell before the risen Christ and said, “My LORD and my God,” Jesus did not correct him (John 20:28).

C. S. Lewis saw that this leaves no room for the polite middle view: “A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.”¹⁸ He is a liar, a madman, or the Lord. And there is the last difference: every other founder's grave is a grave. His is empty.

9. Why did Jesus have to die on the cross?

The short answer: Because God is both just and loving. Sin is real guilt, and a just judge cannot pretend it away. At the cross God paid the penalty Himself, so that He could be just and still forgive.

People sometimes ask, "Why can't God just forgive?" We forgive each other, after all. But when one person forgives another, the one who forgives absorbs the cost. If you break my window and I forgive you, I pay for the glass. Our sin is against God's own law, and the cost is death: “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

At the cross, the judge stepped down and paid the fine. “For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Paul says this was done “that he might be just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:26). Justice is satisfied; mercy is given.

And it was not forced on Him. Jesus said, “No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself” (John 10:18). It was love: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). The cross is not a father punishing an unwilling son. It is the Son freely laying down His life, one with the Father's will, for people who did not deserve it.

10. Isn't the resurrection just a legend that grew over time?

The short answer: There was not enough time. Legends take generations; the resurrection was being preached in Jerusalem within weeks, and written down in a creed within a few years.

The Oxford historian A. N. Sherwin-White, a specialist in Roman law and society, studied how fast legend overtook fact in ancient records. In his 1963 Sarum Lectures he argued that even two generations were too short a time for legend to wipe out the hard historical core of a story.¹⁹ The Gospels were written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses, and the creed in 1 Corinthians 15 is earlier still.

The disciples were not men expecting a resurrection. When the women first told them, “their words seemed to them as idle tales, and they believed them not” (Luke 24:11). And the first witnesses were women, whose testimony was not even accepted in Jewish courts of the time; Josephus records the rule, “let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex.”²⁰ Anyone inventing a legend to persuade first-century Jews would never have made women the first witnesses. The Gospels record it because it happened.

Peter preached the resurrection in Jerusalem, the one city where the claim could be checked by walking to the tomb: “This Jesus hath God raised up, whereof we all are witnesses” (Acts 2:32). The authorities could have ended Christianity by producing the body. They never did.

If Jesus rose, His view of Scripture matters. But skeptics rightly ask whether the book we have can be trusted at all. Here are five short answers.

11. How can I trust the Bible when it was written so long ago?

The short answer: Age is not the same as error. We trust ancient historians every day; the Bible's history has been checked against archaeology again and again, and it has held.

Luke opens his Gospel like a historian, saying he had “perfect understanding of all things from the very first” and wrote “that thou mightest know the certainty of those things” (Luke 1:3-4). He names rulers and dates: “in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judaea” (Luke 3:1). That is the kind of detail a historian can test.

And it has been tested. In 1961 a stone was found at Caesarea bearing Pilate's name and title.²¹ In 1993–94 an inscription at Tel Dan mentioned the "House of David," the first reference to David outside the Bible.²² In 1990 a family tomb in Jerusalem yielded an ossuary inscribed with the name Caiaphas, the high priest at Jesus' trial.²³ In 2004 workers uncovered the Pool of Siloam, where Jesus sent the blind man to wash (John 9:7).²⁴ The Egyptologist Kenneth Kitchen spent a long career showing how the Old Testament fits its ancient world.²⁵

Archaeology cannot prove that God spoke. But it can show that the Bible's writers knew the world they wrote about, and that is what you would expect if they were telling the truth.

12. Hasn't the Bible been changed and corrupted over time?

The short answer: No. The Bible was not passed down like a game of telephone. It was copied from Hebrew and Greek, in thousands of manuscripts, and God promised to keep His words.

The "telephone" picture is wrong from the start. Translators do not translate a translation of a translation; they go back to the Hebrew and Greek. The King James translators of 1611 said exactly that in their preface, and they worked from the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek Received Text of the New.²⁶ The Greek New Testament survives in well over five thousand handwritten copies catalogued by the Institute for New Testament Textual Research in Münster, far more than any other ancient book.²⁷

The Old Testament has its own witness. The Great Isaiah Scroll, found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1947 and dated to roughly 125 BC, is about a thousand years older than the oldest Hebrew manuscripts known before the scrolls were found. The Israel Museum, which holds it, describes its text as generally in agreement with the traditional (Masoretic) text of the medieval codices, while noting that it also carries many variant readings, alternative spellings, scribal errors and corrections.²⁸ Readers can view it online through the museum.

God made a promise about His words: “The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever” (Psalm 12:6-7). And Jesus said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35). This paper stands on the King James Bible and the Received Text behind it. Modern translations follow a different Greek text in some places, and you can see every place they part ways at kylelauriano.com/library/changes.

13. Why are there contradictions in the Bible?

The short answer: Most alleged contradictions are differences of detail, the kind honest witnesses always have. When you read them closely, they fit together.

Take the death of Judas. Matthew says Judas “went and hanged himself” (Matthew 27:5). Acts says “falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst” (Acts 1:18). Is that a contradiction? Not necessarily: a man who hangs himself and is left, or whose rope or branch gives way, falls. The two accounts give two parts of one grim event.

Or take the women at the tomb. Matthew mentions “Mary Magdalene and the other Mary” (Matthew 28:1); Mark adds Salome (Mark 16:1); John names only Mary Magdalene (John 20:1). Naming fewer people is not denying the others. Detectives are suspicious of witnesses whose stories match word for word; independent witnesses tell the same event from different angles. The cold-case detective J. Warner Wallace, formerly an atheist, made this point at length after applying his methods to the Gospels.²⁹

Gleason Archer, a scholar of the biblical languages, wrote an encyclopedia working through the hard passages of Scripture one by one, in biblical order.³⁰ If a particular passage troubles you, look it up there, or ask. The honest course is to take each claimed contradiction on its own and examine it, not to assume that a list on the internet has been checked.

14. Isn't the Bible just a book written by men?

The short answer: It was written by men, about forty of them across many centuries, and it says so. It also says those men were “moved by the Holy Ghost.” Both are true, and the book's unity and its prophecies show it.

Peter puts it plainly: “For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:21). Paul says, “All scripture is given by inspiration of God” (2 Timothy 3:16). God did not erase the writers' personalities; Paul sounds like Paul and John like John. But He so guided them that what they wrote was what He meant.

The evidence is in the book itself. Written over many centuries by shepherds, kings, fishermen and a physician, it tells one story, from creation to new creation, centered on one person. And it predicts. Micah named Bethlehem as the birthplace of a ruler “whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2). Isaiah described a servant who would be “wounded for our transgressions” (Isaiah 53:5). A psalm of David describes a sufferer whose enemies “pierced my hands and my feet” (Psalm 22:16) and “part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture” (Psalm 22:18).

God Himself sets this test: “When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken” (Deuteronomy 18:22). The Bible invites you to check.

15. How do we know which books belong in the Bible?

The short answer: The church did not create the canon; it recognized it. The Old Testament was the Bible Jesus used, and the New Testament books were those received from the start as coming from the apostles and their close companions.

Jesus spoke of the Hebrew Scriptures in their three parts: “the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms” (Luke 24:44). Josephus, in the first century, wrote that the Jews had a fixed set of sacred books and would not add to them.³¹ The apocryphal books printed between the Testaments in the 1611 were set apart there, not as part of the Old Testament itself.

For the New Testament, the test was simple: did the book come from an apostle or someone close to one, did it agree with the faith handed down, and was it received by the churches everywhere? The four Gospels and Paul's letters were in wide use by the early second century. In AD 367 Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, listed the twenty-seven books of our New Testament in his Easter letter.³² No council invented them; councils agreed to what the churches already read. The scholar F. F. Bruce traced this story in detail.³³

Later books that claimed apostolic names, such as the so-called gospels of Thomas or Judas, were written too late and teach a different faith. They are interesting as history. They are not Scripture.

Many skeptics have been told that faith means believing without evidence, and that science has made God unnecessary. These five answers take that on.

16. Isn't faith just wishful thinking?

The short answer: Biblical faith is trust based on evidence, not belief in spite of it. And if wishful thinking were the source, people would have invented a far more comfortable religion.

Mark Twain gave the popular definition through a character in Following the Equator, where Pudd'nhead Wilson remarks that it was the schoolboy who said “Faith is believing what you know ain't so.”³⁴ That is a good joke, and a bad definition. The Bible defines faith this way: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is not the absence of evidence; it is acting on evidence about things you cannot yet see.

John says why he wrote his Gospel: “But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name” (John 20:31). The writing comes first, the believing second. Peter tells Christians to be ready “to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear” (1 Peter 3:15). A reason, not a feeling.

As for wishful thinking: Christianity tells you that you are a sinner, that you must repent, that you must forgive your enemies, that you will be judged, and that following Christ may cost you everything. Few people would wish for that. People wish for a god who agrees with them. The God of the Bible often does not.

17. Why should I believe in the supernatural when science explains everything?

The short answer: Science explains how the natural world normally works. It cannot tell you whether there is anything beyond nature, because it only measures nature. Saying "science explains everything" is a philosophy, not a finding of science.

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher, argued in 1748: “A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.”³⁵ But notice what he assumes. If experience is "unalterable" against miracles, then any report of a miracle is ruled out before we look at it. That is not evidence; it is a decision.

A law of nature tells you what happens when nothing outside nature acts. If God exists, He is not bound by the regularities He made, any more than an author is bound by the plot of his book. The question is not whether miracles fit the laws of nature, but whether God exists and whether He has acted. Those are questions of evidence, and the resurrection is the test case.

Science itself grew up among people who believed the world was made by a rational God and could therefore be understood. Isaac Newton, at the end of his Principia, wrote that “This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”³⁶ He was wrong about some things in theology, but he saw no war between the heavens and their Maker.

18. If God wanted me to believe, why doesn't He just show Himself?

The short answer: He has: in creation, in conscience, in Scripture, and above all in Jesus Christ, who was seen, heard and touched. More spectacle would not change a heart that does not want Him.

John writes of Jesus as one “which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled” (1 John 1:1). God did show Himself, in the flesh, in public, for three years. Some believed. Others saw the same miracles and plotted to kill Him.

Jesus told a story of a rich man in torment who begged Abraham to send someone from the dead to warn his brothers. Abraham answered, “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luke 16:31). Then Jesus rose from the dead, and many still were not persuaded. The problem is often not the evidence but the will. Jesus said, “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).

God also wants more than our agreement that He exists. He wants trust and love, and those cannot be forced by overwhelming display. But He does promise to be found: “And ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). Jesus gave a test anyone can take: “If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God” (John 7:17).

19. Doesn't science disprove Christianity?

The short answer: No. Science studies the world God made. It has not disproved God, and it cannot. Where scientists' theories about the distant past conflict with Genesis, the conflict is between the Bible and a theory, not between the Bible and observation.

Science works by measuring what is here now and testing repeatable results. That is powerful, and Christians have no quarrel with it. But questions about the origin of everything, about why there are laws at all, about right and wrong and meaning, are not settled in a laboratory. Many of the founders of modern science, from Kepler and Boyle to Faraday and Maxwell, were believers who saw their work as tracing the order God put into the world.

The Bible's account of origins is plain. God created in six days: “For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day” (Exodus 20:11). He formed a real man from the dust (Genesis 2:7) and made them “male and female” (Genesis 1:27). Jesus took that as history: “But from the beginning of the creation God made them male and female” (Mark 10:6). Death came into the world through Adam's sin (Romans 5:12), and God judged the world by a flood in which “all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered” (Genesis 7:19). Peter writes of the same flood, by which “the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished” (2 Peter 3:6).

Some have tried to make peace with evolutionary theory by reading Genesis as a picture of a long process of death and struggle before Adam. I do not believe the text allows that, because Scripture ties death to sin, and Jesus ties mankind to "the beginning of the creation." I hold that Genesis is a true record: six real days of creation, a real Adam and Eve, a real Fall, and a global Flood. I make no claim about the age of the earth. The point here is that no observation of science has shown God to be unnecessary. If anything, the beginning and fine-tuning of the universe (see question 2) point the other way.

20. How can intelligent people believe in God?

The short answer: The same way intelligent people believe anything: by weighing the evidence. Some of the greatest minds in history have been Christians, and many intelligent people have come to Christ from atheism.

Blaise Pascal, the French mathematician who helped found probability theory, wrote of an “infinite abyss” in man that “can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God Himself.”³⁷ Augustine, one of the sharpest minds of the ancient world, began his Confessions by praying to God, “Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”³⁸ C. S. Lewis, an Oxford and Cambridge scholar of literature and a convinced atheist in his youth, came to faith and told the story in Surprised by Joy.³⁹

In our own time, Lee Strobel, a legal journalist and atheist, set out to investigate the evidence for Jesus and wrote The Case for Christ about what he found.⁴⁰ Intelligence does not decide the matter either way. Paul said, “not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called” (1 Corinthians 1:26). Faith is not a reward for being clever. But it is not an insult to the mind.

Sy Garte told his story on The King Is Coming Show (TKIC #47): three generations of atheists, until, in his telling, a vision on a Pennsylvania highway. Watch it in his own words: youtube.com/watch?v=h-a_uZBKgDk Sy's account of what happened to him, shared as his testimony — weigh it for yourself.

Some of the hardest questions are not about God at all, but about Christians, or about claims of Christianity that sound narrow or harsh. These five answers face them directly.

21. Why do so many Christians seem like hypocrites?

The short answer: Because many are, at least in part, and Jesus condemned hypocrisy more fiercely than anyone. But the failures of Christians do not show that Christ failed. They show why we need Him.

The perception is widespread. A Barna Group study of young Americans outside the church, reported in 2007, found that 85 percent described present-day Christianity as hypocritical.⁴¹ That should humble every believer.

Jesus saved His hardest words for religious hypocrites: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones” (Matthew 23:27). He warned that many who call Him "Lord, Lord" will hear, “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:23). If you are angry at religious hypocrisy, you are on Jesus' side.

But a hypocrite is someone who pretends. A Christian who struggles and falls is not necessarily pretending. The church has never claimed to be a gathering of good people. It is a gathering of forgiven people who are still being changed: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). Judge Christianity by Christ, not by His worst followers. And know that you will not be judged by their sins, but by your own response to Him.

22. How can Christianity claim to be the only true religion?

The short answer: Because Jesus claimed it, and if He rose from the dead He had the right to. Every religion makes exclusive claims; the question is which one is true.

Peter told the rulers of Jerusalem, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). That sounds narrow, and it is. But truth is narrow. Two plus two is four, and every other answer is wrong. If Jesus is God in the flesh who died for sin and rose, then going around Him is not one path among many; it is refusing the only door God opened.

The view that "all religions are true" is itself an exclusive claim. It says that every religion that claims to be uniquely true is wrong. That is a strong position, and it is usually held by people who have not studied what the religions actually teach. Islam says Jesus was not crucified; Christianity says He was. Both cannot be right.

Christianity is exclusive in its claim, but open in its invitation. “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:22). The door is narrow, but anyone may come through it, and Jesus said, “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37).

23. What about people who've never heard of Jesus?

The short answer: God is perfectly just, and no one will be judged unfairly. Everyone has light from creation and conscience. And God's answer to the unreached is that we should go and tell them.

Paul says that creation makes God's power plain to everyone (Romans 1:20), and that even those without the written law have “the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness” (Romans 2:15). No one is judged for rejecting a gospel they never heard; people are judged for their response to the light they had, and Scripture says no one has lived up to it: “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

Scripture also shows God seeking out those who seek Him. Paul told the Athenians that God placed the nations “That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us” (Acts 17:27). When the Roman officer Cornelius prayed, God sent Peter to him with the gospel (Acts 10:22). Peter concluded, “God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him” (Acts 10:34-35).

We can trust Abraham's question: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25). But Scripture never tells us to sit back and speculate about the unreached. It tells us to reach them: “how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except they be sent?” (Romans 10:14-15). And if you are reading this, the question is no longer about them. You have heard.

24. Why is Christianity so judgmental about sexuality?

The short answer: Because God made sex good and gave it a home: the lifelong marriage of a man and a woman. The Bible's standard condemns every one of us somewhere, and its offer of forgiveness reaches every one of us too.

Jesus grounded marriage in creation: “Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?” (Matthew 19:4-5). Every sexual act outside that union, whether between a man and a woman or between two of the same sex, falls short of it. That is the standard, and it is not up for vote.

But notice who the standard condemns. Jesus said lust in the heart is adultery. By that measure, nobody is innocent. Paul lists sins that exclude from God's kingdom, sexual and otherwise: “neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9-10). Then he writes: “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Corinthians 6:11). The church in Corinth was full of people who had lived those lives and been changed.

Jesus held both truth and mercy together when He spoke to a woman caught in adultery: “Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more” (John 8:11). Not condemnation without a way out; not acceptance without change. Rosaria Butterfield, a tenured professor at Syracuse University who lived as a lesbian, told of coming to Christ through the patient friendship of a pastor and his wife, in The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert.⁴² The Bible's sexual ethic is demanding. So is its love.

25. How can a loving God send people to hell?

The short answer: Because He is also just, and sin against an infinitely holy God is infinitely serious. Hell is real, conscious and everlasting, as Jesus taught. And God has done everything short of overriding our will to keep us from it.

Jesus spoke of hell more than anyone else in the Bible. He said of the unrighteous, “these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal” (Matthew 25:46). He described it as the place “Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:44). He warned, “fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). We do not soften what He did not soften.

Why would a loving God allow it? First, because love is not the same as indifference to evil. A judge who let a murderer go free because he was "loving" would not be good. God's justice means every wrong will be answered. Second, because God takes no pleasure in it: “As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 33:11). C. S. Lewis wrote that the damned are, in one sense, "rebels to the end," and that "the doors of hell are locked on the inside."⁴³ There is truth in that: no one in hell wants God. But Scripture is also clear that hell is God's sentence, not only our choice: “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41).

Third, and most important, God's love is shown in what He did to keep us out. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). The question is not really how God could send anyone to hell. It is why He would send His Son to the cross for people who deserved it. The way out is open: repent and believe.

The last five questions are the most personal. They are often asked not in a debate, but at a hospital bed or a graveside, or late at night. They deserve answers that are honest and gentle.

26. Why do bad things happen to good people?

The short answer: Scripture's honest answer is that there are no truly good people, only people God loves, and that in a fallen world suffering falls on all. But that is not the end: God is working, even in suffering, for those who love Him.

Jesus once stopped a man who called Him "Good Master" and asked, “Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God” (Mark 10:18). He was not denying His own deity; He was challenging the man's easy use of "good." By God's standard, “There is none righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10). The question "Why do bad things happen to good people?" turns out to be harder than we think. A better question might be, "Why does a holy God show kindness to anyone?"

That is not a cold answer. It does not mean every suffering is a punishment; Jesus denied that (John 9:3; Luke 13:1-5). It means we live in a world under the curse of the Fall, where “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” (Romans 8:22). Disease, accident and disaster fall on the kind and the cruel alike.

And yet there is a promise for those who belong to Christ: “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). Not that all things are good, but that God works them together for good. The cross is the proof: the worst thing that ever happened to the best man who ever lived became the salvation of the world.

27. If God cares about me, why doesn't He help when I'm suffering?

The short answer: He often helps in ways we do not see at the time, and He never leaves His people alone in it. Jesus Himself cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” He knows what it feels like.

That cry from the cross (Matthew 27:46) was a quotation of Psalm 22:1. The Bible does not hide the feeling that God is far away. Whole psalms are prayers of men who felt abandoned. They are in Scripture so that you know you can pray that way too, honestly, without pretending.

God's promises are not that we will be spared pain, but that we will not be alone in it: “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart” (Psalm 34:18), and “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee” (Hebrews 13:5). Jesus wept at the grave of His friend Lazarus (John 11:35), even though He knew He was about to raise him. He feels your grief, even when He has a purpose beyond it.

Paul asked three times to have his "thorn in the flesh" removed. God said no, and gave him something else: “My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). Sometimes God's help is the removal of suffering. Sometimes it is strength to carry it. If you are suffering now and feel that God is silent, tell Him so. And find a believer to sit with you. God often sends His help with skin on.

28. How can I find meaning and purpose if God doesn't exist?

The short answer: You can find things that feel meaningful for a while, but if there is no God, there is no ultimate meaning at all. Honest atheists have said so. If God exists, your life has a purpose that does not end at death.

Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher and unbeliever, wrote in 1903 that if the universe is only matter in motion, then man's hopes and loves are the products of blind physical causes, doomed to extinction, and that the soul's habitation can henceforth be safely built "only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair."⁴⁴ Richard Dawkins wrote that the universe has exactly the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, "no design, no purpose, no evil and no good."⁴⁵ They were being consistent.

Ecclesiastes explored life "under the sun," without looking above it, and found the same thing: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). But it ends by looking up: “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man” (Ecclesiastes 12:13).

You were made by God and for God. That is why work, love, beauty and achievement are good but never quite enough. Jesus asked, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36). Meaning is not something you invent. It is something you receive from the One who made you.

29. What's wrong with just being a good person without Christianity?

The short answer: Nothing is wrong with doing good. The problem is that none of us is good enough, and goodness cannot pay for sin. Christianity is not good advice for good people; it is rescue for people who need it.

Most people think of themselves as basically good, and by human comparison many are kind and honest. But God's standard is not comparison with others. It is His own holiness. Jesus summed up the law as loving God with all your heart, soul and mind, and your neighbor as yourself (Matthew 22:37-39). No one has kept that for a single day. Isaiah, a godly man, wrote, “all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6).

If you broke a law and stood before a judge, telling him about all the times you obeyed the law would not cancel the crime. Good deeds do not erase guilt. That is why the Bible insists salvation is not earned: “by the works of the law shall no flesh be justified” (Galatians 2:16). It is received as a gift.

None of this means good works do not matter. They matter enormously, as the fruit of a changed life. But they are the result of salvation, not the price of it. The good person who refuses Christ is like a drowning man who is a strong swimmer, refusing the rope because he can swim a little further than the others. He will still drown. “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners” (1 Timothy 1:15). The first step is admitting you are one.

30. If Christianity is true, why do Christians suffer just like everyone else?

The short answer: Because Jesus never promised that they would not. He promised the opposite: “In the world ye shall have tribulation.” What He promised was His presence in it, and a future beyond it.

The full verse is a promise and a warning together: “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). Any preacher who promises believers health, wealth and an easy life is not preaching the Jesus of the Bible. The apostles were beaten, imprisoned and, according to the tradition of the church, most of them killed.

What Christians have is not exemption but endurance and hope. Paul wrote, “We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; Persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9). He even said suffering produces something: “tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience; and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed” (Romans 5:3-5).

And the suffering has an end. “For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18). The Christian is not a person who suffers less. He is a person who knows that suffering is not the last word, because the tomb was empty on the third day.

Thirty questions, thirty short answers. None of them is the last word on its subject; each could be the first page of a book, and many of those books are in the bibliography. But taken together, they show something. The questions skeptics ask are real, and they deserve answers. And the answers exist.

God has given reasons: a universe that had a beginning and bears the marks of design, a moral law written on every heart, a book that has proved true in history, and above all a man who claimed to be God, died on a Roman cross under Pontius Pilate, and was seen alive again by people who were willing to die rather than deny it.

What the questions have in common

Almost every question in this paper comes back to one: who is Jesus? If He rose from the dead, then God exists, the Bible's view of itself is confirmed by the One who rose, suffering has an answer and an end, and there is meaning and judgment and hope. If He did not rise, Paul himself says, “your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins” (1 Corinthians 15:17).

So the most important thing you can do with your doubts is not to collect answers, but to look at Him. Read one of the Gospels straight through. I would suggest Mark, the shortest, or John, written “that ye might believe” (John 20:31). Read it as you would any other ancient document, honestly, and ask: who is this man?

A prayer for the honest doubter

You do not have to have every question answered to take the next step. A father once came to Jesus with a sick son and a weak faith, and cried out, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief” (Mark 9:24). Jesus helped him.

My own turning came like this: Then one day I got on my knees and prayed: "Jesus, if you are real, show me — and I'll serve you." That is a prayer anyone can pray. You do not need every answer first.

An invitation

The gospel is simple. You have sinned against a holy God. Christ died for sinners, was buried, and rose again the third day. God “now commandeth all men every where to repent: Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead” (Acts 17:30-31). Turn from your sin and trust in Him. Peter told the first hearers, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and ye shall receive the gift of the Holy Ghost” (Acts 2:38).

There is no pressure here. You may close this paper and walk away. But the questions will still be there, and so will He. “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Revelation 3:20).

If you want to talk, or to go further, the companion paper Common Objections takes many of these themes in more depth, the free 1611 Reader is at kylelauriano.com/library, and my own story is at kylelauriano.com/about. Free truth, no pressure.