evidence of christianity

The transcription discusses the evidence for Jesus as the Son of God, emphasizing an evidence-based faith in Christianity. It argues that faith is based on evidence, such as creation and the historical event of Jesus' resurrection. The transformation of the disciples, early church testimony, and societal benefits of Christianity are highlighted as evidence. The text also touches on human response to evidence, freedom of choice in faith, and societal impact of Christianity. Additionally, it mentions personal observations of Christians as better people and Christianity's positive influence on society. So I want to explore this idea of the evidence for Jesus as the son of God and it builds on the idea from, I think it's John Lennox, who talks about how Christianity is an evidence-based faith. It's not a blind faith. You should build upon evidence and he gives a similar analogy to you sit on a chair, you're not 100% sure it won't fall over, but you have faith in it. Or you catch an aeroplane, you're not 100% sure that it will not crash, but you have faith based on evidence, the same with the chair, it's based on evidence, it's what you can see and touch. And the same when you get married, you can't be 100% sure it's going to work out, but you have evidence and you make a decision. So a lot of things in life, if we use faith, which in some ways faith encompasses belief, trust and surrender, but if we use faith in the context of more akin to the word trust, we often make evidence-based links of faith in our lives. So in that sense Christianity is not that different. So what God has given us is evidence, enough evidence to take that step forward in faith. I guess there's a separate question as to why did he just not provide overwhelming evidence, so there was simply no way to refute it and then it was just a matter of do you comply with that or not. I think the answer to that is that humans don't really respond well to having to comply to things. That takes away our freedom. We're at our best when we freely choose, when we enter into a relationship with something or we step into our own belief of something that we've chosen. That's when we're at our most powerful. And it also requires of us an openness and humility that wouldn't be there if we had to comply. So that's sort of a separate issue. There's the idea of having trust based on evidence, which is kind of what Christian faith is. It's a trust in God based on evidence. It's not a blind trust. It's not a blind faith. It's an evidence-based faith. And then there's a separate sort of almost theological question of why would God have done it like this rather than just making it blindly obvious. And I think it's to give us freedom. There's enough—I think it was one of the—it could have been C.S. Lewis who said, there's enough light to find God, but there's also enough shadows to hide from him. And so, you know, people really do have that freedom. What interesting—so that's sort of a second point, just trying to interpret God's intention as to why he doesn't just provide overwhelming evidence. And so look here at the rules. A third point that's sort of interesting is that if you look at the secular world, the sort of world that I understand, most people just—and this is almost proof in itself that there's something powerful there—most people have this kind of visceral reaction where they—they either have one of two things. They either have this visceral reaction against it, like it's all the wacky, wacky supernatural stuff. They're crazy, or, well, I met a pastor who was a hypocrite, and so therefore he is the son of God, or whatever. There's some sort of rebellion or some sort of slightly dysfunctional aggression against the religion. And also that's evident in the media. I've known for a long time—that's a separate point that I'm going to get to later. But I've known for a long time that the media is sort of dysfunctionally biased against Christianity. Like it really does treat it as the enemy, like in movies and in television shows and just in the general news media. But the other thing people do is just kind of hide away from it. Just kind of—and a lot of the celebrities who are interesting, who have podcasts, who Some of them are Christians, but a lot of them aren't. But what's interesting is a lot of these people, especially in the era of the podcast, a lot of them would have done a deep dive on like the health benefits of fasting or, you know, Bitcoin or, you know, they would have done these sort of deep dives on different areas of life that they're interested in, drawn to, or that they feel is going to be useful for. But how many of them have just done a deep dive on the resurrection or the historical evidence of the resurrection, for example? Because that's probably for the skeptical, analytical mind. Like for people who are theologians, there's all these different ways to come to Christ. But I think for the kind of really analytical person who listens to Tim Ferriss about hacks or Balaji about technology or Huberman about health, like a pretty good place is to just go, well, the resurrection was bullshit. I don't have to worry about Christianity. I can safely go ahead and ignore it for the rest of my life as I've been doing up to this point. But if I look into it and go, wow, that's interesting, there's a really good chance that actually happened. Like people say, then there's a different next step. Then that requires further investigation and so on. But most people just haven't done that. Joe Rogan spent weeks looking at whether UFOs are real. Hasn't he spent just three solid days looking into the resurrection, uninterruptedly considering it and weighing the evidence and so on? But the point I was making is that the interesting ones, the people like my dad, like my friends, it's like we know Christianity is there, but we just kind of ignore it. Not even that we're bad people. We're thinking like, my dad, my sisters, my good friends, Jamie, Tony. Everybody kind of knows it's around. And it probably requires a deep dive or some catalytic event to turn to it, but just nobody does. And it's an interesting question as to how big a sin that is. Because I tend to be sympathetic to that in a way, because I kind of understand the modern world. But Jesus was really strong on that. He's like, if people have hard hearts, there's going to be a price to pay. And I'm open hearted. So anyway, it's just interesting. There's a bit of a background to the actual evidence. There's sort of three points I wanted to make. So what's the actual evidence? The two main pieces of evidence, I think, is just life itself, like the universe itself and creation. Let's put that at like number one, because that's the starting point. Just the whole enormity of it, the fact that we're actually alive, I know a lot of it has to do with scientific explanation, but ultimately it's supernatural. Like this binary view of, is it scientific or is it supernatural, kind of, like everything's supernatural in a way. The fact that we exist in consciousness and we're a bunch of atoms organized in a particular way. Those atoms once came from exploding stars. Sure, we can explain parts of it scientifically, but it's still supernatural and miraculous. So I think it's just creation itself. There's some evidence put forth by God. And then the resurrection of Jesus Christ is a historical event, and all of the evidence around that. And there's that whole body of evidence about the disciples amongst others. It's a minimal facts argument. So let's stick with the minimal facts argument at this stage. But the disciples were truly changed and transformed in a way that led to the establishment of Christianity. Many of them went to their deaths still citing Jesus as their Lord and Savior, even though they could have avoided that. There was no motivation for money or power. In fact, they were persecuted. You also had the conversion of Paul and James, and you had the early testimony of the church. So with this seismic event, and the other explanations don't really ring true, like they were just the two leading ones, or they either had a vision. We know it's a historical event. That's kind of ruled out. It's real. These things happened. Not necessarily the resurrection, but the fact that Jesus died, that happened. The fact that the disciples had a radical change of heart and purpose and believed they had seen the risen Christ happened. The conversion of Paul happened. The conversion of James happened. The early recording of these events happened, including Acts and the Gospels. So there's this strong evidence around the resurrection. So I'd say there are two sources of evidence. But then it's sort of like you've got to look for these other signs. So on a separate note, so I put that in one category, because they're kind of historical events that happened. Then I have another category, and this is where I came to Christianity a little bit before. I'm just convinced in my own life experience. These were people I've directly known. But the average Christian is just a better person than the average non-Christian. This is tricky territory, because I'm talking averages. We're all flawed. We're all sinners. Some incredible people I've met are not Christians. You can actually be on this earth and have so much beauty and do so much good without being a Christian. But just when I average it out, Christians are just better people. Just in my own personal experience, let's say I've known 300 people who were really well, like legitimately well in my life. Because I'm in Australia and there aren't that many, I've probably known 30 Christians really well. Just my sense is that they're better people. I also have this overriding sense that just Christianity is good for society. I haven't dug deep into this, about how our society was actually built on Judeo-Christian values and really the West, like England, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe. So the countries that were built on higher Christian values just did so much better and had way more freedom, liberty. We won the wars. We've kind of had this revisionist, black armband view of history, but really we won both morally. We weren't perfect by any stretch, but morally and also just politically and militarily, we won. Again, it's confusing because Europe went to war with itself. You had Christian-on-Christian violence and whatever. But there's something about Christianity being a force of good for society. So I put that as a separate category, those two points, that Christians are better people on average. The other one is the taxi driver test. We look at the wars in the 20th century. They were all secular wars. They were for ideologies that weren't Christianity. And I look at the taxi driver test, which is more religion in general versus secular, because I think the same applied to Islam and Hindu, but if you see the religious symbols on the taxi driver's dashboard, you know you're not going to get ripped off in the days before Uber and Grab. So anyway, but that's kind of second line of reasoning. Like if you were to observe Christians and just go, these guys are just douchebags. Like on average, they're not better than the average citizen, then this whole thing wouldn't work. That's my problem with workers. You just look at the people who believe that stuff, and they're just not good people on average. Like that one, again, I couldn't prove that, and everybody has their own life experience, but that's 100% been my experience. Okay, so that would be a second sort of broad category. It's hard to sort of group these, because I don't know. The next point is that it just seems to help people. Like however it was designed, it seems to be very, very helpful in giving people purpose and liberation and offering them salvation and hope. It kind of works. That was the observation I've made before in my life, where I'm like, I wish I could be Christian, but I just can't bring myself to believe. I look at what they have and go, that's looking really good. So that's that point, that it actually seems to work and be useful, which would be some evidence for it. The success of Christianity. This one's tempered a little bit, because obviously Islam has made perhaps slightly bigger now and growing quicker. But you know, we're in the top two. And as I said, if you take into account the countries that kind of have freedoms and economic freedoms and seem to be a little bit more virtuous on the whole, the success of Christianity especially as a peaceful religion. What have I written here? I suppose the other thing is, when you compare it to the other things that are around, I think it's better than the other religions. Again, my own point is that Islam's got a lot of loose ends that haven't tied it together for me. And I have a bit of a soft spot for Islam, in the sense that probably on average, the average Islamic person is probably a better person than a secular person. They still have the courage, they live by and believe in God. But just, you know, Mohammed raping a nine-year-old girl and the fact that they think Jesus never died and the historical fact that he did. They're meant to build on Christianity, but there are things in their Koran that are just factually inaccurate about the Bible. There's way less historical evidence and build-up. It's just kind of one man's revelation versus the Bible, which is just told over hundreds if not thousands of years. There are so many different authors and different times culminating in the historical events of the resurrection. It's just a lot flimsier. Even how the text came about, where someone after Mohammed pretty much edited the thing, came up with the final version and then destroyed everything else. There's a lot in Islam and nothing else other than Islam is really a competitor. Judah isn't so small. They don't really ask the new people to join them. The other religions aren't really religions. They're more sort of ideologies or mythologies. They don't have that same theme. So that would be another evidence, the fact that it really does sort of stand apart. It's probably linked into the thing that it helps people. Maybe we circle back to the idea that it's helpful. If the first category included the resurrection and the creation, the second category was that if we just observe the world, Christian people tend to be good people. Christian societies tend to be good societies. That would kind of be point two, sort of macro view. Then point three is sort of this macro view that I mentioned before. It seems to be helpful to people. I would add on to that that it offers people hope and salvation in a way that's unique. It's not just based on good deeds. It's based on relationship. So you can enter into it straight away and be liberated, which is kind of genius. The fourth category, and maybe with the good people and good society, you could add the fact that the macro view is that Christianity won, the point I made before, like the success of it, that it grew to be so powerful. Then the fourth area is just the comparison. Like when I compare it to other religions, and definitely when I compare it to secular societies, because what basically happens with non-religious societies is they just get another religion. So sometimes the religion is just money and capitalism. Sometimes it's hedonism. Sometimes it's like wokeism. It's always the left-wing stuff. It started with Marxism, but when it became so obvious that that was just dumb, they moved on to like environmentalism and wokeism and just all these left-wing causes that always have some model of the oppressor and the oppressed, which in theory is good, but without the structure and the grounding of the more deeper wisdom of the Bible, that's just becoming perverted and evil in and of itself. So in the absence of Christianity, I haven't seen, you get individuals, like I look at Rick and Carl, they come up with their own thing that probably has a lot to it, but at a systemic level, some other religion will come and fill the void. That's kind of the fourth category of this, is the different points under what else. It's almost like a little bit of a Winston Churchill's quote about democracy. Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time, or Christianity is the worst religion or ideology except for all those other religions and ideologies that have been tried from time to time. Then a fifth category, when I put sort of two sub-points under this, is just the depth, just the historical weight and power of the Bible. There's never been a deeper, more intense, more meaningful, more thoughtful text written over such a long historical period of time through so many authors. It's just there's something there. It's so profound. Then the second part of that is just the genius of Jesus, and just the genius of the story of the resurrection, extending the sun down and dies on the cross for our sins. It's just so strange and so profound and so weird. It's just genius. It's just so good. So I feel like that's a category. The depth and historical strength and meaning and just power and intensity and diversity of the Bible culminating in the genius of Jesus Christ and the genius of God in sending his son down to die and be resurrected and all of what that means. Then the final category of evidence is just, I guess, experiential. This is when people have an experience of God and they feel his love, they feel his spirit, they feel something that can't be explained. People's own experience is itself evidence. So I feel like the evidence, I think I've clumsily got together about six categories. So I put the first one as the combination of creation culminating in the resurrection, the historical event of the resurrection. When you group that together with creation, that's extraordinarily strong evidence. The second thing is we look at what Christianity does both to people and to society. So we take almost like a macro view and then we look at the success of it over the years, how it's grown, firstly, and then how the societies that had it seem to have done quite well and prospered. So that would be the sort of macro view, that sort of broad point number two. Then there's the micro point of view where it actually seems to help people, seems to give people purpose, liberates them. It offers hope and salvation. Then the fourth thing is that when you ... sorry, that is ... yeah, that's the third thing. The fourth thing, sorry, is the micro. The third thing was ... no, the second thing was the macro, the macro of good people. The fourth thing was the macro that it offers people something. No, that was ... the second thing was the macro. The third thing was the micro. The fourth thing is when you compare it to anything else, which is point number four, when you compare it to other religions or you compare it to just secular society, it compares really well. It's like the best ideology. The fifth thing is just the historical weight and significance and profoundness and depth and complexity and so many authors and so much time of the Bible, culminating in the genius of Jesus' life and the genius of his death and resurrection. These things just seem to be just too profound, like nobody could just come up with them. They're just too good. They're too brilliant. They're too godly. And then the sixth thing is people's personal experiences. So, when you add all those things together, you add creation and the resurrection. You add the fact that Christians are good people and make society better and has been successful. That's number two. You add that it seems to generally help people, number three, which is number three. You add that it compares favourably to other religions and to non-religions. Number four, the depth and complexity and intensity of the Bible, including the genius of Jesus and the resurrection. And then six, people's personal experiences. That's a mountain of evidence. That's so much evidence to just step forward into. So, that's my thesis. The thesis of the evidence of Christianity.