Hello, and welcome to the Faithbrook Church Messages podcast. Whether you're exploring faith, new to faith, or actively following Jesus, we're so glad you're tuning in, and we hope that these weekly messages will encourage, challenge, and inspire you. Life is not meant to be done alone, and our hope is that these messages will lead you into a new and thriving life in Christ. Now let's listen to this message from our lead pastor, Jim Comfort. Well, a couple years ago, there was a teenage daughter who was scrolling on her social media, and she saw our kickoff invite. And she said, man, that looks pretty fun. I don't know about this church. But she asked her parents, hey, can we go to this church near Dayton, Faithbrook? Seems like they have something going on. Well, her mom says, yeah, I'm in. Her dad's like, eh, I don't know, church, all that kind of stuff. I'm not sure, but I'll do it for you. And so he came, and he reluctantly sat on the back, and he was a good sport.
And they had such a great time and felt the warmth of the people, the goodness of God, that they wanted to come back. Well, here he came back again. I remember meeting him for the first time. He'd sit back there and this is kind of how he'd be sitting, like this, right? Nice to meet you, right? And that body language is telling me kind of where he was in his theology and his faith story. They just say, I got some reservations. I got some barriers. Be careful, pastor, right? I'm like, that's fine, right? Everyone's on a journey. And so he kept coming back because his family kept coming back and God kept working on him. And pretty soon his arms came down.
And he started engaging, and he started rethinking things. And before he knew it, he asked for a cup of coffee. He had some questions. He was one of those deep thinkers, educated man, accomplished man. But all this religious stuff, that's for maybe weak-minded people, and I'm not sure. So we had some coffee, and he had some legitimate situations. He had some tough questions like, hey.
If it's true in the Bible, you know, Jesus is the only way, heaven or hell. What about Native Americans? Jesus, they never heard about the gospel. They never heard Jesus. Hey, preacher, are they going to heaven or are they going to hell? Oh, that's a pretty tough question. Okay, all right. And we navigated some of those questions and they also got more personal. His wall started coming down. He says, you know, I really struggle with just believing in your God. I was raised kind of in a religious home, but the truth of the matter is what my parents would be like on Sunday, but back home, it was not good. The way my father treated me really has had some baggage. I have some...
adult baggage going on. The priest and the pastors kept telling me how good a God and he's able. And yeah, when my mom comes down with the disease, she passes. I don't know why this good God did not heal her. And so I'm really struggling to trust in this Jesus intellectually and spiritually. Well, do you know anybody like that? Maybe you've got a coworker, you've got a family member, even yourself. You might be like, hmm, I got some big questions. I'm not really sure. You might be watching us today and we want you to welcome into this new series really propelled by the Easter story of restoring our faith, rebuilding our faith. So many people.
have kind of backed away from their adolescent faith, maybe how they were raised, especially in the last 10 years. Millions of people who claim to be Christians are like, I don't know, that pandemic really kind of got people out of the habit. There's a lot of political, social tensions that people just kind of backed off, and they're not sure if they just want to engage in this Christianity anymore, especially smart people, educated people. Does Christianity measure up logically, scientifically with the thinking in my mind? So that's where we're going. So glad that you are worshiping us today. And we're going to be looking the next couple of weeks on some of these big, hard questions. Today, we're going to confront the question, is Christianity compatible with intellectual thinking? Is it compatible? Many people are not sure. Does the science line up? Can I get my head around this? Is it coherent? A lot of times they look at the culture and they're looking with the Bible. They don't match. And there's a fallout. There's a barrier. There are some legitimate, hard questions.
Some people are critical. It's just this whole God. I can't see God. I can't touch God. Does God even exist? Good question. What about your Bible? Everyone claims that they have a text. They have a sacred parchment that they believe is the one way. What about other religions? There's many religions and they have some commonalities. Why is yours so exclusive? Why does your good God allow suffering to good people? I don't understand. They're fair. These are concerning questions. They're intellectual questions. They're also emotional questions. So today we're going to start asking that question. Is faith compatible?
with intellectual thinking. Well, God loves the intellect. In fact, God loves the intellect in our mental capacity that he has given us and created us with a brain. God gave us intellect. He knows that he gave us physical bodies. He gave us the ability to love and have emotions and have us relationally and even spiritually. We were created in his image. We have a soul, but he's given us this intellect. Intellect means to have the ability to capture knowledge, the ability to reason. If you are an intellectual person, you're a person given to the study or reflection or reason that you have some speculation.
So when it comes to this reason and critical thinking, please don't leave your brain at the door and come into Christianity. God wants you to use your brain. In fact, he has given you a brain. He doesn't want us to just give up intellectually when we come to faith. How do I know this? Well, let's take, for instance, one of the greatest commandments. When Jesus was asked, hey, we got a lot of laws, we got a lot of commandments, a lot of things that we need to do. What is the greatest? He said, well, love your God with all your heart, soul, and with your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. We notice that he says, I want you to love me. I want you to love God with your heart. This is your emotions. I want you to love me with your soul. This is where your spirit is. This is the very core, your essence of who you are, and also with your brain, your mind.
The Greek word for your mind is DNAO. And this DNAO means to think, to have some understanding. And so he wants us to love him with our DNAO or even our brain because he's created with this intellect. And, you know, if we don't use the intellect, it's terrible. Someone said the mind is a terrible thing to waste. And Christianity doesn't want us to waste our brain and leave it at the door. And just because you trust Jesus spiritually and faith doesn't mean that you leave your intellect behind. It doesn't mean that you can't be a critical thinker or use your intellect.
He's given us the ability to wrestle with things like science, psychology, psychological things, logic, reason, et cetera. In fact, God is not glorified by stupidity. If you are a Christ follower and you have no reasoning, you have no intellect, that doesn't glorify him because you're not using what I've given you. And it's okay to wrestle with tough questions. It's okay not to have all the answers. I don't have every answer. Not everything is buttoned down. But this is what I know is that doubts are a pathway to faith. Doubts really propel us to do some research. You find people in the Bible.
followers, non-followers that had doubts and questions themselves. You take, for instance, the resurrection story. Jesus is coming back from the dead. The ladies come back to the apostles. The angel says he's risen. The tomb is empty and intellectually, scientifically, that shouldn't happen. It doesn't happen. What are you talking about? Here comes Jesus. He just appears to these apostles and the other people.
They're like, was this real? Are you a ghost? Am I seeing things? There's Thomas. He's known for doubting Thomas. He doesn't believe it. He confronts Jesus. I'm an intellectual. I'm not sure. Are you a ghost? Jesus says, come here, doubting Thomas. I understand. I receive your doubts. I want you to touch my hands. I want you to see my feet.
It's real. Physically, it's real. Give me some fish. I'm going to eat in front of you guys. Know that it's just not some fairy tale, but I'm a real human. I've risen from the dead. But he doubted. You take, for instance, King David. He had a lot of doubts. You look in the Psalms. He's crying out to God. Why have you forsaken me? Why are you allowing my enemies? If you're such a good God, I don't understand this. Let's go to Job. Job's another man. He's got a lot of questions. He's got a lot of doubts. I am suffering. I was the righteous man. I'm the good guy. I'm hurting. I don't understand. Even the mother of Jesus, Mary.
The angel comes to her and says, hey, you're going to be with child. It's going to be a miracle. And intellectually, she's like, I need some understanding. How is this going to be? Okay, logically, scientifically, this doesn't happen. So being a Christian doesn't mean that you leave your brain at the door. And doubts are a pathway and questions to build our faith. And God wants to answer your questions. God receives your doubts. God receives your understanding.
And we're going to find out that intellect and faith are commendable and complementary to each other rather than contradictory. They complement each other. And Christianity is compatible with intellect and even science. Now, secondly, I would offer you this. God wants us to use our intellect, okay? The brains that he has given us. It's okay to research and to look. Now, sometimes in religious traditions, the clergy doesn't want you to research and be skeptical. They're just like, hey, you just need to go along. You just need to do what I tell you. Sometimes we have parents that's like, don't ask questions. Do what they tell you. Just this is the way it's supposed to be and leave your brain at the door and don't engage it. That's not right. We see a lot of cults do that.
Part of the cult is just like, don't try to think what's going on here and reason with it. You just need to be allegiant to this thinking and go along. No, that's not how God wants you. He wants us to use our intellect. Sometimes we Christians can not use our intellect. We can be kind of weak-minded and non-intellectual sometimes. Sometimes Christians would say, you know, God said it, I believe it, and that just settles it, all right? And so as for the person with a critical mind, they're like, man, that's just like a cop-out.
I don't know if I can back it up, but God said, I'm just going to believe it. Just leave it by faith. And a lot of smart people, educated people is like, wow, that's a turnoff. I don't want to know if I want to follow this. Now, last week was interesting. When Jesus shows up and these people's faith has been crumbled, it's crashed. They're not believing too much anymore. Jesus starts appearing. He's risen from the dead. Their faith starts being restored, rebooted, restarted. And here he comes into that setting. Well, one of the guys in there was Peter. Peter's the guy that denied Christ. And we see in that account in the New Testament, he didn't say anything. Thomas said some things from other people, but he was guilty. He's like, whoa.
And he's also like, ah, I don't know. Now, before that, when the lady showed up and said he's risen, what did Peter do? Peter ran to the tomb because intellectually, he's like, I don't know if that's true. I need to have some evidence. And he put the work in physically and intellectually to see if it's true. This is what God is asking us to do, to use our intellect. Now, the apostle Paul, he also endorses this idea. In fact, we see this in Philippians chapter one. He writes to the church of Philippi and says, I pray that your love will overflow more and more and that you will keep on growing in what? Knowledge and understanding.
Now, the word knowledge here is to have the precise, correct understanding. The word understanding means to have judgment. It's cognitive discernment. I want you to grow in your cognitive understanding and discernment, for I want you to understand what really matters, he says, so that you may live a pure and blameless life until the day of Christ Jesus returns. He knows that they are compatible. They're complementary to each other, not contradictory. The more they know cognitively, intellectually, the more they have some confidence on what they believe, and it's going to spill over into their faith.
and to their belief systems, and even to their lifestyle and how they live intellectually, I mean, integrity, honestly, purely, wholly in the face of Christ. So we find out that Christianity is compatible with the intellect. They complement each other. Now, 170 years ago or more in America, the clergy and church denominations understood this, that we need to engage the intellect. And you might not know this, some of you might know this, especially if you're an American historian, that it was the Christian denominations that were a catalyst for higher education, especially the universities. It wasn't the states that put the universities out there. It was these churches. Now, America started from the East Coast and went West 200 years ago, but it was the Puritans that really said, man, we need to have smart people, especially these Christian people. There's the one that really founded and started the University of Harvard, the Congregational.
denomination started to Yale. The Presbyterians, they started Princeton. The Baptist started Brown University and on and on and on. They understood that we don't want clergy that are stupid. We don't want followers that are stupid. I have to understand that coming from Europe, especially in the Roman Catholic tradition, it was only the priests that were educated and they were preaching in Latin.
And the people were like, I don't have a Bible in front of me. I just have to take the guy's word and just show up, do whatever. But the Protestants said, we want you to have the Bible in your hand. And we want you to be reading along with that clergy guy up there and make him accountable. He's telling the lie. He's telling the truth to the lineup. And people and the pastors need to be educated. So he started these universities to educate foremost clergy. In fact, this degree of divinity, master of divinity, seminaries cropped up. And 180 years ago, 170 years ago, the clergy were the smartest people in town. It wasn't the lawyers and the doctors and the professors. It was the clergy.
The discipline even today to get a master's in divinity is one of the highest levels, the most class hours that you have to go through. Theology is the study of God. He's not glorified by stupid pastors, stupid clergy, and even stupid followers, okay? He wants us to be smart. And so they raised up these universities in America. Now today, you're like, I don't know. But there's a lot of Christian private universities. In fact, the Catholics said, hey, we need to get in the game too. And then we need to start building universities. And today there's about 240 Catholic universities.
There's a lot of them in Minnesota, I noticed. There's Lutheran universities. We even, our denomination has universities out there. But Methodism also got into game. When John Wesleyan's brother came to America, they just started spreading a lot of Methodist churches, and they started universities. They have 100 universities in America today that have roots back to Methodism. In fact, I found this out this last winter. My son had a basketball tournament in Hamlin University. Anybody know where that's it? That's not about it. Stay fair.
I've never been there before. I didn't know anything about Hamlin University, right? And we show up and they said, we go into this gym and this gym is old and kind of historic. And I think it was like built in 1925. It reminds you of the University of Minnesota's barn. It kind of had that architecture. And I was like, man, this thing's an old building. And you go to the trophy cases and there's some really old equipment and stuff like that and some plaques going way back there. So we're doing some research and we find out that Hamlin University was one of the first universities in the state of Minnesota. And right next to it was this little bit of University of Minnesota. In fact, the Hamlin University gave out the first.
a higher education diploma in the state of Minnesota before the U of Minnesota ever did. The churches were funding these universities more than the small tax base of just the public people in the state. So I'm kind of wandering around this Hamlin University. I kind of like history and there's these statues. And sure enough, there is these Methodist preachers and lay people who are big time donors to the roots of Hamlin University. Oh, this is a Methodist university. This corresponds to what God was doing in America 107 years ago, that Christians were the catalyst.
to thinking and educating the people because they understood that the intellect and faith complement each other, don't contradict each other. So if this is true, how do we use our brains? How do we use our intellect? Well, John Wesley, founder of Methodism. he kind of came up with a filter or a matrix on how to find truth, especially biblically, theologically, and even socially. And he created what is called the John Wesley's quadrilateral. And here's a little graph of the quadrilateral right here. And if we're trying to find out what is true, everyone has an opinion. This church says this, this preacher, my neighbor says this, this professor says this. He says, you got to start with these four elements. And then the biggest one is going to be the Bible, the scriptures of God. This is the biggest, most foundational. Now, if you start with the Bible, we call that having a biblical worldview. We're asking, well, how did the world start? How should we treat each other?
Where are the norms of human sexuality? And if you start with the Bible, then you have a biblical worldview. Now, other people, your neighbor or someone else, we don't filter things through the Bible. We have a secular worldview. We just do whatever the culture is and whatever feels right. Some people have a humanistic worldview. That means what starts with the heart, the humans can figure it out. But Christians would say, no, we're going to start with the Bible. What does the Bible say? We have to look at the whole counsel of God, the whole counsel of God in the Bible to find out what is truth. We're going to throw in some tradition. Now, tradition doesn't mean, you know,
liturgy and things like that. Tradition is what are the great intellectuals thought through the years? What is the traditional mindset coming with theology, social norms, et cetera? So they're going to just not look at their own days or their own opinion, but they're also going to look at other writers, other thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas and Luther and Calvin and Wesley and even contemporaries like Tim Keller. What are they writing when it comes to finding what is the truth? Now, he also says we cannot
Dismiss experience. Now, this is tricky for intellects, okay? Experience. Do you mean the Holy Spirit, right? When I'm feeling, to some degree, yes. Because God is spirit, and God does speak, and he still moves. And sometimes God gives us revelations. God gives us circumstances and experience that we have to put in the equation to find what is true. And so that's a little bit tough. And then we find reason. Okay, reason is critical thinking. Is there some evidence, okay? Is there some far-off thinking?
Right? It's like, what? Can you bring some reason? Can you bring some evidence? And maybe even some science in there. And the goal is to find that sweet spot in the middle.
So to find the truth, find the norms, what is right, we're gonna learn from other people and not just what our thinking is or what our neighbor's thinking is. We're gonna look at some of our experiences, what we've experienced. We're gonna look at some reasons and logic, but most important, we're gonna look at the word of God to find that truth. And before you know it, we're not just making decisions on blind faith. Oh, well, I feel this or the pastor said this. No, we are using our intellect to examine and have some reason and test to find where we need to go and what is truth. See, Christianity is compatible with intellectual thinking.
Intellect and faith are commendable, complementary, not contradictory. And faith starts making sense once we start using our intellect. Before we know it, we have a little bit of confidence. We have a little bit of satisfaction. That doesn't mean that we don't have any more curiosity. That doesn't mean we don't have any more doubts. Remember, doubts are a pathway to faith. And here's what I want to tell you, that God is not afraid of your questions. Well, God is going to get mad at me if I'm upset with him, or I don't know. He wants to receive our doubts. You look at the book of Psalms. You look at the New Testament account with doubting Thomas, et cetera.
It's a part of our faith that have some questions, that use our intellect, maybe even have some doubts. You know, that gentleman I was talking about that started coming to faith a couple years ago, we were having these conversations and he had some of these big brain questions and they were fair. A lot of people have those questions. I need to back up before I get to that guy. So let me back up before I talk to this guy. My brain's not working very good. Okay, well.
So one thing is like, well, Comfort, you're so big into that scripture right there. How do we know your scripture is true? That's a good question. Because a Muslim says they got the Koran, right? We got the Mormons, they got the Book of Mormon. They all have had Revelation too. Well, we see that even 2000 years ago, the Christian leaders addressed this. For instance, Peter wrote to his people, this right here, above all, you must understand that no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet's own interpretation. This is what people claim against Christians. It's just man-made. But prophets, though human,
spoke from God as they were being carried along by the Holy Spirit. Carried along by the Holy Spirit. Well, didn't Joseph Smith, doesn't he claim that, that he had a revelation? And that's where he got the Book of Mormon, right? Well, that's definitely what Mohammed claimed. 500 years after Christ, he's by himself and he got this miracle and God dispelled this real truth and Quran, he got inspired. And what's going on here, right?
Well, what you don't know is that a lot of times it wasn't just one man like Muhammad. It was 40 different people who were inspired by God over 1,200 years. And we use a little acronym called MAPS to help us understand intellectually the evidence of the scriptures, that they are viable, they are trustworthy. It's just not my opinion. I didn't get a revelation. It's just one person to get a revelation 2,000 years ago or longer. It was 40 different people who got a revelation. We call this manuscripts, the evidence of the viability of the Bible through manuscripts.
So these 40 different authors in the Bible, they spoke three different languages. They didn't know each other. They lived on three different continents. And they wrote all these parchments. we have, praise God, we have the evidence in our hand of these old ancient manuscripts. These pieces of paintings are parchments. They're hard to find. They're written on scrolls, not like a piece of paper we have today. But we collected all these and they were copied through the years all the way to today. So critical minded people is like, people took advantage of that for their own interpretations of the scriptures. They're not holy. They're man-made because every time you copied it, someone's going to say, no, I don't believe in that. I'll just rewrite that, right? Well, we found all these copies. In fact,
They found 24,000 of these manuscripts, the originals, on top of the copies. And so when they stacked them all up, a copy that was written 1,000 years from the original, they're like, okay, there had to be some changes. And when they looked at it, they're like, there's hardly any changes. They're 99% accurate to the original copy. They did not take privileges or manipulate the original text. And there's so many of these, and they're so precious and old. For instance, if you look for other ancient documents to compare, there's only like 1,500 of the Homer of Iliad.
documents in the Roman Empire that was written at the same time. 1,500 compared to 24,000 of the Bible. There's no other parchments that old that scientists dig up that can look at it. That's how old the Bible is. And we got that many originals and copies to have some confidence that the manuscripts, the writers, they say that 99%, there were some grammatical differences in the copies that all pointed to salvation through Christ Jesus. Okay, so what else can we have? Well, we look at archaeology. So we got these scientists, they're digging over there in the Holy Land.
Egypt, Middle East, et cetera. Every time they're digging, they're digging up the Bible. They're digging up the Old Testament. They're digging up the New Testament that corresponds with the Bible. It's like, this is real evidence. They're finding coins and finding plates and finding bricks and finding fortresses and palaces and the roads. They're like, oh yeah, this was in the Bible. It verifies it. The next thing we have are prophecies. So there's people in the Old Testament, they're predicting we have the way and we're gonna tell you, prove it by prophecies. Oh yeah, fortune teller. Yeah, sure, right? So all these guys, some of them didn't even know each other. They'd be inspired by the Holy Spirit.
They're writing these prophecies in the Old Testament about this messiahic figure that are coming. Theologians and scholars later have discovered like 200 of these messiahic prophecies. Here comes Jesus. Guess what? He starts fulfilling every one of these prophecies. For that to happen, right, to cover 200 or more messiahic prophecies is highly unusual. It would take a miracle. Yes, it was because God proved himself as the real authentic God by coming through. He was pierced. He was...
born in Bethlehem in the line of David. He did raise from the dead. That was all written in the Old Testament, 500, 1,000 years before Christ, and he pulled through and he fulfilled all those prophecies. Sometimes we got to look at statistics and scientists. So outside the Bible, you look at geographic, you look at history, you look at other non-biblical records, you'll find that they talk about the Bible. They talk about the Roman empire. They talk about what the apostle Paul was talking about. So all this apostle Paul stuff, it's like world history. It's verifiable. And it gives us this confidence instead of just blind faith, that it's real, that God can help us in an intellectual way, that it is compatible with faith and our intellect are compatible.
So like I was telling this, this man that came, he was struggling intellectually. He was struggling more spiritually than ever. And so we had a relationship together. And all these intellectual arguments and questions were really kind of a mask of the brokenness he had inside. The way he was raised, the way he was modeled, he struggled with God.
And to see him as a father, he struggled with. But he came to a point where he realized, man, my life has been wrecked. I've made poor choices. I don't have, I might be smart. I might be educated. I've been accomplished, but I've sabotaged my life. There's been some consequences and I need something. And I shared about the good news of Christ Jesus. And that God will take the faith that you have. And if you allow him to come into your life and forgive you and restart you, one of the questions was, man, will God forgive me?
Because I know what I've done. Is his grace deep enough? And I tried to share God's grace is deep enough. Give him a chance to restart your life, to rebuild your faith. We're not talking about the faith that you had as a child and the experience that you went through. It's a new, fresh faith in Christ Jesus. Would you like to pray right now? He said, yeah, I would like to pray. And he crossed that line of faith. And the best he could with his faith, he received God's forgiveness and was born new. He said yes to Jesus Christ and he started his adventure. He started his journey spiritually and intellectually to start understanding the tenets of Christianity. It's not always been easy, but he has shared that he has more clarity in his life. In fact, his life and his faith are being rebuilt.
God is doing things in his life. And he sends me texts once in a while. This is what I'm reading. This is what I'm watching on YouTube. This is a podcast. What do you think? A lot of it has to do with some of these intellectual arguments or answers going on. I'm like, great job. Welcome to the journey of growing and restarting our faith. Would you like to do that? If you have a deep mind and you need some answers, would you be willing to do some research like Peter did? Run to the tomb. Look for yourself. Don't just count on me. Just don't count on priests and pastors and clergy. You look for yourself. Here's the good news.
is that today, our digital mind, you don't have to go far. In fact, I have a lot of books, apologetic books. Apologetics in Christianity is really the art, not the art, but it's really the ability to defend critically, evidentially, the tenets of Christianity. So there's a lot of apologetics out here. I got three. I got a case full in my office. If you want to borrow it, have it. You can take it. Some books nowadays, they have podcasts, and you can listen to some of these authors talking about it. And then even greater than that, you got YouTube. Anybody, YouTubers, right? And these apologists are out there. Now this morning, I want you to take a step. If this interests you,
If you'd like to know more about Christianity and your faith intellectually, I would encourage you to take out your phone and I want you to take a picture of the slide right here. Because faith and intellect are complementary to each other, not just contradictory. So here's what I want to offer you. Now, you can, we sponsor a Right Now Media. If you go to our website, the next steps, scroll down, you get yourself an account for Right Now Media. It's like the Netflix of Christianity. All kinds of good stuff in there. Life groups use it a lot. You go to that search bar and you type in apologetics.
or I don't know, questions we ever have. And there's going to be a menu that comes out about these deep thinkers that can answer some of your questions. That's all free. You can go to a website, Stand the Reason, and cross-examine. They all have podcasts and YouTubes. Here's three people that I would encourage you to go on the YouTube and look at. In fact, Wesley Huff blew Joe Rogan's mind when Joe Rogan, he's kind of agnostic, right? And he don't want to just...
Christians, right? He's talking to the scholar, this Wesley Huff, and Wesley Huff just talked about the evidence of the manuscripts, and they're reliable, and they're real, and Joe Morgan, he was just, wow, blown away, and I think he started really starting to believe in Christianity because of the evidence out there through Wesley Huff. He's got stuff on YouTube. My favorite is this Cliff Connectly. He's an older gentleman, and he has a huge brain, and he's a kind man. He goes to universities, and he debates on the stump, and he's very polite, very kind, and he doesn't have a tense or anything like that, but people from Muslims to atheists, they're pitching these hard questions.
And he's walking around. Let me think about that for a second, right? And the way he answered is so respectful. It's so intellectual, right? And I'm just absorbing this stuff. And frankly, it's entertaining to me. I just like watching that guy because those questions come. I'm like, I have no idea what I would say, right? And Cliff thinks about it for a little bit. And boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's like, roger that, man. That's right on. I need to write that down, right? And it builds our faith. We get confident. So here's an example of this Frank Turt. Now, Frank is on a university.
He does this a lot, goes into an auditorium, and he gives a mic and fields all these questions. I think this question had to do with the origin of the earth. Is it evolution, like most people said? It can't be God. It can't be a deity. So Frank Stewart has a huge intellect. Listen to this, how he comes back to this critic intellectually to prove that there's a God who started the world. Either the universe is the uncaused first cause or something beyond the universe is the uncaused first cause.
The problem is that all the evidence points to the fact that the universe is not the uncaused first cause. And I didn't have time to go through that evidence tonight. That was part one. But I'll give it to you very briefly in an acronym, SURGE, S-U-R-G-E. S stands for the second law of thermodynamics, which says that the universe is running down. Well, if it's running down, somebody must have wound it up. We'd have no energy left right now if the universe was eternal. The U stands for the fact that the universe is expanding. Edwin Hubble detected that back in 1929 and shows that everything came from a single point.
a point actually of infinite density, the singularity, which is actually nothing. So the universe had a beginning. The R in surge stands for the radiation afterglow. That's the remnant heat discovered by Penzias and Wilson in 1965, which is literally the smoking gun to the Big Bang. There's heat, remnant heat from the Big Bang still out there, which shows that the universe had a beginning. The G in surge stands for the great galaxy seeds, which were very fine temperature variations in that radiation afterglow that allowed the galaxies to form in the early universe. And the E stands for Einstein's theory of general relativity, which shows that time, space, and matter are co-relative, that they came into existence together, that space, time, and matter literally had a beginning. Einstein knew this in 1916.
observational evidence began in 1919 when Eddington did his test on the eclipse, and then Hubble discovered the expanding universe in 1929, and then on to the radiation afterglow in the great galaxy seeds after that. So the evidence points to the fact that the universe is not the uncaused first cause. So there must be something beyond the universe that is, and that thing that's beyond the universe must be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. And if you're timeless, do you have a beginning? No. So God is not, he didn't have a beginning. He's the uncaused first cause. Look, Aristotle, Plato, they all knew this. They knew there had to be an unmoved mover. In fact, the Greeks never got their theology and philosophy together.
They knew that there had to be an unmoved mover, but they never put the two together and worship the unmoved mover. So you don't have to worship the unmoved mover. You don't have to. You can do whatever you want. That's why you have free will. God loves you enough to give you free will. You can love him or reject him. That's up to you. So if that intrigues you and you want more information, I encourage you right now to take out your phone or write these down and to go back on your leisure and to get your own evidence. Do your own.
Because God has given you intellect. He wants you to use that intellect. And together, your faith is going to grow intellectually and just evidentially to be able to be a Christ follower even better. And that spills over into our confidence, how we walk, how we interact. And we do have something to share with people, that we don't have to leave our brains at the door, that we're not going to just be totally faith, but there's going to be some evidence to back our Bible, our worldview, thanks to the intellect that God has given us. So why don't we stand and I'll pray us out.
Thanks for watching us today and worshiping. Stop by our New Hero booth or stick around for a little coffee and donuts. Next week, we're going to be looking at that question, why do I need religion? Or why do I need Christianity? If you need some prayer, stick around. Be glad to answer questions. Pray with you. Jesus, thanks for this beautiful day and these people watching and attending. We're all in process. We all have questions. We might even have doubts, God. But you receive our questions and doubts. Help us to grow in our faith, intellectually, spiritually, and we'll give you the praise in Jesus' name. Amen.
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