Faith and science p3:

Molecular biologist Michael Denton stated that even the tiniest of bacterial cells, weighing less than a trillionth of a gram, is “a veritable micro-miniaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up altogether of 100 thousand atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the non-living world.”

Many would say that micro-evolution cannot bear the weight that is often put on it. Recent work on the E coli bacterium back this up. In this research no real innovation changes were observed through 25,000 generations of E. coli bacteria. Biochemist Micheal Behe pointed out that now more than 30,000 generations of E. coli have been studied, equivalent to about 1 million human years, and the net result is that evolution has produced in his words, “Mostly devolution. Although some marginal details of some systems have changed during that thirty thousand generations, the bacterium has repeated thrown away chunks of its genetic patrimony, including the ability to make some of the building blocks of RNA. Apparently throwing away sophisticated but costly molecular machinery saves the bacterium energy. Nothing of remotely similar elegance has been built. The lesson of E. coli is that it’s easier for evolution to break things than to make things.”

Since all species are in transition due to natural selection, the very term “transitional fossil” is essentially a misconception. But this also is a misconception as there is not even one complete transitional fossil record.

—

The biological evolutionary facts that fall outside the margins of Darwin’s theory include, “the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of virus; archaea and bacteria, and the principle lineages within in each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla.” ~ Eugene Koonin – National Center for Biotechnology
That is, pretty much everything.
Koonin goes on to say, “In each of these pivotal nexuses in life’s history, the principle ‘types’ seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate ‘grades’ or intermediate forms between different types are detectable.”

“The general foundations for the evolution of ‘higher’ from ‘lower’ organisms seems so far to have largely eluded analysis.” ~ Emile Zuckerkandl – biologist (considered one of the founders of the field of molecular evolution)
The phrase eluded analysis conveys a current of intellectual optimism at odds with the facts. Something that has so far eluded analysis can hardly be assigned to a force that has so far eluded demonstration.

“The extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of palaeontology.” ~ Professor Stephen Jay Gould (atheist)

“We palaeontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change] knowing all the while it does not.” ~ Niles Eldridge ~ American Museum of Natural History

“I will lay it on the line – there is not one such fossil [a fossil which is ancestral or transitional] for which one could make a watertight argument.” ~ Colin Patterson, FRS

“Evolution is accepted by zoologists, not because it is observed to occur or… can be proved by logically coherent evidence to be true, but because the only alternative, special creation, is clearly incredible.” ~ Professor D.M.S Watson

Robert Wesson, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California put it this way, “Large evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has ever been observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in progress. There is no good fossil record of any.” By contrast, micro-evolutionary variations due to mutation and natural selection have been and are observed.

A detailed and continuous record of transition between species is missing. Robert Carroll observed quite correctly that “most of the fossil record does not support a strictly gradualistic account” of evolution. But a “ strictly gradualistic” account is precisely what Darwin’s theory demands: It is the heart and soul of the theory.

*****

“There is a fundamental difference between religion, which is based on authority, [and] science, which is based on observation and reason.” ~ Physicist Steven Hawking
While Mr Hawking’s statement on religion is wrong, it is interesting to state that science is based on observation when evolution (macro) has never been observed.

—

To use the anthropic principle against the inference of design is a false logic in two ways. All the anthropic principle does is to tell us that for life to exist, certain necessary conditions must be fulfilled. But what it does not tell us is why those necessary conditions are fulfilled, nor how, granted they are fulfilled, life arose. This would be to make an elementary mistake of thinking that necessary conditions are sufficient. But they are not; in order to get a first class degree at a university it is necessary to first get into the university; but, as many students know, it is certainly not sufficient. The anthropic principle far from giving an explanation of the origin of life, is an observation that gives rise to the need for such an explanation.

Faith and science p2:

The present favored candidate for a GUT is superstring theory, but accepting its ideas depends upon believing that theorists, on the basis of mathematical considerations alone, can second-guess the character of nature at a level of detail more than ten thousand million million times smaller than anything of which we have direct empirical evidence.
One may well feel that this act of faith by the physicists is a reflection of a trust, doubtless often unconsciously entertained, in the consistency of the one God whose will is the origin of the order of the created universe.

“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious, and there is no rational explanation for it… it is an article of faith.” ~ Eugene Wigner, Nobel Laureate in Physics

“The belief that there are indeed dependable regularities [the sun will rise each day] of nature – is an act of faith, but one which is indispensable to the progress of science.” ~ Theoretical physicist Paul Davies

“Science does not explain the mathematical intelligibility of the physical world, for it is part of science’s founding faith that this is so.” ~ John Polkinghorn, Professor of Quantum Physics at Cambridge

“Physics is powerless to explain its faith in the mathematical intelligibility of the universe for the simple reason that you’ve got to believe in the intelligibility of the universe before you can do any physics at all.” ~ John Polkinghorn, Professor of Quantum Physics at Cambridge

And Einstein said that he could not image a physicist who did not posses “such faith”.

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…” ~ Harvard geneticist Richard Lewontin

—

“It seems as though someone has fine-tuned nature’s numbers to make the universe… The impression of design is overwhelming.” ~ Theoretical physicist Paul Davies

“Biology, is the study of complicated things which give the impression of having been designed for a purpose.” ~ Professor Richard Dawkins (atheist)

“Living objects… look designed, they look overwhelmingly as though they’re designed.” ~ Professor Richard Dawkins (atheist)

“We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully “designed” to have come into existence by chance.” ~ Professor Richard Dawkins (atheist)

—

“In China we can criticize Darwin, but not the government; in America you can criticize the government but not Darwin.” Palaeontologist Jun-Yuan Chen

—

Atheists use evolution to extrapolate macro changes from micro changes. Yet in meaning and purpose they reverse the idea and postulate that there are only micro meanings with no meta-narrative.

Advancements of science done on atheistic presuppositions will lead to the same results as advancements of science done on theistic presuppositions.

*****

What the blunder of Galileo was to the church, the Piltdown man was to evolution.

—

{Biology & evolution}

There is no genetic mutation or an evolutionary process which can be seen to increase the information in the genome.

There is nothing in any precise concept of the gene that allows a set of biochemicals to create anything at all. If no precise concept of the gene is at issue, the idea that we are created by our genes, body and mind, represents a far less plausible thesis then the correlative doctrine that we are created by our Maker, body and mind.

Natural selection is not creative. It is a “weeding out process” that leaves the stronger progeny. The stronger progeny must already be there; it is not produced by natural selection. Selection is made from already existing entities. It has no innovative capacity; it eliminates or maintains what exists. And natural selection does not cause a mutation. That occurs by chance.

Biological evolution (whatever its extent) requires a fine-tuned universe in which to occur so that no arguments about the nature or status of evolution can undermine the arguments for an intelligent designer.

—

The assertion that natural selection has been demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt must be judged for what it is: it is the ecclesiastical bull of a most peculiar church, a cousin in kind to an ecclesiastical bluff.

Geneticist Michael Denton states that molecular biology has shown that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical. The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells. In terms of their basic biochemical design, therefore, no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.
This view is supported by Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod, whom Denton cites. “We have no idea what the structure of a primitive cell might have been. The simplest living system known to us, the bacterial cell…in its overall chemical plan is the same as that of all other living beings. It employs the same genetic code and the same mechanism of translation as do, for example, human cells. Thus the simplest cells available to us for study have nothing “primitive” about them…No vestiges of truly primitive structures are discernible.
Robert Wesson, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institute in Stanford, California put it this way, “Large evolutionary innovations are not well understood. None has ever been observed, and we have no idea whether any may be in progress. There is no good fossil record of any.” By contrast, micro-evolutionary variations due to mutation and natural selection have been and are observed.

Faith and science p1:

First one has to know that atheism in its classical sense in self-defeating. One cannot affirm a negative in the absolute. It is akin to saying that I have infinite knowledge in order to say that there is no one with infinite knowledge. Therefore God’s non-existence in unprovable thus the burden of proof that God does not exist rests with the atheists and not the theists. That being said there is innumerable evidence for the existence of God.

If the only statements that are true are statements that can be verified empirically, then the principle of verification itself would fail the test because of it’s own premise, “only those statements that can be empirically verified have any meaning,” cannot be empirically verified.

Where is the evidence that religious faith is not based on evidence?

It is rather ironical that in the 16th century some people resisted advances in science because they seemed to threaten belief in God; whereas in the 20th century scientific ideas of a beginning have been resisted because they threatened to increase the plausibility of belief in God.

Philosophers of science during the 2nd half of the 20th century came to realize that the whole scientific enterprise is based on certain assumptions that cannot be proved scientifically, but are guaranteed by the Christian worldview: for example, the laws of logic, the orderly nature of the external world, the reliability of our cognitive faculties in knowing the world, the validity of inductive reasoning and the objectivity of the moral values used in science. Science could not even exist without these assumptions, and yet these assumptions cannot be proved scientifically. They are philosophical assumptions, which, interestingly, are part and parcel of a Christian worldview. Thus, theology is an ally to science in that it can furnish a conceptual framework in which science can exist. More than that, the Christian religion historically furnished the conceptual framework in which modern science was born and nurtured.

“It has to be admitted that of course science grew out of a religious tradition.” ~ Professor Richard Dawkins (atheist)

“Science, the system of belief founded securely on publicly shared reproducible knowledge, emerged from religion.” ~ Peter Atkins Professor of Chemistry at Oxford (atheist)

—

Nothing existed prior to the singularity, for it is the edge of physical space and time. It therefore represents the origin, not only of all matter and energy, but also of physical space and time themselves. Physicist John Barrow and Frank Tipler observed, “At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the universe originated in such a singularity, we would truly have a creation out of nothing.”

There can be no natural, physical cause of the Big Bang event, since, in Philosopher Quentin Smith’s words, “It belongs analytically to the concept of the cosmological singularity that it is not the effect of prior physical events. The definition of a singularity …entails that it is impossible to extend the space time manifold beyond the singularity….This rules out the idea that the singularity is an effect of some prior natural process.”

The history of 20th century cosmology has been the history of the repeated falsification of such non-standard theories and the corroboration of the big bang theory. It has been the overwhelming verdict of the scientific community that none of these alternative theories are superior to the big bang theory. Again and again models aimed at averting the prediction of the standard model of an absolute beginning of the universe have been shown to be either untenable or not to avert the beginning after all. For example, in some such theories, like the oscillating universe or the chaotic inflationary universe, while the universes posited do have a potentially infinite future, they turn out to have only a finite past. Vacuum fluctuation universe theories cannot explain why, if the vacuum was eternal, we do not observe an infinity old universe.

In regards to the “many worlds” hypothesis first we need to realize that it is no more scientific and no less metaphysical than a “cosmic designer” hypothesis. As quantum physicist John Polkinghorne stated, “People try to trick out a “many universe” account in sort of pseudo-scientific terms, but that is pseudo-science. It is a metaphysical guess that there might be many universes with different laws and circumstances.” But as a metaphysical hypothesis, that many worlds hypothesis is arguably inferior to the design hypothesis because the design hypothesis is simpler. According to Ockham’s Razor, we should not multiply causes beyond what is necessary to explain the effect. But it is simpler to postulate one cosmic designer to explain our universe that to postulate the infinitely bloated and contrived collection of universes required by the many worlds hypothesis. Therefore, the design hypothesis is to be preferred.

Second, there is no known way of generating a world ensemble. No one has been able to explain how or why such a varied collection of universes should exist. Moreover, the attempts that have been made require fine-tuning themselves. For example, although some cosmologists appeal to so-called inflationary theories of the universe to generate a world ensemble, the only consistent inflationary model is Linde’s chaotic inflationary theory, and it requires fine-tuning to start the inflation.

Alvin Plantinga of Notre Dame University noted, that if every possible universe exists then there must be a universe in which God exists, since his existence is logically possible. It then follows that, since God is omnipotent, He must exist in every universe and hence there is only one universe, this universe, of which He is the Creator and Upholder.

*****

noun: loyalty or allegiance to a cause or a person (“Keep the faith”)
noun: complete confidence in a person or plan etc (“He cherished the faith of a good woman”)
noun: a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny
noun: institution to express belief in a divine power

The word faith comes from the Latin fides (fee-days) from which we get fidelity. It’s basic meaning is belief, trust; that which produces belief evidence. Belief proceeding from reliance on testimony or authority. Thus the words faith, belief and trust mean essentially the same. Of course they are only justified if there is hard evidence to back it up.

There seems to be a great misunderstanding about faith. First, faith that is not based on evidence is called blind faith and the Bible never asks for blind faith. There are many many question and answer sessions in the Bible. Second, in order to have faith in someone or something it must first exist. To have faith in a loved one that does not exist would be strange indeed.

Naturalism is based on the faith that all phenomena can be explained naturalistically since it must of necessity use faith to postulate that it’s origin can be explained someday.

At the heart of science lies the conviction that the universe has an inherent order that is intelligible.

The irony of the atheistic position appears when we ask where our human faculty of reason comes from. It hold that our human cognitive faculties were produced by purely naturalistic mechanisms that were not concerned with truth but with survival. But if the thoughts in my mind are just the motions of atoms in my brain, a mechanism that has itself arisen by mindless unguided processes, why should I believe anything it tells me including the fact that it is made of atoms?

“Reducing thought to Neurophysiology spells an end to rationality and truth.” ~ Dr John Lennox MA PhD DPhil Dsc Mathematics Professor at Oxford

It’s a high price to pay for atheism.

Therefore, atheism gives no logical justification for the conviction common to all scientists (atheists included) that science can even be done. It undermines the very rationality that we need to construct an argument or understand an argument of any kind. However, theism does provide the necessary basis. The rational intelligibility of the universe points to a rational creator. And it was that conviction that was the powerful motor that drove the rise of modern science in the 16th and 17th centuries.

“Men became scientific because they expected law in nature. And they expected law in nature because they believed in a law giver.” ~ C.S. Lewis

Belief in God, far from hindering the great pioneers of science, was their deepest motivation.

Science did not put the universe in place. I hope you have noticed that. Nor does science explain how it came to be.
To think that as the reach of our theories and instruments increases, the greatness of God the creator is somehow diminished is to make a childish mistake of confusing law and mechanism on the one hand with agency on the other.

To say that we have to choose between God and science is like saying that we have to choose between the laws of internal combustion and Henry Ford. The existence of a mechanism is not itself an argument for the non-existence of an agent who designed the mechanism. As for an intelligent creator, a building does not emerge from the bricks nor the writing from the paper and ink without the injection of both energy and intelligent activity.

God is not a God of the gaps invented to fill a space in our knowledge. The evidence for God lies mainly in the things we do understand, not in the things we don’t. So when Newton discovered his wonderful laws of motion he didn’t say I know how it works I don’t need God. What he did do was to write the most brilliant treatise in the history of science dedicating it to the thinking person in the hope that they would come to believe in a rational creator. Which is very different than the flavor which is presented to us today.

“Christians are bad people”

So called religious wars and atrocities that go against the teachings of Jesus:
(These include the Crusades, Spanish inquisition and burning of witches)
2,000,000 (best estimate)

Wars and atrocities from just 2 atheist regimes:
(Stalin & Mao)
60,000,000 (recorded fact)

Wars and atrocities having nothing to do with religion:
(In just the 20th and 21st centuries since Darwinism was born)
318,685,000 (recorded fact)

I believe this statement by English Journalist, Steve Turner sums it up, sadly, all too well:

We believe that all religions are basically the same-
at least the one that we read was.
They all believe in love and goodness.
They only differ on matters of creation,
sin, heaven, hell, God, and salvation.

“If chance be the Father of all flesh, disaster is his rainbow in the sky, and when you hear
State of Emergency! Sniper Kills Ten! Troops on Rampage! Whites go Looting! Bomb Blasts School!
It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.”

Authority and authenticity of the Bible:

The Jewish historian Josephus as well as the secular Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius all bear record of the person of Jesus. The Talmud and the Koran both attest to the person of Jesus. Historian Gary Habermas, has detailed 39 ancient sources outside of the bible that provide further corroboration for more than 100 facts about Jesus life, teachings, death and resurrection.

The Bible is replete with evidence of the supernatural elements that were testable, and also of God’s pervading involvement with history past, present and future. In no other religion were the authors of the scriptures supernaturally confirmed with miracles. And no other religion than Christianity has a Savior that was foretold with unbelievable precision. Even the most liberal critics admit that the prophetic books were completed some 400 years before Christ, and the book of Daniel by about 167 B.C. The Old Testament contains scores of prophecies about the coming of the Messiah.

Professor Peter Stoner, along with 600 students, calculated the mathematical probability of just 8 New Testament prophecies being fulfilled in any one person at one chance in a hundred million billion. No other book (religious or otherwise) offers anything that can compare with these supernatural predictions.

Barton Payne’s Encyclopedia of Biblical Prophecy list 191 on them, while Oxford scholar Alfred Edersheim cites 400. Major predictions about the Messiah, all of which were fulfilled in Jesus, was that he would be born of a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), of the seed of Abraham (Gen 12:1-3; 22:18), of the tribe of Judah (Gen 49:10), of the house of David (II Sam 7:12-16), in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2); He would be heralded by the Lord’s messenger (Isaiah 40:3); He would cleanse the temple (Malachi 3:1); He would be “cut off” 483 years after the declaration to reconstruct Jerusalem in 444 B.C. (Daniel 9:24-27); He would be rejected (Psalm 118:22); He would have his hands and feet pierced (Psalm 22:16); He would be pierced in His side (Zechariah 12:10); He would rise from the dead (Psalm 16:10); He would ascend into Heaven (Psalm 68:18); and He would sit down at the right hand of God (Psalm 110:1).

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There are over 25,000 pieces of archeology supporting the bible including:
Biblical sites, cities, empires, artifacts, weapons, raw material and more on record which have been located and verified using the scriptures as a guide. In fact many biblical cites still exist today.

Archaeology has corroborated the essential reliability of the New Testament. Time after time, when incidental details of the New Testament can be checked out, they emerge as being accurate. For instance, John 5:1-15 describes how Jesus healed an invalid by the pool at Bethesda, which John describes as having 5 porticoes. And recently the pool was excavated and scientists discovered 5 porticoes or colonnaded porches just as John described.

Luke, who wrote one-quarter of the New Testament, has been found to be a scrupulously accurate historian, even in the smallest details. One archeologist carefully studied Luke’s references to 32 countries, 54 cities, and 9 islands, finding not a single error. “The general consensus of both liberal and conservative scholars is that Luke is very accurate as an historian,” said archeologist John McRay. The authorship of Matthew and Mark was affirmed by Papias in 125 A.D. Then Irenaeus confirmed this in 180 A.D.

The New Testament also features letters by the apostle Paul that are dated as early as A.D. 49. His high Christology – that Jesus is God and the Lord of Heaven and Earth – does not evolve through his various writings and thus “must have been largely completed before he began his great missionary journeys…that is, by A.D. 48,” stated J. P. Moreland, Professor at the Talbot School of Theology.

Archaeologists have uncovered more than 5000 ancient New Testament Greek manuscripts, with fragments dating back as early as the 2nd century. Counting Latin Vulgate manuscripts and others, the total is 24,000 manuscripts in existence. Next to the New Testament, the greatest manuscript evidence for any other ancient work is for Homer’s Iliad, of which there are fewer than 650 copies that come a full thousand years after the original writing.

Not only is 100% of all the major truth and the vast majority of minor truth of Scripture preserved in the manuscripts we have (and in the translations based on them), but more than 99% of the original text can be reconstructed from the manuscripts we posses. The reason is twofold: (1) we have thousands of manuscripts, and (2) we have early manuscripts. The proximity to the original text and the multiplicity of the manuscripts enable textual scholars to accurately reconstruct the original text with more than 99% accuracy. Renowned Greek scholar Sir Frederic Kenyon affirmed that all manuscripts agree on the essential correctness of 99% of the verses in the New Testament. Another noted Greek scholar, A.T. Robertson, said the real concerns of textual criticism is on “a thousandth part of the entire text” making the New Testament 99.9 percent pure.

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Strictly speaking the gospels are anonymous. However, the uniform testimony of the early church was that Matthew, the tax collector and 1 of the 12 disciples, was the author of the first Gospel in the New testament: John Mark, a companion of the disciple Peter, wrote the Gospel we call Mark; and Luke, known as Paul’s “beloved physician,” wrote the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. And there are no known competitors for these 3 gospels. While the name of the author of the fourth Gospel isn’t in doubt – it is certainly John – there was a question concerning whether this was John the apostle or a different John. Professor Craig Bloomberg stated that he is convinced that “a substantial majority of the material goes back to the apostle,” although someone closely associated with John may have acted as an editor, “putting the last verses into shape and potentially creating the stylistic uniformity of the entire document.” In any event, he emphasized, “the Gospel is obviously based on eyewitness material, as are the other 3 Gospels.”

Significantly, there is no evidence from the first century that the authorship of the Gospels was ever in doubt. In fact, if authorship was going to be invented, certainly names of prominent apostles such as Peter or James would have been used in an attempt to bolster credibility rather than to attribute the Gospels to Mark and Luke, who weren’t even among the 12 disciples, and Matthew, who was formerly a hated tax collector.

In reality, far from being contradictory, the Gospels are clearly complementary. Throughout the centuries, countless bible scholars have attested to the fact. Had all the Gospels writers said the same thing in the exact same way, they could have been legitimately questioned on the grounds of collusion. Paul’s writings in Galatians, where he describes meeting with the apostles in Jerusalem and confirming that his message of Christ’s deity was correct, coupled with an extremely early creed about the resurrection found in 1 Corinthians 15, demonstrate that belief in a divine, risen Jesus was in existence within just a few years after his death.

“In no other case is the interval of time between the composition of the book and the date of the earliest manuscripts so short as in that of the New Testament.” ~ Sir Frederic Kenyon, former director of the British Museum and author of The Palaeography of Greek Papyri.

Former atheist skeptic Lee Strobel subjected the Gospels to 8 tests they might face in a court of law – the intention test, the character test, the consistency test, the bias test, the cover-up test, the corroboration test and the adverse witness test – to determine whether they could be considered trustworthy. His verdict was that their essential reliability is beyond serious doubt. As an example, just because the Gospels take a different perspective in describing events does not mean the are irreconcilable. Matthew say there was one angel at Jesus tomb, while John say there were two. Matthew did not say there was only one. John was providing more detail by saying there were two.

After studying the consistency amount the four Gospels, Simon Greenleaf of Harvard Law School, the 19th centuries greatest expert on legal evidence, concluded: “There is enough of a discrepancy to show that there could have been no previous concert among them and at the same time such substantial agreement as to show that they all were independent narrators of the same great transaction.”

Even the once-doubting Sir Lionel Luckhoo, identified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the most successful attorney in the world, concluded after an exhaustive analysis of the evidence for Christ’s resurrection, “I say unequivocally that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ is so overwhelming that it compels acceptance by proof which leave absolutely no room for doubt.”

Archaeology and History Attest to the Reliability of the Bible

By Richard M. Fales, Ph.D.

No other ancient book is questioned or maligned like the Bible. Critics looking for the flyspeck in the masterpiece allege that there was a long span between the time the events in the New Testament occurred and when they were recorded. They claim another gap exists archaeologically between the earliest copies made and the autographs of the New Testament. In reality, the alleged spaces and socalled gaps exist only in the minds of the critics. Manuscript Evidence.

Aristotle’s Ode to Poetics was written between 384 and 322 B.C. The earliest copy of this work dates A.D. 1100, and there are only forty-nine extant manuscripts. The gap between the original writing and the earliest copy is 1,400 years. There are only seven extant manuscripts of Plato’s Tetralogies, written 427–347 B.C. The earliest copy is A.D. 900—a gap of over 1,200 years. What about the New Testament? Jesus was crucified in A.D. 30. The New Testament was written between A.D. 48 and 95. The oldest manuscripts date to the last quarter of the first century, and the second oldest A.D. 125. This gives us a narrow gap of thirty-five to forty years from the originals written by the apostles. From the early centuries, we have some 5,300 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. Altogether, including Syriac, Latin, Coptic, and Aramaic, we have a whopping 24,633 texts of the ancient New Testament to confirm the wording of the Scriptures. So the bottom line is, there was no great period between the events of the New Testament and the New Testament writings. Nor is there a great time lapse between the original writings and the oldest copies.

With the great body of manuscript evidence, it can be proved, beyond a doubt, that the New Testament says exactly the same things today as it originally did nearly 2,000 years ago. Corroborating Writings. Critics also charge that there are no ancient writings about Jesus outside the New Testament. This is another ridiculous claim. Writings confirming His birth, ministry, death, and resurrection include Flavius Josephus (A.D. 93), the Babylonian Talmud (A.D. 70–200), Pliny the Younger’s letter to the Emperor Trajan (approx. A.D. 100), the Annals of Tacitus (A.D. 115–117), Mara Bar Serapion (sometime after A.D. 73), and Suetonius’ Life of Claudius and Life of Nero (A.D. 120).

Another point of contention arises when Bible critics have knowingly or unknowingly misled people by implying that Old and New Testament books were either excluded from or added into the canon of Scripture at the great ecumenical councils of A.D. 336, 382, 397, and 419. In fact, one result of these gatherings was to confirm the Church’s belief that the books already in the Bible were divinely inspired. Therefore, the Church, at these meetings, neither added to nor took away from the books of the Bible. At that time, the thirty-nine Old Testament books had already been accepted, and the New Testament, as it was written, simply grew up with the ancient Church. Each document, being accepted as it was penned in the first century, was then passed on to Christians of the next century. So, this foolishness about the Roman Emperor Constantine dropping books from the Bible is simply uneducated rumor.

Fulfilled Prophecies
Prophecies from the Old and New Testaments that have been fulfilled also add credibility to the Bible. The Scriptures predicted the rise and fall of great empires like Greece and Rome (Daniel 2:39, 40), and foretold the destruction of cities like Tyre and Sidon (Isaiah 23). Tyre’s demise is recorded by ancient historians, who tell how Alexander the Great lay siege to the city for seven months. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had failed in a 13-year attempt to capture the seacoast city and completely destroy its inhabitants. During the siege of 573 B.C., much of the population of Tyre moved to its new island home approximately half a mile from the land city. Here it remained surrounded by walls as high as 150 feet until judgment fell in 332 B.C. with the arrival of Alexander the Great. In the seven-month siege, he fulfilled the remainder of the prophecies (Zechariah 9:4; Ezekiel 26:12) concerning the city at sea by completely destroying Tyre, killing 8,000 of its inhabitants and selling 30,000 of its population into slavery. To reach the island, he scraped up the dust and rubble of the old land city of Tyre, just like the Bible predicted, and cast them into the sea, building a 200-footwide causeway out to the island. Alexander’s death and the murder of his two sons was also foretold in the Scripture. Another startling prophecy was Jesus’ detailed prediction of Jerusalem’s destruction, and the further spreading of the Jewish diaspora throughout the world, which is recorded in Luke 21. In A.D. 70, not only was Jerusalem destroyed by Titus, the future emperor of Rome, but another prediction of Jesus Christ in Matthew 24:1,2 came to pass—the complete destruction of the temple of God.

Messianic Prophecies
In the Book of Daniel, the Bible prophesied the coming of the one and only Jewish Messiah prior to the temple’s demise. The Old Testament prophets declared He would be born in Bethlehem (Micah 5:2) to a virgin (Isaiah 7:14), be betrayed for thirty pieces of silver (Zechariah 11:12,13), die by crucifixion (Psalm 22), and be buried in a rich man’s tomb (Isaiah 53:9). There was only one person who fits all of the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament who lived before A.D. 70: Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of Mary. Yes, the Bible is an amazing book. (See also 1 Peter 1:25 footnote.)