Questions & Answers
Apologetics and Bible study resources for church leaders, teachers, and families.
Is There a God? · Who Is Jesus? · Did Jesus Rise? · Can We Trust the Bible? · What We Believe · Kids Bible Stories
God & Science
Does God exist, and what does science say about it?
- Hasn't science disproved God? — No. Science studies how the natural world works; it cannot rule out a Creator who made that world. Many founders of modern science were Chri…
- Faith is just believing without evidence. — In the Bible, faith means trust based on what God has shown to be true, not a leap in the dark. The apostles pointed people to evidence: eye…
- If God made everything, who made God? — The argument is that everything that begins to exist has a cause. God, by definition, did not begin to exist; he is eternal. The universe ap…
- You don't need God to be a good person. — True: people who don't believe in God can be kind, honest, and generous. Christianity says that is because everyone is made in God's image. …
- There's no evidence for God. — There is evidence; the question is how we weigh it. The universe had a beginning, its laws are finely tuned for life, objective moral values…
- Doesn't the multiverse explain the fine-tuning? — The multiverse is a speculative idea with no direct observational evidence. Even if it exists, the mechanism producing universes would itsel…
- Doesn't evolution explain away design? — Evolution describes how living things change over time. It doesn't explain why there is a universe, why its laws are fine-tuned for life, wh…
- Couldn't our universe have come from another universe? — That only moves the question back a step. If our universe came from a parent universe, a black hole, an earlier cycle, or a computer simulat…
Deity of Christ
Who Jesus is, and answers to common challenges to his divinity.
- Jesus never claimed to be God. — Jesus claimed divine authority in many ways: forgiving sins, accepting worship, calling himself "I am," and claiming he would judge the worl…
- Wasn't Jesus just a great prophet? — Jesus was a prophet, but he claimed and showed far more. Prophets pointed away from themselves and said, "This is what the LORD says." Jesus…
- If Jesus prayed to God, how can he be God? — Christians don't believe the Son prayed to himself. The one God exists as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and the Son, having become fully hum…
- Jesus said, "The Father is greater than I." — "Greater" here describes position, not nature. A king is greater in rank than his son serving as an ambassador, but no less human. During hi…
- Jesus didn't know the day or hour of his return, so he can't be God. — Jesus is fully God and fully human. In becoming man, the Son willingly lived within real human limits, depending on the Father. Mark 13:32 r…
- Jesus said, "Why do you call me good? No one is good except God." — Jesus wasn't denying that he was good or that he was God. He was challenging the man to think about his own words: if only God is good, and …
- The Bible calls Jesus "firstborn" and "begotten," so he was created. — In the Bible, "firstborn" often means the one with the highest rank and the inheritance, not the first one created. God calls David his "fir…
- God can't be born, get hungry, or die. — Christians agree that the divine nature cannot die. The claim is that the eternal Son took on a full human nature, adding humanity without l…
- The Trinity means three gods, and it makes no sense. — Christians believe in one God, as firmly as anyone. The Trinity teaches that the one God eternally exists as three persons: Father, Son, and…
- Jesus called the Father "my God," so he isn't God. — As a true man, Jesus relates to the Father as his God, and he will forever be both God and man. That is exactly what Christians believe. The…
- Others are called "gods" and "sons of God" too. — True: human judges are called "gods" in Psalm 82, and believers are "children of God." But the Bible never gives anyone else what it gives J…
- Paul invented the idea that Jesus is God. — The evidence shows Jesus was worshiped before Paul's letters and independent of him. Paul quotes worship material that already existed, the …
- The church voted Jesus into godhood at Nicaea in AD 325. — Nicaea didn't invent Jesus' divinity. It defended what Christians had believed for nearly three centuries against a new teaching (from Arius…
- Jesus' divinity was added to the Bible later. — Belief in Jesus' divinity runs through every part of the New Testament, in thousands of manuscripts from across the ancient world, and in ea…
- Jesus was baptized, so he must have been a sinner. — This argument assumes Jesus was baptized because he needed forgiveness. But the text says otherwise. John the Baptist tried to stop him, say…
- The Bible never claims that Jesus is God. — It does, plainly and repeatedly. John's Gospel alone calls Jesus "God" three times (John 1:1; 1:18; 20:28), and dozens more verses in John s…
Jesus in History
Did Jesus exist, did he rise from the dead, and what do the earliest sources say?
- Did Jesus even exist? — Yes. Nearly every historian of the ancient world, Christian or not, agrees Jesus was a real Jewish teacher who was crucified under Pontius P…
- The resurrection is just a legend that grew over time. — Legends take generations to develop, but belief in the resurrection appears almost immediately. The creed in 1 Corinthians 15 dates to withi…
- The disciples only hallucinated seeing Jesus. — Hallucinations are private experiences, but Jesus appeared to groups, including more than 500 people at once. Hallucinations also cannot exp…
- Jesus didn't really die on the cross. — Roman soldiers were expert executioners, and crucifixion was designed to kill. Jesus was flogged, crucified, and pierced with a spear. Even …
- Christianity copied older pagan myths like Horus or Mithras. — Most of the claimed parallels collapse when you read the actual ancient sources. Horus was not born of a virgin on December 25 or crucified.…
- Mark's Gospel originally didn't include the resurrection. — Mark clearly includes the resurrection. The angel announces, "He has risen! He is not here" (Mark 16:6), and that verse is in all the manusc…
The Bible
How the Bible came to us and whether we can trust it.
- Hasn't the Bible been changed over the centuries? — No. We have thousands of ancient manuscripts, some within a century or two of the originals. Comparing them lets scholars reconstruct the or…
- The Gospels were written too late to be reliable. — Most scholars date the Gospels to roughly AD 65-95, within the lifetime of eyewitnesses. Paul's letters and the creeds they preserve are ear…
- The Gospels contradict each other. — The Gospels differ in details the way independent eyewitness accounts usually do. They agree on the core story. Many apparent contradictions…
- Isn't the God of the Old Testament violent and cruel? — These are difficult passages and deserve careful reading. They are rare, specific to a particular time, and often responses to extreme evil …
- Christians pick and choose which Bible laws to follow (shellfish, mixed fabrics…). — Christians aren't picking favorites; they're reading the covenants correctly. The Law of Moses was a covenant between God and Israel for a p…
Evil & Suffering
Honest answers to the hardest questions people ask.
- If God is good, why is there so much evil and suffering? — Christianity does not deny the reality of evil; it takes it more seriously than any other worldview. God made us free to love, which also me…
- Why does God allow natural disasters and disease? — The Bible teaches that creation itself was affected by humanity's rebellion against God; it "groans" as it waits to be set free (Romans 8:20…
- Why do innocent children suffer? — There's no easy answer, and we should never pretend there is. But Scripture shows God's fierce love for children and his anger at those who …
- Why didn't God stop what happened to me? — God did not do this to you. We often can't know why a particular hurt happened, and the Bible doesn't pretend we always will (Deuteronomy 29…
- Some suffering seems pointless. Doesn't that prove there's no God? — It may seem pointless to us, but that doesn't mean it is. God doesn't cause every tragedy; much suffering comes from a fallen world, from pe…
- Is God in control of everything? Did God cause this to happen? — God is sovereign: supreme, all-powerful, with final authority over everything. But sovereign doesn't mean he micro-controls every event or d…
- Is God sending hard times to make me stronger? — Hard times can make us stronger, the way a soldier grows stronger in battle. But the battle isn't his friend, and his commander didn't send …
Faith & Culture
Exclusivity, hell, hypocrisy, and the church's record.
- How could a loving God send people to hell? — A loving God must also be just; we would not admire a judge who ignored evil. Hell is ultimately the result of people rejecting God, the sou…
- How can Christianity claim to be the only way to God? — Every worldview makes exclusive claims, including the claim that all religions are equal. Religions disagree on basic questions, so they can…
- What about people who have never heard of Jesus? — Scripture assures us that God is perfectly just and will judge people fairly according to the light they have received. God reveals himself …
- The church is full of hypocrites. — Sometimes that is true, and it should grieve us. But Christianity never claims Christians are perfect; it claims Jesus is. The church is a h…
- Religion has caused more harm than good (the Crusades, etc.). — Christians have done real wrongs, and those should be acknowledged honestly. But they acted against Jesus' teaching, not because of it. The …
- Jesus said not to judge. — Jesus never said not to judge at all. In Matthew 7 he forbids hypocritical, self-righteous judging, and then tells us how to judge rightly: …