Answering the Skeptic

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Street Preachers Corner

The Corner’s answer board. Here stand the hardest arguments ever raised against the Christian faith — evil and suffering, hell, hiddenness, evolution, the Crusades, the contradictions that weren’t — each one stated the way the skeptic states it, at full strength, and every one of them answered twice: first in a video, as men like Cliffe Knechtle answer them face to face on the campus and the street, and then in writing, from reason and the King James Bible. Tap a question. Watch the answer. Then read the refutation. Below the board stand two studies that belong with it: a study on creation, and the witnesses outside the Bible.

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The Arguments — Every One Refuted

Thirty-eight arguments, none of them softened and none of them skipped. Where a worthy recorded answer exists, it plays at the top of the answer; the written refutation stands under every one.

27. If God wants everyone to know Him, why does He hide? His existence should be obvious.

Video answer: Cliffe Knechtle Most Convincing Debate on If God Is Silent, Does He Not Exist? — Bible Light · Watch on YouTube ›

The Answer in Writing

State it at full strength: if a loving God exists and wants a relationship with every person, then reasonable people who honestly look for Him should find Him — yet many sincere seekers report silence. Philosophers call this the argument from divine hiddenness, and it deserves better than a shrug. The Bible's answer begins by denying the premise that God is far away. The creation itself is a standing public witness, conscience is an inward one, and Paul told the Athenians why God appointed the times before, and the bounds of men's habitation: “That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us” (Acts 17:27). The heavens are not silent; the hearing is damaged. Scripture says plainly what muffles it: “your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you” (Isaiah 59:2). Men do not merely fail to find God — they suppress the truth they have, preferring a universe with no one to answer to.

And God has, in fact, appeared — in the flesh, in history, working public signs before friend and enemy; the complaint that He will not show Himself is two thousand years too late. What He will not do is reduce faith to mere acknowledgment under compulsion: “the devils also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19) — bare certainty of God's existence saves no one and loves no one. He seeks trust, and trust grows in those who seek Him on the terms He has given: “ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). The promise stands behind the anchor verse below: He is a rewarder of them that diligently seek Him. The honest question is not whether God has hidden, but whether the seeker has sought Him where He has promised to be found — in His word, on his knees, ready to repent of what he finds.

“But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” — Hebrews 11:6

30. Muslims, Hindus, and everyone else have their own miracles and religious experiences. Why is your religion the true one?

Video answer: Why This ONE Question STUMPED Cliffe Knechtle! — Ten Seconds Jesus · Watch on YouTube ›

The Answer in Writing

This is the pluralist's strongest card, and it should be met honestly: religious experience is real in every faith on earth, and the people having it are usually sincere. But sincerity is not the test of truth — a man can be sincerely mistaken — and the experiences cannot all be telling the truth, because the religions contradict one another at the centre. Islam says God has no Son and Christ was not crucified; Christianity stakes everything on the Son crucified and risen. Hinduism's cycle of rebirth and the Bible's “once to die, but after this the judgment” cannot both describe reality. When testimonies conflict, you stop counting testimonies and start examining evidence — which is exactly where Christianity invites you to go and where the others, at their foundations, do not.

The Christian faith is anchored to public, checkable events: a crucifixion under a named Roman governor, an empty tomb in a city full of hostile witnesses, a resurrection proclaimed within weeks by men who died rather than withdraw it, and prophecies written centuries before the events they describe. The rival claims characteristically rest on private revelation — a man alone in a cave, a vision no one else could examine — accepted on the claimant's word. And Christianity makes one claim no other religion dares: every other teacher shows a path to climb up to God; Christ announces that God came down, and that the work is finished. Scripture even warns that signs alone prove nothing, for false signs exist (Matthew 24:24 stands behind this page's first answer); a miracle authenticates a messenger only when his message agrees with what God has already spoken. Test all of them by evidence — we are content with the comparison.

“For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;” — 1 Timothy 2:5

31. If God is in control, why doesn't He stop earthquakes and tsunamis that kill thousands of innocent people?

Video answer: How Can Christianity Explain Natural Disasters and Evil? - Cliffe Knechtle — Keep The Faith · Watch on YouTube ›

The Answer in Writing

First, get the world right: the Bible never presents the present creation as God's finished design. Since the fall, “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now” — the anchor verse below — and earthquakes, storms, and death are the machinery of a world under a curse, groaning for the renewal God has promised. Christ Himself addressed this exact question when a tower fell on eighteen people in Siloam: were they worse sinners than everyone else in Jerusalem? His answer refuses the arithmetic: “I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish” (Luke 13:5). A disaster is not a verdict on its victims; it is a summons to the survivors — a public reminder that this world kills everyone in it eventually, and that being ready matters more than being spared.

As for “in control”: sovereignty is not micromanagement. God governs a creation He has given a real order — plate tectonics that also recycles the earth's crust and renews its soil, weather that waters the earth and also storms — and He has bound Himself to let that order stand until the day He remakes it. Notice, too, the selective bookkeeping in the objection: no one totals the disasters that did not happen, the rains that came, the harvests that fed, and credits heaven; “acts of God” is a phrase men only reach for when the act hurts. God's final answer to the groaning creation is not an explanation handed down from a distance — it is a new heavens and a new earth He has promised and will deliver, and it is a cross on which He entered the disaster zone Himself rather than watching from outside it.

“For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” — Romans 8:22

33. Jesus is a myth copied from pagan gods like Horus and Mithra.

Video answer: Isn't Jesus just a copy of other ancient religious figures? — Wes Huff · Watch on YouTube ›

The Answer in Writing

This one survives on lists, and dies on sources. Ask for the primary text — the actual Egyptian record — where Horus is born of a virgin on December 25, baptized, followed by twelve disciples, crucified, and risen in three days, and the list-maker goes quiet: those details appear in no ancient source; they were assembled in modern books and documentaries by men who never quoted the texts they summarized. Horus was conceived after his father's corpse was reassembled; Mithra was born full-grown out of a rock and never died at all, so he could hardly rise. The parallels are manufactured by describing both sides in the vaguest English — born of a maiden, gifts brought, death and rising — until everything sounds like everything else.

The timeline makes borrowing impossible anyway. The resurrection was preached in Jerusalem within weeks of the crucifixion, and the summary Paul quotes in 1 Corinthians 15 — Christ died, was buried, rose, and was seen — dates to within a few years of the event, among eyewitnesses who could be questioned. Myths need generations of anonymous retelling at a distance; this had neither distance nor time, and it arose among strict Jewish monotheists, for whom a crucified Messiah was not a attractive invention but a scandal: “we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumblingblock, and unto the Greeks foolishness” (1 Corinthians 1:23). Add the hostile witnesses — Tacitus, Josephus, and the rest gathered in the Witnesses study below — and the myth theory asks you to believe that a fable conquered the Roman world while the people who were there, and hated it, somehow never produced the one fact that would have killed it. Peter, an eyewitness writing to people who could check, states the case in the anchor verse.

“For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” — 2 Peter 1:16

34. Look at the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch trials — the church's own history proves Christianity is corrupt.

Video answer: Christians and the Historical Wrongs They’ve Committed - Cliffe Knechtle — Keep The Faith · Watch on YouTube ›

The Answer in Writing

No whitewash: men wearing the name of Christ have done wicked, murderous things, and any defence of the faith that begins by denying the record deserves to be ignored. But a faith is judged by its Founder and its Book, not by its traitors — and measured by the New Testament, the Crusades and the Inquisition are not Christianity applied but Christianity contradicted: a kingdom Christ said is not of this world, advanced by the sword He ordered put away. History adds an irony the objector rarely mentions: the Inquisition's fires were lit against Bible-believers as much as against anyone — the same machinery that burned “heretics” burned men and women whose crime was translating and preaching the Scriptures. That record does not incriminate Christ; it incriminates the institution that persecuted His people while using His name.

Christ predicted exactly this mixture and warned against exactly this conclusion. His church would grow with tares among the wheat — “Let both grow together until the harvest” (Matthew 13:30) — and His severest sentence in the Sermon on the Mount falls not on pagans but on professors: the anchor verse below. The hypocrite's crime condemns the hypocrite; Judas is an argument against Judas, not against Jesus, and a counterfeit coin is evidence that real currency exists and is worth counterfeiting. If we are keeping ledgers, keep both columns — hospitals, universities, orphanages, the abolition of the slave trade driven by evangelical conviction — but the Christian does not finally rest his case on the ledger. He rests it on the empty tomb, and on the fact that the church's worst chapters are condemned by the church's own Book, in the church's own Saviour's words.

“Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” — Matthew 7:21

35. If God knows everything beforehand, He created people He knew would end up in hell. How is that loving?

Video answer: Do People Have Freewill if God is All-Knowing? — Impact Video Ministries · Watch on YouTube ›

The Answer in Writing

The argument trades on a confusion between knowing and causing. Foreknowledge is not force: you know the sun will rise tomorrow without making it rise, and a man who watches a recording of a game already played does not decide its plays by watching. God's knowledge of a man's choices — stretched across time, all present to Him — leaves the choices the man's own, exactly as Scripture presents them: He set life and death before Israel and commanded them to choose. The God of the Bible does not decree any man's unbelief and then punish him for it. He declares the opposite, in the anchor verse: He “will have all men to be saved” — and swears it by His own life elsewhere: “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 33:11).

Consider the alternative the objection quietly demands: that a loving God should refuse to create anyone who would refuse Him — which is to say, He should create no free creature at all, for freedom that cannot say no is a theatre prop. Love requires the real possibility of refusal; a world of puppets contains no lovers, only machinery. And God did not merely foresee the loss of the lost and proceed anyway for His own satisfaction: at infinite cost He entered the world and bore the cross to prevent it, and that offer stands open to every man who hears it. Christ locates the tragedy with terrible precision, and not in heaven's reluctance: “ye will not come to me, that ye might have life” (John 5:40). Hell is not populated by men God declined to save; it is populated by men who declined the salvation God provided, pursued, and pressed on them.

“Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.” — 1 Timothy 2:4

37. Christians cherry-pick the Bible — you eat shellfish and wear mixed fabrics, but condemn everyone else.

Video answer: He Became Christian in Less than 7 Minutes into the Debate with Professor — Ten Seconds Jesus · Watch on YouTube ›

The Answer in Writing

The charge assumes the Bible is one flat rulebook in which every command binds every person in every age alike — and the Bible itself says otherwise, on its own pages, by its own handling. God gave Israel a law with distinguishable parts: a moral law reflecting His unchanging character, and a civil and ceremonial law — diet, fabrics, feasts, sacrifices — given to that nation for that age as a living picture-book pointing forward to Christ. Nobody “picks” this distinction out of convenience; the apostles draw it themselves. At Jerusalem they released Gentile believers from the ceremonial law while preaching repentance of sin, and Paul states the rule in the anchor verse below: no man may judge you in meat or drink or holy days — those were shadows, and the substance has come.

The test of the method is whether it is applied consistently, and it is: the ceremonial commands expire because Scripture expires them, and the moral commands stand because Scripture reaffirms them — the New Testament repeats, in its own words, the prohibitions of idolatry, adultery, theft, murder, and covetousness, and grounds them in the character of God rather than the calendar of Israel. A doctor is not “cherry-picking” when he retires an old prescription and continues a standing one; he is reading the chart as written. One more honesty: the shellfish argument is almost never really about shellfish. It is a screen held up in front of one particular moral command the objector dislikes. Set the screen gently aside and ask about the command itself — that conversation, at least, is the real one, and this page exists for it.

“Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days:” — Colossians 2:16

A Study on Creation — The Old Earth, and the God Who Began It All

Ask about creation on any street corner and the room divides into two camps, both certain the Bible has picked a side it never picked. One camp insists the earth is a few thousand years old and treats Genesis as a stopwatch; the other insists science has buried the Creator altogether. Grace Team University teaches neither. Here is the position of this school, stated plainly: the earth really is old; Scripture nowhere tells us when God created it; and the best-established facts of science, honestly faced, point away from atheism and straight at a Beginner.

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” — Genesis 1:1

“Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.” — Hebrews 11:3

1. The Earth Really Is Old

Nothing in Scripture calls the earth young. When God answered Job out of the whirlwind, He spoke of foundations laid long ages before any man could measure them — and asked where Job had been standing at the time. The honest reading of the ground beneath us agrees: rock, ice, light from distant stars, and the slow work of rivers all testify to a creation of great age. We receive that testimony without embarrassment. An old earth does not age its Maker, who was God before the mountains were brought forth:

“Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding.” — Job 38:4

“Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.” — Psalm 90:2

2. We Do Not Know When God Created the Earth

Search the Bible from Genesis to Revelation for a date of creation and you will not find one. No prophet, apostle, or verse of Scripture says, “In such a year God made the world.” Any date a man gives you for creation is his arithmetic, not God's revelation — and the difference matters, because we are commanded to preach what God has spoken, not what men have calculated. Some things God has simply kept in His own hand:

“The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.” — Deuteronomy 29:29

3. Genealogies Cannot Date the Earth

The famous dates for creation — 4004 BC and its cousins — were built by adding up the ages in the genealogies of Genesis 5 and 11. But those lists were given to trace lineage — who descended from whom, and how the promise travelled from Adam to Abraham — not to serve as a creation clock. In Scripture's own usage, “begat” can span generations, and the lists are selective by design: Matthew's genealogy of Christ arranges its names in three deliberate fourteens, passing over kings without apology. A family tree is not a stopwatch, and squeezing a date for the universe out of one is using the text for something it was never given to do. Paul even warns the church off building doctrine on endless genealogies:

“Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith: so do.” — 1 Timothy 1:4

4. The Universe Is Expanding — Therefore It Had a Beginning

Astronomers of the last century found the heavens stretching out: every distant galaxy is racing away, the whole universe expanding like the surface of a rising loaf. Run that motion backwards and it gathers, unavoidably, to a beginning — a first moment before which there was no universe at all. Scripture said it first, and said it beautifully: God “stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain.” A beginning is an embarrassment for atheism, because things do not begin themselves. What begins must be begun — a beginning points to a Beginner:

“It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:” — Isaiah 40:22

“Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the heavens like a curtain:” — Psalm 104:2

5. The Universe Is Running Down — Newton's Laws and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Newton's laws describe a universe of majestic order — motion that persists, force answered by force, a great machine moving by fixed rules. But the second law of thermodynamics adds the direction: entropy — disorder — always increases. Heat spreads and levels out; stars burn their fuel and die; everything ordered runs down toward disorder. A universe that is running down cannot have been running forever, or it would have run down already, long ago, into cold equilibrium. Somebody wound it up. The Bible said that too, in the language of a garment wearing thin:

“They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed:” — Psalm 102:26

6. Fine-Tuning and Design

And the universe is not merely old and begun — it is tuned. The force of gravity, the strength that binds the atom, the tilt, water, and distance of this earth: alter any of them by a hair and no life, no chemistry, no stars as we know them could exist. Living things, down to the information written in every cell, bear the marks of mind, not of accident. The heavens declare it; the things that are made leave the skeptic, in Paul's word, without excuse; and a man need look no further than his own fearfully and wonderfully made body:

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.” — Psalm 19:1

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:” — Romans 1:20

“I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.” — Psalm 139:14

The honest sum: the earth is old; its birthday is God's secret, and no man is authorised to announce it; and everything true science has found — a beginning, an expansion, a running down, a design — points one way, the way the first verse of the Bible points: In the beginning, God.

The Witnesses Outside the Bible — What the Ancient World Said About Jesus

“Jesus is a myth the church invented.” The ancient world itself answers that one — and not from the church’s side of the record. Josephus the Jewish historian, Tacitus the Roman senator who despised the faith, Pliny drawing confessions out of tortured deaconesses, Lucian the mocker, Celsus the enemy philosopher, even the rabbis of the Talmud: friends, neutrals, and open enemies all bear witness — to the man, the cross under Pontius Pilate, the darkness at noon, and the followers who would die rather than curse His name. Watch the teaching, then read the full study, with every word quoted and every source named.

Read the Full Study ›

Go Deeper

These short answers open the door; the full studies stand behind them. For the thorough work — the arguments at full strength, the cults and world religions answered, and the training of the apologist — go to Defense of the Faith in the Street Preachers Corner, and to the Apologia Studio, where the apologetics studies live.

Who Is Jesus Christ? ›

Reading photograph: “Colosseum in Rome, Italy - April 2007” — the Colosseum at dusk — by Diliff, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons — resized.