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The observable universe,

we see about 50 billion trillion stars.

Those 50 billion trillion stars

and all the planets and the gas clouds,

the moons, all that together...

makes up just 0.27%

of all the stuff of the universe.

The universe is predominantly made up of dark energy,

about 70%, and then, uh, matter, 30%,

but most of that matter is dark matter,

which means it doesn't give off any light.

The stuff that you see through the telescope,

that's just 0.27%,

and yet that adds up to 50 billion trillion stars.

Our universe truly is enormous.

We talk about things here on Earth

in miles or meters or kilometers,

but those units of measurement

are just so small that they can't

adequately describe what goes on in the universe.

For example, if we go out and ask the distance,

how far is it to the moon, I can tell you it's

a little bit over 200,000 miles.

A more useful unit of measurement is how long

does it take light to get from there to here,

and it actually takes just over one second.

So now let's start exploring

further and further out in the universe.

We can go out to the closest star

four light years away.

In other words, light from the nearest star

takes four years traveling at nearly

200,000 miles per second to get here.

How big is the universe?

Researchers at the University of Hawaii

tried to figure it out, and they estimate that

the number of stars in the universe

are about equivalent

to the number of grains of sand

on all the beaches, on all the Earth,

times...

...100,000.

And just in our galaxy, the average distance

between those stars

is 30 trillion miles.

If you could go space shuttle speed,

which, when it orbited the Earth,

it was going at about five miles a second,

it would take you over 200,000 years

to go 30 trillion miles.

If you got in the space shuttle at the time of Christ

and started traveling from our star, the Sun,

to another star an average distance away,

you've been going five miles a second for 2,000 years,

you would be less

than one hundredth of the way there

right now.

The heavens are awesome.

You get across our galaxies

about 100,000 light years,

you get to the closest large galaxy beyond us,

that's 2.5 million light years.

In other words, that light has been traveling

from the Andromeda Galaxy to us

for two and a half million years,

traveling at 200,000 miles per second.

That's just mind-blowingly vast when you try and think about it.

Any person who is truly a thinking person

needs to ask themselves the question,

"Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Sadly, today, I think many people

just simply don't even engage that question,

partly because we live lives that are extremely busy,

where we have so many things that we have

to be responsible for,

so many things that we're doing,

that we don't have those moments where we just

are alone with our thoughts,

where we just contemplate

the big questions of life.

We come into the world with a lot of questions.

My wife and I have four kids,

they just ask questions all the time,

and usually they're awesome,

because they're gripped with wonder

and curiosity about the world,

but I think as we get older,

we get sort of in the day-to-day grind,

and we kinda stop asking questions,

we kinda stop being curious about the world.

But really, if we would just stop for a minute

and look around at the amazing wonder of the world,

we would see that there's a lot to wonder about,

there's a lot to question.

Most people

are only thinking day-to-day

or maybe week-to-week,

long-term thinkers will think a year

or maybe five years out,

but our culture, our society,

it is a really "right now" kind of society,

it's a microwave kind of society.

Life in Western culture is pretty good for most people,

so there are a lot of things that distract,

a lot of material things, new cars, houses,

clothes, things that we can do.

You look at social media and look at some of the

most popular accounts on social media,

and it's stuff that just doesn't matter at all.

We've all heard of amusement parks, well,

to muse is to think deeply on something,

so to be amused is to literally not have to think deeply,

so you have social media, TikTok, all these applications,

and, you know, we tend to forget about some of these questions

or-- or be so distracted by other things.

I mean, my goodness, if you go outside on a clear night,

it's beautiful, and yet we'd rather be inside and watch TV.

We have access to so much information now,

notice I use the word information,

it doesn't mean it's true information,

there's so much false facts, and so I think

what we're looking at, especially

among the younger generation,

is sort of an agnosticism

toward what could actually be true about those things.

There is a tremendous amount of confusion

in our culture about the concept of truth.

Now, I say confusion instead of difference of opinion,

because it's confusion,

and not just difference of opinion.

Everyone has this idea that truth is relative,

this idea that, well, that might be true for you,

but this is true for me, and both of them

are completely compatible.

Our culture increasingly says

truth is something found within,

based on your decisions, based on your feelings,

based on whatever your life choices are.

Sadly, I think our culture has become

very tribalistic,

because truth doesn't really matter, it's like,

"This tribe says this, this tribe says this,

I wanna be in with this tribe, so I'm gonna say that."

And so all of these approaches to how we think about reality

and how we think about what's true when it comes to reality

have had a devastating effect in our ability

to actually investigate what is true.

It feels better for polite society

to not be telling somebody that they're wrong,

and I know that can sometimes come across

as being the better, more tolerant option,

but I don't think truth really gives us that option,

because I think truth in its very nature is objective.

We all have our views,

we all have our beliefs,

and then truth is really something further than that.

When we believe something, we claim that the world

is some such way,

and that's either the way it is,

or it's not.

So if I say that two plus two

equals four, for example,

it is my opinion,

but it's also the fact that my opinion is true,

that two plus two does equal four,

because it's grounded in reality,

it's grounded in the nature of reality,

the object is reality.

So this mantra,

especially of the 21st century,

creates barriers...

...to finding out what really is true

about the things that really matter.

We wanna believe

because we know something is true,

not just because someone has said it's true,

or because we've grown up with that,

or it's grown to be a sort of familiar belief

or comfortable belief for us.

We really have to put our beliefs to the fire.

We won't get everything figured out,

but we'll have greater clarity as a result of it.

This takes a long time, and it takes patience.

Somebody has to be very determined to want to know

what's actually true about something,

and sometimes what's true

is not the sexiest answer,

it's not the most hip answer, or funny answer,

or attractive answer, it doesn't look great on a meme.

There are truths that can be known,

and I wanna know what they are.

When people start wondering about

the nature of the universe,

and they're trying to answer the fundamental questions,

the things that really matter in the deep sense,

in the broad sense, in the long sense,

this is one of them that needs to be answered.

The world is here,

and following the principle of sufficient reason,

there must be a reason why the world is here,

as opposed to it not being here.

This touches on a very scientific principle,

and it's called "explanatory power."

People look around, and they say,

"Why are things the way they are?"

Scientists believe there's an intelligible answer to that,

meaning there is a reason for the way things are.

What's that reason?

Why do I exist? Why do you exist?

Why does the universe exist?

Well, there's two possibilities.

Either the universe has always existed,

or there's something outside the universe

that has always existed,

if indeed the universe had a beginning.

If you go back at the start of the 1900s,

most scientists thought the universe was eternal.

And why that's important is, 'cause if we look

at the early 1900s, when Einstein introduced

his theories of relativity,

philosophically what drove

his development of those theories

was the idea that the laws of physics

ought to be constant throughout space and time.

Everywhere you go in the universe,

no matter where you are, or how you're moving,

you ought to see the same laws of physics.

What he found was that the solutions to that theory

actually predicted that the universe oughta be

either expanding or contracting.

Einstein's theory of general relativity--

he knew back in the early 1900s,

had shown, at least mathematically,

that space, time, and matter had a beginning,

that they were co-relative, that they came into existence together.

Einstein didn't actually believe that.

He wanted the universe to be static and eternal.

So he put a fudge factor into his equations called

"the cosmological constant,"

to keep the universe static and eternal.

You go up to 1929 while Edwin Hubble's

looking out in the universe and finds that, lo and behold,

the further away galaxies are,

the faster they're moving away from us.

For that to be true, the universe would need to be

expanding, something like a balloon

in a spherically symmetric way.

Then, at any progressive point in the past,

the universe would have been smaller and smaller and smaller,

and all that galactic material would eventually

have converged onto a point.

Edwin Hubble invited Einstein in 1931

to look through his telescope

and actually see the expanding universe

that general relativity had predicted

a couple of decades before.

That's when Einstein, after he looked

through the telescope, said,

"The universe did have a beginning.

The cosmological constant was the greatest mistake

in my professional career.

All I'm interested in now is to find the mind of God.

The rest are details."

Now, Einstein was not a Christian,

but his theory of general relativity,

which has been proven accurate

to more than five decimal points,

shows without any doubt that the universe,

space, matter, and time had a beginning out of nothing.

Now, in the 1960s, Stephen Hawking

began to think about this while he was doing a PhD thesis

at Cambridge University on black hole physics.

And as he began to think about the application

of general relativity

to cosmology, he realized that

as the universe would have been smaller and smaller

and smaller at each successive point in the past,

the curvature of space would have gotten tighter and tighter

and tighter, according to Einstein's theory,

until finally you reached a limiting case.

You couldn't analyze this

from the standpoint of physics anymore because,

for one thing, there was no place to put any physics.

And so by the 1960s and early 70s,

in addition to the evidence from observational astronomy,

there was this powerful

proof coming out of theoretical physics

that the universe must have had a beginning,

that space and time themselves must have had a starting point.

Which is why you had people like Stephen Hawking,

who was an atheist, say, "Almost everyone now believes

that the universe and time itself

had a beginning at the Big Bang."

The only question now is what could have

caused such a beginning?

Well, this is where things get really

interesting, philosophically.

Because if space and time,

as well as matter and energy,

a beginning point,

it becomes impossible to explain the origin of...

...the material or physical universe

by reference to matter and energy.

Before there was matter and energy,

there was no matter and energy to do the causing.

There is a model of the origin of the universe

that Hawking himself came up with,

in part to circumvent the obvious theological

implications of the Big Bang.

Many people have observed that Hawking was

a kind of God-obsessed atheist,

and he realized that his singularity theorems

were pointing to a creation event.

He didn't much like the implications of that,

and so he formulated an alternative cosmological model,

and that was called "Quantum cosmology."

Now, here's the strange thing about this.

In all their quantum cosmological modeling,

they never actually eliminated the singularity.

So the problem of the beginning remained.

But secondly, they generated a strange kind of paradox,

where they were invoking pre-existing...

...physical laws that can be expressed mathematically

before there was any physics,

before there was any matter, space, time, or energy.

And so Stephen Hawking memorably

stated, upon encountering this,

"What puts fire in the equations

that gives them a universe to describe?"

How does mere math

produce matter, space, time, and energy?

If the medium of mathematics is the mind...

...after all, that's where math resides,

these are mental concepts. If the medium of the

mathematics is the mind,

are we really saying that a mind predates the universe?

These space-time theorems tell us

space and time have a beginning,

not just the matter and energy,

but even the space-time dimensions

of the universe have a beginning,

and therefore the cause of the universe

must be an agent beyond

matter, energy, space, and time.

And if time had a beginning,

whatever created time must be timeless.

In other words, something that's uncreated,

something that's eternal.

I was always interested in the big questions

that intersect science and philosophy,

the worldview questions, if you will.

And as a young scientist working

as a geophysicist in the 1980s,

a conference came to Dallas where I was working,

called "Christianity Challenges the University,"

an international conference of atheists and theists.

I had heard about the conference just the night before

from a friend, decided to attend,

came in off the street, was blown away by what I heard.

Allan Sandage, a great astrophysicist, who made

his first public profession of faith in God,

and then explained how the evidence

that he had helped to acquire,

not only a beginning to the expansion of the universe,

but a beginning to the universe itself.

At one point he said, uh,

"Here is evidence for what can only be described as

a super natural event.

There's no way this could've been predicted within

the realm of physics as we know it."

And then he proceeded to explain how this had

troubled him so deeply, because he had been long and well-known

agnostic of a materialistic bent in his worldview.

He realized where the evidence was pointing,

and he realized there was something in him that

didn't want to go there, that didn't want to consider the idea

that there might be a creator beyond the universe

that would explain this creation event.

When we look out in the universe,

it's kind of this odd thing that we see.

Here on the surface of the earth,

it's just... built for life.

Life teems everywhere.

There's an abundance of life.

There's a incredibly diverse array of life.

Basically every place you think life

could exist on earth, it does.

And even in some places we thought it couldn't exist,

lo and behold, we find life there.

But yet when we look out into the heavens,

we see a rather different picture.

Physicists have discovered

that the fundamental constants and parameters

and characteristics that define the universe

have to assume exacting precise values

if life is going to be possible.

And if even one of these parameters deviates

ever so slightly, sometimes even imperceptibly,

life simply couldn't exist in the universe.

If you were to change any one of them,

there would either be no universe

or no universe that could support life.

One was admitted by Stephen Hawking

who said this, "If the expansion rate of the universe

had been different by one part

in a thousand million million,

a second after the Big Bang,

the universe would have collapsed back on itself

or never developed galaxies."

It turns out the force that's

responsible for the expansion of the universe

is fine-tuned to about one part in 10 to the 90th power.

That's one in one with

90 zeros after it.

To put that in perspective, there are only

10 to the 80th elementary particles

in the entire universe.

This is one of the initial conditions of the universe.

When the universe was created,

from the very inception of that creation,

the expansion rate was perfect to give us this universe.

And there's a dozen of these other constants.

Change any of them,

none of us are here.

How do you explain that?

Everything falls within these very narrow ranges

that allows for life to exist.

The probability of getting all of those parameters is

vanishingly small.

I run into a lot of people that say,

"Given the vastness of our galaxy and universe,

there must be billions if not trillions

of habitable planets out there."

If you want life on a planet...

...it must be orbiting a star

that's very similar to our star, the sun.

The planet, of course, must be orbiting

just the right distance from the star.

That's what's called the "liquid water habitable zone."

There are now 14 known habitable zones

that have been fleshed out in the scientific literature.

And for a planet to be truly habitable,

it must reside in all 14.

We've yet to find one,

outside of planet Earth,

that resides in even three of the 14 known habitable zones.

But even if all you look at

is a planetary habitable zone

and a galactic habitable zone,

that number of billions of habitable planets

rapidly shrinks down just to the one that we're living on.

And what we know from looking at Earth's atmosphere

is that it has changed dramatically.

And it's changed dramatically in a way that if

life hadn't changed in just the right way,

if the sun's luminosity hadn't changed in just the right way,

if the plate tectonics hadn't happened in just the right way,

if all of that hadn't happened in concert,

Earth would've lost all its water.

We know from our uniform

and repeated experience

that systems that have the

property of being finely tuned,

to accomplish some discernible end,

invariably are the result of, uh, intelligent run.

An internal combustion engine is finely tuned.

Software within the hardware domain is finely tuned.

In all systems that have that property,

the cause of that property of fine-tuning

is always an intelligent agent.

Fine-tuning requires fine tuners.

Our galaxy, our star,

our planetary system, the Earth, the moon,

whatever size scale you choose to look at,

you see an overwhelming

experimental and observational case

that there is a being out there that's personally

fine-tuning, intervening.

We get probabilities

of all this happening by pure chance

without the intervention of a divine creator.

That's far more remote

than the possibility

that you could pick out a single proton

from all the protons that exist in the entire universe.

I remember back in the 1980s telling audiences

this fine-tuning evidence

is exponentially increasing.

Every month that goes by,

we get a much stronger case for this personal being.

This says, eventually,

the evidence will become so overwhelming

that non-theists or deists

will have nowhere else to go

but to hypothesize there's an infinite number of universes.

And if there is an infinite number of universes,

then not only will you, of necessity, have a universe tuned

just like ours, they argue,

you would have an infinite number of universes

just like ours.

And we happen to be in the universe

where we develop and we observe it and we think,

"Wow, it's amazing," when in fact it's not so amazing.

There's not an infinite number of anything.

There's not an infinite number of atoms.

There's not an infinite number of marbles.

There's not an infinite number of universes.

Even if they do exist, there's only a finite number.

And it proves too much.

It means every universe

exists possibly somewhere.

There's a universe that exists somewhere where

Hitler was a Christian and Billy Graham was Hitler.

There's a universe somewhere where God does exist

and Christianity's true, right?

I appreciate the, uh, writings

and, uh, the lectures of Leonard Susskind.

He's not a theist.

He's a theoretical physicist.

But he basically said, We atheists

have got to stop using the multiverse argument

against the God of the Bible.

It's not a good argument because it explains everything.

And a theory that explains everything explains nothing."

In fact, Alexander Vilenkin,

an astronomer from Tufts University,

wrote a book called Many Worlds in One,

where he puts forth the idea...

...that there is a multiverse out there.

But he also says this in the book,

"Cosmologists can no longer hide

behind the possibility of a past eternal universe.

There is now no escape.

They have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning."

Even if there are other universes out there,

according to him, he says the whole show

needs an absolute beginning.

The multiverse advocates

have proposed...

...universe-generating mechanisms.

And there are two of these

universe-generating mechanisms,

both based on speculative cosmological models.

But the bottom line is that

in both of these two cosmological models,

there is prior unexplained fine-tuning.

For the inflaton field to s--

spit out new universes, even in theory,

there has to be very finely tuned

inflaton shut off energies,

the energy has to drop in just the right measure,

in just the right interval of time.

In order to get the new universes, you have to have

prior fine-tuning, which is unexplained.

And so you're right back where you started from.

Astronomer Paul Davies pointed out,

and he's an agnostic, he's not a Christian,

he said, "The multiverse is a dodge.

Nobody would be talking about

there being other universes out there

if this universe didn't appear to be created and designed."

So all this does is...

...provide an alternate explanation

for which there is scant evidence,

actual hard, uh, evidence,

and doesn't solve the problem,

it just pushes the problem of design

just a little bit further back.

Insofar as the multiverse

has not explained the ultimate origin of fine-tuning,

and we do know of a cause that

is capable of generating fine-tuning,

the best explanation for the origin

of the fine-tuning of the universe remains

intelligent design.

When I, uh, was growing up,

I didn't have any kind of Christian influence in my life.

In fact, by the time I went to college, I was an agnostic.

I wasn't sure if God existed or not, and honestly didn't care.

I was really very interested in doing

everything I could to prepare myself

to go to graduate school to pursue a PhD in biochemistry.

As I was exposed to

uh, courses in biology and chemistry,

I embraced the evolutionary paradigm

as the explanation

for the origin and the design

and the history of life on Earth.

As a graduate student, however,

you know, immersing myself in

the study of biochemical systems,

I became deeply impressed with the

ingenuity and the elegance and the

sophistication of those systems and

asked the question, "Well, where do these systems come from?"

And it was at that point I was convinced

that there must be a mind,

there must be a creator that's behind life itself,

that's responsible for the origin and,

at minimum, the basic design of life.

One of the things that I marvel at as a biochemist is

the eerie similarity that we see between

the structure and operation of biochemical systems

and human designs.

DNA is highly optimized as an information storage system.

It turns out that in about two and a half pounds of DNA,

you could store all the digital information

that exists in the world today.

And at the same time, the designs are so elegant

that they're inspiring new technologies.

To me, this speaks very powerfully that

there is a mind that's ultimately

behind biochemistry

and biology in general.

The world's most famous atheist right now, Richard Dawkins,

wrote a book called The Blind Watchmaker.

In the opening of The Blind Watchmaker,

he makes this statement.

He says, "The biological world

is a complex world

that gives the appearance

of having been designed for a purpose."

Maybe it's not just...

...the appearance of design,

but maybe it is actual design.

I often hear the statement made,

"Evolution is a fact."

Well, yes and no.

The term evolution is ambiguous.

It can mean a lot of things when we're

using it to describe biological change over time.

So for example, microevolution,

which would be variation happening within a species.

The example that we would see in textbooks

would be the Galapagos finches,

where a-- a finch species

makes its way to the Galapagos Islands

and diversifies into a number of different species of finches.

But here, what we see evolution involved in is

tweaking existing designs in response to the environment.

Now, there's another category of evolution

that we also need to consider, and that's macroevolution.

And here, the idea is that

evolutionary mechanisms can innovate

and produce new designs.

This is, in fact, where

the evolutionary paradigm breaks down.

In my book, Darwin's Doubt, I discuss

a problem that Darwin understood about his own theory,

even in 1859 when he published The Origin of Species,

and that is that the pattern of appearance

of new forms of life in the fossil record

does not match the branching tree pattern

that he presented in The Origin of Species.

But instead, in the fossil record,

new forms of life arise very abruptly.

And there's one particular such event

in the history of life that's especially dramatic.

It's known as the "Cambrian Explosion."

Most of the first animals arise during the Cambrian period,

and these first animals exemplify very

new ways of arranging

body parts and tissues called "a body plan."

On my shelf here, I've got a--

a-- a trilobite fossil,

and this particular one has...

...very well-preserved

trilobite eyes.

The trilobites,

one of the earliest Cambrian animals,

came on the scene...

...already with sophisticated compound eyes.

You can see the-- the compound eyes,

like the eyes of modern insects.

We know those are very sophisticated devices.

They are there from the very beginning of

the Cambrian Explosion.

Every time we see innovation,

it happens explosively.

These are called "radiation events."

So there are radiation events for the fishes,

for amphibians, for reptiles.

There are three radiation events for birds.

There's a radiation event for mammals.

And even when human beings come on the scene,

there's something called the "Sociocultural Big Bang,"

where out of nowhere, this incredibly

sophisticated behavior

appears explosively.

This is completely

contrary to what you'd expect

from, uh, an evolutionary framework.

You would expect that there would be a proliferation

of species,

which eventually leads to new genera,

which eventually leads to new families,

and new orders, new classes,

and last of all, new phyla.

But we see the opposite in the fossil record.

The phyla show up first,

and they show up simultaneously and suddenly.

So when we see these big explosions

of new biological form,

we now know we're also seeing evidence

of big explosions of biological information.

To build that form, you need information.

It's kind of like in the computer world,

where if you want to give your computer a new function,

you have to give it new code.

Where does that information come from?

Information always comes from a mind.

In other words, in our uniform and repeated experience,

we always see a conscious mind as the source of information.

If we see a hieroglyphic inscription,

a paragraph in a book,

the information embedded in a radio signal,

software...

Any place where we have information,

especially in a digital

or alphabetic form, it always

has arisen from conscious activity,

from a mind, not an undirected material process.

And so the discovery of information

at the foundation of life,

in even the simplest living cells,

is powerful evidence of a designing intelligence.

And interestingly,

I make that case using Darwin's own method

of scientific reasoning, that we should be

looking for causes now in operation

in order to posit the best explanation

for the phenomenon of interest.

The phenomenon of interest is the information in DNA.

What cause now in operation produces digital information?

Well, there's only one, and that's a mind.

Today, there are a number of biologists that are

calling for what they call an extended evolutionary synthesis,

meaning that evolutionary theory is incomplete, it's inadequate.

They called a meeting in November of 2016

to come up with a new theory of macroevolution,

because the current theory they have,

this neo-Darwinian theory,

where you mutate DNA and get a new body plant,

they were admitting doesn't work.

So they called all these people,

to the UK back in November of 2016

to have this meeting, and they heard a lot of people

complaining about the current theory of macroevolution,

but they couldn't come up with another naturalistic theory

as to how these subsequent life forms could evolve.

Darwinism, neo-Darwinism is dying.

The mutation natural selection mechanism,

which has been the go-to explanation

for the origin of biological form in evolutionary biology,

is insufficient to produce

the information necessary to build

fundamentally new form in the history of life.

It provides a good explanation for small-scale variations,

but if you wanna make a major change,

you're not gonna get it by mutation and selection.

Even if evolution were true,

all it would explain

is how one species morphed into another species,

and then over time we get the complexity

and diversity of life.

Evolution doesn't explain

why there's something rather than nothing.

Evolution doesn't explain why the universe

is exquisitely fine-tuned for life.

Evolution can't explain the origin of life.

There's a recent Gallup poll

that shows that belief in God in the United States

has dropped to an all-time low.

Young people, in particular,

in the age group from 18 to 31,

are generating that trend away from religious belief.

One of the factors that is most commonly cited is science.

The particular finding of science

atheists and agnostics cite most, is the idea

of undirected evolutionary change,

that life arose by an undirected evolutionary process.

That's cited more than worries about death

or disease or suffering.

So evolutionary ideas about origins

have played an outsized role in convincing people

that God does not exist,

that God, as Richard Dawkins put it, is a delusion.

And yet, we live in a time when such unbelief

is not only unnecessary as the result of science,

it's actually contrary to what science has discovered

over the last 100 years.

The idea that the universe has a beginning,

that it's been finely tuned against all odds

and for no underlying physical reason from the beginning,

and that the living cell is chock-full of

miniature machines that doesn't just rival,

but it vastly exceeds

our own high-tech digital technology.

These are discoveries that, I have argued,

point to the designing intelligence and indeed

a designing intelligence with the attributes

that traditional theists, Jews and Christians, for example,

have long ascribed to God.

Transcendence, intelligence, great power,

and a willingness to be involved in the creation.

This is not a time to give up on religious belief.

Instead, I think science is now pointing us back to God

and helping us rediscover what I call "The God hypothesis."

The biggest question we can ask is,

"Is there a God or not?"

And how we answer that has implications

for everything in life.

"Is there a life after death?

Is there human value?

Is there objective morality?

Is there purpose?"

So that question shapes everything.

Once you recognize that there really is good evidence

to think that there is a creator

that brought everything into existence,

you really are left with

the big question, which is,

"What do I do with this information?"

I think it would be a reasonable assumption

to say that if some kind of a God existed,

he would want to reveal himself, at least in some way,

to these intelligent creatures that he created.

We would have to look at all of

the different ways people have understood...

...him to do that and start narrowing down

which ones got it right.

The differences are so fundamental on questions like,

did the universe have a beginning or not?

Is there a personal God or not?

Where did humans come from?

What does it mean to be human?

What happens when we die?

What's wrong with the world?

And what's the afterlife like?

And the major religions offer

fundamentally different responses to those questions.

I wanna know, is there any evidence

backing any one of them up as uniquely being true?

Well, I was born, raised and educated in Canada

'til I left Canada to join the faculty of Caltech.

When I was seven years of age,

I wanted to know why the stars were hot.

And my parents couldn't answer the question.

They encouraged me to go to the library

and our school had a field trip there.

I came home with five books on astronomy and physics.

So I got very interested in astronomy at an early age.

And when I was 16, I spent that year

studying cosmology

as the science of the origin and history of the universe.

And that's when I realized, of all

the different models for the universe,

the one that was fitting the observations

was the Big Bang Theory.

And if it's Big Bang, the universe has a beginning.

The universe has a beginning,

there must be some kind of

causal agent or beginner.

So at age 17, I went on a quest to find that cosmic beginner.

That's when I began to delve into the world's holy books

and basically put each of those books to a rigorous test.

So I went through these books,

searching for errors and contradictions.

And I tell people I didn't really get to know Christians

until I showed up at Caltech.

I actually did see two from 30 feet away

when I was 11 years of age.

And these were two businessmen

that came into our public school

and put two boxes on our teacher's desk.

In those boxes were Gideon Bibles.

So I took one home,

but it took six years

before I picked it off the shelf.

And I actually began to look at it,

began going through it page by page,

realized this book was radically different

from the other holy books.

I had not been able to find

a single provable error or contradiction.

Lots of passages I didn't understand,

but the ones I did understand,

couldn't find any contradictions or errors.

And actually found hundreds of places

where this book, the Bible,

accurately predicted future historical events

and future scientific discoveries.

And I was at age 19, I actually went through a calculation.

What are the odds of the Bible getting all these

statements about the future correct?

And I realized that the probability was

many, many orders of magnitude more remote

than the possibility

that I would be killed by a reversal

of the second law of thermodynamics.

And since I trusted my life in the second law,

I realized it'd be irrational for me to

put not even greater trust in the message of this book.

So it was at age 19,

I signed my name in the back of that Gideon Bible,

committing my life to Jesus Christ,

and immediately began to look for opportunities

to share with people the evidences that I found

for the truth of what the Bible says

and for the existence of the God of the Bible.

Some people will say the Bible's

been changed throughout the centuries,

so we don't know what the original text said.

The question of

do we have an accurate copy

is something that I wrestled with a lot.

I needed to know, why do we trust what's actually written?

Forget the question, are they even telling the truth?

Or are the facts that they recorded reliable?

Like, is this even what we think it is?

I discovered that there's a science called textual criticism

that scholars use to determine

the original wording of a document

when we no longer have the original.

This is how we know what Shakespeare wrote.

This is how we know what Gettysburg Address said.

How we reconstruct the writings of Aristotle and Socrates.

When we're assessing an ancient text,

textual critics have a range of ways

they'll try to ask the question, "Can we trust it?"

One way is looking at how many manuscripts do we have,

so we can compare and contrast the manuscripts,

handwritten copies together.

Another way is looking at how

early are these manuscripts.

Now what's fascinating with the New Testament

is it is in a category of its own.

They've taken the Bible and they

put it through the exact same tests

that they would put any document of antiquity,

and the Bible outperforms all of them.

There are more manuscripts that we have available to us

than any other ancient document.

What we have in the New Testament is,

the manuscripts that are found date back to the second century.

The second century.

There's not just one or two, there's a handful of them,

and then you've got thousands of them

uh, called the majority text of Scripture.

Altogether you have over 5,600 manuscripts.

5,600.

When it comes to other ancient literature

written during the period of the New Testament,

you have about 99 different authors

writing in Latin,

just a couple hundred years before Jesus

to a few hundred years afterward.

For those about a hundred different

authors in all the literature,

they've only got about 1700 Latin manuscripts,

and those manuscripts are dated between

the 9th and 16th centuries.

For Tacitus, the greatest Roman historian,

they have one manuscript that is dated to the 11th century.

What we have for the New Testament

are within just a few centuries, for the most part.

In fact, we have somewhere between 12 and 16 manuscripts

that are dated within 150 years of the autographs.

The earliest fragment we have of the New Testament

comes within 25 years of its writing.

The New Testament manuscripts are much earlier,

much more voluminous

to the original writing than anything else from the ancient world.

With all of those manuscripts, you can take

10 copies of, say, the Book of Matthew,

Gospel of Matthew, or-- or Ephesians,

and put them all next to each other and say,

"What were the changes over time?

This was found in this century, the 2nd century.

This was found in the 10th century.

This was found in the 13th century.

They all say the same thing.

Now, it is true that manuscripts

vary slightly

from one to another,

but most of those variations

are punctuation differences,

word order,

spelling differences.

They're not differences that affect the truth of the text.

One manuscript says Jesus Christ,

and the other says Christ Jesus.

But even when you take the small percentage of those,

there's not one of those

that would call into question

any core Christian doctrine that defines what the Gospel is.

Not one.

And so it just showed how accurately

that these manuscripts, over the years

had been copied.

It wasn't like the game of telephone

where one person whispers to another.

No, these were carefully copied,

and the integrity of the text had been preserved.

That doesn't prove that the Bible is true, but...

...it does prove this,

that if you're searching for truth,

it's a good place to start.

And what we see in Scripture is this

mind-blowing message

that says the Creator that brought

everything that we see into existence,

that is great beyond our imagination,

wants to have an intimate relationship with each of us.

Now, what about Christianity makes it unique,

makes it uniquely believable?

The simplest way to answer that

is Jesus of Nazareth,

because this guy shows up on the scene

and does something remarkable.

Whatever it is he did split history.

I'm Jim Wallace. J. Warner Wallace is the name I use publicly,

because there's lots of Jim Wallace's in the world.

I was not a Christian, and I was not raised in a Christian family

until I was about 35.

Most of my view of Christians was pretty limited

to the kinds of people I came in contact with

working as a homicide detective, and there were two kinds.

There were people I worked with,

and for the most part, a couple of them were--

were Christians, not many.

And if you asked them, "Why is this true?"

They really did not seem to have good answers.

As a matter of fact, they could make a case for why

this is our suspect in a particular crime

far better than they can make a

case why this is the Son of God.

So I was really not interested in that kind of

nonsense, if I'm honest with you, 'cause

the other group we knew that were Christians,

that would often say they were Christians,

were the people we were taken to jail.

So between those two groups, the

people who don't act like it's true or the people

who don't know how to defend it as though it's true,

I just didn't see a place.

Uh, why would I be interested in that?

Why would I be interested in-- in anything like that?

I was intrigued by the person of Jesus at some point.

Uh, I heard a pastor talk about Jesus as a smart guy,

the smartest man who ever lived.

So I bought a Bible to see what was so smart about Jesus,

and I was struck immediately by the

texture of the gospel accounts.

I knew that according to the traditions

and the history of the church,

two of them were eyewitness accounts allegedly

from Matthew and from John, and two were reportedly

taken from eyewitnesses like Peter

or like when Luke is interviewing

everyone who knew Jesus.

So I was interested to see if they would hold up

as eyewitness accounts, given that I, by this point,

had examined and tested

thousands of eyewitness accounts in trials,

and often you have four or five people

who will see the same thing, yet report it differently.

And so I knew that was just part of the

nature of eyewitness accounts,

but that's what intrigued me about the gospels.

That's what started it for me.

After examining them as eyewitnesses,

we have a certain template we use.

I was convinced that they were telling me something true.

It was in my early 20s

that I began to question my faith.

That was in my final semester of grad school.

I ended up doing my doctoral dissertation

trying to look at the question,

"Did Jesus rise from the dead?"

As a historian would approach it.

And I ended up getting involved

in dozens of public debates

with some of the leading skeptics in the world,

and I wanted to see if the evidence that I was finding

for the resurrection of Jesus

would withstand

the toughest of critical scrutiny.

And the more I did it, the more I became convinced

that the resurrection of Jesus

was an event that occurred in history.

It comes down to four major categories.

Were they really there to see what they said they saw?

Can they be corroborated in some way?

Have they changed their story over time?

And do they have a bias that would cause them to lie to us?

So I knew that was my template. That's always been my template.

It's my template for anyone I interview.

So I just applied that to the gospel authors.

And if you do,

you'll find that they are remarkably resilient.

We set aside

the question of whether the Bible is

some wholly inspired inerrant word of God,

and let's just say we can look at these as historical documents

and evaluate them as any other historian would.

What we essentially do is say, "Here are some historical facts

that are agreed upon virtually across the board

by all the scholars who study this field,

whether they're atheists, Christian, agnostic, Jewish."

Virtually all critical scholars today agree

Jesus of Nazareth was crucified

by the Roman governor Pontius Pilate,

and died as a result.

They also agree

many of Jesus' disciples

had experiences

that convinced them that Jesus

had risen from the dead and had appeared to them.

These experiences occurred in both

individual and in group settings.

Almost all of them agree that there was a skeptic

who persecuted the church named Paul,

and that he came to convert to Christianity

after he had an experience that he was convinced

was an appearance of the risen Jesus to him.

And that experience radically transformed his life

from being a persecutor of the church

to one of its most able defenders.

Then there's one that about 75% of scholars

agree on, and that's that the tomb was empty.

That's a big one.

What's interesting is, when the

disciples began proclaiming the resurrection,

what was the response from the Roman and Jewish leaders,

the very people who condemned him to death?

Well, their response was,

"The disciples must've stole the body."

Consider this for a moment because some people miss this.

Why would the enemies of Christianity

make an excuse that the disciples stole the body?

Well, because there was no body to report,

so they're implicitly admitting the tomb was empty.

This brings us to the central,

most important feature of his life.

He was murdered on a Roman cross,

dumped in the tomb,

and three days later the body was gone.

What happened?

It used to be the case long ago that

some would suggest the resurrection of Jesus

was just simply a legend that developed over time.

But then we've got so much evidence that goes back

to show that the resurrection of Jesus

was proclaimed by Jesus' disciples

at the earliest stage.

So you can accuse them of lying,

you can accuse them of hallucinating,

but a legend that developed over time

is not a viable option.

We can almost piece the entire

story of the resurrection together

without using the Bible

by looking at non-biblical or extra-biblical sources.

He is quoted by at least 17 authors

from A.D. 20 up to A.D. 150.

We're talking about people that we know,

emperors Hadrian and Trajan,

uh, Suetonius, historians talking about Jesus.

The hypothesis that Jesus

survived his crucifixion is something that was popular

a little over a hundred years ago,

but since the devastating critique of

the German skeptical scholar David Friedrich Strauss,

hardly anyone accepts that,

and I'm not aware of any credible scholar

who even sees that as a viable possibility.

These Romans were skilled in crucifixion.

They knew how to make sure that someone was completely dead.

And then others might say that maybe

all the people who claimed that they saw this resurrected Christ

were simply hallucinating.

Hallucinations are private occurrences

in the mind of an individual.

They have no external reference.

You can't experience the same hallucination.

And yet there were at least

three group appearances

that are reported in the earliest literature.

Or even the conspiracy hypothesis that the, you know,

disciples were making this up

to gain something for themselves.

Well, what did they gain?

Well, they were beaten, tortured, persecuted,

beheaded, stone whipped, and running for their lives.

These men who were in a position to know

whether Jesus had resurrected or not,

died excruciating deaths

when they could have said, "Look, it never happened.

We're inventing all this."

And-- And why would they invent this?

I-- I think one of the things that

we need to realize when we look at

the New Testament documents is

the New Testament documents were written down by

Bible Old Testament believing Jews

who thought they were God's chosen people.

They believed in Yahweh.

They didn't think someone

could resurrect in the middle of time.

They thought somebody would resurrect at the end of time,

but not in the middle of time.

And they didn't think anybody could claim

to be God. That would be blasphemy.

Yet you have these Old Testament Jews

saying a man claimed to be God and rose from the dead,

and then they went and suffered brutal torture,

and then died for it.

You see, many people...

...would die for a lie they think is the truth.

Some people today will martyr themselves for their faith.

But nobody will die for a lie they know is a lie.

And the New Testament writers were in a position to know

whether it was a lie or not, and

they went to their deaths anyway.

You can't get better evidence than that

unless you were there yourself.

So the bottom line to this whole thing is this...

The New Testament writers did not create the resurrection.

The resurrection created the New Testament writers.

That is the crux of the matter, that resurrection.

It transformed Paul.

It transformed James.

It transformed those cowardly disciples

to go out and die martyrs' deaths.

Transformed my life and every life

who's come to know Christ from the time of the apostles

to me and to you.

And then of course there's the Christian explanation.

The, "No, no, that's-- they didn't lie about it.

They weren't mistaken about it. They didn't dream it up.

They didn't-- weren't fooled by an imposter.

It wasn't a legend that occurred over time.

No, instead, it actually just happened."

If the Christian explanation is true...

...then a resurrection occurred.

But, uh, that's ridiculous

because I'm a philosophical naturalist.

I'm committed to naturalisms. There's no way

I would ever accept that explanation.

There's the weakness. The weakness is

that you're inserting something supernatural

into an otherwise philosophically natural

discipline called history.

Perhaps the most popular

naturalistic explanation

that is used by scholars today who reject the resurrection

is, they have an aversion to miracles, to the supernatural.

David Hume was a famous Scottish skeptic

from the late 18th century,

and he posited what we can call "the balancing argument."

He would say, "Okay,

we've got miracle reports,

and eyewitness testimony is often reliable,

but it's also often unreliable.

On the other hand here, we have natural law,

the laws of science,

that tells us things like when a person dies, they stay dead.

They're not coming back to life ever.

They're gonna have a lot more probability here

that Jesus did not come back from the dead,

that miracles do not happen given the laws of nature."

Now, the problem with this scenario

is it's incorrectly stated,

because what we observe with an exceptionless regularity

is that corpses do not come back from the dead...

...by natural causes.

Just imagine a thought experiment with me for a second.

We have a New Testament. It's got four Gospels,

and those Gospels describe Jesus of Nazareth

as a wise preaching rabbi, but never...

...works a miracle.

I don't think there would be a single historian or skeptic

who would deny the historicity of Jesus

if that was how he was described,

but we do. Why? Because there's miracles.

Well, that's not about the strength of manuscript evidence.

That's not about the strength of historical claims.

That's about a presuppositional bias against miracles.

You're committed to a form of philosophical naturalism

that doesn't let you embrace the clearest, simplest explanation,

which is just, they're reporting

what they saw.

So it's really a matter of philosophical bias

that I think causes us

to come up with all the other explanations.

But if you made a list of all their liabilities and all of their strengths,

you will find that the Christian explanation

has the greatest number of strengths

and only one liability,

and that liability happens to be...

...your presuppositional bias that precedes

any of the decision you might make about the text.

But look, if we already believe what the science

is telling us about cosmology,

you already believe there is something

outside of space, time, and matter.

If there's an infinite, all-powerful being

who is the author of everything, you don't think he can

intervene in natural forces?

I think he probably could. So the-- the biggest miracle,

if that is the case, on Scripture,

is not in the New Testament.

It's Genesis 1, everything from nothing.

The greatest miracle in the Bible

is not the resurrection.

That's easy compared to the greatest miracle.

The greatest miracle in the Bible is the first verse,

"In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."

If that verse is true,

every other verse in the Bible is at least possible.

You've got to look at the evidence

for the resurrection of Jesus,

not just try to brush it out

and say miracles don't occur today.

Look at the evidence.

No one in the history of anyone

has had the impact that Jesus of Nazareth has had.

There isn't anyone who's been written about as much as Jesus.

You can go to the Library of Congress.

You can go to Google Books.

There's no one who's affected the history of art.

Every genre, every ism,

from Impressionism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Popism,

the top three masters have all imaged, sculpted,

painted, etched Jesus of Nazareth.

This can't be said of anyone else.

He's on the pages of the Quran,

on the pages of Bahá'u'lláh's sacred writings,

on the pages of Buddhism, Hinduism, Krishna, New Age.

Everyone loves Jesus,

but Jesus says, "No, actually, I--

I'm glad, I appreciate that, but I'm the only way."

This can't be said for Buddha.

This can't be said for anybody else.

It can only be said of Jesus.

Just think about that for a second.

Why this guy, this nobody,

this guy who's just born in some nowhere town,

and raised in another small nowhere town.

He didn't travel more than about 200 miles

in the short three years he had.

Doesn't have an education you can really speak of.

His family's not wealthy.

Never gets married. Never has kids to extend his legacy.

Doesn't rule a nation.

This is the guy

who changes everything

in literature, art, music, education,

science, and world religions.

And because there's no other fictional character,

and there's no other living human

who's ever had this impact, the third option,

that he's just the God of the universe

who enters back into his creation

and has this kind of expected result,

seems to me to be the most reasonable inference.

So the question is, "What

best explains all of those things?"

And the answer is,

"He who is dead now lives."

He who is dead...

...now lives.

And that, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth,

makes all the difference

compared to every other religious view.

This is the pivotal, central, foundational issue

that makes or breaks Christianity.

Indeed, Paul himself

said, "If Jesus has not raised from the dead,

if we believe in a resurrection contrary to fact,

people should pity us.

People should feel sorry for us."

"But the fact is," he said,

"Jesus has been risen."

And His resurrection seals all the things

that He claimed about reality.

When the angel Gabriel came to

Mary and to Joseph

to explain to them what was going to happen,

and-- "Mary's going to be pregnant,

you're going to name him Jesus, Yeshua,

which means 'Yahweh saves.'

You're gonna name your baby 'Yahweh saves.'

And you're going to call him Emmanuel,"

which is a Hebrew prepositional phrase,

which means "God with us."

"Your baby named 'Yahweh saves' is God with us."

John 1:1 says, in the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God."

And later on in that chapter, in verse 14,

we now come to understand that

Jesus was this Word of God

that John was referring to.

Colossians 2 verse 9 says,

"In Him, Jesus, dwells the fullness

of God in bodily form."

John 8:58, Jesus said,

"Before Abraham was, I am.

Which in Hebrew is YHWH, Yahweh.

It's a Hebrew word. It means a "be verb."

It means I am, or it can mean I will be, or it can mean I was.

I am, I was, I will be the eternally existing God.

We see Jesus forgive sins in Mark chapter 2

by his own authority.

The Bible is very clear

that Jesus is the eternal

self-existent creator.

When my daughter was, uh, about eight years old,

she asked me a question.

She said, "Papa, how do we know that God is true?"

Of course, this is the kind of

question I answer a lot with adults,

but now I have to answer it for my eight-year-old,

and I'm trying to think of a way to characterize it.

And all of a sudden, a line kind of popped into my mind,

and I realized this is the way

I approach the whole project

of making the case for God,

and not just for God, but more specifically for Christianity.

And here's what I said to her.

I said, "Honey, the reason that we believe that God is true...

...is because He's the best explanation

for the way things are."

I-- I want you to think about that for a moment.

The reason we believe God is true

is because He's the best

explanation for the way things are.

We know God by His effects.

We see a creation, that's an effect,

so we reason back to a cause, a creator.

We see design in the universe and design in life,

that's the effect, so we reason back to a cause, a designer.

We have a moral law written on our hearts,

so we reason back to a moral lawgiver.

We're reasoning from effect to cause.

This is what scientists do.

They have an effect, and they're trying to discover

what caused the effect.

And this is why Paul says in Romans chapter 1

that God's invisible qualities and divine attributes

are clearly seen so that men are without excuse.

They're clearly seen by what has been made, he says.

In other words, what's been made is the creation,

and he's saying, "That's the effect,

let's reason back to the cause."

As mankind, we believe in external reality

that has some truth, and that I can know it.

This is why I think Christianity is true,

because when I look at all the big questions of

life, like, "What is prime reality?

How do we know right and wrong? What does it mean to be human?"

Christianity provides what is true

in those areas and what best matches the human experience.

Christian scripture describes the world the way it really is.

The idea that we are created in the image

of a-- of a God who is morally perfect,

and so we're capable of incredible beauty,

yet at the same time we're so rebellious and fallen,

the same person who's capable of beauty

could also be capable of this?

This is why so many times you'll hear someone accused

of a crime and you'll think to yourself, "There's no way.

That guy? Come on."

And we have a sec-- a-- a second of doubt.

The fallen nature of humans

is so repeatedly described on the pages

all the way from the first chapter of Genesis

to the New Testament.

So it turns out that that description

of who we are as humans is a much more accurate--

it's a much more ancient description.

You- -You give me a new system,

a new set of laws, a new culture to live in,

I will find a way to corrupt it, because the problem is not

an outward-in problem, it's an inward-out problem.

I had a question once at Michigan State University.

I knew there was an atheist sitting in the audience.

When it was time for Q&A,

his hand shot up immediately

and I said, "Yes sir!"

And he said,

"If there is a good God, why doesn't He

stop all the evil in the world?"

I said, "Sir, that is an excellent question.

Maybe because if He did, He might start with you

and me, because we do evil every day."

You ever notice when we start questioning God about evil,

we're always saying, "God, why don't you stop him?"

Or, "God, why don't you stop her?"

We never think about stopping ourselves.

I mean, if God wanted to stop all the evil in the world...

...He could do it immediately.

He could just take away our free will.

But if he takes away our free will, then we can't love,

and if we can't love, then this is not a moral universe.

He could have created humans in such a way

that we would always choose to do right all the time,

and that we would always love Him,

but then we wouldn't have any free will.

And it's like, well, if we loved Him,

it's only because we were programmed to do that.

But God gave us a free will.

He said, "You could choose

to love me or not."

But of course, with free will comes evil.

It comes pain and suffering because we

hurt one another as a result.

And if Genesis provides any kind of truth behind it,

the sin in the world can also result in natural evil,

such as hurricanes and famines and death.

I think one of the toughest questions

to answer

is, not so much, "Does God exist?"

'cause I think that's

easier to answer than the question,

"Is God good?" I think a lot of people

struggle with the goodness of God in light of...

...some of the horrendous suffering we see,

the evils that people inflict on one another.

Here's the reality.

Every worldview

has to give an explanation for evil.

The question is not, "Can I tell you why God allowed

every single act of evil?"

'Cause here's the deal.

I can't.

I don't know.

The question is, "Which worldview

offers the most logically

and existentially compelling response to evil?"

That's why I'm a Christian.

And a large measure is because of who the person of Jesus is.

It's only within the Christian worldview

that not only is God sovereign,

not only is He directing the world towards

good, and we use our suffering

and the evil we experience for good,

but it says God isn't distant.

God didn't just send a book.

God didn't just send a prophet or an angel.

It's only within Christianity...

...that says God steps down into our suffering.

Intimately understands

our hurt and our pain.

So if somebody's hurting and they say, "Where is God?"

Part of the answer is, "God is right there suffering with you."

The beautiful thing about God and even Christianity

is that we do not deny the reality of suffering.

But the beautiful thing is that

we serve a God who has promised us in His word

that He will be with us in the midst of our difficulties,

in the midst of our suffering, in the midst of our pain,

in the midst of our loss.

We serve a God who is a personal God and His presence is near

to comfort us even in life's most difficult circumstances.

I've based my faith on evidence.

And so I trust that He has

morally sufficient reason to allow

the type of suffering that He does.

And I've seen it in my own life.

I've been in situations where

I could not fathom the purpose

that He could possibly bring

out of this particular situation.

I couldn't fathom that there could be any point

to the very sudden death of my nephew,

who I loved very much.

I did not see how there could be any point to that,

how there could be any good

or morally sufficient reason for that to happen.

But in the weeks and months and even years that have

followed that event, I've seen it.

I've seen the goodness of God

show up in such big ways.

I've seen...

...the effect as that's rippled out in the lives of others.

I don't know the reason God allowed that,

but I trust in Him and I trust in His goodness.

I want you to address those unbelievers who are watching.

Okay.

What would you say to them?

Okay.

So I know what it is to have lived my entire life

denying that there's anything outside...

...of-- of my own choices, my own, uh, authority.

You know, it's really easy to throw the dart

against the wall and just go draw

the bullseye around wherever the dart lands.

And a lot of us have been doing that for our entire lives,

and we get to decide what the bullseye is.

But I think we always know that's not necessarily the case, right?

Look, if there is a God

that has created everything from nothing,

if all space, time, and matter has been created

by a personal being rather than an impersonal force...

...well, that personal being then has the ability

to eliminate all imperfection.

He's all-powerful, including moral imperfection.

And there's the thing that I think got me thinking about...

...if there's a God, He's not a good God.

If there's a God, He's a morally perfect God.

And there's the difference.

I've had good days, lots of good days,

but I've never had a morally perfect day.

So it turns out that if I want to be in the presence of

something that's morally perfect,

it's a very hot fire to stand in front of.

Uh, you'd have to, in some way,

adopt the nature.

And that's what we do a-- as Christians.

We're adopting the nature of the one perfect being

who comes in the person of Jesus.

There's something that everybody knows,

no matter when they lived or where they lived,

and that is that there's something wrong with the world.

The world is broken, but there's something else they know too.

They know that the brokenness of the world

has something to do with their own brokenness.

That is, our brokenness, that we look down inside of ourselves

and see something that's ugly.

I addressed a large audience at-- at Berkeley, California,

and I got to this point, and I said,

"There's something that everybody knows here

about themselves, and that is, you have a bad self-image."

How do I know that? Because everybody does.

We look inside of ourselves, we see something down in there

that's dark and broken, and the thing that's broken is moral.

Something evil is in there.

And we sometimes try to deny it, but really, we can't.

We know it.

And we have a word for the feeling that we have.

And I asked the audience, "What is the word

that describes the feeling of our own moral brokenness?"

And I just paused, and then I started

hearing it from the audience.

"Guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt."

People are saying-- why do we all--

Why do we feel guilty?

Maybe,

maybe

we feel guilty

because we are guilty.

If we are guilty...

...the answer to guilt...

...is not denial.

The answer to guilt is forgiveness.

"And this," I told them, "is where Jesus comes in."

And Jesus even talked about this in one

parable about a man in the back of the synagogue...

...beating his breast,

saying, "God have mercy on me, a sinner."

This is exactly what God is willing to give

to everyone who does the same thing.

Mercy.

And He can give mercy because what Jesus did,

He took the punishment that I deserve, and you deserve,

and everybody else deserves, and He took it on Himself.

This is why Christians say Jesus paid the price for God.

So He loved the world that He gave...

...His one and only son, so that whoever

would believe, that his trust

in Him, would not perish...

...but have everlasting life.

And incidentally,

maybe this has occurred to some.

This is why Jesus is the only way.

He is the only one who solved the problem.

He himself stepped in

to provide you a way back

so that you could live in goodness, truth, and beauty.

You could live in freedom.

That shows you already,

without you even believing in Him,

how much He values you and how much He loves you.

You are of immeasurable worth.

God's grace is the most beautiful thing

in the entire world, past, present, and future.

And the biblical story is that God loves you,

recognizes that you and I have

profoundly fallen short of the standard,

but God has grace for us,

is willing to forgive us and restore us

if we will trust in His son, Jesus Christ.

And by trusting in Him, you can accept this free gift.

If you don't wanna trust in Him, you don't have to.

There's only two destinations in the afterlife.

You either gonna be with God, that's heaven,

or you're gonna be separated from God, that's hell.

And if you don't want God now,

you're not gonna want Him in eternity.

When we sort of look within ourselves,

we notice that there's this desire deep within us.

We sort of cover it over with...

various pursuits in life,

but at the end of the day,

we are unsatisfied.

The Christian gospel actually diagnoses

why we have this unmet desire in us,

and that's the fallenness of the world,

this state that we're in where we're separated from God,

and we desire,

knowing it or not,

to be reconciled and satisfied by Him.

Blaise Pascal put it as there being an

infinite abyss within our hearts

that sort of longs for

an infinite object to fill it.

I wouldn't

pretend that

I've got it all figured out.

I certainly do not.

But as I've pressed in...

...as I've investigated,

it's hard for me to take seriously

the person who says this is just a fiction and a fairy tale.

Put away your cell phones,

your computers, your cameras, etc.

Just go out into wild nature

and really enjoy what we see there

and realize there's something about those animals.

There's something about the scenery.

There's something about the beauty.

I mean, beauty argues for God,

but if you're never exposed to natural beauty,

then that has no impact on you.

What science has produced

in support of the existence of God

and what history has produced

in support of the reliability of the Gospels

as a sound historical testimony

of the life of Jesus of Nazareth has just strengthened our case.

And so in the last 48 years now,

since I've been a follower of Christ,

I have been making the case

that Christianity is worth thinking about.

I think it's worth thinking about

because I think it's actually true.

And when I say it's true, I mean it's true in the way

gravity is true, okay?

It's not just true for me.

It's true to the real world.

Christianity has...

...a lot of very robust evidence

that demonstrate its truthfulness.

The arguments for God's existence

are intellectually satisfying,

they're robust, they match reality,

they make the best sense

of what we see in the world.

All those big questions,

but beyond that,

it's healing for the soul, because it really cures

the root problem of everything that's wrong with the world.

God has provided an answer

through His son Jesus and what He accomplished

with His sacrificial death on the cross.

So what happens is, I'm gonna give you enough evidence

that's gonna point you in a certain direction, but there's

gonna be a gap in the evidence trail.

You're gonna have to step across that gap.

We call that "rendering a verdict."

It won't be blind. I'm gonna point you,

get you almost all the way there,

but you're gonna step across

your unanswered questions.

I have open questions about how God does certain things,

why God does certain things,

but I think there's enough evidence at the end of that evidence trail

to make that step we call faith.

If we really are honest...

...it's not always about whether there's enough evidence for it.

It's not always about whether I've had an experience that confirms it.

I think more and more, in a world in which

identity is more and more important to people,

it's about do I want to identify with it?

We are more independent than ever before.

We can customize everything, from our vehicles

to our internet use, to our media entertainment.

Now, this ancient view says, "No, you can't customize it.

It existed before you.

We have to bend our knee to it."

That's what I found offensive.

And I think a lot of people find that offensive.

If this is true,

would you become a Christ follower?

And for a lot of us right now,

if they were honest, they would say no.

Well, then you know it's not a matter of evidence.

If there's something that you don't want to identify with,

or there's something that you still

want to do that you think you can't do.

And so what I would say is I'm-- I'm just more convinced that--

that the best reason to be a Christian is just

not because I was raised that way. It's not because

I was trying to fix my marriage. I was trying to

straighten out my life. I had a great life

before I was a Christian. It's because it's true.

And I'm stuck with that.

And, uh, I'm-- I'm willing to be stuck in the truth.

We really, I think, make

something very simple to be

something that-- that's hard for people to grasp.

There's nowhere in Scripture

that we can see where someone

prayed a prayer to be saved.

But what we see is that people trusted.

Paul tells us in Romans... that

those who call upon the name of the Lord

will be saved.

If someone were to ask me, "What do I do then?

I know that there's a God. I know I'm separated from Him.

What do I do?"

I would say, "Simply cry out to God...

...and say, 'Lord, save me.'"