HS Bible
Mr. Jeanfreau
August 19 2016
Are God and His Words Reliable?
God is a mystery to most people, sometimes even faithful Christians, but reliability of God and His Word (known as the Bible), can actually be proven. Questions that often times come up when discussing this difficult subject are “How do we know the Bible is true and trustworthy?” and most obviously, “Does God exist?” Instead of approaching these questions with personal experiences of God being their “fix” and if God worked for me then he could work for you,” rather there is a way of being able to show the historical accuracy and realist approach …show more content…
The Bible gives the account for who God is, what He has done, and what He has done/is doing through world history in both salvation and judgement. The Bible is said to be given to God’s people as the only source of truth and guidance. People often times doubt there is a God based off the doubt in the reliability go the Bible. In terms of determining the authoritativeness of the New Testament, there are thousands of complete manuscripts and multiple thousands more fragmented sections available. The number of manuscripts majorly outweighs the manuscript evidence from any other historical work that people considered authoritative and reliable. For example, the very popular work of Homer known as the Iliad has only 700 copies that have been found. The New Testament contains many claims about the Old Testaments’s reliability; Jesus (a man Christians believe to be God’s son who was perfect and died for the sins of the world), in the New Testament, makes 7 key points about the Old Testament. Norman Heisler explains it best, “Jesus affirmed its divine authority…its imperishability…its unbreakability…its ultimate supremacy…its factual inerrancy…its historical reliability…[and] its scientific accuracy. Corroboration of biblical history and accounts also proves the trustworthiness of the Bible. There are many non-biblical references to events that were written about in the Bible. …show more content…
He explained that a conception of a perfect being without existence is like imagining a triangle whose interior angles don’t sum up to 180 degrees. From this difficult argument we learned that the existence of God was almost obvious and logical, as out-spoken as a basic math truth. The second argument is known as the “First-Cause Argument”, which included the philosophers known Plato, Aristotle, and St. Thomas Aquinas. This argument discusses the assumption of every event must have a cause, and that cause must have a cause, and so on and so forth. Without an end to this cycle it would be considered infinite, but a casual loop cannot exist, and neither can a casual chain of infinite length. So this began the mystery of a “first cause” which in itself is uncaused, unconditioned and supreme, this describes the being philosophers call God. These are only two examples of the role philosophy plays in authenticating God’s existence and the Bible’s reality. As was mentioned before philosophers take scientifically unexplained phenomena and use logic, reason, and human nature to prove the necessity and logical reason for a