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Christian Evidences

Bless Your Heart by Cindy Colley

Guest Writer: Caleb Colley–Two Tales of Gen X.

Posted on May 12, 2025

(Caleb has helped me immensely as I teach with these two compilations/scenarios. Next time: a few obvious, but timely, suggestions to help us stay in scenario 2.)

The first is a composite of several of the many stories I read (among the thousands that are available on-line) of deconstructors. Tom, a young man who grew up attending the services of the church and being active in the youth group, is doing research for a science paper he has been assigned to write for his high school biology class. He comes across an article that provides an argument for the common descent of chimpanzees and humans based on the fused chromosome that humans have. He doesn’t know what to do with this, but his confidence in the Genesis account is shaken. Not long after this, Tom finds out that one of his close friends thinks of himself as being homosexual. He asks his parents why they think that homosexual people are living in sin, and they have some vague sense that the Bible probably teaches against that, but they don’t know where in the Bible it is discussed. Tom has in his mind that his good friend must be pleasing to God, despite his homosexuality, so homosexuality could not be wrong. Later, Tom reads the accounts in Joshua of the Israelites driving out and killing the Canaanites. He doesn’t know how a loving God could allow that. He also reads that there is little evidence outside the Bible that the Israelites were ever slaves in Egypt. He talks to his preacher about it, who tells him to have faith in the Bible, but doesn’t explain any answers to these problems, and so Tom’s confidence in the Old Testament wears away. Tom tells himself that he still believes in Jesus. But then Tom goes to college, and in a religious studies class, he is presented with a book that argues that the New Testament text has been corrupted and is historically unreliable. So, Tom is led to believe that he can’t know what Jesus was really like. The final straw comes when Tom carefully considers the doctrine of hell. He thinks that it is impossible for a loving God to punish people everlastingly in hell. By this time, however, Tom is so unwilling to hear from people who are citing the Bible to him that he has distances himself from them and will not listen to them anymore. So, Tom thinks to himself, “I don’t think that Christianity is true anymore, and there may not even be a God.” 

The second story is quite different, but it is also a composite of my experience with many faithful young people who grow up in the church and stay with the church. Jane is a young woman who also grew up attending the services of the church, and in studying the Bible with a friend of hers who does not believe in God, she is presented with an argument that chimpanzees and humans share a common ancestor. She has never considered the evidence presented there, but she finds the article on the Apologetics Press Web site that presents clear evidence that the best explanation for human chromosomal fusion is not common descent, but common design. Jane is very aware of the LGBTQ+ movement, and she wants all of those who identify as being homosexual to be saved, but she also learns as she studies the Bible daily with her parents that God loves them too much to endorse their sin. Her Bible class teacher at church has made her well informed of the Bible passages that deal with the issue, and has even headed off the argument that these passages are cultural artifacts that are vestiges of patriarchy and are not to be taken seriously today. So she is too grounded in the Bible to be swayed by the Woke movement. Jane’s confidence in the Bible grows every time she sees archaeological support for biblical events, even though she understands that not every Bible event can be verified by secular archaeology. Her dad explains to her that there are those who think the Bible has been corrupted, but they  they review the manuscript evidence for the New Testament, showing how well supported it is, and that we can know the original text with greater than 99-percent accuracy. Jane’s preacher addresses the topic of hell, showing how that God is the One uniquely situated to determine the appropriate punishment for sin, and that Jesus died as an expression of God’s love, so that nobody has to go to hell. With every potential crisis of faith, Jane’s confidence in God grows, because she gets the answers she needs.

Bless Your Heart by Cindy Colley

Those Word Problems

Posted on November 7, 2011

The more I study the scriptures, the more acutely aware I become of their authenticity; that is they are what they claim to be. They are, in fact, a revelation of The Creator– of Himself and His eternal Will for the created.  The longer I live on this planet, the more evidence I see, in archaeological discoveries, in modern scientific agreement with the ancient texts, in the obvious design of the universe and in the historic fulfillment of Biblical prophecies, that this book we call the Bible is from God.

As I stand before this mountain of evidence that this book I hold in my hand is the communication of a Supreme Being, I’m stricken with the Book’s simplicity. (I can read and understand the actual words of God.) I’m amazed at its brevity. (I can read it through many times in a lifetime.)  But, most of all, I’m taken with its relevance. It held the secret to hygiene and health for the ancient nomadic nation of Israel.  Many of those “secrets” have been medically substantiated only in recent decades and yet, have practical significance in modern societies. The Bible holds the keys to ancient and, until recently, unknown civilizations; civilizations buried for centuries by the debris of history. But as long as archaeologists keep digging, they will keep finding relics from biblical civilizations. The Bible is relevant to their work. That’s because the Bible is authentic and, frankly, any case against its authenticity is getting harder and harder to argue.
Why is it, then, that intelligent professing Christians, in the twenty-first century, while accepting the fact that the Bible is from God, fail to view it as a conclusive moral compass?  So often, when asked, we freely confess that we believe in Jehovah God. We are confident that the Bible is His revealed will. We confess that Jesus is His Son. But when it comes to the daily decisions we’re called on to make, we find little relevance in its pages. 
A Christian man walks away from his wife and enters an adulterous relationship with a married coworker. This coworker has already committed adultery with three other men during the course of her ten year marriage, literally devastating the little lives of her innocent children.  His families (both his physical family and his family in the Lord) are begging him to stop and think. But he proceeds in this sinful relationship. What is he thinking? Is he blind to the history of this woman and is he naïve enough to think he will be her last conquest?  Most of all, is his claim to believe in the Bible one hundred percent theoretical and zero percent practical?
An alcoholic enters a rehab program, endures excruciating withdrawal symptoms and dutifully follows the program.  He is released to a new and exciting world of fresh opportunities. He finds a job, becomes faithful in the local congregation, and stays clean for seven months, until a friend pressures him to attend a sports event where alcohol will flow freely and all his old friends will congregate. He makes a deliberate decision to go.  What is he thinking?  Has he mentally blocked out the high priced lessons of his personal history? And what about the Biblical admonition to “abstain from the appearance of [this] evil” which can so easily consume him (I Thess. 5:22)?  Is his faith practical when it counts? 
A modern society founded on biblical moral principles, has grown to about three million people, a large number of which could still tell you that the primary reason for the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was the sin of homosexuality.  Medical science in this society has made it possible for average people to look at video footage taken from the inside of a woman’s womb and see the viability of preborn life. Geneticists in this society have proven that all genetic information has been assigned to the preborn baby at the time of conception.  It has been determined that babies feel pain in the twentieth week of development.1  But major corporations in this society are spending thousands of dollars to celebrate and promote homosexuality and abortion; to protect the rights of those who participate and even sometimes to censure those who object. Abortion remains legal in this society and homosexual unions are recognized as marriages in highly populated areas of this country. Respected pollsters tell us that sixty percent of people in this country believe that the Bible is “totally accurate in all of its teachings”.2 Where are those people of faith?  Is faith relevant in this society?
When faith becomes irrelevant to the daily decision making process, I suggest that it is no longer faith. If there is a “disconnect” between the observation of Biblical history and its application in modern times, the “disconnect” zaps the relevance from any claimed adherence to scriptures. We know the truth, but we are not people of faith.
My kids did not enjoy math. They both have great memories and thus, in their early years they could spit out the theory or equation that solved the problem every time. But it was those “word problems” that they especially loathed, because you had to think about how the equation (the truth given) applied to a particular situation in the real world. Not only did you have to figure out exactly where to plug in the equation (the truth given), you had to remember that superfluous information was often given; information that was not relevant to the solution. This was information that you just had to ignore to get to the bottom line answer.  And at the end you had to remember to identify exactly how the truth affected the outcome of the situation (i.e.…you had to know not only the number that was the answer, but “was it that many unneeded cookies or that many extra students who had no cookie?”).  That’s a lot to deal with:  a truth that is applicable somewhere, extra information or circumstances to try and throw you off, and only one right answer that must be properly identified. That’s why they hated word problems. They were often long and arduous and required some cognitive skills. But isn’t it true that it’s the word problems that gives math relevance in our society? I don’t need to know it if it’s not going to affect real life situations.
And that’s how it is with God’s Word. I can know that the scriptures tell me to flee fornication (I Cor. 6:18), but until I can plug that truth into decisions about entertainment choices and dating behavior, it is really not very useful. Until I plug that truth into a situation and find the answer to a dilemma, I only know the formula. I don’t yet have a practical faith. I can know that the Proverbs writer wrote “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise(Prov.20:1),” but until I am able to recognize that deception when it presents itself in a modern commercial or invitation, I only know. I am not wise or faithful. 
As a Christian, I am familiar with Genesis 19 and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. I know that homosexuality is called vile affection in Romans 1:26. I understand that murder is the taking of innocent human life and is condemned in scripture.  “But the political process is much more complicated than all of that…..You can’t just plug the Bible into modern America.”  Why not?  If the Bible contains absolute truth, then its formulas are not only acceptable, but necessary in solving the real life situations of any society in any generation.  Jesus, Himself, reached back into the early Old Testament writings and plugged scriptures into His moment of temptation in Matthew four.  Faith is eliminating the superfluous psychobabble inserted into troubling modern scenarios. It’s plugging the Word into the problem solving process. It’s wisely seeing how the Word affects the final outcome. You cannot oversimplify truth and the necessity of its application in problem-solving. Faith is putting the Scriptures into the “word problems”. 

(This article first appeared in THINK magazine, Focus Press, Brentwood, TN)
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1 “Pain of the Unborn,” www.NRLC.org, September 15,2004.
2 “Religious Beliefs Remain Consistent, but Subgroups Are Quite Different,” www.Barna.org March 19,2004.

Please visit Cindy’s Blog at cindycolley.blogspot.com/
Uncategorized

You Would Get a Headache of Phenomenal Proportions

Posted on May 14, 2011
Did you know that dental drills, of sorts, date way back to the Indus civilization a few thousand years ago?  (Not that you really need to know that for any practical purpose, except maybe when you one day take that class you’ve always dreamed of taking on the history of dentistry. You’ll be way ahead of the game.) Modern dentist drills rotate at speeds of 400,000 rpm and they have metal alloy burs of various sizes for different drilling jobs. Jaws aching yet?

Right now outside of my window there is a loud drilling sound occurring over and over. It’s fast, it’s powerful and it’s repetitive. It’s a woodpecker. Now, I’m not going to go all technical on you, but this woodpecker’s drill is fast, too. He’s not messing around as he destroys the fascia board on my house. And he does all of his precision drilling without any tools. He merely uses his maximum durability beak, his built-in shock absorber system, and his claws, which furnish him some super stability.

Just consider with me the extreme headache you would get if you hit your head just once against a tree—hard enough to penetrate the tree’s bark. That would be worse than your worst-ever migraine and you would find some medication pretty quickly. Yet my friend outside my window has already hit his cranium against my house and various trees out there hundreds of times this morning. David Juhasz says this about his amazing shock absorber system:

The forces involved in the woodpecker’s hammering away at trees are incredible, for the suddenness with which the head is brought to a halt during each peck results in a stress equivalent to 1,000 times the force of gravity. This is more than 250 times the force to which an astronaut is subjected in a rocket during liftoff…. In most birds, the bones of the beak are joined to the bones of the cranium—the part of the skull that surrounds the brain. But in the woodpecker the cranium and beak are separated by a sponge-like tissue that takes the shock each time the bird strikes its beak against a tree. The woodpecker’s shock-absorber is so good that scientists say it is far better than any that humans have invented.

And Darwinian evolutionists would like us to believe that this amazing phenomenon, combined with all the others that make the woodpecker outside my window the extraordinary creature that he is, just happened to evolve into a living power drill?
May I just agree with Dr. Juhasz when he further exposited that whenever the first “versions” of the woodpecker’s evolving drill system were used on real structures and trees, they would have beaten their brains out, long before their shock absorbers developed. (After all, they depend on their drills for food and if there was ever a time when they found their food elsewhere, then why would they have gotten busy “evolving” a shock absorber system in the first place?)
Now, I know I’m not a rocket scientist, and I know I tend to over-simplify. But simple people can observe nature all around them and figure out that the unanswered and unanswerable questions about the world and its amazing inhabitants—I say, the questions themselves—defy the theory of organic evolution.
For family Bible time tonight, have your kids search the word “woodpecker” on at Apologetics Press. Look at the pictures. Read the fun information and sing “Our God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing our God cannot do!” Talk to this mighty God and praise him for the amazing world in which we live. Then feel free to come to my yard for the full experience!

Colley, Caleb (2009), “The Jackhammer in Your Backyard,” [On-line] URL:http//www.apologeticspress.org/APContent.aspx?category=9&article=2315

Juhasz, David (2001), “The Incredible Woodpecker,” [On-line], URL: http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v18/i1/woodpecker.asp.

Please visit Cindy’s Blog at cindycolley.blogspot.com/