First, I wanted to say that I am glad that you agree that the person in my post called Paul was using bad arguments. Although I know a few Christians who do not reason like that, it is still a very common thing that I hear when i talk to people and that is why I posted it. From your comments, I would imagine that you believe that reason, logic and historical evidence is the best way to know the truth rather than going from a personal experience. Would you say that is true?

Second, I have read many of Josh McDowell’s books including Evidence that Demands a Verdict. I have also a great many other apologetics books such as Lee Stobel’s The Case for Christ, JP Moreland’s Scaling the Secular City and many others. Although McDowell’s writings are a little dated, many of the arguments found in them are still used today. The problems that I ran into were when I studied this material for myself over the years, it became apparent that there were many problems with early Christian writings and that many of the Christian apologists that I had read and believed for so long just did not represent the information accurately. Many of the arguments of McDowell and others concerning early Christian writings were VERY misleading and factually inaccurate and when I looked at the evidence myself, it was actually very weak in many ways.

Some examples of problems are:

- The four new testament gospels are not eye witnesses.
- The four new testament gospels are anonymous. We don’t know who wrote them for sure.
- There is major historical inaccuracies in the Old and New Testament
- There is major contradictions in both the old and new testaments
- We do not have any original manuscripts of the new testament and the closest copies that we have are 30 to 60 years after the events.
- The earlier the NT manuscripts, the more problems and contradictions that exist in them.
- It has been demonstrated that Christian apologists selectively pick and choose the evidence that most supports their case and overlook tons of evidence that does not support their case.

Here is a few articles to read if you are interested that go through some of the problems with Josh McDowell’s research and writings:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/beyond_born_again/chap5.html

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/jeff_lowder/jury/

Here also is a review of Lee Stobel’s The Case for Christ and this will give you an idea of some of the problems that we are dealing with there as well.

http://www.bidstrup.com/apologetics.htm

I did not start reading material like the above articles until after I started to see big problems myself in Christian writings. Then as I began to look outside of the evangelical world, I found that scholars had been pointing out these kind of problems for the last 100 years but evangelicals largely ignore them. I also discovered that the “non-christian” scholars and writers seemed to be much more honest with the evidence then any of the Christians I had read.

I am still totally open on this subject and continue to read and interact with people on a regular basis about it. I am interested in what is actually true about the world and if the evidence shows that Christianity is true, then I want to believe it. I have just not found that to be the case as of yet.

I look forward to your reply. If you would like to continue this discussion privately via email I would be open to that as well.

Jeff

Jan Among