Dear skeptic,
As a Christian, I am absolutely convinced God exists and the Bible is His word because I have seen and tested the evidence. I have tested His promises, and He always comes through. I also have a personal relationship with Him through Jesus Christ and He often answers my prayers. But I know this is unlikely to sway you because you can’t see that. So instead I want to talk about real, hard evidence.
Much of the evidence for God and the Bible is not even on the atheist’s radar. As such, I wrote a free book for skeptics to show one such area of overlooked, testable evidence that strongly supports the existence of God and the inspiration of the Bible. Knowing my target audience is very skeptical of “religious tomfoolery,” I used the following criteria for writing the book’s contents so it would be as unbiased as possible:
I did not want it to be like other apologetics books that rely on philosophical or logical arguments, or where the reader has to trust answers given to him from second- or third-hand sources. I wanted it to rely only on real-world, objective evidence that can be investigated by the reader and proven using purely secular means.I wanted the book to begin with an apparently outlandish biblical claim, followed by a series of straight-forward, unbiased questions for the reader to answer so as to prove or disprove the claim. This way the answers and conclusion would be entirely his own, based only on his own research. I would not feed the reader any answers he might not trust, nor would I word the questions to try to sway him to answer a certain way apart from where the evidence leads.The reader would be free to use any method, source, or tool he trusts to do his research: subject-matter experts, first-hand experience, magazines, news articles, internet, encyclopedias, artificial intelligence, whatever.Because the book is about testing the Bible and comparing it to reality, the reader would need to read various scripture passages in some Bible of his choosing. However, I would not provide any interpretation or commentary because I believe those passages have obvious meanings. I trust the reader is intelligent enough to interpret them on his own.Since it is fair for the reader to demand only hard evidence for the existence of God, it is also fair to only allow the reader to give hard evidence against His existence. Therefore, all answers to the questions must be backed-up by secularly-acknowledged or personally investigable evidence. Any theory with no evidential support is to be rejected. (Faith is not belief with no evidence; it is trust in God because one sees the evidence.)The reader must be free to come up with his own conclusions, as long as it is based purely on the evidence. He must be free to accept or reject the claim.The book must be suitable for use by an individual or a group. It must work whether the reader sincerely wants to know the truth, or wants to disprove it.I think my book, Fifty-Five Questions for Skeptics, meets these goals, although the ultimate judge of that will be the reader.
The questions in the book are used to test a wild, impossible-sounding claim: that God fulfilled His promise to return Israel to their ancestral land in 1948. I chose this claim because it consists of many modern prophecy fulfillments that the reader is an unknowing witness of or can investigate for himself. The questions were chosen such that they can be used to prove or disprove the claim. The answers to the questions can also be used to calculate the combined probability of all of the fulfillments.
This area of prophecy fulfillment also stands up to the most common objections:
“The prophecies were written after the events happened.” – Doesn’t apply, because Israel became an independent nation in modern times, thousands of years after the prophecies were written. The reader is encouraged to read the prophecies from Bibles printed many years before the fulfillments.“The prophecies were written vaguely. They can be interpreted to mean anything.” – By having the reader read the prophecies for himself, he will see they are not vague, nor can they be interpreted to mean anything else. They are very specific and understandable. That is why I let the reader do the interpretation.“The fulfillments were coincidental, the result of random chance.” – The purpose for the fifty-five questions is to have the reader literally calculate the mathematical probability of all of the fulfillments to show they did not happen by chance. (The actual probability will be much smaller than what the reader calculates because the questions only take into account a subset of the fulfilled prophecies.)“The prophecies were purposely fulfilled to make the Bible seem true.” – Israel’s return to statehood, and the other related prophecies about the conditions within the restored nation came about primarily through secular means. Non-believers fulfilled them, and Israel is primarily a secular nation. And besides, dispersed nations don’t return just because they want to, otherwise we would see many ancient nations return.“The Bible writers lied about the fulfillments.” – Not applicable, for they didn’t claim they were fulfilled. The fulfillments did not happen in their time; it happened in our time.This is an update to the book I originally published in 2018. I added an appendix containing GROK‘s answers to the first eleven, non-theological questions. These questions are meant to obtain statistics about all the other nations so the reader can calculate the fulfillment probabilities for Israel later on. Until recently, these first questions have been difficult or impossible for most people to research on their own. But now, AI chatbots can give reasonably accurate and usable answers. The answers aren’t perfect, but if anything, they will err in favor the skeptic. I included GROK’s answers to these questions because, being general in nature, there is no theological bias involved. The reader is free to verify the answers, use another AI tool, or ignore them altogether.
If you’re a skeptic, I invite you to take a look at the book, do the research, and give honest answers to the questions. I matters not to me whether you sincerely want to know if the claim is true or you want to debunk it. But you can only refute the claim if you do the research.
The book is available as a free download at: https://dtjsoft.com/other/55questions.pdf. It is also available for free from Google Play. Printed copies are also available on amazon.com.
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