Loaded Questions

Question 1: How Do We Know What's True?
Pastor Rick Henderson              April 26-27, 2025

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I’ve been looking forward to this series for months. Not only will we engage important questions, questions that some of you consider urgent, we will also hold a live Q&A after this service, and after every service during this series.

Are there any parents in the room who have kiddos in Kids Ministry? Awesome. This is what I’m requesting from you. As soon as the service is over, go get your kiddos. The kids ministry team is not prepared to extend their time. If you wait till the end of Q&A to pick up your kids, the kids ministry team will hurt me.

If this feels at all unfair to you, I want to give you permission to sneak out during the last song, go grab your kids and come back. How does that sound? Everyone who doesn’t have kids, do you promise not judge people who sneak out early? Great.

Why are we doing this? It’s not because we think we’re the best at answering questions. We’re doing this because we value questions, and we value questions because we value people.

It doesn’t matter if it’s an aggressive question or awkward question. We believe every person who has a question deserves a thoughtful answer. While it can be unnerving to be asked a question that you don’t know how to answer; that’s a very real thing. Followers of Jesus should be the people in the room who are NEVER, EVER afraid of any question. This is going to be our thesis throughout this series.

SERIES THESIS: Faith doesn’t HIDE from questions; FEAR does.

If you view truth as something weak and fragile, then I can understand you being afraid of questions. I’d just say to you, if your faith can’t handle the weight of scrutiny, neither can it handle the weight of your life. For followers of Jesus, it would be absurd to have a weak and fragile view of truth.

JOHN 14:6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Truth isn’t just an abstract concept. It’s not just a set of principles and a collection of facts. Truth is a person. Let’s begin with today’s question.

QUESTION: How do we know what’s true?

Allow me to acknowledge the elephant in the room. I’m a pastor—basically I’m a professional Christian. It would be normal for any of you to wonder if I can truly be open to all the facts since it’s my job to convince people to be Christians. It would be weird if no one asked that question. Upton Sinclair once wrote something that puts words to that understandable skepticism.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. –Upton Sinclair

Is it at least possible that I’m guilty of confirmation bias? Well, yeah. There’s nothing about me that would make me any less vulnerable than anyone else. But the reality is that all people are equally vulnerable to confirmation bias. We all have biases. And yet, we can authentically evaluate truth claims without being victims of our own confirmation bias. I’m going to give you tools for that today.

If you need a quick refresher on confirmation bias, it describes why we see only what affirms what we already believe and why we ignore contrary evidence or why we twist all the evidence to make it look like our belief is true.

I’ve talked to people who are convinced that’s what faith is. They say faith is believing even without good reason. In their view, the thing that makes faith is believing even in the face of contradictory evidence. Whatever you want to call that view, it’s not biblical Christianity. It’s actually anti-Jesus. Jesus was once asked, “What’s the most important rule or command.” I think his answer is fascinating.

MATTHEW 22:37 Jesus replied: “ ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ “

That’s my agenda today and for my whole life. To express love to God by using my mind. We’re going to do that together. Believe it or not, I think there will be moments of fun for everybody. Here’s an implication of what Jesus said.

Faith may be MORE than thinking, but it’s not LESS. (Tim Keller)

We’re at an interesting cultural moment. Church attendance has declined by 40 million Americans in the last 25 years. Recently, that has leveled off. Younger generations, especially below 30 are more open to spirituality than we’ve seen in a long, long time.

I don’t know if you know the singer, Grimes. If you do know who she is, cool. If you don’t know who she is, it doesn’t matter. She’s in the over-30 crowd, but she recently said something in a Time Magazine interview that captures the thoughts and feelings of younger generations.

I think the death of religion is very bad. I think killing God was a mistake… Without religion, we haven’t filled in moral instruction with anything else…There aren’t built-in, free things that people do as a community. I think a lot of people are spiritually lost, and a lot of people are filling this need for moral authority with politics, which is leading to a lot of chaos, in my opinion. –Grimes

You can agree or disagree with her. I’m not trying to use her to validate any viewpoints. I wanted to share this because she expresses a way of thinking that has captured many people, especially younger generations. There’s a lot to unpack, but the essence of her concerns are these:

• We need more than our best guesses when it comes to morality.
• We need a common foundation that brings unity, and it must be a coherent foundation.
• We need something that’s real.
• We need something that’s good.

More and more people are concluding that life without religious faith and religious community just isn’t good enough. I want to share some things from recent New York Times article.

New York Times: Americans Haven’t Found a Satisfying Alternative to Religion

• Religious people are happier than nonreligious people.
• Religious Americans are healthier. Lower rates of depression, suicide, alcoholism, cancer, and cardiovascular illness.
• Religiously affiliated Americans are more likely to feel gratitude, spiritual peace, and a deep sense of connection with humanity.
• Positive relationships are the single most important predictor of well-being, according to the longest-running study on human happiness in the world.

I think all of that is good. You probably do, too. Who wouldn’t want to be happier, healthier, and more meaningfully connected? But those statistics don’t tell us if my religious beliefs are true, or if any religious beliefs are true. I don’t know about you, but I want to know what’s true. The only reason I’m a follower of Jesus is because I’m convinced it’s true. I don’t care what the perks are. If Christianity is not true, I’m out. I quit. Anyone who takes Jesus seriously will agree.

At the most pivotal moment in Jesus’ trial, right before he was sentenced to be executed on the cross, he said this.

JOHN 18:37-38 “The reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.” “What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

Let’s define it.

TRUTH: that which describes reality as it actually is

What is the reality behind the most important questions of life?

MAJOR QUESTIONS OF LIFE:

All worldviews, all religious systems and all irreligious systems share the exact same questions. Our answers are different, but the questions are the same.

1. ORIGIN: where did it all come from?

Let me just say that EVOLUTION is NOT an answer to this question. Evolution attempts to explain the processes by which things developed and progressed—it does nothing to explain how time, matter and energy came to be. It’s more challenging than that. The origin question transcends all of science. In the singularity, the laws of physics break down. Science works great for understanding a universe that already exists after a certain point. It has nothing to offer us for the origin of a universe.

1. MEANING: does my life have purpose?

For these questions, we aren’t interested in subjective answers. You might find meaning by serving with a charity. Awesome. But we’re asking if human life has objective value and purpose.

Not preferences. Not opinions. Not personally fulfilling answers. What is reality? If you are interested in objective truth, the answer to the question is either YES or NO. Some say yes, and others say no. Interestingly, just about everyone who says NO goes on to explain why you should live like you do actually have purpose and value.

1. MORALITY: how should I live?

Again, we are only interested in objective truth. Independent of group or society opinion. Are there things you OUGHT to do even if you don’t want to? Are there things you OUGHT NOT to do even if you do want to?

1. DESTINY: where am I ultimately headed?

There are lots of options out here. Reincarnation. Heaven. Hell. Become one with the universe. We cease to exist entirely. But what is going to happen when you die and I die?

It doesn’t matter if you’re religious or irreligious. It doesn’t matter if you are atheist, agnostic, a Muslim or a Christian. We all share the same questions; we just don’t all share the same answers. So, with so many different answers flying around, how can we know which answers are the right ones?

TWO REQUIREMENTS OF TRUTH:

1. All truth CORRESPONDS to reality.

1. • It can accommodate and explain all the relevant facts and evidence.

Six blind men encounter an elephant. This has been used as an attempt to say that truth is a matter of perspective. That’s pretty stupid. Yes, all 6 men have different perspectives, but we know what reality is. It’s an elephant.

All of their truth claims or explanations are understandable, but they’re still wrong. The explanations can’t account for all the relevant facts and evidence because the explainers are either unable or unwilling to look at the bigger picture.

By the way, I think this could be a metaphor for how our culture consumes news and information. This is what happens when we get trapped in a false reality because of algorithms. This is your social media feed and that’s your coworker’s social media feed. This is what happens when you lock into one news channel, or talk radio, or whatever. This what happens when you lock into one podcast as your source of information.

1. All truth is COHERENT.

1. • Something cannot be true and also contradict itself.

When my daughter, Caroline, was in 6^th grade she told me that she learned the difference between fact and opinion in school. According to her teacher, who was just teaching the curriculum given to her, a fact is something that can be proven and an opinion is something that can’t be proven. What do you think of those definitions?

My response was, “That’s just a dumbed-down version of Logical Positivism, which was abandoned decades ago because it’s philosophically bankrupt and can’t live up to its own criteria.” My cute, 6^th-grade daughter just blinked at me. She didn’t really know what to say to that. So I said to her, Your teacher is telling you that the definition of a fact is something that can be proven. She said yes. So I asked, can you prove that definition? You can’t! Which means the definition of a fact isn’t a fact!

A fact is something that is true, whether it can be proven or not. An opinion is someone’s belief or viewpoint, which may or may not be true.

So, the next time her teacher said in class, a fact is something that can be proven. Caroline raised her hand and asked, can you prove that? I don’t think the teacher was happy to be stumped. But I was proud of my girl.

If you start looking, you’ll find examples on incoherence everywhere. Here’s an easy one:

Don’t let people tell you what to think.

Isn’t that someone telling you what to think?

If you dare to listen, you’ll hear brilliant people make incoherent statements. One time I listened to the late Stephen Hawking describe our universe like a circle. He said that nothing exists outside of the circle. Later, in an attempt to justify that it’s mathematically possible for our universe to exist and form at random, without any sort of creator or intelligent design, he posited that there are infinite universes. Do you see the incoherence? It can’t be true that nothing exists outside the circle and that an infinite number of things exist outside the circle.

For a claim to describe reality as it actually is, it must meet the requirements of correspondence and coherence. So, how do we evaluate that?

HOW TO TEST TRUTH CLAIMS:

1. LOGICAL Consistency: Are there any obvious or subtle contradictions?
2. EMPIRICAL Adequacy: Is there any evidence to support or refute what is being claimed?

 

1. • All the Sciences
   • Math
   • History
   • Archeology
   • Testimony and personal experiences
   • Textual Criticism
   • Anything that can be used to capture experiences and information and then analyze them 

1. EXPERIENTIAL Relevance: Is it possible to live this meaningfully and consistently?

In her sermon a couple of weeks ago, Pastor Svea talked about hearing an atheist engage in a friendly debate with a Christian apologist. I was there, too. I thought this man was smart and articulate. If it was a contest, I think he actually won. But truth isn’t a matter of rhetorical skill. It’s about describing reality as it actually is.

In his view of moral reality, all that mattered were helpful outcomes. In his view, he said he thought religious belief was a good thing because it produced helpful outcomes in people. He also said that ultimately all morally helpful choices are selfish. I want you to evaluate that through the filter of Experiential Relevance. Can that be lived meaningfully and consistently? In his view, truth is irrelevant to morality. Motive is irrelevant to morality. How do you live that out meaningfully and consistently?

Let’s turn the spotlight around. How does the Gospel, the fundamental claims of Christianity, measure up?

HOW TO TEST TRUTH CLAIMS:

1. LOGICAL Consistency
2. EMPIRICAL Adequacy
3. EXPERIENTIAL Relevance

For the sake of time, I’m going to test the claims that Jesus lived, Jesus died, and Jesus rose from the dead by looking for Empirical Adequacy. This will go quickly. And this will be just a fraction of what we could include.

Jesus really LIVED:

We have eyewitnesses who claimed to know him.

• Matthew (55-65 AD) Author: Matthew the tax collector
• Mark (55-59 AD) Author: Associate of Peter.
• Luke (58-65 AD) Author: Luke, also author of Acts.
• Gospel and Letters of John (85 – 95 AD) Author: John the son of Zebedee
• Epistles of Paul (48-86 AD) Author: Paul

Someone could object. What if they all lied? After all, they were trying to get others to believe. They had an agenda. Well, what about these guys? None of whom were Christians.

• Flavius Josephus in ‘Antiquities of the Jews’ (93-94 AD) – 2 ref to Jesus.
• Cornelius Tacitus in ‘Annals’ (116 AD)
• Mara-Serapion in a letter (73-100 AD)
• Jewish Talmud (70-200 AD) – 8 possible references to Jesus.
• Suetonius (121 AD) in ‘The Lives of the Twelve Caesars’
• Pliny the Younger (112 AD) in ‘Epistulae X.96’
• Lucian (before 165 AD) in ‘Passing of Peregrinus’

Within 100-150 years of Jesus’ life, there are 67 documents, from 43 authors, 24 of whom are Christians and 19 arenon-Christians.

Let me give you an example of how one Roman historian wrote about Jesus. He was clearly not trying to get people to follow Jesus.

It was by means of sorcery that He was able to accomplish the wonders which He performed... Let us believe that these cures, or the resurrection, or the feeding of a multitude with a few loaves... These are nothing more than the tricks of jugglers... It is by the names of certain demons, and by the use of incantations, that the Christians appear to be possessed of [miraculous] power... -CELSUS (Roman physician and philosopher)

[He must have known some amazing jugglers.]

Celcus concedes as a fact that Jesus performed miracles. He is trying to refute the claim that Jesus was God in the flesh by coming up with other explanations for the incredible things Jesus did.

Jesus was CRUCIFIED.

There are at least 7 non-Christian, historical sources that record Jesus’ crucifixion. One even records a midday darkness during his crucifixion.

• Cornelius Tacitus (55-120 AD)
• Thallus (52 AD)
• Celsus (178 AD)
• Lucian of Samosata (120-180 AD
• Mara Bar-Serapion (Post AD 70)
• Flavius Josephus (37-100 AD)
• Babylonian Talmud

Eyewitnesses claimed he ROSE from the dead.

Over 500 eyewitnesses claimed to have seen him. When you read the NT and someone’s name is included, that is the equivalent to a footnote in a book or a research paper. The original readers were encouraged and invited to go and talk to the people mentioned to see if what was written CORRESPONDED to the evidence.

Eyewitnesses CHOSE to die brutal deaths INSTEAD of changing their stories.

• Peter was crucified.
• Thomas was speared to death.
• James was thrown from the pinnacle of the Temple.
• Stephen was stoned to death.
• Before Paul was eventually beheaded, he was:
  • Whipped
  • Imprisoned
  • Stoned

People die for a lie all the time., but they don’t typically die for something they know is a lie. What would be their motivation? They didn’t gain money, power or sex, the typical stuff that motivates fraud. What’s the best explanation?

Bar Ehrman is a leading New Testament expert. He’s not a Christian. In fact, he debates Christians. As a leading scholar, who is thoroughly skeptical of Christianity, he wrote this.

That Jesus’ followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know…They believed this, they lived it, and they died for it. –Bart Ehrman (Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium)

I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Japanese philosophical writer, Shusaku Endo. I want you to listen to what he said in response to that thinking.

If you don’t believe in the resurrection, you will be forced to believe that something hit the disciples that was every bit amazing, maybe different, yet of equal force in electrifying intensity. For if you try to explain the changed lives of the early Christians, you will find yourself making leaps of faith every bit as great as if we believed in the resurrection to start with. -Shusaku Endo

Rejecting a truth claim is not at all the same thing as refuting it. What’s your explanation? I’ve got a punchy question. Is it OK if I’m direct? Is it possible to ignore this evidence without either being a coward or a fool? Remember our thesis.

SERIES THESIS: Faith doesn’t HIDE from questions; FEAR does.

Fear hides. Let’s don’t be cowards. If you believe in Jesus, I want you to love him by using your mind to think well. If you’re unconvinced or unsure, I want you to use your mind and think well. Let’s go back to the four major questions of life. These are the answers given by a man rose from the dead.

ORIGIN: God created everything from nothing. He can do this because he is a personal being who is eternal (timeless), Spirit (immaterial), and all-powerful.

MEANING: We have infinite value because God created us in his image with the purpose of knowing him, enjoying him, and enjoying all the good things he made.

MORALITY: We should live in a way that trusts him as the authority, expressed through love for him and all other people.

DESTINY: Everybody spends forever somewhere. We will either spend an eternity with God or an eternity separate from him.

Earlier some significant stats about people’s well-being and religion. That’s the kind of thing you’d expect someone like me say. Maybe I’m cherry picking. Do you know Jonathan Rauch?

In 2003 I wrote what is officially the dumbest thing I’ve ever written…I wrote a piece celebrating secularization, saying isn’t it great people are losing interest in religion in America. We’ll all be better without it because we all know religion is a force for divisiveness in society and dogmatism. I called it a major civilizational advance. I was just completely, totally, utterly wrong about that. –Jonathan Rauch

Jonathan Rauch is not a believer. He’s a Jewish, atheist, and a gay man. He just published a book and he’s making the rounds on podcasts with this message, America needs Christians to keep following Jesus and be like Jesus. It appears that there’s a groundswell of people who are saying that we need Christianity and the benefits it provides. And that is coming from people who have no intention of following Jesus.

I welcome that. But I have a word of caution. Remember my favorite saying, for every mile of road there’s two miles of ditch. One ditch is latching onto the benefits of Christianity without first coming to terms with the truthfulness of Christianity.

Back in the 1960s, a Quaker theologian named Elton Trueblood wrote about the dangers of a cut-flower civilization. By that he meant taking all the benefits of Christianity, but forgetting that they’re grounded in Jesus. Taking the benefits without also placing your faith in Jesus, giving your allegiance to him, is living like cut flowers.

It can make your life beautiful. It can add a pleasant fragrance. It can add good things, but only for a while. Cut flowers have no root. They will shrivel and die. A life like that wouldn’t just be a mistake. It would be a tragedy.

This is my invitation to you.

BEHOLD Jesus.

Take the time to get to know the truth, beauty, and goodness of Jesus. Take whatever time you need to see truthfulness of what he taught. Once you see it, turn to him in faith.

For those of us who know Jesus,

BE WITH Jesus.

BECOME like Jesus.

DO as he did.

Others can then see the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus in our lives. What would that mean to you if others were convinced of the truth of Jesus because of their experience with you, with us?