Well, welcome back everyone to another episode of Faithfully Engaged. Recently, I had a guest
on that we talked about hermeneutics and today we're going to cover something a little bit different
called apologetics and we'll get into that more with our guest Scott today. So Scott, why don't
you tell the audience a little bit about yourself? Okay, yes, thank you. So just to let you know,
I'm an author and speaker. I wrote a book called Got Faith. It's a workbook. It's something that
you can go through on your own or a small group study. It's apologetic based. It walks a person
through like talking to an atheist or agnostic to how you know the Bible is the Word of God,
to how do you know who is Jesus and what are his claims and to eventually,
what does it mean to be saved? What does it mean to be a Christian? So it kind of covers the whole
path of a non-believer to somebody who becomes Christian and I've spoken at various places,
including India a couple of times. So it's apologetics is my passion. It's something that I've
been diving into ever since my youth. That's pretty much me in a nutshell.
All right, well, let's kind of start there just on apologetics. Now, I'll tell you just my own
kind of personal story. The first time I heard that word, I don't know, I was 10 or something like
that. Like apologetics. Why are people apologizing? I don't understand. People think first.
Yes. So for those that are listening to the show today and have no idea what that means,
what is apologetics? What does that word mean? So it's basically defending the Christian faith,
well, Christian in this case, but defending your faith, being able to explain the truth, being able to
help somebody understand the Christian faith basically.
Yeah. So it's really that kind of that defense there and explaining more of your faith. So
tell me just your journey. Like how did you get into apologetics? When did you know it was your
passion? Just tell us that story. So I had the privilege of growing up in a Christian home.
And some point in my high school years, we went to this conference, well, my church hosted this
conference that was on cults. And the speaker was just this fascinating speaker talking all about
different cults. And to me, I had never learned much about those. I knew what I believe. I knew what
the church taught. I knew what Christians teach, what the Bible teaches. But I knew what the
church taught. But it was just fascinating to hear this speaker talk about different cults and what
they believe. And it really piqued my interest. And so I started learning about cults. And then
that just grew into other areas of apologetics. And I received a really terrific study Bible.
And in the study Bible, it's called the Defender's Study Bible. It has all kinds of apologetics in it
and scientific facts in the Bible. And it's written by, the notes are written by Dr. Henry Morris.
And that really got me into, well, creation and just a wider area of apologetics. So that's how I
got my faith. I mean, that's how I got really interested in apologetics.
Now, within that, and especially that last part there, talking about into more of the science
aspect, the creation aspect, is that where you kind of, I don't know, find most of your passion,
is it more centered in the kind of the creationism side of things? Or is it really just all of
apologetics in general that that's your most passionate about?
I would say looking at creation and what the Bible teaches is what I kind of dove into
first. But it's grown from that. And I just find it fascinating talking to people that
somehow can think there is no God and that we just evolved and all these things came to be
by chance with no creator. To me, that's not the side of reason. They think they're the reasonable
ones. But when you really look at things and you really take a critical mind to what's being taught
and you don't just buy things who applying and sinkered what science books teach us in public
schools, you can see, you know what, that doesn't make sense. And when we have scientific laws,
you know, like the law of thermodynamics and other scientific laws that say, you know what,
this just isn't possible. And like, for example, when Darwin wrote his book,
The Origin of Species, he had no concept of how complicated things were as they got smaller. He
thought a cell was a very simple, simple, simple thing. He didn't have electron microscopes and
all these different things that reveal the complexity of the DNA structure. And we can see
if you really want to look at it scientifically and not just with my not just something that
from a brainwash perspective, but from an open mind, you can see, you know, evolution doesn't
make sense macro evolution. People say, well, yeah, we can see changes within a species. Okay,
yes, there's adaptation, there's micro evolution. But macro evolution, one kind of an animal to
another that doesn't exist. It's never happened. It's a fairy tale. It can't happen, you know,
genetically. So it's just fascinating to me, those things.
You know, as you're talking about this, especially on the concept of there being no God, I'm
by no means an expert on all of human history. But I know enough that this recent rise of kind
of what they call the nuns, people that don't believe in anything, there is no God.
That's been a very recent phenomenon. Throughout most of history, people have believed in
something. It might be a might be a sun god or whatever. But there's been a belief in something.
So with this recent rise of atheism, agnosticism, things of that nature, like you said, that's
usually tied with, well, we have more reason now, we were more advanced than those that believed in
gods and stuff. We don't need that anymore. What do you find is more helpful and I guess more
succinctly, how do you answer that? An atheist that says, I don't need there to be a common phrase
of the spaghetti monster in the sky, right? I don't need that fairy tale. What's the best
answer to an atheist like that? Okay, so the first question I always ask an atheist is,
would you admit that you don't have even 20% of all the knowledge of the universe?
And if they're willing to have an honest conversation and not just be flipping, you know,
with their answer, then of course they're going to say, no, I nobody has even 20% of all the knowledge
of the universe. And then my follow up question would be, okay, so in the greater than 80% of all
the knowledge in the universe that you do not have, could there be evidence for a creator, for a god?
And again, if they're being honest, then they have to admit, well, yeah, there,
I don't know everything. So there could be enough evidence out there that I don't know
for a god. And at that point, they're no longer an atheist, because nobody has the knowledge to say
there is no god. If you had all the knowledge of the universe, then you're a god, you know. So
I always start with those two questions to get them to admit they don't have enough knowledge
to say there is no god. And then we can start talking about the evidence for God. And so
that's, that's, but that's, that's kind of like the icebreaker, you know, that's, that's how I start
my conversation is just to get them to admit, yeah, there's things I don't know. There's lots of
things I don't know. And so with the evidence, I mean, with what I don't know, there could be
evidence of a god. And then just start getting them to think, you know, nobody looks at a building
and wonders if the building had an architect, if the building had people that put it together.
The fact that we're here, the fact that we have a creation means there was a creator.
Design and purpose are throughout the universe. We, we have laws that physical laws that if you
changed any one of them just slightly, like for example, gravity, the law of gravity, if that
was just slightly, slightly different, we couldn't have complex life. The universe wouldn't exist.
And to think that we have all these fine tune laws to give us life without a person without a
designer doesn't, you know, it's that's, that's not logical.
I love how in the beginning of your response there is, is to ask questions. I think that's
something that in general as Christians, sometimes we're so like, we tend to be really
defensive and just want to like, kind of engage back and don't get me wrong, and engaging in
these conversations is important. But we don't have to convince them of everything right there
from the get go. Let's ask questions. Let's, let's for one, see if we're willing to have a legitimate
discussion. That's why I love what you said there of 20%. If they said, yeah, I know everything,
it doesn't matter what you tell them. Exactly. So that question, one of the things that
it does is get them to, it is for you to find out if they're willing to have an honest conversation.
Because if they just give you a flippant response, why bother, you know, just move on to waste your time.
I've experienced something similar. I haven't done a ton of debates, not formal debates on
kind of pro life type of situations about abortion. But that's one thing I try to do from the get go
is have a kind of just look at the logics of it. And the first thing that goes into is like, well,
what about the exceptions of rape and incest? That's like immediate that almost always comes up.
And in that discussion, even though I still have quite a few strong opinions on those,
for the sake of argument, fine, I'll give you those. Now what? Now where do we draw the line?
And inevitably, almost 90 plus percent of the time, that really wasn't the issue. It wasn't
rape and incest. That's just kind of that easy way to get out of it. But by engaging in that,
by giving them that, I've kind of trapped them a little bit, they don't have that easy out anymore.
And that's what I like about you there, too, is we don't have those real simple
spaghetti monster in the sky, those type of frivolous things. That's just not helpful. Let's
weed out some of these worthless conversations and let's actually get into this. So I love
starting off with the question. That's a fantastic idea. As you go deeper into this,
I know something that happens with people in general, whether they're an atheist or
just maybe even they would consider themselves a Christian, maybe a name only. The question comes
down to why the Bible, why does the Bible matter? Why would you believe that over the Quran or
whatever other type of scripture? So for somebody to ask that, or if you're approaching that question,
how do you get into the authoritative nature of the Bible with someone?
Okay, so great question. And there's plenty to dig into there. Everything from
the history that's written in the Bible that we now can confirm to prophecies.
I mean, Jesus fulfilled over 300 prophecies. How many do you want them to fulfill?
These are prophecies that were written hundreds of years before his birth, his earthly birth.
So, and then you have, I don't know, things like, well, how do you know Jesus was who he said he was?
Well, he rose again from the dead. Well, how do you know he rose again from the dead? Well,
look at the changed lives of the apostles. And I think that's really where we get into things
that you can't argue. Like, you can't argue in somebody's testimony. If you want to
share what God did with your life, that's a great thing to do, because nobody can argue against that.
You know, you really did experience those things. Well, the apostles really did have changed lives.
I mean, you look at, you know, one of the arguments that Jesus didn't rise from the dead is his
disciples stole the body. Okay, so these disciples that were so afraid, they locked themselves in
the room, one of them denied knowing Jesus, you know, multiple times as he was kind of following
from a distance after Jesus was arrested. And you, so you have these people that locked themselves
in a room and are literally in hiding. And you want to tell me that they went to the tomb,
overpowered the Roman soldiers, rolled the two to three tons boulder away, and stole the body.
And then knowing that they are lying about this in their writings of the New Testament,
they, they went through all of this torture and even death for all of them, except for
one that we know of, over a lie. No, nobody, nobody allows themselves to be tortured and killed
for what they know to be a lie. You know, just doesn't happen. So those are, those are the things
that I, I like to discuss. I really like all sorts of those examples. And I can't come up with
come up with the specifics on this, but I've heard pastor, somebody talking about just the
overwhelmingly amount of evidence that we have that, like, the Bible was written by who it was
written by all the manuscripts that we have. And how if you don't believe that the Bible,
whether we believe that it was, that it was God's holy word or not, that it was written,
it was actually written this way by these people that had these thoughts, then you couldn't believe
any ancient literature, because we have way more evidence about the scriptures manuscripts than
anything else in existence. So I think that's an extra kind of protective factor there over.
Okay, we, you still don't necessarily have to believe all those words, but there's a lot of
evidence here and just to dismiss it, and especially those claims of, yeah, they rolled his body away
or whatever. There's, there's no evidence of that, that you can, that's just somebody trying to explain
something. Yeah, so that there's faith statements set all over the place. It's just where people are
placing that faith in. Absolutely. This next question is something that I have been pondering
a little bit. I've actually am in the middle of reading a book I've had recommended a long time,
but just getting around to reading it. It's The Reason for God by Tim Keller. And it's a,
one of the chapters is about classic question of how can a loving God send people to hell?
How can that happen? So I'm sure that's a question that you've received often. How generally do you
answer that when you receive that question? Okay, so what people don't understand is God's perfection.
Yes, he is a loving God, but he is also a just God. And his standard is, is perfection. He doesn't
send anybody to hell. We send ourselves because we do not meet his standard of perfection. You know,
if there was a mass murder on trial and you know, somebody, he was a serial killer,
and they, they finally found him after he killed all these people and now he's on trial. And it's
so obvious that he's guilty. And the judge says, well, because I'm a loving judge, I'm just going
to give you a slap on the wrist and, and make you pay this $500 fine for, you know, whatever,
something stupid. Everybody would be so upset. They're like, there's no justice. Come on, this
isn't right. Well, you know, God, God can't just allow evil or and sin into his perfect heaven.
So we send ourselves to hell by not following and meeting God's standard.
This has been something that I struggled with. I know when I was younger,
like a, I grew up in church. I was very, very gracious to be able to
grow up in a Christian family was saved at a young age about six years old. And I understood all the
concepts of we're sinners and Christ died first since he rose from the dead. I had all that.
But I really did struggle with not so much of just the hell part, but the, the wrath part.
That didn't make sense to me. How you're loving, but how do you have wrath? And what you just explained
there of the judge, that, that's a wonderful explanation. When it really came to make more
sense in my mind was when I started dating my wife. We weren't even married at the time yet. But
I hadn't had a relationship like that. We might have been engaged at this level and nothing had
happened. But I just remember that feeling of like, if somebody was to hurt her, I'm going to be
really mad. Like there's going, I, I can't separate that wrath side of it. And it's not because I don't
love her. It's because I love her that it goes hand in hand. And I love what you said there of
that just, that justice and that judge part. God is loving. He hates sin. He absolutely does.
And there is judgment there. And like you said, it's not him just appeasing his wrath by throwing
us in there. We have chosen that through our sinful beings, through our all sinful beings. And
we kind of flip it on its head in Christianity that it's the bad part isn't that he's, that
people are sitting in hell. The crazy thing is that he offers salvation. We don't deserve that.
That's, that's the good news. Exactly. And people usually identify themselves as a good person.
You know, if you ask somebody, you think you're a good person. Yeah, you know, I haven't killed
anybody. I'm a good person. I haven't robbed a bank. You know, I didn't rape anybody, whatever. But
if you start asking them about the 10 commandments, they can convict themselves. In other words,
ask, have you ever told a lie? And they'll usually say, well, of course I told a lie. I'm human,
but so what? Who has it? Okay, but God says, do not lie. And you've broken one of his 10
commandments right there. What about, have you ever stolen something, even something small, a pencil?
Yeah, but, but everybody has, okay, but God says, do not steal. And, you know, if you've, if you
told a lie, what does that make you? Okay, I'm, I'm a liar. If you're a liar, even something small,
what does that make you? It makes you a thief, right? So if you start looking at what God's
standard is and realizing you have to be perfect to enter heaven, you should understand, okay, then
we don't have, we don't, there's, there's no way we can make it into heaven, right? Because there's
no way any of us have lived up to that standard until, like you said, God provided the way.
He provided salvation through his son. Absolutely. Yeah, I've heard some people present, it's like,
oh, you said that that's the gospel, that's the good news, that's not good news. That sounds terrible.
Because they're looking at it in that lens, I'm a good person. That's, that's something of why,
for Christians, obviously, we play, play a, pay a lot of attention to the New Testament for good
reason. You know, Jesus, that's the good news. We need to really emphasize that. But sometimes in
Christianity, we lose the Old Testament, we forget about the, the Tinkham Amamut things of that nature.
And that gives the New Testament all the weight to it. Because that shows we, we can't do this on
our own. But Israel, they tried it, they failed. Right. But Jesus provides this way. Yes. So yeah,
we need to not lose that Old Testament. It is very, very important to go alongside the New
Covenant as well. Absolutely. This next question kind of goes in hand of the, you know, sending
people to hell or whatever. Okay, if God is so good, he's all powerful, he's perfect,
then why is there even evil? Why is there sin here at all? If he's so good and perfect,
can he just make a good and perfect world? Okay, I love this question. I don't know if you ever
saw the movie Ella Enchanted. So for, for those who have not seen Ella Enchanted, it's a,
you know, it's a fairy tale movie. There's this, this, this fairy godmother that comes into the
scene at the very beginning of the movie, and she blesses or curse, however you want to look at it,
this baby, so that it always will obey on command. In other words, you ask this child to do something,
they don't have an option not to do it. They just do it. Well, God could have made us that way.
But that is not love. He made us with the ability to choose him, to love him. We have chosen not
to love him, which is why there is evil. We, we have evil in this world, because we have done
everything except choose God. And because God gave us the freedom of choice, he allowed for that
possibility of evil. Yeah. And when you look at your, your own lives here, especially anyone
listening that has, has kids, it means so much when, like I have a couple little ones right now,
and another one that's on the way, but when my kids, the first time they told me, I love you,
my goodness, that is, that's incredible. What an incredible moment to hear that. And it means so
much because they chose to say it. It doesn't mean as much when I forced them just say, I, I love,
love you, you, like that means that's nice. That's nice if they can repeat that. But they don't know
what they're saying exactly. When they say it on their own, that is incredible. It just means so
much. And how you lay that out makes so much sense that that would be the equivalent of making us
robots. And that's exactly God did not make mind them robots. He wanted the relationship.
We're not his computer. Yeah. For him to program to do whatever his bidding is. Yeah. So he, it's
all about the relationship. It's all about us making that decision. Otherwise, there's no love
either. Why is there evil? Well, you want a world without love? There's no, you know,
you turn that question on its head. Why is there love? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's love because we
have the freedom of choice. There's evil because we have the freedom of choice.
Yeah. No, I think that's, that's really important again to flip some of these things on its head
and to ask that. Yeah, we, there's evil. Sure. And, and that's something in my kind of in my day
job of talking to some of my clients that the problems they come into if they're sinking counseling
from me, they're legitimate. They're legitimate problems. Don't get me wrong. I don't want to
downgrade them. But so often they're so focused on those problems that they miss the good things.
And that's something I challenge them to do. Like, why do you grateful for? Yeah, you're,
you're dealing with grieving this loss or whatever. But what do you have in your life? And that doesn't
take it all away. Recognizing that we have a God of love or that we have the ability to love on
earth. That doesn't take away the evil. But it gives it a whole lot more context, gives it,
gives that love a whole lot more meaning, instead of solely just focusing on everything going
wrong. We need to see the beauty and the creation as well. Absolutely.
This next question, my every once in a while, I'll reference my wife on here. And there's
times she'll catch up on episodes and times she doesn't. So sometimes I'll tell my guests
not to mention things to my to my wife off off screen there if I get on to her something.
But this is a question for my wife that she is really passionate about. She she just really likes
to talk about this issue. And that is about the the age of the earth. The kind of the typical
mind view or worldview is earth is millions, billions, whatever years old that the dinosaurs
were here. A whole long time ago. And then we came, I don't know how old they say humans have been
here a few tens of 1000 years. I don't I don't remember millions. Okay, well, there you go.
Anyways, is that true? And if it's not true, why is that not true? Okay, very good question.
Let me give you an analogy to answer this question to start off my answer. Let's say
you're a scuba diver, and you find this sunken ship, and it has a treasure chest inside of it.
You bring up the treasure chest, you open it up, and you see all these different coins.
And the coins are dated, let's say you find a coin dated 1745, and another coin dated 1756.
And, you know, you find these these different dates, whatever. And you want to determine when did the
ship sink? Well, are you going to look at the oldest coin, or are you going to look at the newest coin?
You're going to look at the newest coin, because obviously the ship did not sink before that
ship sink. So you could have a coin dated 1600 in that chest, it doesn't matter. You could have
signs of age, it doesn't matter. What are the limiting factors? The limiting factor, the newest coin,
let's say if it's 1784, whatever. You know the ship did not sink before 1784, or it's not going to
have a 1784 coin in it. It doesn't matter if you have coins from the 1600s, that's irrelevant.
You want to know when the ship sank? Okay, probably on or after that newest coin. So we have
limiting factors that limit the Earth's age. For example, the ocean is approximately 3.5% salt,
the oceans. Well, why are they salty? Why are the why is the ocean salt water? The oceans are salt
water because of our water cycle. Water evaporates from the oceans, gets blown over land, it rains on
the land, the rivers run off the land into the ocean containing minerals and whatnot, and it's
the water cycle that makes the ocean salty. It's the runoff from the land with all the minerals
that make the ocean salty. So the oceans are an irreversible process of getting saltier,
and you can measure that. So the question is why are the oceans 3.5% salt? Well, if you say
that's measurable, the rate that they're getting salty is measurable, okay, so we can determine that
the oceans have only been getting salty for the last 5,000 years. The oceans can go from freshwater
to saltwater at the current level in just 5,000 years. So you cannot possibly have oceans that
are millions of years old, otherwise they would all be like the Dead Sea and worse. Nothing would
be living in them. They would be too salty. So that is an incredible limiting factor to the age of
the earth. So you asked the question, how old do I think the earth is? It's somewhere around 6000
years. Biblically speaking, we can see human history. We have great recordings of how long people
lived. The Jews were absolutely fantastic at keeping track of this stuff. So because of those
records, we can guess somewhere around 6000 years. But even scientifically, if you really want to look
at the true science, the things that are limiting factors like the ocean salt level,
you know it just doesn't make sense to say that the earth is millions of years old.
I live here in Hawaii and we are taught that the Hawaiian islands are several million years old.
None of the islands have active volcano activity except for the Big Island.
All the others, they say, have been done, be informed for millions of years. Well, again,
we can see that cannot be true because of the rate of erosion. Well, the rate of erosion is just
under half inch a year. All of our islands except for the Big Island, because it's still growing,
would be underwater in just one million years because of the rate of erosion. I've seen a storm
completely wipe out a beach and us have to, us meaning people, having to rebuild the beach
for people to enjoy because it was wiped out in one storm. So the age that they give things,
they use circular reasoning a lot of times. They'll say the fossils date the rocks,
but the rocks date the fossils more accurately. What? You're hurting my head with that circular
reasoning. If you find a fossil and you want it dated, the people doing the dating,
will not give you a date until you tell them what layer you found it in.
People look at the Grand Canyon and they think, oh, let's look at all these different layers.
I don't know if you've done any research into the Mount St. Helens explosion back in the early 80s,
but that was God's gift to creation science because we saw a miniature Grand Canyon get
created with all the same layers of the Grand Canyon and ours because of the flood that occurred.
Well, the explosion created a dam, a natural dam, and then a subsequent explosion caused a bunch of
water to break through that dam and turn what was a small canyon into a much larger canyon.
All this sediment and all these different layers got created and you can see if you look at, oh,
these look very similar to the layers we have with the Grand Canyon. We know how long those took to
create, ours. You want to tell me the Grand Canyon took millions of years? Well, we now have scientific
evidence that this can be created very quickly. That's really intriguing. I think that's neat to
have those different limiting factors like that to be able to look at that in different areas
instead of just salt, just erosion or whatever. That sounds really intriguing with that. That
leads me into my last bigger question here of most of the audience, although not all, would come from
a Christian type of perspective or at least appreciative of a Christian worldview.
For those that are listening, like, wow, this is really interesting. I want to know more and maybe
I want to pursue some apologetics on my own. What advice would you give them to be able to get started on this?
Good question. I would look at organizations that I've done a lot of research with.
Organizations like Answers in Genesis, Creation Today, those are two outstanding organizations
that have a lot of information on this. I mentioned Dr. Henry Morris. He wrote the
Defender Study Bible. He's kind of the godfather of modern creation science.
Any of his books would be excellent books to look at. Of course, I would love it if you
bought and read my book, Got Faith. By the way, it's for sale on Amazon. My first name is actually
Kenneth. My name as an author is Kay Scott Wells. If you wanted to find me on Amazon, it's the letter
Kay and then Scott Wells. The book title is Got Faith. There's a lot of great resources out there.
I would start with those. I think you can get just a wealth of information from them.
Great. I will include the link to Scott's book down in the show notes so you guys can check it out.
For anybody else that is interested in catching up with you on social media or just in general,
how can they be in contact with you?
Probably the best way would be to send me an email. I don't have a bunch of staff that's
reading my emails. I do it myself. You can email Scott at defendingthetruth.net.
Perfect. I'll include that down in the show notes too. If you have any questions for him,
I'm sure those of you that are just really interested in this side of things because I know a lot
that go to church, they might really enjoy doing theology studies and things like that,
which are great. I know that ties into this. Apologetics is its own discipline.
I just find it fascinating. I'm sure others do too.
Great. Well, Scott, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on and to hear some more of these
kind of apologetic viewpoints. I hope everyone listening has learned something.
Like I said, I encourage everyone to reach out to them. Scott, any parting words before we head
out today? Any parting words. I just want to say trust Christ. The Bible is the truth.
Christ is who he claimed to be. He did live a perfect life. He died for our sins,
rose again from the dead. All we have to do to know that we have salvation is to change our minds,
repent about our sin, and trust in Christ. We trust in Christ and we have salvation.
That's my desire, is that people trust in Christ and are saved.
Amen to that for sure. Thanks again, Scott, for joining me today, having this fantastic
discussion. I want to say thank you to everybody that tuned in today. We will catch you on the next
episode. Thank you so much.