From Melissa’s blog Hard-Core Christianity.
Excerpt:
What bothers me about young-earth organizations (more so than their accusations of compromise aimed at old-earth creationists) is that they shoot themselves in the feet when it comes to offering a viable apologetic to non-believers. You often hear them make statements like, “We should start with the Bible, view everything in the world through the lens of Scripture, and adjust our beliefs about the natural world accordingly.” Of course the Bible should be our ultimate authority on everything; if we hold Scripture to be the inspired word of God, and we understand its factual reliability based on centuries of rigorous historical and textual research, we should trust it to be completely and utterly true (while accepting that there is some latitude in how some passages can be interpreted).
However, when it comes to defending the faith and keeping our hearts united with our God-given intellect, we need to examine this approach more closely. When someone asks you why you believe the biblical claim that “God created the heavens and the earth,” how far do you think you’re going to get with them by answering, “For the Bible tells me so”? This is a fallacy known as circular reasoning, and it is fatal to our apologetic and to having a reasonable faith ourselves!
What we need instead is extra-biblical evidence that supports the truth of the Bible. (Notice that I did not use the word “prove.”) Philosophers use the fancy phrase “epistemic grounding.” We need to meet the non-believer where they are–observable nature–and carry them towards the truth of Christianity. As believers, we benefit from having both intellectual AND spiritual reasons for our beliefs, and we escape the trap of having a privatized theology where our confidence in the Bible is based exclusively on internal feelings.
Find more good posts on Melissa’s blog.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
I still have to wonder about this. While we need to be ready to make a defense and while there is some value in extra-biblical offerings in that direction and while we are commanded to love God with all our minds and to reason together, I do not find, in the pages of Scripture, any indication of “the power of logic”. I DO find the promise that the Word of God has power that exceeds its mere words, that “faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God”, that “My Word shall not return void”, that kind of stuff. Is it really our job to set aside that power in favor of earthly philosophical, natural, and intellectual approaches? I suppose that would make perfect sense in a world bounded by natural laws, but we live in a world bounded by GOD and we are not defending rational facts, but divine truth, and we are not working toward convincing, but conviction and faith, all divine functions. Seems irrational to surrender the best possible weapon toward divine goals in favor of inferior earthly weapons. It’s like bringing a logical argument to a divine battle.
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Without the law of non-contradiction, people would be able to affirm that everything that the Bible says was as true as its negation. I.e. – if the Bible says that that A is true, then non-A would be true as well without the laws of logic. The Bible assumes the laws of logic.
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I think we see many biblical examples of God’s representatives bringing logical arguments to divine battles. Logic belongs to God. Peter, Paul, Elijah, etc.
I think, Stan, that your discomfort may stem from the idea that our logic *on its own* can somehow bring people to a saving knowledge of God. It cannot. It can reveal the truth of the faith to them, but ultimately, faith is about setting one’s trust in God, Whom one already knows to be real, and the truth of Whose Gospel is demonstrable using facts and logic. We have been given the task of bringing that evidence (all of it at our disposal – both biblical and extrabiblical) to those we encounter. Only the Holy Spirit can soften their hearts to draw them to God. We fire salvos against Satan’s schemes (we are instructed to do so, with all God puts at our disposal – both in special and in general revelation), but the deathblow to his entrapment is from the Holy Spirit Himself.
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Yes, this is one of the things that frustrates me. Also, the typical presentation I’ve been to spends more time arguing for the incompatibility of the Bible with macroevolution (something atheists already believe) than presenting scientific evidence for an alternative to macroevolution. And usually one gets told to bring one’s atheist friends, one sits there wincing through the presentation, and the friend is then more confirmed in their rejection of the Bible than before.
There is an argument from the Bible, but it’s not asserting vehemently that it’s true. Instead, it’s an analysis of the coherence of the message carried through all of Scripture, through generations, through many different writers, through fulfilled prophecy. It’s analytical, not bombastic.
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I have to agree with Stan for the most part. It is not by reason or justification by scientific facts that I support the young earth theory, but by faith. It takes a great amount of faith in God as a creator to truly believe that he has the power to create a world in 6 days, and by 6 days I mean 6-24 hour days, not one day is a thousand with the Lord, as many in my faith suggest.
The book of Romans is straight forward regarding proof of God’s creation. In essence, God’s signature is on all his creation, therefore man is without excuse, as Paul explains.
While I am not ruling out completely the argument for using science to prove the Bible correct (many times it confirms what is already written, as does archeology), we must not lose sight of the fact that the Bible interprets itself.
This is comforting because “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe…But God has chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise… (1Cor 1:20,21 &27)
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I see “strawmen” created and destroyed. That does not an argument make. No pre-suppositional apologist (which most young earthers are) says “For the Bible says so” and leaves it at that. The ones that I know of point out that we start with different pre-suppositions and one must explain why in an atheistic view, one should have any confidence in logic, the future uniformity of physical laws or our our rational abilities. A purposeless, beginning and directionless evolutionary process provides no such warrant. We have the same evidence but different interpretations due to different pre-suppositions.
“What we need instead is extra-biblical evidence that supports the truth of the Bible.”
You are going to have a tough time supporting that Biblically speaking. Per Paul, the problem is not the lack of evidence but the suppression thereof.
Mary presents another strawman. Presentations I’ve seen show very clear interpretations of fossil discoveries and how they fit the young-earth timeline.
I also disagree that our logic and reason alone can show the truth of Christianity. I don’t distinguish between “truth of Christianity” and “faith.” To have faith in Christianity is to have a knowledge of the truth of Christianity. Otherwise you get this odd group of people who attest the truth of Christianity but don’t trust God? I’m also a Calvinist, so don’t expect to find agreement here :)
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Of course you can you use the Bible to prove that the Bible is true. Why? Because the Biblical canon is comprised of 66 books written by different persons in different places and during the course of hundreds of years. The Bible is not some kind of conspiracy by a select group to propagate certain ideas. It has come to transcend nations, peoples, cultures, and time itself.
The Bible has withstood the test of time. Why should we not accept what has continually been proven over that which is purely theory? “Extra-biblical” evidence will only go so far in trying to convince someone, because “evidence” can always be found to support the contrary. The power to save lies in the Bible and the work of the Holy Spirit and not in convincingly putting together scientific findings to support the Bible.
The only benefit I see in using “extra-biblical” evidence is that it may help a person arrive at the correct Biblical conclusion provided that that person examine both the Bible and extra-biblical evidence objectively. This is something few people are willing to do. Most people just heap up evidence to contrary and shut their eyes to any other evidence that might disagree to their own skewed subjective view.
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