I have found that a helpful way to teach my children is through simple question and answer memorisation. I taught my children basic Christian doctrine using this method. It worked so well that I decided to write a worldview/apologetics’ catechism to teach them to think worldviewishly and equip them to defend the Christian Faith in the face of the secular challenge. I publish it here in the hope that others may find it helpful. It contains a few quotes that I want my kids to learn. If you would like a PDF version, please send me an email.
Q. What is apologetics?
A. To give a reasoned defence as to why we believe in the Christian faith.
Q. What’s the key Scripture on apologetics?
A. But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defence to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you. 1 Peter 3:15
Q. What’s the key to staying firm in the face of the secularism of our age?
A. Remembering that we are Christians not because we don’t think but because we do.
Q. What reasons are normally given for not believing Christianity?
A. (i) How can Christianity be right and the world’s other religions be wrong? (ii) How can there be a God when there is so much suffering in the world? (iii) Christianity is an immoral creed.
Q. Do Christians think enough?
A. No. Too often we haven’t been taught to see the reasons why belief in God makes sense nor the failure of secularism to make sense of the world.
Q. Why don’t Christians think enough?
A. Too often we assume that Christianity is about personal experience and feelings, not careful thought.
Q. What is a worldview?
A. The deepest beliefs we hold about life, the universe and everything.
Q. Who has a worldview?
A. Everyone does.
Q. Is our worldview important?
A. Yes, it determines our whole life.
Q. Does everyone have the same worldview?
A. No. How we understand the world is highly contested.
Q. Why is worldview thinking important in apologetic engagement?
A. Because one of the keys to explaining the gospel is first to recognise a person’s worldview and help them recognise it too.
Q. What kind of questions does a worldview address?
A. The inescapable questions of life.
Q. What’s the God question?
A. Is there a God and if so, what is He like?
Q. What’s the first origins question?
A. Why is the world here?
Q. What’s the second origins question?
A. What is a human being?
Q. What’s the education question?
A. How can we know anything?
Q. What’s the broken question?
A. What’s wrong with the world?
Q. What’s the repair question?
A. How can the world be fixed?
Q. What’s the death question?
A. What happens when we die?
Q. What’s the why question?
A. Where does meaning and significance come from?
Q. What is the winner’s question?
A. What is a successful life?
Q. What’s the cancer question?
A. Why is there suffering and does it have any purpose?
A. What’s the future question?
Q. How will the world end and what comes next if anything?
Q. What are the four main worldviews we find in the world?
A. Theism; Atheism; Pantheism and Paganism
Q. Define theism.
A. God exists, He made the world but is not the world.
Q. What types of theism exist?
A. Judaism; Christianity and Islam
Q. Define atheism.
A. The universe is characterised by the absence of God.
Q. Name some famous atheists.
A. Richard Dawkins; Christopher Hitchens; Daniel Dennett; Bertrand Russell.
Q. What other words are used for atheists?
A. Naturalists, materialists…but the most common term is secularists
Q. What is naturalism?
A. The belief that the supernatural doesn’t exist: there is no God, no heaven, no hell, no angels, no demons, no miracles, no incarnation, no virgin birth and no bodily resurrection.
Q. What kind of society have atheists sought to create?
A. The secular society.
Q. What is the essence of the secular society?
A. Human beings are central to all that is.
Q. Is secular atheism influential?
A. Secular atheism is making a bid to control the thinking of everyone in the West and beyond.
Q. Name some institutions where secular atheism rules supreme and is almost impossible to challenge.
A. The BBC, CNN, the United Nations, most universities, the UK Government.
Q. Why is secularism so powerful?
A. People who are secularists assume that the way they understand the world is reasonable and normal. Anything else is ‘irrational’ faith.
Q. How do secularists answer the God question?
A. God is an invention of the human imagination.
Q. If secularists maintain that God doesn’t exist, why then do people believe in Him?
A. Because believing in Him helps people cope with life.
Q. For the secularist, why is the universe here?
A. The universe is a cosmic accident.
Q. For the secularist, what is a human being?
A. A complex collection of molecules kicked up out of the slime by chance.
Q. For the secularist, how can we know anything?
A. Reason, feelings, collective human wisdom.
Q. For the secularist, what’s wrong with the world?
A. Differing answers are given: for some religion and ignorance are what’s wrong with the world; others think inequalities of power and wealth.
Q. For the secularist, how can the world be fixed?
A. Various options: eliminate religion; educate people; share power and wealth out equally; science can fix everything.
Q. How do secularists answer the death question?
A. At death we cease to be and our bodies become food for worms.
Q. For the modern secularist, where does meaning and significance come from?
A. You create it for yourself by taking control of your life before someone else does.
Q. For the modern secularist, what’s a successful life?
A. Being true to yourself, being ahead of the pack and achieving the ambitions you set for yourself.
Q. For the modern secularist, what’s the nature of freedom?
A. Freedom is freedom to pursue all your dreams without external restraints.
Q. For the secularist, why is there suffering and does it have any purpose?
A. Suffering is pointless and to be avoided; it points to our weakness in the face of a vast and indifferent universe.
Q. What’s the secularist’s hope in the face of suffering?
A. That science will find ways to overcome it.
Q. What’s the value of relationships?
A. To satisfy myself as I ask, “How can the person be of benefit to me?”
Q. What is a contemporary definition of love?
A. “I will value you for just as long as you make me happy.”
Q. For the secularist, how will the world end and what comes next?
A. The world will one day become extinct and nothing will remain.
Q. For the secularist, what’s the meaning of history?
A. Ever increasing material prosperity and through scientific advancement and human resourcefulness plus ever-increasing equality.
Q. For the secularist, what’s the nature of knowledge?
A. Knowledge about the world comes from science and reason. Knowledge about God, right and wrong and meaning is all personal preference and subjective
Q. What do most secularists think about human nature?
A. Human nature is essentially good but can be corrupted by poor upbringing or bad environment.
Q. For the secularist, what is gender?
A. It’s commonly held today that the very concepts of ‘men’ and ‘woman’ are the construction of a patriarchal society. Men and women are interchangeable.
Q. For the secularist, what’s our order of duty?
A. (i) Self first (ii) the planet (iii) other people (iv) the unborn
Q. For the secularist, what is faith?
A. Faith is commonly viewed as the disregarding of reason and science in order to believe in God or some kind of supernatural aid.
Q. For the secularist, what’s the relationship between faith and reason?
A. Faith and reason are opposed to one another.
Q. How does the atheist explain the existence of people of faith?
A. Although faith is believing in things for which there is no evidence, doing so helps you cope with life.
Q. From a Christian worldview perspective, what’s the attraction of atheism?
A. It’s extremely attractive; if you desire a life where you live for yourself, God is your greatest threat. The best option is to devise a worldview where He does not exist.
Q. For the atheist, why is God a threat?
A. He tells us what’s right and wrong and holds us to account for our lives. That’s intolerable for fallen people.
Q. What does the Bible teach about the knowledge of God?
A. That the knowledge of God is innate in every human being.
Q. If the knowledge of God is innate in every human being, why do people deny the existence of God?
A. Because although they know the truth about God, they supress that knowledge.
Q. What does the evangelist Ray Comfort say about why people call themselves atheists?
A. “The issue is not, ‘I can’t find God, it’s actually, I won’t find God because I’m enjoying my sins. If there is a God and there is law and judgement and hell, then pornography is wrong, rape is wrong, adultery is wrong, homosexuality is wrong. Atheism’s issue is in the end not evidence; it’s morality and accountability.’”
Q. What’s the problem with believing that there is no God?
A. You have more unanswered questions than ever.
Q. How did Richard Dawkins sum up the atheist’s take on the universe in a moment of honesty?
A. “This universe is as you would expect to find it if at bottom there is no good, no evil and no justice. DNA just is and we dance to its music.”
Q. So what’s the problem with secular atheism?
A. It’s is a bundle of contradictions.
Q. What kind of contradictions?
A. Atheists claim things for which they have absolutely no basis.
Q. Suggest five things for which atheists have no basis.
A. Human value, science, reason, morality and justice.
Q. What’s the problem with secularists claiming to value human beings?
A. How can highly evolved pond slime appearing in an accidental universe have any value?
Q. What’s the problem with secularists claiming morality (right and wrong)?
A. If there is no God everything is permitted because there is no one to deny permission.
Q. If we preach the Atheist Gospel to a thief, on what basis do we convince him to be good?
A. There isn’t one.
Q. What was one of the key factors that persuaded the Nazis to do what they did to the Jews?
A. One hundred years of deconstructing the Bible in German universities had persuaded them that there was no God watching them or to whom they were accountable.
Q. But don’t many atheists claim that some things are wrong?
A. Yes, because they live in God’s world and are His image-bearers and so steal from the true world view to get morality.
Q. But isn’t it hypocritical to steal from the Christian’s worldview to shoehorn their worldview to fit with the world?
A. Absolutely, but without stealing from the Christian worldview, the world collapses into absurdity.
Q. What’s the secularist’s problem with justice?
A. As with morality, he/she is always claiming the need for justice but has no basis for it.
Q. Why has the atheist got no basis for justice?
A. Without a reference point for justice outside the world, justice can’t even be defined.
Q. Why can’t the atheist define justice?
A. There is no justice if everything in the world is in the end just preference and opinion.
Q. But can’t a society agree on what is moral?
A. When people say that they appeal to society as the standard for right and wrong, we have to ask, “Which society, Adolf Hitler’s or Mother Teresa’s?
Q. What’s the secular Darwinian view of the world?
A. We’re only here because our ancestors killed their competitors and exist to survive and pass on our genes. One day we will die and so will the sun and all life.
Q. If that statement is true, what’s the motivation for unselfishly loving others?
A. There is none whatsoever.
Q. What is science?
A. The process by which we seek to understand and define the uniform laws of the universe and unlock them for our advantage and advancement.
Q. What’s the problem with doing science for the secularist?
A. Secularists find laws but deny a Lawgiver; they find information like DNA but deny a Mind as its Creator.
Q. Why did even Charles Darwin worry about his own ‘contribution’ to science?
A. Well he worried that if he really did have a monkey brain, trained only to serve his survival, how could he trust anything it told him?
Q. What does science require?
A. An ordered and reliable universe and that our brains can be trusted to understand it.
Q. What does atheism say about the universe?
A. That it is a cosmic accident, unguided, ungoverned and purposeless.
Q. What did the Christian apologist CS Lewis say about science?
A. “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they expected a Law-Giver”
Q. What’s the irony of the atheist claiming science as his explanatory card for the world?
A. The atheist has to steal from the Christian worldview to do his science.
Q. What’s the problem with the atheist claiming to be the champions of rationality?
A. In an accidental, purposeless and meaningless universe, there is no basis for rationality.
Q. So why do secularists claim to be the promoters of the rational society?
A. Because it suits their agenda and gives them power.
A. So to summarise, why is atheism called a thieving worldview?
Q. Because it claims things for which it has no basis at all… rationality, science, human value, morality and justice…he steals these from the true worldview, Biblical Christianity and then denies God’s existence.
Q. What we’re doing here is presuppositional apologetics. What does it claim?
A. That all people, even atheists, pre-suppose the existence of God.
Q. Why do they do that?
A. Because without God, the world cannot be understood and collapses into absurdity.
Q. What did Francis Schaffer say about how men live?
A. “All men constantly and consistently act as though Christianity is true” FS CW 1:330
Q. How does Friedrich Nietzsche help us here?
A. Tellingly, Friedrich Nietzsche said that if you believe in the values of sharing your power and goods with others, in universal human dignity and in caring for the weak, you’re still really thinking as a Christian.
Q. What does Douglas Wilson say about the job of the Christian apologist?
A. He likens the atheist’s suppression of God’s existence to a person holding a beachball underwater. The Christian apologist’s job is to loosen the fingers of the person who holds the beachball and let the Truth emerge.
Q. So, in witnessing to secularists, do we reason our way to God or from Him?
A. From Him. His existence is the only thing that makes sense of the world. He is the precondition for everything else.
Q. What’s the problem with thinking that we can reason our way to God and prove that He exists?
A. Well, it’s almost as if His existence depends upon us, upon Him getting our vote.
Q. Why is reasoning our way to God just silly?
A. Because if God did not exist, we would not be here nor thinking about Him or anything else!
Q. What did Edith Schaeffer say on this point?
A. “It makes sense that there is no sense without God”.
Q. Why are atheists so hypocritical when they accuse Christians of believing in miracles like the virgin birth and the resurrection?
A. Atheists get away with believing, without evidence, all kinds of miraculous things: that the universe, life, the genetic code, human consciousness, reason, logic all came into being by chance.
Q. How do Christian theists answer the God question?
A. The Infinite-Personal Triune God is the key to all reality.
Q. For Christian theists, why is the universe here?
A. The universe is the creation of the Infinite-Personal God.
Q. For Christian theists, what is a human being?
A. A being made in the image of the Triune God.
Q. For Christian theists, how can anything be known?
A. Through God’s Two Books: The Book of God’s Words (The Bible) and the Book of God’s Works (The Creation).
Q. For Christian theists, what’s wrong with the world?
A. Humanity has rejected our Creator God as our King and made themselves ‘kings’, believing that they can be the determiners of right and wrong. The Bible calls this sin and the result is chaos and suffering.
Q. For Christian theists, how can the world be fixed?
A. Through what God has done through Christ and will yet do.
Q. How do Christian theists answer the death question?
A. The body perishes but the soul lives on. One day every soul and body will be reunited. Then judgement leading to heaven or hell depending upon one’s acceptance or rejection of Jesus Christ.
Q. Why is Christianity the exact opposite of Darwin’s survival of the fittest?
A. In Christianity, the fittest (Christ), gives himself for the redemption of the weak and helpless.
Q. For Christian theists, where does meaning and significance come from?
A. From being restored to relationship with God and following his plan for our lives.
Q. For Christian theists, what’s a successful life?
A. A life that trusts in Christ and lives in service to him and our fellow-man.
A. For Christian theists, what’s the nature of freedom?
Q. Freedom is freedom from the things that enslave us so we can be what we ought to be.
Q. For Christian theists, why is there suffering and does it have any purpose?
A. All suffering has its roots in the Fall of Man and the sin that followed. For the believer, God uses suffering for his or her good but we may not know how until Christ returns.
Q. For Christian theists, how will the world end and what comes next?
A. This age will end with the second coming of Jesus Christ who will judge the living and the dead. Afterwards there will be a new heaven and a renewed earth.
Q. For Christian theists, what’s the meaning of history?
A. The triumph of Christ and His people and the eradication of rebels who oppose His rule and plan.
Q. For Christian theists, what’s the nature of truth?
A. Truth comes from God. We were Created by God to know him through His creation and verbal revelation (the Bible).
Q. What do Christian theists think about human nature?
A. Human beings are made in the image of God, but that image is terribly corrupted by sin. Through God’s intervention the image is being restored in believers.
Q. What did Francis Schaeffer say about Man?
A. “Man is a glorious ruin”
Q. For the Christian theist, how is sexuality understood?
A. Maleness and femaleness is created by God and matter to Him.
Q. Are men and women equal?
A. Equal in value but with differing roles.
Q. What are the differing roles and men and women?
A. Men are called to exercise servant leadership in the family and church. In marriage, wives are called to support their husband and submit to their leadership.
Q. If men have been given authority to lead, doesn’t that make them more valuable than women?
A. No. In God’s world, value and significance is not related to authority or position.
Q. Why do we admire doing good over doing evil, and crave justice?
A. Because we’re made in the image of God and programmed to know that good is better than evil.
Q. What about the Bible’s view of Homosexuality?
A. Homosexual acts are in defiance of the blueprint established by the Creator for His creatures and are always destructive to human wellbeing.
Q. For Christian theists, what’s the order of duty?
A. (i) God first (ii) Other people/self (iii) the planet.
Q. What is love in the Christian worldview?
A. Love is giving oneself for the good of another.
Q. For Christian theists, what is the relationship between faith and reason?
A. Faith and reason are not opposed to one another. It is reasonable to trust in the God of the Bible.
Q. What is reason?
A. Reason is a non-material reality that enables us to understand a world which functions rationally.
Q. Why does reason point to the existence of God?
A. Reason doesn’t come from non-reason; it must have come from a rational mind.
Q. What is faith?
A. Faith is the trust we place in the thing we think is the foundational reality.
Q. So do all people possess faith?
A. Yes, even atheists have faith, although they deny it. They trust in the material as the final reality, believing that meaning and happiness are found in that realm. Denying a Creator, they even claim that matter is self-creating.
Q. For the Christian is it true that only people of faith, worship?
A. No. All people worship. Created to find our deepest meaning in the worship of God, if we fail to worship Him, we worship something else and upon that we build our identity and self-worth. We call this an idol.
Q. What are the most common idols found in the western world today?
A. Money, power, fame, freedom, pleasure, ambition.
Q. What did Jackie Pullinger’s father say to her before she left to be a missionary in Hong Kong?
A. What right did she have to give her religion to people who had perfectly good ones of their own?
Q. What issue does Pullinger’s father point to?
A. The scandal that Jesus is unique in a world of many religions and creeds
Q. Don’t all religions basically say the same thing?
A. No. The Muslim fundamentalist wants to kill you if you don’t convert; the Christian fundamentalist will pray for you if you don’t convert. There are huge differences between religions.
Q. Can’t everyone be right simultaneously?
A. No, not everyone can be right at the same time. Take the moment we die. If Mohammed spoke the truth, we go to hell. If the Hindu gurus speaks the truth, we’re reincarnated. If the atheist is correct, we rot. If Christianity is true, the Christian is going to heaven.
A. So what’s so unique about Jesus?
Q. His outrageous claims; his unique character and teaching; his authority; his resurrection.
A. But couldn’t the early Christians have made him up?
Q. You try making Jesus up!
Q. What’s so great about Jesus?
A. His words provide an explanation for all the world’s ills that have an incredible ring of truth about them. His death and resurrection provide a solution that fits with the problem we all have.
Q. But isn’t Christianity an immoral creed?
A. Well, it means that God calls the shots on how we live and that can be highly offensive to today’s generation. But if truth, freedom and human wellbeing are found in Christianity, it can hardly be immoral.
Q. Does God want what’s best for us?
A. Yes, in the end the way that He calls us to live is always best for our welfare.
Q. So, what has Christianity given western nations?
A. Ideas that are rare in other places: the dignity and value of all people, equally made in God’s image; compassion for the weak; freedom of conscience and expression; the rule of law; trust and stability.
Q. But don’t Western nations mostly believe in those things despite no longer being Christian?
A. Yes but that’s because they linger on from our Christian past when people imagined and built a world with their Bibles open.
Q. But if we’ve cut ourselves off from our Judeo-Christian roots, the benefits can’t last forever can they?
A. No. Eventually we will return to a pre-Christian worldview.
Q. And what would a pre-Christian worldview look like?
A. A world consistent with the notion that there is no final morality, no justice, no accountability and every person does what is best for their own survival.
Q. Lots of people raised in Christian homes abandon their faith for secularism. Why?
A. Frequently, they haven’t been taught to see the amazing explanation for the world that Christianity offers, or understand the problems of atheistic secularism.
A. What does Frank Turek say about Christian children abandoning the faith?
Q. He says that young people are talked out of the Christian faith because they haven’t been talked into it.
Q. What is pantheism?
A. The belief that everything is divine and part of the oneness of the cosmos.
Q. Which belief systems are pantheistic?
A. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and New-Age Spirituality
Q. What does the pantheist say about God?
A. It is possible to say that everything is a part of God, or that God is in everything and everyone.
Q. What’s the problem with using the word ‘God’ in Pantheism?
A. The use of the word God is unlike anything theists would think of as God.
Q. So for pantheists, what is the nature of reality?
A. Only the spiritual dimension exists. All else is illusion, Maya. Spiritual reality, Brahman, is eternal, impersonal, and unknowable.
Q. For the pantheist, why is the universe here?
A. Spiritual reality has always been.
Q. In pantheism what is a human being?
A. Humans are one with ultimate reality. Thus, humans are spiritual, eternal, and impersonal. Any belief that he or she is an individual is merely illusionary.
Q. In pantheism, what’s the nature of truth?
A. Truth is an experience of unity with “the oneness” of the universe and is beyond all rational description.
Q. What moral values exist in pantheism?
A. None. Because ultimate reality is impersonal and a unity, there is no distinction between good and evil.
Q. In pantheism what’s wrong with the world?
A. Pursuing “unenlightened” behaviour which fails to understand the essential unity of all things.
Q. In pantheism, what’s the nature of suffering?
A. All suffering is illusionary.
Q. What’s the first principle of life in pantheism?
A. Life is an endless cycle of birth, life, death and reincarnation.
Q. What’s the second principle of life in pantheism?
A. That enlightened behaviour results in good karma and unenlightened behaviour results in bad karma.
Q. What’s the third principle of life in pantheism?
A. Obtain good karma and you come back higher in the next life; obtain bad karma and you come back lower.
Q. So, in a pantheistic framework, why are human beings here?
A. We’re here to suffer and be purged from the sins of our previous life.
Q. What’s the difference between the pantheist concept of karma and the Christian concept of grace?
A. With Karma, you get what you deserve and you pay for your sins. With grace, God gives you what you don’t deserve, forgiveness and supernatural aid.
Q. What’s the pantheist’s view of time?
A. Time is cyclical. We are trapped in it and must accept our fate.
Q. How do pantheists suggest that we approach problems?
A. Resignation, appease the gods, bribe the powerful.
Q. What do pantheists say about human relationships?
A. Accept your place in the Karmic order. Submit to those above, dominate those below.
Q. For the pantheism, how will history end?
A. There is no end to history, only suffering and purging indefinitely.
Q. What’s the difference between Hinduism and Buddhism in how it understands the divine?
A. The divine in Hinduism is impersonal, though approached through countless deities and statues. Buddhism is religion without God, and without even a final existence.
Q. What’s the goal of existence in Buddhism?
A. The goal of Buddhist existence is nirvana, extinction or the complete cessation of desire and personality…or we could say absorption into the sea of undifferentiated being.
Q. How many births was it supposed to have taken The Buddha to attain nirvana?
A. 547.
Q. How does Hinduism work?
A. “The Wheel of Hinduism demonstrates a massive contrast with a Christian view of history. The wheel embodies the cycle of birth, growth, death and rebirth. The wheel offers only one way of escape from this meaningless, endless movement. Take a spoke – it doesn’t matter which one – and travel along it to the hub, where you can observe the endless movement without being involved in it. It doesn’t matter which religion you take: follow it to the timeless central reality hidden behind all the variety and change of daily life. There in that motionless centre where all is peace, you can understand the endless movement which makes up human history – understand that it goes nowhere and means nothing. It is all an illusion.” Ravi Zacharias.
Q. What is paganism?
A. The idea that there are many gods and demons who control the world.
Q. What are these gods like?
A. Mostly they are competitive, capricious and unpredictable.
Q. Can you give examples of pagan cultures?
A. The Greco-Roman world, Canaanite culture, animistic cultures.
Q. What characteristics emerge in pagan societies?
A. A deep fatalism about the world that permeates everything.
Q. How do paganist cultures suggest that we handle life?
A. Resignation to the gods, appease them, bribe them with costly sacrifices.
Q. Finally, how do all other belief systems differ from Christianity in their approach to salvation?
A. In every case the person is saved, reborn or fulfilled by obeying a set of teachings; in Christianity we are saved by receiving a gift.
First published on Challenging Thinking on 2020-10-23. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.