It's been said that Christianity is a religion for the weak minded people who use Jesus as a crutch because they can't make it in life without having religion to undergird them.

Not only that, they read from an ancient book written by men who are not smart, who are not intellectual, and who have unscientific minds.

On top of that, as Josh McDowell said, he he thought that Christians had two brains, one lost and the other out looking for it.

Is this true?

Is there any credibility to what many people in the world think about Christians and about God's word?

Or is God's word actually true and they're actually wrong on everything they think, believe and hold to?

So let's take this time to stop and think about it.

Hello?

Hello?

Anybody home?

Think, McFly, think.

I'm thinking.

I'm thinking.

What were you thinking?

I'm trying to think, but nothing happens.

Don't say anything now.

Just think about it.

You're listening to Stop and Think About It, a podcast for the Christian Thinker.

In a day when sound biblical preaching has been replaced by man centered entertainment and the church has become increasingly anti intellectual, this podcast will encourage believers to think biblically and theologically.

So please join me as we get ready to stop and think about it.

Welcome, friends and foes, saints and sinners.

Thank you for taking this time to listen to another episode of the Stop and Think about it podcast.

We have Anthony Silvestro.

Did I say that right?

You said it right.

That's an Irish name, right?

Yeah, very Irish.

You're a straight goomba, right?

I am.

All right.

That means Italian.

For those of you that don't know, you're a doctor.

I am.

In what field?

So I'm a dentist.

Doctor, dental surgery, and have been doing it for 20 years already.

Hard to believe.

So you're a Christian and you have a PhD?

Well, doctorate.

It's different doctorate, but yeah, different doctorate.

Right.

Many people think that Christians are dumb, that they don't think through things and that the scientists what the science says.

That's right.

But I don't know that science actually talks.

I think scientists talk.

Scientists talk and they don't always agree.

It really throws the people on the streets for a loop when I'm out open air preaching and people think we're all just a bunch of ragtag dummies who believe in some magic brain in the sky.

Like.

No, I actually went to school for a lot of years.

Right.

So apologetics is a word that many people are not familiar with.

Defending the faith and not defending all faiths, defending the faith of Christ, Christianity.

And that is something you're very passionate about.

And so tell us what you do.

Tell us about your ministry.

So my ministry is a creation revival, and I also work with a guy named Mike Riddle with creation training Initiative.

And two things we do.

We teach apologetics, and we also teach people how to teach better.

So similar to what you do in your ministry.

Love it.

We actually are training people, whether it's pastors or Sunday school teachers or lay people who want to get up and start teaching, might be in their families, might be in Sunday school, but get them to be more effective communicators.

And it's so important that we get people that are equipped as teachers, not just the first guy that in a church says, okay, I'm available, but has no training whatsoever.

We need to train those guys to do it.

Right.

And so that's what I'm passionate about.

But I didn't grow up a Christian.

I didn't grow up in a Christian home as an Italian, most of us grew up Roman Catholic by birth.

I've heard of that.

Yeah.

Right.

And thankfully, the Lord saved me me out of that religion years ago and became a Christian after I became a dentist.

And so imagine the worldview flip that I had being raised in scientism, not science.

Scientism.

Right.

Because it's a religion of science today.

Yeah, I like how you put that.

So raised in the religion of scientism, believing in things like macroevolution, seeing things from a humanistic perspective.

Right.

There's two worldviews today.

Sure.

It's either God's worldview or it's humanism.

There's nothing in between.

There's no neutral ground.

And so the flip that I had was a very stark flip from the time that I was trying to disprove the Bible to some friends and by reading the Bible, convicted me of my sin and got saved.

Imagine that.

Imagine that.

Right.

And I had that complete worldview flip of recognizing that the standard of truth isn't humanism, it's God.

But then I still had to wrestle out Genesis because of all my training in the medical fields and chemistry and math, double major in school.

So I went to the Creation Museum for the first time, and I had another big flip in my mind, literally walking out after several hours of the Creation Museum, telling my wife, I have to rethink everything I ever learned.

Wow.

And that's what happens.

God just used that day to.

Even though I had already been saved at that point, there's still a question mark in the back of my head up till that point that, you know, I believe the Bible to be true.

I believe to be God's word.

But Genesis, we're just going to ignore that for a little moment.

You can't.

Genesis is the foundation of the entire Bible.

And in that day I knew it.

And I'll tell you, I carry a chip on my shoulder to this day in apologetics because why had I not been taught these things?

Why did I go to school all these years learning scientism but never hearing the other side?

Why is it I've only been taught from one perspective of science, the humanistic side, and not been taught that there are alternative thoughts out there?

You know why?

It's because if you laid out the science of the humanistic worldview versus the science that is in agreement with what God's word has already stated, not a single soul would choose scientism.

And this was never addressed in Roman Catholicism either.

No, not at all.

Priest or whoever is there.

They didn't even touch this area.

No.

And when they did, they folded to secular science like most Christian churches do today.

I mean, why are we in the mess we're in and why am I so passionate about this?

Because churches aren't teaching.

Kids are growing up without understanding a Christian worldview.

You know, some statistics I have in my book on the origin of kinds talks about kids being in school eight hours a day.

So you talk about 24 hour day.

We have eight hours or so of sleep and a lot of teenagers are sleeping like 10 hours.

Right?

Right.

So eight to 10 hours of sleep, you get eight hours of being.

If they're in a public school, our son's not.

We home school.

But if they go to public school, they're another eight hours.

You got 16 hours a day.

Two thirds of your day is with sleep and a secular worldview.

Now the remaining eight hours in a kid's day, once you take the electronics portion out of it, they're watching TV on the Internet, social media, everything else.

Take that out.

You may have 30 to 60 minutes of free time a day with your child where they're not being poisoned with a humanistic, secular worldview.

Wow.

This is why I'm passionate.

We've got to get the church equipped and we've got to change things from the family level.

Fathers to their kids and then churches to the fathers and to the kids.

And then we've got to go out to the world like we're called to do evangelistically and preach the gospel and show that the Bible has answers.

Yeah.

I mean, a lot of the stuff you're describing is our mission statement for Soul Pitching Ministries.

Right.

So, I mean, I love it.

And, you know, if you attack the Bible from the first verse, why would you believe the rest of it?

Because some people say, I have no problem with Jesus rising from the dead, but I have a problem with God creating the world and speaking it into existence.

So.

Well, if it's not true from the beginning, then how can you believe the rest of it?

Why is Genesis, which I believe and you can correct me if I'm wrong, the most attacked book?

Absolutely it is.

Absolutely.

And, you know, one of the things I kind of joke with, but I'm actually serious about this, I tell people kind of like the seven degrees of Kevin Bacon.

Right.

They say that give me any actor's name and I can get back to Kevin Bacon.

Seven degrees.

Yes.

I say, I can do this with the book of Genesis.

Give me any doctrine of the bible, and within 2 degrees, I'll get you back to Genesis as the foothold of it all.

Wow.

And it's true.

So while I would say that you can be saved without having a right view on creation, I would say also that your understanding of the Gospel is undermined and it's inconsistent if you don't have Genesis.

Right.

And here's what I mean by this.

So when I was finishing my book about eight years ago in a Starbucks, and I have people say, why would you go to Starbucks?

I say, because everywhere you turn, there's a liberal you can witness to.

There you go.

Right.

It's a great place to go.

Absolutely.

So I was there spending time writing my book, editing the book, and every week I was there for one or two days a week when I wasn't practicing to do this and this one particular day, because I always get into conversations with people.

You listen to conversations, get into conversations.

So one particular day, there was two Christians at the table next to me, and I could tell one was discipling the other.

I didn't want to.

Didn't want to bother him until the one said to the other, hey, I got about five minutes left, Pastor.

I got to get going.

To which I'm like, okay, that's my turn to talk.

So I turn to them, say, hey, guys, couldn't help but overhear your conversation.

What are you doing here?

And it's a pastor with a newer congregate.

He's discipling his congregant.

So that is absolutely wonderful.

AOG pastor, by the way, Assemblies of God.

So I said, well, that is absolutely wonderful to hear.

You just don't see this in a lot of churches anymore.

And then of course, he asked me, what are you doing here?

I said, well, I'm finishing my book.

It's a book on biblical creation.

It's on lay level, presuppositional apologetics, and then biblical evangelism, Ray Comfort style.

They go, oh.

And I go, what do you mean, oh?

He goes, well, you know, I just don't think creation is that important anymore.

I said, hold on a second.

You're an Assemblies of God pastor, and I know that your denomination in general believes in a young earth creation.

You're one of the few left.

And he goes, well, actually, we've been getting away from that last few years.

Yes.

I said, pastor, you guys are going the wrong direction.

What do you mean?

And I go, I've got a question for you.

Why did Jesus have to die now?

I go, look, I get it.

He had to die without the dripping of blood.

There's no remission for sin.

So I understand that aspect, but why was the punishment death for Christ?

Like, without sounding ridiculous, why was it not Jesus getting a spanking in a corner or getting a timeout, right?

Why death on the cross?

And he looked at me blank, didn't say a word.

He goes, can you repeat the question?

So I repeated it.

And then he goes, I know this is a trick question.

I go, pastor, I assure you this is not a trick question.

And then I had to open up my Bible and walk him through Genesis 1, 2 and 3.

God created a perfect world.

He gave Adam one command before Eve was even created.

Right in Genesis 2, which is just essentially day six expanded.

Sure.

One command.

Do not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for in the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.

This is a promise of a future physical death, immediate spiritual death.

And what do we see in Genesis 3?

Immediate spiritual death.

And now the promise of future physical death.

Their bodies were starting to decay.

Death, disease, famine had entered into the world.

Jesus went to die on the cross because death was the prescribed punishment for sin from the very beginning of the Bible.

If you think that God somehow used evolution, macroevolution to bring about everything, that somehow he turns goo and then billions of years of death into monkeys, and then millions of years at this point to get to humans, and he used death this whole time.

Well, now all of a sudden, death isn't a bad thing anymore.

Death is not the last enemy to be destroyed.

As we read in 1 Corinthians 15:26.

Now, all of a sudden, death is something God used that he called very good in Genesis 1:31 in his creation because he brought about everything by death.

Wow.

Because how can you have death apart from sin?

Right.

It's impossible.

That's right.

You can't have things dying apart from sin.

That's right.

So death is a bad thing.

Death entered the world because of Adam, and Jesus came to pay that ultimate penalty.

Ken Ham wrote a.

I think he wrote a letter to the Assemblies of God, which I used to be ordained in the Assemblies of God, or credentialed with the Assemblies of God.

And I think he wrote a sad day for the Assemblies of God because they have gotten away from young Earth creationism, and it shows.

And then what?

Are their kids going to go to school?

Right.

If they're going to secular schools, what are they going to hear?

What are they going to leave?

Why do they need God?

They're just setting up the kids for failure.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can question the first 11 books of the Bible.

What stops you from questioning the rest of it?

One Episcopal pastor that I found out was an Episcopal pastor.

He said, oh, I'm a pastor.

I said, what kind of a church?

He said, episcopalian or Episcopal?

And I said, are you tight on the gospel or are you loose on the gospel?

So what do you mean?

I said, does Jesus endorse homosexuality?

Said, oh, yeah, he has no problem with homosexuality.

I said, he talked about Adam and Eve as a marriage.

And he said, we know the first 11 chapters of Genesis are a myth.

I said, well, somebody's got to tell Jesus that because he referenced the first 11 chapters.

So is he wrong or are you wrong?

Yep.

And, you know, and I just shared the gospel with him.

And I said, I.

I just.

I believe you're lost.

You're lost in sin.

And I just, you know, like the training that you and I received from the way the master Ray Comfort, I just went to the law from there, showed him he was a sinner in need of a savior instead of trying to.

That was his problem.

That's absolutely a problem.

Kenya, how do you connect a literal Jesus, right, Who.

I mean, let's be honest, right?

The Christian way of falling asleep is read the genealogies, right?

It's like tongue in cheek.

And of course, I say this jokingly, but why did God put the genealogies in there?

Was it to bore us to tears, or is it to show us several things that from Adam you have his son.

And then you have his son.

You have his son.

And eventually it's connected all the way to a literal Jesus who had to come into the world as fully God and fully man to pay the penalty for sin.

And that he had to be of the human race connected back to Adam for us to be saved of our sin.

The perfect human blood to drip.

That's awesome.

I mean, it's amazing.

But most people don't realize and make these connections.

Why do you think most people aren't making these connections?

Pride.

And look, let's be real.

I know a lot of reformed guys don't want to talk about this, but Satan and his and his demons are behind all this.

Right?

They're the ones who are.

Who are fighting against God in this world in the spiritual war, and they're the ones who are coming after us.

We have sinful flesh, we have sinful desires.

And we're tempted by Satan and his demons in terms of sin.

And they will do anything they can to get us away from the authority of God's word.

Sure.

Genesis 3.

God really say.

Did God really say started there questioning God's word.

And there are spiritual forces.

We see in the book of Job, before he attacked Job, Satan had to ask permission to attack Job.

That's right.

You know, and Satan wants to go after our kids.

I believe the wolves go after little lambs in the back of the flock first because they're easy pickings.

Amen.

But some parents are giving their kids away and then they're going to wonder, I didn't raise you like this.

Well, you kind of did because you had.

You could have painted them any color, but you let the world use the paintbrush.

You let the world speak into their heart.

Because either you're training kids toward the idolatry of man or toward the worship of God.

And like you said, there is no in between.

I know that the world likes to have all these gray areas.

The kingdom.

There's no gray areas.

He called us out of darkness into his marvelous light.

It wasn't like we started to glow on the way there.

That's right.

It was out of one, ripped out of one and placed in the other.

And now we're in the kingdom of God and we're no longer in the kingdom of this world.

That's right.

You know, and you brought up a really touchy point for me that I think needs to be stated here.

When I'm teaching on lay level, presuppositional apologetics, we talk about the two worldviews and no true grounds.

And one of the things I do is I'll stand on a stool and I'll say, look, if we're Christian, our starting point is God's Word.

We start with the fact that God exists.

He has spoken, and his Word's true.

And so we stand on this.

The world stands on humanism, which means really, anything goes other than what God has already spoken.

So the way it goes is like this.

I stand on the one stool and I say, look, this is our grounds that we stand on.

As Christians, every argument we ever make has to start on the foundation of God's Word.

And we argue from there, from those presuppositions.

The world stands on their humanistic stool.

And so I'll get off my stool and pretend I'm a humanist, and I'll stand on that stool and I'll say, okay, I'm a Mac Revolutionist now.

Now I'm a Buddhist.

Now I'm a.

And fill in the blank.

They say what the world wants us to do and what often crosses Christian parents do is they say, you know what?

We need to learn all things.

Let's learn things from their perspective.

That's very similar to what happens when we are out evangelizing on the streets, where the atheist or agnostic or whatever says, hey, you know what?

I don't accept your Bible.

I don't believe your Bible.

How about we do this?

You step down off of your worldview, I'll step down off of mine, and let's meet in the middle, right?

So you get off your stool, they get off theirs, and we meet in the middle.

Now what just happens?

You gave up the authority.

We gave up our entire authority.

You put the sword in the sheath.

That's right.

Now here's the thing.

What did that person do with their authority?

Yeah, they stayed in that position.

They stayed.

That's right.

They said, I'm gonna do one thing, and they didn't.

And they didn't do it because they.

Can'T do it, because they can't.

So imagine the parents.

Now, parents say, we're gonna.

We're not gonna what?

I.

Okay, so the world says that Christians indoctrinate their kids.

Good.

Right?

That's exactly what we're supposed to do.

Because you know what?

If not the world's indoctrinating our kids.

And so when parents say, you know what?

We're just gonna teach them everything and we're gonna show them what they believe.

No, no, no.

What we've done then is we've allowed the world to indoctrinate our kids purposefully.

We've taken our kids off of the authority of God's word and we think that's somehow by humanistic means we can get back to God.

So this is false discipleship completely.

If you don't disciple your family, the world will do it.

And you won't like the fruit of that, because it's not godly fruit, it's rotten fruit.

And what will God do with rotten fruit?

He's good, you know, he's going to destroy that.

That's right.

And I'll say.

And I'll say it, and he is not.

You have not paid me to do this.

Right.

Your discipleship book.

I picked this up earlier and I bought it immediately for my son.

I'm like, this is a great source tool to use.

And what I loved about yours is that it's all God's word.

I mean, it's all foundational for how we are supposed to raise our kids.

And I really encourage, whether it's your book or others that people find godly resources to use to train up their children.

Husbands, train your wives.

I mean, do what we're called to do in indoctrinating our families in God's word, the only source of children, truth.

Amen.

Amen.

That is absolutely crucial.

And if we don't do it here and now, all this time is going by.

I like how you mentioned the time.

How much time is spent our children being influenced by others?

He gave them to us.

He said, here, Deuteronomy 6.

Right here.

Israel, the Lord of God, of the Lord is one.

Teach these things to your children.

What many parents do is they say, you know what?

Youth pastor, teach these things to my children.

Sunday school teacher, teach these things to my children.

But they don't do it themselves.

And they've relegated it out.

And it kind of.

It's actually modeled more on the public school system.

Because the public school system has an agenda.

Oh, yeah.

Divorce children from their parents.

You could feed them, cloth them and change them.

But let us disciple them and indoctrinate them.

So I'm a teacher and I teach a health class and I show the kids there's a difference between indoctrination and education.

And I've already taught them.

And they're, they're, you know, this is in a secular setting.

And I said, what's the difference?

And they said, one, education is teaching us how to think.

Indoctrination is telling us what to think.

And I'm showing them logic now.

But if we don't do it as a church.

We look just like the world because we are like the world.

And we're supposed to come out of the world as those marvelous lights.

That's right.

Amen.

Well, brother, I really appreciate this.

Just tell us, just so people who may not know you use the word presuppositional apologetics, which I am a die hard fan of and I use too, what is the difference between that and what many maybe don't even know?

It's called evidential apologetics, which guys like Josh McDowell and Frank Turek and others, they think that is the way.

That's right.

So there's a lot of books on different apologetics methods.

And I would say that in general we can say that there's three apologetics methods.

Okay, I really think there's two, but I'll explain that in a moment.

So there's in general evidential, classical and presuppositional.

Okay.

Now evidential and classical essentially look the same.

Right?

Right.

Classical.

The only difference I know classicists will hate when I say this, but classical is no different than evidential, except they add some philosophical arguments into it.

And usually the good philosophical arguments are presuppositional.

They steal from us.

Right?

But so here's the philosophical difference.

And I don't believe Christians should be engaging in evidential or classical apologetics really at all unless they are in a presuppositional framework.

So I'll explain that here in a minute.

The whole purpose of evidential and classical is to say everybody that I talk to is an atheist.

That's the assumption.

Right?

And so now I'm going to take evidences, or if you're a classicist, evidences plus philosophical arguments.

And I'm going to build a case to get to theism.

So I'm going to prove to you that God, a God must exist.

And once it gets you to theism, now I'm going to spend some time with evidences and philosophical arguments to get you to the point of believing that the God of the Bible is the most likely God.

Because evidence is you can never 100% prove God's existence.

You can just get really, really close.

And for all you math people out there, it's what's called an asymptote, right?

You get as close as possible without actually getting there.

So this is what their methods actually do.

Now here's the problem.

Who do you rely upon to convince somebody of God's existence?

You and I ourselves.

It's our own intellect, it's our own intelligence, it's our own abilities to do this.

Precept's different.

Precept says, hold on a second.

Romans 1.

Everybody knows God exists, right?

God has already made himself manifest, known to everybody by his creation.

And things have been made.

The moral law testifies, bears witness to his existence according to Romans 2.

So that means that every single person I walk up to already knows God exists.

So the evidential is trying to get you to Genesis 1:1.

You say, why do we need to even go down that road?

We're assuming Genesis 1:1 that God exists.

Let's just go from Genesis 1:1 and not try to get there.

You're already there.

You're already there.

Yeah, God of scripture, not any other God.

And then.

And they know that God exists.

Deep down they know.

And so our job, instead of proving to them God exists is to say, look, you and I both know the creator God exists.

Give them Bible verses and call them to repentance and faith.

This is what we're called to do.

And I know there's guys who've written really large books on precept and I can go through those arguments.

I've got different podcasts out there where I've done some of those things.

But in reality, precept is just the mentality of recognizing.

It's a.

Instead of a bottom up approach like evidential and classicists do, we're a top down approach.

We start with God's word.

God exists and you know it.

And now we give you Bible verses and we preach the gospel and we use the law in order to watch people repent and believe.

So you would say the difference of the two approaches, Evidentialism, classical classism.

You think their problem is intellectual pre sub.

Your problem is sin.

You got to adjust the sin.

You just the intellect.

What does the Bible say about the intellect?

Their minds are darkened.

So now I'm trying to speak to a mind that's darkened and bring light.

Apart from using God's word really to say your problem is sin.

So you're a dentist, right?

I don't know how many people like the dentist.

I guess when the dentist says everything is good news, but when you touch you, you've touched on nerves before.

I imagine poking around in there.

But when you hit the nerve and the person, then they know there's a problem.

Correct.

So now if you just told somebody there's a problem, right?

I want to tell you have teeth and you have nerves and if you're, you know, if there's a problem in there, we have to fix it.

But if you poke on it, you don't need to say any of those things.

You just poke on that nerve, you poke on that problem, and then, boom, they know there's a problem.

And now they're convinced they.

They need you to.

To do something to help them.

And I think that is sort of the picture of evidentialism versus pre sub.

Amen.

It's a great dental one.

Yeah, you might have to use that in the future.

Oh, you've never used that one before.

Never use that one.

No charge for that one.

Well, brother, I really appreciate this time.

You know, we haven't seen each other in a while.

It's good to catch up all the way out here.

We have to do this again.

We're going to get you on Zoom or however we choose to do it.

But this stuff is so important because if Christians don't know how to defend their faith, they'll be run over by a false theology.

And the gates of hell cannot overcome the church because we stand on the word of God.

We stand in a superior position than the entire world.

And yet, you know, we're like in a tank, they have a pea shooter, and we're acting like they're in the tank and we have a pea shooter.

And so it's very sad.

And so just encourage your heart, get into God's word.

Read it.

Memorize your word.

Memorize the word of God.

And brothers, tell me the name of your book again.

The website, so that people can be strengthened in that way.

So the book is called on the Origin of kinds.

So you can look that up online.

And creationtraining.org you can find it on there, as well as my speaking schedule, things like that and creationrevivalmail.com is the way to get ahold of me.

Amen.

Well, thank you for taking this time to stop and think about it.

Thank you.

If you would like to contact us, please email us@stopandthinkcrewmail.com youm could also visit our website at www.stopandthinkpodcast.com.

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