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APOLOGETICS

I  What does Apologetics mean?

The Classical Greek term 'apologetics' etymologically derives from the Classical Greek word apologia, meaning 'defense' or 'answer' of a position against an attack; not from the English word apology, which is exclusively understood as a defensive plea for forgiveness for an action that is open to blame. In the Classical Greek legal systems, two key technical terms were employed: the prosecution delivered the categoria, and the defendant replied with an apologia. To deliver an apologia then meant making a formal speech to reply and debut the charges, as in the case of Socrates' defense.

The Classical Greek term appears in the Koine (i.e., common) Greek of the New Testament. The Apostle Paul employs the term apologia in his trial speech to Festus and Agrippa when he says "I make my defense" (Acts 26:2). A cognate term appears in Philippians 1:7 as he is "defending the gospel", and in 1 Peter 3:15 believers must be ready to give an "answer" for their faith. The term also appears in the negative in Romans 1:20: unbelievers are anapologetoi (the Greek usage means, without excuse, defense, or apology) for rejecting the revelation of God in creation.

Apologetics is the field of study concerned with the systematic defense of a position. It is occasionally used to refer to a speech or writing that defends the author's position. Someone who engages in apologetics is called an apologist. Biblical Apologetics defended Christianity as the culmination of Judaism, with Jesus as the Messiah. In the 2nd and 3rd centuries a number of Christian writers defended the faith against the criticisms of Greco-Roman culture, and in the 5th century St. Augustine wrote his monumental City of God as a response to further criticisms. The late 18th century argument that a universe exhibiting design must have a designer continues to be used; apologists have also dealt with the challenges of Darwinism, Marxism, and Psychoanalysis (For more details refer, Britanica Concise Encyclopedia).

II  NT as a Source for Apologetics

Christian apologetics has a long and honorable history, beginning in New Testament times, for we find Peter making a plea for apologetical reasoning when he writes, "Always be prepared to make a defense (apologia) to anyone who calls you to account for the hope that is in you" (1 Peter 3:15). This is often regarded as the classic biblical statement of the mandate for Christians to engage in apologetics.

Three key observations should be made about this text. First, Peter is definitely instructing believers to make a reasoned defense of their beliefs. Logos (the same word used in John 1:1 to refer to the preexistent Christ) is a very flexible word, but in this context it clearly refers to a rational explanation or account. Second, this apologetic mandate is given generally to all Christians, requiring them to give reasons for faith in Christ to anyone who asks for them. Third, Peter instructs us to engage in apologetics with proper attitudes toward both the non-Christians with whom we are speaking and the Lord about whom we are speaking: "with gentleness and reverence".

One of the New Testament writings, the two volumes by Luke (his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles) are the most overtly apologetical purpose. In his prologue (Luke 1:1-4) Luke announces that his work is based on careful historical research and will present an accurate record of the origins of Christianity. The very structure and content of this two-part work suggests it was written at least in part as a political apology for Paul: Acts ends with Paul under house arrest yet preaching freely in Rome, and both books emphasize that Jesus and the apostles (especially Paul) were law-abiding persons. Along the way Luke uses the speeches of the apostles to present apologetic arguments to a wide variety of audiences, both Jewish and Gentile.

One of these speeches, Paul's address to the Athenians in Acts 17, has been extraordinarily important in Christian reflections about apologetics throughout church history; it is the only substantial example of an apology directed to a non-Jewish audience in the New Testament (though see Acts 14:15-17). Thus this one speech has traditionally been regarded as a paradigm or model of apologetics.

Closely related to Paul's thought in his Athenian address is his argument in Romans 1. Paul takes over Hellenistic Jewish apologetics here on the folly of Gentile culture (Chapter 1, and first half of Chapter 2). Along the way he sets forth some notions about the knowledge of God that have been extremely important for apologetics. According to Paul, God's existence and divinity are clearly revealed in nature. All human beings, he says, "knew God", but they suppressed the truth, refusing to acknowledge God and falling into idolatry instead (1:18-25).

In his epistle to the Colossians, Paul refuted arrors about Christ's person that arose apparently from a religious context in which unbiblical Jewish and Greek ideas were mixed with an acknowledgement, however inadequate, of Jesus Christ. In this context Paul condemns not philosophy per se, but mandate philosophies that are not "according to Christ" (Colossians 2:8). Paul boldly co-opted Greek religious terms such as pleroma, a term used to denote the "fullness" of the divine beings that inhabited the cosmos, to convey Christian ideas--in this case, the idea that all deity dwelled in Christ (2:9).

The apostle John followed a strategy similar to Paul's adoption of Greek philosophical and religious terms in his Gospel, in which the preincarnate Christ is called the Logos ("word", John 1:1,14; cf. 1 John 1:1). Still, to any Gentile or Hellenistic Jewish reader the term Logos would have immediately conjured up Platonic and Stoic notions of the 'Universal Reason' that was believed to govern the cosmos and was thought to be reflected in the rational mind of every human being (cf. John 1:9). Yet the announcement by John that this Logos was personal--that he was God's Son (verses 1,14,18; cf. 20:31) and had become incarnate (1:14)--was shocking to both Jews and Greeks. It required a completely new way of looking at God and humanity to believe that Jesus was the divine Logos incarnate.

III  The Postapostolic Period

From the time of Nero (AD 68), the Christian faith was treated by the civil authorities as an unlawful religion, and Christians were slandered by pagan propagandists as atheists. The apologists, therefore, faced a twofold task: to refute the charge of atheism and immorality and to appeal to the Roman Emperors. Rabbinic Judaism, fully developed Gnosticism, persecuting Paganism, and Hellenistic culture and philosophy all opposed the fledgling church. The religious apologistsdefended Christianity against these attacks and sought to gain converts to the faith by arguing for the superiority of the Christian position.

The apologists of the second century modeled their arguments after contemporary philosophical refutations of polytheism and the critique of the pagan philosophy, by Hellenistic Jews. One of the many apologists from this period, the most important by far was Justin Martyr (ca. 100-165), a convert to Christianity from Platonism. Justin Martyr wrote two apologies in Rome, the first about 150 and the second between 155 and 160. Both were primarily concerned with winning civil toleration for Christians. In A Dialogue With Trypho, A Jew, Justin tells how, after studying the various philosophical systems, he was led to embrace the Christian faith as the true philosophy. He then goes on to show that with the coming of Christ, the Law of Moses has been abrogated and in him the various Old Testament prophesies have been fulfilled.

Another notable apologist of this period was Irenaeus, who published his great work Against Heresies. It consists of five works, the first two being devoted to the exposition and refutation of various Gnostic heresies prevalent at that time; the last three books contain a profound theological account of the Christian faith. Tertullian, a Roman lawyer who was converted to the Christian faith about the year 193, published his Apology in 197. After refuting the customery charges of atheism, promiscuity, and infanticide, Tertullian goes on to describe in glowing terms the Christian way of life, a source of many blessings for the community at large.

The third-century Alexandrians like Clement of Alexandria continued to assimilate arguments from Platonic and Stoic philosophers as well as Jewish controversialists. Clement (AD 214), who was head of the catechetical school of Alexandria, in his book Protrepticus, an exhortation to conversion, gives evidence of a knowledge of Greek culture that is wide and deep. By far the most important Greek apologist of the third century was Origen (AD 185-254), whose lengthy Contra Celsum ("Against Celsum") was a reply to Celsus's philosophical, ethical, and historical criticisms of Christianity. It is with good reason that Origen's book has been ranked as one of the classics of apologetics.

Early in the fourth century, Lactantius, a rhetorician by profession, published a work in seven books, the Divine Institutes, in which he provided a systematic apology for Christianity. Eusebius of Caesarea, the first great Church Historian, writing in Greek about the same time as Lactantius, published a monumental two-part apologetical work, The Preparation of the Gospel and The Proof of the Gospel. The book seems to have been written in reply to a work by Porphyry, a disciple of the neo-Platonist philosopher Plotinus, entitled Against the Christians. The greatest apologist and theologian of the Fourth-Fifth century period was by nearly everyone's reckoning, Aurelius Augustine (354-430), the Bishop of Hippo, whose apologetic and theological writings ranged widely over the areas of human culture, philosophy, and history.

Augustine's teaching on apologetical issues has inspired apologists and theologians from his day to the present. He was often engaged in apologetical arguments with pagans and heretics. His greatest apologetical work is The City of God, written over many years and finished in 426. The pagans were contending that the calamities that had recently befallen the Roman Empire, such as the sack of Rome by Alaric in 410, were due to the abandonment of the pagan gods. To refute this charge, Augustine showed that the pagan religion was not the source of Rome's temporal prosperity and was still less capable of bringing man to eternal blessedness; then he went on to break new ground by providing a Christian interpretation of the history of the human race.

IV  The Middle Ages

By the seventh century Christianity had absorbed Greco-Roman culture and triumphed in its struggle against paganism. The church was the central vehicle of Western culture, and its apologists during the middle ages directed their efforts in three directions--toward unconverted Judaism, the threat of Islam, and the rational ground for belief. There were Jewish groups in the West living by the Law of Moses and Talmud. The Muslims controlled most of Spain and the coast of North Africa and posed a constant threat to the Byzantine Empire. In the East, John Damascene published in 750 his Discussion Between a Saracen and a Christian, in which he put forward a reasoned case for Christianity. Theodore Abu Qurrah, a disciple of John, in his book God and the True Religion shows that Christianity is superior to the other religions that claim to be divinely revealed--Zoroastrianism, the Samaritan Religion, Judaism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism and Islam--since it is better able to meet man's religious needs and moreover is guaranteed by miracles.

Two Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages who stand out for their contributions to apologetics, and whose works continue to be read and debated today, were Anselm and Thomas Acquinas. Anselm (1033-1109), the Bishop of Canterbury, was one of the most creative and original philosophers the Christian Church has ever produced. He emphasized the side of Augustine's view of faith and reason that viewed faith as prior to reason or understanding. The most famous by far of these philosophical arguments has come to be known as the Ontological Argument. From the idea of "that than which nothing greater can be thought", Anselm inferred the existence or being (Greek ontos, hence "ontological" argument) of God.

In the 13th century Christian Europe was shaken by the rediscovery and distribution of the philosophical works of Aristotle and the strong impetus giving to the Aristotelian worldview by the very capable Spanish-Arab philosopher Averroes. The growing influence of Averroist thought in European universities led to a crisis for Christian thought. Some scholars at the universities were embracing an uncritical Aristotelianism, while others, especially high-ranking church officials, uncritically condemned anything Aristotelian. Albert the Great was one of the earliest philosophers to rise to this challenge, writing On the Unity of the Intellect Against Averroes. But it was Albert's disciple, Thomas Acquinas (1225-1274), who would offer a response to this challenge that would change the course of Christian philosophy and apologetics.

Acquinas sought to combat the challenge of the Greco-Arabic worldview by creating a Christian philosophy utilizing Aristotelian categories and logic. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, he presented an apologetic directed primarily against Averroism but also offering a sweeping, comprehensive Christian philosophy in Aristotelian terms. His Summa Theologiae was a systematic theology intended to instruct Christian students in theology; it is important for its opening apologetic sections and its theology of faith.

V  The Reformation and Post-Reformation Period

The primary concern of the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century was the doctrine of salvation. In their view the Aristotelianism of the Scholastics—the medieval theologians on whose teachings the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic system was based—had led to a confusion and perversion of the gospel of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Moreover, the Renaissance was marked by an infatuation with pagan antiquity, especially Plato and Neoplatonism, and the result was a further corruption of the Christian message in what came to be known as humanism.

The doctrine of justification by faith in Jesus Christ alone was the heart and soul of the ministry of Martin Luther (1483-1546), the Augustinian monk who lit the torch of the Reformation with his Ninety-five Theses protesting legalistic abuses in the church. In Luther’s estimation reason, particularly as employed in medieval theology, had obscured the gospel of justification. He therefore emphasized the limitations of reason and rejected the traditional theological project of employing logic and philosophy to explicate and defend the Christian faith.

Luther admitted that non-Christians can gain a “general” knowledge about God through reason, discerning that a God exists, that he is good and powerful, and the like. However, reason is incapable of helping them know who the true God is or how to be justified in his sight. Such “particular” knowledge is available only in the gospel, and can be appropriated only by faith. Not only is reason unhelpful in gaining a saving knowledge of God, it is actually an enemy of faith. If Luther was the father and chief polemicist of the Reformation, John Calvin (1509-1564) was arguably its chief theologian. His Institutes of the Christian Religion and biblical commentaries are still read and discussed today, even by nontheologians. As with Luther, Calvin’s principal apologetic labors were directed against Roman Catholic criticisms of the Reformation gospel.

Unlike Luther, Calvin held that faith is always reasonable. However, he also insisted that faith often seems unreasonable to us because our reason is blinded by sin and spiritual deception. Such blindness is evident in the philosophies of the pagans, which at times come close to recognizing the truth but in the end always distort the truth of God’s revelation of himself in nature. To remedy our spiritual blindness, God has given us his Word in Scripture, which is so much clearer and fuller in its revelation, and, through the redeeming work of Jesus Christ, God has also given us his Spirit, who enables us to understand his Word. Because God’s Word comes with his own divine, absolute authority, it cannot be subjected to our reasoning or tests. Faith needs no rational justification and is more certain than rationally justified knowledge, because it is based on God’s revelation in Scripture.

Until the post-Reformation period most Europeans took Christianity for granted, and the major religious debates were primarily intra-Christian disputes about the meaning of certain key doctrines of the faith. But the seventeenth century saw the rise of religious skepticism that challenged the very truth of the Christian faith. This skepticism led to new developments in apologetics. In his classic work Pensées (“Thoughts”), the French Catholic mathematician and apologist Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) rejected the traditional rational arguments for God’s existence and emphasized the personal, relational aspects involved in a non-Christian coming to faith in Jesus Christ. Pascal pointed out that some things that are clear to one group of people may be unclear or doubtful to another group. He was one of the first apologists to argue that apologetics should take into account the differences among people. Pascal sought to strike a balance between two extremes. He did not want to abandon reason altogether, but he also did not want its importance or value in knowing Christ to be exaggerated.

Despite the eloquence and depth of Pascal’s “thoughts,” his approach to the defense of the faith was to remain a minority report. Natural science, through such giants as Galileo and Newton, achieved major breakthroughs during the seventeenth century and revolutionized our view of the world. In the wake of these developments, most apologists for the next three centuries understood the apologetic task as primarily one of showing the scientific credibility of the Christian faith. More broadly, apologetics became focused on providing empirical evidence, whether scientific or historical, in support of Christianity. Laying the groundwork for this empirical approach was John Locke (1632-1704), a British philosopher who developed one of the earliest formulations of empiricism.

VI  The Modern Era

Butler’s apologetic efforts in The Analogy of Religion were widely regarded as a worthy response to the natural religion of the deists. However, Christian apologetics was forced to reinvent itself with the advent of the Enlightenment. The skepticism of the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) prepared the way for this movement, which rejected all revelation claims and all natural religion or natural theology, and declared the autonomy of human reason. Hume convinced many that the teleological or design argument, the argument from miracles, and other standard Christian apologetic arguments were unsound. The German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who reported having been awakened from his “dogmatic slumbers” by Hume’s writings, likewise critiqued the cosmological and ontological arguments for the existence of God.

These successive waves of attack on Christianity forced orthodox Christians to develop apologetic responses. Such responses varied depending on the theological convictions and philosophical temperament of the apologist as well as the content of the unbelieving attack. One of the earliest apologists to respond to Hume was William Paley (1743-1805). Paley systematized the evidential arguments of this time in two works, A View of the Evidences of Christianity and Natural Theology. The latter work was a classic presentation of the teleological argument. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) seemed to offer a naturalistic explanation for the order and diversity in life, encouraging many in the West to abandon belief in God as the Creator. Paley also defended the reliability of the New Testament writings. In the nineteenth century such historical apologetics, centering on the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and especially his resurrection, came to the fore with works by such apologists as Richard Whately and Simon Greenleaf.

An older contemporary of Paley was Thomas Reid (1710-1796), a Scottish Calvinist who developed a philosophy later known as Scottish Common-Sense Realism. Reid’s philosophy, like Paley’s, was in large part an answer to his fellow countryman Hume. Reid’s epistemology (or theory of knowledge) was dominant at Princeton Theological Seminary in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The “Old Princetonians” affirmed that one could argue for the truth of the Christian revelation on the basis of certain “common sense” presuppositions about the nature of truth, reason, morality, and the world.

Charles Hodge (1797-1878), the most famous Calvinist theologian at Old Princeton, maintained that although reason must submit to God’s revelation in Scripture, reason must first discern whether Scripture is indeed a revelation from God. The non-Christian must therefore be invited to use reason and “common sense” to evaluate the evidences (miracles, fulfilled prophecy, etc.) for Christianity. Hodge also maintained the validity of most of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, even recommending the works of Butler and Paley. B. B. Warfield (1851-1921), one of the last professors at Princeton before its reorganization and shift to liberal theology, continued Hodge’s apologetic approach. The thrust of Warfield’s apologetic was to argue against liberalism that a Christianity devoid of supernaturalism is, first, a Christianity that denies God, and second, really no Christianity at all.

In nineteenth-century Europe the efforts of Christian thinkers to defend Christian faith were directed largely against the philosophies of Kant and another German philosopher, Hegel. In Denmark the “melancholy Dane,” Søren Kierkegaard (1818-1855), strongly denounced both the cold confessional Lutheran orthodoxy and the abstract philosophical system of Hegel. Somewhat later the Scottish theologian James Orr (1844-1913) responded to the Enlightenment challenge. He was one of the first apologists to present Christianity as a worldview, arguing that the weight of the evidence from various quarters supported the Christian view of God and the world.

In the Netherlands one of Orr’s contemporaries, the Calvinist theologian and politician Abraham Kuyper (1837-1920), developed the notion of the antithesis. There is, said Kuyper, an absolute antithesis between the two sets of principles to which Christians and non-Christians are fundamentally committed (for example, God as sovereign versus man as autonomous). In short, Christians and non-Christians cannot see eye to eye on matters of fundamental principle. Kuyper’s seminal ideas were developed into a full-fledged philosophy by others, among whom the best-known figure was Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977). Another Christian thinker influenced by Kuyper was Cornelius Van Til (1895-1987), professor of apologetics at Westminster Theological Seminary. Van Til’s approach was essentially a creative synthesis of the Old Princetonian and Kuyperian philosophical-apologetical positions.

While Van Til was teaching his presuppositional version of Reformed apologetics in Philadelphia, on the other side of the Atlantic the most popular Christian apologist of the twentieth century was giving radio addresses in Britain and writing books. C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a scholar of medieval literature who converted to Christianity in midlife. His apologetic works included The Problem of Pain (on the problem of reconciling human suffering with an all-good God), The Screwtape Letters (from a senior devil instructing a junior devil in the art of temptation), Miracles (defending belief in miracles), and Mere Christianity (defending belief in God and Christ). Among contemporary apologists most indebted to Lewis is the Roman Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, whose articulation of the gospel is surprisingly evangelical and whose philosophy is essentially Thomistic.

An older contemporary of C. S. Lewis who took a very different view of apologetics was the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886-1968). While Lewis had converted from skepticism to Anglican Christianity, Barth had converted from German theological liberalism to a radically Christ-centered faith. Conservative evangelicals generally have rejected Barth’s approach to theology and disagreed with his negative assessment of apologetics. More conservative evangelical apologetics was dominated in the second half of the twentieth century by the debates over Van Til’s presuppositionalism. Notable apologists in the second half of the twentieth century were: Gordon H. Clark, Carl F. H. Henry, Edward John Carnell, Gorden Lewis, Stuart Hackett, William Lane Craig, Robert D. Knutsen, John M. Frame, Vern S. Poythress, John Warwick Montgomery, J. P. Moreland, Clark Pinnock, Norman Geisler, Francis Schaeffer, Alvin Plantinga, C. Stephen Evans, and David K. Clark.

VII  Types of Christian Apologetics

There are a variety of Christian apologetic styles and schools of thought. The major types of Christian apologetics include: historical and legal evidentialist apologetics, presuppositional apologetics, philosophical apologetics, prophetic apologetics, doctrinal apologetics, biblical apologetics, moral apologetics, and scientific apologetics.

In the evidentialist tradition, empirical arguments about the supposed life, miracles, death and resurrection of Jesus are presented as (informal) probabilistic proofs.C. S. Lewis, Norman Geisler, William Lane Craig, and Christians who engage in jurisprudence Christian apologetics have argued that miracles  are reasonable and plausible. Bible prophesy  is used as an argument for Christianity. It is argued that only God knows the future and the Bible prophecy of a compelling nature has been fulfilled. Peter Stoner is often cited by Protestant apologetic works in regards to Bible prophecy, as well as Grant Jeffrey.

Biblical apologetics include issues concerned with the authorship and date of biblical books, biblical canon, and biblical inerrancy. In addition, Christian apologists defend and comment on various books of the Bible. Some scholars who have engaged in the defense of biblical inerrancy include: Robert Dick Wilson, Gleason Archer, Norman Geisler, and R. C. Sproul. Also, there are several resources that Christians offer defending Bible inerrancy in regards to specific verses. Some scholars who have defended the authorship and date of biblical books include: John Wenham, Norman Geisler, Kenneth Kitchen, and Bryant G. Wood. Wenham's work is well-regarded by those who supported the Augustinisn Hypothesis, which is the traditional view of Gospel authorship. Scholars who have defended biblical canon include F. F. Bruce and Bruce Manning Metzger. In addition, there are a host of Bible scholars who have defended and commented on various books of the Bible.

Philosophical apologetics concerns itself primarily with arguments for the existence of God, although they do not exclusively dwell on this area. These arguments can be grouped into several categories: (1) Cosmological Argument- Argues that the existence of the universe demonstrates that God exists. Various ancillary arguments from science are often offered to support the cosmological argument; (2) Teleological Argument (argument from design) - Argues that there is an intricate design in the world around us, and a design requires a designer. Cicero, William Paley, and Michael Behe employed this argument as well as others; (3) Ontological Argument- Argues that the very concept of God demands that there is an actual existent God; (4) Moral Arument- Argues that if there are any real morals, then there must be an absolute from which they are derived; (5) Transcendental Argument- Argues that all our abilities to think and reason require the existence of God; and (6) Presuppositional Argument- Arguments that show basic beliefs of theists and nontheists require God as a necessary precondition.

Another apologetical school of thought, a sort of synthesis of various existing Dutch and American Reformed thinkers (such as, Abraham Kuyper, Benjamin Warfield, Dooyeweerd), emerged in the late 1920s. This school was instituted by Cornelius Van Til, and came to be popularly called Presuppositional Apologetics (though Van Til himself felt "Transcendental" would be a more accurate title). The main distinction between this approach and the more classical evidentialist approach mentioned above is that the Presuppositionalist denies any common ground between the believer and the non-believer, except that which the non-believer denies, namely, the assumption of the truth of the theistic worldview.

In Medieval Europe Saint Anselm of Canterbury composed the Monologion and Proslogion, in which he developed the ontological argument for God's existence. He believed that faith was necessary as a precursor to philosophical argument and expressed his position as "I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand: for this I also believe, that unless I believe I will not understand." The basics of his ontological argument are stated in the following quote: "But clearly that than which a greater cannot be thought cannot exist in the understanding alone. For if it is actually in the understanding alone, it can be thought of as existing also in reality, and this is greater ... Without doubt, therefore, there exists, both in the understanding and in reality, something than which a greater cannot be thought." "That than which a greater cannot be thought" refers to God. Though Bertrand Russell would later question God's existence, he fully accepted the ontological argument during his undergraduate years.

In Doctrinal Christian Apologetics, various Christian doctrines are defended, such as the trinity . Also, non-Christian religions are argued against. Christian apologists have developed arguments against Judaism, Islam, and Deism, for example. Changing modes in apologetics, whether or not they are currently fashionable, are important markers in the history of ideas. In moral apologetics the arguments for man's sinfulness and man's need for redemption is stressed. Examples of this type of apologetic would be Jonathan Edwards's sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God".

Scientific Christian apologists agree that science and the Bible do not contradict each other. For example, some say that the existence of dinosaurs hasn't been proven and that dinosaurs are not mentioned in the Bible. Others say that dinosaurs did exist and are mentioned in the Bible. Likewise, those that hold to young earth creationism say that science hasn't proven that the world is billions of years old, while those that hold to old earth creationism say that the Bible's six-day account of creation is compatible with a universe that's billions of years old.

VIII  Some Notable Christian Apologists