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A Skeptic's Search for God
by Ralph O. Muncaster--a book review

Is the Bible really the Word of God? Is Christianity the only path to God? Don’t all religions lead to God? Did Jesus Christ really exist?

If we are honest, I believe we all would have to admit to doubts from time-to-time. There is more or less skepticism in all of us. But is this a bad or good thing? In the final analysis we are to take God’s revelations by faith, that is, we are take Him at His Word, placing all confidence in the fulfillment of it. But the Bible does tell us not to accept anything on “blind faith.” 1 Thessalonians 5:21 says “Prove [or test] all things; hold fast that which is good.”

Wouldn’t it be beneficial and spiritually strengthening to know that the Bible, Jesus Christ and Christian doctrine are supported by historical, archeological, statistical and scientific fact? I submit to you that even though it is possible to be engulfed by skepticism to the extent of agnosticism or atheism, some skepticism is both healthy and scriptural. The Christian does not need to take a back-seat to anyone in the areas of science, history or archeology when it comes to apologetics (the defense of the faith). For these reasons, and particularly for the strengthening of your faith, I submit for your earnest consideration a most rewarding and enlightening book by Ralph O. Muncaster, which is entitled A Skeptic’s Search for God (Harvest House Publishers, 2002). It may be purchased for $10.19 plus shipping at www.alibris.com, along with other fine books by this author.

Mr. Muncaster holds a BS in engineering and an MBA from the University of Colorado. A former atheist and hardcore Bible skeptic, Ralph spent 15 years conducting research to dispute the Bible. To Ralph, it seemed that the Bible could not possibly be consistent with such sciences as anthropology, molecular biology and physics. Armed with an engineering-education and a critical, questioning mind, to his surprise, the more he searched, the more evidence he found that supported the Bible's claims. Mr. Muncaster has taught classes in Christian Apologetics and World Religion in universities including Vanguard University of Southern California where he served as Adjunct Professor.  He frequently speaks at churches and organizations on a broad variety of biblical topics.

The following is a book review of Mr. Muncaster’s excellent work and it is worthy of your attention.

The Review

A Skeptic’s Search for God by Ralph O. Muncaster is divided into six sections.

  1. The first section (chapters 1-5) explains how he became an atheist, even though being brought up in a small town church, then an agnostic and finally a full-fledge atheist. It ends in a personal accounting of how he was challenged and decided to accept the challenge to research the Bible in the same scientific and systematic manner in which he criticized it.


  2. The second section (chapter 6) defines his decision pertaining to definitions of proof with which he would investigate the veracity of the Bible.


  3. The third section (chapters 7-12) details his accumulation of analytical proof of God.


  4. The fourth section (chapters 13-29) details his accumulation of statistical proof of God.


  5. The fifth section (chapters 21-26) details his accumulation of legal proof of God.


  6. The sixth section (chapter 27) establishes his verdict regarding the matter and the re-direction of his life due to his attempt to disprove the Bible and its God.


  7. The remainder: Epilogue, Afterword, Appendices, Bibliography & Notes.

     Section One (How I Became an Atheist in Church)

  1. Chapter one (The Child Skeptic) explains how Mr. Muncaster was a skeptic during his earliest years, how he was routinely bored with church and continuously questioned the Bible in Sunday school, e.g., Adam and Eve, people living to be 900 years old, a worldwide flood, the parting of the Red Sea and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He explains how the absences of such “truths” in public school fueled his skepticism. He reveals that by the time he was nine years old the seeds of agnosticism had been sown, and he believed more in his secular education as opposed to the “fantasyland” of church.

     

  2. Chapter two (Watering the Seeds of Agnosticism) describes how an experience with his father led Mr. Muncaster to judge evangelical Christians as “Jesus freaks” and cemented his prejudice against them. He then recounts another experience with a fellow worker who experienced a near-death incident while working at an ice cream factory in his hometown of Woodstown, New Jersey, and how a conversation with this person contributed to his drift toward agnosticism and atheism. Within the chapter he concludes that the foundation for agnosticism that eventually led him to atheism was due to experiences he had at church and Sunday school, combined with the teachings in public schools and the media, along with the lack of Christian teachings at home.

     

  3. Chapter three (The Beginning of the Death of God) recounts Mr. Muncaster’s secular exposure to the teaching of evolution, how it was accepted as “fact” by those in authority, academic and scientific, and in the broadcast media. He tells how he became convinced that the “proofs” for this teaching were correct and that such a theory, which is a “chance origin of life,” is the “killer of God” for any organization associated with the Bible. On the other hand he found that Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism were compatible with the “chance origin of life,” since their god is not defined as a personal Creator, but only as a “personal force.” The chapter concludes with the fact that at 18 years of age he was an agnostic and “fearfully confident that God simply didn’t exist at all.”

     

  4. Chapter four (Atheism at the University) finds Mr. Muncaster pursuing an engineering degree at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Because Boulder, Colorado, was known for the presence of the National Bureau of Standards and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the university had access to some of the top scientists in the world. The chapter stresses that exposure to this intelligentsia only strengthened his skepticism and drove him deeper into agnosticism. He states that by this time he had become adept at arguing with others against belief in God, as he had a background in the Christian faith and he had taken time to investigate several non-Bible-based philosophies and religions, e.g., Hare Krishna, the New Age movement, Islam, naturalism and others. In closing he states that he was “amazed at how many churches, pastors, and others were ill-equipped to defend the Bible.”

     

  5. Chapter five (The Challenge) relates how Mr. Muncaster in 1984, during a luncheon with a couple of other advertising executives, entered into a conversation with one of them named Bob regarding the topic of God. He tells how the end result of this tête-à-tête dialog was a challenge to him to sincerely research the Bible in the same way that he criticized it. Bob assured him that if he would do an honest job of researching the Bible, he would find it 100-percent accurate. In his arrogance he accepted the challenge, thinking that two weeks and a library would put the “Bible accuracy claim to rest forever.”

    Section Two (Standards of Proof)

     

  6. Chapter six (Definitions of Proof) explains first how Mr. Muncaster realized that it was more than just a simple matter of the Bible being correct, but that he was dealing with the issue of whether God was real. Defining “standards of proof” would be necessary. As an engineer with a background in philosophical debate, he decided that the standards had to be strict, which were the three commonly accepted human standards of proof, i.e., analytical, statistical and legal. Mr. Muncaster goes on in this chapter describing these types of proof. In the analytical realm he discusses both “hard” and “soft” evidence and their relevance to his quest and how analytical proof should relate to the existence of God. He shows his word definitions, in place of numerical definitions, in arriving at provable equations. Then, in the area of statistics, he explains how the same statistical standards used for proving accepted laws of physics would also be used to prove the existence of God and the reliability of the Bible, which is a degree of certainty exceeding 1 chance of non-occurrence in 10 to the 50th power. How to apply this statistical test to the existence of God was a problem, but it was soon resolved. He discovered that there was a statistical test, “the probability of [God’s] existence by testing for something that only God could do . . . His ability to foretell the future with perfect precision and accuracy. Finally, in the sphere of legal proof, he concluded that just as in a court of law, the existence of God and the reliability of the Bible had to be proved “beyond a reasonable doubt.” This type of proof can be both soft and hard, depending on the number and quality of eyewitness testimony, hostile-witness testimony, corroborative reports and circumstantial evidence. The chapter ends as he tells how he initiates his research “in secret” with an intensity, as if his life depended on it, to disprove God and the Bible.

    Section Three (Analytical Proof of God)

     

  7. Chapter seven (Dice or God?) outlines Mr. Muncaster’s efforts to disprove God in two specific areas, which were (1) to demonstrate a mechanism for developing “first life” that didn’t require God, thereby establishing that God would not be necessary for the creation of life, and (2) to seek evidence to the degree of a “high probability” of other planets that could support life, thereby diminishing the idea of a God-of-the-earth-only idea. This procedure had to start with definitions of “God” and “no God.” Next would be the testing of such definitions. He chose to define God as originator of first life, an “intelligent designer;” and “no God” as the origin of first life without a specific creator. So “first life” had to have only one cause, either God or a natural, random process. He concluded that by restricting these definitions to the essence of origin, they would not violate the more “accepted general definition” of God such as was contained in the Webster dictionary; and it could always be expanded later. He came to the fundamental premise, which was expressed in the following word equation: (1) If first life occurred by chance, then evolution=cause; (2) If first life required design, then God=cause; and (3) If God=cause, then God=real. The rest of the chapter reveals how Mr. Muncaster immersed himself into the study of evolution vs. creation. He first considered his roots in the acceptance of the evolution. He came to the conclusion that present-day science did not supply any realistic, provable answers to the origin of life. He also came to the realization that due to the inbreeding of the theory in academia, evolution was a closed system of thinking and promotion, that “if evolutionists claimed the theory was fact, and changed the theory each time a scientific breakthrough disproved portions of an earlier version, the whole thing could become a self-perpetuating fantasy.” He found that he could no longer assume that the evidence for evolution was overwhelming and certain. Then, due to a chance meeting and conversation with a person who was reading a Bible on an airplane flight, he was told (1) that many leading scientists in the world were now rejecting evolution and believing in creation as a form of “intelligent design” and (2) that he had been taught misleading data regarding evolution in school. He was further introduced to the two types of evolution, microevolution and macroevolution. Impressed with the depth of knowledge of his co-passenger, he inquired as to how he could find more creditable material that supported creationism over evolution. He was directed to several different sources, and he made the commitment to follow through with these sources in order to be “fair and balanced” in his investigation.

     

  8. Chapter eight (What It Takes to Randomly Assemble Life) recounts Mr. Muncaster’s investigation into what it takes to randomly assemble life. He determined that analytical proof of the existence of a Creator God depended largely upon disproving naturalistic evolution. He first broke down the complex events that would be necessary for the chance origin of life into five basic steps. This led him to the complexity of a single living cell. He came to understand through his study of the vast complexity of a single cell that there were technical and mathematical problems with naturalistic evolution. This realization came from his in-depth study of DNA, RNA and the components of a living cell, some of which are the nucleus, ribosomes, mitochondria, the lysosomes process, the endoplasmic reticulum, the golgi apparatus, enzymes and regulatory proteins and the cytoskeleton. The result of his study of the sheer complexity in even a simplified cell caused him to be amazed in how “these billions of parts could randomly come together in just the right way, at just the right time” to initiate just the “first step” of naturalistic evolution. His further consideration that there are about 75 trillion cells in the human body, with about 210 cell types, created his first serious doubts about evolution. From this he formulated specific questions that needed to be answered regarding the origin of life, and he then vigorously revisited the theory of evolution by immersing himself in the latest documents and books on the subject. He found that new scientific techniques, e.g., electron microscope, wet chemistry, mapping DNA, laser tweezers, etc., revealed how much more complex life is than was ever conceived, and that more and more biochemists were calling into question the theory of evolution as the first-cause of life. As he continued his investigation, Mr. Muncaster continued to run into dead-end streets for evolution as the answer to the origin for life. Conversely, he found that many of the answers to his former objections to Creationism could now be understood within God Creator framework. But he was still fervently attempting to disprove Creationism. The chapter ends with his hope to do just that by showing that given enough time “mathematically . . . all these things could come together and somehow electricity—or something—would bring it to life.

     

  9. Chapter nine (The Molecular Anatomy of Life) recounts Mr. Muncaster’s continuing investigation into the molecular anatomy of life. It reveals his further findings into DNA, RNA and protein functions. This led him to even more scientists (astronomers, mathematicians and microbiologists) who were now attacking the random origin of life. This fueled his doubts and led him back to the determination that the core issue had to be at the molecular level, which led him to a “simple biological phenomenon that is seldom discussed in much detail in biology textbooks and is almost never addressed by evolutionists,” chirality. Chirality is the term used to describe molecules that are “handled”—that is, they come in “right-handed” and “left-handed” versions (technically, dextroform and levoform). He found that the molecules used in the building blocks of life had to be one of these two types formulated in just the precise sequence and orientation within the DNA chain. This revealed to him that the process of life was even more complex than ever and led him to further discover that researchers, after years of study, had not found one single means of purifying such a mixture—or substantially increasing the proportion of left-handed amino acids to right-handed ones. This led Mr. Muncaster in estimating the probability of the origin of first life by chance to be one in ten to the 33,113 power. This equated to winning more than 4700 state lotteries in a row with the purchase of single ticket for each. This essentially made him realize that the issue raised by chirality alone placed the odds for the random beginning of first life at essentially zero. He then factored in academia’s “accepted” age of the earth into his statistical formula for the random assembly of the first bacterium, but the resulting equation still came to zero. This led him to the conclusion that “random chance could not possibly assemble the first cell.” And as he further deliberated over how scientists could defend evolution, he found that many could do so by simply believing in an “infinite universe,” thereby assuming that with enough time chance origin of life could eventually take place. But he “knew from physics that discoveries by Hubble in 1929, and later Penzias in 1964, when reconciled with Einstein’s general relativity formula, showed that the universe had to have a beginning.” This and his findings regarding “general relativity,” which had been tested to a precision level of ten to the 14th power, meant that infinity could no longer be used to explain the process of evolution. He now “had hard evidence of the most basic form for why the chance origin of life could not have occurred.”

     

  10. Chapter ten (Back at the University) is the account of Mr. Muncaster’s endeavor to test his newly acquired analytical belief in a “real world” environment. He did this at one of the top biochemistry institutes in the United States, “a mecca for evolutionary thinking—the University of California at Irvine (UCI).” He felt that this was a final opportunity for some expert to bring him back to evolution. He discussed his findings with the author of Darwin’s Black Box, Michael Behe, who was lecturing at the university. An associate professor at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, Behe dealt primarily with “transitional evolution,” not the origin of life. Mr. Muncaster learned from him (1) that so many intricate changes would have to take place simultaneously to produce even a partial change in a species and (2) that entire biochemical systems would need to change all at once in the transitional process. To Mr. Muncaster this seemed to contradict Darwin’s conclusion about the need for gradual change over time. So from the approach of “basic reason,” and not from a “belief in God,” Professor Behe only reinforced Mr. Muncaster’s new analytical belief. His lectures naturally brought on strenuous opposition from students bent on defending evolution. From the discussions that followed, Mr. Muncaster soon realized that “evolution apparently wasn’t the issue, the Bible was.” Further involvement with the personnel at the university revealed that no one could name even one person who had conducted a hard experiment or written a journal article that clearly demonstrated a method of satisfying the origin-of-life chirality problem. In one situation Mr. Muncaster addressed a group of students with the following comments, “There are enormous statistical issues involved in correct biogenetic sequencing or simultaneous DNA mutation in germ cells. Add to that the addition of life itself to inanimate cells, and the theory of naturalistic evolution is statistically far less likely than a tornado assembling a junkyard into a Boeing 747.” Mr. Muncaster came to the conclusion that the academic world spreads false rumors just like everyone else. In fact, contrary to one of them, he learned that random development of RNA in the environment of early earth had been shown to be impossible. He now knew that the only possible hope for “chance origins” would be infinite time. But he knew that time is not infinite. So again, he came to the conclusion that the only alternative is some form of intelligent design—supernatural creation—or what is commonly defined as “God.”

     

  11. Chapter eleven (I Start to Investigate God) illustrates Mr. Muncaster’s turn to an investigation of God. He had discovered a number of other serious flaws in the evolutionary chain such as (1) irreducible complexity, (2) contradiction of the first law of thermodynamics and general relativity, (3) lack of any proven mechanism for transition from lower to higher life forms, and (4) the fossil record, which he found didn’t support evolution. He became troubled over the fact that intelligent scientists were not facing reality. What opened his eyes to the cause was a statement by George Wald in the May 1954 “Scientific American,” in which he concluded that even though “spontaneous generation was disproved one hundred years ago” the only other possibility, “that of supernatural creation,” was entirely unacceptable and therefore by choice the “impossible,” that life arose spontaneously by chance, would be believed. In other words, Mr. Wald was admitting that he’d rather adopt the impossible than believe in a supernatural Creator. Mr. Muncaster concluded that many educators and scientists would never forsake the theory of evolution, because to do so would leave them no other choice but to accept the concept of God. The remainder of the chapter reveals how Mr. Muncaster proves with the analytical process the concept of supernatural creation, which concludes in his analytical proof conclusion that “some form of a Creator God exists.”

     

  12. Chapter twelve (Who Are You, God?) covers some of the difficulties Mr. Muncaster faced in arriving at the methods for proving the particulars of God, that is, who in fact was this Creator God. He relays a conversation with two other affluent business associates which ended in his determination to prove whether or not everything in the Bible was true. In this way, he could at least determine whether or not the God of the Bible was the real God.

    Section Four (Statistical Proof of God)

     

  13. Chapter thirteen (Could I Develop Statistical Standards for Determining God’s Existence?) opens with Mr. Muncaster being convinced that a God existed and that even statistically the evidence for a God passed both the “macro-test” and the “micro-test,” both explained in the chapter. He now knew that it was statistically impossible for there not to be a God, but the challenge was to find some way that he could statistically prove God was the God of the Bible. He decided to go to the Bible to find evidence that he could test statistically. The remainder of the chapter reveals how Mr. Muncaster came to the conclusion that since the Bible contained numerous prophecies, which the fulfillments of each could be tested in several ways, they would therefore be the ideal testing ground for his statistical analysis of the Bible. He concluded that something that claimed to be prophecy should (1) be of sufficient specificity, and unlikelihood, that a cursory examination would lead a reasonable person to conclude a probability of 1 in 10 or smaller, (2) be authenticated by one source and confirmed by a separate source that would receive no net benefit from the confirmation of the prophecy and (3) be based on reliable source.

     

  14. Chapter fourteen (Thinking About the God of the Jews) reveals how Mr. Muncaster settled on the Old Testament for his initial statistical analysis, how he was stunned to find so many prophecies within its pages and how he decided to ignore the short-term biblical prophecies because they did not meet his statistical standards of objective verifiability.

     

  15. Chapter fifteen (Testable Prophecies I Found in the Old Testament) explains how Mr. Muncaster selected prophecies from (1) the first Jewish exile, (2) the second Jewish exile and the survival and return of the Jews and (3) about cities, nations and peoples. He was particularly amazed at the chronological accuracy within the 8th chapter of the book of Daniel of the 400 years of history that involved Israel. At the conclusion of the chapter, Mr. Muncaster states that he was stunned at the number of prophecies he had tested that were 100-percent accurate, most with additional historical support outside the Bible. In addition to all these, he had found 80 more prophecies that met his standards, which are listed in appendix B of the book. In closing the chapter he expresses that he wanted to at least place some probability parameters of odds around these prophecies so that he could feel justified in doing further study.

     

  16. Chapter sixteen (Does Perfect Prophecy Prove That the Jewish God Is Real?) opens with Mr. Muncaster’s statement that the Old Testament appeared to pass the test of perfect prophecy, and then he asked, “would it stack up to the human standard set by scientists—that the random occurrence of anything with a probability of less than 1 chance in 10 to the 50th power is essentially impossible?” He then sets up a highly conservative model of multiple probability in which he would test the prophecies under statistical conventions. As he runs the prophecies through his model they exceed the scientific stand, which leads him to the following conclusions: (1) God definitely exists—proven statistically by the 100-percent fulfilled prophecy in the Jewish Bible (the Tanakh) and (2) the Jewish Bible was inspired by God.

     

  17. Chapter seventeen (Was There Other Ancient Prophecy That Was Valid?) shows Mr. Muncaster’s investigation into various religions to see if they too contained prophecies that could be statistically verified. He discovered that many major religions outside Christianity are essentially philosophy-based and were without any provable prophetic-historical components. Therefore there was absolutely nothing he could find that could provide him with any confidence in their various beliefs.

     

  18. Chapter eighteen (Testable Prophecy in the New Testament) finds Mr. Muncaster convinced that the God of the Old Testament was certainly real, proven from history with hard, statistical analysis. His concern now was whether or not the New Testament represented the God of the Old Testament. The fact that Jesus Christ claimed to be indeed this God posed a challenge for further investigation and statistical analysis. So he decided to test Jesus’ claim to be the Messiah. His research in the Bible stunned him when he found that the entire Old Testament was filled with prophecies that seemed to match Jesus—specifics about His life, death and resurrection. The chapter goes into detail of how he found the prophetic elements of the Messiah within the Old Testament matched with 100-percent accuracy the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

     

  19. Chapter nineteen (A Description of the Messiah from Old Testament Prophecy) further details Mr. Muncaster’s analytical comparison of the Messiah of the Old Testament with Jesus Christ of the New Testament. In his investigation he considered prophecies about the “who, what, when, and where” of the Messiah to see if all matched Jesus Christ. The chapter is replete with numerous prophecies and their match with New Testament scriptural details of Jesus Christ. He determined that this was only a partial listing of the many messianic prophecies. He found that some scholars had counted 322 prophecies that were apparently fulfilled by Jesus.

     

  20. Chapter twenty (The Critical Question) opens with Mr. Muncaster’s decision to prove statistically that Jesus was the Messiah. In doing this he took 30 prophecies (from the Old Testament that Jesus had fulfilled) that had passed his acceptability standards and estimated the odds, which showed that the probability of all of them randomly coming true in one person would be 1 chance in 10 to the 110th power. He therefore came to the determination that “Jesus was the Messiah, as planned by a supernatural God and predicted in the Bible.” Next he turned to the issue of Jesus’ claim to be God. The remainder of the chapter depicts how Mr. Muncaster examined the sayings and prophecies made by Jesus Himself and the beliefs by many of both Jews and Gentiles regarding Him during His earthly sojourn.

    Section Five (Legal Proof of God)

     

  21. Chapter twenty-one (A Response from an Atheist) recounts how a conversation with a confirmed atheist led him to conclude that Jesus was the prophesied Son of God if legal evidence could be found to prove the Bible’s account as trustworthy.

     

  22. Chapter twenty-two (Blood Evidence) outlines how Mr. Muncaster proves that there is an unbroken historical timeline of people who truly believed in the factualness of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, with no gaps. He approached this pursuit of evidence with the same degree of accuracy needed to present a case in a court of law. He first researched the earliest Christians. Secondly, he addressed the manuscript evidence for both the Old and New Testaments to see if flawed documentation was responsible for false beliefs. And thirdly, he sought out circumstantial evidence. The remainder of the chapter details his investigation into the earliest Christians and their martyrs’ deaths that they experienced, all because of a single historical event. Their deaths were not due to some philosophical belief—a belief that they would get to some eternal paradise or a belief in a metaphysical cause. No, their deaths had depended upon a historical event—the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If this was not true, the prophecies were also not true, and Jesus was not God; and therefore there would be no reason for their martyrdom. Jesus was unlike all religious leaders. He taught His disciples to spread history—not to commit suicide. Mr. Muncaster became convinced that the followers of Jesus were absolutely convinced (to the death) that Jesus Christ was God.

     

  23. Chapter twenty-three (Could I Trust the Bible Texts?) outlines how Mr. Muncaster came to trust the Bible as it has come down through the generations to today. He again goes into the fact that the Bible, consisting of 66 books written by at least 40 authors over a span of approximately 2000 years, was amazingly consistent in its message. From a statistical analysis point-of-view it would be an impossibility for not only the multiple-thousands of manuscripts to survive throughout the centuries maintaining their consistency and uniformity, but it would be also an impossibility to get any 40 authors together in one room to discuss such controversial and relevant issues and have them agree. This led Mr. Muncaster to consider the authorship and content of the Bible as even more miraculous.

     

  24. Chapter twenty-four (I Find More Support for the Bible) tells how Mr. Muncaster finds more support for the Bible in various non-Christian historical works.

     

  25. Chapter twenty-five (The Final Barriers) details the discoveries made by Mr. Muncaster of the numerous archaeological findings that have confirmed Biblical accounts. He found that they were very convincing as to the supernatural accuracy of the Bible. He outlines many of them in this chapter, such as (1) flood accounts and fossil graveyards, (2) Sarah’s grave, (3) Hebrew slaves building cities in Egypt, (4) The existence of David, (5) Solomon’s Empire, (6) Nebuchadnezzar, (7) the birthplace of Jesus, (8) the house of Joseph, (9) Peter’s house in Capernaum, (10) the synagogue in Capernaum, (11) Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, (12) the tomb of Lazarus and (13) the sites of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Then Mr. Muncaster outlines the proof showing that the right books are in the Bible. Finally, he details the 15 points that he could present in a court of law to show that Jesus was indeed God. His final conclusion was that “legal evidence proved that Jesus is the prophesied Son of God.”

     

  26. Chapter twenty-six (Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?) reveals how by studying, in light of the proof he now possessed, three present-day religions that profess to be Christian, he came to the conclusion that the Mormons (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Science definitely did not represent the Jesus Christ of the Bible or the true doctrine of the Bible.

    Section Six (Proving God Three Ways)

     

  27. Chapter twenty-seven (The Verdict) reveals the verdict, the final conclusion of Mr. Muncaster’s exhaustive investigation of the Bible, of God and of Jesus Christ. He reviews his facts:

    · He had analytical evidence that (1) life could not possibly have come about by random chance (naturalism), and since the only choices for the origin of life are random chance and creation, therefore God must exist—and by definitions, God=Creator; and (2) a planet so precisely suited to man could not have come into existence by random chance, therefore, God must exist, and by extension, He must be all-powerful.

    · He had statistical evidence that if any holy book has many significant prophecies that are 100-percent correct—with a statistical probability of their coming true randomly of less than the scientific standard of 1 chance in 10 to the 50th power—that book must be supernatural, which essentially proves the existence of God. Valid prophecy in the Old Testament (the Jewish Bible) far exceeded that standard. This indicated that God is real. Furthermore, the many valid prophecies of the Messiah that Jesus fulfilled were verified in the New Testament. This also had a statistical probability that far exceeded the standard—which indicated Jesus’ Deity.

    · He had legal evidence that the prophecies he had evaluated statistically were precisely copied and accurately transmitted. The New Testament was reliable, based on the manuscript evidence. And as important, the people who definitely knew the facts willingly died based on the historicity of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The chapter then turns to what Mr. Muncaster did with this information. It shows that after studying the Greek word translated “believe” in John 3:16 and learning that it had a deeper meaning than to simply intellectually acknowledge a fact, but that it carried the sense of “to put one’s trust in,” he came to the conclusion that he needed to do more than simply know the truth; he needed a close relationship with Jesus—he needed to place his trust completely in Him. He thought back over all the questions he once had regarding the Bible and its contents, of the fear of being called a “Jesus freak,” and of the path he had taken to discover the truth. He realized that the study he had engaged in had changed his mind completely, that now he knew that the Bible and Christianity were based on facts—lots of facts and evidence that could be verified. It was not based on blind faith. Finally the chapter reveals how Mr. Muncaster, thinking over all of this, accepted by faith Jesus Christ as his personal Savior while taking a shower, and some of the results of this decision in his life.