ANSWERING SKEPTICS
In Answering Skeptics, Dr. Peter Hammond cover some of the following topics –
What About Hypocrites in the Church?
How can a Good God Allow Evil?
Why Does God Not Stop All the Suffering?
How Do You Know There is a God?
Isn’t Religion Just a Crutch for the Weak?
But Aren’t All Religions the Same?
How Can a Loving God Send Anyone to Hell?
What about the Inquisition?
And much more.
FOREWORD
Answering Skeptics may become another classic by Peter Hammond. The contents of Answering Skeptics seems bound to become a "must read" for Christians.
Skeptics, atheists, secular humanists, or whatever name is given to godless philosophies, are on the march with a new militancy.
Just in this year the following was reported by the secular press: At the World Humanist Congress in Oslo in August, delegates from India, Uganda, Nigeria, Argentina and Brazil — all countries where belief in a supreme deity or deities has a strong hold — reported mounting interest in their philosophy. Like their counterparts in Europe and North America, they argue that morality is based in human nature and does not need a father-figure god to back it up with punishment in an afterlife, in which they do not believe.
"There are more godless groups in the world than ever before," Sonja Eggerickx, a Belgian schools inspector who is president of the International Humanist and Ethical Union, told the Congress.
US delegates, including a serving army major who has just established an organisation for atheists in the military, spoke of a surge of rejection of religion in all its forms among young Americans — a point some recent opinion surveys back up.
In Manchester in May, British Humanists — one of the world’s oldest such groupings — were told of a sharp rise in humanist birth, marriage and death ceremonies, and strong growth in their association’s four-year-old student wing.
In Ireland, a country where the influence of the Catholic Church was for decades dominant in all areas of life, including politics and government decision-making, an optimistic national humanist association met in Carlingford in late August.
In Nigeria, where the openly non-religious face Christian preacher-inspired public opprobrium as "immoral reprobates" or "Satanists" and in the Islamic north are treated as apostates, the humanist movement held its Congress in Abuja in September.
How is that for a taste of militant skepticism? Peter Hammond’s book is designed to meet these skeptics head-on.
May the Lord’s blessing be upon this book. I pray that it would inspire Christians to trust more in the Book of books, the Bible. And above all, may our Lord Jesus Christ be glorified.
Rev Erlo Stegen
Director of Kwasizabantu Mission
INTRODUCTION
God bless Peter Hammond for his deep commitment to the cause of the Great Commission. It was the father of science, Sir Isaac Newton, who once said, “Opposition to godliness is atheism in profession and idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind that it never had many professors.”
If he was alive today, he may like to revise his last six words. We live in an age of skepticism, where there is a revival of the foolishness of atheism. But he certainly put his finger on the cause of atheism. Normally those guilty of the sin of idolatry pick and choose the attractive characteristics of the nature of God—“My God is a God of love and mercy. He would never create hell.” And they are right. He would never create Hell because he couldn’t. He doesn’t exist. He’s a figment of their over active imagination—the place of imagery. The nature of the Creator of the Universe, as revealed in Holy Scripture, is not only love and mercy, but also justice and truth, holiness and righteousness.
The atheist, however, reverses idolatry and creates a god from the characteristics he finds unattractive—“The God of the Bible is a judgmental, homophobic, unloving, wrath-filled, merciless tyrant. If that’s your ‘God of love,’ I want nothing to do with him!” But the god he doesn’t believe in doesn’t exist! He is also a figment of the human imagination. The atheist is in truth the offspring of Adam, still imitating his first forefather, by trying to hide from God. And the best hiding place he can find is in atheism.
But not all skeptics are hardened atheists. Some are prepared to think and listen. It is to these ears that Peter Hammond writes - and to the faithful Christian who wants to reach them.
Ray Comfort
Way of the Master
“Peter Hammond's Answering Skeptics AudioMP3 series is full of history. It has an amazing way of lifting me out of selfishness and setting me on the rock of God's Word. It makes me enthusiastic about evangelizing and gives the tools I need”. ~Dinah Seppi
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