One of the most important aspects of the resurrection in the New Testament is that it's not that on the Easter morning people came to the tomb and found the tomb empty and then therefore drew an inference from an empty tomb saying he must be risen because we can't find him.

No, the testimony of the New Testament on Christ's resurrection does not rest upon inferences drawn from an empty tomb but rather from eyewitness testimony.

If you would have listened to the world, you would get the impression that to be a Christian, to believe in God is to be irrational, to be a non-thinker.

But in reality, the opposite is true.

Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham and thank you for joining us this week on renewing your mind.

Becoming a Christian is not a blind leap of faith and neither should it be in apologetics as we're giving a defense of our faith and that's why this week Dr. Sproul has been taking us through his series, defending your faith.

And today he's going to help us understand how we know what we know. Here's Dr. Sproul.

And we're engaged in the task of apologetics of giving an intellectual defense of the truth claims of Christianity.

One of the first things that we have to grapple with in terms of our strategy of developing an intellectual defense has to do with the science of epistemology.

And I know that's a strange sounding word to many people so I'm going to take a few moments today to explain what epistemology is and why it is so important to the whole science of apologetics.

So let's put the word on the board epistemology.

Epistomology is that subdivision of philosophy that focuses its attention on this basic question that's so important.

How do we know what we know?

How can we verify or falsify claims to truth?

We're dealing with this all the time. I say something to you and you say, well, how do you know?

And I say, well, I know because and I give a defense, I give a reason.

And I try to substantiate that claim by appealing to some basis of knowledge.

And some people say, well, I don't believe in God because God is invisible unless I can see Him, taste Him, touch Him, smell Him or hear Him.

I'm not going to believe in Him because that person says as far as I'm concerned, the only knowledge that is adequate knowledge is knowledge that can be tested through one or more of the five senses.

Another person says, well, wait a minute, I'm from Missouri and even if I see it, I'm not going to believe it unless you can demonstrate to me with the kind of certainty you get from mathematics.

Because I know I witness this to things people are often mistaken and they are deceived by what they think they see, they hallucinate and so on.

And so the only proof I will submit to is of the rational sort of the formal sort such as you get in mathematics at the level of two plus two equals four.

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