Round 1: the Reliability of the Gospels.
When you read John, you’re reading someone who was an eyewitness, not a “powerplay” not a meta-narrative so he could be boiled in oil. “I believe those witnesses who get their throats cut” (Pascal). One aspect of reliability has to do with how many manuscripts we have.The more copies we have, the more reliable it becomes because we can compare copy to copy.
For Sophocles, a playwrights of Athens, 200 manuscripts.
For Plato’s200 manuscripts.
For Homer’s The Iliad, less than 2,000.
For the New Testament, we have 5,800, three times as many, and with more than 2.6 million pages! Point=we can trust the New Testament.
Round 2: the battle over the truthfulness of Genesis.
"Most remarkable of all, astronomers have found proof that the universe sprang into existence abruptly, in a sudden moment of creation, as the Bible said it did." Robert Jastrow
"I think, however, that we must go further than this and admit that the only accepted explanation is Creation. I know that this is anathema to physicists, as indeed it is to me, but we must not reject a theory that we do not like if the experimental evidence supports it." physicist H.J. Lipson
“The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole.” Arno Penzias, the Nobel Prize winner for his discovery of the Cosmic Background Radiation
"For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." -Robert Jastrow
Round 3 wasn’t with the gospels or Genesis or any other part of the Bible but with SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE IN THE BIBLE
What helped me most was I learned the history of the church. Darwin produced Christians who were afraid, who were insecure that people would abandon faith. This produced Fundamentalism, Christians who were ANTI-INTELLECTUAL, ANTI-SCIENTIFIC AND ANTI-DISCUSSION with non-Christians.
I learned that the TRUTH, if held poorly, can be REALLY UGLY.