The big questions

Does archaeology actually back up the Bible?

It depends entirely on what you mean by back up — there are three different sizes of evidence here, and only the smallest of them does what most people are hoping for.

Hasn't the Bible been copied and changed so many times we can't know what it said?

We do not have the originals, and the copies do differ — but the differences are almost entirely spelling, word order, and obvious slips, and the handful that matter are printed openly in every scholarly edition, which is the reason we can say anything about them at all.

Did the prophets really predict the future?

Some prophecies are far weaker than apologetics websites admit — this page leads with the worst one and prints the verse that embarrasses it — and a small number survive every honest objection, which is why they need no inflated numbers.

How do we know God exists?

Nobody has a proof, and the Bible never offers one — what there is instead is a set of features of the world that are easier to explain if a mind is behind it than if nothing is, and this page prints the best answers to every one of them.

How old is the earth, and does it matter?

MannaFest reads Genesis 1 as six ordinary days and reckons the earth's age in thousands of years from Scripture's own genealogies — and this page prints the other Christian readings at full strength, shows our own approved voices disagreeing, and states the hardest unsolved problem in the young-earth case in the young-earth section.

Does life look designed, or does it just look that way?

Living things look engineered, and everyone on every side of this argument agrees they look that way — the whole fight is over whether an unguided process can produce that appearance, and this page prints the best case for each answer at the same length.

Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

There is a short list of facts about the weeks after the crucifixion that nearly every historian grants — including historians who conclude no resurrection happened — and the argument is about which explanation of that list is least strained.

If there's no God, is anything really wrong?

Almost nobody can actually live as though cruelty is merely unpopular — and a real right and wrong is far easier to explain if goodness is rooted in someone's character than if it is only something our species happens to feel.

Isn't faith just believing things without evidence?

Not in the Bible's own vocabulary — the Hebrew and Greek words behind faith mean trust based on a track record, the same thing you mean when you say you have faith in a friend, and the New Testament repeatedly stakes itself on claims that could have been checked and could have failed.

Doesn't the Bible contradict itself?

Most of the famous cases are differences rather than contradictions, and the standard tools for reading ancient documents dissolve them honestly — but a few genuinely remain open, and this page names them instead of smoothing them.

Who decided what goes in the Bible?

No council invented the list — the story is churches across the Roman world converging over three centuries on books they were already reading, and the paperwork survives so you can watch it happen.

What about God commanding the killing of the Canaanites?

This is the hardest thing in the Bible, several of the standard responses have real evidence behind them, and none of them makes the texts comfortable — a page that leaves you at ease here has not been honest with you.

If God is good, why is there so much suffering?

There are real answers to the logical version of this question, and they are widely accepted even by philosophers who are not believers — and none of them explains any particular child's cancer, which the Bible itself declines to explain.