 You see, in our world, again and again, people divide so easily. We live in a brittle world when it comes to epistemology, where people think that you either have to know everything for certain. Like putting something in a test tube, doing a test, yes, it is this or that or the other chemical. It either is or it isn't. So people say again and again, I want to know the facts, I just want certainty. And that then breeds its opposite. It breeds skepticism. The people who say, I'm quite sure that isn't the case. I'm absolutely sure certain that Jesus didn't rise from the dead or whatever. But again and again, this is a problem about our modes of knowing in the post-enlightenment world. We have forgotten that love is the primary mode of knowing. Many theologians have argued this, and as I've read the New Testament over the years, I've come back to it again and again. People talks about love as the ultimate mode of knowing God in 1 Corinthians 8 and in Galatians 4. Love is more than simply knowing about. Love is this relationship in which we affirm the truth of what is known without it collapsing into being simply an extension of my personality. But in affirming the otherness of what is known, also delighting in it, celebrating in it and relishing the engagement that we have together. And this is the way we have to go. Unfortunately, there are many Christians who faced with contemporary skepticism try to mount arguments which are arguments for a form of certainty. And I listen to these and I want to say, I share your faith in principle. I share the desire that people should know that there are good answers to the skeptical questions. But if you're trying to create this kind of mathematical certainty, I'm not so sure. When I wrote my big book on the resurrection, The Resurrection of the Son of God, in 2003, some readers thought I was trying to give that kind of certainty, will prove beyond any shadow of doubt Jesus must have been raised from the dead. No, what I try to do in that book, and I try to make this clearer in chapter six of history and eschatology, is to say, let's examine all the different theories about what happened, as much as you like, and we'll see how poverty-stricken most of them are. And coming through the middle again and again is the possibility that it might actually have happened, that Jesus might have been bodily raised from the dead. But make no mistake, in order to embrace that, it isn't just a matter of putting a tick or a check by a box saying, did it or didn't it happen. It's a matter of having the mind and the heart expanded to believe a worldview within which there might be a God, the Creator, who would do this as the launching of his new creation. That's a whole theme that we'll get to in the subsequent course, which will follow this and take us through the second half of this book, History and Eschatology. But it's perfectly possible then for somebody to hear all the arguments and to come back as my atheist former tutor came back to me and said, well, I see those are great arguments. I see there is really no place for the skeptic to hide, but I simply choose to believe that there must have been some other explanation for the rise of Christianity, even though at the moment I have no idea what that might be. Seems to me that's a perfectly honest answer and that the apologist does not need to imagine that the task is to put such a person into the position of either looking stupid or wicked. The person I'm talking about is not stupid and is not wicked, but he sees that the arguments have got him to the point where it is a choice. He hasn't got any better arguments, but he's faced with a worldview choice. So be it.