“Research shows… Historians recognize… If you could read… [something]” so people argue various points of view, and few are challenged to change their minds. What use are academic papers demonstrating reasons to believe in God and Christ if the common Christian cannot apply them in their conversations. Christians need a defense of the faith that one could write on a business card and is handy enough to stick in one’s pocket.

            The Christian must recognize that not everyone is going to believe and that those who will consider the evidence for the faith must have a reasonable view of God (Acts 17:22–31). A person must be willing to consider with honesty the self-evident facts. The apostle Paul revealed, “For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse” (Rom 1:20 ESV). The Christian can help those willing to consider God by keeping five reasons (more or less) to demonstrate the reasonable faith in God and Christ.

Here are 5 reasons to believe:

1. Cause and Effect: The universe must have a cause that is greater than itself. The cause of the universe must be greater in power, create order, and exist beyond the universe and its natural laws. Therefore, the cause of the universe must be by definition the supernatural Creator. Furthermore, the creation of the universe is the first miracle that proves that God does miracles.

2. Design: As the complex order of a smartphone being greater than a pencil demonstrates intelligent design, so the complex order of biology being greater than human inventions demonstrates intelligent design. Otherwise, everything exists by random chance or determined by the necessity of purposeless laws. Creation reveals God’s eternal power and divine nature.

3. Logic: Without God, no objective standards for logic could exist, because logic cannot discover logic without logic, create itself, or exist outside the mind. Therefore, logic exists constantly and eternally, so logic reveals God’s divine nature.

4. Morality: Without God, no objective values for morality could exist because morality would then be subject to some arbitrary foundation of self, society and, or instinct. However, objective moral values exist, God must exist who is the source of morality, and thus universal morality reveals God’s divine nature as love (1 John 3:16; 4:8, 16).

5. Witnesses: Various doubters and unbelievers witnessed Jesus resurrected from the dead and that changed their lives (1 Cor 15:1–11). The church could only begin and exist because of the witnesses of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection. Furthermore, Peter proclaimed predictions of Jesus’s resurrection, Jesus’s empty tomb, and witnesses as evidence of Jesus’s resurrection (Acts 2:14–36).