In the Christian Story, mind and matter - invisible things and visible things - are both real. The Christian view is not the only way of viewing the world, of course. It has competition.

Our reasons for believing Jesus existed and also that He was who He claimed to be - the God who came down - are the same reasons for believing any fact of history: the documentation is substantial and it passes all the tests of historical reliability. Scholars - both liberal and conservative - overwhelming agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a man of history and the Gospels, on the main, tell His story accurately.

Our souls - our invisible selves - bear the mark of God Himself. We're like God in that we bear His image.

If the Christian doesn't get reality right, he loses effectiveness in this life. If the non-Christian doesn't get reality right, he loses much in this life, and everything and the next one. As Jesus put it, "What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?"

If man is not special, if he's not deeply different from any other thing, then there's no good reason not to treat him just like any other thing when it's convenient for us to do so.

I want people to see that Christianity claims to be true in the deep sense, and if it isn't, then it solves nothing at all.

Christianity is actually "true Truth," as Francis Schaeffer used to put it. God really does exist, Heaven actually is real (along with Hell), Jesus really did live and He did the things the historical records - the Gospels - say He did, the resurrection of Christ really happened, and there really is hope each of us can count on for "the kind of perfect world our hearts have always longed for."