Pastor Adam Parker

You may be familiar with the common digital refrain: “Pics, or it didn’t happen.” For a long time, we believed that unless there was a digital trail or a lens involved, a claim remained mere hearsay. But now we’ve entered a day where neither pics nor vids convince us that something has taken place.

Lately, I have been reflecting on the kind of evidence that really persuades us. Our confidence in the “visual record” is being dismantled before our eyes by a relentless stream of digital deception. Grainy videos of overseas conflicts that turn out to be repurposed footage from a decade ago. Night-vision clips of “destruction” that are actually high-resolution renders from a video game. The endless, wearying debates over whether a political crowd was digitally “inflated.” The wholesale manufacture of entire events—people who do not exist saying things they never said in places they never were—all generated by a prompt in an A.I. engine.

For a time, we tried to outrun this skepticism by moving the goalposts. When it became easy to doctor a photograph, we told ourselves that video was the final frontier of the “real story.” We assumed that while a still image could be manipulated, the complexity of a moving, speaking person was beyond forgery.

Today, even that retreat has failed. We are now deeply suspicious of video and audio evidence. Whether it is a politician’s controversial statement, a celebrity endorsement, or a feat of physical strength, we immediately look for the seams of CGI or the artifacts of A.I. voice generation. Sociologists now speak of the “Liar’s Dividend,” which is a phenomenon where the very existence of deepfakes allows anyone to claim that genuine evidence is actually a forgery. The result is that video evidence no longer carries the weight it once did; it has become just another shadow in a digital hall of mirrors.

It seems we have come full circle. I believe we are returning to the power of the eyewitness. We once viewed personal testimony as an archaic, “soft” form of evidence, yet we are relearning that the value of testimony is often directly proportional to its cost. It is cheap and easy to edit a digital file; it costs virtually nothing to manufacture a lie in pixels. Consequently, what used to be seen as “hard evidence” now often leaves us skeptical because it requires no skin in the game for the one producing it.

Philosopher C.A.J. Coady and biblical scholar Richard Bauckham remind us that the testimony of others is not a second-rate source of knowledge, but a fundamental one. Bauckham writes:

“Testimony is as basic a form of knowledge as perception, memory, and inference. It has the same kind of epistemic status as our other primary sources of information… If testimony is as basic a means of knowledge… then we must understand our epistemic situation in less exclusively individualistic terms and more in communal or inter-subjective terms” (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, 475-477).

In other words, we were never meant to be “isolated investigators” who only believe what we can see with our own eyes or record on our own phones. We are designed to live in a community of trust. This is reflected in the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, which highlights a pivot toward “Insular Trust.” As trust in global digital platforms collapses, people are pivoting back to the authority of the local, the personal, and the peer. We are finding that we cannot live in a world where everything is a deepfake; we are wired to seek out a “worthy witness.”

Modern skepticism is often described as an acid that eats through even its own container. If you are skeptical of everything, you must eventually become skeptical of your own senses and the very foundations of your logic. Some might think this is just epistemological modesty, but G.K. Chesterton (in his book Orthodoxy) has a criticism of this attitude:

“What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition and settled upon the organ of conviction, where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.”

C.S. Lewis (in The Abolition of Man) speaks to this tendency not just to be modest, but to be skeptical of everything.

“You cannot go on ‘explaining away’ for ever: you will find now that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ‘see through’ first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

The answer, of course, is not credulity or gullibility. Instead, I would suggest we return to a robust appreciation for more basic means of knowledge, especially including the eyewitness.

None of this means that we should be so naïve as to always believe that every claim is necessarily true. The ancient historian Polybius noted that the historian’s task is “to believe those worthy of belief and to be a good critic of the reports that reach him.” We have always known that people do lie. However, as we see with digital fabrications, lies are usually told when the cost is low or the liar believes they will escape suffering. Is it any wonder that we are now awash in disinformation?

While the value of a video has been cheapened, the price a person is willing to pay for what they have seen remains a definitive metric of truth. Is a claim worth losing one’s job for? One’s family? One’s life?

To be a martus (the Greek word for “witness” from which we get “martyr”) is often to pay a price. This is vital when the event in question is the most important moment in human history. When we examine the New Testament, we find men who were uniquely positioned to know the facts and uniquely pressured to recant them.

Unlike the anonymous user who uploads a deepfake for “clout,” the Apostles represent the ultimate cost of testimony. Church history records that the Apostles paid for their claim that Jesus Christ rose from the dead with their very lives. With the exception of John (who endured exile), they faced execution rather than recant what they had seen and touched.

As Blaise Pascal famously noted in his Pensées:

“I prefer to believe those writers who get their throats cut for what they write.”

Perhaps we are finally returning to an era where we realize that talk and fakery are cheap precisely because they come at no cost to their creator. In a world of digital shadows, we are forced to return to something more substantial. If you find yourself skeptical of the “evidence” you see on your screen, I invite you to reconsider the costly, blood-bought testimony of the Apostles. Their foundation is one that cannot be edited, deleted, or devalued because they were there, and they chose to die rather than deny it.