Sometimes in a tennis match one player will be up at the net and the other will be back at the baseline. When the baseline player hits the ball the net player hits it in mid air, often directing it to the far corner. The baseline player hustles and manages to return the ball but once again the net player zings it back. The baseline player can sometimes lob the ball over the net player, who then has to fall back to the baseline to return it. The game has become more symmetrical now.
Often in a conversation the skeptic will zing challenge after challenge at the believer - prove this, justify that, prove this other thing, and so on. One way to even things up and create room for the Holy Spirit is to ask questions. The purpose of the questions is not to win a debating point by zinging the metaphorical ball down the sideline, but to make the other take on some of the work.
James W. Sire wrote an apologetics book Why Should Anyone Believe Anything at All?. The title question can make it so that the skeptic has to justify existing convictions and knowledge against skepticism. No longer can the skeptic merely zing challenges at the believer. He or she must also grapple with defending the plausibility and truth of history, science, common sense, and so on.
This inversion is one instance of a general class of questions that lob the rhetorical ball over the head of the skeptic at the net. This is not a reductio ad absurdum, which tries to shut down discussion by destroying the opposing argument. Instead, it puts both interlocutors into a common space for further discussion.
“Prove that the New Testament manuscripts are reliable” can be turned into “How can we assess the reliability of any ancient manuscripts, say Aristotle or Herodotus or Beowulf? What criteria and methods can we use?” One can pick a particular author or work and then apply criteria to it, and then apply the criteria to the NT. In a case like this Wikipedia can be your friend. For instance of the Annals of Tacitus we learn: “Though most has been lost, what remains is an invaluable record of the era. The first half of the Annals survived in a single copy of a manuscript from Corvey Abbey, and the second half from a single copy of a manuscript from Monte Cassino, and so it is remarkable that they survived at all.” The one manuscript dated from the 11th century, that is, roughly a thousand years after the original work. The NT, on the other hand, survived in thousands of manuscripts in multiple languages widely distributed in space and time that can be compared with one another to verify readings, and the oldest manuscripts are within three or four centuries of the originals (snippets are even older).
Very often objections can be inverted. If the skeptic says there are four accounts of Jesus’ life and they differ in details, one can ask “If we had only one version or the several accounts were identical in their details, wouldn’t we be worried that it was indeed a fabricated story? In real life, don't multiple histories or eye-witness accounts always differ one from another?”
Since the goal is not to win the argument but to create room for the Holy Spirit to work in, all a question has to do is get the skeptic (and those in the audience) to ask the question and attempt to answer it.
