Posted on 02/11/2015 7:50:28 AM PST by Kaslin
The other day an old friend of mine said the following: “I believe in Christianity except for the part about the resurrection. We all know that didn’t happen. The New Testament may say Jesus arose from the dead. But that was probably due to corruption of the early manuscripts.” When you hear a quote like that you might assume it comes from reading The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. More likely, it comes from unwillingness to part ways with philosophical naturalism. In other words, it is not a surface factual problem. It is a deeper worldview problem.
The problem, of course, is that wholesale rejection of super-naturalism doesn’t just force you to reject the resurrection. It forces you to reject the notion of God altogether. Fortunately, there are good philosophical and scientific reasons to accept supernatural explanations for the origins of life and the universe.
Philosophers as early as the Middle Ages concluded that today never would have arrived if there was an infinite number of days that preceded it. So if today is here the universe must have had a beginning. But it wasn’t until the 20th Century that scientists began to converge on the idea that space, time, and matter had a fixed beginning with a “big bang” in the distant past.
This convergence is important because nature cannot be its own cause. If space, time, and matter had a beginning then it must have had a cause that transcends space, time, and matter.
It should go without saying that such a cause must be powerful. Furthermore, the cause would seem to be personal since a choice had to be made to create, and impersonal forces don’t make choices. Think about it: a blind force like gravity can be expected to do the same thing over and over again. In contrast, doing something unique - like creating something from nothing - is the kind of thing we would expect from a personal and purposeful force.
Of course, atheists are in trouble if they accept the idea that the universe had a beginning while simultaneously denying that it had a cause. The entire scientific enterprise depends on the cause-and-effect relationship. If things can simply pop in and out of existence without a cause then science cannot be conducted reliably.
Atheists unwittingly prove my general point every time they sit down to write books denying the existence of God. Their books are, of course, physical things. The book is produced by the atheist’s mind, which is a non-physical entity. But if the atheist tries to deny that his mind is in any way immaterial – that it is just the same thing as his brain – he loses all claims to know the truth. He cannot objectively evaluate the evidence if his thoughts are solely the result of physical reactions over which he has no control. He cannot reason; he can only react. In other words, he cannot know he is a robot if he is only a robot.
Of course, the atheist is not a robot. His physical brain changes over time but he still retains his thoughts long after his brain has physically changed. So his mind and brain are not the same. Moreover, the nonphysical laws of nature remain unchanged, and so do the nonphysical laws of logic he employs to reach his conclusions. Therefore, despite claiming everything is material, the atheist uses the immaterial to make his case. Materialism is false.
However, the writings produced by the minds of atheists like Stephen Hawking have been enormously beneficial in my own understanding of nature’s origins. Hawking estimates that if the expansion rate of the universe was different by one part in a hundred thousand million million one second after the big bang, the universe would have either collapsed back on itself or never developed galaxies. The implications of this are rather obvious.
The physical universe had a beginning and, therefore, had a cause. Because an effect can’t precede its cause, the cause of the physical universe must be supernatural. Given the precision that was required to bring this about, nothing else seems comparably difficult. It would certainly be easier to enter and renter the universe than it would be to create it. In comparison to the creation of the universe, the resurrection seems relatively simplistic.
When we put the resurrection in its proper perspective, we realize that people who reject it are engaged in a broader rejection of supernaturalism. Their reasons for rejecting the resurrection necessitate rejecting God altogether. Ironically, science and reason are also rejected in the process.
Author’s Confession: Nothing in the column you just read is an original product of my mind. I stole everything from my friend Frank Turek’s new book, Stealing From God: Why Atheists Need God to Make Their Case.”
“I believe in Christianity except for the part about the resurrection.”
Oh, well that’s only the most indispensable doctrine, so don’t worry about it. /sarc
All three possible explanations for the origin of the universe are supernatural.
In other words, naturalism necessitates supernaturalism.
I don’t know how valid it is to “reason” one’s way to Faith. The latter exists independent of the former.
1. the universe has always been in existence
2. the universe was created out of nothing by itself
3. the universe was created by an uncreated God
What is the metaphysical origin of reason?
“I believe in Christianity except for the part about the resurrection. We all know that didn’t happen. The New Testament may say Jesus arose from the dead. But that was probably due to corruption of the early manuscripts.”
That’s the sort of pseudo-intellectual tripe one hears all too often these days. Another good one is “Communism is good in theory.” It’s a way for the speaker to cast himself as an above it all intellectual. These people are usually idiots, and you have just heard the entirety of their thinking on the matter.
The lack of faith, and just plain ignorance is astounding.
I happened upon this article by William Lane Craig yesterday, regarding the big bang. It’s accessible to the non-scientist and fairly brief.
Basically the Apostle Paul says in Scripture (the authoritative and inerrant Word of God) that without the resurrection being true and having actually happened, that we don’t have Christianity ... but we are to be pitied, instead.
This guy that said that either doesn’t read his Bible, or he thinks the Bible isn’t true, in which case I have to wonder why he’s concerned about Christianity in the first place.
We can reason our way to the God of the philosophers with certainty, and we can even reason our way to the probability of Christ’s divinity. Reason can take us a long way, and at least remove impediments to faith.
All faith has a foundation of reason, whether you realize it or not.
I remember a scientist saying that studying science actually made his faith in God stronger. He likened the Earth to the porridge in Goldlocks and the three bears—not too hot, not to cold but just right. If one factor was off by the slightest degree, (size, distance of the moon, distance of Earh from the sun) we wouldn’t be here. If you tried to justify our existence, logically based on what we know, it would be an improbability.
In other words, our very existence is proof that God exists.
FALSANI:
Who’s Jesus to you?
(He laughs nervously)
OBAMA:
Right.
Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he’s also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher.
Francis Schaeffer has addressed some of these same topics. He has a trilogy that demonstrates clearly that the arguments of the unbeliever are actually untenable. They desperately rely upon the foundation of God being there in order to argue that He is not there. Thanks for the thread.
2. the universe was created out of nothing by itself
Big Bang theory
3. the universe was created by an uncreated God
Theism
Yes, in the lineage of presuppositionalism (Van Til, Frame, others).
The First Law of Thermodynamics comes to mind here. That’s the law of nature that declares that neither matter nor energy can be created nor destroyed. It’s a law of nature because it has always been proven true. That begs the question, of course, of where all the matter and energy in the universe came from? The Christian believes it was created ex nihilo by God. The atheist believes that something ultimately far more supernatural occurred to bring all matter and energy into existence.
The bottom line is you can’t get to matter or energy without a supernatural explanation, and you can’t get to the most “simple” stupendously complex single-celled organism without a supernatural explanation.
Ultimately, however, people like Adams’ friend are obviously unbelievers, no matter what their so-called profession may be. They’re calling God a liar, engaging in false prophecy, claiming God didn’t say something He said, and that God said something He didn’t say. And Christ condemns false prophets in Matthew 7.
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