Arguments for God’s Existence-The Argument from Jesus’ Resurrection (Part 1)

By Matt Lefebvre

Please read the introduction to this series before reading this article.

To read along with audio for this article, click here Resurrection-Part 1

Introduction

It is a unique feature of a cumulative case for God’s existence that each individual argument, on its own, does not establish all the traditional attributes of God; in the case of this series, the God of Christianity.  While some would consider this a reason to ignore the argument, it is precisely the nature of the cumulative case that allows any given argument to remain limited in its scope, for the individual arguments employed are not intended to give the whole picture alone, but form, as it were, a piece of the puzzle.  Hopefully then, the arguments together create a strong case for the existence of God that cannot be ignored.  Richard Dawkins illustrates this point well for our purposes, albeit unintentionally.  In reference to the cosmological argument for God’s existence, Dawkins counters, “Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, simply because we need one, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.” (The God Delusion, p.101).  If you have already read the cosmological argument in this series, or have heard of it before, perhaps you can appreciate the humour in this admission.  In fact, William Lane Craig includes this as #10 on his Ten Worst objections to the Kalam Cosmological Argument, and after reading this quote from Dawkins, Craig responds, “So what?”  The funny part is that Dawkins does not refute either of the premises, but simply complains of the argument not proving more.  Well, that is just the thing…the cosmological argument does not attempt to prove these other things.  However, what we do have can be found near the end of my article in this series on the cosmological argument: “So to sum up, we have a transcendent, timeless, nonspatial, immaterial, supremely powerful, supremely intelligent, personal cause.”  If we are looking for other attributes, other arguments are useful (Ex. the moral argument is helpful in establishing that God is good), and we need not fault an argument for not establishing more than it intends to.

That being said, sometimes it can seem like arguments for the existence of God are a little general.  After all, many could concede that there is some overarching power who created the world, and maybe even that such a being is fundamentally good, but still not be Christians.  I certainly agree that this is true, and that the theism so far contended for in the cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments is not exclusively Christian.  However, this is precisely where the argument from Jesus’ resurrection comes in.  This just happens to be my favourite argument for God’s existence, not because I think that the other arguments are not strong, but because I find this particular argument to be specific to Christianity.  It is all well and good to talk about the existence of a higher power in one form or another in most major religions, or maybe even to talk of a powerful first cause that created the world without intending to be directly involved subsequently.  However, as soon as the prospect of evidence for a physical resurrection happening in history within a particular religious tradition enters the equation, the viability of a host of religious views could legitimately be severed, depending on the truth of such evidence, of course.  If Jesus is just another religious founder who just lived, taught some things, and died, He would be about on the same level as all the rest, but if it is really true that God raised Him from the dead, this would be an unparalleled event within history.  Since no other founder of a major religion has claimed that they would be raised from the dead (Wilbur Smith, in New Evidence That Demands A Verdict, p.209), much less have been able to prove it, if Jesus’ resurrection took place within history, this would place the case for the existence of the Christian (not just generic) God head and shoulders above other religious claims.  For those who think I am being overly generous toward my own faith, I will soberly mention that this knife cuts both ways, for if Jesus has not been raised from the dead, my faith is in vain and futile (1 Corinthians 15:14-20).

So, all that to point out that the question of Jesus’ resurrection is of enormous significance.  How then do we proceed in attempting to answer this question, you might ask?  After all, is the resurrection not something to be rejected or accepted based on personal skepticism or Christian faith respectively?  Well, as a matter of fact, there are a few points of agreement regarding events surrounding the event in question among scholars who range from conservative Christians to theological liberals, and even to antagonists toward the Christian faith.  The reason for the wide agreement on these historical points, which have also been called minimal facts or historical bedrock, is clearly not based on common religious beliefs, but rather on the strength of the historical evidence for these facts.  For those engaged in historical Jesus studies, any scheme attempting to explain what happened with Jesus on Easter Sunday must include these widely accepted facts.  This is quite significant, because I believe a very strong case for God having raised Jesus from the dead can be made by incorporating these historical facts that are so well-accepted.  At the same time, these facts are also sufficient to show the inadequacy of alternate explanations, which serves as an added bonus.  I believe that the resurrection hypothesis is strong enough by itself, but the failure of other attempts to explain the facts apart from the resurrection serves to add weight to the scales in favour of Jesus actually being raised from the dead.  The form of the argument will be to first explain what these facts are, as well as some of the reasons for their historicity, followed by a look at the implications of these facts for various hypotheses, including the resurrection of Jesus, of course.  My contentions are as follows:

1. Shortly after Jesus’ death by crucifixion, His tomb was found empty and His disciples believed that He had risen from the dead and appeared to them
2. Belief in these phenomena led to the rapid spread of the Christian faith
3. The best explanation of these phenomena is that God raised Jesus from the dead

My hope is that the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus will lead to acceptance, not just of the existence of some distant God off somewhere, but of the existence of a God integrally involved in His creation; a God who raises the dead.

1. Shortly after Jesus’ death by crucifixion, His tomb was found empty and His disciples believed that He had risen from the dead and appeared to them

Have you ever heard someone claim something like, “Most people believe…” or “The majority of experts agree…” or “Nine out of ten dentists confirm…”?  Have you ever felt like asking them where they got those generalizations from?  A fair question when presented with an apparent consensus could be to ask whether such a statement is based on a critical survey or if it is in fact just an educated guess (or even just an ordinary guess).  In the present case, however, when I mention that there are a few widely accepted facts, this is based on the pain-staking and extensive research of historical Jesus scholar Gary Habermas.  In 2005, he published a summary of historical Jesus studies based on 3,400 sources going back to 1975 in French, German, and English in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus entitled “Resurrection Research from 1975 to the Present: What are Critical Scholars Saying?” (p.135-153).   How do we know that there is widespread agreement among scholars concerning these historical facts surrounding what happened to Jesus?  We can know this, because, thankfully, Habermas has largely consulted them.  So when we speak of these minimal facts, we can be confident that the experts have confirmed these.  However, we do not just believe them because scholars affirm their historicity, because sometimes scholars can be quite off on a particular topic, but also because these facts are strongly evidenced.  It is not just that scholars like these particular facts, and it can even be mentioned that many do not like having to explain them, but scholars accept these facts because there are good historical reasons for doing so.  For some people, it might be enough to just take the word of those who know, or at least claim to know, what they are talking about, but it is important to realize that it is not always “the facts” that determine what scholars think about the past.  To one degree or another, a scholar’s presuppositions play a role in what they accept or reject.  In fact, many would attest to the fact that “Philosophical presuppositions and historical evidence are not always good friends.” (J. Ed Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p.100).  Thus, in affirming these facts, I will also include various reasons for accepting them, so hopefully it can also be clear to you why these can be used to support the resurrection as the best explanation.  To state the facts more formerly in order: Jesus died by crucifixion-Jesus’ tomb was found empty-Jesus’ disciples believed that He had risen from the dead and appeared to them.  Connected with this is the origin of the Christian faith, and along with that, the conversion of Paul, which will be discussed in the second section.  In discussing these facts, I will limit myself to one objection per fact, for the sake of space, but various alternate explanations of the resurrection as a whole have been addressed in my article Following the Evidence Wherever It Leads based on the Minimal Facts Approach.

Jesus died by crucifixion

There is a very important prerequisite for a resurrection of a dead body; namely, it has to be dead first.  This may seem simple and uncontroversial, but there have been some attempts to explain the resurrection by suggesting that Jesus was not actually dead in the first place.  Although Jesus’ death by crucifixion is one of the historical facts widely accepted, the idea that Jesus was not really dead has been put forward in the past and still rears its head from time to time outside the scholarly community.  As the story goes, Jesus was thought to be dead and was taken down from the cross, before succumbing to death.  There is also the suggestion that Jesus was not actually crucified, as in Islam (Sura 4:157-158).  However, since this is not based on any early testimony that might contain accurate historical information and goes against what is known from early testimony, I will not pay this objection any more attention.  However, the contention that Jesus did not die, though not necessarily taking everything written in the Gospels as fact, seems to have initial support from within the report of Mark.  In 15:44 Mark writes, “Pilate was surprised to hear that he should have already died. And summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he was already dead.”  With the possibility of Jesus being taken down early from the cross, the scenario goes something along these lines:

Jesus did not die on the cross, but just fainted, and was thus mistaken for being dead.  Having been taken down, he was laid in a tomb, and in the coolness of the tomb, he woke up.  Upon returning to His disciples, they believed that He had been raised from the dead (Frank Morison, Who Moved the Stone?, p.104-105).

Could that have been what really happened?  Well, there are at least four good reasons for accepting that Jesus did actually die on the cross.  Before going on to these, though, it is worth mentioning that this idea suffered a scathing critique by a scholar who did not believe Jesus was resurrected, but nonetheless, considered the proposition that he did not die thoroughly implausible.  Liberal theologian David Strauss pointed out a series of obstacles that the crucified Jesus would need to overcome.  Even if He could survive crucifixion, how would he remove the stone of the tomb, considering His condition, the weight and incline of the stone, and the lack of an edge on which to push from the inside?  Even if He could get out, how would He walk the distance to where the disciples were hiding on His wounded feet?  Even if He could make it to His disciples, how would they think He was the resurrected and glorified Prince of life in His sad physical shape (A New Life of Jesus, p.408-412)?  To this could be added that there was a guard both at the crucifixion and at the tomb which would be responsible for guarding the body of the victim and corpse respectively.  They could even be executed for failing this duty (Craig Keener, Bible Background Commentary NT, p.130).  So not only does Jesus have to be taken down from the cross alive with the guard responsible there, but He also has to get past them to get to His disciples.  If I were to add evidence against this particular objection, I would rightly be accused of beating a dead horse, but in the interest of also ruling out other doubts about Jesus having really died, I turn now to the positive support for the death of Jesus by crucifixion.

1. Jesus’ death by crucifixion is attested by various ancient sources, Christian and non-Christian alike.  The Christian literature includes the canonical literature (the four Gospels, Acts, Paul’s letters, 1 Peter, and Revelation) and extrabibilical Christian literature (Ignatius’ letters, the Epistle of Barnabas, and many Gnostic sources).  However, it is not just from the Christians, but also Jewish and secular Roman testimony exists (Josephus, Tacitus, Lucian, Mara bar Serapion, and the Talmud).  In addition, there is no ancient evidence to the contrary (Gary Habermas, The Historical Jesus, p.187-189, 192-196, 202-204, 206-208; Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, p.304-305).

2. Not only are there many reports, but there are also some reports that are very early.  Paul mentions Jesus’ death by crucifixion no later than 55AD (1 Corinthians 15:3-8, Galatians 3:1), but even this was already preached to the Corinthians around 51AD when he founded the church in Corinth and to the Galatians even earlier.  But wait, it gets better!  Scholars have identified oral tradition behind what Paul delivers in 1 Corinthians 15, and in fact, the words Paul uses for “delivered” and “received” (ESV) are words often used for passing on formal tradition.  There is widespread agreement that Paul received this from the Jerusalem apostles and that it was within 3 to 8 years of Jesus crucifixion!  This is indeed very early, but since this is only when Paul receives the tradition, it must have been formulated even earlier (Gary Habermas, The Historical Jesus, p.152-157; Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, p.223-235, 305-306).

3. There is also internal evidence for belief in Gospel narratives of Jesus’ crucifixion themselves.  First of all, being crucified was a shameful thing, but especially for someone like Jesus.

Second, there was no belief that the Messiah would be crucified and this goes against the common Jewish picture of the Messiah.

Third, Jesus is depicted as a martyr who is struggling through His martyrdom, when a number of other accounts of Jewish martyrs show bravery in the face of torture and death.  The account of Jesus’ crucifixion would be hard to explain as pure fiction.

Fourth, the Gospels include incidental details that coincide with what we know of crucifixion from other sources.  These include crowds following Jesus to Golgotha, the breaking of the criminals’ legs, the piercing of Jesus’ side with a spear, and the Jews desiring to take the bodies down before sunset, prior to the Sabbath.  These details attest to the historicity of the passion narratives (Gary Habermas, The Historical Jesus, p.73-75; Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, p.306-311).

4. As unlikely as the objection above seems, as pointed out by Strauss, it is even more unlikely considering how improbable it is that someone would survive crucifixion.  First, the torture that often preceded crucifixion was very brutal, which would already weaken the victim.

Second, there is only one ancient report of someone surviving crucifixion, given to us by Josephus, but even though three of Josephus’ friends were taken down from their crosses and given the best care Rome had to offer, two out of the three still died.

Third, death by crucifixion is believed to be due to asphyxiation (not being able to exhale), so crucified criminals would have to push up using their nailed feet to breathe out.  This would not only make it easy to see if someone was dead, because most people would not survive more than ten or twelve minutes in the hanging position without lifting up, but it would also explain why breaking the legs of the criminals would speed up the process, as in the case of the approaching Sabbath when Jesus was crucified.

Fourth, an article that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association concerning the methods of scourging and crucifixion concluded that “interpretations based on the assumption that Jesus did not die on the cross appear to be at odds with modern medical knowledge.”  One of the issues involved the spear thrust into the heart of a crucifixion victim.  Romans ensured death by stabbing the heart and the testimony of John 19:34-35 coincides with this modern medical knowledge.  The blood and water that John saw would be from the right side of the heart and the pericardium (the sac that surrounds the heart) respectively.  Even if Jesus were to be alive for a significant amount of time in the hanging position without moving, the spear thrust to the heart would certainly have killed Him (Gary Habermas, The Historical Jesus, p.73-75; Michael Licona, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, p.304, 311-313).

The evidence for Jesus’ death by crucifixion is very strong and it is no wonder that so many scholars accept it as fact.  Mike Licona (The Resurrection of Jesus, p.313-314) records the statements of two very skeptical scholars, Gerd Lüdemann and John Dominic Crossan, that adequately sum up the view of the scholarly community concerning the death of Jesus:

“Jesus’ death as a consequence of crucifixion is indisputable.” (Lüdemann)

“That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.” (Crossan)

Click here to see part 2 of the article

Miracles-What Do You Expect Me To Believe? (Part 6)

by Matt Lefebvre

This post is a continuation of the series on miracles. Please see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 if you have not read them yet.

The line of thought for this third problem goes that miracle stories are much more common among those too stupid to recognize that it is nonsense, or more directly, contrary to science.  Richard Dawkins certainly thinks so.

“When pressed, many educated Christians today are too loyal to deny the virgin birth and the resurrection. But it embarrasses them because their rational minds know it is absurd, so they would much rather not be asked.” (The God Delusion, p.187)

It sounds like Dawkins meets a lot of people like Rudolf Bultmann, who attempted to demythologize the Bible, because he thought that, as paraphrased by William Lane Craig, “no one who uses the radio or electric lights should be expected to believe the mythological worldview of the Bible in order to become a Christian.” (Reasonable Faith, p.247). Elsewhere, Dawkins mocked the miracles of the Old and New Testaments, saying that “they are very effective with an audience of unsophisticates and children.” and the Jesus Seminar’s The Five Gospels says “The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope.  The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable glass.” (Cited in Who Made God?, p.88).  I, for one, am not embarrassed about the virgin birth or the resurrection, but I do understand why some people are.  While I might think it speaks so much more of God to look at His creation through a telescope, there are others who think this represents a choice between science and religion.  In the present context, it even means choosing between the enlightened thinkers in the universities and the barbarian ignoramuses down in the mud.  However, as Norman Geisler has pointed out, “belief in miracles does not destroy the integrity of scientific methodology, only its sovereignty.  It says in effect that science does not have sovereign claim to explain all events as natural, but only those that are regular, repeatable, and/or predictable.” (Miracles and Modern Thought, p.58).  What about the charge that miracle claims abound among the ignorant?  Well, both John Lennox and Craig Blomberg will tell you that it takes only a moment’s thought to realize that to recognize something as miraculous, you have to know what is normal.  Lennox mentions the story of Elizabeth in Luke 1 (Luke was a doctor) and how Zachariah her husband refused to believe that she would bear a son, because he was old and his wife was barren.  They had as much difficulty believing as someone today might, and they believed in the end because of all the evidence, and not because of ignorance toward the laws of nature (God’s Undertaker, p.199).  Blomberg says basically the same, saying that people of every generation know that two parents are needed for conception and that death is irreversible (The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, p.105).  Furthermore, N.T. Wright observes,

“Proposing that Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead was just as controversial nineteen hundred years ago as it is today. The discovery that dead people stayed dead was not first made by the philosophers of the Enlightenment. The historian who wishes to make such a proposal is therefore compelled to challenge a basic and fundamental assumption — not only, as is sometimes suggested, the position of eighteenth-century scepticism, or of the ‘scientific worldview’ as opposed to a ‘pre-scientific worldview’, but also of almost all ancient and modem peoples outside the Jewish and Christian traditions.” (Resurrection of the Son of God, p.10)

“Did any worshipper in these cults, from Egypt to Norway, at any time in antiquity, think that actual human beings, having died, actually came back to life?  Of course not.” (Resurrection of the Son of God, p.80)

Stephen Davis also asks, if belief in miracles was so common in ignorant times, why were Jesus’ miracles taken to be so significant (In Defense of Miracles, p.174)?  In reading these perspectives, I found myself amazed at some modern skeptics: he must consider the disciples of Jesus to be so stupid as to not know miracle from nature or anything else, but so smart as to create an elaborate and seemingly credible forgery in which the miracle is distinct from nature or anything else.  Another question the modern skeptic has to answer is why the disciples would include potentially detrimental information in the accounts if they were false.  If we look at the virgin birth, we have to ask along with Blomberg, “What follower of Jesus would have invented an account that led to Jesus being scorned as a mamzer (bastard) throughout his life as well as after his death?” (The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, p.117).  You might say that the disciples were trying to make Jesus’ life fulfill prophecy, but to be honest, the reference in Isaiah to the virgin birth is kind of obscure and not clearly about the Messiah.  I find it more logical to believe in the actual event bringing the thoughts together that the Messiah would be born of a virgin, rather than the disciples combing the Scriptures for what might make Jesus look like the Messiah.  Okay, so let’s say that the virgin birth was not a fabrication of the disciples; how then do we explain how a virgin gives birth?  For some this is really a large obstacle and is probably why Dawkins uses it in his embarrassment examples, but is it really that absurd to think of a virgin giving birth?  William Lane Craig has a recent example.

“in a recent conference at Notre Dame on `Science and Religion in the Post-Positivist Era,’ Arthur Peacocke claimed that modern cell biology has `radically undermined’ the credibility of the virgin birth because it would require God’s making a Y-chromosome de novo in Mary’s ovum-in other words, it would have to be a miracle!” (Reasonable Faith, p.280)

This makes me feel like we are back in elementary school again, finding out how babies are made and thinking we have discovered something new.  Mary could have told you that it would have to be a miracle, as she was sure that she was a virgin, and she did not need to have modern cell biology tell her that.  Is it really so incredible to think that God could create a Y-chromosome inside Mary?  I have a cousin who is unmarried, but still wants to have a baby.  For a large sum of money, she can have that opportunity, and far from prohibiting this, it is science that makes it possible.  It is called artificial insemination and she could technically still be a virgin and yet get pregnant.  I echo the words above once again in saying that if humans can do this, surely God, as Creator of both the Y- and the X-chromosomes in the first place, could create a Y-chromosome in Mary.  Very fitting that the words spoken in response to Mary’s question (yes, she asked how she could bear a son while still a virgin) were that “nothing will be impossible with God.” (Luke 1:37).

Click here to see part 7 of the article

Miracles-What Do You Expect Me To Believe? (Part 5)

by Matt Lefebvre

This post is a continuation of the series on miracles. Please see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 if you have not read them yet.

Secondly, Hume says that people want to believe in the amazing and the miraculous, so they are easily duped into believing false miracle stories.  However, this need not be a check against any miracle story being considered by weighing evidence and not adding, as I explained above.  Even if there are many more miracle stories that are false than those that are true, if those that are true have good evidence, they should naturally carry more weight.  In my high school, there were a couple students who rarely listened in class, did not do very much of their homework, and barely ever studied.  When it came time for a test, they would cheat, usually by discreetly (or so they thought) looking at someone else’s paper.  If they were caught doing so by the teacher, they would get zero, but it had no effect on those of us who did the test based solely on what we had learned.  Especially when the test involved an essay, it was easy for the teacher to see who actually knew what they were talking about.  In the same way that the teacher still gave the good grades to those who did not cheat, false miracle claims do not explain away positive evidence for better miracle claims.  Having said that, I can at least understand why Hume would remain suspicious of miracle claims because of the unbridled attention they draw.  However, what separates the miracles of Jesus from false miracle claims is the early testimony in the Gospels and the enemy attestation to Jesus’ miracles.  Many miracles have been shown to be legendary, written back into some historical person’s life, but with Jesus’ miracles, even very liberal scholars recognize the early attestation to Jesus’ miracles in the sources behind the Gospel narratives, as Lee Strobel demonstrates (Who Made God?, p.89-90).  In fact, Mohammed, whom Hume uses as an example of competing miracle reports, claimed that Jesus performed miracles, but that he himself was not going to do so.  Miracle accounts for him and other saints come after his death, in sources many Islamic scholars consider to be unhistorical (Who Made God?, p.91, Answering Islam, p.171-172, 254, 257).  It was not just those who wanted to make Jesus look good, though, for the Talmud does not deny that Jesus performed miracles, but rather, it merely attributes the power to sorcery (Sanhedrin 43a).  There are others that could be cited, but the words of very liberal scholar Marcus Borg say more than enough.

“Despite the difficulty which miracles pose for the modern mind, on historical grounds it is virtually indisputable that Jesus was a healer and an exorcist.” (A New Vision, p.61)

Naturalistic explanations have been attempted to explain how Jesus could be seen as a miracle worker, but these fail, because many of Jesus’ miracles were such as those that happened instantly and defy explanation apart from divine intervention, such as curing blindness or disfiguration, or even feeding the 5,000, which appears in all four Gospels.  So perhaps the only way out is to say that these people believed Jesus to be a miracle worker because they were ignorant barbarians.

Click here to see part 6 of the article

Miracles-What Do You Expect Me To Believe? (Part 4)

by Matt Lefebvre

This post is a continuation of the series on miracles. Please see Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 if you have not read them yet.

For the purpose of showing that God has acted in history

According to Hume, the task of marshalling sufficient evidence for a miracle claim is insurmountable.  The witnesses are never good enough!  False miracles abound and people are easily taken in by them!  Miracles would not be so popular if they had to get started among a more intelligent society!  One claims a miracle by his god and another claims a conflicting miracle by his own god, so neither can be rationally believed!  These are quite bold assertions, but in the end, even they seem to be irrelevant to Hume, who says something which I find paradoxical.

“Our most holy religion is founded on Faith, not on reason; and it is a sure method of exposing it to put it to such a trial as it is, by no means, fitted to endure.” (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding)

I am not exactly sure what Hume thinks will be left of such a religion founded on faith if that faith is not founded on reality.  However, I do know what 1 Corinthians 15:17 says, “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.”  Hume thinks he is actually protecting the Christian religion; to which I say with friends like these, who needs enemies?  In my effort to defend Christianity, I make it my aim to defend what truth claims it makes, for if its claims are not true, it is not worth defending.

Hume’s first objection to miracle claims is that the quality and quantity of witnesses are lacking.  As far as quantity, it is unfortunate that he does not give us an approximate number, because it makes it hard to judge what a sufficient number would then be, but I have a pretty good number in mind.  If you thought I was going to say twelve, you would be wrong (perhaps based on uniform experience again!), for the New Testament says much more than that.  In 1 Corinthians 15:6 we find, not only the appearance of Jesus, resurrected from the dead, to more than five hundred people at the same time, but also that most of them were still alive.  The implication of this would be, anyone who doubted the testimony of Paul could ask these other witnesses to the risen Christ.  If you want to read more about this early Christian witness to the risen Christ and other widely recognized facts about the resurrection of Jesus, you can look at The Minimal Facts Approach, but here suffice it to say that the quantity objection seems stretched pretty thin in this case.  The quality of the witnesses is a little less straightforward, but still hard to question.  Among Gary Habermas’ 129 facts from ancient sources for the life and teaching of Jesus are references to, not only the integrity of the early Christians, but also their willingness to die for the message of Christ’s death and resurrection (The Historical Jesus, p.243-250).  Now those who heard the preaching of the apostles and subsequently died for this belief in the resurrection of Christ may be likened to a Muslim suicide bomber today, just dying for what someone else has told them is true.  However, the same cannot be said of the apostles.  They claimed to have seen the risen Jesus and no suffering or even threat of death would get them to recant.  So it seems that if they were not deceivers, since they had nothing to gain from what they were propagating, but quite the contrary, perhaps they were deceived, then, as Hume might put it.  This may go along with his requirement that they be of unquestioned good sense, education, and learning.  The New Testament is not silent on this matter, for at least Peter and John were uneducated, common men, but this was not a strike against them, for they were recognized as having been with Jesus (Acts 4:13). I consider Hume’s restriction in the case of education to be quite arrogant and unnecessary.  I wholeheartedly agree that a witness must be of great integrity to testify to the truth they have seen, but to think that someone who had not been to university could not testify to what they saw and touched, namely Jesus, is asking too much.  If the disciples had all believed immediately after hearing of the empty tomb, without seeing Jesus, then that would be subject to criticism, but the fact that Jesus appeared to them personally would not take rocket science to judge correctly, especially considering their disposition to believe that Jesus was dead.

Click here to see part 5 of the article

Miracles-What Do You Expect Me To Believe? (Part 3)

by Matt Lefebvre

This post is a continuation of the series on miracles. Please see Part 1, Part 2 if you have not read them yet.

A temporary exception to the ordinary course of nature

Hume defines a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature and points to uniform experience of the laws of nature going along as normal in support of the fact that miracles are not possible, or at least, not accessible through testimony.  However, what can this mean?  Certainly not that we are omniscient and can see the laws of nature being upheld everywhere, but even if we could, Hume’s own words would still speak against the uniformity of nature he used to argue against miracles!  Hume says in the same work as our feature essay on miracles, under the title “Cause and Effect” in Part I:

“That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood.”

Well, I think John Lennox rightly follows the implications of this line of thought to say that if you cannot predict the future on the basis of past experience, Hume in the same way cannot be sure that a dead man will not rise up tomorrow.  The same argument also works backwards in time, for even if there was uniformity for 300 years that kings of England are not decapitated, if someone said that Charles I was not decapitated, on the basis of uniformity, that person would be wrong.  “Uniformity is one thing; absolute uniformity is another.” (God’s Undertaker, p.196).  Norman Geisler also catches Hume making outlandish assertions by pointing out the fallacy of adding evidence instead of weighing it.  Based on the fact that deaths occur over and over again, but resurrections are rare at best, Hume rejects resurrections.  However, this does not involve examining the facts (say of whether Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead), for he is confusing “quantity of evidence with the quality of evidence.”  This practice of adding evidence could be applied to unusual or unique events that are not miracles, leading people to disbelieve them, or thinking that because something is highly improbable, it can never happen.  However, odds do not carry as much weight as facts, so evidence must be weighed.  Geisler finishes by saying “Hume’s argument seems to prove too much.  It proves that we should not believe in a miracle even if it happens!” (In Defense of Miracles, p.78-79).

So if absolute uniformity is out of our reach, what about the claim that a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature?  Surely everyone can appreciate the role of gravity in keeping us from floating off into space, so it would likely be distressing to find out that these laws were not set.  But what does it mean that the laws of nature are violated by miracles?  Certainly not that one instance that does not conform to the normal course of events puts an end to the standard that governs the normal course of events.  Without the concept of the way events normally happen, there would be no way to recognize anything as miraculous.  So a miracle, by definition is something exceptional and temporary, not something that happens so naturally or normally that we do not think of it as miraculous.  In other words, a miracle does not change the laws of nature or set in motion a new way the world works.  The claim that Jesus was born of a virgin did not carry with it the assumption that babies would all of a sudden start growing in young women who had not had sexual intercourse with a man.  In fact, the opposite assumption came with it, that Jesus was unique in this way; the product of a divine miracle of God from birth.

By way of analogy, C.S. Lewis offers the following illustration:

“If this week I put a thousand pounds in the drawer of my desk, add two thousand next week and another thousand the week thereafter, the laws of arithmetic allow me to predict that the next time I come to my drawer, I shall find four thousand pounds.  But suppose when I next open the drawer, I find only one thousand pounds, what shall I conclude?  That the laws of arithmetic have been broken?  Certainly not!  I might more reasonably conclude that some thief has broken the laws of the State and stolen three thousand pounds out of my drawer.  Furthermore, it would be ludicrous to claim that the laws of arithmetic made it impossible to believe in the existence of such a thief or the possibility of his intervention.  On the contrary, it is the normal workings of those laws that have exposed the existence and activity of the thief.” (Miracles, p.62)

Laws do not prevent intervention, but only point out that intervention, in that something is not conforming to the usual way things happen.  Scientists often think of what is scientific in terms of what is repeatable, conforming to the laws of nature.  With a miracle, God intervenes into the natural order of things.  If the same circumstances arise as when the miracle took place and there is no intervention from God, the same event will not be repeated, but the laws of nature will turn the events according to their usual pattern.  If C.S. Lewis came to his drawer in a further few weeks, in the absence of a thief, there would still be the thousand pounds that the thief left after the initial theft.  In addition, there are naturalistic unrepeatabilities.  The Big Bang is the singular origin of the universe that many contemporary astronomers believe to be the best explanation of what happened (please see the cosmological argument for God’s existence), but it has not happened again, nor can it be repeated naturally.  I mentioned above that I think this to be a naturalistic miracle, but in actuality, it is.  It cannot be said that the big bang operated according to natural laws, for both space and time are believed to have come into existence at the beginning of the universe with the Big Bang.  Norman Geisler adds to this.

“And nearly all scientists believe that the origin of life on this planet also was a singular event that has never been repeated here.” (In Defense of Miracles, p.82)

People have tried to create life, imagining what the early conditions of the earth were like, but have been unsuccessful.  It seems like this again fits the category of miracle, for life is not being created out of non-life anywhere that we know of.  To bring the parallel to a miracle claim, dead men usually stay dead.  To say that certain persons were resurrected does not directly contradict this nor imply that dead people will start to randomly rise from the dead, because the claim is not that those resurrected were raised naturally.  There is no dead raising mechanism in the laws of nature, but the claim is that they were brought back to life by a supernatural power; a significant intervention into the natural course of events.  My brother-in-law likes to skydive.  Thinking in terms of what can be discovered scientifically about the laws of nature, after he jumps out of the plane, gravity will bring him toward the earth at a very rapid speed.  Should he hit the ground at that speed, the pressure exerted on his body would kill him.  You are probably thinking that I am forgetting about the parachute.  Well, nothing scientific says that according to the laws of nature the parachute must open before he hits the ground.  It must be his choice to intervene in the normal course of events that are taking place by pulling the cord to release his chute.  Again, I do not see how God would be unable to do something similar.  If He is indeed the One who first gave life to a human being, why could He not do it again to bring a dead man to life?

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