Joshualetter

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Five: Twentieth Century Physics and the Recovery of Theistic Science

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.

– Genesis 1:1

The author of the Book of Genesis was very clear about it: there was an absolute beginning. But Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) didn’t get the news. He taught that the universe was eternal, and that view prevailed in Europe until the early 20^th Century. What happened then is one of the most fascinating stories in the history of science, and one of the most important. What is most significant about the story for our immediate purposes, is that it demonstrates that science and religion are allies in the search for truth, and not adversaries.

In 1915 Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity (GTR), by which he explained gravity as a distortion in the fabric of space-time under the influence of massive objects. How this happens is beyond the scope of this paper (which is fortunate, seeing that it is beyond my comprehension too). What concerns us is that Einstein’s GTR mathematical equations implied that the universe is not static (and hence not eternal), but is either expanding or contracting. Einstein himself found that idea repugnant, and he eliminated it by introducing a “fudge factor,” or rather a “cosmological constant” into his equations.

In 1922 Alexander Friedmann showed that Einstein’s original equations were correct, and Einstein acknowledged the fudge factor to be his “biggest blunder.” Then in 1929 Edwin Hubble produced the first empirical confirmation of GTR by observing that the distant galaxies are moving away from us; indeed, he saw that the farther away the galaxies are, the faster they are receding. Thus Hubble showed that as between a contracting or an expanding universe, we definitely occupy an expanding one.

Then in 1931 Georges Lemaitre showed that by extrapolating the expansion of the universe backward in time, it could be shown that the universe began from a “singularity” in which all the material of the universe was concentrated into an infinitely dense and hot, infinitesimal mathematical point, strongly suggesting an absolute beginning.

Not everyone was convinced; and it was not until 1965 that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found the radiation (the “cosmic microwave background radiation,” or CMBR) that was left over from the creation event, confirming Big Bang theory. For this they were awarded the Nobel Prize.

The fact that many scientists did not immediately embrace what has become known as “Big Bang” cosmology illustrates beautifully the unavoidable interrelatedness of science and religion. An absolute beginning has obvious theistic implications. Since the universe began to exist, it must have had a cause.¹ The cause must have been spaceless, timeless, and inconceivably powerful and intelligent. This would not necessarily be a personal God, but it does indicate a Creator of some kind. Many scientists were slow to acknowledge this. William Lane Craig states that the history of twentieth-century theory is a long series of failed attempts to falsify Big Bang cosmology:

With each successive failure of alternative . . . theories to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe predicted by the Standard Model, that prediction has been corroborated. It can be confidently said that no cosmogonic model has been as repeatedly verified in its predictions and as corroborated by attempts at its falsification . . . as the Standard Big Bang Model.

Moreover, leading theorists have pronounced the matter closed. Craig puts it this way:

A watershed of sorts appears to have been reached in 2003 with Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin’s formulation of their theorem establishing that any universe which has on average over its past history been in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be eternal in the past but must have a spacetime boundary. . . . [T]he Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem . . . single-handedly sweeps away the most important attempts to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe, especially the darling of current cosmologists, the eternal inflationary multiverse. Vilenkin pulls no punches: “It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”²

Why, then, has a segment of the scientific community struggled so mightily to avoid the beginning? It seems sufficiently apparent that they are bringing their prior metaphysical (i.e., religious) commitments to bear upon their science, which confirms again the interrelatedness of science and religion.

Atheism is as much a religious viewpoint as is theism. Both address the perennial religious questions: Who am I, Where did I come from, Where am I going, Why are people so selfish, and What can we do about it? It is the questions themselves which qualify a viewpoint as religious.³

It is impossible to separate completely science and religion from each other. What matters is that when we practice science, we do it well, and when we practice religion, we do it well. That entails avoidance of doing religion and calling it science.

The Fine-Tuning of the Laws of Physics

The Twentieth Century produced two more blockbuster scientific discoveries that re-establish the plausibility of theism and of theistic science: the discovery that the laws of physics have been “fine-tuned” to an astonishing degree so as to produce a universe hospitable to life; and the elucidation of the DNA molecule.

In 1961 Robert H. Dicke discovered that gravity and electromagnetism must be fine-tuned for life – that is, that they have very precise values, and that if they did not have exactly those very values, there would be no life anywhere in the universe. Hawking has stated, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”⁴ In the ensuing decades, scientists have learned that almost everything about the physical cosmos is fine-tuned.⁵Suffice it to say, anyone who is not flabbergasted at the astonishing fine-tuning of the cosmos, is not paying attention.

DNA

In addition to the Big Bang and the Fine-Tuning, Twentieth Century science has made one more discovery having sweeping implications, and that is the discovery of the mind-boggling complexity of living things.

The human body has roughly 30 trillion cells and twenty thousand different kinds of proteins. Proteins carry out all of the life functions of the organism, from respiration to metabolism to digestion to the immune system, to name a few. Proteins also build and maintain the system in which the instructions for fabricating all of these proteins are contained in the three billion base pairs of DNA, not to mention the system for communicating those instructions to the ribosomes, where all the proteins that the body needs are manufactured. The complexity is overwhelming. One way to gain a deep appreciation of this would be to read Fazale Rana’s Fit For a Purpose.⁶ The impression of design is unavoidable. Rana shows that cellular functions take place at the atomic and the subatomic levels, one proton at a time, one electron at a time, performing precisely their instructions from DNA.

Conclusion

It makes my head spin when I consider that until 1929 scientists believed that the universe was static and eternal. It spins faster when I recall that the Big Bang was presented to me in high school in 1965 as a commonplace fact, as if we had always known the universe had an absolute beginning.

Did I mention that until 1924 we thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy? Do you remember when you first learned there are billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars? I don’t. People weren’t talking about it much when I was growing up. We’re still not talking about it.

Listen. If there was a beginning, then there is a Creator. If there is a Creator, naturalism is false. This is news! The whole project of investigating nature needs thoroughgoing reform.

But there is much more than that. There was a beginning, and there is a Creator. Who cares about naturalism? There is a Creator! Who is this person? Did he, as the Bible teaches, take human form, walk the planet, and promise me eternal life?

I know that He did.

Thomas Alderman

December 3, 2024

ENDNOTES

¹I have previously demonstrated this necessary causal relationship. See Part Four, fn 2.

²William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Crossway 2008), 139-140.

³I have also addressed this question in a previous post. See joshualetter.com June 13, 2015 blog post, “The Definition of Religion.”

⁴Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1 1998, 1996), 129-131.

⁵I have discussed this topic at length also. See joshualetter.com June 28, 2018 blog post, “The Existence of God: Four Philosophical Arguments,” pp 18-27 at https://joshualetter.com/2018/06/28/the-existence-of-god/

And see joshualetter.com January 27, 2023 blog post, “The Heavens Declare the Glory” at https://joshualetter.com/category/philosophy/the-existence-of-god/

And see joshualetter.com July 26, 2022 blog post, “Water: Designed for Life,” at https://joshualetter.com/?s=water.

And see reasons.org Design Compendium at https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/rtb-design-compendium-2009.

⁶Fazale Rana, Fit For a Purpose (Reasons to Believe Press, 2021). Rana is the Executive Director of Reasons to Believe.

How Intellectuals Found God

by Peter Savodnik in Free Press, 12.28.24

In April, the comedian Russell Brand—who has emerged in recent years as a voice of the counterculture and amassed an audience of more than 11 million on X—announced that he was about to be baptized. “I know a lot of people are cynical about the increasing interest in Christianity and the return to God but, to me, it’s obvious. As meaning deteriorates in the modern world, as our value systems and institutions crumble, all of us become increasingly aware that there is this eerily familiar awakening and beckoning figure that we’ve all known all our lives within us and around us. For me, it’s very exciting.”

Read the whole article at https://www.thefp.com/p/how-intellectuals-found-god-ayaan-hirsi-ali-peter-thiel-jordan-peterson

(A subscription may be necessary — I’m not sure. Either way, I recommend you do subscribe.)

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Four: Whatever Happened to Theistic Science?

The 1633 trial of Galileo occurred right in the middle of the Thirty Years religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, which lasted from 1618 to 1648. The causes of the wars were complex, but they started when Ferdinand II, the future Holy Roman Emperor, attempted to enforce Catholic orthodoxy on Protestant Bohemia. The wars then proceeded with complex and shifting sets of alliances. Eventually, Europe was exhausted after decades of sectarian conflict, and was receptive to new ways of ordering relations among the state, the church, and religious minorities. Partly in reaction against efforts to impose religious orthodoxy by the use of force, there arose in the 17^th and 18^th centuries an intellectual movement which became known, somewhat ironically, as “the Age of Enlightenment.” The intellectuals of that era thought they could end such strife by finding a source of moral authority independent of the Bible, and they thought they had found it in the power of human reason.

Human reason did not prove equal to the task. Scholars were enticed into a number of intellectual blunders which set the stage for the embrace of Darwinism and the eventual outright rejection of the former synthesis based on the biblical doctrine of Creation, wherein a rational God had created man a rational being in God’s own image, capable of comprehending an ordered cosmos.

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Three: There is Conflict, but it is Between Naturalism and Science

Naturalism is the view that nature is all that exists. That is, the matter and energy which constitute the physical world exist, but nothing else does. The immediate corollaries of this view, of course, are that the cosmos and everything in it is a single interconnected system of physical causation, and that spirits do not exist, and that includes God.

It may still safely be said, perhaps, that most contemporary scientists are naturalists – although that is changing, since naturalism has been under siege for decades and is showing signs of strain. Certainly most scientists in the fields of paleontology and biology are naturalists. This is in stark contrast to those in the fields of physics and astronomy, many of whom have exclaimed the theistic implications of Big Bang cosmology and the fine-tuning of the laws of physics. The difference is attributable, no doubt, to the fact that astronomers and physicists are not as constrained as biologists are by the dictates of neo-Darwinian orthodoxy.

Here is a representative sample of the views of many astronomers and physicists:

Albert Einstein (1879–1955):

In response to the evidence for the Big Bang, he acknowledged “the necessity for a beginning”¹ and “the presence of a superior reasoning power.”².

Stephen Hawking (1942-2018):

Commenting on the Fine-Tuning of the Universe, he stated that “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”³.

Cambridge astronomer and atheist Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) (who never accepted Big Bang cosmology):

A “superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology. . . .”⁴.

Physicist Paul Davies (1946- ):

He once promoted atheism⁵ and is still opposed to Intelligent Design theory,⁶ but has conceded that “the laws [of physics] . . . seem themselves to be the product of exceedingly ingenious design.”⁷ He further states: “[There] is for me powerful evidence that there is ‘something going on’ behind it all. The impression of design is overwhelming.”⁸

Design is an activity of mind. Mind is a capacity of persons. The Creator is a person (or rather, three persons). Science is the study of the Creation. All truth is God’s truth.

Clearly, then, a commitment to naturalism is unnecessary for the conduct of good science. But we want to claim much more than that: we want to claim that naturalism actually impedes the progress of science.

Naturalism posits that human consciousness arises out of purely impersonal, mechanistic processes. Somehow (they don’t tell us how, since they don’t know how), it is said, the motions of the atoms in my brain produce the thoughts, beliefs, and intentions which form my mental experience. But thoughts, beliefs, and intentions are mental events, not physical events. Mental events occur only in minds. A mind is not a physical thing.

The naturalist will interject that mental events are embodied in neuro-physiological structures. That may be the case; yet the properties of brain events and the properties of mental events are mutually exclusive. The properties of brain events are physical: magnitude, valence, location, connections among neurons. Mental events have none of those physical properties and possess one property which brain events lack, namely, “aboutness.” Mental events – thoughts, beliefs, intentions – are always about something else.

Thus the mind and the brain, having entirely disparate sets of properties, cannot be the same thing.

A careful distinction must here be made. Naturalism and evolution are not the same thing; yet they are almost always conflated. The reason is readily apparent. Consciousness is something that requires an explanation, and evolution is the only naturalistic explanation for the rise of consciousness which anyone has ever proposed. If you are a naturalist, therefore, your choice is between evolution, as thinly supported by evidence as it is, and no explanation at all. It is thus naturalism, not evidence, which drives naturalists into Darwin’s embrace.

We saw that theism provides an intelligible justification for our confidence in the reliability of the human cognitive capability: our having been created in the image of a rational deity. What is naturalism’s justification? Far from positing a rational source for the human mind, naturalism posits a cognitive faculty formed by undirected, purposeless, mechanistic, impersonal processes. What basis is there for confidence that such processes could result in the formation of a reliable mind?

J. B. S. Haldane, a leading evolutionary theorist of the mid-twentieth century, may have been the first to notice that

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence no reason for supposing my brain to be made of atoms.

And no reason to believe that my awareness evolved. Darwin himself worried about this.

There is more. According to naturalism, theism is false; yet belief in God is widespread. According to the Pew Research Center, 84% of the world’s population are religiously affiliated. But theism is false, according to neo-Darwinists. Do false beliefs then have survival value? If not, how can evolutionary theory account for our species’ religiosity, how can we trust our cognitive capacity, and how can we be sure that naturalism is true? Naturalism is thus seen to be not only self-refuting, but an obstacle to the progress of science.⁹

NEXT WEEK: Part Four: What Happened to Theistic Science?

ENDNOTES

¹A. Vibert Douglas, “Forty Minutes with Einstein,” Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada 50 (1956), 100.

²Lincoln Barnett, The Universe and Dr. Einstein (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1948), 106.

³Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1998, 1996), 129-131.

⁴Hoyle, “The Universe,” 16.

⁵Paul Davies, God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), viii, 3–42, 142–143.

⁶https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jun/26/ spaceexploration.comment. (Page unavailable 12.2.24.)

⁷Paul Davies, Superforce (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 243.

⁸Paul Davies, The Cosmic Blueprint (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 203; Paul Davies, “The Anthropic Principle,” Science Digest 191, no. 10 (October 1983), 24.

⁹I have Kenneth Samples of Reasons to Believe to thank for this argument.

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Two: The Scientific Revolution Arose only in the West for a Reason

As we saw in Part One, there are reasons science arose in the West. At the same time there are also reasons why it did NOT arise anywhere else: their theology did not permit it.

Barbour argues that “science in its modern form [arose] in Western civilization alone, among all the cultures of the world,” because only the Christian West had the necessary “intellectual presuppositions underlying the rise of science.”¹ These included, as noted in Part One, the belief in a rational God who created an orderly cosmos and humans in his image as also rational beings precisely because he wished to be known.

Greece.

Ancient Greek philosophy is a case in point. Many Greek philosophers “assumed they could deduce how nature ought to behave . . . based on only superficial observations of natural phenomena or without actually observing nature at all.”². Thus, Aristotle’s conception of the cosmos was based more on his suppositions about the divinity of the celestial objects and his assumptions about what kinds of motions would be suitable to them, given their divine nature. Supposing that a circular motion was most perfect, for example, Aristotle concluded that the orbit of the sun around the Earth must be perfectly circular. (Of course the sun does not orbit the Earth, and the Earth’s orbit of the sun is elliptical, not circular.) He also reasoned that the Earth must be eternal and the center of the universe.

Egypt

Despite Egypt’s technical prowess in building the pyramids, Egyptian mathematics and geometry remained a practical art.

Any possibility for scientific breakthroughs was destroyed by

the polytheistic, animistic precepts central to Egyptian religion. In polytheism, each god governs its domain according to its own rules; uniformity and hence intelligibility are elusive. In animism, likewise, many gods inhabit natural things such as trees and animals.

Eastern pantheistic monism

The Hindu and Buddhist precept that all is One implies that all distinctions are illusory – a real curiosity-killer! The study of nature requires duality: the knower and the thing which is known. They are not the same thing. Just as importantly, classification is an indispensable scientific exercise. E.g., a dolphin is not a porpoise, and a bacterium is not a virus. Study of the Creation entails careful distinctions. But in Eastern thought, to realize one’s oneness with the cosmos is to pass beyond knowledge. This is hardly a view that encourages scientific inquiry.

NEXT WEEK: Part Three: There is Conflict, but it is Between Naturalism and Science

ENDNOTES

¹Barbour, Religion and Science, 27.

²Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper Collins 2021), 32.

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Introduction

The myth that there is some inherent conflict between faith and reason, or between religion and science, dies hard; but for at least twenty years, philosophers of science have attacked the myth so many times and so effectively that we now happily see it gasping for breath. So it may seem like piling on, but it is important that the truth of the matter be discoverable in these pages.

Perhaps the most important reason for the myth’s tenacity is that while there is no inherent conflict between science and religion – indeed, they are, on the contrary, close allies in the search for truth – there is conflict between science and religion as practiced, in two very important ways. First, many scientists impose a metaphysical naturalism upon their research. The essence of naturalism is the presupposition that reality consists of matter and energy and nothing else – the immediate corollary being that any imagined spiritual or supernatural entity (such as God) is just that: imaginary, unreal. Thus naturalism is the equivalent of atheism. In such a view, the causes of all natural phenomena must themselves be physical, which is to say, impersonal. What other sorts of causation might there be? Personal causation: design.

Accordingly, it must be emphasized that this scientific naturalism, as it is often called, constitutes a religious idea. Any assertion as to the ultimate nature of reality is, by definition, religious. The mere fact that naturalism answers the question, Is there a creator? in the negative does not make it any less religious.¹

Please note also that naturalism does not arrive at this doctrine by any scientific or empirical means; rather, it does so a priori – that is, rather than make an effort to establish the truth or falsity of its atheism by observation, naturalists simply declare the matter in the negative, and pronounce it closed. This places it in direct conflict with science, which, properly conceived, seeks evidence of the causes for natural phenomena, and follows that evidence to its conclusion, whether it leads to the personal or to the impersonal.

This is well-illustrated by the methods employed in the sciences of archaeology, forensic science, and the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. In each of these, researchers seek to determine whether an ancient artifact, or a fatal injury, or a signal from space, may be the result of the activity of a conscious agent acting purposefully. If the data indicate that the artifact, or the death, or the signal, bear the hallmarks of design, then the activity of a conscious agent is inferred. So is design a meaningful category in astronomy but not in biology? Why or why not?

There is, of course, a difference between the inference to personal causation in archeology, on the one hand, and the inference to personal causation in biology, on the other hand. In practice, such an inference in archeology generally invokes a human agent, whereas such an inference in biology obviously invokes a non-human agent; and there are very few candidates for the non-human agent– most people can think of only one, that being a divine creator. But for the naturalist, the only permissible inference is to the impersonal, because to the naturalist only the impersonal exists; and this is how naturalism comes into conflict with science. Is it even possible that a personal creator exists? Big Bang cosmology powerfully says that it is possible. Does science, then, not wish to know about this creator? Wouldn’t that be anti-scientific? The term science comes from the Latin for “to know.” Thus, there is indeed conflict between science and religion, but it is not between science and biblical religion: it is between science and naturalistic religion.

The scientist who imposes his naturalism onto the data may be correct some of the time, just as the theist who imposes his theism onto the data may be right part of the time. But the naturalist who rushes to an atheistic conclusion is just as unscientific as the theist who rushes to a theistic conclusion. The solution, obviously, is to make oneself conscious of one’s biases, guard against them by remaining open to either type of causation, and to follow the data wherever they lead.

The other source of conflict arises out of the insistence on the part of many Christians on a wooden exegesis of the Book of Genesis. Their commitment to a literal understanding of the six days of creation places them in direct conflict with many recent and seemingly solid scientific findings. How can we see light from stars millions of light years away if the universe is only 6,000 years old? Why do radiometric dating and Antarctic ice cores reflect an ancient Earth? Ken Ham, a leading Young Earth proponent, himself acknowledges that Young Earth Creationism has no answers to such questions.² Young Earth Creationism then becomes the straw man ripe for attack by the advocates of naturalism who find it convenient to ignore the existence of the other major exegetical school, namely, Old Earth Creationism, which makes a much more robust (and successful) effort to reconcile the science and the biblical text in ways that are faithful to both.³

Leaving those matters to one side, I propose, in a five-part series, to comment on a more pertinent question, namely, whether science and religion are necessarily at odds when practiced rightly. In this connection I wish to emphasize four simple truths.

First, it was theists who invented modern science. That is, it was Christian and Jewish scientists who did so, and they did so not merely as an expression of their religious faith but as affirmations of particular biblical doctrines as to the nature of God, the nature of the Creation, and the nature of man. It was their belief in those doctrines which incited their inquiries.

Second, there is a reason why modern science gained no foothold in areas of the globe where non-biblical religions were observed: namely, their religious doctrines were not conducive to the systematic investigation of the cosmos. Indeed, some of their beliefs actively discouraged scientific inquiry.

Third, the precepts of atheism/materialism⁴ likewise provide no warrant for expecting the study of nature to be fruitful. Indeed, if the scientific community were to apply its metaphysical assumptions consistently to the scientific enterprise, the latter would come to a screeching halt. It is only by borrowing from the earlier, theistic consensus that the project continues at all.

Fourth, while it is true that the church badly mishandled the Galileo affair, that dispute had almost nothing to do with cosmology and everything to do with the politics of the time. Only decades later was it re-interpreted as evidencing enmity between science and religion. That reinterpretation, together with a long series of ideological blunders on the part of leading intellectuals, resulted in the widespread embrace of scientific materialism which now causes so much confusion.

Fifth, monumental discoveries in 20^th-Century physics – the Big Bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics, and DNA – have resoundingly restored the scientific plausibility of theistic science.

Part One: The Biblical Basis for the Scientific Revolution

It is no surprise, of course, that the founders of modern science were predominantly Christian, since in the 16^th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries almost everyone in the West was a Christian or a Jew. If one searches the web for lists of Christians who were important in the development of the sciences, one finds the names of hundreds who lived from the 16^th century forward. For example, if one goes to the web page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology

and searches the page for the word “father,” it appears 17 times, and we learn that Christians were considered the “fathers” of the following fields of science:

Empiricism and the scientific method

Botony

Parasitology

Chemistry

Microbiology

Physiology

Taxonomy

Paleontology

Genetics

Surgery

Special mention is merited in the following instances, with whose names and accomplishments many readers will also be familiar:

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543), showed that the Earth orbits the sun (heliocentrism), rather than the sun orbiting the Earth as previously believed.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626), “Considered among the fathers of empiricism and is credited with establishing the inductive method of experimental science via what is called the scientific method today.”⁵

Galileo Galilei (1564–1642)

Johannes Kepler (1564–1642)

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)

Robert Boyle (1627–1691), father of modern chemistry

Isaac Newton (1642-1726), discoverer of gravity, classical mechanics, and the calculus

Michael Faraday (1791–1867)

James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879)

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895)

Lord Kelvin (1824–1907)

Arthur Eddington (1882–1944)

Georges Lemaitre (1894–1966)

Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976)

Wernher von Braun (1912–1977)

Alan Sandage (1926–2010)

Freeman Dyson (1923–2020)

John Polkinghorne (1930–2021)

Owen Gingerich (1930–2023)

Francis Collins (b. 1950)

Paul R. McHugh (b. 1931)

Kenneth R. Miller (b. 1948)

Hugh Ross (b. 1945)

Pat Gelsinger (b. 1962)

James Tour (b. 1959)

Christians, all.

The same web page informs us that:

According to 100 Years of Nobel Prizes, a review of Nobel prizes awarded between 1901 and 2000, 65.4% of Nobel Prizes Laureates have identified Christianity in its various forms as their religious preference. Overall, 72.5% of all the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry,65.3% in Physics, 62% in Medicine, 54% in Economics were either Christians or had a Christian background.

What’s more, among the early founders, it was their theology which inspired their science. They considered their scientific endeavors to be expressions of their faith. According to Stephen C. Meyer, Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry, regarded devotion to the study of nature, like devotion to the study of scripture, as “an act of Piety,” especially since he thought God desired “to have his Works regarded and taken Notice of.”⁶

Their belief in a rational God and in an orderly, purposeful universe was conducive to scientific inquiry. The divine logos creates an orderly universe – intelligible and sacred, but disenchanted (not magical). Humans, likewise, having been created in the image of a rational God, are also rational creatures who therefore have the mental capacity to apprehend the order which God has implanted in nature. Thus the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630), for example, could say that “God wanted us to recognize natural laws, and God made this possible by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”⁷

Isaac Newton wrote, “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”⁸ According to Oxford University historian of science John Hedley Brooke, “For Newton, as for Boyle and Descartes, there were laws of nature only because there had been a [divine] Legislator.”⁹

British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) argued that “There can be no living science unless there is a widespread instinctive conviction in the existence of an Order of Things. And, in particular, of an Order of Nature.”¹⁰ Whitehead particularly attributed this conviction among the founders of modern science to the “medieval insistence upon the rationality of God.”¹¹ Meyer comments:

Other scholars have amplified this observation. They insist that modern science was specifically inspired by the conviction that the universe is the product of a rational mind who designed the universe to be understood and who also designed the human mind to understand it. As historian and philosopher of science Steve Fuller notes, Western science is grounded in the belief that “the natural order is the product of a single intelligence from which our own intelligence descends.” Philosopher Holmes Rolston III puts the point this way: “It was monotheism that launched the coming of physical science, for it premised an intelligible world, sacred but disenchanted, a world with a blueprint, which was therefore open to the searches of the scientists. The great pioneers in physics – Newton, Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus – devoutly believed themselves called to find evidences of God in the physical world.” The astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) exclaimed that “God wanted us to recognize” natural laws and that God made this possible “by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts.”¹²

The “Two Books” metaphor reinforced this view. The idea is that scripture is one book and nature another book. Both books having the same author, there can be no contradiction between them. If they seem incompatible, it is because we have not yet understood one or the other or both. Galileo specifically affirmed that in some cases it might be our interpretation of scripture which must give way. (The Pope was prepared to do exactly that in Galileo’s case, until Galileo offended the Pope.) “The metaphor of the book of nature . . . implied the legitimacy of scientific endeavor, since it affirmed that nature supplied a secondary source of authoritative revelation about the character and wisdom of the creator.”¹³

These ideas were not made up out of whole cloth, but were based on clear scriptural warrant. Thus, in his letter to the Roman Christians, the Apostle Paul wrote:

. . . [W]hat may be known about God is plain . . because God has made it plain. . . . For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

And in Psalm 19, David writes:

The heavens declare the glory of God,

the skies proclaim the work of his hands,

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they display knowledge.

There is no speech or language

where their voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world.

And in Psalm 104, the Psalmist writes:

O Lord my God, you are very great;

you are clothed with splendor and majesty.

He wraps himself in light as with a garment;

he stretches out the heavens like a tent

and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their

waters.

The idea of divine sovereignty and freedom further justified interest in nature. The understanding of God’s freedom to create or not, or, creating, to create whatever He will, spurs inquiry into what He may actually have done. This is another way in which biblical teaching encouraged an empirical epistemology, which relies on observation and experiment, in contrast to the Aristotelian tradition of relatively abstract speculation.

Finally, the belief in human fallibility and depravity “engendered caution about trusting human conjectures and hypotheses unless they were carefully tested by experiment and observation.”¹⁴

NEXT WEEK: The Scientific Revolution Arose only in the West for a Reason

ENDNOTES

¹For a fuller discussion of the religious character of non-theistic belief systems, see Joshualetter, “The Definition of Religion, June 13, 2015 blog post, https://joshualetter.com/2015/06/13/the-definition-of-religion/.

²Ken Ham, “Young Earth Creationism,” in Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (J. B. Stump ed., Zondervan 2017), 17-48, 41-42.

³The reader is encouraged to visit the website, reasons.org.

⁴I use the terms naturalism and materialism interchangeably. Naturalism, again, is the view that nature is all there is; materialism is the view that matter and energy are all there is. Naturalism is the term which one encounters more often.

⁵https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christians_in_science_and_technology.  (Last visited 12.2.24.)

⁶Stephen C. Meyer, Return of the God Hypothesis (Harper Collins 2021), 48.

⁷Meyer, 36.

⁸”General Scholium,” in Mathematical Priciples of Natural Philosophy (1687) in Great Books of the Western World, Robert M. Hutchins, ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.), 369.

⁹Brooke, “Science and Theology in the Enlightenment,” 9.

¹⁰Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 3-4, emphasis in original.

¹¹Id, 12.

¹²Meyer, 36.

¹³Meyer, 48.

¹⁴Meyer, 38.

Two for the Price of One

Here are two videos well worth your time.

First, John Lennox, my favorite Christian apologist, tells a roomful of Oxford professors why they should become Christians: click here.

And Reason to Believe’s Steven Willing’s very insightful discussion of gender dysphoria: click here.

Nikki Haley ’28!

(Or, JoshuaLetter’s first foray into electoral politics.)

A September 9, 2024 ABC News piece by Oren Oppenheim articulates why I admire Nikki Haley and why I expect to be voting for Donald Trump for president in 2024:

Former presidential candidate Nikki Haley pushed back against criticism from former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney on Haley’s support for former President Donald Trump despite previous comments saying she found him unfit for office.

In an exclusive “This Week” interview on Sunday, co-anchor Jonathan Karl asked Cheney about Haley saying she’s on “standby” to campaign for Trump after the former South Carolina governor openly opposed him in the Republican primaries.

Cheney, who last week endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, told Karl, “I can’t understand [Haley’s] position on this in any kind of a principled way. I think that, you know, the things that she said, that she made clear when she was running in the primary, those things are true.”

During the Republican presidential primary, Haley said Trump lacked focus and that “chaos follows him.” Months later, Haley said she would vote for Trump despite her disappointment with him.

Reacting to Cheney’s remarks, Haley told “Fox and Friends” Monday morning, “I respect her decision, but she can’t say my decision is not principled. It actually is.” Haley continued:

We can either vote based on style or we can vote on substance. I’m voting based on substance. I’m looking at the fact we can’t live the next four years like we did the last four years. This is no contest.

Seeking to contrast Trump with Harris on the economy, border and energy, Haley added, “We should be very clear, if you don’t like him, say you don’t like him, but you can’t say that his policies are worse than Kamala Harris’s.”

Haley also directly criticized Trump and running mate Sen. JD Vance when asked about the “gender gap” with women supporting Harris more than Trump. “I think it’s because Donald Trump and JD Vance need to change the way they speak about women. You don’t need to call Kamala dumb. She didn’t get this far, you know, just by accident – she’s here. That’s what it is. She’s a prosecutor,” Haley said. “You don’t need to go and talk about intelligence, or looks or anything else. Just focus on the policies. When you call even a Democrat woman dumb, Republican women get their backs up too.”

Last month, Trump said he’s “entitled” to the personal attacks aimed at Harris – because he doesn’t respect her and doesn’t “have a lot of respect for her intelligence.”

Haley reiterated that Trump should ditch those attacks to focus on substance. “The bottom line is, we win on policy. Stick to the policies, leave all the other stuff. That’s how he can win,” Haley said.

Meanwhile, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat amplifies Haley’s remarks and provides the Trump campaign with a winning theme by listing the policy failures of the Biden administration:

A historic surge in migration that happened without any kind of legislation or debate. A historic surge in inflation that was caused by the pandemic, but almost certainly goosed by Biden administration deficits. A mismanaged withdrawal from Afghanistan. A stalemated proxy war in Eastern Europe with a looming threat of escalation. An elite lurch into woke radicalism that had real-world as well as ivory-tower consequences, in the form of bad progressive policymaking on crime and drugs and schools.

(https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/opinion/trump-harris-undecided-voter.html)

Further, Douthat articulates a decisive factor which is not to be overlooked:

But this unfit man was already president for four years, and for three of them his personal chaos coexisted with decent outcomes in arenas — foreign policy, inflation and immigration — where things have been much worse under the rule of the serious people, the good meritocrats, the smooth and respectable elites. And even when Covid overmastered his administration, his flailing was matched by progressivism’s period of mania, and his White House still managed to keep the middle class solvent, the stock market high, and also delivered a Covid vaccine faster than almost anyone expected.

Thomas Alderman

September 14, 2024

What’s the Big Idea?

“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

– Acts of the Apostles 1:8

Beginning February 18, 2024, there were posted in these pages seven articles about the text of the New Testament. When I began those posts, there was no plan to address any grand theme common to all seven articles – I was just following my nose, as it were. By the time (July 12, 2024) I had posted the most recent one, however, such a theme had clearly emerged: Jesus is alive. There are no gaps in the proof of this. We can know it, rest in it, and rejoice in it.

So let’s take a step back and attempt a concise, integrated summary of what we have learned. What have these authors shown us?

ONE

Bauckham, “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses,” posted May 13, 2024: The Gospels were written very near in time to the events, and either the authors were eyewitnesses or they had immediate access to the eyewitnesses.

TWO

Greenleaf, “As to Their Honesty” (April 23, 2024): The Gospel writers were honest. When they said they were sure they had seen the risen Christ, they were telling the truth. As another scholar said, “They lived it, they died for it.”

THREE

Metzger, “The Recovery of the New Testament” (February 18, 2024): What the Evangelists wrote – the text of the New Testament – has been fully recovered for all practical purposes. Bible scholars, including skeptical scholars, acknowledge this.

FOUR

Habermas, “He is Risen” (March 30, 2024): The claims of the Gospels as to the historicity of the events in the life, death, and the Resurrection of Jesus meet more than abundantly all of the well-established historiographical criteria for historicity which professional historians generally apply in researching and writing about the past. Indeed, the general outline of the entire Gospel narrative has been verified by extra-biblical documents, which satisfies two criteria for historicity, namely, multiple attestation and in some cases, enemy attestation. (This extra-biblical record has not been discussed in these pages previously, so a summary description is provided in the Appendix for your edification.)

FIVE

Licona: “Jesus, Contradicted” (July 17, 2024): Most of the differences among the Gospels can be understood if we take account of the fact that the conventions governing the practice of historiography were different in the First Century, such that ancient biography was a genre unto itself, in which writers were encouraged to alter the details of a story when doing so would be an “improvement,” so long as the essence of the story is preserved.

SIX

Greenleaf: “Pearl of Great Price” (April 7, 2024): The Person of Jesus is superlative in every way. The very existence of His story testifies to His deity, because no mere human could have invented such a character.

SEVEN

Habermas: “Minimal Facts” (June 12, 2024): If for any reason someone should, after considering all of the above, still harbor doubts concerning the reliability of the New Testament, such a person should ponder what is known as the “minimal facts” argument for the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus. In recent years, there has developed a near unanimity among bible scholars as to the historicity of most of the facts surrounding the death, burial, and Resurrection of Jesus, as related by the authors of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. While only a “strong minority” acknowledge the Resurrection itself, both liberal and conservative scholars have acceded to the rest of the narrative.

To my mind, the most salient element of this consensus is the effect which Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances had on his followers. According to the author of the Gospel of John, after the crucifixion the disciples “were together with the doors locked for fear of the Jews.” John 20:19. Their leader had just been executed, and the disciples must have feared they could be next. But then Jesus appeared in their midst and within days they were found boldly preaching the Resurrection to thousands. When they were hauled before the Jewish authorities, they defiantly proclaimed the Resurrection yet again. Even skeptical scholars acknowledge these facts and have abandoned all of the proposed naturalistic explanations for the disciples’ transformation.

Conclusion

So if the Gospel writers had reliable sources for their biographies of Jesus (Bauckham); if they were honest (Greenleaf); if we have the text of their original writings (Metzger); if the Gospel accounts are confirmed by reliable extra-biblical sources (Habermas); if what were once thought to be discrepancies in the Gospel accounts were manifestations of the prevailing literary conventions of the time (Licona); if the Person portrayed in the Gospels is more than humanly wonderful (Greenleaf); if a Resurrection is the most plausible explanation for the transformation of Jesus’ followers and the success of His movement (Habermas); and if no plausible naturalistic explanation can be found; then as Habermas writes, “a stronger case could hardly even be imagined,” and the honest seeker has found his home.

(Want to know more? Read the posts. Better yet, read the books!)

Appendix

EXTRA-BIBLICAL EVIDENCE FOR JESUS AND THE GOSPEL

Extra-biblical evidence for Jesus and the Gospel story comprises nearly two dozen sources from the first 150 years after the Crucifixion. Notable among these sources are the Roman historians Tacitus and Seutonius, the Greek historian Thallus, the Jewish historian Josephus, and Pliny the Roman administrator. This evidence is, in Habermas’ words, “quite impressive”; and so it is. By corroborating very many of the events recorded in the Gospels and in the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, these extra-biblical sources support the view that the authors of the Gospels and of the Book of Acts were reliable witnesses. Here is a partial list of the things they recorded:

Jesus’ ministry centered in Palestine.

He was said to have been born of a virgin.

He had a brother named James.

He was from a poor family.

He was known as wise and virtuous.

He had many disciples, both Jew and gentile.

He was known as the Son of Man.

His disciples regarded Him as the Son of God.

He was worshiped as deity.

Some believed He was the Messiah.

He taught the need for conversion, the importance of faith and obedience, the brotherhood of believers, the requirement of abandoning other gods, and the immortality of the soul.

He reportedly performed miracles and cast out demons.

He predicted His death, Resurrection, and return.

He was crucified on Passover by Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius.

His executioners gambled for his garments.

There were darkness covering the land and earthquakes when He died.

Several non-canonical theological works affirm the Resurrection: the Treatise on the Resurrection, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Thomas, the Apocryphon of John.

Soon after He died, His teaching broke out again and reached Rome before A.D. 49 – less than 20 years after the death of Jesus – when Claudius expelled Jews from the city due to what was thought to be the influence of Jesus’ teachings. (This event is described in Acts 18.)

Minimal Facts

I. Introduction.

Recent posts to this space have had to do with the New Testament (NT) scriptures: the preservation of the Gospel tradition during its oral phase between the Ascension and the writing (“Jesus and the Eyewitnesses,” May 13, 2024 post); the honesty of the authors of the NT (“As to Their Honesty,” April 23, 2024 post); the historical accuracy of the Gospels (“He is Risen,” March 30, 2024 post); and the integrity of the recovered text of the New Testament (“The Recovery of the New Testament,” February 18, 2024 post). But there is also a recent movement among biblical scholars to advocate for the Resurrection of Jesus on the basis of what is known as “minimal facts” methodology. Liberty University New Testament scholar Gary R. Habermas explains in his just-out book, On the Resurrection: Evidences (B&H Academic, 2024).

II. The New Testament as History.

In recent years, there has developed a near unanimity among bible scholars as to the historicity of most of the facts surrounding the death, burial, and Resurrection of Jesus, as related by the authors of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. While only a “strong minority” acknowledge the Resurrection itself, both liberal and conservative scholars have acceded to the rest of the narrative. This is progress, and it will come, if I am not mistaken, as news to most people!

James Charlesworth, for instance, lists twenty areas of consensus among Jesus researchers and states that “In contrast to [Rudolf] Bultmann’s time [1884-1976], it is now being recognized that there is considerable and reliable bedrock historical material in the Gospels.”¹ Here Charlesworth is referring to the former insistence on discounting the historical value of any Bible pericope which cannot be verified by extrinsic evidence. And Habermas does not state this explicitly, but he implies that this elevation of the historical status of the New Testament is the result of the application to the Bible of the same criteria which historians employ in evaluating other sources. The fact is that by those standards, the Gospels are by far the very best sources of information about Jesus’ times. Notably, this new-found respect for the NT is an artifact of the last 30 years of Bible scholarship!

That’s what I mean when I say this is probably news to most people: it takes time for expert knowledge to filter down from the universities to the man in the street. Scholars may know the evidence supports the Resurrection while the average person is still stuck in early twentieth-century skepticism. Someone needs to tell them!

Bible scholars now recognize that much of what we know about those times comes from the Bible. Robert Funk, a founder and prominent member of the skeptical Jesus Seminar, states that “a disinterested, neutral observer” could acknowledge that Jesus was a teacher, healer, and exorcist; that the Romans executed him by crucifixion under Herod Antipas and Pontius Pilate. He further states that after the crucifixion Jesus’ disciples were convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead and had appeared to them, as a result of which their lives were transformed.² Jewish historian Geza Vermes recites many of the same facts, along with others. And E. P. Sanders, who, according to Habermas, “ranks as one of the most influential scholars in the Third Quest for the historical Jesus,” states that it is “not in dispute” that “the resurrection experiences of the disciples provided the motivating force behind the proclamation of Jesus as the Christ and as Lord. . . .”³

III. “Minimal Facts” Methodology.

Habermas identifies twelve facts which “are acknowledged as historical by virtually all researchers who investigate this area.” From that list he distills six that he considers “most essential to the overall research that addresses the historicity of the occurrences in question.”⁴ In addition, he includes one other fact – the empty tomb – because it is as strong evidentially as the other six facts but “is still not considered as one of the six minimal facts since it does not strictly meet the second standard of being almost unanimously recognized by critical scholars.”⁵ The empty tomb is accepted, instead, by “only” a “significant majority” of Jesus researchers.⁶

THE KNOWN OR ACCEPTED HISTORICAL FACTS

Here are the list of twelve facts, followed by the list of six essential facts.

1. Jesus died due to the effects of Roman crucifixion.

2. Jesus was buried, most likely in a private tomb.

3. Afterwards, the disciples were discouraged, bereaved, and despondent, having their previous hope challenged.

4. The tomb in which Jesus was probably buried was discovered to be empty very soon after his interment.

5. The disciples reported experiences that they thought were actual appearances of the risen Jesus.

6. The teaching and proclamation of Jesus’ resurrection and the subsequent appearances took place very early after the disciples’ experiences.

7. These experiences accounted for the disciples’ lives becoming thoroughly transformed, even to the point of being willing to die for their belief.

8. The disciples’ reports, preaching, and teaching of these resurrection experiences took place in the city of Jerusalem, where Jesus was crucified and buried shortly before.

9. The gospel message centered on the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

10. The gatherings of the Christian community began at approximately this same time, featuring the first day of the week as a frequent time for worship.

11. James, the brother of Jesus and a skeptic or at least an unbeliever before his conversion, most likely believed and became a follower after he also believed that he saw the risen Jesus.

12. Just a few years later, Saul of Tarsus (Paul) also became a Christian believer due to an experience that he also concluded was an appearance to him of the risen Jesus.⁷

And the six “minimal facts:”

1. Jesus died due to the effects of Roman crucifixion.

2. The disciples afterwards reported experiences that they thought were actual appearances of the risen Jesus.

3. These experiences accounted for the disciples’ lives becoming thoroughly transformed, even to the point of being willing to die for their belief.

4. The proclamation of Jesus’s resurrection and appearances took place very early, soon after the experiences themselves.

5. James, the brother of Jesus and a skeptic before his conversion, most likely believed after he also thought that he saw the risen Jesus.

6. Just a few years later, Saul of Tarsus (Paul) also became a Christian believer due to an experience that he also concluded was an appearance to him of the risen Jesus.

+ 1 The private tomb in which Jesus was probably buried was discovered to be empty shortly after his death.⁸

Habermas writes:

Sanders concludes in an epilogue on the resurrection: “That Jesus’ followers (and later Paul) had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact.” Moreover, numerous alternative theories are unsuccessful in explaining these events in natural terms. For example, he “was not a ghost, or a resuscitated corpse, or a badly wounded man limping around.” Nor was this a case of deliberate fraud or “mass hysteria.” But “we know that after his death his followers experienced what they described as the ‘resurrection’: the appearance of a living but transformed person who had actually died. They believed this, they lived it, and they died for it.”⁹

Habermas continues:

What makes this summation all the more impressive is that, far from very few of these scholars being conservative, the preceding list includes a Jewish historian who was agnostic regarding the nature of Jesus’s appearances (Vermes), a well-known and well-published atheist New Testament scholar (Ehrman), cofounders of the Jesus Seminar (Funk, Borg), another critical New Testament scholar influenced by the skeptical Second or New Quest movement for the historical Jesus (Perrin), plus a post-Bultmannian New Testament researcher who differed significantly on the nature of the resurrection appearances (Marxsen). And while all of these critical scholars allow historical items such as those mentioned in the previous paragraph, it is a very influential, self-styled “liberal, modern, secularized Protestant” (Sanders) who states more than once that the general consensus among scholars is that Jesus actually did appear in some sense to his disciples after his death. This is simply remarkable.”¹⁰

IV. Criteria of Historicity.

Habermas then explains why each minimal fact commands the assent of the scholarly community by recounting the ways in which each fact, respectively, thoroughly satisfies the historiographical criteria by which historians generally evaluate any claim to historicity:

Early attestation

Eyewitness testimony

Multiple attestation

Dissimilarity (A particular saying may be attributed to someone if it cannot plausibly be attributed to anyone else. The very idea that anyone but Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount seems highly unlikely, for instance.)

Palestinian origin (Sayings in the Aramaic language, for example. The raising of Jairus’ daughter and the cry of dereliction come to mind.)

Embarrassment (Frankly acknowledging words or events which place the author or others in a negative light may reflect a commitment to truth-telling. Mark and Peter, for example, are unflinching in describing Peter’s repeated failures.)

Enemy attestation (The Jews to this day claim that the body was stolen, which means the tomb must have been empty.)

V. The Evidence.

Space does not permit a detailed discussion of the ways all the minimal facts satisfy these criteria. Perhaps the central facts of all, however, would be that the disciples had experiences which they were thoroughly convinced were encounters with the risen Christ and that they were transformed as a result of those experiences from cowering fugitives to on-fire evangelists. Why do these fact-claims command nearly universal assent, even among skeptical scholars? A summary of the evidence for those two “minimal facts” may suffice for present purposes.

EARLY ATTESTATION

At 1 Corinthians 15:3-7, Paul writes:

³For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,

⁴that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,

⁵and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.

⁶After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.

⁷Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles,

⁸and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus occurred two or three years after the Crucifixion. Three years later – but before he wrote 1 Corinthians – he visited Jerusalem and conferred with Peter and James – eyewitnesses – for 15 days. Paul’s purpose in making this trip was to determine whether he and the Jerusalem apostles were preaching the same Gospel. It is thus likely, says Habermas, that the statement which was to become 1 Cor 15:3-7 had been formulated before Paul’s arrival, was given to him at that time, and was later incorporated into his letter. Richard Bauckham concurs: “All scholars recognize here an early tradition that was formulated even before Paul’s own call to be an apostle. . . .”¹¹ And by whom was it formulated? It was formulated by Peter, James, and the other eyewitnesses, and that puts us “on top of the historical events themselves.”¹²

MULTIPLE ATTESTATION

The appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus is attested at least twice (Luke 24:13-35 and Pseudo-Mark 16:12-13).

The appearances to the Eleven are attested ten times (1 Cor 15:5b, 7b; Matt 28:16-20; Luke 24:36-39; John 20:19-21; and Ign. Smyrn. 3:2b-3); Acts 10:39; Gos. Peter 9:1-10:5; Mark 14:27-28, 16:7; Mark 16:14-20.

The appearance to Paul: 1 Cor 9:1; 15:8; Acts 9:3-19, 22:1-16; 26:9-18.

Mary Magdalene: Matt 28:9-10; John 20:11-18; pseudo-Mark 16:9-11.

Peter: 1 Cor 15:5a; Luke 24:12; John 20:2-10; Luke 24:34; Ign. Smyrn. 3:2a; John 21:15-23.

James: 1 Cor 15:7a; Gos. Thom. 12; Gospel of the Hebrews 7.

Habermas comments: “If significant contradictory information opposed the minimal historical items in crucial aspects, then they would hardly be accepted by virtually all researchers. Yet, these events are acknowledged as historical precisely because of the literally dozens of pointers to the truth.”¹³ Further, he encourages the reader, “When considering this exceptionally large number of sources, [to] recall historian Paul Maier’s assertion that ‘many facts from antiquity rest on just one ancient source, while two or three sources in agreement generally render the fact unimpeachable.'” [Habermas, 289.]

EMBARRASSMENT

Here are a few of the more significant instances in which the impetus to truth-telling was strong enough to overcome the instinct to preserve one’s reputation:

That the leader of the movement should die by crucifixion

That Jesus’ disciples abandoned Him in the garden

That Peter denied Him three times

That the empty tomb was discovered by the women

DISSIMILARITY

That Messiah should suffer and die

ENEMY ATTESTATION

The Jewish leaders claimed the body had been stolen.

As Habermas states, “a stronger case could hardly even be imagined.”¹⁴

Many scholars have crossed the threshold of the Kingdom. I am reminded of the similar experience of Simon Greenleaf, the 19^th Century’s leading expert on the law of evidence and a founder of Harvard Law, who set himself to refute the Gospel and instead became a follower of Christ. Habermas summarizes:

. . . [A] greater number of critical scholars proceed beyond the disciples’ belief here and conclude that Jesus was truly raised from the dead and actually appeared in some real sense. As noted at the outset of this chapter, eminent researcher E. P. Sanders actually ranks the actual appearances of the risen Jesus as part of the “equally secure facts” and places them among the historical data that are most widely accepted by recent scholars, thereby enjoying widespread critical attestation. Even Alison joins these scholars in acknowledging firmly, “I am sure that the disciples saw Jesus after his death.” Strauss and many other critics did not confess anything like this – hence the huge difference between “then” and “now”! Such affirmations proceed beyond the normal scholarly recognition witnessed in the past, and at the most crucial junction in Christian belief as well. Not to recognize these developments is to miss a vital cog in the contemporary ethos.¹⁵

The Disciples’ Transformations

The impact which their encounter with the risen Christ had on the disciples is also abundantly clear. Both secular sources (Tacitus, Pliny, Trajan, Josephus, and Mara bar Serapion) and Christian (Clement, Ignatius) back this up. Peter, Paul, James the brother of Jesus, James the son of Zebedee, all were martyred, along with “an immense multitude,” according to the Roman historian Tacitus, who were crucified, torn by animals, or burned alive. Pliny conceded that true Christians could not be forced to recant. “It is no wonder, then,” says Habermas, “that contemporary critical scholars, even including skeptics of several varieties, rarely challenge or doubt that Jesus’ disciples were radically transformed from fearful followers of Jesus or even unbelievers into courageous proclaimers of their faith.”¹⁶

As far as the other minimal facts are concerned, I encourage the reader to purchase the book. For present purposes, it is sufficient merely to note that Habermas shows that the nearly universal assent to all of the “minimal facts” is also based on solid evidence. To my mind, the Resurrection would be most powerfully presented on the basis of three minimal facts – the empty tomb, the disciples’ belief that they had seen the risen Christ, and their resulting transformation – together with the fact that there simply is no plausible naturalistic explanation for these events.

Jesus is alive, and if you only believe what is right in front of you, your sins are forgiven, and you have a glorious, eternal future in the Kingdom of God.

ENDNOTES

¹Charlesworth, “Jesus Research Expands with Chaotic Creativity,” in Images of Jesus Today, ed. James H. Charlesworth and Walter P. Weaver (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity press International, 1994), 6. (Cited by Gary R. Habermas, On the Resurrection: Evidences (B&H Academic, 2024), Kindle Edition, 152.)

²Robert V. Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 32-40, 220-222, 264-71. (Cited by Habermas, 133.)

³E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 3. (Cited by Habermas, 135.)

⁴Gary R. Habermas, On the Resurrection: Evidences (B&H Academic, 2024), Kindle Edition, 145, 147; my emphasis.

⁵Habermas, 148.

⁶Habermas, 146 n 53.

⁷Habermas, 145-146.

⁸Habermas, 148-149.

⁹Habermas 135.

¹⁰Habermas, 145. My emphasis.

¹¹Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2d ed. 2017), 578. (Cited by Habermas, 375.)

¹²Habermas, 381.

¹³Habermas, 403.

¹⁴Habermas, 419.

¹⁵Habermas 434-435.

¹⁶Habermas, 528.