Joshualetter

As To Their Honesty

In my most recent post I published in these pages an excerpt from Simon Greenleaf’s (1783-1853) The Testimony of the Evangelists: The Gospels Examined by the Rules of Evidence, because it so eloquently and brilliantly captures the exalted virtues of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Here I offer another excerpt from the same source because it demonstrates, again very eloquently, how it is impossible that the authors of the New Testament were anything but completely honest in what they were claiming to have seen, heard, and touched. In elegant prose Greenleaf shows conclusively that the Evangelists were honest men. One can imagine Greenleaf addressing a jury, who are transfixed by the power of his argument.

I heartily recommend the full essay, which is in the public domain at http://www.newhumanityinstitute.org/pdf-articles/Simon-Greenleaf-Testimony-of-the-Evangelists.pdf.

(Excerpt: As to their honesty:)

The credit due to the testimony of witnesses depends upon, firstly, their honesty; secondly, their ability; thirdly, their number and the consistency of their testimony; fourthly, the conformity of their testimony with experience; and fifthly, the coincidence of their testimony with collateral circumstances.

Let the evangelists be tried by these tests.

And first, as to their honesty.

Here they are entitled to the benefit of the general course of human experience, that men ordinarily speak the truth, when they have no prevailing motive or inducement to the contrary. This presumption, to which we have before alluded, is applied in courts of justice, even to witnesses whose integrity is not wholly free from suspicion; much more is it applicable to the evangelists, whose testimony went against all their worldly interests. The great truths which the apostles declared, were that Christ had risen from the dead, and that only through repentance from sin, and faith in him, could men hope for salvation. This doctrine they asserted with one voice, everywhere, not only under the greatest discouragements, but in the face of the most appalling terrors that can be presented to the mind of man. Their master had recently perished as a malefactor, by the sentence of a public tribunal. His religion sought to overthrow the religions of the whole world. The laws of every country were against the teaching of his disciples. The interests and passions of all the rulers and great men in the world were against them. The fashion of the world was against them. Propagating this new faith, even in the most inoffensive and peaceful manner, they could expect nothing but contempt, opposition, revilings, bitter persecutions, stripes, imprisonments, torments, and cruel deaths. Yet this faith they zealously did propagate; and all these miseries they endured undismayed, nay, rejoicing. As one after another was put to a miserable death, the survivors only prosecuted their work with increased vigor and resolution. The annals of military warfare afford scarcely an example of the like heroic constancy, patience, and unblenching courage. They had every possible motive to review carefully the grounds of their faith, and the evidences of the great facts and truths which they asserted; and these motives were pressed upon their attention with the most melancholy and terrific frequency. It was therefore impossible that they could have persisted in affirming the truths they have narrated, had not Jesus actually risen from the dead, and had they not known this fact as certainly as they knew any other fact. If it were morally possible for them to have been deceived in this matter, every human motive operated to lead them to discover and avow their error. To have persisted in so gross a falsehood, after it was known to them, was not only to encounter, for life, all the evils which man could inflict, from without, but to endure also the pangs of inward and conscious guilt; with no hope of future peace, no testimony of a good conscience, no expectation of honor or esteem among men, no hope of happiness in this life, or in the world to come.

Such conduct in the apostles would moreover have been utterly irreconcilable with the fact, that they possessed the ordinary constitution of our common nature. Yet their lives do show them to have been men like all others of our race; swayed by the same motives, animated by the same hopes, affected by the same joys, subdued by the same sorrows, agitated by the same fears, and subject to the same passions, temptations, and infirmities, as ourselves. And their writings show them to have been men of vigorous understandings. If then their testimony was not true, there was no possible motive for this fabrication.

It would also have been irreconcilable with the fact that they were good men. But it is impossible to read their writings, and not feel that we are conversing with men eminently holy, and of tender consciences, with men acting under an abiding sense of the presence and omniscience of God, and of their accountability to him, living in his fear, and walking in his ways. Now, though, in a single instance, a good man may fall, when under strong temptations, yet he is not found persisting, for years, in deliberated falsehood, asserted with the most solemn appeals to God, without the slightest temptation or motive, and against all the opposing interests which reign in the human breast. If, on the contrary, they are supposed to have been bad men, it is incredible that such men should have chosen this form of imposture; enjoining, as it does, unfeigned repentance, the utter forsaking and abhorrence of all falsehood and of every other sin, the practice of daily self-denial, self-abasement and self-sacrifice, the crucifixion of the flesh with all its earthly appetites and desires, indifference to the honors, and hearty contempt of the vanities of the world; and inculcating perfect purity of heart and life, and intercourse of the soul with heaven. It is incredible, that bad men should invent falsehoods to promote the religion of the God of truth. The supposition is suicidal. If they did believe in a future state of retribution, a heaven and a hell hereafter, they took the most certain course, if false witnesses, to secure the latter for their portion. And if, still being bad men, they did not believe in future punishment, how came they to invent that which was to destroy all their prospects of worldly honor and happiness, and to insure their misery in this life? From these absurdities there is no escape, but in the perfect conviction and admission that they were good men, testifying to that which they had carefully observed and considered, and well knew to be true.

Pearl of Great Price

Will Durant said it well: The portrayal of Jesus in the Gospels must be true, because no one could have invented such a character:

That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels. After two centuries of Higher Criticism, the outlines of the life, character, and teaching of Christ, remain reasonably clear, and constitute the most fascinating feature in the history of Western man.

Will Durant, Historian¹

But Simon Greenleaf said it even better:

Lastly, the great character they have portrayed is perfect. It is the character of a sinless Being; of one supremely wise and supremely good. It exhibits no error, no sinister intention, no imprudence, no ignorance, no evil passion, no impatience; in a word, no fault; but all is perfect uprightness, innocence, wisdom, goodness and truth. The mind of man has never conceived the idea of such a character, even for his gods; nor has history or poetry shadowed it forth. The doctrines and precepts of Jesus are in strict accordance with the attributes of God, agreeably to the most exalted idea which we can form of them, either from reason or from revelation. They are strikingly adapted to the capacity of mankind, and yet are delivered with a simplicity and majesty wholly divine. He spake as never man spake. He spake with authority; yet addressed himself to the reason and the understanding of men; and he spake with wisdom, which men could neither gainsay nor resist. In his private life, he exhibits a character not merely of strict justice, but of flowing benignity. He is temperate, without austerity; his meekness and humility are signal; his patience is invincible; truth and sincerity illustrate his whole conduct; every one of his virtues is regulated by consummate prudence; and he both wins the love of his friends, and extorts the wonder and admiration of his enemies. He is represented in every variety of situation in life, from the height of worldly grandeur, amid the acclamations of an admiring multitude, to the deepest abyss of human degradation and woe, apparently deserted of God and man. Yet everywhere he is the same; displaying a character of unearthly perfection, symmetrical in all its proportions, and encircled with splendor more than human. Either the men of Galilee were men of superlative wisdom, and extensive knowledge and experience, and of deeper skill in the arts of deception, than any and all others, before or after them, or they have truly stated the astonishing things which they saw and heard.²

¹From The Story of Civilization, Vol. III: Caesar and Christ, by Will Durant, p. 557.

²Simon Greenleaf (1783-1853), The Testimony of the Evangelists: The Gospels Examined by the Rules of Evidence (Full text: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34989/34989-pdf.pdf (last visited 4.5.24).) (Greenleaf, of course, one of the founders of Harvard Law and the Nineteenth Century’s foremost authority on the law of evidence, set out to refute Christianity and became a follower of Christ instead.)

He is Risen!

On this Easter weekend it pleases me to share with you something of what I’ve learned from Gary Habermas’ On the Resurrection: Evidences (B&H Academic, 2024).

There is virtual unanimity among scholars, both liberal and conservative, that the details of the events which gave rise to the Gospel story probably happened – with the sole exception of the empty tomb, which is accepted by “only” a clear majority of scholars. That is to say, more particularly, that the scholarly community agrees that the disciples believed they had seen the risen Christ, it transformed them from cowering fugitives into on-fire evangelists, and many of them were martyred for it. None recanted.

As to the Resurrection itself, a strong minority of scholars believe Jesus arose. For those who do not, there are no plausible naturalistic explanations for the events described above. Their only theory is a hidebound naturalistic prejudice that there is no God and hence no miracles. But if God exists then naturalism is false and miracles can and will happen whenever God wants them to.

Applying well-accepted historiographical criteria for historicity, it would be almost impossible for the evidence for the Resurrection to be any stronger than it is. Indeed, considering that we are at a distance of 2,000 years, it is astonishing how extensively documented are the events of the New Testament, such that one can only ascribe it to a meticulous providence. What are those criteria? (Time permits only a cursory recounting; I hope to flesh out the following in future posts.)

Early attestation. (Check.)
Eyewitness testimony. (Check.)
Multiple attestation. (Check.)
Dissimilarity. (“[A] particular saying may be attributed to someone . . . if it cannot plausibly be [attributed to] . . . the words or teachings of other roughly contemporary sources.” Habermas, 47.) The very idea of imagining the sayings of Jesus as coming from anyone else is ludicrous.
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.

He is risen!

The Recovery of the New Testament

Was the New Testament corrupted? Or has it been restored?

Thomas Alderman 2024

The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, by Bruce M. Metzger (Oxford University Press, 3d ed. 1992; 4th ed. with Bart D. Ehrman 2005)¹.

I. Introduction.

The Apostle Peter exhorts believers to “be ready always to give an answer to every man who asks of you a reason for the hope that is in you.” 1 Peter 3:15. We certainly ought, therefore, to be prepared in advance to answer those who insist that the text of the New Testament has been so corrupted that we cannot know what its authors were trying to tell us.

It’s a claim that cannot be lightly dismissed.

Explain This

There really are very few atheists. No, I don’t have the results of a poll right here at hand, but it’s still the case that the great majority of nonbelievers identify as agnostic.

There are two kinds of agnostic, those who are unsure whether or not God exists, and those who believe it cannot be known whether or not God exists. I remember my father telling me, “You can’t know.” I was not equipped at that time to ask him, “Now, how could you possibly know that I can’t know?” But unless I am mistaken, most agnostics are of the former kind.

Elsewhere I have argued that everyone knows God exists. The wonder with which the beauty of nature fills us compels us to confess, “There must be an explanation for all of this.” Young children have already absorbed the laws of cause and effect and know that every effect has a cause. The universe is an effect and must have been caused by something outside itself, which cause must have been sufficient to produce the effect in question. You don’t get an atomic explosion from a firecracker. It is only when we go to school that we learn that only the foolish and backward doubt that the universe created itself.

But how do they think the universe created itself? They don’t know. They don’t even have a theory. They do speculate, but speculations do not constitute testable scientific theories.

What else does naturalism fail to explain? Well, pretty much everything.

I have identified eleven features of the universe which demand explanation. (If you can think of others, please let me know.) Atheism explains none of them. Theism explains them all without breaking a sweat. What are they?

The fact that the universe had a beginning.
The fine-tuning of the laws of physics.
The existence of objective moral values.
The origin of life.
Information, the infallible sign of active intelligence.
Consciousness.
Reason.
Language.
Natural beauty.
Mathematics – that is, the correspondence between complex math and the physical universe.
The Resurrection of Jesus. There is no plausible naturalistic explanation. Unbelieving philosophers have given up finding one.

Each of these phenomena deserves a book-length treatment, and many books have been written. But what do you expect? This is just a blog post.

Even so, I judged that it would be worthwhile to remind you of the cogency of belief in God. Once one realizes that

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 (Ps. 19),

one is very near the Kingdom of God. And when one realizes also that the text of the New Testament has been fully recovered and that the Gospel authors were undoubtedly truthful, one can “endure any misery undismayed, nay rejoicing.” (Simon Greenleaf, The Testimony of the Evangelists.)

Rejoice!

303 Creative, LLC v. Elena

Supreme Court of the United States
June 30, 2023
Slip Opinion No. 21-476

Americans of all persuasions have cause to rejoice, now that Lorie Smith, a Christian and a Colorado web designer, has prevailed in the Supreme Court of the United States in her action against the State of Colorado, which had sought to use its Anti-Discrimination Act to compel her to design web sites celebrating gay marriage, against her sincerely-held belief that marriage should be reserved for unions of one man and one woman. The Supreme Court, in a 6-to-3 opinion authored by Justice Neil Gorsuch, held in 303 Creative, LLC v. Elena that Smith’s right of free speech, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, protects her from such action. By doing so, the Court spared the country a dramatic escalation in the culture wars.

What effect would a ruling in Colorado’s favor have had?

Evolutionary Theory in Crisis

For any who are interested in evolutionary theory, I recommend you subscribe to Evolution News (it’s free), published by Discovery Institute, a leading Intelligent Design thinktank. You will be kept abreast of such developments as described in “Neo-Darwinism Must Mutate to Survive,” a peer reviewed article which concludes that macroevolutionary changes cannot be explained as simply an accumulation of microevolutionary changes.

A review of the article can be found here:

Peer-Reviewed Paper: “Neo-Darwinism Must Mutate to Survive”

Of course, accumulations of microevolutionary changes has always been the presumed mechanism driving evolution. Without a mechanism, there is no theory of evolution, because the mechanism is the theory.

Postscript to the Cosmological Argument

As children growing up, each of us at some point becomes aware of the laws of cause and effect. Every effect has a cause, and each cause must be sufficient to produce the effect in question.

Then when in childhood or adolescence we become aware also of the beauty and power of nature, most of us will say to ourselves, “There must be an explanation for all of this.” What we see is this magnificent natural world, and we know intuitively that it must have a cause, and that the cause must itself be colossal.

Not only that; but we have also by this time learned to distinguish objects and events that are designed from those which result from impersonal forces such as wind erosion, earthquake, or chemical reactions. We may not be able to articulate exactly how we make such distinctions, but every child can accurately tell a slab of marble from a statue. (We will elucidate the precise criteria for design in a future post.) Finally, we also have understood by this time that design invariably signals personhood – that is, it implies intention, which is an activity of mind, and only of mind. Put it this way: design is a mental activity — and we know this as children.

But then the child returns to her classroom and does not consider the matter further for months or years, until her next experience of nature, and again she tells herself, “There must be an explanation for all of this.” Even then she does not pursue the inquiry in any deliberate way; and before long her elders begin teaching her that her intuition is not true, that it is irrational and superstitious, and that science shows that everything is the unintended result of impersonal forces.

But it is perfectly rational to apply the laws of cause and effect to the universe itself – why wouldn’t we? – and perfectly rational to infer mind from design.

Anything which exists either had a beginning or it didn’t, and if it did, then it either had a cause or it didn’t. The evidence of science overwhelmingly shows that the universe did have a beginning. What is irrational is to suppose that anything could come into existence, uncaused.

What we all need is someone to confirm that our childhood intuition was and is true.

Those who confirmed that intuition for me are men such as William Craig, Michael Behe, Hugh Ross, J. P. Moreland, John Lennox, and Stephen Meyer. I thank my God for each one.

A Little Deeper Into the Cosmos

More on the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God

Why is there something rather than nothing?

If anything exists, then an uncaused being exists. How do we know this?

Something does exist: the universe; and the universe either had a beginning or it didn’t. If it didn’t, then it has an infinite past, and neither has a cause nor can it have a cause, and that would end the inquiry.

But we happen to know that the universe did have a beginning, and since it did not create itself, it must have had a cause outside itself. Thus there exists, in addition to the universe itself, at least one other being – specifically, whatever it was that caused the universe to exist.

Either the cause of the universe was itself uncaused, or it was preceded by an infinite regress of caused causes. An actual infinite regress of caused causes is impossible. Therefore, the universe was caused by an uncaused cause. QED.

What kind of being is this uncaused cause of the universe?

Big Bang cosmology entails that space and time themselves came into existence with the matter and energy of the Creation event. Therefore, the cause of the universe must be:

Uncaused

Spaceless

Timeless

Immaterial

Stupendously powerful

Other observations enable us to add to the list of divine attributes. The fine-tuning of the universe shows that the First Cause has crafted the constants of physics to achieve a particular purpose, namely, a universe hospitable to complex life. Purpose is a mental activity: only minds have purposes. Therefore the First Cause is a personal being. The fine-tuning demonstrates also that the First Cause is transcendently intelligent.

Why does the universe exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? Because God caused the universe to exist. Then why does God exist? I do not believe there is an answer to that question. God does not exist for a reason: he just is. He is the uncaused cause. He, and only He, contains in Himself the explanation of His own existence. As He said to Moses: “I am that I am. Tell them that I am sent you.”

So to someone who asks, “If God created the universe, then who created God?” the proper response is to point out that the answer is obvious, but that it is the wrong question. The question is not who created God, but how can it be that God exists, uncaused? What is the reason for God’s existence? And the only answer I know of is that He just exists. He and He alone contains within himself the explanation for his own existence.

And we are in awe once again, and our hearts overflow with gratitude.

Many philosophers maintain that the reason God exists is that He is the necessary being. I’m not clear on what that means. Wouldn’t it be possible that nothing at all exists? Then God would also not exist, right? Then He doesn’t exist by any sort of logical necessity. In what sense, then, is he the necessary being?

I suspect the answer is that if God did not exist, then nothing would exist.

So my answer to the question how we know God exists is that we know it from the fact that something that is not God exists and had a beginning. Everything else follows by logical necessity.

The Heavens Declare the Glory

Several people who follow this blog have been complaining about the recent dearth of posts. Mea culpa! I repent!

Here is a fascinating special case of the fine-tuning of the universe.

There are 90 naturally-occurring elements in the periodic table – elements like hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and many others. Every physical thing in the universe is made up of these elements or of combinations of these elements.

Each element has distinctive properties, and the properties of all the elements, taken together, result in our physical world –the Earth, the Earth’s atmosphere, the iron that drives the Earth’s magnetic field, the water that makes life possible, the sun, the moon, the stars, our bodies.

It makes me weep to realize the wisdom and power displayed in the Creation.

Where do these elements come from?

I learned several years ago that there have been three or four generations of stars. The first generation, formed at about 100 million years after the Creation event, consisted only of the lightest elements, hydrogen and helium. During the lifetime of those stars, they produced heavier elements by a process of fusion – that is, by combining lighter elements to form heavier ones under extreme heat and pressure. When these stars reached the end of their lifespans, they collapsed, and then they exploded, spreading those heavier elements throughout the cosmos. Then under gravitation the debris from the explosion of those stars formed a second generation of stars, which likewise produced even heavier elements, collapsed, and exploded. (They are still exploding; they are called “super-novas.”) Our sun is an instance of at least a third-generation star, if not a fourth.

Recently it was learned that iron is the heaviest element formed in this manner – by fusion within the first generations of stars. Now cosmologists have discovered how the heaviest elements were formed.

Most massive stars (say, 10 times the mass of our Sun) exist in binary systems with a twin. When they die, they explode, but their cores remain, and they collapse to a diameter of only 10 to 12 kilometers, forming the densest objects in the universe other than black holes – so dense that the protons and electrons combine, forming neutrons; and hence they are called “neutron stars.”

The twin neutron stars then circle each other for eons until at last, under their mutual gravitational attraction, they fall into each other. When they collide, they annihilate in the most spectacular events ever observed. But after the collapse and before the explosion, they form the heavy elements by a process called “rapid neutron capture,” or the r-process. Then the explosions again spread these heaviest elements throughout the universe. Some of them ended up in Earth’s soil. We ingested the plants that drew those elements out of that soil, and those elements keep us alive by performing vital life functions, from the regulation of brain development to the formation of strong bones.

You can read more from Scientific American at https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-star-collisions-forge-the-universes-heaviest-elements/

Glory to God!