The fact of Jesus' existence, according to the worldview of [redacted], would not prove the supernatural or the paranatural. For example, when an interviewer asked, "So how was the stone rolled away in front of Jesus' tomb? Wouldn't such a feat require supernatural power, especially with Roman guards on duty to thwart such an effort?", [redacted] responded by saying that if one accepted all these premises (and some additional ones that will be addressed later), then "perhaps, one may construct a possible scenario in which supernatural forces were at work - although hundreds of other explanations would continue to be more plausible." ([redacted] 2006, 38) It's clear from his answer that he considers supernatural explanations to be extremely improbable.
[redacted]
Unfortunately, [redacted] did not give us one of the hundreds of naturalistic explanations that would be more plausible than the supernatural one given in the Bible. William Lane Craig, the Christian theologian and apologist, has denied that any naturalistic explanation that he is aware of is more plausible. According to him, "historical evidence combines to place the weight of the evidence solidly in favor of the historical fact that Jesus' tomb was found empty on the Sunday after his crucifixion and burial. We have … seen that no natural hypothesis that has been offered can furnish a plausible explanation." (Craig 1988, 86) [redacted] said that if one presupposes that 99 percent of the Bible is true "[i]t isn't difficult … to logically 'prove' the remaining 1 percent." ([redacted] 2006, 38) The word "prove" is in quotes because in [redacted]' mind, influenced by naturalism, a supernatural or miraculous event isn't really proved even if it is a simple and comprehensive explanation of all the data. Contradicting [redacted], Craig implied that if one accepts the story about the guards then one can't deny that Jesus actually rose from the dead:
If one denies that Jesus rose from the dead as the early Christians proclaimed, then about the only alternative is to say that some unknown party robbed the tomb prior to the women's visit. This is, of course, an appeal to ignorance, and there is no positive proof for this assertion. It also assumes that the story about the Jews' posting a guard at the tomb is not true… (Craig 1988, 84)
Exactly how much of the narrative one can accept before having to believe in the supernatural is an issue that philosophers have debated. There may well be no definitive answer to this question.
[redacted]
Incredulity is not a virtue in and of itself; as Carl Sagan argued, "[A]t the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes - an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new." (Sagan [1996] 1997, 304) It is unfortunate that my source doesn't inform me what Darwin meant exactly by "direct arguments against Christianity and theism". If the direct arguments are based on thorough-going and legitimate skepticism then it is certainly a pessimistic conclusion that such arguments will not influence the public; this, however, doesn't mean that the conclusion is mistaken. Many after Darwin, as we are all aware, certainly didn't think that assailing orthodoxy was fruitless. We don't know their motives. Perhaps they didn't think that their work would have much of an impact. Nevertheless, a substantial body of "rationalist" literature does exist to supplement [redacted]' paperback.
[redacted] For now, we will return to the subject of the historical evidence for the resurrection. As alluded to, [redacted] actually adds difficulties that his interviewer doesn't mention and still insists that any one of a multitude of naturalistic explanations is more believable than the supernatural biblical one. For the sake of argument, he assumed that Jesus' body was laid in a tomb and that the body was absent after the third day. (These premises were implied but not stated.) Craig, if I've interpreted him correctly, said that if you accept that the guards were stationed outside the tomb then you can't believe that an unknown party stole the body and, therefore, the only explanation for the empty tomb is something supernatural. [redacted], of course, doesn't say in his list of premises how long the guards were stationed there. We can assume that the duration of their watch was "until the third day" in accordance with the Scriptures. (Matthew 27:64 KJV) If so, then the naturalist has quite a task ahead of him. As the nineteenth-century freethinker W. S. Ross (who didn't believe in the resurrection) explained, "If Christ rose at all, he rose before the soldiers walked sentry in front of his tomb … The story of the Roman soldiers falling asleep is too feeble and clumsy to merit serious refutation…" (Stein 1980, 210) In the words of another atheist writer, "some of the natural explanations … tend to require almost as much faith as the orthodox interpretation." (Barker 2008, 281) The Gospel account makes it clear that at least three soldiers were guarding the tomb. (Matt. 28:11) Ross finds it incredible that "they managed to fall asleep simultaneously." (Stein 1980, 211) Ironically, Ross' analysis concerning the guards tends to agree with Craig's; they agree that, if we take the guard story to be literal, we need a special explanation to account for why the body of Jesus was missing when Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary" reached the tomb. [redacted] is confident that numerous special explanations, each more plausible than the traditional one, exist. This confidence, I suspect, is due, ultimately, to philosophical assumptions about miracles; if you refuse to believe in miracles, you simply won't believe a miraculous account.
Before concluding, philosophical matters such as naturalism, miracles and the significance of Jesus' resurrection will be simultaneously addressed. According to William Lane Craig,
The resurrection of Jesus so far exceeds the causal power of nature that nothing that we have learned in the two thousand years that have elapsed since that remarkable event enables us to account for its occurrence. Those who have opposed the resurrection have always tried to explain away the facts without admitting that Jesus was raised. Once it is admitted that Jesus really did rise transformed from the dead, the conclusion that God raised him up is virtually inescapable. (Craig 1988, 127 & 128)
One could get the impression from this passage that one could believe in a miracle first and from there be compelled to believe in God. However, Josh McDowell and Don Stewart wrote, contrary to this impression, that "if one does not believe in God, he will not accept the miraculous…" (McDowell & Stewart 1980, 92) What McDowell and Stewart wrote receives support from [redacted] and another atheist, as we'll see shortly.
Much has been written about "the God hypothesis". On that subject, the physicist Victor Stenger wrote, "Let us give the God hypothesis every benefit of the doubt and keep open the possibility of a miraculous origin for inexplicable events and unlikely coincidences, examining any such occurrences on an individual basis. If even with the loosest definition of a miracle none is observed to occur, then we will have obtained strong support for the case against the existence of a God who directs miraculous events." (Hitchens 2007, 312 & 313) Conversely, if a miracle did occur, we could make a strong case that God does exist. An unbeliever, however, would not have to accept that a miracle is possible. As the philosopher Antony Flew explained,
Our only way of determining the capacities and the incapacities of Nature is to study what does in fact occur. Suppose, for instance, that all previous observation and experiment had suggested that some performance was beyond human power; and suppose then we find, to our amazement, that after all some people can do it. Still this by itself is a reason, not for postulating a series of infusions of supernatural grace, but for shaking up the psychological assumptions which these discoveries have discredited. (Flew 1966, 149)
Only after grasping the above viewpoint can we make sense of [redacted]' statement to the effect that a true falsification of a law of nature would bolster secularism. ([redacted] 2006, 77) This is not to say that Flew meant this. Flew merely said that a falsification of a law of nature is not a violation of a law of nature that would support supernaturalism. What [redacted] wrote shows that if someone chooses naturalism then anything that happens can be interpreted to attest to its truth. [NOTE: I'm not sure about the previous sentence.]According to that philosophy, if it exists it is natural. (Harris 2008, 40) Events themselves don't prove or disprove naturalism; naturalism is chosen prior to reckoning.
To illustrate this, let's consider Kai Nielsen's thoughts on the Resurrection. During a debate, he said,
[S]uppose it were the case that Jesus was raised from the dead … Suppose something like that really happened. Suppose there were good historical evidence for it … It wouldn't give you any way of being able to detect if there is a God. It would be just that a very strange happening happened, namely that somebody who died - or certainly appeared to have died - came together again as a living human being … It would just be a very peculiar fact we hadn't explained and indeed lacked the scientific resources to explain.
Craig may think that belief in God is unavoidable after one believes in Jesus' resurrection but he is mistaken. Believing in Jesus' resurrection does not compel one to renounce naturalism. Until one does, belief in God is precluded. Interestingly, the Bible seems to contradict Craig on this matter. According to the philosopher Dallas Willard, Jesus agreed with Nielsen. As he explained,
… I completely agree with Professor Nielsen's comment, at the opening of his "Rebuttal," that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, even if he stood by and saw it happen, "wouldn't show there was an infinite intelligible being." He knows there are lots of weird things in the world, and, as he says, "It would be just that a very strange happening happened." … Jesus himself, according to the record, agrees with us on this matter. In the story (Jesus) told of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16), the self-indulged rich man asked Father Abraham to send Lazarus back to warn his brothers of their fate in Hades, saying that "if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent!" But Abraham replied, "If they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead." (Moreland & Nielsen ([1990] 1993, 64, 214 & 215)
Willard was accusing Nielsen of being as obstinate as the rich man's brothers. It is clear after skimming Nielsen's work that he indeed was obstinate when it came to what he referred to as "the God of the developed Judeo-Christian-Islamic strand" or the "God of developed theism." Nothing could make him believe in that. As he explained,
Suppose thousands of us were standing out under the starry skies and we all saw a set of stars rearrange themselves to spell out "God." We would be utterly astonished and indeed rightly think we had gone mad. Even if we could somehow assure ourselves that this was not some form of mass hallucination … such an experience would still not constitute evidence for the existence of God, for we still would be without a clue as to what could be meant by speaking of an infinite individual transcendent to the world.
He concluded, "All we would know is that something very strange indeed had happened - something we would not know what to make of." (Nielsen 1985, 20, 45 & 212) His position, arguably, was not that this would be natural phenomena. This fanciful stellar episode as well as a risen Jesus were called strange happenings but strange doesn't necessarily mean merely natural. As a matter of fact, William Lane Craig knows of no critic who argues that "(Jesus') resurrection was … a perfectly natural occurrence." (Craig 2008, 267) Jesus' resurrection, according to Craig, "exceeds the productive capacity of natural causes." (Moreland & Nielsen ([1990] 1993, 149) A resuscitation, however, does not. As Victor Stenger explained,
It is … possible for an old person to become young again, or a dead person to be brought back to life, with just the right movement of molecules. This would be regarded as a miracle, yet such incredible events are not, strictly speaking, impossible. Observing a miracle of this nature, we would be incapable of proving it as such, and not simply a result of blind chance. We could calculate the probability of the event occurring and get a number so low as to make the event unlikely in many times the age of the universe. But such calculations after the fact cannot be used in any impossibility proof. If they could, we all would prove ourselves out of existence, since the existence of any given individual is so unlikely. Nevertheless, none of us should count on spontaneously growing younger or coming back to life …, despite the fact that such a miracle is not impossible. (Stenger 1988, 21)
Heinz Pagels pointed out that the law of entropy increase (the second law of thermodynamics) is "interesting, because it is a fundamental law and yet it is statistical in character. Really (the second law) follows because a highly organized configuration is improbable compared to a disorganized one and it is more likely for a state of nature to go from an improbable configuration to a highly probable one." (Pagels 1982, 124) The second law "simply codifies the observed fact of everyday life that many macroscopic physical processes seem to be irreversible. However, the second law does not demand that they be so. In fact, every physical process is, in principle, reversible." (Stenger 2000)
Surprisingly, the Christian apologist Gary Habermas reinforced Stenger when he said,
[T]he current view in physics (is) that the laws of nature are statistical. That is, these laws describe what generally occurs. But these laws do not cause or keep anything from happening. As a result, these laws should not be utilized as any sort of barrier to the occurrence of miracles … [I]f (the laws of nature) are general and statistical, then there is no problem for miracles. (Habermas et al 1987, 18)
A miracle is not necessarily contrary to nature. It depends on how one defines the word. A miracle could be an event that is highly unlikely. According to Stenger, "[w]e do not see a dead man rising, not because it is impossible but because it is so highly unlikely." (Stenger 2000)
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