When I was a child, my parents told me that thunder was caused by God bowling in heaven. But when I was old enough to understand, I learned the real explanation in science class.
Like a child growing up and learning what thunder really is, advances in science are rapidly eliminating the need for God. We don’t need this “God-of-the-gaps” any longer to explain the mysteries that surround us. Science will eventually be able to explain them all.
In our modern, scientific age, belief in God is naïve.
A blogger I once read exhorted people to THINK! What’s more likely: that Jesus actually rose from the dead, or that it’s just some kind of fluke? Even if there was solid historical evidence for the resurrection, given everything science tells us about our world, it couldn’t have happened. It couldn’t possibly be the supernatural miracle it purports to be, because we know that things like this simply don’t happen. A fluke it is.
I couldn’t agree more.
If there is good reason to think God doesn’t exist, then it’s foolish to believe in the resurrection, no matter how much historical evidence there may be.
For the majority of skeptics, the great obstacle to belief in the resurrection is a philosophical one: How is a rational person supposed to believe this stuff?
This was the biggest obstacle for me.
I am fully a child of our modern, scientific worldview.
I don’t blindly believe “because the Bible tells me so.” In fact, I only came to believe in the inspiration of Scripture because I first believed Jesus rose from the dead.
If he didn’t, I wouldn’t.
I accept evolution as the best scientific account of how we got here. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, seeing things that aren’t there. I don’t believe the United States government was responsible for 9-11 or “Tower 7,” whatever that means. I don’t believe in UFO’s, ET’s or any other assorted acronymed alien invaders. Without objective data to back it up, I don’t trust personal experience, especially personal religious experience. I categorically reject “alternative facts.”
More to the point, my overriding bias is to deny the miraculous. My running assumption is that there must be some rational explanation to every so-called “miracle.” Unless some detached, objective authority—like an unbelieving doctor—can verify a miracle, I won’t accept it. And even then, I only tentatively commit. I’m never surprised when it turns out that a supposed miracle can later be explained naturalistically. I even expect it.
Where others see divine intervention, I see only coincidence.
I always look for the simplest and most rational explanation for any phenomena.
I seek and want to find a naturalistic answer to everything.
This is especially true of Jesus’ resurrection. It is the most far-fetched, fantastic, and unbelievable event ever reported (a dead man coming back to life utterly transformed to the transcendent sphere). It’s the stuff of fantasy.
Yes, if there is anything I am disposed to doubt, it is the resurrection of Jesus.
So definitely THINK! I say a big “Amen” to that.
Christianity is often thought to be based on a simplistic worldview, on flimsy scholarship of a decidedly biased and conservative bent, on “alternative facts”, or on no scholarship, no reason or logic, at all. Many people think that, to follow Christ, you have to leave your brain at the door.
But, as I’ll show in future posts, advances in astrophysics and molecular biology over the last forty years or so make belief in some kind of rational creator far more likely than not. Which means, if the historical evidence stands up, Jesus’ resurrection is something a thinking person can believe in. In fact, based on the evidence, I, along with many other skeptics, have found, and hope to show, that it is the most reasonable conclusion you can make.
Gary Habermas has done an extensive study of a wide range of over two thousand scholars’ views on the resurrection—the ones who have the most expertise in the subject. Bear in mind, these are highly intelligent, critical scholars who have intimate familiarity with all the evidence and arguments mounted, pro and con.
Roughly three-quarters of these scholars think it was a supernatural event. Three quarters of this group thinks Jesus rose bodily. If you do the math, this means that three-quarters of the three-quarters of this extensive sampling of scholars, some nine-sixteenths, over half (that is, over a thousand) think the appearances were a real manifestation of a risen, albeit transformed, Jesus. A majority of the scholars who study the resurrection intensely think it was a supernatural and very REAL event.
You don’t have to get a lobotomy to believe Jesus rose from the dead!
