25 Jan Free Miracle #1: Something Came from Nothing – Part 2 of 3
Blog Series
Why Believe in God? ~ If You Reject God, You’ve Only Done Half the Job.
The focus of this blog series is that if you reject God, you have only done half the job. The other half of the job is that you must explain reality without God, which I believe is impossible if you take assumptions and evidence all the way to their logical conclusions.
Many years ago, during the Vietnam War, a CBS news correspondent on the program 60 Minutes, was reporting on an atrocity that happened during the war. At the end of his report, he paused, absorbing the horror of the incident, and then he said, “If there is a God, he has a lot of explaining to do.” The implication was that he doubted the existence of God because of the evil that he saw in the world.
Explaining the evil in the world is, indeed, a significant challenge for the Christian faith. But to conclude there is no God is not an option. For someone to reject the possibility of God because of rampant evil in the world means that that person must be prepared to explain the universe based on either:
- Something coming from nothing, or
- Matter being eternal
As we saw last week, those are not viable options. The evidence does not support either option. So, that leaves us with God. The answer to dealing with the difficult questions of life, including the problem of evil, pain and suffering, is always found moving forward toward God, never away from Him.
But, which God?
If the universe is created by God, which God?
There are three categories of divinity from which to choose when deciding which God is the creator God:
- Naturalistic gods of groups such as Native Americans or Amazonian Tribal People or African Shamans, etc.
- Gods of eastern religions such as Hinduism or Buddhism.
- The God of Abraham, to whom three religions trace their origin… Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
As we compare them, part of the credibility of the option of the God of Abraham is that the information concerning Him can be tied to things which are historically verifiable. The Jews existed. They had an advanced civilization. Evidence of the Old Testament Temple stands in Jerusalem today. Beyond that, there is evidence that Jesus lived and influenced Western civilization, from which came modern science and our knowledge base for understanding the physical world in which we live.
The creation account in Genesis has been taken seriously for centuries. The scientific information in the Bible has been a guide to expand our knowledge and understanding of the physical world in which we live. D. James Kennedy makes the case, in his book What if Jesus Had Never Been Born, that if it were not for Christianity, we would would not have a modern world. It would be much the same as it was in Roman times.
On the other hand, the information concerning naturalistic gods and gods of eastern religions have no credible evidence to commend them as a philosophically verifiable creation account. There is virtually nothing in their religious writings that are historically verifiable. Their creation accounts do not rise above the level of myth. Civilizations given over to those religions have been locked in ignorance and lack of progress.
The God of Abraham and the creation account in Genesis stands head and shoulders above any other possible explanation for the creation of the universe. But when we look to the God of Abraham, we must discern between the three Abrahamic religions to see which one earns credibility as the true creator God.
If Jesus is who He says He is, then Christianity is true, Islam is not true and Judaism is incomplete, because of their conclusion of who Jesus is.
To determine if Jesus is who He says He is, we must look to the resurrection. If the resurrection is true, then it is reasonable to believe that everything Jesus said was true. If the resurrection is not true, then Jesus is either a liar or a lunatic.
Therefore, we culminate our decision about which God to believe in by looking at evidence for the resurrection. Because the resurrection is such an astonishing event, the first impulse is to conclude that believers have to prove the resurrection. However, the resurrection cannot be proved. But neither can it be disproved. So, we look at evidence to suggest how likely it is that the resurrection happened.
The ground shifts dramatically at that point, and the unbeliever has a considerable burden of explaining the worldwide, historic impact of Jesus if He is not who He said He was – if He did not do what He said He would: rise from the dead.
Evidence the believer has that the resurrection of Jesus did happen:
First, the news of the resurrection became widely known immediately.
It was not as though the rumor leaked out slowly after a long period of time. Eyewitnesses of the events of the time were still living when the reports began to circulate (1 Corinthians 15:3-6). Awareness of the resurrection is documented in literature as early as the first century. Josephus, a historian writing for Roman Emperor Vespasian, speaks of the resurrection as though it were true. It was not a minor event. It rocked the early Roman world.
Second, alternative explanations for the resurrection are not convincing.
Some people over the years have proposed a number of explanations for the resurrection:
- His disciples stole the body. Impossible. The body was being guarded by elite Roman soldiers at the time who would have paid with their lives if Jesus’ body had been stolen under their watch.
- Jewish leaders stole the body. Inconceivable. Rumors of the resurrection were the very thing the Jewish leaders wanted to avoid. If they had the body when rumors of the resurrection began to surface, they would have paraded the body of Jesus through the streets of Jerusalem and immediately squashed any resurrection rumors.
- They went to the wrong tomb. Unthinkable. Skeptics would have immediately located the right one, as it was known exactly in whose tomb Jesus’ body had been placed (Matthew 27:57-66).
The resurrection is one of the most factually credible events in ancient history. If we apply the same tests of historical accuracy to the resurrection that we apply to the assassination of Caesar, we must conclude it is true.
Third, the resurrection best explains the explosion of the early church.
That the message of the resurrection would have spread throughout the immediate world is too far-fetched to believe, for many reasons, unless it was true. The disciples of Christ all suffered a hard life, and most, a terrible death. They would not have risked their lives for something they knew wasn’t true. They had seen him crucified. They had seen him verified as dead. They had seen him buried. Why would they then come out of hiding, defy the Jewish leaders and proclaim him as the Lord God able to forgive sins and give eternal life? It only makes sense if they had seen the resurrected Lord!
When we look at the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection* without an “anti-supernatural presupposition,” we conclude that the resurrection is true, and that the God of Christianity is the creator God of the universe. When unbelievers look at the resurrection, they have to explain how the story of the resurrection could have become one of the dominant accounts of history resulting in Christianity’s central role in the history of the world, if it were not true. Was everyone in the Western world duped into believing something that didn’t happen? No, the story of the resurrection has dominated history because, try as they may, unbelievers have been unable to explain it away.
Conclusion
So far in this series on “Why Believe in God”, in parts 1 & 2 of declining to give modern science Free Miracle #1, we have made two significant points.
First, believing in the creation of the universe is a philosophically stronger position than believing that matter is eternal or that something came from nothing.
Second, we have concluded that the resurrection of Jesus demonstrates that the God of Abraham, and specifically the God of Christianity, is the creator God.
Next week, we’ll conclude our discussion of how we reconcile the God of the Bible with all the pain, evil and suffering in the world as we look at part 3 of why we decline to give modern medicine the first free miracle they want.
*For more support for the resurrection of Christ see More Then a Carpenter, by Josh McDowell. For an even more complete presentation, see The Case for Christ, by Lee Strobel.
In case you’re new here
This blog post is part of a series titled “Why Believe in God? If You Reject God, You’ve Only Done Half the Job.”, introduced on January 5, 2022. As the series continues, each succeeding post will be added to and available in the blog archives at www.maxanders.com.
If you know anyone who you think might enjoy joining us in this study, please forward this blog to them and encourage them to go to my web site (www.maxanders.com) and sign up for the free video, “Master the Bible So Well That the Bible Masters You”, available there on the home page. This will put them on my regular mailing list and they’ll receive my weekly blogs on this subject.
I look forward to going through this faith-affirming journey with you.
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