In this episode, I talk about the resurrection and whether or not science can prove God didn't make the world in six days. I also discuss the argument that science disproves the resurrection, and whether that's a good or bad thing.
00:07:31.900Again, this is evidence for God, not against him.
00:07:34.320The fact that you can do science at all would seem to give credence to the idea that the universe was constructed by an intelligent designer
00:08:59.720So, it's like if you were to ask God the question, what's the color of the number seven, that's a question God can't answer because it is, by definition, an unanswerable nonsense question.
00:09:14.980So, when confronted with claims, you know, when we are confronted with claims that God did this or that, we can analyze those claims on two levels to try and figure out if the claims might be true.
00:09:30.300Number one, we can ask, is this claim consistent with the nature of God?
00:09:34.300Number two, we can ask, is it logically possible?
00:09:36.800We can't ask, is it scientifically possible?
00:09:39.220We can't ask, is it logically possible?
00:09:42.100When someone says that God instructed them to blow up a school bus full of children, we can say definitively that that claim is false because it is not consistent with God's nature.
00:09:52.300When someone says that two plus two equals 16 because God told them so, we can say definitively that is false because it is not logical.
00:09:59.400The resurrection, though, does not contradict God's nature and it is not illogical.
00:10:07.320Therefore, we have no rational or scientific reason to disbelieve it.
00:10:34.080What's so incredible about Christianity is that it makes historical claims, even, I would say, in the grand scheme of things, you might even say recent historical claims, recent in comparison to the whole history of the world.
00:10:51.260It says that a historical event occurred 2,000 years ago.
00:10:55.160And it's very specific about what that historical event entailed.
00:11:00.860Now, if it made that historical claim and provided no evidence to support it, then I think we'd have every reason to dismiss it.
00:11:09.340If a religion is going to claim that God himself entered into human history at a particular point, did a bunch of stuff, and then died and was raised and appeared to people after his resurrection, we should be able to provide documentation to prove it.
00:11:23.240I mean, you can't very well go and expect someone to believe it, because this is supposed to be a historical event.
00:11:34.720Something that actually physically happened and that people witnessed and documented, so then we can say, well, where is the proof?
00:11:43.320And we have, indeed, I think, quite a bit of historical proof.
00:11:51.460Well, we have the epistles of Paul, first of all.
00:11:55.880And I say the epistles first of all because they were, even though the Gospels come before the epistles in the Bible, chronologically the epistles were written first.
00:12:06.440And though Paul was not one of the original twelve apostles, he does testify to what the twelve reported.
00:12:15.640And he also gives us, you know, Paul, I think, gives us maybe the best evidence in the entire New Testament.
00:12:23.820If you look specifically at 1 Corinthians 15, and this letter was written probably in A.D. 54 or 55, so only 20 years or so after Christ.
00:12:33.560And this letter is also among the seven of the epistles of Paul that nobody, no scholar, disputes was authentically written by him.
00:12:45.680And that's important because there are secular and atheist scholars who attempt to argue that certain of Paul's epistles were not written by him.
00:12:52.800The pastoral epistles, especially, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, they'll say, many secular and atheist scholars will say,
00:13:04.360well, those probably weren't written by Paul because it's a different style of writing and he appears to have, you know, changed his perspective on certain things.
00:13:15.740Those letters were clearly written by Paul as well.
00:13:18.140Well, so the secular scholars are wrong on that point.
00:13:21.380But the point is that 1 Corinthians, with 1 Corinthians, you have a text that even the most skeptical will admit was written by Paul himself,
00:14:22.300This is a statement of faith that he says was given to him and which he is passing on.
00:14:29.140Which means that by the time of this writing, in fact, by the time of his first visit to Corinth, so a few years earlier than that, this creed had already taken shape.
00:14:40.200It had taken shape very quickly, remarkably fast, actually.
00:14:46.840And it tells us some basic facts about Jesus, including that he was crucified, that he died, he was buried, he rose from the dead, and he appeared to 500 witnesses and then to the apostles.
00:14:59.700So I think that this, along with Paul's other letters, where he speaks about Jesus' death and resurrection frequently, they all offer, I think, very good evidence for the resurrection.
00:15:13.960But I think even more than that, Paul himself, his story, what he did, his own biography is even more compelling evidence.
00:15:28.200Because we know that he was a very strict Jew who originally considered the Christians to be heretics.
00:15:35.880He helped to round them up and execute them, but something happened.
00:15:39.920Something quite sudden occurred, and then he changed.
00:15:42.660There was a change in him, and he went from a persecutor of the followers of Christ to persecuted in the name of Christ.
00:15:52.480Now, how do we account for that as a skeptic?
00:15:57.180If you're a skeptic, how do you account for that?
00:15:59.960I haven't really heard an even halfway convincing argument.
00:16:04.100The best you can do to try to explain, you've got this guy, persecutor of Christians, strict, observant Jew, who comes to believe that Jesus rose from the dead,
00:16:18.640and then goes and travels around the region preaching this, putting his life in jeopardy, writing these letters.
00:16:23.440How do you explain that if the resurrection never occurred?
00:16:28.920The best you can do, I think, your only recourse, really, is to claim that Paul was just a madman, that he was a lunatic.
00:16:35.700That he had a hallucination on the road to Damascus, and then he went insane, and he decided to travel all around the region preaching gibberish.
00:16:45.400Now, the problem with that is that we have the epistles.
00:22:13.260And, you know, these days, in terms of when they were written, these days, Markan priority is popular.
00:22:21.260That is that many scholars, especially secular ones, say that Mark was written first, and then Matthew and Luke, and then John last of all.
00:22:27.780There does seem to be unanimous consensus across the centuries, starting very early on, that John went last, and that he wrote his Gospel when he was an old man.
00:23:03.880So, it's convenient for Mark to go first, in the mind of a skeptic, because the synoptics, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, are called synoptics because they're so very similar.
00:23:14.840And it's clear that somebody went first, and then the others used that first one as a source, though not their only source.
00:23:22.780So, if Matthew used Mark as a source, though Matthew was an eyewitness and Mark wasn't,
00:23:28.420then the atheist thinks he can argue, well, Matthew must not have been an eyewitness, because what kind of eyewitness would use a non-eyewitness as a source?
00:23:36.780Well, this isn't really a problem at all.
00:23:39.280First of all, there's a very good chance that Matthew did go first, you know, that he was the first Gospel.
00:23:44.380The earliest traditions say so, which is a pretty strong reason to believe it.
00:23:48.580These are the people that were, you know, around within a century or so of the Gospels being written.
00:23:54.120They all believe that Matthew went first.
00:23:55.460But anyway, Mark was a companion of Peter.
00:24:00.600Peter was in a privileged position as an apostle.
00:24:03.860And we know that he saw things, and he was likely told things that the others weren't.
00:24:07.700He was closer to Jesus than Matthew was.
00:24:11.740So, if Mark did go first, and he got his information from Peter,
00:24:15.200it makes sense that Matthew, though he was a disciple of Jesus as well, would refer back to Peter through Mark.
00:24:20.000In any case, whatever the order, we have, within a few decades of Christ's death,
00:24:25.160four Gospels that attest to Christ's life and work and death and resurrection.
00:24:34.500They are written in biographical fashion, according to how biographies were written back in those days.
00:24:39.080They weren't written like modern biographies, but they are written like ancient biographies.
00:24:44.580And they also lack the kind of dramatic detail and embellishment that you would expect if these were made-up stories.
00:24:51.480In fact, we do also have very ancient, made-up stories about Jesus, so we know what those look like.
00:25:00.480If you go to the Apocryphal Gospels, the so-called Gospels of Peter, Judas, Thomas, Mary,
00:25:06.000which were made-up, fabricated forgeries,
00:25:11.200and these do contain wild and obviously fabricated stories.
00:25:15.100I think the Gospel of Thomas has a story about, for instance, about the child Jesus murdering another child in the village when he was a boy.
00:25:24.320I'm not sure why you would want to have Jesus doing that, but that's in the, I believe it's the Gospel of Thomas has that.
00:25:31.140But the church uniformly rejected the Apocryphal Gospels, and that's important.
00:25:37.440The church did not just accept any Jesus material it could get its hands on.
00:25:42.060It's not like it had no discerning process.
00:25:45.700It subjected these writings to rigorous analysis and would only accept the ones that were authentic,
00:25:51.400even if the authentic ones were, frankly, a bit more boring than the fake ones.
00:25:58.360So the Gospels are very compelling evidence,
00:26:02.500and we should also note here that, although we don't have the originals of any of these documents,
00:26:07.800we do have a ton of early manuscripts,