An Empty Tomb

The 5th historical fact that needs explaining is that

The tomb was empty.

Unlike the other facts we have discussed, this one is not accepted by virtually all scholars. Nonetheless, there is powerful evidence for it, and about 75% of the scholars who study the subject accept it. Habermas and Licona lay out three sets of evidence. The first is what they call the Jerusalem factor. By this is meant that the preaching of the resurrection of Jesus took place immediately after the events in the same area where the events occurred. Those who desired to deny the claim of Jesus' resurrection--and there were many, both among the Jews and the Romans--needed only to provide a corpse, the verifiable proof that Jesus was still dead. There is no evidence that this was ever done. Habermas and Licona...

We certainly would expect to have heard from Celsus, the second-century critic of Christianity, if Jesus' corpse had been produced. When he wrote against Jesus' resurrection, it would have been to his advantage to include this damaging information, had it been available. In short, if a body of any sort was discovered in the tomb, the Christian message of an empty sepulcher would have been falsified. Anything but an empty tomb would have been devastating to the Resurrection account.

A second set of evidence for the empty tomb is enemy attestation. Several independent sources attest to the fact that early critics of the Resurrection accused the disciples of stealing Jesus' body. If the body were still in the tomb, there would have been no need to account for its absence.

When the boy tells his teacher that the dog ate his homework, this is an indirect admission that his homework is unavailable for assessment. Likewise, the earliest Jewish claim reported regarding Jesus' resurrection was to accuse the disciples of stealing the body, an indirect admission that the body was unavailable for public display. This is the only early opposing theory we know of that was offered by Jesus' enemies.

A third set of evidence for the empty tomb is the testimony of women. In those days, women were seen as untrustworthy witnesses, and their testimony was not even admissible in legal cases. If the empty tomb story were fabricated by the early Christians, it would not serve their case--in such a culture--to have women as the first and most frequent witnesses to the fact. Yet all four gospel accounts have it that way, and two gospels never have men at the empty tomb. The best explanation for this quirk in the accounts is that this is what actually occurred, that the gospels record no more nor less than what truly happened.

For all these reasons,

The empty tomb is, therefore, well evidenced for historical certainty. Former Oxford University church historian William Wand writes, "All the strictly historical evidence we have is in favor of [the empty tomb], and those scholars who reject it ought to recognize that they do so on some other ground than that of scientific history." (Wand, 1972, Christianity: A Historical Religion?)

So we have five historical facts, each supported by multiple independent attestations and each accepted by most scholars who study the issue (and the first four facts by virtually all such scholars). Together, these facts provide powerful support for the bodily resurrection of Jesus. And--here's the main point of the 'minimal facts' argument--any alternate theory must adequately account for each and all of these. And, as the remaining chapters of Habermas and Licona's book demonstrates, they do not. No explanation yet produced accounts for these five historical facts as does the Christian one--that Jesus really did rise from the dead. And the implications are rather obvious:

If the tomb was empty because Jesus rose from the dead, then God exists and eternal life is both possible and available.

Good news indeed, even 2,000 years later.

(All quotes from Habermas and Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus)

Skeptic, Enemy Attest Resurrection

I'm sharing the 'minimal facts' argument for the actual bodily resurrection of Jesus as found in Habermas and Licona's book. We've already discussed two historical facts, each with multiple lines of evidence supporting them and each enjoying the agreement of virtually all scholars that study the issue. These were:

1) Jesus of Nazareth was executed by Roman cucifixion

and

2) His disciples claimed--and believed--that he had appeared to them bodily risen from the dead.

Today, I'll share two more historical facts. These are:

3) Saul of Tarsus (better known as the apostle Paul), a persecutor of early Chistians, became a follower of Jesus after he experienced what he thought was a resurrection appearance,

and

4) James, Jesus' brother and a skeptic throughout Jesus' life, believed that he, too, saw the risen Jesus and subsequently became a leader of the church at Jerusalem.

Again, these two facts enjoy a multiplicity of independent attestations and are accepted by virtually all scholars.

Regarding Paul's conversion from enemy to follower, the evidence includes Paul's own testimony, that of Luke, and that of the church in Galatia. Regarding his believing in the resurrection to the point of being willing to suffer and experience martyrdom, these same three witnesses are augmented by the testimony of Clement of Rome, Polycarp, Tertullian, Dionysius of Corinth and Origen (the latter two preserved in Eusebius).

There is less information available to us regarding James' life before the death of Jesus. Nonetheless, the gospels report that Jesus' brothers didn't believe his message, the early creed imbedded in I Corinthians 15:3-8 reports the appearance of the risen Jesus to James, and Paul and Luke identify this same James as a leader in the early church. There is independent evidence as well for James' martyrdom, these including Josephus, Hegesippus, and Clement of Alexandria. It is true that the appearance of the risen Jesus to James is only recorded once (in the I Cor. passage of the New Testament), but Habermas and Licona argue that it enjoys early church tradition and acceptance of the vast majority of modern scholars...

Further, critical scholar Reginald Fuller explains that [the evidence] is sufficient. Even without it, "we should have to invent" such an appearance in order to account for two things: James' conversion from skepticism and his elevation to the pastorate of the church in Jerusalem, the center of ancient Christianity.

Here are 4 historical facts, then, that need explaining. Belief that Jesus appeared alive after being horribly crucified was taught by his disciples and held to even in the face of the threat of persecution and death. And while some skeptics argue that it was their collective desire that led them to hallucinate a risen friend, that theory cannot account for the conversion and belief of Paul, an enemy, or James, a skeptic.

But there's one more such historical fact to be addressed... in the next post.

Why is Christianity True?

Beginning today, my fellow apologist Brian Auten is doing a series in which apologists from across the web weigh in on the question "Why is Christianity True?" It includes audio presentations of each of our essays and links to the authors' blog sites. A new essay will be published each week day throughout April, and my contribution is due to be posted on Wednesday, April 7.

Go to apologetics315 to check out today's installment, which includes both a foreword and an introduction. Then be sure to check out Brian's site each weekday for another reason for concluding that Christianity is true.


(Back to the "minimal facts" argument in the next post)

The Disciples Believed

So, I'm sharing the 'minimal facts' argument taken from Habermas and Licona's The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. The first historical fact, discussed in the last post, is that Jesus was executed by Roman crucifixion. Here's the second fact:

Jesus' close followers--his disciples--claimed and believed that he rose bodily from the dead and appeared to them.

Again, this is a fact of history, one that enjoys multiple independent sources of attestation and that, as a result, is accepted by virtually all scholars who study the issue. Habermas and Licona identify nine independent sources attesting to the statement that the disciples claimed from the very beginning that Jesus rose from the dead. These sources fall into three categories--the testimony of Paul, the testimony of oral tradition, and the testimony of written documents.

But not only is it historical fact that the disciples claimed resurrection--it is also historical fact that they believed it, that they truly thought that Jesus had appeared to them following his crucifixion. Habermas and Licona identify seven independent sources that attest to the willingness of the disciples to suffer persecution and even martyrdom rather than deny the resurrection. Habermas conducted a study of more than 1,400 sources published since 1975 about the resurrection, and concluded

perhaps no fact is more widely recognized than that early Christian believers had real experiences that they thought were appearances of the risen Jesus. A critic may claim that what they saw were hallucinations or visions, but he does not deny that they actually experienced something.

As just one example, the atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Ludemann writes,

It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus' death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.

So we now have two historical facts upon which our argument builds: 1) Jesus died by Roman crucifixion, and 2) His disciples believed that he rose from the dead and appeared to them.

Jesus was Crucified

So in the run-up to Easter, I'm sharing the "minimal-facts" argument for the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. It comes from Gary Habermas, and the version I'm using this week comes from the book he coauthored with Michael Licona titled The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus. It does not depend upon proving the reliability of the Bible, but instead uses only historical facts, events that virtually all scholars agree occurred.* Here's how Habermas and Licona put it:

This approach considers only those data that are so strongly attested historically that they are granted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject, even the rather skeptical ones... Most facts we use meet two criteria: They are well evidenced and nearly every scholar accepts them.

Seems reasonable, eh? So here's the first fact:

Jesus of Nazareth died by Roman crucifixion.

This historical event enjoys plenty of attestation, so much so that John Dominic Crossan, who has made a name for himself by denying the claims of Christianity, can write

That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.

The crucifixion of Jesus is, of course, recorded in all four gospels. Non-biblical sources that confirm this as an historical event include the Jewish historian Josephus, the Greek Lucian, and Mara Bar-Serapion.

The Talmud includes the statement that "on the eve of Passover Yeshu was hanged" (a Jewish way of referring to crucifixion). And while the Talmud was written long enough after the fact as to rely upon other earlier sources, no early Jewish source denies Jesus' existence, his working of miracles, or his death by crucifixion.

The Roman historian Tacitus renders it this way:

Nero fastened the guilt [for Rome's burning] and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.

So the first historical event that goes into this argument is that Jesus died by crucifixion. Interestingly, the centrality of this event to all of human history is attested to by the language we use. When we seek to describe something as of central importance, we use words like "crucial" and "crux," which, as you might guess, take their etymology from the same word as "crucifixion," that is, the Latin word for torture. The life and death of Jesus of Nazareth are so central and important that the Western world sets its calendars by them. And so to say that the crucufixion--the atoning death of Jesus on a Roman cross--is the crux of all human history (or the most crucial event in history) is, in a very real way, to be guilty of redundancy.

In the next post, I'll share the second historical fact in the "minimal facts" argument.





* Complete unanimity is not a reasonable goal in historical research; you can find folks today who seriously insist that things like the Holocaust or mankind walking on the moon never actually happened.

Argument for the Resurrection

I spend a good deal of time chatting with Christians and Christian apologists who are scientists or science-minded. I'm talking astronomers, physicists, geologists, and biologists who recognize that all of the most significant scientific discoveries of the last 100 years support the Christian understanding of the world in which we live. But some of these folks spend so much of their time making a case for the truth of Christianity from science that they are less well-versed on some of the other--historical and philosophical--arguments for Christianity. For example, one of my science apologist friends recently asked,

Doesn't any argument for the historicity of the Resurrection of Jesus depend upon the reliability of the Bible?

It is true, of course, that a very compelling argument can be made that way. It's a somewhat long argument, relying upon the internal cohesion of Scripture, fulfillment of prophecy in Scripture, the historical accuracy of the Bible, the amazing scientific credibility of early books of the Bible (written thousands of years ago, validated by the latest modern science), and such. Once it can be established that the Bible is reliable, the argument can then be made that the Resurrection occurred.

But my friend was wrong--there are compelling arguments for the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth that do not depend upon first demonstrating that the Bible is reliable (much less inerrant). My favorite is known as the 'minimal facts' argument, and is put forth by Gary Habermas (in his book The Risen Jesus and Future Hope and in another he wrote with Mike Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus).

As a run-up to Easter, I'll share the 'minimal facts' argument here in a series of posts.

The Conservative Nature of Natural Selection

In the class on the History and Philosophy of Atheism I'm taking this semester at Kilns College, I had the opportunity last night to guest-lecture on naturalism and evolution. I mentioned that we now know--150 years after Darwin--that the mechanism of natural selection that he endowed with incredible creative potential instead acts only in conservative and degenerative ways. Time, however, prevented me from sharing one of my favorite illustrations of this, the "green toothpick" illustration. So I'll share it here.

I took an undergraduate biology class from Dr. M.D. "Mad Dog" Johnson, in which he tried to demonstrate natural selection in action. We went outside to a lush, uncut, well-fertilized portion of the campus lawn, where we scattered a known number of toothpicks of different colors--red, yellow, blue, and green. We, the students, then acted as predators--the agents of natural selection--foraging through that patch of lawn capturing as many toothpicks as we could find. As I recall, we found all of the yellow and red toothpicks, most of the blue ones, and almost none of the green, so well-camouflaged were they among the long blades of grass. The lesson was that natural selection works just so on populations of living things.

There are at least a couple of serious problems with this experiment as an illustration of natural selection at work. If--as is claimed--natural selection acting on genetic variation is the mechanism by which evolutionary advance is made, what we demonstrated would seem to be just the opposite. Our toothpick population began with a much higher genetic diversity than it had by the end. The population, which now consists almost entirely of green toothpicks, would seem to be much less able to adapt to a changing environment than when it contained the greater diversity of phenotypes. It has ever since seemed to me that we demonstrated that natural selection has a far greater capacity to tend toward extinction than to adaptation and advance.

Another problem with this illustration is just as important. Let us be unreasonably generous and grant that the resulting population of toothpicks is somehow better prepared to adapt to some future environmental change. That is, let us say--for the sake of argument--that what we witnessed was an instance of microevolution. Microevolution refers to the idea that species (and populations and such) are not static, but change over time in both their phenotype and genotype (their form and the genetic basis for that form, respectively).

That microevolution occurs is a well-accepted, non-controversial idea. But granting that the population of green toothpicks is a good example of something having undergone microevolution provides no support for the claim of neo-Darwinism, which is that this same mechanism--natural selection acting upon genetic variation (mutation)--can account for macroevolution. In other words, the diversity of all life is explainable by this sort of natural selection acting over vast time scales. In the specific case of the toothpick illustration, we are to believe that if we waited long enough (as the toothpicks bred generation after generation), continued natural selection (predation on those toothpicks most easily spotted) would eventually cause those toothpicks to give rise to species of dental floss, of toothbrushes, and even, eventually, of electric toothbrushes, all without the input of any sort of intelligence or designer.

The fossil record shows that there have existed--over the course of Earth's history--different life forms. But macroevolutionary theory, as an explanation for how that record came to be, has yet to be substantiated by any evidence. Rare cases of microevolution have been documented, and then we are asked to make the unreasonable and unsupported extrapolation that such minor changes can be invoked to explain all of the advancing complexity witnessed in the fossil record. For me, Professor Johnson's toothpick demonstration has always served as a reminder of the absurdity of the grander claims of evolutionists.



(A version of this post originally appeared on 26 Feb 2007.)

Spring's Near

The annual return of spring is a gradual development marked by innumerable minor events, changes in the behavior of wildlife, and (perhaps more obvious) alterations in the vegetation (greening of the grass, the appearance of the first crocus). Being more of a zoologist than botanist, I'm more attuned to the faunal than the floral changes, and yet invariably I wrestle with identifying which changes to imbue with the greatest significance.

This year, for example, I have long been aware of increasing territoriality and 'breediness' among some of the raptors that I spend time watching. Golden Eagles, Prairie Falcons, and Northern Harriers began back in January the undulating flight displays that serve to both establish their claim on a breeding locale and advertise their readiness to begin the courtship process. But though those January days were clear and blue and beginnning to lengthen, it still most definitely felt like there was a good bit of winter still to be endured.

Not long ago, the grassland birds (especially up in the Columbia Plateau) began to dramatically alter their behavior. The Horned Larks, which had been covorting for long months in large flocks, have begun pairing up, and they will, accordingly, be one of the first songbirds to nest (and some of them will successfully produce 3 broods this year). In Western Meadowlarks, the behavioral change is even more significant. They have also flocked up for the winter, but throughout that season remained almost unobserved, staying on the ground, silent, flying seldom, and not even bothering to post a sentinel. In recent weeks, they've suddenly 'popped up,' with males especially (though you can't tell the gender by looking at them) now spending most of their day perched high and singing lustily.

The medium-sized ground squirrels (Washington, Belding's, Merriam's, and such) have--within the past week or ten days--ended their long period of estivation-followed-by-hibernation that began last July as the shrub-steppe and grassland habitats they occupied dried up and quit producing the grasses and forbs on which they feed. Their reemergence causes movements of hawks and even eagles, and the annual population levels of these squirrels has a significant effect on the productivity of some raptors, notably Ferruginous Hawks and Prairie Falcons.

There are many spring milestones yet to occur--the arrival of the first Osprey (from wintering grounds in southern Mexico, Central America, and northern South America), the first Turkey Vulture, and the first Western Kingbird (to name a few). But yesterday I experienced another notable spring first, one that reminds me of the inevitable progression of the seasons. I saw my first nesting Great-horned Owl of the year, a female in Morrow County sitting on eggs on a stick-nest (originally built by Red-tailed Hawks). As a member of one of the first bird species to nest each year, this female will undoubtedly sit tight through many days of winter-like weather still to come, but by the time her young are beginning to flex their flight muscles, spring will be back in all its cacophanous, riotous glory.

Apologetics Conference Here

The second annual Bend (Oregon) area Apologetics Conference is less than a week away. Go here to check out a Vimeo promotional of the event. The theme of the conference is The Reliability of the New Testament, and we have two of the leading New Testament scholars coming to give plenary talks.

I'll be speaking during two of the breakout seesions, once on "Biblical Miracles in a Modern Scientific Age" and once on "A New Testament Textual Criticism Primer." I hope to see you there.

Lucretius and Naturalism

Did I mention that I'm in a class on the History and Philosophy of Atheism (at Kilns College)? Well, I am, and today I want to post about the first reading. Our text for the course is The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. These essential readings are selected and introduced by New Atheist Christopher Hitchens, and promise to provide good fodder for any Christian apologist-blogger. In today's post, I'll identify two sets of problems, one in the reading (by Lucretius) and one in Hitchens' introduction to it.

Lucretius was an ancient Greek naturalist; he lived in the early 1st century BC and (following Leucippus) promoted atomism, the view that in our day would be called naturalism. He rejected the pantheism of the Greek and Roman worlds of his day, pointing out that what those pagans credited to the acts of the gods could be better explained as the result of natural laws.

I find Hitchens' inclusion of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura intriguing for at least three reasons.

First, the entire project of the ancient atomists depended upon our universe being infinite as regards both space and time, a claim that Lucretius is at pains to make (though not to support). This idea was likewise foundational to Darwin's 19th-century theory and remains (logically) foundational to modern atheism. Unfortunately--for Hitchens and his ilk (Richard Dawkins admits that his opponents have accused him of being stuck in 19th-century science and further admits that he doesn't know what they're talking about)--20th century science has convincingly refuted this foundational assumption. For most scientists, philosophers of science, and historians of science, the greatest discovery of the last 100 years was the recognition that all of the matter, energy, space, and time of the universe had a beginning a finite time ago. The universe began--it is finite with regard to both space and time. Lucretius and Epicurus were wrong on this basic score, as were Kant and Darwin. I am left wondering whether Hitchens and Dawkins fail to realize the implications (for metaphysical naturalism) or are simply in denial of the evidence.

Second, Lucretius also makes clear that living things reproduce after their kind, that there is a continuity of reproduction. This idea--known to the ancient Greeks--passed out of knowledge in the Western world, and throughout the Middle Ages, educated people believed (what Homer, writing in the 8th century BC, knew to be false) that life was spontaneously generated (as maggots from rotten meat). Some would argue that modern biology began when Francesco Redi disproved spontaneous generation (at least with regard to worms in meat). Geneticist Giuseppi Sermonti, discussing the later refutation of spontaneous generation by Pasteur (with regard to bacteria), writes

Biology has advanced in status with every new refutation of the spontaneous generation thesis.

And yet, modern disciples of Darwin (like Hitchens and Dawkins) continue--contrary to all the evidence and reason--to steadfastly maintain the spontaneous generation of life from non-life.

The third problem has to do with the history of science, and seems to betray a further weakness in Hitchens' understanding. I take it that Hitchens approves of Lucretius' essay as an ancient articulation of the superiority of a reasoned appeal to natural law over a superstitious appeal to acts of the gods. But while Lucretius was right in this particular, this stands as an argument against polytheism and pantheism, but not against Christian monotheism. That is, if Hitchens' book is meant to be an argument for atheism as over against Christianity, then De Rerum Natura misses the point. More importantly, however, it was Christians--not atheists--who agreed with Lucretius, saw the world as following natural laws, and thus established (in the 16th and 17th centuries) modern science.

As glaring as are these problems in De Rerum Natura itself, there's an arguably bigger problem with Hitchens' introduction to it. Having established that Lucretius' atomism was a superior, more reasoned understanding of the world (than the religious superstitions of that day), he writes,

Atomism was viciously persecuted as heresy throughout the early Christian era, and only one printed manuscript of De Rerum Naturum survived the flames.

What is one to make of such a statement? Is it revisionist history foisted on us by someone for whom the ends (turning readers into unbelievers) justifies the means (making up history)? To be sure, atomism didn't carry the day, and the Greeks and Romans continued to worship their pantheons of gods. But there was no persecution of the ancient Greek naturalists. (Lucretius may have committed suicide, but if so it appears to be a direct consequence of his disbelief in an afterlife, and not because of any contemporary reaction against his views.) There is no evidence that atomist books were burned; the reason such books did not survive is because they were written on papyrus or animal skins, and the same fate faced every ancient writing regardless of its metaphysical claims.

But more importantly, why does Hitchens refer to the 'early Christian era' if not to wrongfully impugn Christians? Throughout the early Christian era, Christians were too busy being persecuted themselves to persecute others. They were themselves being burned at the stake and not burning obscure books about natural philosophy. Even when--much later in church history--Christians did turn their attention to the subjects of orthodoxy and heresy, the issues that captured their attention for several centuries had to do with the nature of the trinity and the deity/humanity of Christ, not what a minor sector of dead Greek poets had written.

Coming as it does in the introduction to the very first selection in his book, this statement by Hitchens raises a bright red flag. At best, it highlights either gross ignorance about or willing gullibility regarding the issues about which he writes. At worst, it stamps him at the outset as disingenuous or downright deceiving and his book as a skewed polemic rather than an honest search for truth.

rUFOs

This is the 3rd (and final) part of the answer to a question I received about extra-terrestrials. In the first part, I discussed how the latest evidence from astronomy and physics have demonstrated the extreme unlikelihood (on naturalistic terms) of even one planet in the universe supporting intelligent life. In the second part, I asserted that the laws of physics prohibit the travel of any hypothetical extra-terrestrial beings across the distances involved in reaching us from anywhere else in the universe. It remains in this post to address the issue of how to explain the UFO sightings and the tales of encounters with and even abductions by beings from outer space.

The majority of all alien encounters can be explained as tricks of lighting, as illusions, or as identifiable physical phenomena. But not all reports fit any of these categories, and researchers conclude that there remains a category of UFO sightings that are unexplainable by appealing to physical law. This category--dubbed rUFOs for 'residual UFOs'--is, of course, the most interesting type.

This being the case, a good deal of research has been centered on rUFOs, and such research is made easy by the very wealth of available information and evidence. If you're at all interested in the findings of such research, I can do no better than recommend a comprehensive treatment of the issue (which remains, nonetheless, an easy read), Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men. But here, in a nutshell, is what can be known about rUFOs.

rUFOs are capable of producing physical effects but are not themselves physical. The physical effects produced by them include physical trauma (to soil, plants, animals, humans, and machines). Physical symptoms most commonly reported by humans who claim to have seen rUfOs include nausea, headache, blindness, paralysis, numbness, and recurring nightmares. Other observers have experienced serious injury or even death.

But while causing these and other physical effects, rUFOs are not themselves physical. They defy well-known laws of physics, they leave behind no physical artifacts (even when they have crashed to earth), they disintegrate and reintegrate, and make physically impossible turns and stops. Importantly, they are not seen most often by people who spend most of the night hours outside or watching the skies, and they appear most often to single individuals or very small groups, at 3:00 am (more often than earlier or later), and in rural rather than populated settings.

In short, rUFOs are real, but they are not physical. And to the modern scientific naturalist, this is nonsensical. But (as I have been at great pains to express in numerous other posts) scientific naturalism does not itself make adequate sense of the real world in which we live, and so we may reasonably continue this discussion.

Many scientists who have studied this phenomenon have come to the same conclusion, that rUFOs are demonic in nature. This conclusion is supported by a number of facts, including the following... They appear to a select few, and make repeat visits to the same individuals; they appear to be alive; they cause disturbing emotions and bodily and psychological harm; and they deceive their human contacts. Interestingly, throughout history, rUFOs have stayed just ahead of human technology in their appearance and claims, though these claims are clearly false to scientists of that day or of the next generation. Most importantly, those involved in encountering rUFOs invariably have a link in their lives to occult phenomena (participating in seances, astrology, ouija boards, channeling, and such).

The connection between rUFOs and occultism is especially clear with regard to encounters of the fourth and fifth kinds--abductions and contacts. Abduction is generally a negative experience ("ya think?"), with abductees suffering long-term emotional and psychological trauma, and often seeking professional therapy.

Contactees are those who claim to serve as human mouthpieces for alien 'masters' whom they perceive as wise and benificent. The most extreme and charismatic of these contactees become the founders of UFO cults, new religions that mix occult practices and UFOlogy. Some of the most famous of these are the Raelians and Heaven's Gate, the latter of which committed mass suicide in 1997 in order to catch a ride with the alien spaceship they believed was traveling with the Hale-Bopp comet.

With regard to contactees and their cults, researcher John Saliba writes,

Many UFO groups have borrowed heavily from both spiritualism and Theosophy. They have incorporated in their ideology the concepts of cosmic wisdom and cosmic masters who exist on other planets. Their leaders often channel, or communicate with, these masters through some psychic means (such as telepathy) or by entering into a trance-like state.*

So there you have it. If extra-terrestrials existed, they would face insurmountable barriers--based in the laws of physics--to making contact with us. But modern astronomy and physics have demonstrated that Earth is uniquely designed for supporting intelligent life, and that it is astronomically unlikely that any other intelligent life exists in the entire universe. And those UFO sightings that cannot be explained by appealing to identifiable physical phenomena invariably involve people with a link to occult practices in their lives.

rUFOs are neither more nor less than demonic manifestations to those who have willingly opened their lives to such influences.


* Saliba, J.A. "Religious Dimensions of UFO Phenomena" in Gods have Landed. Cited in Ross, H, K. Samples, and M. Clark, Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men.

On Space Travel

In the last post, we saw that from a scientific perspective, the odds are astronomic against there being even one life-support planet in this universe without supernatural design.* In this post, I will nonetheless pretend that intelligent life might exist out there, and discuss the difficulties in our ever encountering it.

For ET-believers like Carl Sagan, the sheer number of stars suggests that there are many civilizations out there, some of them more intelligent than we, and some of them much older and farther along (technologically) than we. It is these assumptions that for such believers justify scouring space for their communications (as in the SETI Project).

But realistically there are fatal problems to any hypothetical advanced civilization in physically contacting us. And these problems have nothing to do with level of technology (as is generally assumed), and everything to do with the physical laws of the universe.

As is discussed in much more depth in the book Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men, there are physical limits to space travel speeds that make crossing the distances between stars in our universe physically impossible (or, at least, an endeavor necessarily spanning the lifetimes of many generations of the ETs in question). I know this is hard to hear for those of us raised on Star Trek and Star Wars, but I was asked here for scientific thoughts, not fictional stories.

Moreover, as astronomers continue to look for potential life-support planets outside our solar system, they are systematically eliminating all systems within any remotely reasonable distance from Earth.

So, the latest scientific discoveries have demonstrated the extreme unlikelihood of life anywhere else in the universe. In addition, the physics of the universe are such that travel across space is prohibitive for even a hypothetical advanced being. All of this, then, begs the question

What of all the sightings--of UFOs and ETs--and reports of actual encounters with and abductions by aliens?

I'll focus on that question in the next post.


*If God made other life-support planets and then created life on them, He has chosen not to reveal that to us. Part of C.S. Lewis' motivation in writing his Space Trilogy was to show that extra-terrestrial life would not be inconsistent with Christianity.

Extra-terrestrials

I had a question texted in while I was handling Q&A at Redux last Sunday. It read,

What are your thoughts on Aliens, scientifically and scripturally?

I'm going to assume that the questioner had in mind extra-terrestrials, as opposed to immigrants with or without legal standing. (I have thoughts about that, too, but will save those for another time.)

I guess this question encompasses several others. Is there intelligent life on other planets? If so, can it contact us? If so, has it? If not, what do we make of the reported UFO sightings and even those of actual encounters, including claims of having been inside of alien spaceships?

Let me begin my answer with a physics/astronomy tutorial. Some of the most fascinating (and relevant) research of the past several decades can be summed up in the idea known as the 'anthropic principle.' It was not all that long ago that astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan told millions of TV viewers as often as he could that there were probably billions of planets out there capable of supporting advanced life. And to generations of Americans who grew up with Star Trek, and then Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, Star Trek the Next Generation, and such, this idea of a universe teeming with life seemed to resonate.

But a whole lot of better science has since told us that it's just not so. (This research was going on in Sagan's day, but by that period of his life, his metaphysical and scientific views had formed; his beliefs took on a religious fervor, and he was no longer open to new research developments. Sagan is not alone among scientists who become close-minded later in life.)

For the past 3 decades and more, astronomers and physicists have discovered that the universe itself, our galaxy, and our solar system are incredibly fine-tuned to make human life on Earth possible. That is, the characteristics and measurements of the physical constants of our universe, the nature and age of our galaxy, the position within our galaxy of our sun, and everything about our solar system fall within extremely narrow ranges (among the large theoretical ranges) that allow for life on just a single planet, this one. The list of such fine-tuned characteristics is now nearly 200, but still the best place I know for a partial list is the book by astronomer Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos.

Combining all of these characteristics and their improbabilities yields a single likelihood--a one-in-a-[large number] chance of finding life anywhere in the universe. (I could insert that large number, but it grows weekly as new design characteristics are identified. Suffice it to say that...) The odds against there being even a single life support planet in the whole universe are astronomical, and this takes into account the fact that so impressed Sagan, that there are billions and billions of stars and galaxies out there. Even so, it is beyond the realm of statistical likelihood that even one planet contains life.*

So the first answer is that it is extremely unlikely that any other life support planets exist, that indeed the ability of even our planet to support life requires a supernatural explanation. In the next post I'll pretend nonetheless that such life does exist, and explain why it is extremely improbable that such life would ever find us.


* This doesn't even address the problem of the origin of life, The anthropic principle has as its referrent the ability of the universe to support life, with the origin of life being an additional and independent problem.

Redux

A couple of months ago at my church, Antioch, we started a second service, which we call Redux. There is no sermon in Redux, but the meat of the service is a question-and-answer period. The point is to restore the conversation, to make it okay to ask questions and raise doubts and even criticisms. We do this confident in the knowledge that the Christian world- and life-view really do represent the uniquely accurate understanding of the world in which we live.

At any rate, I was given the opportunity last Sunday of fielding the questions, which spanned a range of subjects that included biblical inerrancy, the age of the earth and universe, the Sabbath, and anti-intellectualism in the church. You can go here to watch a vimeo of my answer to the latter question.

At Redux, we take questions directly from the audience, but we also allow folks to use text messaging to ask questions or offer challenges. At the end of the service, there were several text questions that I hadn't had time to address, so in the next post or two, I'll offer responses to one or more of those, including one about the existence of extra-terrestrials.

Apologetics Conference

We're hosting the second annual Apologetics Conference here in Bend, Oregon, February 19th and 20th. The theme is the reliability of the New Testament, and guest lecturers Craig Blomberg, Daniel Wallace, and Craig Hazen are coming in for this outstanding event. I'll be delivering a couple of talks during breakout sessions, one on the credibility of biblical miracles in the age of modern science and the other a New Testament textual criticism primer.

If there's any way you can make it to Bend for this Friday evening and all-day Saturday event, it will be well worth your while. Go here to register.

Transitional Forms

Not infrequently I come across the question, “What about the evidence for transitional forms? Hasn’t science proved that transitional forms exist, thereby validating Darwinian evolution?”

I understand why people might believe this to be the case. The claim that science has found transitional intermediates in the fossil record is taught in schools and universities throughout the land, and is made frequently and loudly by scientists and by the media, seemingly with the authority of evidence behind them.

But this claim has no basis in evidence, but instead is made solely because it is a fundamental and necessary prediction of Darwinian evolution.

To understand the issue, let’s take a big-picture, historical look at it. The real conflict is between two explanations for the diversity of life on Earth. The Darwinian view (or its modern synthesis, generally known as neo-Darwinism) is one. The other—the one held by all the biologists, anatomists, physiologists, and paleontologists of Darwin’s day, and the one Darwin intended to replace—I’ll call typology. Typology sought to explain—and did a very good job of explaining—the two most important characteristics of living things, which are their similarities and their differences. Biologists long knew that all life shared certain similarities, and that different groups of living things shared even more similarities with one another than with species outside their group. The typological explanation for the similarities among living things was (and is) that all things were created—and designed to fulfill their role—by the same Creator.*

But groups of living things exhibit stark differences as well. Indeed, the life forms (extant and extinct) identified by Darwin’s time fell rather neatly into groupings—“types”—that were separated, in many cases by rather large gaps. Thus, mammals all share characteristics that set them apart from birds or reptiles, and bats all share characteristics that set them apart from rodents. Typology said (and says) that gaps exist because the hypothetical things in-between (the half-reptile, half bird or the half-rodent, half bat) are nonsensical and non-functional.

Darwin, on the other hand, postulated that those gaps have been populated throughout life’s history by other living things—transitional intermediates. And on his view, there would have to have been not just one or two such forms bridging the apparent gaps, but that

the number of intermediate and transitional links, between all living and extinct species, must have been inconceivably great.

He knew that no such transitional forms were known at that time, but then paleontology was a relatively young discipline in Darwin’s day. He wrote that the fossil record was

the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory [and the reason] all the most eminent paleontologists… and all our greatest geologists… have unanimously, often vehemently, maintained the immutability of species.

So a prediction central to the verification of his theory was that further fossil digging would uncover a great many of these “inconceivably great” number of transitional forms.

For the ensuing 150 years, the history of paleontology has been primarily a search to find these forms predicted by Darwin, the evidence that would validate his theory. What has been the result? Scientists have uncovered hundreds of millions of new fossil forms. Unfortunately (for Darwin’s theory), they have invariably fallen into one of two categories—they have either fit into a type already known to science, or they have represented yet a new type, one not transitional to known types, but rather requiring yet another exceedingly vast number of transitional forms to link that type to other known ones.

Contrary to the educational and media misrepresentation, here’s the true situation as described by arguably the preeminent paleontologist of our generation. Harvard’s late Stephen Jay Gould called

the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record… the trade secret of paleontology.

His colleague, Niles Eldredge, concurred:

We paleontologists have said that the history of life supports [the story of gradual adaptive change], all the while really knowing that it does not.

Stephen Stanley, commenting on research from Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin—where a continuous record of deposits covering millions of years led paleontologists to expect evidence for transitional forms—wrote that

the fossil record does not convincingly document a single transition from one species to another.

So the central evidentially-based prediction made by Darwin has roundly failed. That it continues to be claimed today that science has documented transitional forms has nothing to do with evidence and everything to do with the centrality of these forms to the theory. It’s really nothing more than a group wish-fulfillment exercise on the part of those who want Darwinism to be true.


* I’ll discuss in one of the next posts why typology still does a better job than neo-Darwinism of explaining the similarities among living things.

The Creation Museum

I'm frequently asked--both by believers and unbelievers--about the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum that opened in May of 2007 across the river from where I grew up in Cincinnati. So I thought I'd share a post that I wrote back nearer that time. It included three apt quotes. The first, from an essay by Michael Patrick Leahy titled The Trouble with Fred and Wilma, specifically addresses the museum.

The trouble with the $27 million Creation Museum, which replaces the scientific method with word for word Christian Biblical literalist theology, is that it makes all Christians who don’t accept evolution look stupid. In doing so in such a publicly visible way it undermines the credibility of all Christians, especially those who are researching alternatives to Darwinian evolution using the tools of the scientific method. It also gives the growing movement of militant atheism, as exemplified by the works of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett, an easy opportunity to misrepresent all Christians as “irrational”. The mainstream media, including the Los Angeles Times itself, are only too happy to lend assistance to this misrepresentation.

Owned by the “Young Earth Creationist” organization Answers in Genesis, the Creation Museum claims that the universe, earth, and man are only 6,000 years old, and that dinosaurs co-existed with man. The premise worked well for the Flintstones cartoon show, but has zero credibility within the scientific community in general and the Christian scientific community in particular.

The rest of the essay is well worth reading. Leahy is a theistic evolutionist, and I hope my regular readers will by now recognize that I find extremely little evidential support for that position. Nonetheless, I agree with most of what Leahy writes in this article.

The second and third quotes, by Thomas Aquinas and Saint Augustine, respectively, were not written specifically about the Creation Museum (obviously), but I take Ham's ministry in general and the museum in particular to be perfect examples of what these church fathers had in mind. First, Aquinas...

The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Christian, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.

Now Augustine, from The Literal Meaning of Genesis...

Usually, even a new Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world...and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. [Be prepared for a good deal of this in the months to come with regard to the Museum.] The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?

The Star of Bethlehem

One of the questions that comes up at this time of year is "What was the star of Bethlehem?" That is, "How should we understand the phenomenon referred to in Matthew 2 as a 'star' that guided wise men out of the east to the place of the young Messiah?"

The modern scientific materialist has a couple of options. He may discount the account altogether, or he may seek some strictly natural explanation that explains the event and explains away the idea that it had anything to do with the appearance of God in human form.

We'll talk about strictly natural explanations in a moment (since it is an option available to the theist as well). But we can dismiss the materialist view itself, because it is an inaccurate understanding of the world in which we actually live. The term 'scientific materialist' frequently misleads folks; it is not a scientific view, one arrived at by consideration of the scientific evidence. Instead, it is a metaphysical view (a religious one), involving belief a priori (that is, 'before the evidence') that nature is the whole show and that there is no God.

But both the evidence and reason lead away from that view, confirming instead the Judeo-Christian understanding of the universe. To put it another way, scientific discoveries--and especially the biggest discoveries of the past century--powerfully confirm the metaphysical claims contained in the Bible, many of which anticipated those dicoveries by thousands of years.

This Bible--unique among the world's holy books in this scientific accuracy--tells us several important things. Besides the fact of the existence of a Creator/Sustainer that is transcendent to (outside of the time and space of) the creation, Scripture tells us to study the creation itself to learn about that God. And both that study of the creation and the Scriptures themselves tell us that God is not merely transcendent but also immanent. By immanence is meant that He actual enters in to, supernaturally intervenes in, that creation. Such supernatural intervention is usually given the term 'miracle,' and the star over Bethlehem is generally considered to fall into that category.

[By now, some of my readers are becoming exasperated by my taking the long way around to answer the question. "Just tell me what you think the star was!" they are saying. But I'm hopelessly big-picture, and feel the need to put that answer in its larger context, and, well, it's my blog, so they'll just have to hang in there while I do that, or move on in their impatience.]

Now, given all that--that we live in a world accurately described by the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, one created and sustained by a transcendent yet immanent God--we can rightly go on to distinguish between two categories of miracles.

First, there are those miracles in which God uses strictly material things (that He previously created) and purely physical laws (that He already put into place). In such instances, the only supernatural aspect of the event is the fine-tuning, the timing and/or location, of it. The evidence (from science and Scripture) indicates that many of God's miracles have been of this type.

Generally, the question "What was the star of Bethlehem?" has in view this category of miracle. The person posing the question usually means, "Is there some well-documented physical phenomenon, some understood physical laws, that can be invoked to explain the account in Matthew 2?"

And for the person looking for such an answer, many options exist. This is in part because the Greek word aster, which is translated 'star' in the gospel account, has a broad range of potential meanings. That is, objects and events that in English are distinguished among by the terms star, planet, conjunction of planets, meteor, comet, and supernova all would be covered by the single Greek word translated star. And each of these things has been proposed as the explanation for the star of Bethlehem. Most can be quickly dismissed for a variety of reasons, each presenting problems even for the scant textual evidence that is given us.

In my opinion, the most likely explanation (from within this category of miracle) is that the star may have been a recurring nova. Novae are the explosions of stars as they die. And a small percentage of such explosions occur in stages, such that the initial explosion (resulting in a period of great brightness that may last weeks or even months) may be followed (after a period of dimness) by a second explosion. Such an event could be reconciled with the star seen (according to Matthew 2) in the east, and later as the wise men neared Bethlehem.

But there's a second category of miracle that should be mentioned. This category encompasses those cases where God does not limit Himself to already-created material and established physical laws, instances where (as is His perogative) He actually suspends those laws for His good purposes.

Take, for example, the story of Jonah in the belly of the whale. There have been those Christian apologists who have sought to allay the incredibility of this miracle by finding similar, natural examples. They posit a baleen whale (the large species without teeth that filter krill and other tiny organisms from the water), and look for records of such a whale engulfing, say, a sea otter, which was subsequently released unharmed when the whale once again opened its jaws. I consider this approach misguided. It seems to miss the main point, which is that however much natural material was involved there was something very supernatural that went on.

Or take a more obvious example, the account of Yahweh speaking to the false prophet Balaam through the mouth of an ass. Is it clear that I would be wasting my time if I searched for a race of donkeys with a wider vocal repertoire than the ones with which we are familiar, in order to try to make this Old Testament account more palatable to folks in a modern scientific age? If we really take this account seriously, we acknowledge that in this one instance God suspended the natural laws that He put in place (those governing the vocal capacities of equines), and did something supernatural.

The same could easily be true of the star of Bethlehem. Perhaps the light guiding the shepherds cannot be understood as a natural phenomenon (even with supernatural timing) of this universe. It could be that God provided a supernatural, other-worldly light on this one occasion for His own purposes.

We may never be able to answer this question with any certainty, to avow that the star in question was a recurring nova (or some other natural event with miraculous timing and location) or, on the other hand, that it was almost certainly entirely supernatural. But while it is God Himself who gives us our native curiosity about such issues, the important thing is that we recognize and acknowledge that it is He who is sovereign over this world, and He who can intervene when and how He chooses, that it was He who, about 2000 years ago, made a way of reconciling the world to Himself through the Baby born at the other end of that star-guided journey.

Next Semester

The schedule of classes is out for the spring semester at Kilns College (where I teach in Bend, Oregon). There's a great lineup of courses being offered, and you can go here to check them out, and to register. I'm most excited about the History and Philosophy of Atheism course, which will be taught by Ken Wytsma (I'll guest lecture on the night on which we discuss science and atheism and then evolution and atheism).

Making Sense of the World

In my last series of posts (on the faulty analogy central to the arguments of New Atheists Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens), I mentioned in passing that atheism (in the form of scientific naturalism) does not provide a logical justification for doing science, whereas Christian theism does. I want in this post to flesh that out just a bit.

The fact of the matter is that modern science arose and flourished within a Christian understanding of the world. And this was not mere historical coincidence but precisely because Judeo-Christianity uniquely provides the set of assumptions that make science a worthwhile endeavor.

A short list of such assumptions includes... the existence of the universe, the order in the universe, the fact that the laws of mathematics apply to the universe, the fact that the laws of logic apply to the universe, the reliability of our senses in discovering the order in the universe, the reliability of human reasoning in drawing accurate conclusions about the universe, the necessity of honesty and integrity in conducting and reporting research...

Science depends upon these assumptions, and Christianity has a reasonable explanation for each and every one. Naturalism, not so much. In the case of most of these assumptions, scientific naturalism does not deny them, but accepts them as unexplained, unexplainable, brute (and fortuitous) facts. For others, naturalism would seem to fare even more poorly. As just one example, if naturalistic evolution is true, and human consciousness and reason are merely the purposeless results of undirected interactions of biochemicals, there seems no reason to accept that human reasoning should lead to meaningful and accurate conclusions about the world.

This problem has been recognized in recent years by a variety of thinkers from across the theological spectrum. Agnostic physicist Paul Davies, for example, wrote

People take it for granted that the physical world is both ordered and intelligible. The underlying order in nature—the laws of physics—are simply accepted as given, as brute facts. Nobody asks where they came from; at least not in polite company. However, even the most atheistic scientist accepts as an act of faith that the universe is not absurd, that there is a rational basis to physical existence manifested as law-like order in nature that is at least partly comprehensible to us. So science can proceed only if the scientist adopts an essentially theological worldview.

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga puts it this way:

Modern science was conceived, and born, and flourished in the matrix of Christian theism. Only liberal doses of self-deception and double-think, I believe, will permit it to flourish in the context of Darwinian naturalism.

Some of my readers will be familiar with a famous sentence of C.S. Lewis':

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

What some may not realize, however, is the context of this quote. It is the final statement of a paper titled "Is theology poetry?" (which can be found in the compilation of essays The Weight of Glory). And what Lewis is dealing with is exactly what I've been writing about, how scientific naturalism (what Lewis calls the "mythical cosmology derived from science") cannot explain things nearly so well as Christian theism can. So, although it's lengthy, here's the final paragraph of Lewis' argument:

I was taught at school, when I had done a sum, to "prove my answer." The proof or verification of my Christian answer to the cosmic sum is this. When I accept Theology I may find difficulties, at this point or that, in harmonising it with some particular truths which are imbedded in the mythical cosmology derived from science. But I can get in, or allow for, science as a whole. Granted that Reason is prior to matter and that the light of that primal Reason illuminates finite minds, I can understand how men should come, by observation and inference, to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology as a whole, then not only can I not fit in Christianity, but I cannot even fit in science. If minds are wholly dependent on brains, and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. And this is to me the final test. This is how I distinguish dreaming and waking. When I am awake I can, in some degree, account for and study my dream. The dragon that pursued me last night can be fitted into my waking world. I know that there are such things as dreams; I know that I had eaten an indigestible dinner; I know that a man of my reading might be expected to dream of dragons. But while in the nightmare I could not have fitted in my waking experience. The waking world is judged more real because it can thus contain the dreaming world; the dreaming world is judged less real because it cannot contain the waking one. For the same reason I am certain that in passing from the scientific points of view to the theological, I have passed from dream to waking. Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religions. The scientific point of view cannot fit in any of these things, not even science itself. I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.