Faith on Trial (13 page)

As to the third element of Greenleaf’s credibility test, we must analyze the “number of witnesses” and the “consistency” of the testimonies of the authors of the four Gospels. With respect to the nonconforming portions of the Gospels, they are all consistent as to material facts, and they all corroborate one another. For example, Greenleaf noted that the character of Jesus as portrayed by the four Gospel writers is perfectly consistent, which is particularly convincing given the unusual nature of Jesus.
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Additionally, Greenleaf has pointed out that, as one would ordinarily expect with truthful witnesses, the integrity of the testimony is confirmed by the fact that there is enough discrepancy among the Gospels to show that they were all independent narrators of those events.
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Many scholars have shown throughout the years that discrepancies between the details of the four Gospels are not sufficient to invalidate their testimony, and there are no contradictions on the fundamental points. Differences between the Gospel narratives can be harmonized.

Taking into consideration the so-called “synoptic problem” so far as the consistency test is concerned, evidence presented in chapter 4 has established that when it comes to reporting on the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, the testimony of each of the Gospels is independent of the others—they are not inconsistent; they are not identical, but they harmonize. The synoptic analysis often made by critics does not, therefore, diminish the corroborative value of the Gospels and, as we have seen, that is particularly true regarding the fact of the resurrection of Jesus. With respect to our particular issues—the truth of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus—though there are some minimal differences between the Gospels in the telling of those events, the differences are accounted for by the witnesses’ different perspectives.

The fourth element of the credibility test, comparing the “conformity of the testimony with experience,” requires us to consider the Gospels in light of the world as we know it today. In the eighteenth century when Greenleaf first addressed this issue, he stated that he believed that this element of the credibility test presented the more difficult problem under strict legal scrutiny because the resurrection of Jesus and the miracles related by the Gospels are not ordinary events that occur in our everyday experience. But in the last few decades new and sweeping discoveries in science support, rather than detract from, the Gospel testimonies’ depictions of extraordinary events. This is particularly true with regard to advances in astronomy and particle physics. Simon Greenleaf did not have the benefit of the modern scientific information available to us today.

Here is something to keep in mind: when weighing testimony against our own experience, the jury must be careful not to base judgments of events described in the Gospels merely upon direct personal knowledge. Instead, open your mind to inductive and deductive reasoning, without which there can be no advancement of knowledge. That is the reason the law permits us reasonably to infer other facts from what we do see and know or understand.

The scientific process relies on the same reasoning, and that is how it advances knowledge. For example, mathematical proofs are often based on propositions or axioms that are merely
assumed
to be true for the sake of studying the consequences. Following the protocol used in science, the jury should not reject evidence of a fact such as the resurrection merely because it requires an assumption based on the unknown. The interesting development of mathematical models that form the basis for new hypotheses in physics and chemistry as well as in mathematics would not be possible without the use of such assumptions. This is reasoning based on the unknown. We reason and infer conclusions from those assumptions. Gödel’s famous “incompleteness” theorem recognizes that certain systems of proof used to advance knowledge will always use such assumptions that are not susceptible to proof or are unknowable under the rules used by that system.
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In fact, the
process
of thinking is not yet understood. The British mathematician Roger Penrose has concluded that the insight required by mathematical reasoning and any other system of logic is intuitive and lies beyond mere computational, or formalized, rules.
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The basic point is that daily we accept things we do not understand. Today many scientists studying human consciousness have recognized that conscious activity and the ability to reason beyond the mere processing and computation of information transcends the physical ability of the brain. Even our ability to perceive and enjoy simple things such as the color red, or the smell of a rose, or happiness and love is not understood. Science does not explain how a physical system like the human brain can give rise to these types of conscious experiences. This nonphysical aspect of consciousness awareness, like the resurrection, still has no scientific explanation.
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Today it is common protocol for scientists to accept the existence of facts and circumstances without understanding the related cause. For example, on July 4, 2012, physicists around the world gathered to announce and celebrate the discovery of a long-sought subatomic particle called the “Higgs boson.” The elusive and invisible quantum particle was apprehended through circumstantial evidence based on mathematical models—by smashing protons at almost light speed in the Haldron Collider, an immense particle accelerator located in Geneva that runs underground beneath the borders of France and Switzerland. The appearance of the Higgs boson is believed by physicists to evidence a force field that gives mass to all ordinary matter in the universe, including us. If the discovery holds, scientists theorize that everything in the universe exists within this force field that is, metaphorically, like a bath of molasses which adds mass and weight to matter, such as things like particles, dust, and us as we pass through. Thus, based on the assumption that this force field exists, the Higgs boson has also mistakenly been called the “God particle” by some attempting to understand how the universe began—and as some believe, multiple other universes and shadowy new dimensions in time and space.
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But not so fast.

To step back for a moment, this celebrated new particle, the Higgs boson, rose from existing mass
assumed
from mathematical models to exist, a force field. And the Higgs field, itself being mass, must have come from something else because something cannot come from nothing. So we find ourselves returning full circle back to the big question: If the Higgs field exists, what was its first cause?

Simply put, the first cause of the universe, or of matter in the universe, from a scientific viewpoint is still unknown. Data gathered by NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anistropy Probe (WMAP) evidences that the universe, and all matter, energy, and time, as we know it, began at once from a singular point much smaller than the period at the end of this sentence. This event, known as the “Big Bang,” used to be described as an explosion. NASA has now determined, however, that the Big Bang should instead be thought of as a simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe in one instant of time.

In other words, the universe has no real center, like a ball, although the universe is not believed by scientists to be shaped round like a ball. But as the radius grows, the universe expands equally in all directions. And since the universe is currently expanding, the only known “edge” to space-time so far existed at the point of the beginning, referred to by scientists as the Big Bang.
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But science also acknowledges that what came before the Big Bang is still scientifically unknown, as is what is to come; these are the boundaries (or limits) scientists accept for space-time, and they are the boundaries at which the laws of science break down.
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Or, as NASA puts it, explaining Big Bang cosmology: “It is beyond the realm of the Big Bang Model to say what gave rise to the Big Bang.”
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Reason tells us that since something cannot come from nothing, every event must have a cause. Therefore, the
first cause
of the universe must have occurred outside the “edge” of matter, time, and space proclaimed by science. That cause, therefore, could not have been governed by, and would not be limited by, our known natural and scientific laws. For science, perhaps this first cause could be called, for now, the Great Unknown. The only alternative to this conclusion under current scientific understanding is to hypothesize that the creation event had no cause at all, a theory that is explored by scientists predisposed to question the foundation for religious belief but a hypothesis that is speculative at best.
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One thing is clear, however; from the point of view of science, the first cause of our universe is not yet understood.

Likewise, in the study of the origin of life, we have been willing to accept the existence of many fundamental physical facts without understanding the cause. No empirical scientific explanation for the origin of life has ever been published. Dr. Hubert P. Yockey, in a text written for researchers dealing with molecular evolution, used the science of information theory and coding theory in molecular biology to conclude that “the origin of life by chance in a primeval soup is impossible in probability in the same way that a perpetual motion machine is impossible in probability. . . . A practical person must conclude that life didn’t happen by chance.”
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In fact, Yockey has noted that there is absolutely no evidence independent of the existence of life even to support the hypothesis for a primeval soup with the building blocks of life, even though the existence of such a circumstance is the foundation for all origin of life research.
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The conclusion of a careful summary and analysis of the laboratory and theoretical research on the origins of life is that it is not likely that life on earth could have begun spontaneously by purely chemical and physical means and, in fact, such studies appear to have reached an impasse.
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The closest science has come to demonstrating how life could have originated by natural processes is the well-known Miller-Urey electrical sparking type of experiment in 1953 in which small quantities of amino acids were produced, along with tar. That is a long way from the creation of life. A particular set and structure of twenty amino acids are used by living cells to construct proteins, but proteins are only one of the building blocks that make up a bacterial cell (one of the smallest and simplest forms of life).
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After Miller’s death in 2007 his research team found some of the original samples from this experiment in vials and reanalyzed them. They claim to have found a wider variety of amino acids in the vials, but the work was not published by Miller. Doubt has again been cast on whether the primordial-soup conditions Miller used in his research ever actually existed on Earth.
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The Miller-Urey type of experiment is still typical of the best-published chemistry produced in any laboratory on the origin of life, but experts acknowledge it did not come close to achieving a living organism. In fact, these amino acids “no more resemble a bacterium than a small pile of real and nonsense words, each written on an individual scrap of paper, resembles the complete works of Shakespeare.”
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Twentieth-century “origin of life” research focused on evolution has recently taken a turn toward research on the creation of artificial life through cloning, replicating genes, and synthetic life forms. In 2010 scientists reported success in creating what they’ve called a new synthetic life form, a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesized gene. But the “new” life form was created by inserting a synthetic chemical gene into an
existing
live bacterium. In announcing this work in a publication in
Science
, the research team stated that the synthetic cell was “controlled by a genome assembled from chemically synthesized pieces of DNA” and was replicating.
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Attempts to create a new living organism under controlled laboratory conditions with the smallest set of genes (minimal genome) necessary for creating life are still a long way from creating even artificial life, however, and this work has also raised controversial ethical concerns among scientists.
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An interesting Policy Forum involving many of the scientists involved in this genetic research raised these questions. First, can anyone truly accept defining life merely in terms of DNA and assume that there is nothing in the world that is not physical? The jury should hold that question in mind until the end of the trial.

And second, as the Policy Forum put it: “Reducing life to genes has profound implications for several societal debates, including what constitutes human life and when life begins. . . . Likewise, a genetic definition of when life begins would have implications for the abortion debate.”
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Research on understanding microsystems—for example, the biological systems at the cellular level within living organisms such as the human vision system, the immune system, or the blood clotting system—shows that not only the origin but also the evolution of many of those systems cannot be explained by present scientific knowledge. In other words, these subcellular systems are “irreducibly complex”—that is, each part of the whole is completely dependent at all times on the existence of the hundreds of other parts in the system. For that reason their internal development cannot be explained by numerous, successive slight modifications.
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But our continuing point here is that lack of understanding of the unknown does not stop scientists from studying the systems.

Science is permeated with unknowables. In astrophysics scientists accept that things exist within our universe that cannot be perceived by ordinary sensory mechanisms. In fact, scientists currently accept that 95 percent of the mass in the universe is composed of cold, dark matter and dark energy that they don’t understand, that we cannot see or touch, and that can be measured only through circumstantial evidence.
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Additionally, scientists now routinely accept that primordial black holes exist in the universe, based solely on circumstantial evidence, deductions from principles such as the effect of gravity on light.
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A black hole is a region of space in which matter is so concentrated and the pull of its gravity is so powerful that nothing, not even light, can emerge from it; it has been described as a whirling vortex around an ultimate point of no return. It can only be detected through indirect evidence.
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