Gunning for God (28 page)

Luke here makes it obvious that the early Christians were not a credulous bunch, unaware of the laws of nature, and therefore prepared to believe any miraculous story, however absurd. They felt the difficulty in believing the story of such a miracle, just like anyone would today. If in the end they believed, it was because they were forced to by the sheer weight of the direct evidence presented to them, not through their ignorance of nature’s laws.

Similarly, in his account of the rise of Christianity, Luke shows us that the first opposition to the Christian message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ came not from atheists, but from the Sadducean High Priests in Judaism.
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They were highly religious men. They believed in God. They said their prayers and conducted the services in the temple. But that did not mean that the first time they heard the claim that Jesus had risen from the dead they believed it. They did not believe it; for they had embraced a worldview that denied the possibility of bodily resurrection of any one at all, let alone that of Jesus Christ.
²⁰

Indeed, they shared a widespread conviction. Historian Tom Wright says:

Ancient paganism contains all kinds of theories, but whenever resurrection is mentioned, the answer is a firm negative: we know that doesn’t happen. (This is worth stressing in today’s context. One sometimes hears it said or implied that prior to the rise of modern science people believed in all kinds of odd things like resurrection but that now, with two hundred years of scientific research on our side, we know that dead people stay dead. This is ridiculous. The evidence, and the conclusion, was massive and massively drawn in the ancient world as it is today.)
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To suppose, then, that Christianity was born in a pre-scientific, credulous, and ignorant world is simply false to the facts. The ancient world knew the law of nature as well as we do, that dead bodies do not get up out of graves. Christianity won its way by dint of the sheer weight of evidence that one man had actually risen from the dead.

Argument 2.
Now that we know the laws of nature, belief in miracles is impossible.

The idea that miracles are “violations” of the laws of nature involves another fallacy, which C. S. Lewis illustrated by the following analogy:

If this week I put a thousand pounds in the drawer of my desk, add two thousand next week and another thousand the week thereafter, the laws of arithmetic allow me to predict that the next time I come to my drawer, I shall find four thousand pounds. But suppose when I next open the drawer, I find only one thousand pounds, what shall I conclude? That the laws of arithmetic have been broken? Certainly not! I might more reasonably conclude that some thief has broken the laws of the State and stolen three thousand pounds out of my drawer. One thing it would be ludicrous to claim is that the laws of arithmetic make it impossible to believe in the existence of such a thief or the possibility of his intervention. On the contrary, it is the normal workings of those laws that have exposed the existence and activity of the thief.
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The analogy also helps point out that the scientific use of the word “law” is not the same as the legal use, where we often think of a law as constraining someone’s actions.
²³
There is no sense in which the laws of arithmetic constrain or pressurize the thief in our story! Newton’s law of gravitation tells me that if I drop an apple it will fall towards the centre of the earth. But that law does not prevent someone intervening, and catching the apple as it descends. In other words, the law predicts what will happen, provided there is no change in the conditions under which the experiment is conducted.

Thus, from the theistic perspective, the laws of nature predict what is bound to happen if God does not intervene; though, of course, it is no act of theft, if the Creator intervenes in his own creation. It is plainly fallacious to argue that the laws of nature make it impossible for us to believe in the existence of God and the possibility of his intervention in the universe. It would be like claiming that an understanding of the laws of the internal combustion engine makes it impossible to believe that the designer of a motor car, or one of his mechanics, could or would intervene and remove the cylinder head. Of course they could intervene. Moreover, this intervention would not destroy those laws. The very same laws that explained why the engine worked with the cylinder head on would now explain why it does not work with the head removed.

It is, therefore, inaccurate and misleading to say with Hume that miracles “violate” the laws of nature. Once more C. S. Lewis is very helpful:

If God annihilates or creates or deflects a unit of matter, He has created a new situation at that point. Immediately all nature domiciles this new situation, makes it at home in her realm, adapts all other events to it. It finds itself conforming to all the laws. If God creates a miraculous spermatozoon in the body of a virgin, it does not proceed to break any laws. The laws at once take over. Nature is ready. Pregnancy follows, according to all the normal laws, and nine months later a child is born.
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In this vein we could say that it is a law of nature that human beings do not rise again from the dead
by some natural mechanism
. But Christians do not claim that Christ rose from the dead by such a mechanism. They claim that he rose from the dead by supernatural power. By themselves, the laws of nature cannot rule out that possibility. When a miracle takes place, it is the laws of nature that alert us to the fact that it is a miracle. It is important to grasp that Christians do not deny the laws of nature, as Hume implies they do. It is an essential part of the Christian position to believe in the laws of nature as descriptions of those regularities and cause-effect relationships built into the universe by its Creator and according to which it normally operates. If we did not know them, we should never recognize a miracle if we saw one.

THE ARGUMENT FROM THE UNIFORMITY OF EXPERIENCE

In anybody’s book, miracles, by definition, are exceptions to what normally happens. If miracles were normal, they wouldn’t be called miracles! What, then, does Hume mean by “uniform experience”? It is one thing to say “Experience shows that such and such normally happens, but there may be exceptions, although none has been observed, that is, the experience
we have had
has been uniform.” It is an entirely different thing to say, “This is what we normally experience, and we must always experience it, for there can be and are no exceptions.”

Hume appears to favour the second definition. For him, a miracle is something that has never been experienced before; for if it had been experienced before, you could no longer call it a miracle. But that is a very arbitrary statement. Why can there not have been a succession of miracles in the past, as well as the particular one we may be discussing at the moment? What Hume does is to assume what he wants to prove, namely that there have never been any miracles in the past, and so there is uniform experience against this present instance being a miracle. But here his argument runs into very serious trouble. How does he know? In order to know that experience against miracles is absolutely uniform, he would need to have total access to every event in the universe at all times and places, which is self-evidently impossible. It would seem that Hume has forgotten that humans have only ever observed a tiny fraction of the sum total of events that have occurred in the universe; and in any case, very few of the total of all human observations have been written down. Therefore, Hume cannot know that miracles have never occurred. He is simply assuming what he wants to prove — that nature is uniform, and no miracles have taken place!

The only real alternative to Hume’s circular argument, of course, is to be open to the possibility that miracles have occurred. That is a historical question, and not a philosophical one, and depends on witness and evidence. But Hume does not appear willing to consider the question of whether there is any valid historical evidence that a miracle or miracles have taken place. He simply denies it, claiming that experience against miracles is “firm and unalterable”. But, we repeat, his claim has no substance unless he has demonstrated that all reports of miracles are false. He singularly fails even to attempt to do this, so there is simply no way in which he can know the answer. The New Atheists follow him like sheep. But, on this issue, he is a blind guide.

HUME’S CRITERIA FOR EVIDENCE, AND THE CREDIBILITY OF WITNESSES

Not unreasonably, Hume thinks, “A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.”
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It means that, when faced with, say, the report of a miracle, the wise person will weigh up all the evidence for the miracle on the one side, and all the evidence against it on the other, and then come to his decision. Hume adds a further criterion to aid this process:

No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood be more miraculous, than the fact which it endeavours to establish… When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened. I weigh the one miracle against the other; and according to the superiority, which I discover, I pronounce my decision, and always reject the greater miracle. If the falsehood of his testimony would be more miraculous, than the event which he relates; then, and not until then, can he pretend to command my belief or opinion.
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Let us examine what Hume is saying here. Suppose someone tells you that a miracle has happened. You have to decide whether it is true or false. If the character of the witness is dubious, you would be likely to dismiss his story out of hand. However, if the witness is of known moral integrity, you turn next to the actual thing that is claimed. Hume’s view is that you must reject it as false, unless believing in its falsity would land you in such an impossible situation, and have such totally inexplicable implications in history, that you would need an even bigger miracle to explain them.

HUME’S CRITERIA APPLIED TO THE IDEA THAT THE DISCIPLES WERE FRAUDSTERS

This criterion of Hume’s is precisely what Christians will use! Academician Professor Sir Norman Anderson, formerly Director of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in the University of London, writes in the opening words of his book
The Evidence for the Resurrection
:

Easter is not primarily a comfort, but a challenge. Its message is either the supreme fact in history or else a gigantic hoax… If it is true, then it is the supreme fact of history; and to fail to adjust one’s life to its implications means irreparable loss. But if it is not true, if Christ be not risen, then the whole of Christianity is a fraud, foisted on the world by a company of consummate liars, or, at best, deluded simpletons. St Paul himself realised this when he wrote:
If Christ be not risen, then our preaching is meaningless, and your faith worthless. More, we are found to be false witnesses.
²⁷

Centuries before Hume, the Christian apostle Paul saw the issue clearly: either Christ is risen from the dead, or he and the other apostles are deliberate perpetrators of fraud.
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But then the question cannot be avoided: is it possible to believe that Christ’s apostles were the kind of men who would concoct a lie, foist it somehow upon their followers, and not only watch them go to their deaths for it, but themselves pay for their deliberate lie with prison, constant harassment and suffering, and eventually with their lives?

We must remember that, at the very beginning of Christianity, the apostles Peter and John were imprisoned twice by the authorities for preaching the resurrection.
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Not long afterwards John’s brother, James, was murdered by Herod. Can we imagine that John would have been prepared to keep silent while his brother suffered like that, if he knew the resurrection was a lie? By the time John died as an old man, exiled for his faith on the island of Patmos, many people had given their lives in the name of the risen Christ. John explicitly tells us that he would not be prepared to condone a lie even in a good cause. His reason was:
we know that no lie comes from the truth
.
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Was John the kind of man then, who would watch his brother, and others as well, die for a lie that he himself had concocted? Hardly. And what about Peter? Historical tradition tells us that he was eventually martyred — as Jesus had indicated to him.
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Was he likely to have allowed himself to be martyred for what he knew to be a lie?

In any case, is it reasonable to suppose that none of the disciples who perpetrated such a fraud would never have broken under torture, and confessed that it was a fraud? No — it is frankly impossible to believe that they were deliberate liars. Hence, according to Hume’s criterion, if believing that the disciples were deliberate liars would involve a totally inexplicable historical and moral contradiction, then we must accept their testimony, as millions have done over the last twenty centuries.