Gunning for God (36 page)

Doubt and the resurrection

The New Testament writers tell us honestly that there were several occasions on which the first reaction of some of the disciples was to entertain doubts about the resurrection. For example, when the apostles first heard the report of the women, they simply did not believe them, and regarded what they said as nonsense.
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They were not in the end convinced, until they had seen Jesus for themselves.

Thomas was not with the other disciples in Jerusalem on the evening when the risen Christ appeared in the locked room; and he simply refused to believe their claim that they had seen him. He issued a challenge: “Unless I see in his hands the mark of the nails and place my finger into the mark of the nails, and place my hand into his side, I will never believe.”
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Thomas was not prepared to give in to group pressure — he wanted the evidence for himself. A week later, they all found themselves once more in the locked room in Jerusalem. Jesus appeared, spoke to Thomas, and invited him to put his finger in the nail marks, and his hand in the spear wound. Christ offered him the evidence that he demanded (which proves, incidentally, that the risen Christ had heard him ask for it), gently reproaching him for not believing what the others had said. We are not told whether Thomas did touch Christ on this occasion. But we are told what his response was. He said: “My Lord and my God!”
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He recognized the risen Jesus as God.

What about those who have not seen Christ?

In this lengthy section on the appearances of Christ we have been thinking of those early Christians who saw him. We also have made the point that after about forty days the appearances stopped — apart from those to Stephen and Paul. It is a simple historical fact, therefore, that the vast majority of Christians throughout history have become Christians without literally seeing Jesus. Christ said something very important about this to Thomas and the others: “Have you believed because you have seen? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”
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They saw and believed — but most have not seen. This, as we saw in Chapter 1, does not mean that Christ is asking all the rest of us to believe without any evidence. In the first place, the evidence that is offered to us is the eyewitness evidence of those who did see. But Christ is also alerting us to the fact that there are different kinds of evidence. One of them is the way in which the communication of God’s message penetrates the heart and conscience of the listener.

Christ’s death and resurrection predicted by the Old Testament

Among the disciples there was a deeper sort of incredulity than that of Thomas, which was not overcome simply by seeing. Luke tells us of two of Jesus’ followers who were taking a journey from Jerusalem to the nearby village of Emmaus on that event-packed first day of the week.
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They were utterly dispirited at the events that had just taken place in Jerusalem. A stranger joined them. It was Jesus, but they did not recognize him. Luke explains that their eyes were “held”, presumably supernaturally, and for the following reason. They had thought that Jesus was going to be their political liberator; but, to their dismay, he had allowed himself to be crucified. To their way of thinking, a liberator who allowed himself to be crucified by his opponents was useless as a liberator. Rumours spread by women about his resurrection were therefore irrelevant.

To solve their problem, Jesus did not immediately open their eyes to see who he was. What he did was to take them through a concise summary of the Old Testament, arguing that it was the consistent testimony of the Old Testament prophets that the messiah, whoever he was, would be rejected by his nation, put to death, and then eventually be raised and glorified. This was news to the two travellers. Hitherto they had read from the Old Testament what they had wanted to see. They had studied the prophecies about the triumphant coming of messiah, but had overlooked the fact that messiah also had to fulfil the role of the suffering servant; and in order to do that he must suffer, and only then enter into his glory.

Perhaps the most remarkable of those predictions is contained in Isaiah. Over 500 years before it occurred, the rejection, suffering, and death of the messiah for human sins is graphically portrayed: “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed.”
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Isaiah then speaks of him being “cut off out of the land of the living”, and being put in a grave; after which we read the remarkable words: “Out of the anguish of his soul he shall see and be satisfied.”
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According to Isaiah, then, the messiah was going to die. Therefore, far from the death of Jesus proving that he was not the messiah, it proved that he was. When the two travellers had grasped that, it made the story of Jesus’ resurrection that they had heard from the women credible. It removed the grounds of their despair, and filled them with new hope.

But still they didn’t recognize that the stranger was Jesus. So far it was enough that they had been brought to see the objective fact that the Old Testament proclaimed the death of messiah. How did they come to recognize him? The answer is that they recognized him by something he did when they invited him into their home. He performed an act that would be intensely revealing to those who belonged to the inner core of the early disciples. As they were partaking of a simple meal, Jesus broke the bread for them — and suddenly they recognized him! This detail has a powerful ring of genuineness and truth. They had seen Jesus break bread before — when he fed the multitudes, for instance — and there was something indefinable, but characteristic about the way he did it that was instantly recognizable.

We all know this kind of thing from our experience of family and friends: characteristic ways of doing things that are special to them and which we would recognize anywhere. To the disciples it was evidence, conclusive evidence, that this really was Jesus. No impostor would ever have thought of imitating such a tiny detail.

This has been a lengthy and detailed account — necessarily so, because of the importance of the topic. We give the last word on the evidence for the resurrection to legal expert Professor Sir Norman Anderson: “The empty tomb, then, forms a veritable rock on which all rationalistic theories of the resurrection dash themselves in vain.”
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The reader will note that there have been relatively few references to the New Atheists in this section on the resurrection. There is a simple reason for that. For all their vaunted interest in evidence, there is nothing in their writings to show that they have seriously interacted with the arguments, many of them very well known, that we have presented here. The silence of the New Atheism on this matter tells its own story.

CHAPTER 9

FINAL REFLECTIONS

There is another kind of evidence that we have not yet discussed in this book. It is the evidence of God that is available through direct perception. Suppose I say to you: “The roses have started to bloom in our garden.” You would not dream of thinking that I had come to this conclusion as the result of a long chain of philosophical and scientific reasoning. No, you would correctly infer that I had perceived it directly. There are many things in our daily experience just like that. They are directly perceived, rather than established by a long chain of inference and reasoning. It is so with God. Logical arguments are important of course; but, if there is a God worthy of the name, they cannot possibly be the whole story. Otherwise access to God would be the provenance of a few intellectuals. There must be something more. And there is. The Bible speaks clearly of at least three distinct ways in which God reveals himself to human beings: (1) through creation, (2) moral conscience, and (3) through the written revelation of Scripture.

In his famous letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul discusses this important matter of revelation. In the first chapter we find the following passage that deals with our point (1). Speaking of human beings Paul says: “For what can be known about God is plain to them [
lit
: ‘in them’],
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because God has shown it to them.
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For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. For although they knew God, they did not honour him as God or give thanks…”
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This passage makes several assertions:

1. God has taken the initiative in making himself known to us by first creating us and placing us in a universe designed and created to express not merely his existence, but something of what he is like.

2. The visible creation objectively shows us two of God’s attributes: his eternal power and divinity.

3. We perceive these attributes directly, intuitionally; not by a long process of discursive, logical reasoning.

4. So that we could perceive the significance of what we see as we contemplate God’s creation, he created within us not only our cognitive faculties in general, but an instinctive faculty of awareness of God.

This faculty of perception is at work in everyone, including Richard Dawkins. We can see this in his famous definition of biology as: “the study of complicated things which give the impression of having been designed for a purpose”.
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Indeed, he writes elsewhere that it is “terribly tempting” to say that the universe has been designed. The spectacular success of science in elucidating the unbelievably sophisticated mechanisms of the workings of the universe has done nothing but enhance that initial impression. The New Atheists, however, spend their lives in denial, hiding behind the idea that, because they have found what they think is the only mechanism involved in life’s origin and variation, they have somehow explained life. They seem unaware of their elementary category mistake, in thinking that the existence of a mechanism somehow obviates the need for an agent who designed the mechanism. Their concept of “explanation” is inadequate – in several different ways, in fact.

The distinguished German philosopher Robert Spaemann of Munich University says:

Science does not try to find out, as Aristotle did, why the stone falls downwards. It rather tries to discover the laws according to which it falls. And that constitutes scientific “explanation”. But Wittgenstein writes: “The great delusion of modernity is that the laws of nature explain the universe for us. The laws of nature describe the universe, they describe the regularities. But they explain nothing.”
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Dawkins needs to pay attention to Wittgenstein. The “great delusion” has Dawkins so thoroughly in its grip, that he thinks science has given the ultimate explanation, making God redundant and enabling him to deny the evidence of God that he experiences every day of his life. Spaemann
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gives an interesting analogy to illuminate this flaw in atheist thinking. He refers to the work of musicologist Helga Thoene, who discovered a remarkable double coding in the D-minor
Partita
by J. S. Bach. If you apply to the music a formal scheme of numbers corresponding to letters of the alphabet
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the following ancient proverb appears:
Ex Deo nascimur, in Christo morimur, per Spiritum Sanctum reviviscimus.
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Clearly one does not have to know about this hidden text in order to enjoy the Sonata – it has been enjoyed for hundreds of years without people having any idea that the message was there.

Spaemann addresses the New Atheists: “You can describe the evolutionary process, if you so decide, in purely naturalistic terms. But the text that then appears when you see a person, when you see a beautiful act or a beautiful picture, can only be read if you use a completely different code.” Spaemann goes on to imagine that our musicologist then said that the music of Bach had explained itself completely; that it was simply chance that the message pops out, and so it was enough to interpret the music purely as music without thinking about any text. Would that not strain our credulity? Of course it would. We would not accept for a moment that the text just happened to be there by chance, without someone having encoded it and put it there. So it is with science. You can, if you wish, restrict yourself to a purely naturalistic science. But then you cannot hope to explain the text that appears. The musicologist, as a musicologist, can explain how the music was composed; but only if they ignore the text. The New Atheists would appear to be in exactly that position. They openly confess that they are not prepared even to listen to arguments that go outside the bounds of their naturalism. Of course it is honest of them to say that they have decided to imprison themselves inside the small world of their naturalistic castle. But whether that attitude is reasonable, or whether there is a world outside that they have put beyond their own reach, is of course quite a different matter.