Gunning for God (29 page)

HUME’S CRITERIA APPLIED TO THE CAUSE OF THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY

The existence of the Christian church throughout the world is an indisputable fact. In the spirit of Hume’s criterion we ask: what explanation is adequate to explain the transformation of the early disciples? From a frightened group of men and women — utterly depressed and disillusioned at what was to them the calamity that had befallen their movement when their leader was crucified — there suddenly exploded a powerful international movement which rapidly established itself all over the Roman empire, and ultimately all over the world. And the striking thing is that the early disciples were all Jews, a religion not noted for its enthusiasm in making converts from other nations. What could have been powerful enough to set all of this going?

If we ask the early church, they will answer at once that it was the resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, they maintained that the very reason and purpose for their existence was to be a witness to the resurrection of Christ. That is, they came into existence, not to promulgate some political programme or campaign for moral renovation; but primarily to bear witness to the fact that God had intervened in history, raised Christ from the dead, and that forgiveness of sins could be received in his name. This message would ultimately have major moral implications for society; but it was the message of the resurrection itself that was central.

If we reject the early Christians’ own explanation for their existence, on the basis that it involves too big a miracle, what are we going to put in its place that will not involve an even greater strain on our capacity for belief? To deny the resurrection simply leaves the church without a
raison d’être
, which is historically and psychologically absurd.

Professor C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge wrote:

If the coming into existence of the Nazarenes, a phenomenon undeniably attested by the New Testament, rips a great hole in history, a hole the size and shape of the Resurrection, what does the secular historian propose to stop it up with?… the birth and rapid rise of the Christian Church… remain an unsolved enigma for any historian who refuses to take seriously the only explanation offered by the Church itself.
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HUME’S FURTHER OBJECTIONS TO MIRACLES

So far Hume’s criterion makes good sense. But then he goes on to show that he is not content to proceed with an even-handed assessment of evidence in order to decide whether a miracle has happened or not. He has determined the verdict against miracles in advance, without allowing any trial to take place! In his very next paragraph he says that he has been far too liberal in imagining that the “testimony on which a miracle is founded may amount to an entire proof”, since “there never was a miraculous event established on so full an evidence”. But this is precisely what Christians will dispute. They will claim, for instance, that there is strong historical evidence for the resurrection of Christ, evidence that Hume never seems to have considered.

Hume’s logic, then, looks something like this:

1. The laws of nature describe regularities.
   
2. Miracles are singularities, exceptions to the regular course of nature, and exceedingly rare.
   
3. Evidence for what is regular and repeatable must always be more than the evidence for what is singular and unrepeatable.
   
4. The wise man bases his belief on the weight of evidence.
   
5. Therefore no wise man can ever believe in miracles.
   

In other words, although at first Hume seems to be open to the theoretical possibility of a miracle having occurred provided the evidence is strong enough, he eventually reveals that from the beginning he is completely convinced that there can never be enough evidence to persuade a rational person that a miracle has happened, because rational people know that miracles cannot happen! Hume lays himself open to the charge of begging the question.

The idea in point 3 above, that evidence for what is regular and repeatable must always be more than the evidence for what is singular and unrepeatable, is heavily emphasized by Anthony Flew in his original defence of Hume’s argument.
³³
Flew argues that “the proposition reporting the (alleged) occurrence of the miracle will be singular, particular and in the past tense”, and deduces that, since propositions of this sort cannot be tested directly in any case, the evidence for them will always be immeasurably weaker in logical strength, than the evidence for general and repeatable propositions.
³⁴

However, quite apart from the question of miracle, this argument is inimical to science, the classic example being the origin of the universe. The so-called “Big Bang” is a singularity in the past, an unrepeatable event. So, if Flew’s argument is valid, no scientist should be prepared to believe in the Big Bang! Indeed, when scientists began to talk of the universe having a beginning in a singularity, they met strong objections from fellow scientists who held strong uniformitarian views, like those of Flew. However, it was studying the data supplied to them — not theoretical arguments on what was or what was not possible on the basis of an assumed uniformity — that convinced them that the Big Bang was a plausible explanation. It is very important, therefore, to realize that, even when scientists speak of the uniformity of nature, they do not mean absolute uniformity — especially if they believe in singularities like the Big Bang. Flew abandoned his earlier views and become a deist, on the basis of the evidence that the origin of life cannot be fitted into a naturalistic account of the uniformity of nature.

Turning to the question of the resurrection of Christ, what Hume and Flew have overlooked is that it is simply inadequate to judge the likelihood of the occurrence of the resurrection of Jesus on the basis of the observed, very high probability of dead people remaining dead. What they should have done (but did not do) was to weigh the probability of the resurrection of Jesus against the probability of the tomb of Jesus being empty
on any other hypothesis
than the resurrection.
³⁵
We shall do this below.

Hume is aware of course that there are situations where people have understandable difficulty in accepting something because it is outside their experience, but which is nonetheless true. He relates a story of an Indian prince who refused to believe what he was told about the effects of frost.
³⁶
Hume’s point is that, although what he was told was not contrary to his experience, it was not conformable with it.

However, even here Hume is not on safe ground. In modern science, especially the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, there are key ideas that do appear contrary to our experience. A strict application of Hume’s principles might well have rejected such ideas, and thus impeded the progress of science! It is often the counterintuitive anomaly, the contrary fact, the exception to past repeated observation and experience, which turns out to be the key to the discovery of a new scientific paradigm. But the crucial thing here is that the exception is a
fact
, however improbable it may be on the basis of past repeated experience. Wise people, particularly if they are scientists, are concerned with facts, not simply with probabilities — even if those facts do not appear to fit into their uniformitarian schemes.

I agree that miracles are inherently improbable. We should certainly demand strong evidence for their happening in any particular case (see Hume’s point 5). But this is not the real problem with miracles of the sort found in the New Testament. The real problem is that they threaten the foundations of naturalism, which is clearly Hume’s worldview at this point. That is, Hume regards it as axiomatic that nature is all that there is, and there is nothing and no one outside nature that could from time to time intervene in nature. This is what he means when he claims that nature is uniform. His axiom, of course, is simply a belief that arises from his worldview. It is not a consequence of scientific investigation.

Ironically enough, Christians will argue that it is
only belief in a Creator that gives us a satisfactory ground for believing in the uniformity of nature in the first place
. In denying that there is a Creator the atheists are kicking away the basis of their own argument! As C. S. Lewis puts it:

If all that exists in Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us — like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform. It can be trusted only if quite a different metaphysic is true. If the deepest thing in reality, the Fact which is the source of all other facthood, is a thing in some degree like ourselves — if it is a Rational Spirit and we derive our rational spirituality from It —then indeed our conviction can be trusted. Our repugnance to disorder is derived from Nature’s Creator and ours.
³⁷

Thus, excluding the possibility of miracle, and making nature and its processes an absolute in the name of science, removes all grounds for trusting in the rationality of science in the first place. On the other hand, regarding nature as only part of a greater reality, which includes nature’s intelligent Creator God, gives a rational justification for belief in the orderliness of nature, a conviction that led to the rise of modern science.

Secondly, however, if one admits the existence of a Creator in order to account for the uniformity of nature, the door is inevitably open for that same Creator to intervene in the course of nature. There is no such thing as a tame Creator, who cannot, or must not, or dare not get actively involved in the universe which he has created. So miracles may occur.

I stress once more that one can agree with Hume that “uniform experience” shows that resurrection
by means of a natural mechanism
is extremely improbable, and we may rule it out. But Christians do not claim that Jesus rose by some natural mechanism. They claim something totally different — that God raised him from the dead. And if there is a God, why should that be judged impossible?

This paves the way for a consideration of the resurrection from the perspective of history, as Wolfhart Pannenberg makes clear: “As long as historiography does not begin with a narrow concept of reality according to which ‘dead men do not rise’, it is not clear why historiography should not in principle be able to speak about Jesus’ resurrection as the explanation that is best established of such events as the disciples’ experiences of the appearances and the discovery of the empty tomb.”
³⁸

In this chapter we have been considering essentially
a priori
reasons
³⁹
for which Hume and others have rejected miracles. However, we have seen that it is not science that rules out miracles. Surely, then, the open-minded attitude demanded by reason is to proceed now to investigate the evidence, to establish the facts, and be prepared to follow where that process leads; even if it entails alterations to our preconceived ideas. So let us do precisely that — and challenge the New Atheists to leave Hume behind and follow us. We shall never know whether or not there is a mouse in the attic unless we actually go and look!

CHAPTER 8

DID JESUS RISE FROM THE DEAD?
¹

“We come down to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s so petty; it’s so trivial; it’s so local; it’s so earthbound; it’s so unworthy of the universe.”

“Accounts of Jesus’ resurrection and ascension are about as well documented as Jack in the Beanstalk.”

Richard Dawkins

“The resurrection of Jesus does in fact provide a sufficient explanation for the empty tomb and the meetings with Jesus. Having examined all the other possible hypotheses I’ve read about anywhere in the literature, I think it’s also a necessary explanation.”

Tom Wright

The New Atheists never tire of citing Bertrand Russell’s reply when he was asked what he would say if God were to ask him after his death why he had not believed: “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.” But then a curious thing happens. When evidence is offered to them, they refuse to examine it. I have already mentioned Richard Dawkins’ contemptuous dismissal of the resurrection in our
God Delusion
debate; so his attitude is clear. Furthermore, I know of no serious attempt by any of the New Atheists to engage with the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Indeed, it is even worse than that. Their whole attitude to history in general is characterized by sheer closed-mind prejudice: light-years removed from the open-minded scientific attitude that they pretend to hold in high esteem.

For instance, it is likely to be very difficult to get people to seriously consider historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, if they question his very existence. Christopher Hitchens speaks of “the highly questionable existence of Jesus”.
²
Richard Dawkins concedes the probable existence of Jesus, although he says: “It is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported historical case that Jesus never lived at all, as has been done by, amongst others Professor G. A. Wells of London University.”
³
A little further on in the same book Dawkins says: “Indeed, Jesus, if he existed (or whoever wrote his script if he didn’t)…” What is interesting here is that neither Hitchens nor Dawkins appears to have bothered to consult a reputable ancient historian — Wells is an Emeritus Professor of German. If Wells’ case is not “widely supported”, why doesn’t Dawkins, in the interests of accuracy, tell us why? Since I am interested in accuracy, and like Dawkins I am not a historian, I have therefore consulted the experts. Here are some examples of what I have found. Incidentally, some of these were pointed out in my presence to atheist physicist Victor Stenger by an ancient historian, who took exception to Stenger’s insistence that there was no historical evidence for the existence of Jesus.
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