Confident Christianity (Second Edition)

A Big-Picture View of the Evidence for a Faith That Makes Sense of the World

It’s been a long-time in the works, but today the Second Edition of my book, Confident Christianity launches on Amazon. This is not a minor revision. With more than 70% more content, the update includes:

• At least partial — but in several cases complete — rewrites of the original chapters.

• Six completely new chapters.

• Archaeological evidence for the both the Old and New Testaments.

• Historical evidence for the origin, transmission, and translations of the Bible.

• Discussion questions at the end of each chapter for small groups, along with recommended reading on the topic of each chapter.

• Greatly expanded Recommended Reading list.

I would be honored not only if you would order a copy, but if you would be willing to write an honest review on Amazon. That is the only real way to ensure the algorithm gets the book in front of more eyes.

Thanks for considering it. I am including one of the new chapters as a sample below for subscribers to True Horizon …

A Merry Christmas to you and yours,

Bob

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Chapter 15

A WORLD WITH MIRACLES

“The mere idea of a Nature beyond nature, a systematic and diversified reality which is ‘supernatural’ in relation to the world of our five senses … is profoundly shocking to a certain philosophical preconception from which we all suffer.”

~ C. S. Lewis

As I stated in the “Intermission,” the existence of some kind of God not only makes sense based on the evidence we’ve uncovered, it seems to be the most reasonable explanation for all of it. And that leads to a startling conclusion.

We live in a supernatural world.

That’s not a weird, spooky thing to say. All it means is that there is some aspect of reality that lies outside the physical world. And it’s not a religious claim floating in an evidential vacuum. We can say it because, according to the science of Big Bang cosmology, all of physical reality (matter, energy, space, and time) came into existence at a point in the finite past. Whatever caused all matter, energy, space, and time to come into existence cannot be composed of matter, energy, space, or time. That’s just basic logic. And since we define the natural world — the universe we live in — as physical reality, it means that there is something that lies outside physical reality. Something beyond nature.

Something supernatural.

The word supernatural is just a term that describes the logical conclusion of the scientific evidence we covered in Section II. It’s an inference we get, not just from what we learn from Big Bang cosmology, but from a combination of all the evidence discussed in the previous section of this book. Philosophy tells us that non-physical things like truth, justice, love, and goodness are all real, even if we can’t see, touch, taste, hear, or smell them.

We find evidence of a soul in all living things. That’s not physical either. We see that information and design infuse life — both details that can only result from the actions of a non-physical mind. Finally, we can’t escape the fact that we live in a moral universe. All of us recognize morals are very real, but you certainly can’t hold them in your hands.

All of this screams out for an explanation. It means that a reasonable, holistic view of reality must allow for the supernatural.

Theistic Expectations

In Chapter 6, we defined theism as “the view that God is a real, personal, moral agent who exists apart from the physical universe but is free to act within it because he created it … If God exists, and theism is true, there should also be evidence that this God interacts with the world he created. That’s what theism means.”

That leads us to a logical conclusion — namely that the implications of the evidence for God’s existence imply that there is a supernatural aspect to ultimate reality and therefore to a deity who is at least capable of interacting with the world. And we have a word that describes such an interaction.

It’s called a miracle.

Somehow, our materialistic culture has convinced us that believing in miracles is crazy. But, as you can see, it’s not crazy at all. It follows logically from the evidence we see all around us. We have plenty of evidence that God exists. If he does, it would also make sense that such a God could communicate to us in such a way that we would have a record of it. In fact, you might say we should expect it. And that is what we call the Bible or, as I referred to it in Chapter 4, “Special Revelation.”

Are Miracles “Allowed”?

The atheist English philosopher, David Hume, is famous for arguing against miracles. In a nutshell, he insisted that believing someone who claims to witness a miracle is mistaken or lying is always more rational than believing the laws of nature actually suspended those laws. Hume demanded that the sheer improbability of a miracle happening is all the reason we need to deny that any miracle could ever happen. Others have claimed that the laws of nature are unchanging and, since miracles would seem to defy those laws, they can’t be possible.

Both these arguments against miracles engage in what’s called “circular reasoning.” They assume what they’re trying to prove. Folks like Hume demand that we dismiss the possibility of miracles because they are, by definition, so rare. But if “miracles” happened all the time … they wouldn’t be miracles. Hume, and others like him, reject miracles because they deny the supernatural exists. Their logic amounts to saying, “Miracles don’t happen because miracles can’t happen.” In philosophical talk, this is called “begging the question.”

They rule out miracles by presupposition — before they’ve even considered the evidence.

Getting into details about specific occurrences of miracles is beyond the scope of this book. But I want to offer one mind-blowing example of exactly what I’m talking about.

A Mind-Blowing Miracle

In 1995, Oliver Sacks wrote a book, An Anthropologist on Mars, that contained the true story of a man named Virgil.*

Val Kilmer later starred in the movie, At First Sight, which was an adaptation of one chapter in Sacks’ book.

Virgil was a 50-year-old man who had been blind since he was a child. He had successful surgery to correct his eye condition, but five weeks later he was still struggling. A doctor had surgically repaired Virgil’s eyes. But that was only part of the problem.

It turns out, our ability to see actually comes in two parts. The physical structure and connections in our eyeballs must be correct, of course. But it doesn’t stop there. The cerebral cortex must also properly process the visual signals the eyes send to the brain. People who lose their eyesight quickly lose the ability to process those signals. When doctors repair their eyes, the brain must “re-learn” how to see. That’s what makes this story so interesting.

For weeks, Virgil saw lights and shapes in a cubist conglomeration that made no sense. His brain couldn’t synthesize the signals it received. When he looked at a cat “all Virgil could see was a confusion, a flat surface of parallel and criss-crossing lines; he could not see them as solid objects going up or coming down in three-dimensional space … this was one reason the cat, visually, was so puzzling: he would see the paw, a nose, the tail, an ear, but could not see all of them together, the cat as a whole.”

After a few weeks, Virgil’s processing power gradually improved. That’s when his wife was thrilled to report that “Virgil finally put a tree together — he now knows that the trunk and leaves go together to form a complete unit.”

That quote from Virgil’s wife set off an alarm in National Review columnist Keith Mano’s mind. It sounded familiar, but he didn’t know why. Then, it hit him.**

The word-picture of an unmade tree set off associations in my mind. I remembered Jesus and the Bethsaida blind man from the book of Mark … “They came to Bethsaida, and some people brought a blind man and begged Jesus to touch him. He took the blind man by the hand and led him outside the village. When he had spit on the man’s eyes and put his hands on him, Jesus asked, “Do you see anything?” He looked up and said, “I see people; they look like trees walking around.” Once more Jesus put his hands on the man’s eyes. Then his eyes were opened, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.”***

Keith Mano realized that what he had always considered a poetic image — “they look like trees walking around” — was actually a clinical description. Both Virgil and the blind man from Bethsaida experienced the same thing.

It turns out Jesus performed two miracles that day. First, he fixed the man’s eyes. Then, he instantaneously repaired the man’s ability to synthesize visual signals.

This is a medical detail no first-century author could have ever known about the two-step process that allows us to see things. It’s simply the author’s observation of an event he recorded just as he witnessed it. Two thousand years later, modern science has finally caught up enough to understand exactly what Jesus did that day.

Many people have experienced events like this — events that atheistic materialism can’t even begin to explain. Theologian Craig Keener has written a two-volume, nearly 1200-page tome about these kinds of things titled ever-so-cleverly, Miracles. His research includes almost 300 pages of detailed footnotes corroborating his claims. These are not anecdotal stories somebody says they heard about from somebody else. They include documented cases of things that only make sense in a supernatural world.

Evidence for Christianity

There’s an important reason to talk about all this. Many people who reject the idea that Christianity is actually true, do so because both the Bible and Christian history contain miracles. Their reasoning says that any belief system that includes, or is based on, miracles must be false. And they say this for the same reason Hume rejects the possibility of miracles in the first place — because of the presupposition that miracles can’t happen.

So, if the goal here is to have a Confident Christianity, this is a topic that we must deal with. There is no denying that Christianity contains an appeal to the miraculous. But the point I want to make is that it is perfectly rational to accept that appeal. Remember, the first half of this book shows substantial, reasonable evidence that God exists. And that evidence leads to supernatural implications. To summarize:

If God exists, miracles are at least possible.

Any being who could bring the entire known universe into existence in an instant would be perfectly capable of acting inside the universe he created. In fact, some would say the greatest miracle of all is the first sentence in the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” An all-powerful, omni-benevolent, intelligent, moral, supernatural entity brought the natural world into existence by the sheer power of his will.

That’s quite a miracle! And we have confirmed it through the collection of some of the most robust scientific evidence for any event that has ever occurred.

That being the case, it’s not really a stretch to conclude that doing things like turning water into wine or walking on the water he created would be out of the realm of possibility. Actually, those kinds of miracles are small potatoes for a being like that.

Yes, Christianity and the Bible contain miraculous elements that we must be open to accepting. But, like the rest of the evidence we’ve been discussing, we don’t accept them blindly. Evidence for God’s existence makes them at least possible. As you will see in the chapters that follow, the miracles that are embedded in historical accounts that are jam-packed with philosophical and historical evidence to support them. Miracles are just one part of that grand story — a story that is so trustworthy and reliable, it compels us to acknowledge the miraculous, too.

We live in a God-haunted world, and part of the evidence for that is a trustworthy scriptural record that ties all this together. That’s where we’re headed next.

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* Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars (Vintage Books: New York, New York, 1995).

** I owe this account and the associated quotes to a 1999 article in National Review magazine, “How a 20^th Century Eye Operation Shows the Bethsaida Miracle Actually Happened,” by Keith Mano. The article is no longer available.

*** Mark 8:22-26.