EVIDENCE FOR CHRISTIANITY BEING TRUE

Introduction to the concept of evidence for God.

This essay takes a brief overview of the idea of evidence and reason as applied to God and Christ, looking at some of the obstacles in the path of the genuinely open minded person interested in what evidence there is for God. It is light on detail: there are links below to more detailed sources, I will add more specifics later as I have time. My main purpose here is to challenge Dawkins style propaganda asserting that Christian faith is ‘blind’ and irrational. Assertions like this are usually ignorant, flippant, basic category errors or all three.

 Basic category error

I once read a Russian sci-fi short story called ‘Futility’ about an alien race investigating Earth to see if there was any intelligent life there. After an intense search which revealed only a few abandoned vessels, they gave up and left for their home planet, concluding that if there had ever been intelligent life on earth it was now extinct. In the last paragraph we realise that they are octopus like beings who live in water: they did not search for intelligent life on the surface of the planet as they assumed it was uninhabitable. Their search failed because it was based on false assumptions and they did not search in the right place. The comparison with people who say ‘There is no evidence for God’ because they can’t produce Him in a science lab is very apt.

Prominent US atheist Eugenie Scott has demanded that theists produce a ‘theometer’, a device for detecting and measuring God. Fellow materialists like Louis Wolpert, Steve Jones, Richard Dawkins and others frequently insist that there is ‘not a shred’ of evidence for the Deity and use slogans like ‘Evolution is science, creationism is religion’…’faith is the ultimate cop out’…faith is believing what you know ain’t so…’ etc.

Much of this is just mouthing off and bluster. Some of it is basic category error (like Scott’s puerile idea of a ‘theometer’). You cannot measure supernature with nature, and if God could be weighed and measured like a piece or aluminium ore or electromagnetic radiation then he would not be God but just a previously undiscovered law of nature. You can neither prove nor disprove the supernatural in a laboratory; less stupid and angry atheists/agnostics acknowledge this.

Some of the perception that there is a lack of supporting evidence for the Christian case is the fault of Christians for not having done the hard work of investigating, explaining and engaging over the issue of reasons to believe. But the assertion that Christian faith is blind or irrational is a gross misrepresentation, as contemporary apologists like Alister McGrath and William Lane Craig have set out in detail. The honest sceptic who wants to go beyond rabble rousing anti-God slogans would do well to check these men’s thoughtful arguments out. In particular, McGrath is as well qualified a biologist as Dawkins and has exposed much of his fallacious rhetoric in books like ‘The Dawkins Delusion and ‘Why God won’t go away: Answering the New Atheists’. Other apologists include Lee Strobel who writes in a more approachable style in books like ‘The Case for Christ’ and ‘The Case for a Creator.’

Plenty of evidence if you look for it

There is plenty of evidence, essentially from creation (e.g. Romans 1:18-22) from the Bible’s unparralleled historical continuity, wisdom and fulfilled prophecy, from outcomes of nations following Christianity as opposed to other world views such as Animism, Islam or Marxism, and experiental evidence in the lives of believers. Most significantly, there is the evidence from the life, miracles, teaching and resurrection of Jesus. Jesus of Nazareth fulfilled multiple Old Testament prophecies which had been given centuries earlier-this is unparalleled in any religion or world view and is high level evidence for a supernatural Sovereign Deity who exists outside of time and knows the end from the beginning. I will approach these subjects later in more detail as I have time, this site is mainly concerned with the evidence from creation.

No excuses

But while there is a sound intellectual, philosophical and historical case for faith in Christ, you don’t need a great intellect to understand the arguments for God and Christ. The bible asserts that God has made himself sufficiently clear to the humble although He will not force Himself on the proud. As Jesus said ‘Seek and you will find’. Jesus said that those of us who deny him will meet him face to face none the less and give account for what we did that we should not have done and what we culpably failed to do that we should have done, including our culpable and defiant unbelief. As Paul wrote in Romans chapter 1 vss 18-22, we have no excuse for unbelief because God has revealed himself though the things that have been created. It is my conviction that the whole Darwinian Evolutionism project is a defiant revolutionary attempt to overthrow this evidence from creation. That’s my primary reason for writing to falsify Darwinian evolutionism, in the knowledge that I will attract contempt and misrepresentation for doing so.

Atheism-a fairy tale for those who are afraid of the light

The evidence for God and his Christ is out there, it is not very difficult to find or understand provided we are willing to set aside the barriers to understanding. The main obstacle is our unwillingness to approach God because of our defiant and rebellious sin nature. This amounts to a major confounding factor: sinners avoid a holy God, as we read in John’s Gospel 3:19 ‘And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light, lest his deeds should be exposed.’ The Bible contains numerous of accounts of men being confronted with truth they didn’t like by a messenger from God and (often literally) killing the messenger.

Do scientists always seek truth?

Bias, fraud, pride, ambition, censorship, bullying, desire to get rich and/or famous and simple error all sadly exist, and scientists are no different to other men in this regard. Asking the wrong question in the wrong way will give misleading results. Unwanted results can be buried, sidelined or explained away. It is possible to design or manipulate a study so as to exclude some possible answers. ‘Peer review’ simply means ‘me and my associates are agreed’.Truth is not decided by a vote, let alone by a mutually apointed elite that limits membership to the orthodox.

If we investigate God with naturalistic assumptions (i.e. by axiomatically ruling out the possibility of a personal supernatural entity) and ask for laboratory evidence, we will obviously conclude that there is no God. Just like searching for fish in desert sand: you won’t find any, but you won’t have proved that fish don’t exist. But that does not mean that we cannot investigate, just that we have to widen our search, look in the right place and in the right way, and allow for confounding factors, including the main one I set out earlier-we may not WANT to find God. The Judaeo Christian Deity demands our total obedience, and this could be a problem if we are into greed, drunkenness, extra marital sex, pride or other things that offend Him. The idea that people are neutral about such matters is laughable.

Sense and nonsense about evidence

All attempts to carry out honest scientific, historical, psychological, economic or other form of investigative research must take potential confounding factors into account. Historical events such as the creation of the world or the resurrection of Jesus cannot be re-created in a laboratory, we require witness accounts. Refutation bias and confirmation bias both exist, where the researcher has a preference for one result over another and selects evidence and methodology accordingly, and that’s before we even get started on fraud. Much medical research is funded by Pharmaceutical companies, if the research is unfavourable to their product, it may never be published, whereas if it is favourable, it may be widely publicised through a team of salespeople and advertising. This well known problem is often discussed in the British Medical Journal.

Ulterior motives, corruption and bribery are not unknown. I have discussed this in more depth in Three Men in a Hut and Other Essays in the chapter ‘Sense and nonsense about evidence’ with several examples, including the research that proved lung cancer was caused by smoking. As is well recognised, the tobacco companies had a vested interest in the link not being proved, and fought against the evidence for years.

Are there vested interests, whether New World Order, old fashioned Communists or other controlling groups who are determined to suppress evidence for Christianity being true or Darwinism being bad science? How would we investigate any such bias or publish any results if, for example, the universities and media were largely controlled by a mutually apointed elite which shares a common world view that excludes the idea of authentic Christianity being true? Check out the Michael Reiss affair (I wrote about this at the time on the Creation Science Movement web site), where a biologist and Anglican minister who fully accepted evolution was hounded out of his post at The Royal Society for merely sugegsting that Darwin dissent might be politely discused if it came up in class, rather than merely stamped upon. This was a powerful show of absolute establishment intolerance to questioning Darwin that embarrassed even committed Darwinists like Lord Winston.

Former Marxist revolutionary (now a Christian) Peter Hitchens discusses this issue in his books ‘The Cameron Delusion’ and ‘The Rage Against God’ explaining how socialist and other Utopians see religion (primarily Christianity as it was the religion of the West) as standing in the way of their dreams. If a man places loyalty to God before the commands of the State, he stands in the way of their Utopia. Something similar was responsible for the persecution of Christians in Ancient Rome who refused to worship Caesar. The State demands our total alleigance, i.e. worship. Christians cannot give it.

If we can see, and we can, that people will bend research, science and evidence to their own preferred conclusions when money and reputation are at stake, how much more can this happen over the far weightier matter of our origin and destiny? In other words, when a committed atheist like Richard Dawkins swears that he is determined to follow the evidence wherever it leads, you should no more take that at face value than if I say the same think while taking a diametrically opposite view to him. One of us is either deceived or deceiver (maybe both). Which one is it and how can we objectively tell?

In any event, I appeal to the reader not to believe someone chanting‘Science, science, science! Evidence, evidence, evidence!’ without doing some detective work. It’s your origin, relationship to God and eternal destiny that’s being discussed here, don;lt you think that deserves some serious thinking? If you want to dismiss the Christian faith that largely built Western Civilisation and which promises a new start, adoption into God’s family and eternal happiness on the basis of handed down slogans like ‘It’s all a load of Bronze Age Fairy Tales’or ‘What about the Crusades and Inquisition?’ without doing any serious research, then that’s your call, but it doesn’t seem a very rational or free thinking way to go.

Here are a few links for further research.

William Lane Craig http://www.reasonablefaith.org/

Lee Strobel http://www.leestrobel.com/

Alister McGrath http://alistermcgrath.weebly.com/

I plan to post more as I have time setting out specific areas of evidence including falsification of molecules to man evolution, revelation, the historic narrative of the Old and New Testaments including fulfilled prophecy, the effects of Christianity compared with other systems as a foundation for civilisation, and the inner longing and witness that all men experience that there is ‘something more’ that C S Lewis wrote so much about. Meanwhile I have offered resources above which I believe are helpful although I don’t necessarily endorse them 100%. I don’t even endorse myuself 100%. My endorsement would be meaningless anyway for the reasons I have set out above, because like you and everyone else, I am imperfect and biased.

Jesus and the Apostles taught that each of us is accountable to our Maker for what we do with the opportunities and light we have been given. I appeal to anyone calling themself a rationalist or free thinker to live up to those titles and so fearlessly investigate Jesus of Nazareth without preconceptions. If the Bible is true you will be meeting him sooner than you think. Let it be a happy meeting for both of you.

31^st May 2013

edited 13th November 2013