Betting Against God

The Christian message has always been a hard message. The apostle Paul, who had an encounter with the ascended Christ, said it is “blasphemy” to the Jews and “foolishness” to the Greeks. Today, the blasphemy charge is leveled by over a billion Muslims, as well as Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses. The charge of foolishness comes from two camps: the naturalists —who think the material world is all there is, and the “spiritualizers”—who deny that God came in the flesh (I John 4:1- 3). The spiritualizers include Eastern religions, the New Age movement, and “liberal” Christianity that retains the form of the Christian religion but denies its power.

Getting others to consider Christ as “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” is difficult. The Bible message is that we are alienated from God by sin. The result of sin is both spiritual and physical death. God could have left us in this helpless state, but out of His love for us, He took on human flesh and died on a Roman cross to pay for our sin so that we could avoid eternal destruction and enjoy Him forever.

At one time, religious traditions—whether true or false—informed us about our fate. But the secular person is cut off from traditional answers. One is left with the nihilism of scientific materialism or an irrational leap into mysticism in all its forms—Eastern or Western. The secular person is distracted by things of the world, not unlike the period of the Enlightenment when French mathematician, Blaise Pascal, outraged that his friends were so reckless with their souls, made his famous “Wager”: If we bet on God and we are right, we gain an infinite good. If we are wrong, we have lost nothing. However, if we bet against God and we are wrong, we have an infinite loss.

Compelling Evidence

The only hope of avoiding this loss is if a personal Creator God exists. All that is needed to believe that the universe has an absolute beginning is to accept that you can’t count to infinity. Compelling scientific data give reason to believe that the universe was designed to support life. The origin of life appears chemically impossible without appealing to a mind. The reasonable conclusion— for the willing—is that we are the end product of a self-existent, powerful, intelligent Being with the properties of the God of the Bible.

Once Omnipotence is granted, anything that is logically possible is on the table. This includes miracles. Compared to the act of creation (God bringing everything out of pure nothing) the miracles in the Bible are minor—except for the fact that God did them for us so that we might believe. While the miracles of the Old Testament are beyond the reach of the historian (except for the special case of predictive prophecy), the resurrection of Jesus is amazingly open to the methods of historical study. Professor Gary Habermas has sifted through the corpus of modern scholarship—approximately 2,000 articles on the resurrection—and found overwhelming agreement on this basic set of facts:

1 Jesus died on a Roman cross in 30 or 33 AD.

2 Jesus was buried in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Jewish high council, who was a well-known figure at the time. It is unlikely that his character would have been invented, since he was on the wrong side of the Christian case. Just such a person would have had the connections to obtain the body from Pilate, the Roman governor who sentenced Jesus to die.

3 The tomb was found empty the first day of the week (Sunday morning). This is presupposed by the argument from the Jewish authorities (according to Matthew and Jewish sources) that Jesus’ followers stole the body. A stolen body implies an empty tomb!

4 Jesus’ followers sincerely believed that they had physical contact with him over 40 days. No one disputes this; and the only natural explanation—mass hallucinations— is incredible considering the nature of the appearances.

5 Jesus’ followers started preaching the resurrected Christ in Jerusalem after 50 days. It would have been impossible to do this if there had been a body to produce; and the Jewish and Roman authorities had the power to produce it—had it been available.

These facts are the judgment of the majority of historians—not theologians. As historians, they do not make a judgment about the resurrection of Jesus. But you are left to deal with the facts. There is no plausible natural explanation. If God is allowed, the simplest inference— with the most explanatory power and scope—is that God raised Jesus from the dead. Most counterarguments are not based on history, but on philosophical commitments about what is possible.

The resurrection of Jesus is not just some weird anomaly, but is consistent with the expectations of the Old Testament. In it are hundreds of references to a coming Jewish Messiah that are uniquely fulfilled in Jesus. These include his genealogy, his birthplace, the date of his arrival in Jerusalem, details of his death, his burial in a rich man’s tomb, and that his body would not see decay. Even just a handful of these prophecies make it a near mathematical certainty that only Jesus fits the person described. At the same time, this foreknowledge demonstrates that the God who stands above time (therefore the Creator) is the God who inspired the Bible. While some try to cast doubt on these arguments, I maintain that they are very strong and have withstood critical challenge from academics, scholarly debates, and popular-culture books like The Passover Plot and The Da Vinci Code. The relentless skeptical attacks have aroused a response from Christian scholars that has immensely strengthened the Christian case.

Why Men Don’t Seek

Diversion can be a great barrier to seeking God. If we have too much leisure, we might spend time in introspection and see the “infinite abyss” that Pascal says we can only fill with the infinite God. He writes:

God alone is man’s true good…it is a fact…that nothing in nature has been found to take his place. Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.

Indifference is another great barrier to seeking God. Pascal saw indifference to one’s fate after death as a character flaw. One reason for indifference is that we are drowning in so much information that truth can’t break through the competing claims. This leads to the same skeptical response that Pontius Pilate gave to Jesus when he said, “What is truth?” There are only a few competing thought systems, and everyone has adopted one of them—most of the time as a subconscious set of control beliefs that determine what sort of evidence we will commit to in forming our conscious beliefs.

Christianity cannot be refuted by one who is indifferent, no matter how intelligent he is. Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft writes:

Hell is not populated mainly by passionate rebels, but by nice, bland, indifferent, respectable people who never gave a damn…How could anyone act as if it made no difference whether the obscure path through the dark forest of life leads home or into quicksand; whether the waterslide has a pool at the bottom or rocks? It is insanity to sing, “I don’t care” while walking along such a path.

Some people who hear the Christian message become so angry that they spend disproportionate effort creating rationalizations to justify their rejection. Often this is nothing more than “I don’t like it, and the people I associate with don’t like it either.” The big questions they should be trying to answer are not met with “Is it true?”— but with “Do I like it?” The hardened heart may actively try to refute the specifics of the cumulative Christian case, spending hours on the internet refuting every argument. Or, one could spend his/her efforts trying to see if these things are true.

Tried and Proven

Which path you choose depends on your heart—your deepest desires. God’s claim is that “You will find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jeremiah 29:13). This claim is not refuted unless tested—tested philosophically, scientifically, historically, and existentially. By existentially I mean: Does it meet our deepest needs? One of those needs is to solve the problem of death, nonexistence, and the fact that death renders all that we will ever do as meaningless. Avoiding death is not enough. We have a deep desire to maintain our relationship with others and with Someone greater than ourselves.

One objection that has force for anyone who holds that God is all-powerful and all-good is the problem of evil. While atheist philosophers recognize that there is no successful logical defeater against this Christian conception of God, the problem of evil still has emotional force because of the amount and severity of evil and the fact that we will all experience it. To the skeptic who thinks he has an effective weapon, I would give the answer from Ravi Zacharias, a Christian from India:

When you say there is too much evil, you assume there is good. When you assume there is good, you assume there is such a thing as a moral law on the basis to differentiate between good and evil. But if you assume a moral law, you assume a moral law giver, but that is who you are trying to disprove.

What the sincere inquirer is really asking is, “Why did this happen?” The honest answer is, “We don’t know.” But just because we don’t know is not a proof against God or a mark on His character. Given free will and a universe with natural laws, we are simply not in a position to know. That would require omnipotence on our part. This world (while created good) provides enough unpleasantness to make us long for something better—and this is what God promises us if we trust Him through Christ.

The large group of men and women who saw the risen Christ 2,000 years ago were not merely pre-scientific and gullible—succumbing to the mythologies of the day. Their proclamation still has the power to give hope that our lives will not come to nothing.

(Paul Ernst has taught high school hemistry and physics and worked as an analytical chemist. He lives with his wife Mary in Boulder, Colorado. Paul’s apologetics book, You Bet Your Life: A Toolkit for Making Life’s Ultimate Decision, is written for the modern skeptic who is open to rethinking his/her position. It is available through Amazon.com and can also be found through Paul’s website: www.youbetyourlife.org.)