Be prepared.  Today’s post is long…but necessary, for me.  Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll have lighter fare, you poor dears.

It’s only fair that I let you in on my thinking processes, since so recently (around Easter) I was asked to answer three important questions by Bing from Birmingham.

I’ve been quite honest about the fact that I don’t know a great many things, and the more I read, it seems, the less I know–including my final analyses on God or Jesus.  I understand that there are a great deal of people who simply accept the facts they grew up with.  It’s the easiest thing to do, and it requires no mental torment.

I’ve just finished reading Antony Flew’s book There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, and I’m flummoxed once again.  Here’s a man who is arguing as a philosopher.  To explain the difference between a scientist and a philosopher, he gives the following illustration:

“You might ask how I, a philosopher, could speak to issues treated by scientists.  The best way to answer this is with another question.  Are we engaging in science or philosophy here?  When you study the interaction of two physical bodies, for instance, two subatomic particles, you are engaged in science.  When you ask how it is that those subatomic particles–or anything physical–could exist and why, you are engaged in philosophy.  When you draw philosophical conclusions from scientific data, then you are thinking as a philosopher.”

Although one of Richard Dawkins’ conjectures in The God Delusion was that even Einstein was an atheist, Flew refutes this in Einstein’s own words:

“I’m not an atheist, and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist.  We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages.  The child knows someone must have written those books.  It does not know how.  It does not understand the languages in which they are written.  The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is.  That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.  We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws.  Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.”

So much for Einstein.

Flew’s arguments make sense, except for one thing, which I’ll get to soon.

One of the arguments for the existence of an Intelligent Mind has been the fine-tuning argument.  Flew explains it at first metaphorically, having us imagine entering a hotel room on our next vacation and strangely, everything is just like home–the fragrance, the picture on the wall, the music on the CD player, the cookies and drinks in the mini-bar, the books on the desk, the hygiene products in the bathroom.  You’d begin to think that someone knew you were coming.

Likewise, writes physicist Freeman Dyson, “The more I examine the universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense knew we were coming.”

Flew continues, “Let’s take the most basic laws of physics.  It has been calculated that if the value of even one of the fundamental constants–the speed of light or the mass of an electron, for instance–had been to the slightest degree different, then no planet capable of permitting the evolution of human life could have formed.”

Probably the most rampant reason for people abandoning their faith and saying there’s no God is the existence of evil, and I could spend hours discussing the various arguments, either way.  Books have been written on the subject.

Here’s what Flew says: “Certainly, the existence of evil and suffering must be faced.  However, philosophically speaking, that is a separate issue from the question of God’s existence.  From the existence of nature, we arrive at the ground of its existence.  Nature may have its imperfections, but this says nothing as to whether it had an ultimate Source.  Thus, the existence of God does not depend on the existence of warranted or unwarranted evil.”  Now to the existence of evil… “With regard to explaining the presence of evil, there are two alternate explanations for those who accept the existence of the Divine.  The first is that of the Aristotelian God who does not intervene in the world.  The second is the free-will defense, the idea that evil is always a possibility if human beings are truly free.  In the Aristotelian framework, once the work of creation is completed, God leaves the universe subject to the laws of nature, although perhaps sometimes providing a rather distant and detached endorsement of the fundamental principles of justice.  The free-will defense depends on the prior acceptance of a framework of divine revelation, the idea that God has revealed himself.”

In Appendix A, Flew has allowed Roy Abraham Varghese to speak.  Varghese has worked with a number of atheists at conferences and in publications.  Rightly, I think, he starts off by explaining that “We are accustomed to hearing about arguments and proofs for God’s existence.  In my view, such arguments are useful in articulating certain fundamental insights, but cannot be regarded as ‘proofs’ whose formal validity determines whether there is a God.”  His approach “is that we have all the evidence we need in our immediate experience and that only a deliberate refusal to ‘look’ is responsible for atheism of any variety.”

He gives an example:

“In considering our immediate experience, let us perform a thought experiment.  Think for a minute of a marble table in front of you.  Do you think that, given a trillion years or infinite time, this table could suddenly or gradually become conscious, aware of its surroundings, aware of its identity the way you are?  It is simply inconceivable that this would or could happen.  And the same goes for any kind of matter.  Once you understand the nature of matter, of mass-energy, you realize that, by its very nature, it could never become ‘aware,’ never ‘think,’ never say ‘I.’  But the atheist position is that, at some point in the history of the universe, the impossible and the inconceivable took place.  Undifferentiated matter (here we include energy), at some point, became ‘alive,’ then conscious, then conceptually proficient, then an ‘I.’  But returning to our table, we see why this is simply laughable.  The table has none of the properties of being conscious and, given infinite time, it cannot ‘acquire’ such properties.  Even if one subscribes to some far-fetched scenario of the origin of life, one would have taken leave of one’s senses to suggest that, given certain conditions, a piece of marble could produce concepts.  And, at a subatomic level, what holds for the table holds for all the other matter in the universe.”

I’ve heard a similar argument using quarks, and I can’t remember where.  You’re heard of protons and neutrons, right?  Refresher course: an atom is made up of a central nucleus surrounded by a cloud of negatively charged electrons.  The nucleus includes positively charged protons and neutrally charged neutrons.  Remember the chart of elements in chemistry class?  The number of protons in an atom tells what element the atom is (hydrogen, oxygen, barium, potassium, etc.); the number of neutrons tells what isotope of the element it is…in layman’s terms, the different forms that that element takes.

Back to quarks.  Quarks combine to form protons and neutrons, and the only way scientists know they’re there is to study their effects on protons and neutrons.  Meaning that although we can’t see them, we can study what they do.  Could this be applied to God?

And finally in Appendix B of the book, Flew allows N. T. Wright to take the stage.  As you may or may not know, Wright is a bishop and a leading New Testament scholar.  Flew asks Wright, “What grounds are there for claiming, from the texts, that Jesus is God Incarnate?”

Surprisingly, Wright jumps right in with an astonishing comment: “My faith in Jesus as the incarnate Son of God does not rest on the verses in the Gospels making this claim.”  What?  Does he, too, not see significance in the Gospels?  Continuing, “It goes much deeper, in fact way back to the very important question about how first-century Jews understood God and God’s action in the world….”

His concludes his arguments, which are reasonable (and too long to go into here), by saying, “So what we see is not so much Jesus going around saying, ‘I am the Second Person of the Trinity.  Either believe it or not.’  That really isn’t the way to read the Gospels.  Rather, reading them as first-century historians, we can see that Jesus is behaving in ways that together say: this whole great story about a God who comes to be with his people is actually happening.  Only it isn’t through the Word and wisdom and the rest.  It’s in and as a person.”

Flew moves onto the next question: “What evidence is there for the resurrection of Christ?”  You must know, first, that Wright has written a lengthy accounting of such research in his book The Resurrection of the Son of God, and this appendix cannot do justice to it all, but here are a couple of his thoughts (to counter Bart Ehrman, whose books I’ve reviewed recently…Misquoting Jesus here and Jesus, Interrupted here).

First, the term resurrection meant something different to the Jews.  It meant they were going to die, then lie dormant for a while, then be raised up.  “And what we then find–and this to me is utterly fascinating–that we can track, in early Christianity, several modifications in the classic Jewish belief about resurrection.  First, instead of resurrection being something that was simply going to happen to all God’s people at the end, the early Christians said it had happened to one person in advance.  Now, no first-century Jew, as far as we know, believed there would be one person raised ahead of everybody else.  So that’s a radical innovation, but they all believed that.”

He talks about the Gospels and how know no one knows, for sure, when they were written.  He claims that “though they were written down later, they go back in a way that has not been altered very much at all, lightly edited but not substantially altered, to very early oral tradition.  This is, obviously, of huge importance.”

And here’s where he taps into what Ehrman was saying:

“It has been said again and again (and when I was researching the big book I got very tired of reading scholars saying this) that (1) Mark was written first, and he’s hardly got anything about the resurrection; (2) Matthew comes next, and there’s not much more; and then (3) toward the end of the century we get Luke and John, and then and only then do we find stories about Jesus eating broiled fish, cooking breakfast by the shore, inviting Thomas to touch him, and so on.”  He claims his was because, according to the theory, there were Christians who thought Jesus might not have been fully human.  The trouble with this theory, though, is that the writers also included references of Jesus going through locked doors and not being recognized.  If that were the point of the writer–to insist on Jesus’s humanness–why would he have included those things?

The second point Wright makes is that “there’s an almost complete absence of echo and allusion to the Old Testament in the resurrection narratives.”  To crucifixion narratives, yes; to the resurrection, no.  It seems odd that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wouldn’t draw on these resources.  “Either we have to say that the early church wrote resurrection narratives replete with reflection on the Old Testament and that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John went through independently and took those references out, or we have to say that these stories go back substantially to an early oral tradition that precedes the theological and exegetical reflection.  In my judgment the second of these is far and away the more likely.”  This is the one line of reasoning I don’t understand.  Couldn’t it mean, too, if there are no resurrection references that there are none, and could it mean, too, it wasn’t expected…nor happened?

I do think his third argument is fascinating.  He says that throughout the gospels the women are included–in finding the empty tomb, in conversing with a newly risen Jesus–yet by the time of Paul, the women had been excised from the account.  I Corinthians 15:5-7 offers up a list of people who saw Jesus as proof–men’s names, then “five hundred brethren,” then James and the apostles, and finally, “me.”  Wright says, “The answer is that, already in the early 50s, the public tradition has airbrushed the women out of the account, because the public tradition knew that they were going to be in trouble.  We see the trouble they had when we read Celsus, who a century later pours scorn on the resurrection by saying, “This faith is just based on the testimony of some hysterical women.”  Yet Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John include the women, especially Mary Magdalene who had a sordid past.

Two more historical explanations must have been true–there must have been an empty tomb, and Jesus must have been seen by people.  Well, Wright says, if you have the first without a second, people would assume body snatchers.  No resurrection then.  What about seeing a hallucination then?  They would have been familiar with ghosts and visions; it’s all over ancient literature.  So.  “The point is this.  If the body of Jesus had still been in the tomb, the disciples could easily have found out.  Then they would have said, “However strong these hallucinations are that we’ve been having, he hasn’t been raised from the dead.”

And Wright’s conclusion: “How, as a historian, do I explain these two facts, as I take them to be: the empty tomb and the appearances and visions of Jesus.  The easiest explanation by far is that these things happened because Jesus really was raised from the dead, and the disciples really did meet him, even though his body was renewed and transformed so that now it seemed to be able to live in two dimensions at once.  (That, indeed, is perhaps the best way to understand the phenomena: Jesus was now living in God’s dimension and ours, or, if you like, heaven and earth, simultaneously.)”

There you have it.  More information to mull over, sort out.  Perfect for a day when you’re preparing for a relaxing weekend, no?

[Post image: Antony Flew by John Lawrence]