Thinking to Believe

A simple reflection tells us that something must be eternal.  After all, if you start with nothing, you’ll always end up with nothing.  But we ended up with something, which means we must have started with something.  Put another way, since something exists now something must have always existed.  There could never be a time when absolutely nothing existed.  Something must be eternal, but what is that something?

There are good scientific and philosophical reasons to conclude that physical reality has not always existed, so physical reality can’t be the eternal something.  Since things which begin to exist must be caused to exist by something else, physical reality had to be caused by something else, and perhaps the cause of the physical world is the eternal something we are looking for.  How would we know?

(more…)

Could the human population have originated from two people? Many say science has proven this to be impossible and are reinterpreting the Biblical narrative to fit the current scientific thinking.  In this article, Fuz Rana evaluates the science behind the claims regarding original human population sizes. He notes that it is based on mathematical modeling rather than empirical data, and those mathematical models have failed verification in each case we have been able to test them.  At the very least this ought to give Christians pause before reinterpreting the Bible to fit the latest scientific thinking.  It would be foolish to abandon the historicity of a primordial pair of humans based on scientific reasoning that has inaccurately “predicted” the original population sizes of animals for which we know the original populations.  If the mathematics are too idealized for real-life biology, then Christians should not feel the pressure to “revise” our theology.

Michael Licona’s magnum opus on the resurrection, The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach, is a must read for those who are interested in the historical evidence for the resurrection.  It has some overlap with other great works on the resurrection such as N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God, but it is distinct in that it begins with an examination of history and method (philosophy of history) before examining the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus and drawing any conclusions.  Licona explores the nature of historical knowledge (what can be known) and historical methodology.  He even assesses the source material (canonical as well as non-canonical material) to determine each source’s value for the investigation.  Finally, he gets to the heart of the matter by determining the historical facts, and then assessing competing hypotheses to determine the best explanation.  All 600+ pages are worth your attention!