Tag Archives: William Lane Craig

New Testament Reliability, Resurrection

Is There Evidence for the Empty Tomb?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

I have been having an interesting discussion with a gentleman on the issue of the empty tomb.  We’ve touched on some of the evidence, but I decided to present a brief synopsis of William Lane Craig’s arguments for the empty tomb (from Jesus Under Fire).  Here goes!

  1. The historical credibility of the burial story supports the empty tomb.  If the burial story is accurate, the site of Jesus’ tomb would have been known to Jew and Christian alike.  Anyone could have, and would have, just marched to the tomb and produced the body.  In fact, the burial story is widely recognized as a historically credible narrative.
  2. Paul’s testimony implies the fact of the empty tomb.  The sequence in 1 Cor 15 is death- burial – resurrection.  Surely this sequence implies a tomb, or else where would Jesus be buried?
  3. The presence of the empty tomb narrative in the pre-Markan Passion story supports its historical credibility.  Scholars believe that Mark’s sources from which he wrote his Gospel contained the Passion story of Jesus.  Therefore, this source material would have been very old and date back to right after Jesus’ death (about A.D. 37).
  4. The use of the “first day of the week” (Mark 16:2) instead of  “on the third day” points to the primitiveness of the tradition of the empty tomb.  Scholars believe that the “third day” motif found in the New Testament developed later in Christian preaching.  The fact that Mark leaves those words out speaks to a very early date for the material in Mark.
  5. The nature of the narrative itself is theologically unadorned and nonapologetic.  Mark’s account of the empty tomb is simple and straightforward.
  6. The empty tomb was discovered by women.  Given the low status of women in 1st century Jewish society and their inability to serve as legal witnesses, it would be nonsensical for the New Testament writers to fabricate the story of the women finding the empty tomb.  The most reasonable explanation is that they really did.
  7. The investigation of the tomb by Peter and John is historically probable.  The visit of the disciples to the tomb is attested both in tradition (Luke 24:12, 24; John 20:3) and by John himself.
  8. It would have been virtually impossible for the disciples to proclaim the resurrection in Jerusalem had the tomb not been empty.  When the disciples began to preach the resurrection in Jerusalem and people responded, and when the religious authorities stood helplessly by, the tomb must have been empty.
  9. The earliest Jewish polemic presupposes the empty tomb.  Matthew tells us in Matt. 28:15 that the Jewish opponents of Christianity did not deny that the tomb was empty.  They claimed the disciples stole the body.
  10. The fact that Jesus’ tomb was not venerated as a shrine indicates that the tomb was empty.  It was customary in Judaism for the tomb of a prophet or holy man to be preserved or venerated as a shrine because the bones of the prophet lay in the tomb.  The only reason Jesus’ followers would not have venerated his tomb is because it was empty.

Aside from those 10 reasons, there is very little evidence.  🙂

Existence of God

Does the Appearance of Design Prove God's Existence?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt

Certainly the appearance of design in the natural world makes a strong case for the existence of a super-intelligent being, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Many people look at the world around them and marvel at its functionality and complexity.  A common reaction to the functionality and complexity of the world is to wonder who or what made it that way.

Based on that intuition about the world, theists, those who believe in a single creator God, have made an argument about the existence of God in the following way.

  1. Every design has a designer.
  2. The universe exhibits complex design.
  3. Therefore the universe has a designer.

Premise 1 is fairly straightforward.  If something can be shown to be designed, it must have had a designer.

Premise 2, however, requires evidence.  Below is an extended quotation from William Lane Craig, one of the foremost Christian scholars of our day.

During the last thirty years or so, scientists have discovered that the existence of intelligent life depends on a complex and delicate balance of initial conditions given in the big bang itself.  Scientists once believed that whatever the initial conditions of the universe, eventually intelligent life might evolve.  But we now know that our existence is balanced on a knife’s edge.  It seems vastly more probable that a life-prohibiting universe rather than a life-permitting universe such as ours should exist.  The existence of intelligent life depends on a conspiracy of initial conditions that must be fine-tuned to a degree that is literally incomprehensible and incalculable.  For example, Stephen Hawking has estimated that if the rate of the universe’s expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have re-collapsed into a hot fireball.  British physicist P. C. W. Davies has calculated that the odds against the initial conditions being suitable for later star formation (without which planets could not exist) is one followed by a thousand billion billion zeroes, at least.  He also estimates that a change in the strength of gravity or of the weak force by only one part in 10,100 would have prevented a life-permitting universe. Roger Penrose of Oxford University has calculated that the odds of the big bang’s low entropy condition existing by chance are on the order of one out of 10 to the 123rd power.  There are [many] such quantities and constants present in the big bang that must be fine-tuned in this way if the universe is to permit life. And it’s not just each quantity that must be finely tuned; their ratios to one another must be also finely tuned. Therefore, improbability is added to improbability to improbability until our minds are reeling in incomprehensible numbers.

It is not just the physical conditions that must be present in the universe for life to exist that exhibit complex design.  There is also the issue of life itself.

Living cells are composed of DNA.  DNA consists of nitrogen bases called adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine which are commonly represented by the letters A, T, C and G.  These letters form genetic codes which provide the instructions for the building and replicating of all living things.  The four letter genetic code is identical to any other written language.  The sequences of genetic letters spell out exact instructions just like a sentence in English would.

To give you an idea of how complex life is, a single-celled amoeba contains the equivalent of 1,000 sets of an encyclopedia in its DNA.  The human genome is composed of about three billion nucleotide base pairs.  Years ago, Carl Sagan estimated that there is the equivalent of 20 million books of information stored in the human brain.  This number is considered to be conservative now.  The amount of information contained in living cells and the human brain is truly staggering, and thus the conclusion of complex design seems easily warranted.

Before we move on, I need to quickly add that the evidence presented above of design in the fine tuning of the universe to support life and of the composition of life itself is merely scratching the surface.  Many fantastic books have been written in the past 20 years detailing far more evidence of design in the natural world than what was mentioned above, so hopefully I have just whet your appetite to read more!

But now, if we have shown that the universe is indeed characterized by complex design, then who or what is the designer?

I think we can make the following conclusions about the designer.  The designer is super-intelligent and purposeful.  The intelligence of the designer far surpasses any kind of human intelligence ever seen.  The designer is purposeful because all designs have purposes behind them.  We are not dealing with a being who is randomly creating with no purpose.

Have we arrived at the God of the Bible?  No, we haven’t, but we have certainly made a strong case for the existence of a designer who has at least a couple of the attributes of the God of the Bible, and we have eliminated the possibility that no such designer exists.  We haved ruled out the possibility that the universe is caused by some irrational or purely non-intelligent source.

Theistic arguments for the existence of a Designer confirm the intuition that many people have had since the dawn of man.  To say that everything we see in the world around us just happened by chance is simply unbelievable.

Morality, Philosophy

What Do We Know About Morality? Part 1

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First, when one reflects on morality, there are certain objective moral facts that seem to be obvious; these facts can be known by intuition.  According to ethicist Greg Koukl, “Philosophers call this kind of knowing a priori knowledge (literally, ‘from what is prior’), that which one knows prior to sense experience.”   There are clear-cut actions that we know are wrong, such as murder, the torture of babies for fun, and rape. 

The great apologist, C. S. Lewis, argued forcefully that all men are aware of basic moral facts and that these moral facts do not vary from civilization to civilization or from time to time.  To prove his point he asked the reader to think of a “country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all of the people who had been kindest to him.  You might as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.”  

Philosopher William Lane Craig has argued that people who can not see clear-cut cases of moral truth are morally handicapped and can be safely ignored when debating ethics.   Greg Koukl summarizes by claiming “all moral reasoning must start with foundational concepts that can only be known by intuition, which is why one doesn’t carry the burden of proof in clear-cut examples of moral truth.”

Clear-cut moral cases are then seen to be objectively true by intuition, by a priori knowledge.  A person may want to reject the existence of objective moral truth by arguing that people often vehemently disagree about particular difficult moral situations, and that this fact, therefore, demonstrates that morality cannot be objectively known.  Christian apologists Norman Geisler and Frank Turek respond to this argument by stating that “the fact that there are difficult problems in morality doesn’t disprove the existence of objective natural laws.  Scientists don’t deny that an objective world exists when they encounter a difficult problem in the natural world (i.e., when they have trouble knowing the answer).”  

In other words, the fact that there are disagreements over complex moral issues fails to prove that objective moral truth cannot be discerned by moral intuition.  The point to be understood is that there are straightforward instances of moral judgments – killing innocent humans is wrong, acting unselfishly is a virtue, and so on – that can be known by virtually all people.

Given the existence of objective moral laws, there are other attributes of morality that can be grasped upon further reflection.  According to ethicist Francis Beckwith there are at least seven aspects of morality that appear to be true, based on mankind’s common moral experience.  

We will review these seven aspects of morality in future posts, so stay tuned.

[quotation references can be provided on request]