Some
skeptics bring an interesting twist to the question of believing in the God of
the Bible. Acknowledging that there may have been a resurrection, they ask on
what basis we can conclude that Yahweh was the cause. “Why,”
one challenger asked, “should I reach that conclusion when I could introduce a
myriad of other supernatural explanations that explain the data equally well?
For instance, why should I not conclude that an “evil god” is fooling us for
its own sinister reasons?”
This same
type of challenge finds its way into criminal courtrooms every day in America.
The challenge has some intuitive appeal: whenever we are assessing the evidence
for an event that we did not ourselves perceive, the possibility that something
bizarre and out of the ordinary was at play is not far from our minds. Afraid to be seen as gullible, we will
quickly form a doubt if we begin to sense that perhaps someone is trying to
mislead us. The safe bet, in that
setting, is to remain ambivalent, consider both sides, and appear to be open, putting
off a decision. No one likes to be wrong. Defense attorneys will, consequently,
use this ploy to exploit to their client's advantage.
But this
line of thinking goes too far. If I
accept it, then I will be unable to make any
decisions. I will approach every inquiry doubting that any aspect of what I perceive
is accurate, and in the end I will begin to doubt whether my senses are
providing me with any reliable data. If it is true that “anything could explain
how the drugs got into my client’s car,” then I must acquit before I begin to
assess the remainder of the evidence.
That’s not the way it works, because generalized statements like that are
simply not accurate. They either fail to account for actual pieces of evidence
that are reliably known, or they introduce the hidden assumption that nothing can ever be reliably known.
Applying
this to the resurrection, could I not posit an evil troll living under a bridge
that has the power to cause resurrections, but who can remain invisible? No one
has ever disproven this proposition, so it could be argued that the troll’s
power is quite impressive. The troll became aware of Jesus’ works and decided
to mislead his followers by faking the resurrection, even though Jesus actually
died. Since such a being “fully explains” the resurrection, we have no way,
then, of distinguishing between the two explanations.
The short
answer is that this is simply false; the only explanation that fully and
adequately explains the evidence for the resurrection is the Christian God. I have no good
reason to believe that trolls exist, or that there are beings with such magical powers. So,
“positing” one is a mental exercise that does not advance our knowledge. Similarly, I have a reliable basis for rejecting the “evil
god” hypothesis, for two reasons: it is based on a misunderstanding of the
concept of God; and in it fails to account for the cumulative case for
Christianity. Let’s start with what we
mean by God. St. Anselm expressed it
effectively in his ontological argument – God is that being who possesses
maximal greatness, a being a greater than which cannot be conceived. What attributes exist, God possesses them in
an infinitely maximal way. The basic operation of our minds allows us to discern
and intuit certain characteristics that such a being must possess, including
such things as infinite power, perfect knowledge and perfect goodness. Goodness
is the key to our inquiry here - why goodness? St. Augustine’s reflections on evil (in Confessions)
may help make this point clear; evil is the perversion of the good, not a thing
in and of itself. Evil and good are not
independent forces at war against each other. Evil is the reflection of how
what was good has been perverted or sullied. God, therefore, possesses and
reflects this maximal goodness; he is the source of all the good we can perceive is
an infinitely good God. So “positing” an evil God runs afoul of this conceptual
sense. There may be "evil" beings - even powerful ones like the Devil
- but they are "evil" precisely because they deploy their will
against God. It is their thoughts and acts contrary to God's perfect goodness
that allow us to recognize them as evil in the first place, not some inherent
quality of "evilness" which they possess.
The
second source of knowledge is from revelation. Knowing what limited
(conceptual) things reason can tell us about God, we see in the pages of
Scripture the account of God’s actual interaction with this world, which
culminated with Jesus’ sacrifice. Several authors have made this case in easily
readable formats, such as Gary Habermas, Lee Strobel, William Lane Craig and
Mike Licona. Though beyond the scope of this limited post, the case includes:
Jesus fulfills prophecies written centuries before his birth, claims to be God
while impressing people with both his sanity and his goodness, performs
miracles to prove his claim, and then pulls off the greatest miracle of all by
rising from the dead. Jesus’ ministry is marked by goodness and love, and
includes repeated references to the importance of forgiveness and love of
enemy. He tells the disciples exactly what is going to happen, and then goes
about making it happen. In short, Jesus has both the power and the motivation
to not let the disciples be fooled by "evil gods."
Taken
together, these two sources provide the one explanation that makes the most
sense of the data. Could an “evil god” have snuck in there somehow and fooled
the disciples through the use of some unexplained power? The answer in the
abstract would have to be yes. It’s possible also that no one wrote this post
and you are only imagining that you are reading it. But the reasonable conclusion, based not on abstractions but on all the evidence, is that this unique event in history was the product of the God of goodness and love who sent his Son into the world to save us from ourselves. And that is "good" news indeed.
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