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Authors: John C. Lennox
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was really God, as I believe he was, what was God doing on a cross?
“Could it be that God begins just here to meet our heartbreaks, by demonstrating that he did not remain distant from our human suffering, but became part of it himself? For me, this is the beginning of hope; and it is a living hope that cannot be smashed by the enemy of death. The story does not end in the darkness of the cross. Yeshua conquered death. He rose from the dead; and one day, as the final judge, he will assess everything in absolute fairness, righteousness, and mercy.”
There was silence. She was still standing, arms outstretched, forming a motionless cross in the doorway. After a moment, with tears in her eyes, very quietly but audibly, she said: “Why has no one ever told me that about my messiah before?”
There are no simplistic answers to the hard questions thrown up by human suffering. The answer that Christianity gives is not a set of propositions or a philosophical analysis of the possibilities — it is, rather, a Person who suffered.
But it is not simply a Person who suffered to show solidarity with us in our suffering. It went far deeper than that. The unique claim of Christianity is that, on the cross, Jesus suffered something very much worse than crucifixion — he suffered to atone for sin. As the old hymn says, “He died that we might be forgiven.”
New Atheism, however, finds that concept reprehensible…
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
ARE MIRACLES PURE FANTASY? 1
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined.”
David Hume
“Generations of Humeans have… been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws… Hume’s scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study.”
Anthony Flew
The vehement reaction of the New Atheists against miracles springs from the fact that they are convinced that miracles “violate the principle of science”. 2 In his debate with Jay Richards at Stanford, Christopher Hitchens asked Richards if he believed that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. When Richards replied in the affirmative, Hitchens then asked if he believed that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin. Richards again said that he did. “I rest my case,” Hitchens responded. “This is an honest guy, who has just made it very clear [that] science has nothing to do with his worldview.” 3 To this I would in turn respond that Hitchens has just made it clear that understanding what science can and cannot do is not one of his strengths.
The same is true of Richard Dawkins. My debate with him in Oxford was on the question “Has Science Buried God?” The debate was staged in the Oxford Museum of Natural History, a place certainly famous for a previous debate there in 1860 between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, on Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species . That debate is now commemorated with the Darwin Plinth , placed at the main entrance to the museum in 2010. On the way in to the debate through that entrance I had a sudden recollection that the building had an interesting history connected with Christianity; but I could not quite focus, with the pre-debate pressure. I mentioned it tentatively to Dawkins in the debate; he said no, there was no connection. But he was wrong. In fact, the building was the project of Sir Henry Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine in the University, whose aim was to bring all aspects of science together around a central display area. In an 1858 lecture Acland explained that the reason for the building’s construction was to give people the opportunity to
“Could it be that God begins just here to meet our heartbreaks, by demonstrating that he did not remain distant from our human suffering, but became part of it himself? For me, this is the beginning of hope; and it is a living hope that cannot be smashed by the enemy of death. The story does not end in the darkness of the cross. Yeshua conquered death. He rose from the dead; and one day, as the final judge, he will assess everything in absolute fairness, righteousness, and mercy.”
There was silence. She was still standing, arms outstretched, forming a motionless cross in the doorway. After a moment, with tears in her eyes, very quietly but audibly, she said: “Why has no one ever told me that about my messiah before?”
There are no simplistic answers to the hard questions thrown up by human suffering. The answer that Christianity gives is not a set of propositions or a philosophical analysis of the possibilities — it is, rather, a Person who suffered.
But it is not simply a Person who suffered to show solidarity with us in our suffering. It went far deeper than that. The unique claim of Christianity is that, on the cross, Jesus suffered something very much worse than crucifixion — he suffered to atone for sin. As the old hymn says, “He died that we might be forgiven.”
New Atheism, however, finds that concept reprehensible…
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
ARE MIRACLES PURE FANTASY? 1
“A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience as can be imagined.”
David Hume
“Generations of Humeans have… been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws… Hume’s scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study.”
Anthony Flew
The vehement reaction of the New Atheists against miracles springs from the fact that they are convinced that miracles “violate the principle of science”. 2 In his debate with Jay Richards at Stanford, Christopher Hitchens asked Richards if he believed that Jesus was resurrected from the dead. When Richards replied in the affirmative, Hitchens then asked if he believed that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin. Richards again said that he did. “I rest my case,” Hitchens responded. “This is an honest guy, who has just made it very clear [that] science has nothing to do with his worldview.” 3 To this I would in turn respond that Hitchens has just made it clear that understanding what science can and cannot do is not one of his strengths.
The same is true of Richard Dawkins. My debate with him in Oxford was on the question “Has Science Buried God?” The debate was staged in the Oxford Museum of Natural History, a place certainly famous for a previous debate there in 1860 between Thomas Henry Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, on Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species . That debate is now commemorated with the Darwin Plinth , placed at the main entrance to the museum in 2010. On the way in to the debate through that entrance I had a sudden recollection that the building had an interesting history connected with Christianity; but I could not quite focus, with the pre-debate pressure. I mentioned it tentatively to Dawkins in the debate; he said no, there was no connection. But he was wrong. In fact, the building was the project of Sir Henry Acland, Regius Professor of Medicine in the University, whose aim was to bring all aspects of science together around a central display area. In an 1858 lecture Acland explained that the reason for the building’s construction was to give people the opportunity to
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