Wednesday 16 July 2014

Impossible!? Exactly!

I want to tell you about a conversation I had with a young woman who was more than a bit sceptical about Christianity.

Her opening line was that she wanted to know how we could believe what we believe, because she just went by facts, evidence, reason and science, and the idea of a dead man coming to life is just biologically impossible and statistically it just doesn't happen.

I told her we would address the evidence for the resurrection after I said two things. The first thing I wanted to point out was that the Christian claim is not that the Lord Jesus naturally rose from the dead - we agree that is impossible. Our claim is that God raised Him from the dead - it was a miracle, not a natural event.

The second thing I said was that she has stated that life coming from death is biologically impossible, but that is her view, not ours. She is the one who is claiming that all of life came from non-life, which is indeed biologically impossible, statistically it "just doesn't happen." The conditions scientists believed to be present in the early earth make the production of amino acids impossible, and even if amino acids could have been produced that is still nowhere near producing life. No matter how many molecules could be produced from early earth conditions you can never produce a living cell, because, as Jonathan Wells points out, if you had perfect conditions and you put a living cell in and poke the cell with a sterile needle you would have all the ingredients of a living cell but you could not make one - you can't put Humpty together again!

But it gets worse. I told her she not only believed that all of life came from non-life, which is impossible, but that everything came from nothing without a cause, which again "just doesn't happen"!

For this reason, I told her I find it a bit rich when atheists say they find Christianity hard to believe.

We spoke about the evidence for the resurrection (see some of the posts here) and well as the experience of the living Christ in our own lives. She said she would think these things through. I hope she does, and I hope you do too.