Michael Woroniecki for Logos.com
Across the world today, Christians of every race, tribe, and tongue celebrate the highest of Holy holidays – the resurrection of Jesus. To the unbeliever, it is a foolish notion that someone would die and come to life again — unseen and unheard by them — in a volatile world filled with anguish and ruin.
By necessity, Christianity is a historical religion; the good news of the gospel is only “good” if it transcends theological truth into reality. And this, of course, is what millions of Christians attest – that Jesus is alive by virtue of an inexplicable personal experience.
And so today, instead of attempting to convince those who cannot fathom the power and truth of the gospel; those who believe Easter to be folly, Liberty Nation offers up the reflections of scientists, philosophers, and authors – skeptics one and all. Here are their personal contemplations on man, God, and the resurrection:
Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen, for physical or chemical reasons, to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call thought. But, if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? It’s like upsetting a milk jug and hoping that the way it splashes itself will give you a map of London. But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course I can’t trust the arguments leading to Atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an Atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I cannot believe in thought: so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God.
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.
— C.S. Lewis
Over a half century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of old people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.
…we have all the evidence we need in our immediate experience and that only a deliberate refusal to “look” is responsible for atheism of any variety.
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
(Winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize)
I now believe there is a God…I now think it [the evidence] does point to a creative Intelligence almost entirely because of the DNA investigations. What I think the DNA material has done is that it has shown, by the almost unbelievable complexity of the arrangements which which are needed to produce life, that intelligence must have been involved in getting these extraordinarily diverse elements to work together.
— Antony Flew
(Atheist philosopher who belonged to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought)
I believe God did intend, in giving us intelligence, to give us the opportunity to investigate and appreciate the wonders of His creation. He is not threatened by our scientific adventures.
— Francis Collins
(Former NIH Director, geneticist noted for his leadership of the Human Genome Project)
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And so to the unbeliever, this foolishness of the gospel may stand for another hour, day or year. But in the end, each of us must answer the question for ourselves: “Who is this Jesus?”
