Congratulations to ReligionFreeDeist and evangelical1 for winning the Resurrection challenge.
Why are naturalistic explanations preferred?
(hover the mouse pointer over the scripture references)
What happens if you do acknowledge the evidence for the resurrection?
Then you have to take Jesus seriously… (Jn. 18:37)
Jesus taught that man is hopelessly sinful and lost. This is an inconvenient truth, also it’s not a likely human invention. (Jn. 8:34)
It’s also extremely distasteful if you believe you are a ‘good’ person. (Mrk. 10:18)
He taught that the penalty for sin is eternal separation from God in a place called hell. This is radically different from Judaism it was Jesus’ new teaching — another inconvenient and very unattractive idea from a humanist perspective — why would human beings make this up? (Matt. 10:28)
Jesus dies for our sins, and this seems weird to us, even unjust. Yet it has coherence with the Torah’s sacrificial system and especially with the account of Abraham taking Isaac up on the mountain. The concluding message was that God would provide the lamb for the sacrifice. (Gen. 22: 8, 22:14)
Then John the Baptist comes along and declares Jesus as “the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (Jn. 1:29)
Jesus teaches that this is not something you can earn with your good behavior, but salvation is a free gift from God (Jn. 15:16). This is an idea that appears in no other world religion, unmerited grace. We like to take pride in our accomplishments. This is just not something men would come up with. (Eph. 2:8)
To receive this free gift of salvation, it is a requirement to acknowledge the resurrection.(Rom 10:9)
If the message of Jesus has opened you to the need for forgiveness and to the reality of God… then perhaps the anti-supernatural dogma might lose its power over your mind. The evidence is there and it is compelling.
After all… who are you? what are you? your mind, your consciousness, your sense of self is an immaterial reality that transcends naturalistic explanation. So why the insistence on only naturalistic explanations? (1 Cor 2:14)
Could it be that openness to a supernatural explanation is not prejudice to believe in the resurrection, but freedom from prejudice against it?
About Cris Putnam
Listening to Ravi Zacharies in which he was talking about the resurrection and the following is what I found interesting and I paraphrase “Jesus promised a bodily resurrection not a spiritual resurrection which proves to me that God was not trying to pull the wool over any ones eyes. That he was set to prove that he in fact resurrection did occur.” I believe that if Jesus did not actually resurrect from the dead somebody by now would have been able to disprove it in a non-refutable way!
Another interesting point that Ravi makes is the “argument to design” not argument from design” which goes something like this “in order for anything to come into being there must be the raw material from which design was even possible. You can look at a baby and say this is an argument from consummation of a husband and a wife who brought this baby into the world, that’s an argument from effect. The question to ask is “Why is it possible that the combination of what the husband and wife brought into the consummate union that its even possible for a life to come into being. That is the agreement to design?” You don’t have a dictionary if there is no alphabet.” There is always a prefiguring of what we call love, sexuality, procreation, empiricism, and logic etc, etc, there is a pre-configuring of making all this possible which is the agreement to design.” My point is that naturalism does give us any answers to why anything exists at all!
That is so true Shelley! Look at what an instance on naturalism did to poor Stephen Hawking as in my post below. Naturalism as an metaphysical explanation is woefully inadequate.
I just realized that I left out the very important word :”not”…sorry about that!
“There is always a prefiguring of what we call love, sexuality, procreation, empiricism, and logic etc, etc, there is a pre-configuring of making all this possible which is the agreement to design.” My point is that naturalism does not give us any answers to why anything exists at all”!