Only a literal corpse reanimation (resurrection) can adequately explain why a few hundred first century country bumpkins came to believe that their executed cult leader had appeared to them from the dead, proving to the entire world that he truly was Almighty God, Lord and Creator of the Cosmos.
Lee, Christian: Ockham’s Razor only eliminates a supernatural explanation [for the Resurrection Belief] if an adequate natural explanation can be offered; to date, none of the natural explanations (no burial; body stolen; wrong tomb; some kind of “spiritual” as opposed to bodily resurrection; etc.) have proved adequate to explain all of the historically documented evidence surrounding Jesus’ resurrection.
Gary: Adequate to whom???
Millions of non-Christians all over the world, theists and non-theists, believe that there are multiple, very adequate natural explanations for the origination of the Resurrection (of Jesus) Belief. You know this, Lee! I have presented several hypothetical natural explanations to you—multiple times! Yet you and your fellow Christian apologists persist in claiming that no “adequate” natural explanation exists. Here is the big question for you, Lee: Who gave Christian apologists the final say on this matter??? Why do you and your fellow Christian apologists get the final say regarding which explanations for the early Christian Resurrection Belief are adequate and which are not?
Who died and made you God?
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Escaping Christian Fundamentalism 
There’s no Resurrection to explain. What we have is a story of a Resurrection.
So our question becomes, Do we have natural explanations for the story of the Resurrection?
Do we have natural explanations of the stories of Merlin the magician? Sure. No one is surprised that the story of Merlin isn’t taken as a historical account. Same with the Resurrection.
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Very true.
But what if I claim that the natural explanations for the stories about Merlin the magician are not “adequate” and therefore without any adequate natural explanations, Merlin must have truly possessed magical powers? Who can argue with such logic, Bob?
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Curses! I was only hoping you wouldn’t expose that glaring hole in my logic.
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If people didn’t take the bible as a history book and accepted it as simply a “statement of faith” by some centuries old religious-folk, many of the arguments/discussions would be unnecessary.
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GARY: Why do you and your fellow Christian apologists get the final say regarding which explanations for the early Christian Resurrection Belief are adequate and which are not?
LEE: Reason and common sense “get the final say regarding which explanations for the early Christian Resurrection Belief are adequate and which are not.”
None of the alternative explanations you’ve put forward satisfactorily explain the data; as I keep saying, it honestly takes more faith for me to believe these alternate scenarios than it does to believe the resurrection actually occurred.
Wrong tomb? Stolen body? Too dark to see good? Mass hallucination? Some kind of non-bodily “spiritual” resurrection?
NT Wright considers some of these alternative theories in his Essay “Christian Origins and the Resurrection of Jesus: The Resurrection of Jesus as a Historical Problem. He specifically addresses the problems of saying the resurrection was just a “vision” or some kind of non-physical resurrection:
“As we see from the story of Rhoda in Acts 12, first-century Jews knew about post-mortem visitations from recently deceased friends, and they already had Language systems for speaking of suck phenomena. “It must be his angel,” they said, when they thought they were having a visit of just this sort from Peter. They did not say that Peter had been raised from the dead. To put it another way, if we had been members of that group in Acts 12, and if we had been made aware of a recently executed Peter as a ghostly or spiritual presence with us, we would have concluded, certainly, that Peter was now alive with God. But we still also would have thought that we would have to claim his corpse for burial the next day, and we still would have believed that it remained for him actually to be raised, along with the rest of God’s people, at the last day.
“You see, it would have been very natural for first-century Jews, especially if they bad belonged to a kingdom-of-God movement already, to say of a leader who had paid the ultimate penalty at the hands of the authorities, that his soul was in the band of God, that he was alive to God, that he had been exalted to paradise, and that be was therefore among the righteous who had been unjustly put to death but who would rise again to rule the world in God’s good time. (This is, of course, exactly what Wisdom 3:1-9 does say) And if Jesus’ followers had indeed had a sense that he was alive in a nonphysical way, and even that he was still present with them in some fashion, this is how they would have expressed it. But in so doing they would not have been claiming (to stress the point again) that the eschaton, the longed-for kingdom of God, had now arrived; they would not have been saying that their crucified leader was the Messiah; and above all they would not have been saying that he had been raised from the dead or that ‘the resurrection of the dead’ had now occurred.
“In particular, we have no reason to suppose that after the crucifixion of a would-be messiah anyone would suppose that he had been exalted to a place either of world rulership or divine lordship. Nobody, so far as we know, ever suggested that this was the case after the deaths of Judas the Galilean, Simon bar-Giora, or Simeon ben-Kosiba. Actually, such a suggestion would most likely have been regarded as at best ridiculous and at worst scandalous. The failure of such men to lead a successful messianic movement debarred them from further consideration as candidates for such a position. Even if someone had made such a suggestion, however, they would not then have gone on to say that this person had been ‘raised from the dead.’ Belief in exaltation alone would not lead, in the world of first-century Judaism, to belief in resurrection. If, by contrast, we suppose that the followers of a crucified would-be messiah first came to believe that he had been bodily raised from the dead, then we can trace a clear line by which they subsequently would have come to believe that he must be the Messiah. And if he was the Messiah, then he was also the world ruler promised in Psalm 89 and Daniel 7, and thus he was exalted over the world, and so on. All our texts suggest that this actually was the train of thought that the early Christians followed.”
https://ntwrightpage.com/2016/07/12/christian-origins-and-the-resurrection-of-jesus-the-resurrection-of-jesus-as-a-historical-problem/
Pax.
Lee.
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Lee: Reason and common sense “get the final say regarding which explanations for the early Christian Resurrection Belief are adequate and which are not.” None of the alternative explanations you’ve put forward satisfactorily explain the data; as I keep saying, it honestly takes more faith for me to believe these alternate scenarios than it does to believe the resurrection actually occurred.
Question: Is a cumulative natural explanation (an explanation with multiple components) for an event inadequate simply because it involves multiple improbable steps?
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GARY: Question: Is a cumulative natural explanation (an explanation with multiple components) for an event inadequate simply because it involves multiple improbable steps?
LEE: So no commentary on Wright’s essay? He shoots your hypothesis that Saul of Tarsus saw a “heavenly vision” out of the water on historical grounds.
But to answer your question, such a natural explanation, if it is built upon multiple unnecessary assumptions, would be inadequate. Like your hypothesis that because the tomb was empty, the disciples had to explain its being empty, thus jumped to the conclusion that he must’ve been resurrected, and then they all mass-hallucinated Jesus together.
This scenario is built upon a number of unnecessary, inaccurate assumptions, which I’ve stated numerous times.
Pax.
Lee.
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Again, why do you get to decide what is necessary and what is not, Lee? Guess what? You don’t! You are engaging in another logical fallacy. This time it is the No True Scotsman Fallacy.
Example of No True Scotsman Fallacy:
Person A: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Person B: “But my uncle Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar on his porridge.”
Person A: “But no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge.”
Obviously, the original assertion about Scotsmen has been challenged quite well by Person B. However, in a desperate attempt to shore up his original claim, Person A uses an ad hoc change combined with a shifted meaning of the words from the original.
Let’s see how Lee has used the No True Scotsman Fallacy:
Lee: No true (adequate) natural explanation exists for the Resurrection Belief.
Gary: What about a cumulative natural explanation involving multiple steps and factors, such as:
–someone moved the body to an unknown location.
–the empty tomb gave false hope to the disciples that Jesus might somehow still be alive.
–this false hope triggered religious hysteria resulting in hallucinations, vivid dreams, delusions, and illusions of Jesus appearing to the disciples.
–the alleged (but delusional) appearances led to the belief that Jesus had risen from the dead, which eventually morphed into the belief that Jesus had been resurrected from the dead.
Lee: No adequate natural explanation would involve so many improbable steps/components.
So Lee went from “no true (adequate) natural explanation exists” to “no adequate natural explanation involves multiple improbable steps/factors”.
I dare Lee to demonstrate why even one of the above steps in my hypothetical natural explanation for the Resurrection Belief is impossible. He can’t and he knows it. If any of the steps above are possible, no matter how improbable, then an adequate natural explanation for the Resurrection Belief does exist, regardless of Lee’s fallacious ad hoc protests to the contrary.
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“such a natural explanation, if it is built upon multiple unnecessary assumptions, would be inadequate.”
So you’re saying that a several-step process with natural steps isn’t as simple as “God did it” and so fails?
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By “natural explanation” Gary means anything which isn’t a supernatural explanation.
Gary’s alternate scenario is roughly, that because the tomb was empty, the disciples had to explain its being empty, thus jumped to the conclusion that Jesus must’ve been resurrected, and then they all mass-hallucinated Jesus together (but didn’t recognize him after they mass-hallucinated him). Despite all of them being first-century, Second Temple Messianic Jews, for whom such a scenario is both a historical and theological anachronism.
Belief in Jesus’ exaltation to heaven (as happened in the OT to Methuselah and Elijah) wouldn’t lead to a belief in resurrection; it certainly wouldn’t cause the disciples to say that the eschaton, the longed-for Kingdom of God had finally arrived. Certainly no “heavenly vision” of a “bright light” as Gary claims is all Saul witnessed (though one which talked), would get them there.
Regarding his “No True Scotsman” analogy, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, an acknowledged expert on first-century Judaism, says that possibly, a few Jews of that day could’ve believed that Jesus was a righteous martyr, who’d been exalted to heaven, or possibly even resurrected, but not that he was the Messiah, because, again, if the Messiah died that proved he wasn’t the Messiah because Messiah was supposed to reign triumphally in Jerusalem, then be resurrected with everyone else at the end of the age. So one righteous martyr resurrected in the middle of history wouldn’t cause Jesus’ disciples to say that his death and resurrection had ushered in the eschaton.
So Gary’s alternate hypothesis fails for a number of reasons.
Pax.
Lee.
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Nowhere have I EVER claimed that the disciples had a group hallucination. As a physician, I know that two or more people cannot have the exact same hallucination or dream. This is a Strawman, a favorite tactic of Christian apologists like yourself, Lee.
So let me correct you: Gary’s alternate scenario is roughly, that because the tomb was empty, the disciples had to explain its being empty, thus jumped to the conclusion that Jesus must’ve been resurrected, and then individuals had hallucinations, vivid dreams, and/or illusions and groups of disciples experienced group illusions or cases of mistaken identity (seeing Jesus in the distance when it is not Jesus but someone who looks like him). Despite all of them being first-century, Second Temple Messianic Jews, for whom such a scenario is both a historical and theological anachronism.
Question: Is this (Gary’s) alternative scenario possible, however improbable you may believe it to be?
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Belief in Jesus’ exaltation to heaven (as happened in the OT to Methuselah and Elijah) wouldn’t lead to a belief in resurrection;
Are you saying that this conclusion is improbable or impossible? Please clarify.
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Regarding his “No True Scotsman” analogy, Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, an acknowledged expert on first-century Judaism, says that possibly, a few Jews of that day could’ve believed that Jesus was a righteous martyr, who’d been exalted to heaven, or possibly even resurrected, but not that he was the Messiah, because, again, if the Messiah died that proved he wasn’t the Messiah because Messiah was supposed to reign triumphally in Jerusalem, then be resurrected with everyone else at the end of the age. So one righteous martyr resurrected in the middle of history wouldn’t cause Jesus’ disciples to say that his death and resurrection had ushered in the eschaton.
Does Dr. Levine ever state that she believes it is impossible that any first century messianic Jew would have believed in the resurrected Jesus as the Messiah without seeing his resurrected body with their own two eyes? Please provide the source and page number if you say yes.
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GARY: Does Dr. Levine ever state that she believes it is impossible that any first century messianic Jew would have believed in the resurrected Jesus as the Messiah without seeing his resurrected body with their own two eyes? Please provide the source and page number if you say yes.
LEE: You’re doing the exact opposite of what you claim I’m doing. You’re saying that because your hypothesis is theoretically possible that it should be considered as a legitimate possibility. However theoretically possible and * very likely to have occurred* are two different things.
Your scenario is so unlikely that NT Wright and Amy-Jill Levine both rule it out. There’s a good reason they do. As well-read as you are you shouldn’t have to be remined of it:
History deals in probabilities not certainties.
Pax.
Lee.
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No. Dr. Levine has never said that the only way a first century messianic Jew would ever believe in a dead but resurrected messiah is if they had seen his resurrected body, and you know it, Lee! Are you deliberately lying?
And please give me a quote from NT Wright in which he states it is impossible that any first century messianic Jew would believe in a dead but resurrected messiah unless he/she had seen his resurrected corpse with their own two eyes. I don’t believe that Wright has ever made such a blanket, black and white statement, but if he has, I no longer have any respect for his critical thinking skills.
You’re saying that because your hypothesis is theoretically possible that it should be considered as a legitimate possibility. However theoretically possible and * very likely to have occurred* are two different things.
And you think your explanation that a first century middle eastern peasant raised himself from the dead, moved a huge boulder from the front of his crypt, disappeared into thin air to later pop in to eat a fish sandwich with his old fishing buddies is a more “legitimate” possibility??? What is in your Kool-Aid, my friend???
Do you know how improbable it is for a coin to land on “heads” twenty times in a row in a succession of coin flips! Infinitesimal! However, it is still possible and does not require supernatural intervention. Each of the steps in my hypothetical natural explanation for the Resurrection Belief have a greater probability of being historical than flipping a coin “heads” twenty times in a row, Lee. Yet you want us to believe that a supernatural act by an invisible god is a more probable explanation. Are you serious?
You don’t jump to a conclusion that “a god did it” when a coin lands on heads twenty times in a row (at least I hope you don’t) so why do you jump to a conclusion that “a god did it” in regards to alleged sightings of a resurrected Jesus instead of believing as more probable a natural explanation with multiple steps; individual steps/components which each have a better statistical chance than flipping heads twenty times in a row???
You are not using good critical thinking skills, Lee. You are not using reason and common sense. You are being irrational.
You cannot prove to me or anyone else that your supernatural explanation for the Resurrection Belief is more probable than my cumulative natural explanation and you know it. And you can’t appeal to Occam’s Razor because “all other factors being equal” has been violated. You can’t add an all-powerful, invisible superhero to one side of the equation.
Stop obfuscating, Lee. Accept the facts. Your religion’s core superstition is no more believable than that of any other world religion.
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So Gary’s alternate hypothesis fails for a number of reasons.
My dear Lee, you are appealing to generalizations as if they are inviolable laws. Tsk. Tsk. You are not using good critical thinking skills. There are exceptions to every generalization.
Would most first century messianic Jews reject a messiah pretender who is killed? Yes! And that is exactly what happened in the case of the executed messiah-pretender, Jesus of Nazareth. 99.999% of first century Jews rejected his claim. But is it possible that a few hundred first century messianic Jews would believe such a claim (without seeing a resurrected corpse)? Of course! How can you possibly be 100% certain it is not possible?? You can’t. Generalizations are just that—generalizations. Generalizations are not inviolable laws. You need to review the definition of this word, my Christian friend.
If a natural explanation is possible, even though highly improbable, it is still more probable than a supernatural explanation according to common sense and reason!
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GARY: My dear Lee, you are appealing to generalizations as if they are inviolable laws. Tsk. Tsk. You are not using good critical thinking skills. There are exceptions to every generalization.
LEE: My dear Gary, you are appealing to exceptions as if they are/were the rule in historiography. Just because something theoretically could have happened, doesn’t mean we should consider that possibility as a likely event.
To a large extent history deals in generalizations; we have to until/unless we get more precise evidence. As I keep having to remind you, history speaks to what was/is probable, not everything that was/is possible. It’s theoretically possible that Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan were abducted by aliens from a distant galaxy (just as Star Trek: Voyager theorized). It’s also possible that they were US spies who faked their own deaths so they could get married and defect to Japan. I can’t prove either of these scenarios didn’t happen. So let’s revise all the books examining their disappearance to include both of these scenarios.
Heck, I can’t prove that aliens didn’t build the Great Pyramid of Giza. So let’s throw that out as a real possibility.
Maybe Elvis was the second gunman on the grassy knoll in Dealy Plaza on November 22, 1963, and Richard Nixon was his handler (Nixon was in Dallas that day, after all).
Maybe the 1969 moon landing was faked. I wasn’t there. I didn’t actually see it. And video can be altered.
I hope you get my point.
Pax.
Lee.
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You are comparing apples to oranges. You are violating the first principle of Occam’s Razor: “all other things being equal…”.
Adding an all-powerful superhero to one side of the equation invalidates Occam’s Razor (and makes you look really naive and silly).
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“Heck, I can’t prove that aliens didn’t build the Great Pyramid of Giza. So let’s throw that out as a real possibility.
Maybe Elvis was the second gunman on the grassy knoll in Dealy Plaza on November 22, 1963, and Richard Nixon was his handler (Nixon was in Dallas that day, after all).
Maybe the 1969 moon landing was faked. I wasn’t there. I didn’t actually see it. And video can be altered.
I hope you get my point.”
Is it that crazy natural explanations don’t sound so improbable when compared against the absolutely ludicrous, unprecedented supernatural explanations you propose?
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Exactly, Bob.
Lee seems to believe that a never heard of before or since corpse reanimation (the tissue regeneration of a body in which all bodily functions have ceased; all cells have ceased to function; all cells are dead; all cells are in the process of decay) is more probable than that a small band of first century Galilean hillbillies came up with completely new interpretations for the exclusively Jewish concepts of “messiah” and “resurrection”.
How dense (or brainwashed) are Christians???
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If memory serves … wasn’t it PAUL that started the whole resurrection idea? He wanted to appeal to the Gentiles who actually believed their gods could return to life. Then a few of the Jewish guys thought the whole scenario sounded reasonable. so they ran with it. And here we are in the current century still bickering over an event that is so improbable it’s laughable.
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Nan, resurrection is a Jewish belief. It goes back at least to intertestamental times (the Maccabees), and possibly to the OT itself (Daniel and Ezekiel both describe a kind of resurrection).
For example, in II Maccabees 7.14, one of the Jewish martyrs says to his enemies who are threatening him with death:
“When he was near death, he said, ‘One cannot but choose to die at the hands of mortals and to cherish the hope God gives of being raised again by him. But for you there will be no resurrection to life!'”
And the Pharisaic Mishnah Sanhedrin X.I says:
“All Israelites have a share in the world to come. . . . And these are they that have no share in the world to come: he that says there is no resurrection of the dead prescribed in the Law, and [he that says] that the Law is not from Heaven, and an Epicurean.”
And in his Wars of the Jews, 3.374 (ca. 79 AD) the Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus described the hope of resurrection shared by many Jews during the recent Jewish War:
“People who depart from this life in accordance with nature’s law, thus repaying what God has lent them, when the giver wants to claim it back again, win everlasting fame. Their houses and families are secure. Their souls remain without blemish, and obedient, and receive the most holy place in heaven. From there, when the ages come around again, they come back again to live instead in holy bodies.”
No Greco-Roman pagans believed in bodily resurrection. The very idea was at best absurd, at worst, downright offensive, because most pagans were dualists, which said that matter was evil and spirit or soul was good. So the best a pagan could hope for, or would want to hope for, was that he/she might return from the dead as a ghost, shade or spirit, but not in a resurrected human body.
For Plato the soul is the immortal, preexistent, non-material aspect of a human being, and is the aspect that really matters. Your soul is the real you, not your body. The soul, being immortal, existed both before and after the body, and will continue to exist after the body is gone.
Thus for many educated pagans the body was the prison of the soul.
So Paul did not invent the idea of resurrection; it was a mainstream Jewish idea that had already been around for several centuries before Jesus himself, in the gospels, predicted his own resurrection.
Pax.
Lee.
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Yes … it was a belief among TRADITIONAL Jews (ancient rabbis) that during the Messianic Age (end-of-days), the temple will be rebuilt in Jerusalem, the Jewish people ingathered from the far corners of the earth and the bodies of the dead will be brought back to life and reunited with their souls.
This view of the resurrection was far different than what happened with Jesus– one guy, not the resurrection of many.
And I disagree with you (and others you cite) that the Gentiles (pagans) did not believe in bodily resurrection. At the core of each religion was a myth in which the deity returned to life after death. https://bible.org/article/paul-and-mystery-religions
Lee, you are so entrenched with the scenarios presented by the multiple sources you cite that you’re unable to see what’s actually written in The Word. You quote more of them than you do actual bible scripture.
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Please provide the signed affadavits of these alleged eyewitnesses.
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Lee: “Nan, resurrection is a Jewish belief. It goes back at least to intertestamental times (the Maccabees), and possibly to the OT itself (Daniel and Ezekiel both describe a kind of resurrection).”
Goes back to intertestamental times?! Why is resurrection not plainly in the Old Testament? You’re making it sound like the Bible is just a manmade collection of books that kinda fit together but not really.
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BOB: Is it that crazy natural explanations don’t sound so improbable when compared against the absolutely ludicrous, unprecedented supernatural explanations you propose?
Here are a few of the more popular “natural” explanations I’ve read and heard from skeptics over the past 20 years and the main reasons I don’t find them persuasive:
The disciples based their ideas of resurrection on the Greco-Roman mystery religions (Attis, Mithras, etc.) and dying/rising cults.
This theory is anachronistic on several levels. For one thing, resurrection of the body is a Jewish idea, not a pagan one. Educated pagans considered bodily resurrection, at best absurd, at worst offensive. The cult of Mithras as we know it today didn’t exist until 100 about years after Jesus’ death. And in Mithras there’s no death or resurrection of Mithras. The “resurrection” of Attis doesn’t appear in the Cybele myth until about 150 AD. Osiris’ body was hacked to pieces and had to be reassembled by Isis, then he was mummified and reigned as a “mummy-king” in the Egyptian realm of the dead, a far cry from Jesus being bodily raised to life in the real space-time world. And as Prof. Edwin Yamauchi reminds us, “All of these myths [Osiris, Cybele and Attis, Mithras] are repetitive, symbolic representations of the death and rebirth of vegetation. These are not historical figures, and none of their deaths were intended to provide salvation.”
Jesus didn’t really die on the cross, he just “swooned,” or passed out, and was later taken down and revived–thus no need for a resurrection (the late Dr. Barbara Thiering’s theory).
The Romans knew how to execute people. Dom Crossan (who doesn’t believe Jesus was resurrected, but his corpse was eaten by wild dogs), says, “That he [Jesus] was crucified is as sure as anything historical ever can be.”
The disciples of Jesus went to the wrong tomb.
None of them would’ve been able to locate the tomb of a local official as well-known as Joseph of Arimathea? Jerusalem was big, but not that big. That would be akin to someone nowadays not being able to find the burial location of a mayor or senator in their town. And this detail in itself fits the criterion of embarrassment because it says that, contrary to proper Jewish custom, Jesus’ family were either unwilling or unable to bury him. So that his disciples had to bury him in a borrowed tomb–a tomb borrowed from a member of the very Sanhedrin that had just condemned him three days earlier! Hey, Peter, James and John, let’s make up that story!
It was too dark to see straight.
The women couldn’t wait for daylight and come back? Or simply carry torches with them the first time?
Either grave robbers or the disciples stole the body.
The gospels tell us that the Sanhedrin attempted to bribe the Roman guards into saying that his disciples stole the body; Gary thinks Mary Magdalen, as a prostitute may have stolen his body. What did they/she do with it? The NT never says that Mary Magdalen was a prostitute, only that she had been exorcised by Jesus and helped bankroll his ministry (that and referring to her as “Mary Magdalen” with no husband mentioned indicates that she may have been a widow of some means.) Regardless, how did any of them get past the Roman guard, whose careers, if not lives, were on the line for losing the body of a convicted criminal?
The disciples mass-hallucinated a resurrected Jesus.
How many mass-hallucinations are there in history? And the gospels claim that after they saw Jesus they didn’t recognize him until he revealed his identity to them. Who hallucinates a loved one but doesn’t recognize them? And did they mass-hallucinate Jesus eating a meal with them, too? Not to mention the fact that his death and resurrection were not on anyone’s radar before, despite his cryptic predictions of same (which itself is another detail which meets the criterion of embarrassment, because the disciples come off as spiritually ignorant in resisting the very idea of his death or resurrection).
As per the late Rudolf Bultmann, the resurrection-language of the early church was used to denote not a separate event from the crucifixion but the early disciples’ faith that the crucifixion was not a tragic defeat but the divine act of salvation. Easter is thus about the rising, not of Jesus, but of the faith of the early church.
Yet as Wright insists, in first-century Jewish terms, “it is impossible to conceive what sort of religious or spiritual experience someone could have that would make them say that the kingdom of God had arrived when it clearly had not, that a crucified leader was the Messiah when he obviously was not, or that the resurrection occurred last month when it obviously did not.”
As per the late Edward Schillebeeckx in a variation on Bultmann’s theory, the resurrection was a kind of spiritual metaphor for their conversion to Jesus as the Messiah in which their minds and hearts were so filled with light and forgiveness for abandoning Jesus that it didn’t matter whether his body was raised or not; this was the “illumination” and “forgiveness” by which the disciples were justified and which they in turn spread throughout the Roman Empire.
This theory, too, is as anachronistic as Bultmann’s. If you’d told a first-century Jew that you’d just experienced the love and forgiveness of God they’d have said, “great,” but would be puzzled if not downright offended when you then said that the eschaton had come, that a crucified criminal was the Messiah or that the resurrection had occurred. Because resurrection-language was not about private, interior experiences; it is about eschatology, about something which happened in actual space-time history by which there is a new creation and the world is a different place.
Gerd Lüdemann’s theory was that Peter and the other disciples were so overwhelmed by a feeling of the deceased Jesus’ presence that it caused them to hallucinate visions of him which convinced them that he was still alive in some non-literal yet still real sense. Paul, on the other hand, overwhelmed with guilt about persecuting the church experienced a guilt-induced hallucination of Jesus which he then felt compelled to share with the world.
This theory is anachronistic and would’ve made no sense to a first-century Jew. Not to mention such psychological theories are at best unproveable and at worst simply too fantastic to believe. These guys according to historical tradition (all save John) were executed for their beliefs. We’re supposed to believe any of them died defending a hallucination?
So yes, sometimes the supernatural explanation is easier to believe than these creative, fanciful reconstructions, most of which are historically and theologically anachronistic and strain credulity.
As I keep saying, it all comes down to your worldview. If you’re a committed materialist you’ll never be convinced that the resurrection actually occurred and will always be forced to look for alternate explanations.
Pax.
Lee.
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You just don’t get it do you, Lee? You are trying to convince educated, modern people that an executed first century peasant is the creator of our complex universe. And you cannot see how ludicrous and silly that is. So, so sad.
I feel for you, my friend. I was once as blind (and brainwashed) as you. I sincerely hope that one day Reason will somehow create a small crack in the surface of your delusion.
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A new post on this topic:
https://lutherwasnotbornagaincom.wordpress.com/2023/05/17/skeptics-need-to-explain-the-origin-of-the-resurrection-belief/
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GARY: You just don’t get it do you, Lee? You are trying to convince educated, modern people that an executed first century peasant is the creator of our complex universe. And you cannot see how ludicrous and silly that is. So, so sad.
LEE: Atheists just don’t get it, do they? Atheists are trying to convince educated, modern people that the universe somehow spontaneously created itself from nothing then, as if that weren’t miraculous enough, evolved a planet with conditions fine-tuned enough to support life; and then, to top it all off, unconscious matter somehow evolved into conscious, self-aware, rational, thinking matter with an idea of self, *personhood,**identity* and *worth.*
Which scenario is ultimately more ludicrous and silly? That the universe somehow created itself from absolutely nothing and then unconscious matter evolved into conscious matter? Or that there was a creator?
(But I notice you didn’t actually address any of my actual points above).
Pax.
Lee.
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If I called myself an atheist, I would be insulted by this remark of yours … Atheists are trying to convince educated, modern people …. Think about it.
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Yes, yes. I know, Lee. You are in a corner, aren’t you?
Any time you (and other Christian apologists) are trapped in a corner regarding your preposterous and very silly claim that a first century peasant (who you claim was regenerated from the dead by a bronze age middle eastern deity a couple of days after his public execution) is the creator of our complex universe…you attempt to get out of that corner by demanding that skeptics prove a negative (that no gods exist).
We are not talking about gods and creators in general, we are talking about your god. And the fact is that the evidence for your god is pathetic. Absolutely pathetic. The evidence that your god, Jesus, is the creator is so pathetic it is sad, Lee. Why don’t you just admit that Jesus is dead and then we can move on to more probable candidates for our creator. What do you say?
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Lee: “Atheists are trying to convince educated, modern people that the universe somehow spontaneously created itself from nothing then, as if that weren’t miraculous enough, evolved a planet with conditions fine-tuned enough to support life; and then, to top it all off, unconscious matter somehow evolved into conscious, self-aware, rational, thinking matter with an idea of self, *personhood,**identity* and *worth.*”
You’re confused about what “atheist” means.
“Which scenario is ultimately more ludicrous and silly?”
Is this a trick question? We go with the scientific consensus where it exists, and we say “we don’t know” where it doesn’t. It’s not hard.
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If a person does not believe/accept the bible and its stories, then why would they “always be forced to look for alternate explanations” to the resurrection? Non-believers are just that … non-believers.
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Current explanations for the Great Pyramid of Giza aren’t adequate. These explanations involve feats that seem impossible for any civilization existing 4500 years ago: 50,000 skilled workers, quarrying 2.3 million blocks weighing 1.5 tons each, transporting them 400+ miles, and lifting them 400 feet into the air using ramps and levers. Construction by aliens using advanced technology would require fewer improbable steps. And if you don’t believe this is most likely event, I’ll accuse you of being blinded by your anti-alien bias.
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Excellent analogy, Bill. Absolutely perfect!
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“Gary’s alternate scenario is roughly, that because the tomb was empty, the disciples had to explain its being empty, thus jumped to the conclusion that Jesus must’ve been resurrected”
My position is a little different. There is no resurrection to explain. Ditto the empty tomb. What we have in front of us is a story about a resurrection and an empty tomb. Don’t take me to some place in the story, cross your arms, and then say, “How ya gonna explain this without there being an actual resurrection, smart guy?”
, and then they all mass-hallucinated Jesus together (but didn’t recognize him after they mass-hallucinated him). Despite all of them being first-century, Second Temple Messianic Jews, for whom such a scenario is both a historical and theological anachronism.
“as happened in the OT to Methuselah and Elijah”
Do you mean Enoch and Elijah?
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Okay, Bob, then where did that story about the resurrection come from? Because without an actual resurrection I don’t think you can explain the rise of the Church from Jesus’ scattered band of disciples.
To quote Wright again:
“My point is that resurrection is something that had a quite clear meaning at that time. It was something that every pagan knew doesn’t happen. And a lot of Jews (the Sadducees and some others) believed it doesn’t happen. Those who did affirm the resurrection did not think it was just a way of saying, ‘He is Lord.’
“The historian has to offer a plausible hypothesis of why the disciples used the language of resurrection.”
So where did the story come from? Were they simply making it up, or just really confused? And why use the specific language of resurrection with all the theological baggage it carried?
And yes, I meant Enoch.
Pax.
Lee.
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“The historian has to offer a plausible hypothesis of why the disciples used the language of resurrection.”
No. Non. Nein. Skeptics do not need to provide possible hypotheses for the Resurrection Belief any more than we need to provide possible hypothesis for every other ghost sighting on the planet. Superstitious people with wild, hysterical imaginations are capable of concocting the most fantastical of tales. “Resurrection” was not invented by the first Christians. It was an established belief in the mother religion (Judaism). Christians simply gave it a new twist. This is the typical point of origin of most sects and cults.
Only brainwashed Christians are incapable of seeing this fact. Everyone else in the world, theists and non-theists, get it. That is what YOU need to explain, Lee. Why is it that only Christians (with very few exceptions) assume that a literal resurrection is the only plausible explanation for the Resurrection Belief?
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Lee: “Because without an actual resurrection I don’t think you can explain the rise of the Church from Jesus’ scattered band of disciples.”
Mormonism started with one guy. Now it’s 16 million after 200 years. Why is Christianity’s increase hard to explain with natural reasons?
The “actual resurrection,” if true, would’ve been witnessed by perhaps dozens of Christians. By the time of the gospels, pretty much every Christian was of the “heard stories of an actual resurrection,” just like you. You’re a pretty fervent believer. So would be a 1st-century Christian who only heard a story.
“So where did the story come from? Were they simply making it up, or just really confused?”
What planet are you from? You do know that humans have created zillions of religions, right? Not hard to understand how that happens. Why is the Christianity story immune from a natural start when that’s how it happened for all the others?
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A death and resurrection were not on anyone’s radar. When Jesus got executed by the Romans, based upon all the other would-be Messiahs before and after him, his movement, too should’ve disintegrated. But it didn’t. Why?
As NT Wright forcefully and I think persuasively argues, none of the counter-explanations which attempt to explain away the resurrection and the beginnings of the church can account for all the data.
Visions won’t cut it, because Jews already had a religious vocabulary for visions, which the gospels do not use in describing what the post-Easter disciples experienced.
If they were just making it all up as they went along, then they purposely invented a story which was designed to be hard to sell to other Jews and even non-Jews.
You say in your “Okay, Smart Guy–YOU tell Us What Happened” from 2012 that:
“The stories were corrupted as they went. Some of this might have been inadvertent, but some was deliberate. Embellishments were added to improve the story, either to satisfy imagined or real prophecy from the Old Testament (for a Jewish audience) or to duplicate a supernatural feature of a competing Greek, Mesopotamian, or Egyptian religion (for a gentile audience). Starting from a Jewish community that spoke Aramaic, it found a home in a far-flung community that was culturally Greek.”
To which I would say that the central tenet of Christianity is Jesus’ death and resurrection. In no way did the death/resurrection of Messiah fit any preexisting Jewish reading of OT prophecies. So if they gospel authors deliberately “embellished” their story to fit preexisting Jewish prophecy they did a very bad job of it because most Jews then and now rejected Jesus because Jesus as set forth in the gospels did not fit the prophecies the way anyone expected.
As I think I’ve said ad nauseum here, a dead Messiah was a false Messiah. The Messiah wasn’t supposed to die, and when he did get resurrected at the end of the Messianic Age, at the end of history, he was supposed to be resurrected with everyone else. Nobody was looking for one man to be raised ahead of everyone else in the middle of history.
For Greeks and Romans the idea of God incarnating as a human was a ridiculous notion. So also, resurrection of the body was at best absurd, at worst offensive to most pagans. Besides which, none of the Greek myths or mystery religions featured resurrection of the body as a central tenet, whether of the founder or of the initiates.
The pagan critic of Christianity Celsus ca. 180 AD is a good example of the standard pagan objection to the Christian notion of resurrection when he said:
“It is foolish also of them to suppose that, when God applies the fire (like a cook!), all the rest of mankind will be thoroughly burnt up, and that they alone will survive, not merely those who are alive at the time, but also those long dead who will rise up from the earth possessing the same bodies as before. This is simply the hope of worms. For what sort of human soul would have any further desire for a body that has rotted? . . . For what sort of body, completely and utterly destroyed, could return to its original nature and to that same first constitution from which it was dissolved? Because they cannot answer, they flee to an extremely absurd refuge, that
everything is possible for God. No! God cannot do what is shameful, nor does he want
what is against (his) nature.” (Origen, Contra Celsus. 5.14)
Celsus also found the idea of God incarnating as a human offensive, too.
So if the Jewish disciples of Jesus were creating a religion centered on Jesus that they hoped to sell to other Jews and Gentiles, they made some very odd choices, theologically.
No, a religion centered around Jesus geared towards pagans would look like Docetism or its younger, more exclusivist brother, Gnosticism.
Whereas a religion centered around Jesus geared towards Jews would look more like Ebionism.
The religion of the NT doesn’t fit either one of these molds because it wasn’t dualist and insisted that God incarnated as Jesus in actual space-time history (unlike the gods of the mystery religions), was crucified, buried, and resurrected, inaugurating the eschaton and a new creation.
Skeptics need to give us a convincing explanation as to why Jesus’ disciples went so far off book in deliberately creating key aspects of their new religion calculated to turn off the very people they hoped to convince.
Lest someone again point to Joseph Smith, when Smith founded the Mormon Church his theology was not substantially different from a dozen other Protestant millennial Christian sects. Despite the Book of Mormon it’s actual theology didn’t start to get really weird and polytheistic until it was already about 20 years old. But from the standpoint of first-century Jews and Greeks, Christianity started off as a “really weird” sect.
Pax.
Lee.
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Lee: “A death and resurrection were not on anyone’s radar.”
A death and resurrection were not on the radar of those who saw him as the Messiah. The Messiah was going to come and kick some Roman butt. Dying a humiliating death didn’t count.
Bizarrely, we seem to be on the same page.
“When Jesus got executed by the Romans, based upon all the other would-be Messiahs before and after him, his movement, too should’ve disintegrated. But it didn’t. Why?”
Again, you’re being naïve. You’re acting like you don’t understand that humans create religions by the truckload. But you do understand this, right?
“As NT Wright forcefully and I think persuasively argues, none of the counter-explanations which attempt to explain away the resurrection and the beginnings of the church can account for all the data.”
What counter-explanations? You mean like Jesus swooned, wrong tomb, and so on? You and I both don’t accept these, so let’s not discuss them again.
When you say, “Given the gospel story up to this point, explain miracle X,” you’ve lost me. To that, I simply say, it’s a story.
“If they were just making it all up as they went along”
And you’ve lost me again. This isn’t what I say.
Tell you what: you stop telling me what my argument is, and I’ll stop ridiculing those strawmen. Deal?
“To which I would say that the central tenet of Christianity is Jesus’ death and resurrection. In no way did the death/resurrection of Messiah fit any preexisting Jewish reading of OT prophecies.”
Awkward … ! I agree that any claim of accurate OT prophecies is nonsense. Now explain how you’re still in your tree after you just sawed off the limb you were sitting on.
“So if they gospel authors deliberately “embellished” their story to fit preexisting Jewish prophecy …”
I’ve already said that I don’t imagine a deliberate anything in connection to how the Jesus story grew. It grew like any legend grew during a decades-long period of oral history.
“As I think I’ve said ad nauseum here, a dead Messiah was a false Messiah. The Messiah wasn’t supposed to die, and when he did get resurrected at the end of the Messianic Age, at the end of history, he was supposed to be resurrected with everyone else.”
Right. The claims of Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah were wrong. You can accept the accuracy of the OT scriptures, or you can accept the gospel story. Pick.
And any “Age” referred to Apocalypticism. If a new Apocalyptic Age had dawned, we’d all know it. That’s what Jesus was referring to when he said that the stars would fall (and much else).
When you say, “Jesus was predicted to be X, but in fact he was not-X, and that early Christians would report that can only be because it was true,” you’re appealing to the Criterion of Embarrassment. Playing this card is a big deal with huge consequences. You don’t get to do so without first making plain what you’re embarrassed about.
So go ahead and tell us what you’re embarrassed about and show how you didn’t just chop off your religion’s legs.
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This approach would have made university coursework so much easier. Rather than having to memorize all the many complex (and seemingly improbable) steps of the Krebs cycle, or photosynthesis, or kidney filtration, I could have just simply written “God did it” on my exams and be done with it!
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Exactly.
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“I could have just simply written “God did it” on my exams and be done with it!”
The Lord rewards those who blindly follow him.
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GARY: Any time you (and other Christian apologists) are trapped in a corner regarding your preposterous and very silly claim that a first century peasant (who you claim was regenerated from the dead by a bronze age middle eastern deity a couple of days after his public execution) is the creator of our complex universe…you attempt to get out of that corner by demanding that skeptics prove a negative (that no gods exist).
LEE: Gary, once again you’ve read my post and completely missed my point. I’m not asking your or anyone else to “prove a negative (that no gods exist).”
I’m asking if it’s more rational to believe that the universe somehow miraculously created itself from absolutely nothing and then somehow even more miraculously evolved conscious, self-aware, thinking matter from unconscious, inanimate matter; or is it more rational to posit a creator?
Or maybe you witness matter spontaneously create itself from nothing all the time?
Pax.
Lee.
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Once you give good evidence to support your claim that our universe was created by a first century peasant I will be happy to discuss other possible candidates for our creator.
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GARY: Once you give good evidence to support your claim that our universe was created by a first century peasant I will be happy to discuss other possible candidates for our creator.
LEE: I haven’t claimed that our universe “was created by a first-century peasant.” Nobody actually even believes that.
Besides, my point was which scenario is more plausible? That the space-time universe had a creator, or that it, somehow–magically!–created itself. Even considering the “weirdness” of modern physics, how could our space-time universe not exist, then exist, without an outside agent?
Thus when you answer my original query I’ll clarify your sloppy terminology and answer yours.
Pax.
Lee.
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I believe the original creator of original matter probably had supernatural powers. Now, please provide ADEQUATE evidence that Jesus of Nazareth is the creator of our universe.
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BOB: Huh?? Who says the universe created itself? Do atheists say this? Do cosmologists?
LEE: They surely do. The late Prof. Stephen Hawking said it, in the 2012 book he co-authored with Prof. Leonard Mlodinow:
” “Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.
“It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
So, I’m asking whether this is a rational, logical belief or not. How can the law of gravity (and the other universal laws) exist before the space-time universe itself existed? That’s like saying that because nuclear fission exists, the first nuclear reactor created itself.
Pax.
Lee.
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“I’m asking whether this is a rational, logical belief or not. How can the law of gravity (and the other universal laws) exist before the space-time universe itself existed? That’s like saying that because nuclear fission exists, the first nuclear reactor created itself.”
You’re appealing to common sense, but this is the wrong tool to use. If it were, the questions at the frontier of science would fall easily.
It’s the frontier of science because it’s hard, and it’s hard because it defies common sense.
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I agree that Christianity was a copycat religion, as was Judaism before it. Genesis 1 is the Sumerian creation story, for example.
I don’t argue any of your natural explanations for the empty tomb. Again, if you take the story to a certain point and demand that I explain what followed without a resurrection, I’ll reply (yet again) that it’s just a story. This is why I don’t say, “OK, so Goldilocks is woken by the 3 bears, and then what? I mean, obviously, she ran away, right?!”
“As I keep saying, it all comes down to your worldview. If you’re a committed materialist you’ll never be convinced that the resurrection actually occurred and will always be forced to look for alternate explanations.”
This is your attempt to argue that I’m biased, just like you? Wrong. I’m a materialist because that’s where the evidence points. Show me I’m wrong, and I’ll change. Sound reasonable?
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Genesis certainly uses conventional ANE terminology and concepts, but it then turns them on their head. John Walton has shown how Genesis 1-3 differs in several fundamental respects from anything the Sumerians, Egyptians or anyone else was doing.
Pax.
Lee.
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Lee: “Genesis certainly uses conventional ANE terminology and concepts”
And this looks like how God would do things? He’d use tropes popular in the religions of the guys down the street (who used them earlier) but give them a twist to add some originality?
Once again, I have much, much higher standards for your god than you do.
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BOB: This is your attempt to argue that I’m biased, just like you? Wrong. I’m a materialist because that’s where the evidence points. Show me I’m wrong, and I’ll change. Sound reasonable?
LEE: Materialism is fine until you get to such fundamental questions like how the rational, thinking, self-aware human mind evolved from inanimate matter. Does the existence of the human mind point towards a materialist answer? I don’t think so.
On this question I agree with the atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel, author of Mind & Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
According to Prof. Nagel, materialism has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. According to Nagel this failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind is an enormous problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Though refusing to consider a supernatural explanation, for the origin of mind he’s at least honest enough to admit the elephant in the room.
Read this book and ten tell me all the evidence points to materialism. And this is just one major question materialism cannot answer. There are lots more.
Pax.
Lee.
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Lee: “Materialism is fine until you get to such fundamental questions like how the rational, thinking, self-aware human mind evolved from inanimate matter. Does the existence of the human mind point towards a materialist answer? I don’t think so.”
Evolution is the scientific consensus. You say you don’t understand something within the domain of evolution? OK, that’s fine, but “non-biologist Lee has a question, so biology is wrong” is no argument.
You need to preface your question with an argument that (1) shows that evolution fails and (2) explains the facts better than evolution did. Do I see a Nobel Prize in your future?
“According to Prof. Nagel, materialism has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value.”
Guess how much interest I have in a non-biologist’s complaint about evolution.
“According to Nagel this failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind is an enormous problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology.”
Ah, I think you have things right-side up now! There’s your task: unravel evolution, and then demand that I explain the human mind naturalistically.
(And if you did, my answer would be “I don’t know.” “God did it” would still be a ridiculous answer since the supernatural has explained precisely zero puzzles about nature.)
“Though refusing to consider a supernatural explanation, for the origin of mind he’s at least honest enough to admit the elephant in the room.”
Uh … excuse me? The elephant in the room, which presumably means God?! Again, God has explained bupkis so far. The smart money is on naturalism, which has explained bazillions of things. And continues to do so.
“And this is just one major question materialism cannot answer. There are lots more.”
So what? “Materialism has unanswered questions” is indeed true, but it’s answering them with science. The unpleasant fact remains that you’re sitting there with God, who has answered nothing.
We’re long past God causing lightning, drought, and disease.
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Lee: “That the space-time universe had a creator, or that it, somehow–magically!–created itself.”
Huh?? Who says the universe created itself? Do atheists say this? Do cosmologists? It almost looks like you’re taking a half-baked idea that you think is lampoon-worthy and assigning it to your debate opponent.
Sorry. Doesn’t fit.
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NAN: And I disagree with you (and others you cite) that the Gentiles (pagans) did not believe in bodily resurrection. At the core of each religion was a myth in which the deity returned to life after death. https://bible.org/article/paul-and-mystery-religions
LEE: Nan, did you read carefully the article you posted the link to above, “Paul and the Mystery Religions”? Because it’s written by Don Closson of Probe Ministries and his conclusion is:
“Those who find Christianity hard to accept have offered many reasons for not doing so. The claim that the doctrines of Christianity had a strong dependency on the mystery religions stands on shaky ground and should be investigated thoroughly before one rejects the good news of the New Testament writers.”
Mr. Closson is exactly right in his article and his concluding statement. Christianity didn’t borrow from the pagan mystery religions; if anything, mystery cults like Mithras (as we know dating from the mid-second century AD) borrowed ideas and terms from Christianity because it was so popular, whereas Mithras was exclusivist (mostly male, nearly all soldiers).
You’re free to disagree with me, Closson, and the scholars I cite of course, but neither they nor I are making this up.
For one thing, all of these ancient myths [Osiris, Cybele and Attis, Mithras] are repetitive, symbolic representations of the death and rebirth of vegetation. As such they were/are not historical figures, being resurrected in actual space-time history and none of their deaths were intended to provide salvation from sin and the eschaton, concepts completely foreign to paganism anyway. For example, nobody actually thought you could visit the various sites where the pieces of Osiris’ body were scattered after he was hacked to pieces; less still visit the underworld where he reigned as a “mummy king.”
For For Plato and most educated Greeks and Romans the soul was the immortal, non-material aspect of a human being, and is the aspect that really matters. The body was thus thought of as basically the prison of the soul. The soul, being immortal, existed after the body, and will continue to exist after the body is gone. . .
Paganism was essentially dualist, holding that matter and the space-time universe were, at best flawed and ultimately irrelevant copies of a transcendent spiritual reality (Platonism and its realm of the Forms), at worst downright evil (Gnosticism).
The pagan critic of Christianity Celsus, writing ca. 180 AD., actually makes fun of the Jewish-Christian idea of bodily resurrection, basically arguing that, because matter was bad and spirit was good, god would never act against his nature by resurrecting human bodies. Here’s what Celsus had to say about the (to him) offensive idea of bodily resurrection:
“It is foolish also of them to suppose that, when God applies the fire (like a cook!), all the rest of mankind will be thoroughly burnt up, and that they alone will survive, not merely those who are alive at the time, but also those long dead who will rise up from the earth possessing the same bodies as before. This is simply the hope of worms. For what sort of human soul would have any further desire for a body for a body that has rotted? For what kind of body is that which, after being completely corrupted, can return to its original nature, and to that self-same first condition out of which it fell into dissolution? Being unable to return any answer, they [Christians] betake themselves to a most absurd refuge, viz., that all things are possible with God. And yet God cannot do things that are disgraceful, nor does he wish to do things that are contrary to his nature. . . . For the soul, indeed, he might be able to provide an everlasting life; while dead bodies, on the contrary, are, as Heraclitus observes, more worthless than dung. God, however, neither can nor will declare, contrary to all reason, that the flesh, which is full of those things which it is not even honorable to mention, is to exist forever.”
Pax.
Lee.
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Bob, according to none other than the late Prof. Stephen Hawking, the universe did, in fact, “create itself. from nothing.” He tells us this in the 2012 book he co-authored with Dr. Leonard Mlodinow, the grand Dersign:
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. . . . Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
My question remains, Is this logical or rational? How can a universal law like gravity exist before the universe itself exists?
Pax.
Lee,.
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