THE CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH OF CANTON

Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

Sunday, January 28, 2018 ~ Epiphany IV

 Sermon: “Why Believe?”

Scripture Lessons: Deuteronomy 18:15-20, Mark 1:21-28

© 2018, Dr. Tamilio

Why believe in God?

Why believe in Jesus?

Isn’t there sufficient evidence to show that religion is primitive, that it just isn’t based on truth?

Hasn’t science proven everything?

I teach a course entitled the Philosophy of Religion.  In this class, we examine different arguments that seek to show the legitimacy of religious faith.

One of the arguments from within religion has to do with prophecy.  As you know, the Hebrew Bible (what Christians commonly call the Old Testament) was written centuries before the birth of Jesus.  We often turn to some of those ancient prophets (like Isaiah and Jeremiah) to find verses pointing to the coming Messiah.  But some of those prophecies appear earlier in the Bible.  The Book of Deuteronomy, for example, was probably composed in the 7th century BC after having passed through innumerable years of oral tradition.  This text is part of the Torah, or the Books of Moses.  In them, we find an early prophecy pointing to Jesus.  Moses, speaking to the Israelites, says, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your fellow Israelites.  You must listen to him.”  This is from the passage that Pam just read.

Sceptics say many things in response.  Maybe Moses is referring to one of the other Old Testament prophets.  After all, there is no proof that he is talking about Jesus per se.  Or maybe Christians have committed the sin of eisegesis: reading an interpretation into the text that we want to see.  But responsible interpretation doesn’t look at isolated verses.  A scholarly analysis will take the totality of Scripture into account, including this passage.  We need to ask what all the prophetic passages in the Hebrew Bible combined say about the coming Messiah?

But there are other ways that the philosopher of religion constructs cogent arguments.  Some include the New Testament itself.  Consisting of numerous writers, the Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Revelation of John (the four parts of the New Testament) were written over several decades: between (roughly) the years 50 and 100 AD.  Much of Jesus’ ministry was public, meaning it was witnessed by thousands and thousands of people.  If it didn’t happen, someone would have probably said something to refute the authenticity and or challenge the accuracy of the biblical witness.  There are no such historical records.

Today’s Gospel lesson occurs in the Temple.  There would have been many witnesses.  Furthermore, if the Jewish authorities were at odds with Jesus, as we are told that they were, then surely they would have said or written something to counter what Mark tells us, especially since it is on their turf.  Jesus performs an exorcism, cleansing a man with an unclean spirit.  The onlookers are amazed (as you can imagine) and proclaim, “What is this?  A new teaching — and with authority!”  “Wow!” doesn’t come close to capturing their astonishment.  One thinks that testimonies about such public displays of power would have been refuted if they did not occur.

But, as any good student of logic knows, you cannot use the thing in question to prove the thing in question.  You cannot say that the Bible is true, for example, by saying that the Bible affirms its own truth.  You need external sources of proof.  There are many of them.

In his recent book, Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense: A Response to Contemporary Challenges, leading Christian apologist C. Stephen Evans offers many extra-biblical proofs for the faith.  Among his claims, there is one that Evans calls “cosmic wonder,” which other philosophers call the Cosmological Argument.  Evans writes,

There are times when it strikes almost everyone as strange and wonderful that the universe should exist at all.  An experience of this sort might well start by reflecting on our own existence.  It seems quite obvious that I might never have existed.  My parents might have married other people or not gotten married at all…

…when I think a little more deeply, I see that what is true of myself is true of everything else in the world.  My parents, like me, might never have existed at all.  Scientists say that if the evolutionary story had gone just a bit differently, humans would never have existed.  If the initial configuration of the clumps of matter and energy coming out of the “Big Bang” that began the universe had been distributed a bit differently, perhaps there would have been no planet Earth, no solar system, no Milky Way galaxy.[1]

Evans goes onto wonder why there was even a Big Bang at all.  Why is there something rather than nothing.  Thinking about the vastness of the universe, the purposefulness of all that we know, makes the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing God not only possible but probable.  The 18th century British philosopher and Christian apologist William Paley used a watch as an example of this.

Imagine that you are walking through the woods and you find a watch on the ground.  Also, imagine that you have never seen a watch before nor do you know what it does.  That said, it wouldn’t take you long to figure out that it has a purpose.  It does something.  The face, hands, and gears all suggest this.  You would also conclude that someone (an intelligent being) created it.  In fact, that would be the only logical conclusion you could make.  Watches just don’t grow out of the ground!  Now compare this to us.  Human beings are far more complex than watches.

You do not have to study anatomy and physiology too deeply to figure this out.  In fact, the deeper you study human biology the more purposeful you see that we are.  People often think that the more someone studies biology (doctors, for example) the more likely they are not to believe in God.  For some students of science, the opposite occurs.  Some doctors-in-training are so amazed at how everything in the human body is linked together and works together they conclude that our existence cannot be a mistake.  Einstein himself once wrote, “Certain it is that a conviction, akin to religious feeling, of the rationality or intelligibility of the world lies behind all scientific work of a high order.”[2]

One can construct other arguments as well.  Ultimately, what does all the evidence combined suggest?  When we reflect on all the methods employed by philosophers to argue for God’s existence — all those twenty-five cent words like Cosmology, Teleology, and Ontology — where does that leave us.  More importantly, though, beyond all that philosophical reflection — what does your heart tell you.  God is not a mathematical formula to be solved.  God is not a scientific experiment.  God is not a subject that can be contained within the limits of human reason.  What does your heart tell you?  To prove God’s existence, one needs to have a personal relationship with God.  In fact, that is the ultimate proof.

[1] C. Steven Evans, Why Christian Faith Still Makes Sense: A Response to Contemporary Challenges (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2015), 40, 41.

[2] Albert Einstein in a reply to a Japanese scholar.