Talking reason at Easter

Holy Week at Santhome Basilica, Chennai (HDR) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

On Sunday Christians around the world celebrated in remembrance that Jesus of Nazareth came back to life after having died.

And of course, a whole bunch of non-Christians either had no idea of what Easter actually is, or they thought something along the lines of ‘Christians can believe what they want to believe but I refuse to.’ And that must be true, because if they actually believed that Jesus came back to life then they’d be Christians. I rest my case.

Anyway, I just wanted to point out to any non-Christians that have an ear to hear (or an eye to read) that Christians don’t simply believe that Jesus rose again, but that it’s the only logical conclusion to draw based on the mountain of evidence for it.

Over here there’s a transcript of a debate between a Christian and a non-Christian. The Christian basically says ‘here’s the evidence, the only logical conclusion is that Jesus rose again’. The non-Christian has a bit of an odd way of responding: ‘miracles don’t happen, therefore the evidence must be false.’ Clear circular reasoning.

And the non-Christian admits it – here’s his explanation as to why no-one has ever walked on water:

Suppose from the 1850s, we have an account of a pastor of a church in Kansas who walked across this pond during the fourth of July on a celebration, and there were twelve people who saw him do it. The historian will have to evaluate this testimony and have to ask, did he probably do it or not? Now these eyewitnesses might have said that he did it. But there are other possibilities that one could imagine. There might be stones in the pond, for example. He might have been at a distance, and they didn’t see him. There were other things that you could think of. If you were trying to ask for probabilities, what is the probability that a human being can walk on a pond of water unless it’s frozen? The probability is virtually zero because in fact humans can’t do that.

Right…in other words, miracles don’t happen, and I would rather assume that I must be right than properly evaluate evidence that could suggest otherwise. If Jesus Christ was really God, then something as easy as walking on water is easily explainable…

Non-Christian! If you’re still reading, and your mind is thinking that your approach is genuinely logical, allow me to agree with you! But let’s agree together on one more thing: you and I both use reason in light of our equal levels of ‘blind faith’, it’s just that my blind faith is faith that the mountain of evidence is true, whereas yours is blind faith that any evidence that disagrees with your own beliefs must be false. That’s quite impressive faith!

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