More on Challenges to the Bible

Here we go again. I'm continuing a long series of blogs dealing with Jonathan Morrow's book Questioning the Bible. Let's look at more about David Hume (see the last blog).

Morrow spends time to refute Hume's arguments since so many skeptics today use these arguments to ridicule the idea of miracles. One argument that Hume brought up was this – no historical miracle has been sufficiently attested by honest and reliable men than. But Morrow says that the New Testament writers were both interested in and capable of recording accurate history. In addition, both Christian and non-Christian sources agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a miracle worker.

I want to continue Morrow's chapter arguing that the Bible is actually not unscientific. He was challenging David Hume's arguments against the possibility of miracles.

Hume presented four arguments against miracles. I covered the first one in the last blog. For the second point, Hume believed that people crave miraculous stories and are gullible to believe absurd stories. Morrow agrees there are certainly gullible people, but is that true of everyone? Decidedly not. Hume also stated that miracles only occur among ignorant and uncivilized people. That smacks of racism. The miracles of Jesus did not occur among ignorant uncivilized people, but among the Jews, who were highly educated and sophisticated. Finally, Hume argues that miracles occur in all religions and thus cancel each other out since they teach mutually contradictory doctrines. But Morrow says none of these other miracles is as powerfully attested as the miracles of Jesus Christ. He focuses on the resurrection, claiming that historical evidence for it is quite strong. A more rational approach, he believes, would be to examine the strongest claims one by one rather than just dismissing all of them.

In the rest of the chapter Morrow looks at scientific reasons that point to the existence of God. First is the cosmological argument (why is there something rather than nothing?). Science tells us now that the universe had a beginning and since something can't begin to exist without a cause, it seems reasonable to believe that a cause outside of the universe is responsible for its existence. The Big Bang, in other words, is not a threat to belief in God but a supporting point. Secondly, the author points out a design argument from physics. He notes that the laws of physics that govern the universe are fine-tuned for the emergence and sustenance of human life. It is as if the universe was crafted with us in mind. If there were the slightest changes in any number of physical constants, our universe would be unable to have human life. Finally, Morrow discusses the design argument from DNA. Scientists in the last half-century have learned that cellular organization and the development of living creatures are orchestrated by genetic information. Natural forces such as chance and necessity have failed to explain the origin of biological information.

So Morrow comes to the conclusion that the Bible is not unscientific since arguments against the existence of miracles fail and there is so much scientific evidence suggesting the existence of a creator.