Does God Exist?Sample

Life from Death

And if Christ has not been raised, then all our preaching is useless, and your faith is useless.  1 Corinthians 15:14 NLT

Christianity is the only falsifiable religion in the world. Why is that? Because Christianity is based on a historical event. That event is the resurrection of Jesus. If you disprove the resurrection, then you disprove Christianity.

Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions, had this to say about Christianity: “Christianity is basically a historical religion. That is to say, it is founded not on abstract principles but on concrete events, actual historical happenings.” The foundation of the Christian faith is the claim that something happened in history. Which brings us to our next question: Did Jesus come back from the dead?

Because if Jesus did, in fact, come back from the dead, that would prove Christianity is true. But if he didn't, Christianity would be proven false. So, did it really happen? This is a question that many people have tried to answer, some of them Christians, and others of them skeptics. A fascinating detail is the number of skeptics who set out to disprove the resurrection and became Christians in the process. Some examples are: J.D. Anderson, William Ramsay, Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, Gilbert West, and Frank Morison. Their journeys all brought them to believe in the event they originally set out to disprove.

Gary Habermas, a historian and philosopher of religion, is considered to be one of the foremost experts on the resurrection of Jesus. He embarked on one of the most intense investigations ever done on what modern scholars believe about the resurrection of Jesus. He and his team went through thousands of different sources, from both skeptics and believers, to come up with a list of what he calls the Minimal Facts. In order for a fact to make it on this list, more than 90% of the sources they investigated had to agree it happened. Remember, those sources included many atheist and skeptical scholars.

What are those agreed-upon facts? 

1. Jesus was a real person who died by crucifixion on a Roman cross.
2. Very soon afterward, Jesus’ followers had experiences they believed were actual appearances of a resurrected Jesus.
3. Because of those experiences, these followers went from cowering in fear to being willing to die for their belief in Jesus’ resurrection.
4. The message of Jesus and the Christian church started right after Jesus was killed, right where Jesus was killed: the city of Jerusalem.
5. James, Jesus’ own brother, who was not a Christian at first, became a Christian after the death of Jesus because he believed his brother really did come back from the dead.
6. Paul, who wrote the majority of the New Testament, went from hunting Christians to starting churches because he had an experience he believed was with the risen Jesus.

What is the best explanation for these facts? Different explanations have been presented by skeptical scholars, but none of them have been convincing, even to other skeptics. If you begin by assuming God is fake and miracles are impossible, then of course any explanation will seem more plausible than a miracle taking place. But, if you are open to the possibility that God might exist, then the best explanation is that Jesus did what He said He was going to do: rise from the dead.

When we add the historical evidence for the resurrection to the arguments for God we’ve looked at over the last several days, we are building a stronger and stronger case for the existence of not just any God, but specifically, the God of the Bible. The God who created something out of nothing, brought order to chaos, ordained  morality from mayhem, and brought life from death.