Easter Apologetics: Part 1. The Women at the tomb

Opponents of Christianity often try to attack the faith by pointing out supposed contradictions in the Bible.  It’s a rather futile tactic because I don’t think their conclusion necessarily follows their premise.  What, if one passage of the Bible is wrong then all the Bible is wrong?  If two verses contradict each other, then there is no God?  It just doesn’t make any sense.  

Now, I get that, if the Bible isn’t reliable, then what we can know about God becomes suspect but I hardly see that as proof that God isn’t real, that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, and that our sins can’t be forgiven!  Of course, I am of the opinion that the Bible is 100% accurate and that all criticisms directed at the Bible will disappear with a fair reading of the text.  I was just pointing out that an alleged contradiction, even one which is not easily explained, isn’t proof of anything!

Many examples of alleged contradictions surround the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus: things like, how many women went to the tomb?  What time did they arrive?  How many angels were there?  What did Judas do with the 30 pieces of silver?  How did Judas die?  This Easter season, I thought I’d make a series of posts dealing with the most often used criticisms of the events, and conclude the series with a day by day discussion of what Jesus may have been doing each day during the Passion Week.  

Please keep checking back!

Who were the women who went to the tomb and when did they arrive?

Matthew 28:1, In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, came Mary Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepulchre.

Mark 16:1-2, And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, had bought sweet spices, that they might come and anoint him.  And very early in the morning the first day of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at the rising of the sun.

Luke 24:1,10,  Now upon the first day of the week, very early in the morning, they came unto the sepulchre, bringing the spices which they had prepared, and certain others with them… It was Mary Magdalene and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James, and other women that were with them, which told these things unto the apostles.

John 20:1, The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.

Each of the above passages are describing the events of the Resurrection Morning where women are coming to the tomb of Jesus to prepare His body.  They all mention Mary Magdalene but they also mention other women.  Mark mentions Salome but Luke says Joanna was with them.  Mark says they came at the rising of the sun but John says Mary Magdalene came while it was still dark.  The accounts are all very similar but they’re not identical which is what leads to the accusation of “contradiction!”

In the above passages, the gospels are describing four or five women by name (Matthew identifies one as “the other Mary” which could be the mother of James or a different Mary) all going to the tomb.  Luke mentions there were “other women,” meaning there could have been even more than five.  The fact that we have differing accounts of the same event is not a contradiction.  Rather, it actually helps us better understand what it was probably like that morning.  

At first hearing, for example, people tend to assume that all the women were walking toward the tomb together.  Considering the details, though, I think it’s more likely they were all traveling toward the tomb, but some began at different places and arrived at slightly different times.

Let me give you a hypothetical situation as an analogy: Suppose I’m going to meet my grown daughter (we’ll call her, Mary) at a theater to watch a movie.  I might tell my wife, “Mary and I are going to the movies.”  The movie starts at 8PM but I live further away from the theater than my daughter so I have to begin driving a little earlier than she does. It’s light when I leave but it’s dark when I arrive at the theater. Mary is already there and I see she brought her friend Susan with her.  

Considering this very plausible scenario, let me ask a few questions: Was my statement to my wife untrue because I didn’t mention Susan?  Did we still go to the movie together even though we drove there separately?  Is there anything contradictory about her arriving slightly before dark and me arriving after it was dark?  Should I have mentioned there were other people who went to the same movie?  

If I were ever to recount this event to someone else, I would probably say something like, “Yeah, my daughter and I saw a late showing of that movie.  It was pretty good.”  I wouldn’t pour over every detail about the time of day, the distance from my house, how many people were in the theater, what snacks we had, etc.  Susan might describe the same event this way, “Mary and I saw that movie.  I thought it was boring.”  Does her recollection of the event actually contradict mine?  Can they seem contradictory yet still be accurate?

That is what is happening here.  The Resurrection was the main point in each of these passages.  That was the focus of the gospel writers and none of them saw the need to burden the event with a laborious description of every detail.  In my opinion, to include minutia and unsolicited details would make the passages become less credible.  It is the tell-tale sign of lying when a person volunteers too much information!

If Mary Magdalene had somehow died during the Passion week, but is now described as visiting the empty tomb, maybe that would be a contradiction. Not this.  The accounts given here are exactly what I expect from true witnesses to the events.  They mention details while leading up to their point, but their focus is always on the big picture!  The tomb was empty and all the women saw it!!  Praise God!!  As far as I’m concerned, that’s the most important detail and all the gospels agree on it. 

Proof for evolution?

I came across an article a while ago on Futurism.com titled, “Three Pieces of Evidence That Prove Evolution is a Fact.” You'll notice the article is a few years old but I'm sorry – it's a big world wide web and I haven't gotten to all of it yet.  Even so, the “proof” presented in the article is the same stuff I continue to hear so I thought I'd write a post discussing it.  I'll address the three pieces of evidence briefly at the end of this post but there’s a lot I want to say about the article just from its opening paragraphs. I think they shed a lot of light on the attitude of its author. 

First, there's the title: “prove evolution is a fact.” Really? Prove? I thought science doesn't ever prove anything. Actually, let me quote another article from Futurism.com, “Don’t ever say around me that science has “proven” something unless you want an ear full. Understanding why that phrase is problematic is essential to understanding the most important tool humans have ever devised to understand reality – science.” Isn't that a hoot? The same website that warns us to never say science “proves” anything turns right around and says the evidence has proven evolution!

Moving on, the first paragraph starts by saying, “For over 150 years—since the time of Charles Darwin—the Theory of Evolution has been through more scrutiny and rigorous investigation than just about any other scientific claim.” Hmm. “Investigation”? Maybe. “Scrutiny”? Please! I’ve said many times before that most scientists proudly boast how they only ever consider natural explanations. Regarding our origins, evolution is the only natural explanation so they don't scrutinize it. No matter how weakly it might explain some phenomenon, no matter how little evidence there is for some point of the theory, no matter how absurd some of its explanations are, they will never question the theory itself because the only alternative is supernatural creation which they've disqualified in advance.

The article continues, “And the theory has only been strengthened as more evidence has been accrued.” I wouldn't say the theory has been strengthened but, rather, it has been fleshed out as more evidence is found. It's a case of having a theory and then seeking out evidence for it. You see, every time they think they have some part of evolution figured out, some new discovery is made that forces them to rethink everything. I've asked before, how many times are they allowed to redraw the tree?  How many times will different points of the theory be proven wrong before people begin questioning the theory itself?

Next, the article says, “While there are many that people who, for ideological reasons, want to make it seem like evolution is not widely accepted within the scientific community, this is not actually the case.” Of course that's not the case and no one says it is. Creationists might sometimes point out a contention in the scientific community about some point of evolution but that's only to show that evolution is not the neat package that's being presented to the lay public. However, we completely understand that, even though scientists might disagree on different points of evolution, they don't question the theory itself. Where creationists disagree with evolutionists is over whether evolution is true, not whether evolutionists really believe it!

“Across universities, research institutions, and scientific organizations, evolution is not only nearly universally accepted,...” Yes, “the science is settled” and most scientists do not question the theory of evolution. By the way, there is an oft quoted statistic that 99.9% of all scientists accept evolution but I've never seen a scientific survey to support that. Regardless, how many scientists believe evolution isn't evidence for evolution. Scientists – even the majority of scientists – can be wrong. Before Galileo, for example, the majority of people believed the sun orbited the earth. Anyway, back to the point, “... [evolution] is also the basis upon which active, exciting, and important research is being done. Indeed, the scientific fact that is evolution is the basis of most of biology.” Wrong, wrong, wrong! Evolution is the basis only for research into evolution; it's completely irrelevant to any other field of science.

If you were to google, “how evolution helps research,” you'll find plenty of articles by people trying to convince you that understanding evolution is critical to scientific research. Here's another exercise to try: see if you can find any invention, scientific advancement, or life improving technology whose discovery hinged upon evolution being true. I sometimes call evolution, “the trivial pursuit branch of science.”  From a survey into the relevance of evolution to academia, we have this quote:

The message that Darwinists convey to the public is often very different than what they recognize as true among themselves. Although they state to the public that, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” most scientists can “conduct their work quite happily without particular reference to evolutionary ideas”.... One “notable aspect of natural scientists in assembly is how little they focus on evolution. It’s day-to-day irrelevance is a great ‘paradox’ in biology”.

After having said all this, let’s look quickly at the highly touted evidence that’s supposed to “prove” evolution is true:

Common Traits. Common Ancestor.

Think about your family. You and your closest relatives look more alike than you and your cousins. Likewise, you look more like your cousins than you do more distant relatives, and more like distant relatives that people on the other side of the globe. The closer you are related, by-and-large, the more similarities you share.... This patterning, like in your family, extends throughout all life on Earth.

It's true that evolution could explain similar features in closely related species. Of course, created things can also have common traits. Consider this illustration. This bicycle and this scooter obviously have features in common but neither has evolved from the other.. Their only relationship is that they were designed to perform similar functions. Some of their similarities, the blue frames and the black tires and accessories are merely the preferences of the designers. Likewise, similar features among different creatures could be evidence they were designed by a Creator and reflect his purpose and preferences.  Since both theories explain common traits, common traits can’t be used to prove evolution.

We See Species Changing Over Time

One of the most important discoveries that lead to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution was extinct animals found as fossils. Early paleontologists, like Charles Lyell and George Cuvier, noticed a very simple fact: Species that lived in the past are very often drastically, wildly different from anything alive today. Trilobites, dinosaurs, giant sloths, baculites, etc., they all suggest that life on Earth has changed quite a bit.

I like to use dogs as an example of change in populations because most people are familiar with dogs and know they come in all shapes, sizes, and colors. The problem with evolution is that dogs never come in new shapes, sizes, and colors. Take color, for example. Dogs can be white, brown, black, blonde, and red. However, they aren't green or blue. Why not? It's because the “change” we observe in species are merely rearrangements of traits already present in the population.

Natural selection can only ever select from traits that already exist – hence, we call it, “selection.” For evolution to be possible, creatures have to acquire new traits. For a dinosaur to become a bird, you would have to add feathers. For a fish to become a frog, you would have to add legs. To turn a bacterium into a basset hound would require a millions of years long parade of new traits being added generation after generation. We don't see any new traits. We see changes among animal populations; we don’t see evolution.  Natural selection is the opposite of evolution!

The Remnants of Past Generations

Turn over a manufactured product today, and you are likely to see a small sticker or tag that says what country it was made in. Like those tags, species bear the marks of where they came from. These signs of origin might come in the form of repurposed traits, traits that hurt a species chances of surviving or reproducing.

The author appears to be talking about vestigial organs. The champion of all vestigial organs ever touted by evolutionists is the appendix. I've discussed above how the appendix being present in some mammals but absent in the species that are supposed to link them is evidence against common ancestry. What I didn't mention above is, if the appendix is vestigial, it's even more difficult for evolution to explain how it would evolve independently in different species. Put another way, why should I believe the appendix served some function so well that “nature” created it in several different species of mammal but now it's nothing more than a useless leftover?

In conclusion, the article should have been titled, How Evolution Can Explain These Three Observations.  These three things certainly don’t “prove” anything.  Actually, evolution is even a poor explanation of them!

Eric the God-Eating Penguin v. God

This post is going to be a little different than my usual content.  I read an amusing analogy written by an anonymous skeptic attempting to compare the Christian God to a mythical penguin named Eric.  It went like this:

God can’t exist because of Eric, the God-Eating magic penguin.  Since Eric is god-eating by definition, he has no choice but to eat god.  So, if god exists, he automatically ceases to exist as a result of being eaten.

So unless you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist, god doesn’t exist.  Even if you can prove Eric doesn’t exist, that same proof will also be applicable to god.

There are only two possibilities.  Either you can prove that Eric doesn’t exist or you can’t.  In both cases, it logically follows that god doesn’t exist.

It’s an amusing argument but it suffers from a failed premise - it’s non sequitur.  It doesn’t logically follow that if Eric doesn’t exist, then God doesn’t exist.  To show the weakness of this analogy, here’s another analogy: The Joker is a supervillain who immediately destroys all police officers.  If the Joker exists, then police officers cannot exist because they would all be destroyed already.  But if you can prove the Joker doesn’t exist, then it follows that police officers do not exist!

Wow, that took only about 2 minutes to rebut.  But since the story is amusing, I thought I’d explore it a little more.  

What kind of being would Eric have to be, that would make it able to eat gods?  I mean, what sort of attributes would it possess?  Let’s think about that.

First, how would it find the gods?  There could be a god born (er… come into being? exist? IDK) on a small planet in a galaxy far away from Eric and how would Eric know he was there?  Eric would somehow have to automatically know whenever a god comes into being anywhere in the universe.  In other words, Eric would have to be omniscient.

Next, how would Eric eat a god unless it was near him?  If Eric were on Earth and there were a god on a planet 1 billion light years away, it wouldn’t be able to eat him.  What’s more, suppose there is another god on a different planet 1 billion light years in the opposite direction.  Can Eric be in both places?  That would make it omnipresent.

Another point is, if Eric can automatically know when a god is born and can instantly be there next to him, ready to devour it, how could it unless it were able to overpower the god?  A mouse couldn’t eat a lion, could it?  To be able to eat any god that could ever exist, Eric would have to be omnipotent.

Finally, is Eric confined only to this universe?  What if there were a god that transcends the natural - a god that is supernatural - would Eric be able to eat that god also?  Then Eric would have to be supernatural.

So Eric would have to be a supernatural, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being.  It’s funny that, to argue that God doesn’t exist, skeptics have to invent a being like God to rebut Him.  Now, I get it. That’s sort of what the skeptic is going for.  He’s trying to say that anyone can make up an all-powerful being and evidence against that imaginary being is also evidence against any all-powerful being.  That really doesn’t follow, does it?  I mean, Samuel Clemens (AKA Mark Twain) was a real person who, on occasion, would ride on a boat on the Mississippi River.  He made up a boy named Tom Sawyer who also rode on a boat on the Mississippi River.  So, if I can prove Tom Sawyer didn’t exist, is that evidence that Samuel Clemens doesn’t exist?  Hardly!  Like I’ve already said, the entire argument is non sequitur.  

The idea to make Eric a penguin suggests the analogy was intended to be absurd but the anonymous author was still trying to make a point.  It’s sort of like the Flying Spaghetti Monster analogy.  They invent a comical, obviously imaginary creature with god-like abilities, to plant the idea that God, too, is imaginary.  These types of arguments sound clever for a moment, but they’re a mish mash of logical fallacies.  Think about other examples: because Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist, real detectives don’t exist.  Because Rain Man (the Dustin Hoffman character) doesn’t exist, Kim Peek didn’t exist.  Because Paul Bunyan doesn’t exist, lumberjacks don’t exist.  Where does it end?

Here’s a thought: the analogy said Eric “is god-eating by definition, he has no choice but to eat god.”  So if God exists, that alone would be proof that Eric doesn’t exist since it hasn’t eaten God already!  There you go, Mr. Skeptic.  Chew on that one for a while!