Gunning for God by John C. Lennox

god could arbitrarily intervene, and alter, suspend, reverse, or otherwise “violate” these laws of nature. For that would seem to them to contradict the immutability of those laws, and thus overturn the very basis of the scientific understanding of the universe. As a corollary to this, many such scientists would advance two arguments:
    Argument 1. Belief in miracles in general, and New Testament miracles in particular, arose in a primitive, pre-scientific culture where people were ignorant of the laws of nature, and readily accepted miracle stories.
    Hume endorses this view, when he says that accounts of miracles “are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.” 17 However plausible this explanation may seem at first sight, it is in fact nonsense when applied to the New Testament miracles. A moment’s thought will show us that, in order to recognize some event as a miracle, there must be some perceived regularity to which that event is an apparent exception! You cannot recognize something that is abnormal, if you do not know what is normal.
    This was recognized long ago. It is interesting that the historian Luke, who was a doctor trained in the medical science of his day, begins his biography of Christ by raising this very matter. 18 He tells the story of a man, Zechariah, and of his wife, Elizabeth, who for many years had prayed for a son because she was barren. When, in his old age, an angel appeared to him and told him that his former prayers were about to be answered and that his wife would conceive and bear a son, he very politely but firmly refused to believe it. The reason he gave was that he was now old and his wife’s body decrepit. For him and his wife to have a child at this stage would run counter to all that he knew of the laws of nature. The interesting thing about him is this: he was no atheist; he was a priest who believed in God, in the existence of angels, and in the value of prayer. But if the promised fulfilment of his prayer was going to involve a reversal of the laws of nature, he was not prepared to believe it.
    Luke here makes it obvious that the early Christians were not a credulous bunch, unaware of the laws of nature, and therefore prepared to believe any miraculous story, however absurd. They felt the difficulty in believing the story of such a miracle, just like anyone would today. If in the end they believed, it was because they were forced to by the sheer weight of the direct evidence presented to them, not through their ignorance of nature’s laws.
    Similarly, in his account of the rise of Christianity, Luke shows us that the first opposition to the Christian message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ came not from atheists, but from the Sadducean High Priests in Judaism. 19 They were highly religious men. They believed in God. They said their prayers and conducted the services in the temple. But that did not mean that the first time they heard the claim that Jesus had risen from the dead they believed it. They did not believe it; for they had embraced a worldview that denied the possibility of bodily resurrection of any one at all, let alone that of Jesus Christ. 20
    Indeed, they shared a widespread conviction. Historian Tom Wright says:
Ancient paganism contains all kinds of theories, but whenever resurrection is mentioned, the answer is a firm negative: we know that doesn’t happen. (This is worth stressing in today’s context. One sometimes hears it said or implied that prior to the rise of modern science people believed in all kinds of odd things like resurrection but that now, with two hundred years of scientific research on our side, we know that dead people stay dead. This is ridiculous. The evidence, and the conclusion, was massive and massively drawn in the ancient world as it is today.) 21
     
    To suppose, then, that Christianity was born in a pre-scientific, credulous, and ignorant world is simply false to the facts. The ancient world knew the law