If we are going to consider the evidence for anything we
need to avoid coming at it with presuppositions. We all have background,
culture, upbringing, beliefs and experiences that affect the way we look at
things. Presupposing things leads to prejudice, pre-judicial judgement. It is
to decide what is true, who is guilty, what happened and why first and then
hear the evidence after. It can be positive or negative. You can look at a
person and say to yourself, "They are a thief." Or you can look at
someone else and think "They must be honest." Either way, if you make
that decision as soon as you see them in a courtroom, before the evidence is
presented you are not giving them a fair trial. You cannot, with integrity,
eliminate a possibility before considering the evidence, just because you don't
like it or it doesn't suit you.
Here are some typical presuppositions:
Everything must be proven "scientifically." The
Laws of science can be proven scientifically. The Laws of mathematics can be
proven mathematically. But many things cannot be proven scientifically. Did
anyone read stories to you when you were a young child? Prove it
scientifically. Is this boy in love with that girl? Prove it scientifically.
What did you have for breakfast last Thursday? Prove it scientifically.
Everything has to be proven beyond all other possibility.
Let's consider those childhood stories. You could produce historical evidence.
Maybe you can produce the book. Perhaps you can get the person who read to you
to testify to the fact. Maybe someone else was there listening with you, say a
brother or sister, who can also testify as a witness. Does that provide perfect
proof that it happened? No, but it would be good enough for a court of law to pass
judgement and it would be good enough for a historian to accept.
Accounts of miracles must be rejected out of hand. If there is a creator
god who is involved with their creation then logically they could be a
possibility and also they would be unusual. Let's just look at this in the
context of the resurrection of Jesus. The argument goes that Jesus could not
have risen from the dead because people don't rise from the dead. Therefore
there must be some other explanation, and if there must be some other
explanation then he didn't rise from the dead. This is a circular argument and
can be used to "prove" just about anything. It is true that people do
not generally get resurrected after three days.
If they did we would not refer to it as the miracle of the resurrection
but as the law of resurrection. Another point is that if Jesus was resurrected
then there was a cause. Someone or something brought him back. We can't just
start from a position of saying "It couldn't have happened." without
looking at the evidence first. But if it did then it was most unusual and we
have to ask how and why.
As an aside here, it is worth pointing out that scientific
progress involves thinking the unthinkable. In the early 1800s the leading view
of scientists was that the disease, cholera, was transmitted by particles in
the air called "miasmata." Have you heard of miasmata? Probably not
and there is a reason for that. Dr John Snow thought the unthinkable, that
maybe there was something in the water that transmitted the disease. The lead
medical officer for London labelled this theory "peculiar." The
experts did not think Dr John Snow knew anything. However by studies of the
1854 outbreak he was able to convince people that the source was a particular
water-pump. The popular version of the story has it that he had the pump
disabled and the outbreak stopped as a result an everyone believed his theory.
That is a bit of an over simplification but, while it took a few years to
investigate the details, the idea of miasmata was replaced with the
understanding of germs!
This does not mean we have to believe every outlandish idea
or conclude that anything we don't understand is a miracle. That would be
another presupposition. We do need to be willing to follow where the evidence
leads.
If the Bible is the word of God it must have been dictated from above.
Another way of putting this is: If the Bible is a human book it cannot be a
divine book. This is tied into our western way of thinking that separates the
physical (or secular) and the spiritual. If we look at Jesus we see the Word
made flesh. Jesus, fully God, also became fully man in order to fulfil his
mission. In the same way the Bible is both a human and divine book. There are
some prophetic passages that are more of a word declared from heaven and
written down, but much of it is records of human interaction with God and his
plan. This does not need to make it any the less inspired. It can still be accurate
and authoritative. It is a method for a transcendent God, beyond space and
time, to effectively communicate with us living within the constraints of this
universe. Telling the story of someone you can identify with is often more
effective than just listing principles on abstraction. A legal library contains
far more than volumes of statutes. It also contains many volumes of case law.
This is where the application of the status can be understood. To the Jews the
Old Testament was The Law and The Prophets. The Law is not just the statutes
recorded by Moses on the desert, but the CASE LAW from the lives of the
patriarchs before Moses as well as the nations, leaders and people afterwards.
Because of this we need to understand the people and the
times to rightly judge their words. This includes bearing in mind the type of literature they
are writing at the time. The Bible is a library of different types of book.
Psalms are poetry, songs from the heart. Proverbs are nuggets of wisdom often
like Tweets, constrained to 144 characters. History and prophecy are different
again. And they are generally written in the observational language of people
on the ground rather than God in heaven. It is easier to try to put ourselves
into someone else's does than onto God's throne.
As I was preparing this post I was sent a link to this interesting blog post listing 17 ways of prejudicing an examination of scripture.
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