What I found fascinating is that even though the cultural/religious backdrop in the film (shia Islam) is very different than my western background these themes are easily understood and I resonate with them.  I am gripped in a key moment when the daughter asks her father if he is telling the truth when he says (in court) he did not know that the hired woman was pregnant when he pushed her out the door (the chador dress hides the pregnant figure).  The father squirms as he addresses his daughter’s questioning regarding his honesty.  And we realize that indeed the father had known the woman was pregnant and thus was lying when in court he testified that he did not know about her pregnant state.  But the cost of admitting this would be 1-3 years in Iranian jail.  He knew he ought to tell the truth – but the cost was too high.  And the daughter herself, in another tense moment, when she is before the judge she also continues the deception by corroborating her father’s story – though by now she knows that this is not true.  As she leaves the court she is quietly crying.  Her innocence has been lost.

And the mother who initiated the divorce, ostensibly for the sake of their daughter, watches as her daughter, caught in this web, descends into depression and fear as she is stalked by the husband of the woman who had the miscarriage. Taking matters into her own hand she starts a back-channel to pay money to the family suffering the miscarriage.  At first the offer is rebuffed, but they themselves are in severe debt and desperately need the money.  So the husband and wife (who suffered the miscarriage) accept the offer.  And this utilitarian and pragmatic solution seems at first to provide a solution that will satisfy everyone.  The couple suffering the miscarriage get money so they can pay their debts.  The creditors can get their loans repaid.  The daughter (of the divorcing couple) can live life again.  At the climax when everyone is gathered to witness and clear all transactions, the husband who is accused of causing the miscarriage slyly (because he wants to defend his honor) requests that the woman swear on the Qur’an that in her total conscience she knew he was the cause of the miscarriage.  But the woman will not swear because she is not sure (even though she gone along with his accusation in court) that he had caused it.  No resolution is found.  No one is satisfied.

We often hear that Right & Wrong are basically invented and overseen by society for its functioning.  Now it is indeed true that without morals society cannot function.  But it does not necessarily follow from this that society is the source or cause of morals.  What is intriguing in this film is that at the end it would be much more to society’s better functioning to have had the woman simply swear (and thus lie) that it was the man pushing her that caused the miscarriage.  Her husband, his creditors, the family who was accused would all have benefited and society’s better functioning would have been lubricated.  But her sense of Truth would not let her.

It is because the moral choices are so poignant and precisely because they go beyond society’s need to function that they are so compelling and draw everyone into it – even those of us from very different societies.  We can feel them ourselves.  To me this is a hint that there is a deeper basis for morals – that there is an objective Right & Wrong.  In Session Two I wanted to get us to come to grips with a couple of observations that we easily miss.  First, morals are so congruent across vastly different cultures that it speaks to something deeper than simply society/culture/religion being the cause behind it.  I surveyed ethics of religions across the world and down through time.  It speaks to a basis that is built into us in an absolute way – A Moral Law.  The film, A Separation, corroborates this by expecting us to be able to enter and feel their moral choices – even as we do not understand their dress, their religion and their customs.  Secondly, in Session Two I wanted us to consider that though we sense this Right&Wrong we do not consistently live it, even while we intrinsically expect others around us to do so.  I looked at Bertrand Russell’s pointing out the Wrongness of religious people’s treatment of him – even while he argued that there was no real Right &Wrong – as food for thought.  A Separation attests to this as we see how the characters expect to receive truth, justice and mercy – but all the while they cannot extend it to others – either those they love in their own family or the strangers at the other end of their legal and moral confrontation.  And we find this so natural we barely notice it.

I wrote in introducing Session Two that I first became acquainted with these generalizations through the writings of CS Lewis but held them very tentatively as the data seemed hard to get a handle on.  As I continued to consider Right&Wrong through the lense of human life experience I noticed things that made their resonance grow stronger while other hypotheses seemed to follow one another with a restless sense of bewilderment.  Since it took me a lot of reflection I simply offer them as thoughts to hold out for your consideration.  This film, A Separation, is one such hint for us to consider as it strikes our hearts – that Right&Wrong is objective Truth but that universal human experience demonstrates that we do not live by it.  Perhaps this is also one reason it is up for two Oscars.

Here is the trailer for A Separation

Click here to view the embedded video.

It took me some time (and a lot of reading) to arrive at this conclusion.  And if this is a new thought for you I am sure that likewise this will require more consideration.  But I am not just maliciously picking on some ‘mistaken’ examples in a sea of correct ones.  The examples I covered in the video are endemic across the literature.  But how can this be?  Analyzing another case study, taken from Evolutionary Analysis by Scott Freeman and JC Herron, can help us better understand how it occurs.

Soapberry bugs: Before & After the New Host Plant

In this study, soapberry bugs in Florida had traditionally fed on the Balloon vine fruit as shown in this figure taken from the text.

But in 1926 a new host plant for this bug was introduced and almost immediately biologists noticed a change in the beak length.  Our text concludes that:

the soapberry bug population evolved …the characteristics of soapberry bugs … have changed substantially (pg 41)

So again, an example of observed evolution is claimed.  A graph of beak lengths over time is presented from the text to support this conclusion.  I added the green vertical 1926 line which is the point at which beak lengths changed.  So what can we conclude?  As you can see, before 1926 soapberry beak lengths ranged from 9 to 5.5 millimeters – a 3.5 mm range.  After 1926, when this new tree was introduced the beak size range was reduced from 7.5 to 5.5 millmeters – a 2 mm range.  The title for the graph (which I circled) states this as ‘evolutionary change in soapberry bugs’.  But was anything new gained or developed?  Were even new beak lengths, not previously seen, observed?  No! Not at all!  All that happened was that after the new tree was introduced, beak sizes from 7.5 to 9 millimeters disappeared.  Information was lost!  A certain allele that produced long beaks was selected against in the new environment and was now gone.  Change –Yes!  Natural Selection – Yes!  Evolution – definitely not!  Their own data refutes it!

But how can this case study, which simply documents a loss (of longer beak lengths), be touted as an example of evolution?  It is simple.  The authors have equated ‘evolution’ with ‘change’.  But that is erroneous at best and misleading at worst.  Evolutionary naturalism as the establishment’s answer to Design is a claim to account for the origin and development of all life, and is supposed to be a process that over long time produces new information, genes and structures that were not previously there.  That is not just any kind of change, but a certain kind of change – one that increases genetic information and function.  To reason like these authors is like saying that increasing company profits is simply a change in the balance sheet, and thus if one can show any balance sheet change – such as a corporate loss  - this would demonstrate increased profits since a change has occurred in the balance sheet??!!   This is such a basic logical error – called the fallacy of equivocation – whereby the definition of a key term is subtly modified during the reasoning process (in this case ‘evolution’ is modified from ‘change with new function and information’ to ‘any change’) that I found it breathtaking to see it not just once, but again and again in so many university textbooks and books promoting naturalism and evolution.

And this is also true of the cases of Superbugs, perhaps the strongest cases in the public mind of observed evolution.  We have all heard of bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics, having thus ‘evolved’, and now threatening humans with an epidemic.  What is happening in these situations?  Are new enzymes, processes, or organelles that were not previously there being developed by these bacteria?  That is what I had originally thought.  If so that would be an example of an innovative evolutionary process.

But if we examine the literature we find this is not the case.  Consider the following:

‘most cases’ antibiotic resistance results from selection of an existing genetic trait, especially those traits that are highly variable, such as the natural defences that all organisms possess[1]

In other words in most cases, there were bacteria prior to the introduction of the antibiotic that already had the resistance.  The other bacteria were selected away by the antibiotic and we are left with the resistant bacteria.  For example, there was a 1988 University of Alberta study of bacteria on the bodies of Arctic explorers frozen in 1845.  Investigators discovered that some of the bacterial strains were resistant to antibiotics. The study, which evaluated six strains of Clostridium on three men who had been buried in permafrost, found the bacteria were particularly resistance to clindamycin and cefoxitin, both antibiotics that were developed over a century after the men died.[2]

Bacteria can also physically transfer DNA from one organism to another – a process called conjugation.  In 1990 “a strain that was resistant to cadmium, penicillin, kanamycin, neomycin, streptomycin, tetracycline, and trimethoprim. … could resist, to varying degrees, some thirtyone different drugs. … The most common mode of passage was conjugation: one bacterium simply stretched out its cytoplasm and passed plasmids to its partner.”[3] This is similar to how we transfer information from one computer to another by using a USB stick.  But transferring information from one organism to another (or one computer to another) is not a process that is making or developing new information.  It is simply copying existing information.

Certain antibiotic resistances do occur from mutation.  But again these mutations do not develop new enzymes, processes or organelles.  They in fact damage existing enzymes and degrade the function of the bacteria.

Perhaps the best known example of this is resistance to the antibiotic streptomycin.  The figure on the left shows how this works.  Mycin antibiotics attack bacteria by having the right ‘fit’ to attach to a specific receptor site on the bacteria’s ribosomes, and thereby interfering with their protein-manufacturing process.  As a result, the proteins that the bacteria produce are non-functional – and they die.  Mammalian ribosomes do not contain the specific site where myosin drugs can attach, and for this reason the drug does not interfere with their ribosomes. Therefore, mycin drugs adversely affect bacterial growth without harming the host (us).

With resistant bacteria, mutations cause the bacteria to become resistant to streptomycin if the ribosome site where the streptomycin attaches is damaged by the mutation. As a result, the streptomycin no longer can bind, and therefore does not interfere as well with the ribosome function.  This is shown in the next figure.

Streptomycin with mutant resistant bacteria

Streptomycin-resistant bacteria actually are weaker in the wild for several reasons. The major reason is the ribosome’s specific shape is degraded in bacteria that become resistant to streptomycin, and as a result the ribosomes’ ability to translate certain RNA transcripts into protein is less effective.  Thus the mutations that confer resistance decrease the fitness of bacteria in environments without antibiotics. As a result they do not reproduce as quickly as non-resistant bacteria.  Evidence discovered so far indicates that these mutations render bacteria less fit in the wild because the mutant strain is less able to compete with the wild type.

The mutations causing resistance to mycin is a case similar to birds on remote islands losing wings – it may be an advantage since there are no predators on those islands – but it is not an example of gain-of-function.  In the specific antibiotic environment, having a misshapen ribosome prevents the antibiotic from readily attaching and there is thus resistance.  But the ribosome does not function as well as non-mutant ribosomes and thus these bacteria are selected out (eliminated) in the wild.

French biologist Pierre Grasse remarked on the irony of using bacteria as a showcase to try to observe evolution.  He stated:

Bacteria, the study of which has formed a great part of the foundation of genetics and molecular biology, are the organisms which, because of their huge numbers, produce the most mutants . . . bacteria, despite their great production of intra-specific varieties, exhibit a great fidelity to their species. The bacillus Echerichia coli, whose mutants have been studied very carefully, is the best example. The reader will agree that it is surprising, to say the least, to want to prove evolution and to discover its mechanisms and then to choose as a material for this study a being which practically stabilized a billion years ago.[4]

These same processes also explain insect resistance to DDT and other insecticides.  Evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala reports that:

Insect resistance to a pesticide was first reported in 1947 for the housefly (Musca domestica) with respect to DDT. Since then the resistance to pesticides has been reported in at least 225 species of insects and other arthropods. The genetic variants required for resistance to the most diverse kinds of pesticides were apparently present in every one of the populations exposed to these man-made compounds.[5]

The fruit fly is another small insect from which investigators have tried to ‘observe’ evolution. Rifkin writes about this

The fruit fly has long been the favorite object of mutation experiments because of its fast gestation period (twelve days). X-rays have been used to increase the mutation rate in the fruit fly 15,000 percent. All in all, scientists have been able to “catalyze the fruit fly evolutionary process such that what has been seen to occur in Drosophila (fruit fly) is the equivalent of many millions of years of normal mutations and evolution.” Even with this tremendous speed-up of mutations, scientists have never been able to come up with anything other than another fruit fly.[6]

The ability to observe this alleged process has eluded scientists since Darwin so eloquently argued for it.  However, instead of coming clean about this, textbooks and news articles confuse us in a slippery way by equivocating evolution with ‘change’.  And this is always presented as a scientific (ie observed) answer to Design.  But Soapberry bugs to SuperBugs simply attest, along with all other observed changes, that Nature is simply on a slide downwards.  To-date there is no observed alternative to Design.

It is a good question and someone challenged me on it a little while ago.   After all, it can be such a polarizing topic – why go there?  I thought I would address it with a five page pdf article which I have attached with this post.  In it I show how what we think about our origins is foundational to everything we understand about ourselves.  It affects all areas of human inquiry.  This includes our understanding of ethics, as we will see in Session 2.

I hope you take the 5-10 minutes you will need to read this article.  I do not argue for the correctness of any belief of system – evolutionary or otherwise.  I only show that it is an important question.  And important questions demand informed answers, not politically correct silence.  As the article says, it is well worth the fuss.

Evolution and origins – why the fuss?

Antony Flew was born in the early 1920’s, and by the late 1930’s had concluded that there was no God.  But in 2007 he co-authored a rather remarkable book entitled There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind. So what caused this man to change his mind?  In a 2005 interview he explained:

It seems to me that Richard Dawkins constantly overlooks the fact that Darwin himself, in the fourteenth chapter of The Origin of Species, pointed out that his whole argument began with a being which already possessed reproductive powers. This is the creature the evolution of which a truly comprehensive theory of evolution must give some account.

Darwin himself was well aware that he had not produced such an account. It now seems to me that the findings of more than fifty years of DNA research have provided materials for a new and enormously powerful argument to design.[1]

In his 2007 book Antony Flew stated that “the most impressive arguments for God’s existence are those that are supported by recent scientific discoveries” and that “the argument to Intelligent Design is enormously stronger than it was when I first met it”.  He stated the issue succinctly in his book:

The philosophical question that has not been answered in origin-of-life studies is this: How can a universe of mindless matter produce beings with intrinsic ends, self-replication capabilities, and “coded chemistry”? Here we are not dealing with biology, but an entirely different category of problem.[2]

In late 2006, Flew joined 11 other academics in urging the British government to teach intelligent design in the state schools.[3]

I am not generally swayed solely by opinions of leading people.  But I rarely ignore them.  I want to know the reasons which these people base their opinions on.  So what was it that Antony Flew learned about the cell that was not known in the 1930’s when he first decided that there was no God?  Take a look at some of the following videos that have been made recently to teach students how parts of the cell work.  As you watch them ask yourself these questions.  How could this cellular machinery put itself together to start cellular life?  Can this work if only half the components are present ‘waiting’ for the other half (and remember these are basic cells functions that are essential for life)?  Could this be assembled by chance (one cannot invoke natural selection since there is no reproduction until these processes work)?  Follow Flew’s lead and Consider Design at the cellular level.

This one shows ATP Synthase – the enzyme that makes ATP, the molecule used for energy in all cellular functions.  Without this energy there could be no life.  Each cell in all bodies has many mitochondria organelles where the ATP Synthase is lodged in its membrane.  While you watch this video you will have generated trillions of ATP.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This one shows how information in DNA is transcribed to RNA.  Without this capability life could not make proteins – the building blocks of cells.  Notice that it requires ATP to do this while the ATP Synthase requires DNA-RNA transcription.  A decidedly chicken-and-egg problem.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This one shows how photosynthesis works.  This process is found in cyanobacteria, the simplest cells, and is the prerequisite function to convert solar energy into chemical energy, without which life could not function.  Notice again how ATP Synthase is required here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I encourage you to watch the many fascinating educational videos on how the cell works.  You can find them (Virtual Cell) at http://vcell.ndsu.edu/animations/home.htm

I can see why Antony Flew changed his mind.

The same is true of our Design Inference.  It is so innate to us that we can miss it even when it confronts us directly.  This realization snuck up on me last week when I was staying with a friend of mine.

This friend is wrestling deeply with questions pertaining to the Gospel.  Is there a God?  Has He revealed himself?  Or have people made him up?  If He has revealed himself, how should one separate his ‘fingerprints’ from those of people?  Is the historical Jesus accessible to us?  As we shared our thoughts, insights and doubts about these and other similar questions our friendship grew because it is often the sharing of these questions, rather than having similar answers that can spark fellowship.  As part of his search he was exploring naturalistic answers, and given that I believe the gospel assertion that we are made by a Creator, he invited me and another to view the NOVA series Becoming Human. It is a documentary on naturalistic human evolution.  We watched the third episode entitled Last Human Standing.

I predicted that the general trend would be that as more information is gathered one would see that the supposedly intermediate ‘ape-men’ would be either human or ape.  This was based on my experience in discovering in the literature that there is marked absence of transitional fossils across the fossil record (see Session 1b video for more on that).  The documentary did show, through DNA sequencing comparisons that Neanderthals were fully human.  Their DNA is the same as ours.  I showed my friend how other data presented in the documentary fit readily within a Biblical framework.  One needed just to look at the data slightly differently.

But it was the inferences and reasoning logic of the anthropologists interviewed in the documentary that made me take note.  They were excited because they had discovered rocks in Africa that had etchings scratched on them.  They had also discovered shells with holes in them.  Their conclusion was that this was the first instance ever of information being stored outside a human brain.  And given the presence of these artefacts, hominids at this point must have evolved sufficiently to have minds capable of symbolic thought.  And it was then that the irony struck me.

Why did these anthropologists very naturally, and without hesitation, deduce that hominids at this ‘stage’ of evolution must have developed the capability of symbolic thought? Because we know from universal experience – it is ubiquitous – that information and design only comes from an intelligent agent.  These anthropologists did not stop to wonder if the holes in the shells and the etchings on the rocks were produced by time, chance and natural processes.  They used the design inference to deduce that they were made by hominids and that these hominids must therefore have been ‘intelligent’.  And we the viewers did not even question their reasoning.  Without batting an eye we accepted it as self-evidently logical and reasonable.  The inference to an intelligent agent when confronted by design is ubiquitous.

Yet in the same interview these same anthropologists surmised that these etchings and shell holes were the first instance ever of information stored outside the brain.  Really?  The information stored universally in the biological world in DNA, from which kidneys, wings, lungs, feathers – and yes even brains – are built is astronomically more complex and functional than any etchings on rocks or holes in shells.

Is it really a stretch to deduce an Intelligent Designer when we are confronted with information in DNA that is far more complex than anything man has ever developed when we at the same time so naturally deduce ‘Intelligent Hominids’ when confronted by information that is far less impressive?  That is the question we take up in Session 1 – The Case for God: Considering Design.  The videos in this session are high definition and they are partitioned into chapters so you can stop and then re-start viewing in marked spots.

First-year courses also serve as the foundational prerequisites upon which the more useful upper-year courses are built – the ones that give the knowledge and information that we really use.  In a similar way we are now in a position to integrate the External Evidence Session with that of Session 5 – where we opened a case to see if there is a Divine Mind behind the biblical account.

In that 5^th Session we looked at two very important stories in the earliest section of the Old Testament – in the Pentateuch of the books ascribed to Moses.  We first looked at the account of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son on Mount Moriah, which (though many are not aware of it) we showed to be the place where the city of Jerusalem was eventually established.  And we saw that there are allusions in this account of Abraham that have fascinating parallels with, and point to, Jesus’ crucifixion in Jerusalem.  It is the fact that the allusion predates the event it alludes to by thousands of years that makes it so especially intriguing.  It points to a drama/literary mind, but since no human mind can coordinate events far into the future it opens the possibility that there is indeed a Divine Mind coordinating these events.  Now the first (and most obvious) rebuttal to this is that the gospel writers simply made up the ‘detail’ of Jesus’crucifixion being in Jerusalem to make it ‘fit’ that Abrahamic allusion.  But now we know from external evidence that Tacitus (a historian not at all sympathetic to the gospel) places that event in Judea.  He says:

Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, … but the pernicious superstition, repressed for a time broke out again, not only through Judea, where the mischief originated…(Annals XV. 44)

Josephus, the Jewish historian from the same period agrees with Tacitus in saying that:

At this time there was a wise man … Jesus. … good, and … virtuous. Many people among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples. Pilate condemned Him to be crucified and to die.  (Antiquities Book XVIII, III)

And Josephus tells us in his Antiquities in the two paragraphs just preceding this quote that:

But now Pilate, the procurator of Judea, removed the army from Cesarea to Jerusalem, to take their winter quarters there …Pilate was the first who brought these [pagan] images to Jerusalem and set them there …But Pilate undertook to bring a current of water to Jerusalem (Antiquities Book XVIII, III)

In other words, though the Roman center had previously been in Cesarea, Pilate was in Jerusalem when Jesus was executed.  So we have two external sources with unbiased or negative motives that corroborate the crucifixion of Jesus being under Pilate in Jerusalem.  Thus we know that the Gospel writers did not fabricate this detail to make it ‘fit’ the allusion from Abraham.

Similarly with the Mosaic Passover story we saw allusions pointing to the Passover as the time of year when Jesus was to be executed.  For Jesus’ death to fall on that same festival by chance is slim indeed.  Adding to that is that the Mosaic account tells us that this festival is a ‘sign for us’ and it comes with so many parallels to Jesus crucifixion.  Did the Gospel writers fabricate this link to the Passover to make it ‘fit’ the allusion from Moses?

We did not cover this particular item in the External Evidence session, but in the Jewish Talmud is preserved this statement about the execution of Jesus.

“Jesus was hanged on Passover Eve.  Forty days previously the herald had cried, ‘He is being led out for stoning because he has practised sorcery and led Israel astray and enticed them into apostasy.  Whosoever has anything to say in his defence let him come and declare it’.  As nothing was brought forward in his defence he was hanged on Passover Eve” cited in FF Bruce,  Jesus and Christian Origins outside the New Testament. 1974 p.56

So we have, once again, hostile witnesses, that though disagreeing on the meaning of Jesus, place Jesus’ crucifixion (ie hanging) at Passover.  They would be the last people to have any motive to do so because it strengthens the meaning of Jesus that they are vehemently at odds with.

So we cannot simply dismiss the fulfillment of these allusions that we looked at in Session 5 as simply fabrications on the part of the gospel writers.  We have to take it seriously as history.

And that does partially address an issue that was raised when Justin asked:

The main issue at hand, I think, is the apparent impossibility of Jesus’ miracles and resurrection…can that really be addressed in this way?

In other words, how can one verify the miraculous?  The miraculous is impossible by everyone’s calculation – unless there really is a Divine Being at work – and then the very idea of the miraculous moves from the impossible to plausible.  And we now are confronted with a strengthening case for a Divine Mind in these accounts since, using external evidence, we cannot dismiss their fulfillment simply by saying that the gospel writers made it up.  These particular details are verifiable.  Now, I titled Session 5 as an ‘opening case’ because I think if there are only these two allusions it is certainly conceivable that coincidence could explain them.  But it does open up a possibility that surely warrants further investigation.  Are there more, even ones that are more explicit?  What can we learn from them about the Good News?  This is what we will look at in subsequent sessions and posts.

I guess your main aim was to convince us that the Bible’s content is not ‘mythical’ in the sense that it was not entirely made up, and I agree with that (except in the case of the creation story)…

And that indeed was my aim.  I was not trying to prove or state that the Biblical account is true, proven or inspired, but that it sits on a tight historical framework.  So why do I think that to be significant?  Permit me to draw upon my university experience to illustrate.

When I started out in Forest Engineering I took courses like statics, dynamics, physics and mathematics.  They were rather tough courses for first year students and the failure rate was high.  “Why are they loading us down with so many hard assignments and killer tests?” we would complain to each other.  The word spread that in fact the professors intentionally structured things this way to ‘weed out’ students.  And in fact that is what happened.  We ended that year with about half the number of students that started.  A high percentage was ‘weeded out’.  Those of us who remained were still not ready to graduate and get our engineering rings – other difficulties lay ahead and not all would make it – but now the professors would continue our education with smaller, more focussed classes.

Truth claims and Flying Spaghetti Monsters

This illustrates my first reason for looking at external evidence – it ‘weeds out’ many candidates.  And you will find that there are many contestant worldviews in this ‘class’.  There are enough to make us wonder if we can make any sense of it.

For example, if you google ‘flying spaghetti monster’ you will find that the FSM (to use the acronym) is touted by some as a deity.  Now they do so in parody and satire (they are pastafarians of the church of the FSM!).  But with their satire they are asking a very pointed question: “Why should anyone take a scriptural account more seriously than how you take the FSM deity (which you dismiss)?  If you dismiss the FSM out-of-hand why not dismiss any other scriptural account out-of-hand?”  For me, applying external evidence is my ‘first cut’ by which I rationally weed out pretenders from contenders.  Why do I dismiss the FSM?  There is not one shred of evidence that the FSM has interacted through history in any way.  This is not the case for other scriptures.

To raise the bar a bit higher, I have friends who claim that Jesus never existed.  External evidence shouts that this is nonsense.  I know others who worship pagan deities such as Thor.  External evidence allows me to ask, “Has this god/figure ever intersected with humanity in a historical way?”

My Mormon experience

When I was an undergrad, Mormon believers met with me over multiple weeks to explain and help me assess their ‘news’.  I learned that their founding prophet, Joseph Smith, had discovered scriptures in the early 19th century buried in the ground in New York State that told the history of a clash of civilizations in North America.  These civilizations stemmed from a small Jewish community that left Jerusalem around the time of its first fall (586 BC) and immigrated to North America.  This discovery by Smith was written in a book made of golden plates in a language of ‘Reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics’.

External evidence allowed me to assess and ask some questions to myself.  Why would Jewish people write in ‘Reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics’ when in all their other writings they write in Hebrew, Aramaic or Greek?  In fact, there is not one shred of any historical document in existence in the world today written in ‘Reformed Egyptian Hieroglyphics’ (the scripture book that Smith discovered was ‘lost’ just after he translated it into English), so there is no external evidence, in a sea of data from that era, that such a language ever existed.  All other writings from that era were written on scrolls made from animal skins or papyrus plants.  Why would these Jews start using gold plates?  There is no archeological evidence of any civilization in North America having a Jewish distinctive (and remember that Jewish people have been dispersed throughout the world for millennia and have always maintained their Jewish distinctive customs and scriptures).  The lack of external evidence allowed me to ‘weed out’ this news.

Krishna and External Evidence

The significance of the external evidence supporting the Gospel may perhaps be better appreciated by comparing it with a non-Western scripture.  The central figure in Hinduism is Krishna who is the incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu.  The pivotal event in his incarnate life was when he was a charioteer in the Kurukshetra War, and he gave wise advice and indispensable aid to one of the armies in this war.  So historically, when did this pivotal war for the central figure in Hinduism happen?  Wiki sums it up well:

The Kurukshetra War is believed to date variously from 6000 BCE to 500 BCE, based on the astronomical and literary information from Mahābhārata…. The historicity of the Kurukshetra War is unclear… The reconstruction of the history of Vedic India is based on text-internal details.

There is no external evidence at all to help us find this most important event of the Hindu scriptures in history, and thus there is about a 5000 year range in (basically) guessing when this may have happened.  In comparison with this, the external evidence from both extra-biblical writers and archeological artefacts concerning the Gospel, as we saw in Session 4, is stunning.

Substantiating the Supernatural in the Biblical record?

But I suspect Justin that you have already done your ‘weeding’ and have your ‘short-list’ and you are perhaps feeling stuck because external evidence did not help you further at this point.  In particular you are asking whether the biblical account is a “distortion of the truth, rather than ‘mythical’”, and whether (or not) the Gospel writers fabricated details around a historically verifiable kernel of truth.  I think you wonder about this because the Bible contains accounts of supernatural events.  As you ask:

The main issue at hand, I think, is the apparent impossibility of Jesus’ miracles and resurrection…can that really be addressed in this way?

Now those ‘weeder’ first-year courses that I took also served another purpose.  They provided foundational knowledge which I could build upon in my upper-year courses.  In the same way, armed with the information from Session 3 and 4 we can begin to address this question that really bothers you.  Let me explain in my next post.

So it pays to have practical and common-sense checks to test against the advice of experts.  This is all the more true when it comes to claims and statements by ‘experts’ when it comes to the Bible.  Bart Ehrman is one such New Testament scholar who has gained much notoriety for his public attacks on the gospel.  The title of one of his books, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005) tells us what he thinks of the reliability of the text of the Bible.  And since he is one of these ‘experts’ who are we to argue?  For many, just reading the title of his book closes the case for them.

But New Year’s Eve 2011 is a last-minute reminder of a common-sense and reasoned test for the reliability of the Bible.  For 2011 is the 400th anniversary of the publication of the Authorized King James Bible.  Yes, this translation that has so shaped the English language through modern history is on the verge of passing its 4th centennial!

The timeline figure below from time of Jesus until today shows the extent of the time period in which the 24000 manuscripts of the New Testament that are extant (i.e. in existence today) were being copied (the thick white bar labelled ‘24000 NT MSSs’).   Extant copies are dated starting from 125 AD and continue until about 1250 AD.  This is what we covered in Session 3.  No one – Bart Ehrman included – disputes this.

Our next figure shows the manuscript source for the venerable King James Version (KJV).  It was a 16th century scholar named Erasmus who first produced a Greek text from which the KJV was translated.  But where did Erasmus get his Greek text?  As you can see from the red oval it was from a few very late Greek manuscripts, dated well into the 2nd millennium, from which Erasmus obtained his text (called the Textus Receptus or Received Text) and from which the KJV was developed.  No one disputes this – Bart Ehrman included.  In fact, his book is an easy-to-read description of how this transpired.

The reason that Erasmus used just a handful of very late manuscripts for his Greek Edition was that in 1515 AD no others were on hand.  He used the best he could find.  But since 1515 AD thousands more have been discovered (which is why we now have 24000 manuscripts catalogued) and many much earlier, even preceding Constantine (325 AD).

Our third figure shows, with this modern catalogue of manuscripts to draw from, the manuscript source for present-day translations (like NIV, ESV, NLT etc.).  They draw from the earliest and best manuscripts that scholarship and archaeology today provides, and which were unavailable to the translators of the KJV in 1611.  Again, this was covered in Session 3, and as with our other points, no one today – Ehrman included – disputes this.

To put it in another way – the translators of the KJV used (by today’s scholarly standards) the latest and least reliable manuscripts (their source manuscripts were later than 1000 AD).  And today we know we are very close to the original text with an extremely high standard (see session 3) because of the much earlier texts that were discovered after the making of the KJV.  So these advances give us a superb common-sense and practical way to test the reliability of the New Testament.  We simply need to ask the question:  What teaching or belief changes took place when gospel followers went from the KJV (the least reliable) to the modern versions (the most reliable)?  Was the person and work of Jesus, the historical events portrayed, or teachings outlined in the epistles ‘adjusted’ in some way?  For example, was there anything even remotely close to an adjustment on the order of a Da Vinci Code?  No!  In point of fact nothing changed!  Today you can find gospel followers worldwide – some using the KJV and others using a modern translation – and no difference in their understanding or following of the gospel come as a result of their divergent translations.

Our fourth figure illustrates this schematically.  We know (in step 1) that what is purported to be ‘very different’ by scholars such as Ehrman is in reality a small difference since the KJV teaches the same thing as the modern translations.  So therefore (in step 2) we know that what is now a smaller difference between our current textual base and the originals must be small indeed.  We have a solid textual base and can confidently say (Ehrman notwithstanding) that the Bible has not changed.

The same test is available for the Old Testament.  In 1611 the only practical Hebrew text for the Old Testament was the Masoretic text dated at around 900 AD.  The most modern translations of the Old Testament can make use of the Dead Sea Scrolls dated at 100 BC.  (We look at the Old Testament in the 2nd video of Session 3).  And you will find no ‘adjustment’ in the history and teachings between the KJV and these modern translations.  They tell the same account.

Ehrman’s book title aside, and despite his intent to denigrate the textual reliability of the Bible, his own account of the textual development of the KJV, and a common-sense check for any ‘adjustments’ in teaching or belief stemming from the KJV to a modern translation reveals the hollowness of his claim.  Sometimes it pays to not to blindly accept ‘expert’ opinion by faith like so many do today.  Common-sense reasoning from the verifiable facts on-hand is the safest way to go.  On the passing of the 400th anniversary of the KJV It is a good reminder that it provides us with a dataset with which we can consider the gospel in just such a way.

“A 2,000-year-old clay seal from the  Second Temple that was used to show that payment had been made for offerings to  the Temple.
The 1cm.-by-1cm. ancient seal was found with the words “Pure  for God” written in Aramaic. It is one of the first discoveries that deals with  the administrative aspect of the Second Temple, and helps put a human spin on  the day-to-day activities of the period, said archeologists…”