Free God and Stephen Hawking by John Lennox

resurrection of Christ – which they regard, as I do, as the supreme evidence for the truth of the Christian world-view.
    One of the scientists just mentioned, Francis Collins, gives a wise caution regarding the matter of miracles:
    It is crucial that a healthy scepticism be applied when interpreting potentially miraculous events, lest the integrity and rationality of the religious perspective be brought into question. The only thing that will kill the possibility of miracles more quickly than a committed materialism is the claiming of miracle status for everyday events for which natural explanations are readily at hand. 86
     
    For that reason I shall concentrate on the resurrection of Christ, in order to give the discussion as sharp a focus as possible. It was the miracle of the resurrection of Christ that started Christianity going, and that same miracle is its central message. Indeed, the basic qualification of a Christian apostle was to be an eyewitness of the resurrection. 87 C. S. Lewis writes: “The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. If they had died without making anyone else believe this ‘gospel’, no Gospels would ever have been written.” 88 According to the early Christians, then, without the resurrection there simply is no Christian message. The apostle Paul writes: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.” 89
    Let us remind ourselves of the perspective of contemporary science, and its thinking about the laws of nature. Since scientific laws embody cause-effect relationships, scientists nowadays do not regard them as merely capable of describing what has happened in the past. Provided we are not working at the quantum level, such laws can successfully predict what will happen in the future with such accuracy that, for example, the orbits of communication satellites can be precisely calculated, and moon and Mars landings are possible. Many scientists are therefore convinced that the universe is a closed system of cause and effect.
    In light of this, it is understandable that such scientists resent the idea that some god could arbitrarily intervene and alter, suspend, reverse, or otherwise “violate”, these laws of nature. To them that would seem to contradict the immutability of those laws, and thus overturn the very basis of the scientific understanding of the universe. In consequence many such scientists would advance the following two arguments against miracles.
    The first is that belief in miracles in general, and in the New Testament miracles in particular, arose in primitive, pre-scientific cultures, where people were ignorant of the laws of nature and so readily accepted miracle stories.
    Any initial plausibility which this explanation may seem to possess disappears rapidly when it is applied to New Testament miracles like the resurrection. 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 as abnormal if you do not know what is normal.
    This was actually well appreciated long ago, indeed at the time of the writing of the New Testament documents. Interestingly, the historian Luke, who was a doctor trained in the medical science of his day, raises this very matter. In his account of the rise of Christianity, Luke informs us that the first opposition to the Christian message of the resurrection of Jesus Christ came not from atheists, but from the high priests of Judaism. They were highly religious men of the party of the Sadducees. 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 world-view which denied the possibility of bodily resurrection