Proof

In October 2022 a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record. Over the course of 11 days, B6, a young Bar-tailed Godwit, flew from its hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in Tasmania, covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break. For comparison, there is only one commercial aircraft that can fly that far nonstop, a Boeing 777 with a 213-foot wingspan and one of the most powerful jet engines in the world.

During its journey, B6—an animal that could perch comfortably on your shoulder—did not land, did not eat, did not drink, and did not stop flapping, sustaining an average ground speed of 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day as it winged its way to the other end of the world.

Many factors contributed to this astonishing feat of athleticism—muscle power, a high metabolic rate, and a physiological tolerance for elevated cortisol levels, among other things. B6’s odyssey is also a triumph of the remarkable mechanical properties of feathers. Feathers kept B6 warm overnight while it flew above the Pacific Ocean. Feathers repelled rain along the way. Feathers formed the flight surfaces of the wings that kept B6 aloft and drove the bird forward for nearly 250 hours without failing.

Research shows that feather shape is largely optimized to allow the feather to twist and bend in sophisticated ways that greatly enhance flight performance. Merely being anatomically asymmetrical doesn’t mean much. What matters is that the feather is aerodynamically asymmetrical. That is, the trailing blade needs to be three times wider than the leading one. Below this ratio, the feather twists in a destabilizing rather than stabilizing way during flight.

Editor’s Note: This small bird is one example of the creative wisdom of God. This article goes on to attribute the marvel of the flight in this bird to evolution. However, the Bible says that all of creation shows the glory of intelligent design by God for those who are willing to see it (Ps. 19:1-6; Rom. 1:18-25).

In April 2023, the social media company Twitter, under the direction of its new owner Elon Musk, eliminated its previous verification standards. Since 2009, a blue check mark next to a Twitter account signified a form of verification meant to guarantee a user’s identity. It was used to weed out charlatans impersonating famous or notable people or organizations, and gave users a reliable indicator of authenticity to counter disinformation on the platform.

But under Musk, blue check marks are now exclusively reserved for users who subscribe to Twitter Blue, a premium service. This change has created a crisis for people who tend to rely on the service for newsgathering purposes. For example, the NY Times reported that within 24 hours, there were eleven different accounts impersonating the Los Angeles Police Department.

One researcher tweeted, “This is going to be chaos for emergency services.” Because Twitter is often a source of credible information during national disasters or other forms of local crisis, the change will make it harder for people to receive emergency services.

Podcaster Josh Boerman posted a satirical tweet impersonating New York City Mayor Eric Adams. In it he claimed that the NYPD budget would be slashed by 70%. He said, “Pretty much everybody got that it was a joke immediately—I wasn’t trying to mislead anyone. The point was that this can be both a joke on the state of the network as well as an opportunity to think about the way that media is disseminated.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Without a standard by which sources are verified as being truthful and trustworthy, people are left to their own devices. Similarly, without God's Word, we have no way of arriving at ultimate truth.

A team of archaeologists with the Archaeological Studies Institute believes it has found a tablet dating back to 1400 BC. Institute Director, Scott Stripling, says the tablet pre-dates the commonly held belief about when the Bible was written by as much as 800 years. If true, this would dispel the theory that the Bible was written around 600 years after the occurrence of some of the first events it describes. This means that the events were written as a firsthand account rather than after the fact.

Stripling continued, “Some scholars believe in something called the ‘documentary hypothesis,’ which states that the Bible was composed hundreds of years apart in different sections, and then later redacted. The tablet is a problem for that theory and the idea that Moses could not have written the Pentateuch. ... This type of writing is more characteristic of the very beginning of the Late Bronze Era II horizon around 1400 B.C. For those who want to push the Exodus date way off into the future, this is really problematic for them.”

Houston Baptist University Professor, Craig Evans, said; “This tablet contains the oldest text that we know of so far. It also correlates with two passages in the book of Deuteronomy where it talks about going up on Mount Ebal, building an altar and cursing the enemies of Yahweh in Israel … The skepticism that nobody could write Hebrew that far back—is just an unwarranted skepticism."

The tablet has major religious and historical implications. If the peer review of Stripling’s discovery confirms his claims, it could dispel the liberal idea that the Old Testament was written in 600 BC.

There was no archaeological evidence for the existence of the biblical King David. That is, until 1993, when surveyor Gila Cook noticed a basalt stone inscription by an Aramaic-speaking king celebrating a military victory over “the House of David.”

To date, archaeological evidence has confirmed the historical existence of about 50 Old Testament figures, most of them kings. Archaeologists have also found records of a few other names, such as Balaam, which may or may not be the biblical prophet of the same name.

Biblical people named in the archaeological record:

Foreign kings: 26

Israelite kings: 8

Judean kings: 6

Israelite priests: 3

Israelite scribes: 1

Possible Preaching Angle:

Once again, archaeology confirms that the Bible record is true and accurate and it has a historical framework. “All your words are true” (Ps. 119:160).

For decades, scientist Sir Fred Hoyle pioneered research in astrophysics. He started his scientific career as a staunch atheist who saw no evidence of design in the universe. In his early years, he said, “Religion is but a desperate attempt to find an escape from the truly dreadful situation in which we find ourselves.”

But as his career went on, he discovered something that would rock his atheism—physicists call it “fine tuning.” Fine tuning refers to the discovery that many properties of the universe fall within extremely narrow and improbable ranges that turn out to be absolutely necessary for complex forms of life, or for any life at all. Hoyle’s contribution to the discovery of fine tuning began in the 1950s.

Eventually, Hoyle became convinced that some intelligence had orchestrated the precise balance of forces and factors in nature, to make the universe life permitting. He was overwhelmed by what he called “Cosmic coincidences.” As he put it in 1981:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces we're speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion, almost beyond question.”

Every bird is covered with feathers, and almost every feather on an individual bird is different, specialized in length, shape and structure to match whatever function is needed at that position. Feathers around the head are all quite specialized, with tiny feathers around the eyes, feathers modified into bristles at the base of the bill, and longer feathers on the throat.

Among the most specialized are the feathers that cover the ear opening. These must allow sound to pass through but also protect against debris and create a streamlined surface over the ear for air to flow across as smoothly and quietly as possible.

Small songbirds generally have about two thousand feathers, fewer in summer and more in winter. Larger birds like crows mostly have larger feathers, not more.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Think of it, 2,000 feathers on a bird and nearly every feather designed by God with a purpose in mind. With such a display of purpose in a single bird feather, is there any doubt that God has a purpose in mind for his people.

Poet Amy B Hunter writes:

Five years ago I had emergency surgery. My sister, a professor with final exams to give, was getting married in less than a week. Yet she drove from New York City to Massachusetts in a snowstorm to see me in the hospital. No phone call would reassure her that I was alive. She had to see me with her own eyes.

Sometimes the demand to see is not doubt. Sometimes it is even love.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Thomas wanted proof of the resurrected Christ. Thomas’ words, “My Lord and my God!” is the high point of John’s Gospel. No one else has offered such devotion or named Jesus as God. Thomas held out for a personal experience of Jesus on his own terms.

A recent survey polled people with an average age of 38. Eighty percent had college degrees. The results revealed a lot of ignorance about origin of life research and the success of life creating life from nonliving matter (also called abiogenesis).

More than 41 percent thought that researchers had created “complex life forms from scratch,” such as frogs, using simple chemicals and conditions that “approximate Earth’s early atmosphere.” Remarkably, more than 72 percent of respondents thought origin of life researchers had created “simple life forms from scratch,” such as bacteria.

To put it kindly, the respondents’ great expectations about the accomplishments of origin of life researchers are wrong. Wildly so.

Researchers have not created a frog or a bacterium from simple chemicals in the lab under early Earth conditions. They haven’t created a functional membrane, or flagella or cilia, or any of dozens of molecular machines, or the DNA required for even the simplest living bacterium.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The mystery of life is explained in the profound phrase “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well” (Ps. 139:14). We can only understand the origin of life when we turn our minds to our Creator God who is the Source of life.

The radio program, This American Life, tells the story about the late writer David Rakoff, who had a hard time believing what was right in front of his eyes. In 1986, Rakoff’s company in Tokyo was working on a computer program that would allow expats like himself to write short little messages to one another after logging on to the network.

David was not impressed. He thought, “What kind of loser would log onto a computer [just to] talk to someone?” And in a moment of decisiveness, he went into work and quit. “Sayonara, suckers! Good luck with your ‘network’!” Of course, we can all guess what that network became. It was the beginning of a little thing called the internet.

David has other stories too. Earlier in the 1980s, he went to a dance club and heard a young blonde singer from Michigan and thought, “Boy, is she lousy!” That singer was later known by the name, “Madonna.” Again, working in publishing, he was handed a manuscript and passed it off as “subliterate drivel” and an “easy pass.” That turned out to be a book called Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which went on to sell 15 million copies as one of the best-selling works of the 1990s.

Apparently, seeing isn’t always believing--even when it’s right in front of your eyes.

In an interview about his book (2020), apologist Timothy Paul Jones was asked:

In your final chapter, you talk about how one barrier to the faith is the way Christians, both throughout history and today, have used the Bible in ways that are abusive to the Bible. So many today find it difficult to trust a book that was used to justify the Crusades or used to justify chattel slavery. How would you answer the individual who’s struggling with that objection?

Jones replied:

Well my answer is the Beatles’ White Album. As we all know, the Beatles’ White Album, especially the song “Helter Skelter” was used by Charles Manson as an excuse for the Manson murders. He felt like the White Album was calling him to commit all of these murders, and yet nobody has ever indicted Paul McCartney for those murders. And the reason that they haven’t is because of the fact that the misuse of the White Album doesn’t reflect on its creator. Just because the White Album was misused doesn’t mean the creator of it was at fault. And I think we have to help people recognize that: The Bible is used [to justify terrible things]. But was it rightly used for these things?

What happens when a CSI-style forensic detective goes to Calvary to investigate what transpired after Jesus' crucifixion? J. Warner Wallace is a forensic detective specializing in cold-case investigations. As an atheist Wallace became intrigued with the Gospels and their account of Jesus' resurrection because “the most important question I could ask about Christianity just so happened to fall within my area of expertise. Did Jesus really rise from the dead?” It would prove to be the ultimate cold-case forensic investigation because eyewitnesses and material evidence that could be used to prove or disprove what happened have been gone for nearly 2000 years. Wallace came away utterly convinced that it was true.

As an atheist, Wallace had always assumed that the resurrection was a lie, believing that the twelve apostles “concocted, executed, and maintained the most elaborate and influential conspiracy of all time.” When Wallace looked at the evidence and as an “unbeliever: he found four minimal facts to be substantiated “by both friends and foes” of Christianity:

1. Jesus died on the cross and was buried.

2. Jesus’ tomb was empty and no one ever produced his body.

3. Jesus’ disciples believed that they saw Jesus resurrected from the dead.

4. Jesus’ disciples were transformed following their alleged resurrection observations.

Wallace tells how he then used the kind of abductive reasoning he would use at a crime scene “inferring the most reasonable explanation” and came up with several hypotheses:

One: The disciples were mistaken about Jesus’s death. Jesus survived his crucifixion and appeared to disciples after he recovered. This theory fails to explain what the disciples saw when they brought Jesus down from the cross. Didn’t they check if he was breathing, if his body was cold, or if rigor mortis had set in? Is it reasonable to believe they would have not noticed any of these conditions common to dead bodies?

Two: The disciples stole the body and fabricated the story of the resurrection. While this explanation accounts for the empty tomb, it fails to account for the transformed lives of the apostles. The apostles, who had been cowards, were now suddenly as bold as a battleship because of the lies they themselves had concocted.

Three: The disciples were delusional. This fails to account for the empty tomb. More importantly, Wallace argues that he has never encountered large groups having identical hallucinations.

Four: An imposter tricked the disciples, convincing them that Jesus was alive. This theory fails to account for the empty tomb and requires an impersonator. The disciples were highly skeptical and the impersonator would have had to be adept at copying Jesus’ mannerisms. Above all, he would have needed to possess miraculous powers since the disciples’ report Jesus working miracles after the resurrection.

Five: The resurrection is a wildly exaggerated legend that grew exponentially over time. This theory clashes with the record of witnesses making claims about the resurrection from the earliest days of the Christian movement.

Wallace concludes: “The resurrection is reasonable. The answers are available; you don’t have to turn off your brain to be a believer.” Wallace joins a long line of intellectuals who are part of the “resurrection genre” of writers--sceptics who started out to disprove the resurrection and ended up believing that it is true.

In her book, Rebecca McLaughlin writes:

Describing the congruence he sees between science and his Christian faith, Nobel Prize–winning physicist William Phillips says:

“I see an orderly, beautiful universe in which nearly all physical phenomena can be understood from a few simple mathematical equations. I see a universe that, had it been constructed slightly differently, would never have given birth to stars and planets, let alone bacteria and people. And there is no good scientific reason for why the universe should not have been different. Many good scientists have concluded from these observations that an intelligent God must have chosen to create the universe with such beautiful, simple, and life-giving properties. Many other equally good scientists are nevertheless atheists. Both conclusions are positions of faith.”

Physicist Sean Carroll is a professor at the California Institute of Technology. In an interview on NPR, he marvels at the breathtaking number of 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy and the 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe. What amazes him more is that at the theoretical Big Bang, everything had to be just right. Just a few atoms out of place and there would have been no birth to the known universe. “It's a delicate arrangement. It's a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly. There is something that made it that way. We would like to know what.”

Notice how Carroll can’t help implying that the universe looks like it was created. But Carroll is an atheist, so how does he explain the appearance of creation? He basically says, Yes, the universe looks really fine-tuned. As a matter of fact, it looks too fine-tuned and orderly. So it must not have been created. Here are his exact words:

There's something called the teleological argument (that intelligent design argues for the existence of a supernatural creator). This says that features of our universe, if they were very different, wouldn't have allowed for us human beings to exist. But (in) the early universe … the problem is not just it was quite orderly, but it was really way more orderly than it needed to be for us to be here … If you really want to make this argument that the universe is set up to allow for the existence of life or humanity or something like that, the early universe is overkill.

Possible Preaching Angles: If you’re determined not to believe in a Creator God, you can always find a reason to reject him.

In his book Star Struck: Seeing the Wonder of the Creator in the Cosmos, astronomy professor and committed Christian, David Hart Bradstreet writes:

Is God calling you to be a scientist? That's not for me to say. Just make sure you don't let anyone tell you that all scientists are "godless scientists." Godly scientists are everywhere, as a survey by the American Association for the Advancement of Science shows.

AAAS found that nearly 36 percent of scientists have no doubts about God's existence, 18 percent of scientists attended weekly religious services (compared with 20 percent of the rest of us), and 15 percent of scientists consider themselves very religious (compared with 19 percent of the general population).

If miracles are impossible, then the resurrection of Jesus could not have occurred, and we must look for some natural explanation of the events. But if miracles are at least possible, then we can be open to following the evidence without bias.

In other words, whenever we hear of an event that seems contrary to the laws of nature, we naturally raise our guard. But we also shouldn't prejudge the evidence by ruling out the possibility of miracles just because they don't fit our categories. It’s unscientific to decide the outcome of an investigation before examining the facts.

Consider the following true story. Near the end of the eighteenth century the Western world first encountered the duck-billed platypus. The platypus, which is indigenous to Australia, has fur over its entire body, is the size of a rabbit, and has webbed feet. Yet since it lays eggs, it reproduces like a reptile! When the skin of a platypus was first brought to Europe, it was greeted with complete amazement. Was it a mammal or a reptile? The platypus seemed so bizarre that—despite the physical evidence of the skin and the testimony of the witnesses—many Londoners dismissed it as a sham.

Not until a pregnant platypus was shot and brought to London for observers to see with their own eyes did people begin to believe. Until this happened, some of the greatest thinkers refused to accept the existence of the platypus. The initial problem was that it did not fit some people's view of how the world operated. So they rejected it and then reached a verdict even though the weight of the evidence said otherwise.

Timothy Keller in his sermon: “Jesus Vindicated: The Resurrection Makes the Future Certain, Personal, and Unimaginable”:

We should be more sympathetic to our skeptical friends. The resurrection makes Christianity the most irritating religion on the face of the earth, and the reason is because how do people decide what they believe? They decide what they believe by reading it and saying I like it or I don't like it. Over the years I've had so many people say, "Well, I could never be a Christian." I say, "Why?" "Well, there are parts of the Bible I find offensive." I remember years ago it had to do with money. In my little church in Virginia, people were often offended by what the Bible said about money. Today in New York they are much more offended by what the Bible says about sex.

I usually say, "Let me ask you a question: Are you saying because there are parts of the Bible that you don't like, that Jesus Christ couldn't have been raised from the dead?" They say, "Well, no, I guess I'm not saying that." I said, "Well, every part of the Bible is important, but would you please put the ethical teaching aside for a minute, and here's the point: If Jesus was raised from the dead, you're going to have to deal with everything in the Bible. If Jesus wasn't raised from the dead, I don't know why you're vexing yourself over that. But the fact of the matter is Paul was more offended by Christianity than you. He was killing Christians, and we don't advise that. But when he realized Jesus had been raised, it didn't matter what offended him anymore. It didn't matter, because it was true." And we have to keep that in mind. The resurrection is a paradigm-shattering historical event.

Can a classical scholar believe in Jesus? Lindsay Whaley, professor of mathematics and linguistics at Dartmouth University, certainly thinks so. Whaley writes:

Billions of people around the world…celebrate Jesus’ resurrection. But can we really take it seriously? Or is Christianity—as cosmologist, Stephen Hawking once put it—“A fairy story for people afraid of the dark?” Resurrection? Is the concept even intellectually responsible in the 21st century? After all, we know that … Death = decomposition = dirt. Again, Stephen Hawking [wrote]: “I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers.”

Is the resurrection of Jesus historically plausible? Dr. Whaley weighs the evidence Jesus’ resurrection and states:

Most people agree that the historical record is quite strong on the following eight points [simplified from her original list]:

Jesus was born in ancient Palestine. He became known for his healing and teaching activities. He clashed with the religious establishment and was crucified by the Romans. He was given a dignified burial. His tomb was found empty. Many people experienced visions of him after his death including his closest disciples and a large number of his other followers. He was worshipped as God soon after his death Belief about him as a divine savior who had been resurrected spread rapidly throughout the Roman Empire.

Whaley concludes:

For me, the resurrection … requires one external hypothesis: that there is a God who can perform miracles. In a western university setting, belief in God can seem terribly far-fetched, let alone belief in the resurrection. … Perhaps the story of Jesus … is a comforting story for people afraid of the dark. But Oxford professor, C. S. Lewis, put my own view best: “the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

There was once a Muslim college student who came to believe in Jesus Christ. One of his friends was shocked and asked him, “Why did you become a follower of Jesus?” Here was his response: “It’s simple really. Imagine that you’re walking down a road and you come to a fork in the road and there are two people there to follow as your guide along the way. One of them is dead, and one of them is alive. Which one would you follow?”

One of the great appeals of Christianity is that Jesus, its Founder, is not dead but alive, and so even after the hype from Easter Sunday fades into the grind of Monday, Jesus is still alive. And because he lives, people should seek him, worship him, and obey him.

Jesus’ resurrection either happened or it didn't. It is objective reality; and so it cannot be true for one person and false for another. To prove this point, Sean McDowell related the following experiment:

I placed a jar of marbles in front of my students and asked, "How many marbles are in the jar?" They responded with different guesses: 221, 168, and so on. Then after giving them the correct number of 188, I asked, "Which of you is closest to being right?" While they all agreed that 168 was the closest guess, they understood and agreed that the number of marbles was a matter of objective fact and not one determined by personal preference.

Then I passed out Starburst candies to each student and asked, "Which flavor is right?" As you might expect, they all felt this to be a nonsense question because each person had a preference that was right for them. "That is correct," I concluded. "The right flavor has to do with a person's preferences. It is a matter of subjective opinion or personal preference, not objective fact.”

Then I asked, “Are religious claims objective facts, like the number of marbles in a jar, or are they only a matter of personal opinion, like one's candy preference?" Most students concluded that religious claims belonged in the category of candy preference. I then opened the door for us to discuss the objective claims of Christianity. I pointed out that Christianity is based on an objective historical fact—the resurrection of Jesus. I reminded them that while many people may reject the historical resurrection of Jesus, it is not the type of claim that can be "true for you, but not true for me.” The tomb was either empty on the third day, or it was occupied—there is no middle ground. Before anyone can grasp the transforming power of the resurrection of Jesus, he or she must realize that it is a matter of objective fact, not of personal preference.

In talks on university campuses, Christian physicist and MIT professor Ian Hutchinson asks “Can a scientist believe in miracles?” (He’s also written a book with the same title.) Hutchinson sometimes begins his talks by jokingly saying, “Can scientists believe in miracles? We can answer that question pretty easily—I’m a scientist, and I believe in miracles. So the answer is yes.”

He notes that most of us don’t understand the Bible’s view of miracles. He says, “We tend to view God as mostly hands-off, standing on the sidelines, letting nature look after itself, but then on rare occasions reaching in to tweak things by the odd miracle here and there.” But Hutchinson argues that according to the Bible, “[God] continuously holds the universe in the palm of his hand … It exists because of his continuous creative power and will: If he were to stop exerting that upholding power, stop paying attention to every part of the universe, it would instantly cease to exist.”

Thus, he defines a miracle this way: A miracle is “an extraordinary act of God” by which God “upholds a part of the universe in a manner different from the normal.” He adds, “Yes, we know more today than people did long ago, but what we know today makes the universe seem, if anything, even more open."