Answering Atheism

We’ve seen that God exists. The next question: has God spoken to us? Christianity says God spoke in Jesus and that Jesus rose from the dead. Let’s start with the sources.

The question that silenced a physicist

In a debate, the historian Gary Habermas asked an atheist physicist who said the Gospels were written far too late: “Do we know a lot about Alexander the Great?” “Yes.” “How long after his death were the sources for that written?” “I don’t know, I’m a physicist.” The answer: “For Jesus we have about 25,000 manuscript copies and 30 different sources written within the first 150 years, while for Alexander the Great there are only 5 main sources, written an estimated 400 years after his death.” Nobody questions whether Alexander existed, even though his sources are far weaker, yet Jesus’ existence is debated all the time.

The Gospel writers don’t tell ornate legends; they give accounts full of places, dates and names. By the standards of textual criticism and historical evidence, the Gospels are among the best-attested texts of the ancient world.

Why a different standard for the Gospels?

Brant Pitre’s point: Alexander the Great claimed to be a god too. But nobody worships him today, so nobody bothers to question his sources. Jesus’ claims, on the other hand, ask you to change your life. That, not the data, is where the extra suspicion of the Gospels comes from.

The myth of the anonymous Gospels

You hear it online all the time: the Gospels circulated without names, and the authors were made up later. As a student, Pitre went looking for the anonymous manuscripts. The result: there isn’t a single one. From Africa to Italy, every manuscript carries the same four names. Compare the Letter to the Hebrews, which really is anonymous: the manuscripts and the Church Fathers disagree about who wrote it; some say Paul, some Barnabas, some Luke. That’s what an anonymous text looks like. The Gospels don’t look like that.

And if you were inventing an author, you’d pick Jesus or Peter, not Peter’s assistant Mark or Paul’s traveling companion Luke. Matthew was a tax collector. Telling Jewish readers “Trust me, I’m a tax man” didn’t win anyone over then either. But among a group of fishermen, he was the one who could read, write and take notes.

How does Luke begin?

Fairy tales begin with “Once upon a time”. Luke begins by saying he has looked into what eyewitnesses told from the start and written it down carefully and in order (Luke 1:1-4). The Greek word he uses for “eyewitnesses” is the root of our word “autopsy”: to see for oneself. Even the atheist Richard Carrier, who denies Jesus existed, grants that Luke is “a better than average historian”.

“But the Gospels don’t agree”

When the Titanic sank, the survivors disagreed on details: did the ship break in two before it went down or not? But none of them doubted that it sank. Courts get suspicious when testimonies match word for word, because they may have been rehearsed. The Gospels agree on the main point: Jesus was crucified and buried, on the third day the tomb was found empty, and His disciples saw Him alive. Made-up stories aren’t this plain, either. In the fake Gospel of Peter from the second century, Jesus walks out of the tomb as a giant, followed by a talking cross. Mark simply says the women ran away afraid, and that’s it.

We know about Jesus from outside the Gospels too

The Jewish historian Josephus mentions Jesus and His brother James; he even gives more space to John the Baptist than to Jesus. If Christians had made the passage up, they would have done the opposite. The Roman historian Tacitus writes that Jesus was executed under Pontius Pilate. According to Michael Licona, when Richard Carrier listed the scholars who think Jesus never existed, he could find only thirteen living ones, himself included.

In the 1970s, if you mentioned “the empty tomb” at a university, people laughed. Gary Habermas was doing his doctorate back then. Today about two thirds of scholars who publish on the subject accept that the tomb was found empty. What changed? The evidence.

Habermas’ challenge

“Suppose the Bible isn’t inspired, isn’t even reliable, just an ordinary ancient book like Homer. I can still show that Jesus rose from the dead.” How? Using only facts that atheist and skeptical historians accept too:

• Jesus died on a cross.
• Soon afterwards, His disciples truly believed they had seen Him alive, some alone and some in groups.
• Paul, who persecuted Christians, became a Christian because he believed he had seen Jesus.
• James, Jesus’ brother, who hadn’t believed in Him, came to believe.

The historian Dale Allison, who calls himself a skeptic, says: “I’m sure the risen Jesus appeared to his followers after his death.” The liberal historian E. P. Sanders puts it on his list of historical facts: “The disciples saw the risen Jesus. I don’t know how exactly they saw him, but they saw him.”

Within a year or two

In his letter to the Corinthians, Paul passes on a short creed he had been taught: Christ died, was buried and rose on the third day; He appeared to Peter, then to the Twelve, then to more than five hundred people at once (1 Corinthians 15:3-8). He adds that most of those five hundred are still alive; in other words, “If you don’t believe me, go and ask them.” How old is this creed? Even Bart Ehrman, America’s best-known skeptical New Testament scholar, dates it to within a year or two of the crucifixion. According to the well-known scholar James Dunn, it had taken shape within six months at the latest. Legends take generations to grow. Here we have months.

Where did Paul get it? He writes that a few years after the crucifixion he went to Jerusalem, stayed with Peter for fifteen days and saw James, Jesus’ brother (Galatians 1:18). The Greek verb he uses means “to find out, to inquire”. Even Bart Ehrman says: “These are two good people to know if you want to know anything about the historical Jesus. I wish I knew them.”

Could they have been hallucinating?

Only about seven percent of grieving people say they have seen the person they lost. The real problem is the group appearances. Michael Licona asked the authors of a textbook on hallucinations, published by the American Psychological Association, why they never discussed group hallucinations. Their answer: “We couldn’t find a single documented case.” A hallucination is like a dream: private to one person. A crowd doesn’t share a dream. Yet Jesus appeared to three separate groups. And Paul wasn’t a grieving follower but an enemy hunting Christians down; Jesus was the last person he wanted to see.

As Licona sums it up: hallucination explains only two of the six facts historians accept. The Resurrection explains all six. “It’s not even close.”

Could they have been lying?

People die for lies; look at suicide bombers. Trent Horn sharpens the question: the real question is, who would die for something they KNOW is a lie? A martyr today dies believing what others have told him. Jesus’ disciples were the only people who could know the truth: they had seen Jesus or they hadn’t. Peter, Paul and James were killed for telling it. In Licona’s words, liars make poor martyrs.

Could the body have been stolen?

Grave robbers in those days took the valuable linen and left the body. In the Gospels, the linen is still there and the body is gone (John 20:6-7). The Jewish authorities didn’t deny the tomb was empty; they only said the body had been stolen (Matthew 28:13). And the first to find the empty tomb were women. At the time, a woman’s testimony counted for less in court than a criminal’s. Anyone making the story up would have picked Peter as the witness.

“He didn’t rise” isn’t an explanation

Trent Horn’s point: “He didn’t rise” isn’t one explanation but an umbrella. Nothing under it explains all the facts on its own. The skeptic has to stack several explanations together: the body went missing, plus some people hallucinated, plus Paul saw something else, plus James was somehow convinced... Every piece you add makes the whole thing less likely.

“The Mormons have witnesses too”

Alex O’Connor points to the witnesses who said they saw Joseph Smith’s golden plates. Trent Horn shows the difference: Smith picked his witnesses and worked to convince them, and one of them was funding the project. Smith gained power and wives from it; when he was arrested, he had a handgun smuggled into his cell and shot back. Jesus’ disciples had lost all hope and gained nothing. And Mormonism has no Paul, no enemy who turned.

What does the Resurrection show?

The Jews expected the dead to rise at the end of the world, all together. Claiming that one man had risen in the middle of history wasn’t something anyone would think to make up. The Resurrection also confirms what Jesus said about Himself. He did something only God can do and forgave sins (Mark 2:5-7). At His trial He presented Himself as the one the prophet Daniel saw coming with the clouds of heaven (Mark 14:61-64; Daniel 7:13-14). That’s why He was accused of blasphemy and condemned to death. As Brant Pitre says, anyone who claims Jesus never claimed to be God has to take all the evidence for why He was executed off the table. God raised Him from the dead; in other words, God said, “He told the truth.”

Licona’s wife once told him, “Even if Christianity turned out to be false, I’d still be a Christian for Jesus’ teachings.” Licona: “I wouldn’t.” Paul says the same: if the dead are not raised, “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die” (1 Corinthians 15:32). Christianity isn’t a nice philosophy; it’s an event that either happened or didn’t.

What convinces an atheist most? Ask Joe Schmid. He was an agnostic doing a philosophy doctorate at Princeton, and he tried to take apart every argument for God in a 12-hour video that became the most-watched on his channel. In the end, what brought him to the Catholic Church wasn’t philosophy but documented miracles. As Trent Horn says, if Jesus rose, it’s no surprise that His mother would appear to those who believe in Him.

A severed leg and two dozen sworn witnesses

In 1637, the leg of a young Spanish farmer, Miguel Pellicer, was amputated in Zaragoza and buried. He lived as a beggar with his stump; his begging license still survives. One night in 1640 he woke up and his leg was back. An official inquiry was opened at once. Its records hold the sworn statements of two dozen people from his village who had felt his stump with their own hands. The surgeons who had amputated the leg were found and testified too. When Joe Schmid read this file, he thought, “Oh no. Christianity might be true.”

A blind man, an insurance company and a fraud investigation

Gregory Spencer was legally blind from macular degeneration, a disease that doesn’t heal by itself. After prayer he could see almost perfectly. His doctor was astonished. His insurance company opened a fraud investigation; once it went through his medical records, it had to drop the case.

“Get up, my child, and walk”

Barbara Snyder had advanced multiple sclerosis. She hadn’t walked in years, one lung had collapsed, she was legally blind, her hands were curled up and her feet were locked. She had been sent home to die. One day, as a friend read her the letters of people praying for her, she heard a voice say, “Get up, my child, and walk.” She took out her tubes and walked. Her feet were flat on the floor, her hands had opened, she could see, and her lung had reopened. Her medical records from before and after are there.

From bread to heart tissue

The flesh and blood kept since the eighth century in Lanciano, Italy, were examined in the 1970s: human heart muscle and human blood of group AB, with no preservatives, unspoiled for centuries. In 1996 in Buenos Aires, a host that began to bleed was kept in distilled water for three years and then examined. The heart specialist Dr Frederick Zugibe, who wasn’t told where the sample came from, said it was heart muscle from the left ventricle of a living heart under severe stress.

Joe Schmid asks: if we had asked Luther or Calvin, “What would convince you of the Catholic teaching?” and they had joked, “Let a priest pray over bread, several times, on different continents, and let it turn into suffering heart tissue, all of the same blood type,” we’d think they were making fun of us. “But it happened. It really happened.”

Fatima: a miracle announced three months ahead

In 1917 in Portugal, three shepherd children announced three months in advance that at noon on 13 October there would be a miracle for everyone to see. The authorities interrogated them and threatened them with death; they didn’t back down. That day between 30,000 and 100,000 people gathered, among them anti-Church journalists who had come to mock. It had been raining since morning. At noon the rain stopped, and a light like the sun began to spin, throw off colors and plunge toward the crowd. Soaked clothes dried within minutes. People in villages miles away saw the same thing. Even Scott Alexander, a writer skeptical of miracles, grants that the agreement among the witnesses is as impressive as you’d expect from a real event.

Padre Pio: wounds that bled for fifty years

For fifty years Padre Pio had bleeding wounds in his hands, his feet and his side. The doctors who examined him wrote that the wounds were perfectly round and never became infected or swollen; one said he could see through his hand. When he ran a fever, a mercury thermometer burst at 42.5°C; according to the newspapers, before the doctors’ eyes his temperature went above 48°C. On the day he died the wounds had closed without a scar; there are photographs. As his friend Ethan Muse read him the reports for four hours, Joe Schmid threw up his hands: “I can’t risk looking Jesus in the face after I die and saying, ‘I knew Padre Pio bore your wounds, but I didn’t believe.’” A few days later he made a confession covering ten years.

Zeitoun: the power was cut, the vision stayed

In 1968, a figure of a woman made of light appeared on the dome of a church in Cairo, and kept appearing on and off for three years. The first to see it were Muslim workers. The worker who pointed at it had a gangrenous finger due to be amputated the next day; when the bandage came off the next day, the finger was healthy. To check for a trick, the Egyptian government cut the electricity to the whole neighborhood. The vision stayed for hours. On some nights hundreds of thousands watched; there are photographs.

Either all lies, or one is true

You can find an excuse for each event one at a time. But the excuses needed to explain them all away become harder to believe than the miracles: calling hundreds of honest strangers liars, saying labs on different continents all made the same mistake... One day Joe Schmid noticed what he was doing: from his armchair, with no evidence at all, he was calling a witness he had never met a liar. For the details and the answers to skeptics, see our Miracles page.

Atheists who came to believe

• Joe Schmid spent ten years as an atheist and agnostic and made hundreds of hours of videos against God. His mother prayed for him every day. On the day he first told his story on camera, a Mass his family had booked for him a year earlier was being said.
• Pat Flynn became an atheist listening to Metallica and reading Nietzsche. It troubled him that atheism left morality and free will hanging in the air. One Christmas Eve, when the priest lifted up the bread, he knew this was where he had to be.
• Mark Goring lost his faith at twelve or thirteen. He told his father, “When I pray the rosary, it feels like I’m talking to a wall.” Every night he prayed, “God, if You’re real, show me. I’m in.” One night the fear he’d lived with for years gave way to a deep peace. Today he is a priest in Canada.

All three say the same thing: whoever seeks God with a sincere heart finds Him (Matthew 7:7-8).