WORLD SIGHT DAY is on the 13th of October, celebrating our physical sight – a wonderful gift and a vital sense that helps us interpret and evaluate our environment.
However, there are many real and important things that are not visible to us like energy, love, and gravity.
What about faith? An oft-quoted Christian phrase is “we walk by faith and not by sight” but is it really true that “faith is blind”?
Homicide detective J. Warner Wallace, in his 2013 book entitled Cold Case Christianity: A Homicide Detective Investigates the Claims of the Gospels, discusses how, as a religious sceptic, he investigated the death of Jesus Christ and the evidence for God in the same manner he investigates cold cases (unsolved murders of the past) in his job.
Like in many of the cold cases police have to deal with all the eye-witnesses to Jesus’ death and resurrection are dead and there is no surviving forensic evidence, so an investigator is left only with circumstantial evidence.
Wallace explains circumstantial evidence is not inferior to forensic evidence and a lot of circumstances all pointing to the same conclusion can in fact be more damning than even DNA samples.
Eventually the circumstantial evidence builds up so much that there comes to be only one reasonable way to make sense of it all – the case is beyond reasonable doubt.
He then goes on to give strong cumulative circumstantial evidence for the existence of a Creator God.
The first is causal evidence – the fact that the universe had a beginning and something or someone must have caused it to exist and that cause must itself be eternal and uncaused.
The second is the evidence of fine tuning – that the physical constants and laws of the universe seem to be designed in just such a way to make life possible on Earth. Any further from the sun and we would freeze, any closer and we would cook. The Earth is at just the right angle of tilt and speed of rotation, it has a properly proportioned magnetic field, a terrestrial crust and the correct ratio of oxygen to nitrogen among hundreds of other essential constants, right down to the ratio of protons to neutrons in the atom.
The third point is the evidence of design in biological systems – specifically the fact that DNA has been demonstrated to be a highly complex digital code, needing intelligence to have created it, and unable to be randomly generated.
The fourth is moral evidence – the existence of moral duty that spans all nations or cultures, for example that it is never morally right to murder for the mere fun of it. The existence of transcendent, objective moral truth allows us to make meaningful judgments about the moral rightness or wrongness of any given set of actions and is inexplicable by the processes of Darwinian evolution.
Wallace argues that the most reasonable explanation for these facts is the existence of an intelligent, pre-existent, wise, all-powerful, and moral lawgiver.
He goes on to critique the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection with equal rigour and make a convincing case for the veracity of the Bible and Jesus’ claims to being the Jewish Messiah (Christ).
So to become a Christian does not mean you have to close your brain to sense and jump with “blind faith” into belief; a lot of intelligent, keen thinking individuals have found that the Christian faith rests on some very compelling evidence. Why not check out the arguments for yourself at coldcasechristianity.com?•