It Only Takes One Miracle
Sep 23, 2011 by Craig Blomberg | 12 Comments
“For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what they already have?” (Romans 8:24 NIV)
I watched a fascinating “debate” on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation channel while I was in Sydney in July. It involved a leading Christian mathematician from Oxford and four Aussies: a humanist, a skeptical comedian, a Pentecostal Bible scholar and an adult convert to Islam. A well-known journalist facilitated the informal banter among the participants in response to a wide variety of questions of current, public interest.
The humanist took an interesting tack. Every time one of the three religious people cited an example of something good being done by their communities in the world, she had a counterexample, either of something bad those same communities had done elsewhere or of evil in the world still unaddressed by them.
A friend of mine has frequently done the same thing in her conversations with me. At first blush, the rejoinders seem persuasive—if you look at the amazing good Christians have done, you can always find counterexamples of unspeakable horror offered in Christ’s name, enough to make you question God’s wisdom in granting free will to human beings or perhaps to question his very existence. For every example of amazing answered prayer you can find plenty of examples of unanswered ones where surely the good and compassionate thing for an omnicompetent, omnibenevolent God to do would be to provide the answer as requested.
But there are several fallacies with this approach to spiritual matters. If I return home to my house after setting out the trash to be collected, only to find garbage strewn about my yard and the can tipped over and the bag torn apart and on the ground near the can, something which has never happened before, and then learn that my neighbor’s German shepherd accidentally got loose from his leash and roamed the neighborhood for an hour before coming home, and that all this took place before the time the trashmen usually come by, I have a pretty good idea of what happened, even if the evidence is all circumstantial and fails to pass the strictest logical and philosophical tests for compelling proof. Indeed, I would need new evidence of a rather significant nature to suggest any other hypothesis as more likely than that “the dog did it.”
And it doesn’t really matter that mine was the only garbage can of several nearby so attacked. I don’t know why the dog chose mine only. Maybe it was the closest and he found a nice morsel of something and wasn’t as hungry afterwards. Maybe he tried all of them and mine was the loosest lid. Maybe someone was home at the other houses and saw him, yelled at him and shooed him off. Numerous other suggestions readily come to mind. The point is that I don’t need to explain his inaction elsewhere—there are plenty of plausible possibilities--to make it likely that he was the culprit in my yard. Nor do I need to discuss the fact that in other parts of my city, country or world, other animals might do something similar, or that hooligans might be out just to mess up a nice neighborhood, or that a starving person might even be foraging for a bite to eat. It is not impossible that one of those explanations applies in my neighborhood too—foxes come through it occasionally, hooligans have been known to teepee my yard, and the homeless are moving ever southward in the Denver metro area. But I would still need some new evidence I don’t currently have to make those hypotheses more likely than the one about my neighbor’s dog.
I have been privy to a handful of miracles in my life. I have been privileged a few times, with a group of church elders, to follow James 5:13-18 in praying for seriously ill people on a Sunday morning and to have doctors confirm the next day that their tumors or other internal maladies have inexplicably vanished. I have had close friends and relatives, whose chronic pain I was very familiar with, experience instantaneous healing and permanent relief from pain after pretty exotic charismatic Christian events. I have studied enough church history and observed enough current events in my 56 years to know that Christians are disproportionately responsible for the sum total of physical and social help offered to the most unlovely, despised, rejected people throughout history. I am well aware that the foundations of most of what the Western world so values today and often does not associate with God—science, law, education, medicine, relief work, etc.—all owe disproportionately large amounts of their foundations and values to Jews, Christians and Muslims—the three great theist religions of the world. Even today Christians alone work far more than all non-religious people put together every year to help the desperately hurting of our world.
I have also known non-Christians who knew nothing of Jesus to whom Jesus appeared in a dream or vision and they eventually became his followers. I have known people who have had near-death experiences knowing nothing of Jesus who met Jesus but returned to this life and became Christians. Devotees of other religions sometimes report similar experiences, but typically only with religious figures and destinies they already have learned about within world views that are already largely theirs.
When I understand that Christianity also offers a wide array of plausible reasons why God does not miraculously heal the majority of chronically ill people or supernaturally intervene to obliterate the majority of all evil (not least because his power is made perfect in weakness), then I don’t have to explain his inaction in those settings. He has his purposes and I don’t have to know them. When I understand that Christians remain sinners, sometimes horrible ones, even as saved people in the process of being transformed, and that many people who have never been Christians have coopted the term to gain power for themselves and then wreak unspeakable havoc in Jesus’ name, then I don’t have to explain all the evil perpetrated by people using that label.
But I have yet to encounter a plausible explanation from non-theists to account for the miracles that have occurred or for the sum total of all the good that has been accomplished in the world by Christ’s followers, who by their own testimonies had no desire in and of themselves to commit to such tasks. Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” offers no explanation for the fit who sacrifice their health and even their lives in the service of the least fit of the world.
But wouldn’t it be so much better if God just made his existence plain enough that no rational person could ever doubt it? One wonders what form that disclosure would have to take. The Israelites turned their back on God after seeing him work spectacular miracles. So did a variety of people in Jesus’ day. Is there anything humans value more than their autonomy, including their autonomy to rebel against God? We could have been created without this freedom but then we would probably be incapable of even having this kind of conversation. We can look forward to perfected, resurrection lives without the possibility of evil, now that we have seen what freedom is like. But could we ever appreciate such existence without first experiencing such freedom? Indeed, what kind of beings would we be if loyalty to God (or anyone or anything) was always coerced? I doubt our fallen, finite minds even have the ability to begin to grasp the nature of such existence, much less pontificate that we know it would have been better.
It only takes one miracle for belief to make perfect sense to me. And I’ve been privileged to see or know about a whole bunch of them. The rest is properly left to faith, to hope, as Paul so poignantly put it in Romans 8:24. God has left enough evidence of himself to support faith without giving so much that it destroys the freedom that is crucial to the very essence of our humanity. And a God who can do that is far more complex, powerful, wise and worthy of worship than one who could only have done the comparatively easy tasks either of creating the universe and then leaving it to run on its own or compelling everyone to follow him.
Comments
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Wayne Gaerlan Sep 27, 2011 8:46pm
Great article that I plan to share with friends.
Keith Harrison Oct 2, 2011 6:23pm
Just a couple of quick comments from a skeptic:
I'm not sure your analogy about the dog getting into your trash works for miracles (if that's what you were intending). The dog explanation is one that appeals to the sorts of common events that people know occur in the natural world regularly. In other words, claiming that a neighbor's dog is responsible for your strewn trash is reasonable precisely because it's a naturalistic, rational explanation.
If you were to tell people that your trash was strewn by a stray thunderbolt from Thor, the god of thunder, they would be a lot more skeptical, and rightly so, because such an explanation relies on the unsupported existence of supernatural entities that no one has ever seen.
In the same way, it is hard to argue that alleged miracles reported today actually have supernatural explanations. This is because there are always far more plausible natural explanations at hand. (Indeed, the word "miracle" itself is used very carelessly today, usually because someone happens not to know the real explanation for what has happened, not because they've exhausted all possible reasonable explanations.)
Another point, this time about evolution. There is, in fact, much work in the scientific literature that supports the rise of empathy and altruism among individuals of a deeply social species such as ourselves. The idea that evolution necessarily gives rise to selfish individuals is an old one, and very few biologists carry this view today.
Furthermore, because we are able to reason, we are able to extent our moral framework beyond mere evolutionary instinct. For instance, it is obvious to anyone who has given it much thought that a society can only flourish if certain moral precepts are adhered to: an aversion to murder and rape, for instance, and compassion for, and solidarity with, one's fellow man. We do not need gods to figure this out.
I'll finish off by returning to your first point, namely that skeptics often point out how much evil has been done in the name of Christianity. I think this is, indeed, a poor way of countering the good that has been done by Christianity, because it has indeed done much good. However, it is also true that many Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists, have done good things in the name of their beliefs - and bad. It seems premature, then, to argue that any one of these traditions has the net effect of making people better. It may just as sound to conclude that people are who they are (thanks to their upbringing and genetics), and that their religious beliefs don't make a huge difference, at least on average.
Craig Blomberg Oct 3, 2011 9:39am
Thanks, Keith.for taking the time to give such a detailed and throughtful reply. I guess I'd make four main points in response. 1) I agree that the analogy breaks down if a person is closed to the supernatural. 2) Hume's famous charge, however, that a naturalistic explanation is always more probable than a supernaturalistic one is itself a faith-based statement that cannot be empirically demonstrated, and I'm unaware of any plausible naturalistic explanations of the many miracles I and people close to me have experienced firsthand (not to be confused with TV stuff where who knows what's going on!). 3) I've looked into the research on altruism from an evolutionary perspective a little and know of nothing remotely close to explaining the millions of people throughout history who have allowed themselves to be martyred for religious faith. 4) I was careful to word things so that I was not denying that other religious (and irreligious) people have also done very good things for humanity, merely making the empirically demonstrable point that the foundations for most of modern law, science, medicine, relief work, etc., has been DISPROPORTIONATELY largely contributed to by Jews and Christians. Muslims, the one other major theistic religion would rank third. Jonathan Hill's What Has Christianity Ever Done for Us? is a good primer on the topic.
Keith Harrison Oct 3, 2011 7:57pm
Thanks for the feedback!
On your first two points: I, personally, am not strictly closed to the supernatural. It is simply that I've never seen a supernatural explanation stand up to close scrutiny. And this is related to your second point, namely that the astounding success of natural explanations over the ages is evidence enough that they are more probable than supernatural explanations.
There are events that happen in our everyday lives that sometimes do not seem to have obvious natural explanations. But unfortunately it is a sad fact of our biology that our minds are easily tricked, especially if they want to be. If we look hard enough for something, we'll eventually convince ourselves that we've found it. As Feynman famously stated, "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
As for people who have willingly died for their religious faith, that is not quite what I argued is supported by evolution. I argued that altruism, namely care for one's fellow being, is something that is supported by evolution. (That said, I think there are feasible evolutionary scenarios that could explain martyrdom, but I won't take up space with that now.)
People from many different faiths have given their lives for their beliefs over the centuries. And their beliefs can't all have been true. Sadly, it seems that many of these people died (and often killed others) in the name of beliefs that were just plain false.
I agree that modern law, science, and medicine happen to have been established by people from Abrahamic faith backgrounds. But this is because most of the modern world is part of these faiths. You could just as easily say that modern law, science, and medicine were established by people who drank coffee. There is no reason to assume that the beliefs themselves (or the coffee) were responsible for those discoveries. Beside, we could cast our net wider, and look to the scientific advances made by the Chinese, that we still use today (fireworks, for instance) and let's not forget the Greeks with their enormous contributions to philosophy. It seems that clever people are everywhere, regardless of their beliefs!
Finally, the foundations of law, science, and medicine are, after all, secular: no one who practices in these areas needs to reference a Bible or say a prayer in order to conduct her work.
Craig Blomberg Oct 4, 2011 9:07am
And thanks for YOUR feedback!
It would be interesting to know what kind of naturalistic explanations would account for the numerous instantaneous healings of chronic maladies after Christian prayer services to which I've been close enough to know that nothing is being faked and for which doctors have no explanation.
You've made my point exactly--altruism and martyrdom aren't really the same. And the point about people of different religions doing it was deliberately worded that way--I wasn't trying to make an exclusive claim for Christianity at that point, just for an element of religion not easily explained by naturalism. The point about Christian origins is actually a much stronger one; it's that it was the very belief in one God vs. the many gods of other religions that led to believing we could find scientific laws. It was the distinctive commands about loving enemies that led early Christians alone to be among those in the Roman empire staying behind to minister to the contagious but dying victims of disease. It was the distinctively Christian views against the caste system that has led to freedom movements for the Dalit in India that Hinduism would never support. And the list could go on. No, one does not have to believe in any religion to participate in these very efforts but one wonders if they would ever have arisen apart from Christian convictions. The Chinese may have had fireworks (and gunpowder!) but nothing led them to ever protest against binding women's feet together to make them sexually attractive, so they thought, to men. It was Christianity that protested against it. Yes the Greeks had great philosophers, but nothing that prevented them from promoting infanticide (esp. of baby girls), promiscuity, prostitution or pederasty. It was Jews and Christians that introduced true care for women and children, despite all the chauvinism that may have at times still been attached to it, because of the conviction that all humans are made in the image of God. And I could go on. :)
Keith Harrison Oct 4, 2011 10:13am
Thanks once again for the reply, and I'll try to keep this as short as possible :-)
A few words on faith healing first.
A lot of investigations have been conducted on faith healing. There are two avenues of explanation. The most prevalent is the placebo effect, a very real physiological phenomenon which demonstrates that the mere belief that medicine has been taken - or that a healing has been performed - is enough to produce a (usually temporary) cessation of pain. Put someone in the emotionally charged atmosphere of a healing service, with a dynamic, excited preacher, and swelling music, and their mind becomes wide open to the sort of suggestion that makes the placebo effect work.
You will note that faith healings never addresses a visible ailment such as a missing limb, a skin condition, or any kind of deformity. It always claims to heal some unseen ailment like back pain or cancer. Exceptions include the old unequal-leg-length trick, which is blatant sleight of hand, and the apparent healing of paralysis, usually involving someone getting out of a wheelchair. In these cases, the person is usually able to walk before the service, and they are asked by church staff to sit in a wheelchair (in order not to overexert themselves, or whatever).
People who attend these services want to believe that the healings are real. They want to believe their god can do these things. These people, then, are not the right ones to ask for balanced, critical analyses of what they've seen - they are far too invested in a particular outcome.
This brings me to the second line of evidence explaining apparent faith healing: plain old deception. I'm not suggesting that this has necessarily been a part of your own experience, but time and time again this or that self-proclaimed faith healer has been exposed as a fraud. Peter Popoff is an excellent example, and even after he was exposed, he lay low for a little while and then just picked up his scam right back up again, duping a whole new generation of people desperate to get well.
--
I'm still a little confused about your argument regarding martyrdom. You seem to be making the general point that the act of martyrdom cannot be explained naturally, because no natural motivation could lead to such behavior. Instead of revisiting the issue of different faiths, though, I'll simply point out that self-sacrifice is a common behavior seen in nature. Sometimes it is done for immediate kin, and sometimes it is done for a colony. It is not anathema to nature.
--
I agree with you, as I did before, that the compassionate aspect of Christianity has led to many good things. There is no dispute about this. We must remember though that Christianity (like all religious traditions) has marks against it also. For instance, Christian leaders may initially have promoted good care of women (some texts even suggest the existence of women preachers in the very early years), but in it's more conservative forms, it finds itself as one of the last remaining bastions of both gender and sexual inequality in America today.
It all depends on who's interpreting the Bible, which in turn depends on the personality of the person doing the interpreting. Give a compassionate person a Bible and he'll point to scriptures supporting equal rights for women. Give a conservative, traditionalist person a Bible, and he will point to scriptures that tell women to be subservient to their husbands.
I'm less willing to concede is that Christianity was somehow a necessary prerequisite for the discovery of the scientific method (which, after all, can be detected in the work of other societies, including Arabic, Greek, and Chinese societies).
Assessing counterfactuals is ultimately a fool's errand, but I would speculate that humans would eventually have discovered the basic principles of the scientific method regardless of the particular religious beliefs they held. Curiosity is a deeply human characteristic that crosses all sectarian lines.
Craig Blomberg Oct 4, 2011 4:40pm
A worthwhile conversation indeed! In the interests of brevity I've left out a lot of information, and for the same reason will continue to do so, but I did anticipate your various replies and was not thinking of examples that fall under their purview. For example, the only kinds of healing I have in mind are those of people I personally know or knew well, who had diagnosable and chronic conditions that vanished permanently. In some cases, they were not believers; in other cases, they were certainly not expecting anything to happen.
Yes, I think we've come a fair way from my original, simple point about self-sacrifice. If I refuse to recant my faith on penalty of death, I'm not doing so to save others in my community or to do something nice to anybody in anyway. I'm doing so based on the belief that there is a life to come which will far outweigh the otherwise shattering consequences of physical death. I may or may not have good warrant for such a belief, but the very fact that such a belief exists and that I am prepared to act in such a decisive way on it is what I have not found explicable in evolutionary theory.
Whether people take more "conservative" or more "liberal" approaches to Scripture on issues that divide Christians (or devotees of other religions) is a far more complex issue than just their personalities. But again, my point was a more nuanced one than you're acknowledging. Talk to a high caste Brahmin and he will quickly acknowledge that Hinduism does not even have the theological framework within its massive body of Scriptures for freeing the Dalit (formerly the untouchables). The Bible is dominated by concern for the poor, oppressed and marginalized, and stands out vis-a-vis each culture in which it took shape with the extent of its liberating themes. People can ignore those major themes, even in the name of Christ, but not without others familiar with the biblical contents recognizing their myopic reading. No such parallel exists in the Bhagavad Gita. I could give numerous similar examples with other religions.
As for science, again you're not reading carefully. I wasn't arguing for Christianity as a prerequisite but (mono)theism. I acknowledged the role Islam played, which would have been the dominant worldview in the Arabic societies that furthered science. It's not a coincidence that the handful of scientists that emerged out of ancient Greece tended more in the direction of monotheism, even if giving lip service to the traditional gods and goddesses. If you think Apollo drives his fiery chariot across the sky every day you're not going to be looking for scientific explanations for the sun. Ancient China was dominated by Confucianism, which is regularly regarded more as a philosophy than a religion. There are enough varieties of belief about God or the gods to allow for a few to imagine predictability in the universe and to want to study it. There are almost no such analogies in Hinduism, traditionally at least, so that it's not surprising India isn't on your list. We really need to study history and comparative religion a whole lot better before making the sweeping generalizations about them that so many, believers and unbelievers alike, so often make.
Keith Harrison Oct 4, 2011 8:20pm
Craig.
"I may or may not have good warrant for such a belief, but the very fact that such a belief exists and that I am prepared to act in such a decisive way on it is what I have not found explicable in evolutionary theory."
Fair enough. Evolutionary psychology does tend to be a bit of an hypothesis-fest after all, with limited means of testing! I guess my point is that if evolution can't explain the fervor with which you believe, and your belief turns out to be wrong, then what *can* explain that fervor? Some other god?
Here's an evolutionary psychology hypothesis that might fit the bill, just for the fun of it: people are scared of death. This fear is an immensely valuable thing to have in terms of evolution: it helps the individual evade dangerous situations. It seems to me that latching onto a belief in eternal life could be a simple response to this fear.
"The Bible is dominated by concern for the poor, oppressed and marginalized..."
I think you're being very selective here (at worst, you're making the sort of generalization that you warn against later in your post). It may be true that Hindu texts do not provide for the equality of the Dalit, but that is one example. The Old Testament, for instance, does not provide for the equality of anyone who is not a member of the tribes of Israel, for instance.
Here's another example. Let's look at the Golden Rule, what many Christians consider to be a staple moral principle of their faith. We actually see this basic tenet springing up in all sorts of religious traditions, often long before the advent of Christianity (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Rule).
So, while I acknowledge that parts of the Bible express concern for the poor and oppressed, parts of other faith's texts do the same, while other parts of the Bible do not. It's a mixed bag.
"If you think Apollo drives his fiery chariot across the sky every day you're not going to be looking for scientific explanations for the sun."
Ah, I think this is where the heart of your argument lies. Let me try to paraphrase so that I understand you: you're suggesting that in a polytheistic world, people were less likely to be curious about the workings of nature because the gods supposedly explained everything. However, those who were more curious about the workings of nature, and who were dissatisfied with the polytheistic explanation, had to give up their beliefs in these gods in order to pursue alternative explanations.
That makes a lot of sense. However, I'm not sure how monotheism can be given credit for this. If an ancient Greek was dissatisfied with the polytheistic explanation for the universe, it might simply have been because it didn't work very well, not because everything seemed better explained by one, as opposed to twenty, gods. (In fact, I think certain issues like the problem of evil would actually make *more* sense under polytheism, but that's getting a little off topic.)
The other implication of your theory is that the adoption of a single god, rather than many, gave the inquiring mind more freedom to explore her own hypotheses about the nature of the world. But this is not what actually happened. The early monotheistic churches, including the Catholic Church, were anything but permissive when it came to people thinking independently about nature, especially where such thoughts contradicted doctrine. Heresy was considered a major crime punishable by all sorts of gruesome methods.
If anything, it was the Protestant Reformation, not monotheism in general, that contributed to scientific endeavor, because it handed greater responsibility to the individual, requiring less dependence rigid church doctrine. However, even this is a tenuous proposition, given the time difference between the Reformation and the Enlightenment, which is when science as we know it today really took off.
"There are enough varieties of belief about God or the gods to allow for a few to imagine predictability in the universe and to want to study it."
I'm afraid I'm not exactly sure what you're saying here, but it seems you're suggesting that the messy confusion of polytheistic beliefs drove people to seek something more predictable. Again, this does not support your thesis that monotheism itself was responsible for the birth of science. Rather, it suggests that both science and monotheism were responses to polytheism.
"We really need to study history and comparative religion a whole lot better before making the sweeping generalizations about them that so many, believers and unbelievers alike, so often make."
Agreed, which is why I argue above that there are good and bad elements to be found in all the major religious traditions - it's not as simple as designating one tradition as good, and the other as bad.
Craig Blomberg Oct 5, 2011 2:09pm
And I'm not suggesting that one tradition is good and others bad. And I'm agreeing there are good and bad elements to be found in all the major traditions. Now I'm asking for even more nuancing beyond even these sweeping generalizations. Pick a specific issue of particular concern to you, examine all the religious traditions carefully. Go to their defining sources and best historical examples, because anybody can knock down the straw men of people who have abused their traditions. Study history carefully, travel widely, talk to people representing the best of current traditions. Don't generalize from my specific examples to other points that I'm not making. When you do all that you'll find that the reality is far more complex than there is just good and bad in all traditions. Of course you can find the Golden Rule, though usually in the negative not positive form, in many traditions. But again you miss my point. Some traditions by their very nature preclude certain cherished values, whereas others contain within them the theological resources to highlight those values for those who are willing to do so. To take one final specific example and then I'll be quiet--yes, you can find what appears to be a mixed bag of teaching about women in the Bible, not least because it's a collection of books that (dare I say) evolved over centuries. Yes, you can find a mixed bag of approaches among the Bible's followers over the centuries. But I challenge anyone to produce anything like the pro-women texts when read against their cultures at the time they were written that are found in the Bible by reading the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, or the writings of Lao-tze or Confucius. I know. I've read those works. They just aren't there.
Keith Harrison Oct 6, 2011 11:15am
I'm mostly on board with what you're saying.
One thing stuck out, though. You say "Some traditions by their very nature preclude certain cherished values"
It actually sounds like you're making an appeal to moral values that lie outside any single religious tradition, and which we can use to assess the moral value of these traditions. In that case, you are planting your flag firmly on the side of Euthyphro's Dilemma that states that moral laws arise from an objective standard that exists independently of any particular religious belief. If this is the case, one must ask why religious belief is necessary for morality (and indeed, I personally don't think that it is).
If, on the other hand, by "cherished values", you simply mean the values dictated by the Christian god, then your point reduces to the rather unhelpful observation that Christian morality is not the same as all other religious moralities.
"But I challenge anyone to produce anything like the pro-women texts when read against their cultures at the time they were written that are found in the Bible by reading the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, or the writings of Lao-tze or Confucius. I know. I've read those works. They just aren't there."
I agree that in some areas, ancient Christian thought was progressive for its time. But this is simply an historical observation, not an argument for what sort of morality to take on today.
Thanks for the conversation Craig!
Craig Blomberg Oct 9, 2011 9:10am
An e-mail today coaxed me to come back for one more post! This is from a former student, whose ministry in Greece to middle-eastern immigrants for the last 25 years has seen countless examples of this type of thing, and even more dramatic ones, occur:
Tuesday we participated in the family day at the refugee center, preparing and serving a meal to about 150 Afghan refugees. A lady who I met in August was there. She had been so sick in August and we prayed for her at the center and again at the Samaria church meeting. Following the prayers she had a dream that a man in white came to her and told her to get up. He told her she was not sick anymore. She woke up and got up and found that she was well! Praise the Lord! When I saw her on Tuesday her color was back in her face and she said she was doing well! Please pray that I will be able to develop more of a relationship with her and her family and that she will come to know the True Lord and Savior!
The woman had no predisposition to follow anything Christian and indeed has yet to become one. But the timing of the miracle coincided exactly with a Christian prayer meeting, unknown to her.
I do believe that God imprinted his image of all humans, so that one need not participate in any religion to be moral, but that is a separate question from whether any one religion has to be true in order for morality to exist. The more important question, however, is, if there is life after death, as well over 90% of all people in the history of the world have believed, how can humans have a positive experience in that afterlife.
Craig Blomberg Oct 9, 2011 9:13am
Sorry, that should have been "imprinted his image IN all humans." And the second paragraph should have quotation marks around it.