Overtime: Know God? No Body? with Pastor Clayton Tyner

All right.

Well, welcome to Overtime.

My name is Clayton.

I am the pastor of MetaCurch in San Antonio, Texas, and I'm the host of the Clayton Tiner Podcast on YouTube and audio podcast platforms.

What this is specifically our overtime is when we're in a series where we have a lot of content to get to at MetaCurch.

Our plan is to start doing these overtimes where we take some of the material that ended up on the cutting room floor.

We just didn't have time for it on Sunday morning and to circle back into it.

It's also a place where we can go and really dive deep on some of these issues that maybe Sunday morning isn't always the best platform for when trying to communicate to a lot of people all at once.

And right now at MetaCurch, we're in a series called No God.

And we're trying to compile all of these resources at metachurch.tv slash knowod.

That's K-N-O-W-G-O-D, metachurch.tv slash know God.

There you can find the sermon from the week as well as the overtime that is attached to it.

We're compiling all that together.

Also at metachurch.tv slash knowod.

I have links to a few of the books that have really inspired me in my own apologetics journey that's giving a defense for our faith.

I have three books on there.

There are, I mean, hundreds, thousands of unbelievable books on this topic.

There are hours and hours of lectures that you can watch online, but these three will really help you begin to start getting a handle on the good arguments there are out there for the existence of God and specifically the God of Christianity.

In week one, we asked whether or not there is a God.

And we made three arguments for theism, which is just belief in a creator God.

Now, you can extrapolate out of those scientific and philosophical arguments some of the characteristics of that God.

Uh, this God, by necessity, would be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial because what the Big Bang shows us is that before the universe began, there was no space, time, or matter.

This God would have to be all-powerful because he spoke the world and the universe into existence, which is unbelievable, but have to be a personal being because a decision was made to go from a state of nothing to something, and that this God would have to be perfectly moral as the standard for objective morals, ethics, and duties in our world.

So that was week one.

In week two, we turned the corner to seeing if this is actually the God of the Bible and the God of Christianity.

And we believe what the Apostle Paul believed and said in 1 Corinthians 15 that our faith actually hinges on an event, not on a religious book, not on documents, not on doctrine.

Those things are all really, really, really important.

But the faith itself of Christianity and whether or not God is the God of the Bible all hinges on the resurrection.

The Apostle Paul said, if Jesus has not raised from the dead, then our proclamation is in vain, and so is our faith.

In other words, the whole enterprise is just a waste of time.

And so we set out to look at the widely established historical facts surrounding the resurrection of Jesus, to look at the fact pattern that those represent and to try and see if the best argument for those fact patterns is, in fact, the resurrection of Jesus.

I am convinced of that, and I think it is reasonable to be convinced of that as well.

We looked at 10 facts that across different scholars.

Gary Habermass, he studied over 1,400 critical works from scholars all across the ideological spectrum.

He found actually 12 facts for the sermon.

I condensed a couple of them into, you know, one fact so that we ended up with a list of 10.

And then we really focused on three.

And we gave each of them a word, and they all started with the same letter because pastors love alliteration.

We talked about missing meetings and movement.

Missing is the fact of the missing body, that even most, the majority of secular non-Christian scholars believe that there was an empty tomb, that where people believe Jesus was buried was found empty a very short time later.

The second is meetings, that even agnostic atheist scholars, they believe that many people believed they had real experiences of the risen Jesus.

And of course, those who are convinced of the claims of Christianity believe people actually saw appearances of Jesus.

And then last, we looked at the movement that was started not by the life of Jesus, but by the resurrection of Jesus.

And this was really significant.

It's a significant point for me personally as the pastor of a local church because 2,000 years later, we're sitting on the other side of the world, living in a technologically advanced modern society that is as different from the world Jesus walked in on the other side of the world 2,000 years ago.

It might as well be an alien planet.

And we're still all gathering together on Sunday mornings and lifting high the name of Jesus.

Now, that certainly isn't proof positive by itself for the resurrection of Jesus and that Jesus really did die and rise from the dead.

However, it is a key component because what we know and what historians agree on is that the followers of Jesus, once he died, they quit.

They lost hope, they were bereaved, they were despondent, they went back to their old jobs.

It wasn't like they huddled together and said, Hey, I know our leader died, but let's figure out how to keep this thing going.

No, no, no.

They quit.

The movement of Jesus was over the day that Jesus died.

And all of a sudden, the movement of Jesus came back in full force.

And these same followers of Jesus, like his disciples, who had actually fled the night that he was arrested, Peter famously denied him, who had given up all hope and were ashamed and embarrassed that their leader had been humiliated and embarrassed by hanging on a Roman cross, that the Messiah, who was supposed to come and defeat Rome, had now been defeated by Rome.

Those same disciples end up becoming these unbelievably courageous men of courage who changed the world as we know it and even died for their belief and their claim that Jesus did come back to life.

And so missing, meetings, movement.

We're going to get back to that as we look at the fact pattern.

And in overtime, I also want to really dig into some of the counter-theories that accounts or tries to account for these historical facts.

But first, we got to talk about miracles because the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is a miracle, an unbelievable miracle.

Now, there are other people who are resuscitated in scripture, like Lazarus.

But Lazarus is not resurrected because resurrection lasts forever.

Lazarus comes back to life, Jesus calls him out of the grave, and then he dies again someday.

There are also what are what's known in Jewish thought as assumptions, which is like Enoch and Elijah.

They were men of God who walked with God, and scripture says that they didn't die.

They kind of skipped the part of mortal death, and God just assumed them to heaven and they transitioned to the next part of their life.

That's very different from resurrection.

Jesus is at this point the only resurrection.

Scripture calls him the first fruit of many brethren, which means he was the first resurrection, which gives us a guarantee, hope, and allows us to have faith in our future resurrection.

Resurrection requires for you to really die, to really come back to life, and then to never die again.

And that is the claim that Christianity makes about Jesus.

And so that is a miracle, and it kind of begs the question, or assumes the question rather, uh, what are miracles?

Like what are these things and why are they in scripture so frequently?

It feels like if you're reading through scripture, you can't go 10 pages without running into something that qualifies as a miracle.

A miracle is a rare occurrence.

In fact, by definition, it really only happens one time in its exact way.

Now, there are multiple people who are paralytic and end up walking, but they are different because it's different people.

There are a few different people, it seems, who were blind that Jesus opened their eyes.

And so there can be a similar repeating of the type of miracle that we see Jesus doing.

We see Jesus interacting with the forces of nature.

That's a similar category of miracle, but the exact miracle does not replace itself.

A miracle, by definition, goes against the natural laws.

It is supernatural, which means it is beyond the natural.

It is metaphysical, which means it is beyond just the physical world or what we can experience and understand and the laws of nature as given and the reasoning of science that we have available to us.

So these are very, very rare occurrences.

Now, there's something to be noted when we look in scripture, is you could read scripture and come to the conclusion that there was a world where miracles were just taking place every time you turned around.

You go to the grocery store, a miracle happens.

On your way home, a miracle happens.

You go to the movies at night, a miracle happens.

And that's really not what is happening.

Miracles, because of their nature, are worth reporting on.

And so they are reported on throughout scripture.

But scripture represents thousands of years of primarily Jewish history in the Old Testament and primarily Jewish history in the New Testament, although the church was moving out to foreign nations.

And what we see is the reporting of these incredible supernatural events because they were of note.

However, there would be long periods in Israel's history without miracles.

And if you think about the life of Jesus throughout his three years, his miracles were very frequent and happening all of the time, but they stood out in society and people were amazed by them because they were miraculous.

They weren't used to seeing miracles every day.

And so, why did these miracles occur?

There is uh intramural debate within theologians and Christians more in general, and uh it's called uh the cess the cessationist versus the continuationist.

Neither of those words I'm very good at saying.

But cessationists believe that miracles are contained within the biblical period, so the time that the Bible was written, and once the church got started, that miracles were no longer happening on a regular basis.

There's the other side of the spectrum, the continuationists who believe that miracles are still just as prevalent and just as available, and we should still be seeing miracles at the same rate we were back then today, even in our modern society.

And if we're not seeing it, it's just because we don't have enough faith.

And so the cessationists will say that we are foolish to think that we would still be seeing these divine healings and stuff.

The continuationists would say, no, we just don't have enough faith to be seeing those, and you still see evidence of that.

And really, in my opinion, it's a bit of a false dichotomy, which is where a lot of these arguments end up, unfortunately.

Um there's kind of a both and.

And I think the general principle for those who believe in God is that God is God and he gets to do whatever he wants.

And so if he wants to do a miracle, he gets to do a miracle, and if he has a reason for it, um, then we can trust him with that.

However, when when we look for patterns, which is what we do, we are pattern mapping beings.

Um, why is it that there were so many miracles and we don't see as many today?

And yet we do still hear reports of miracles.

Throughout history, and what we see throughout scripture is that God would use miracles almost as his seal of affirmation when a new movement was happening, either through a new person, in a new way, or in a new time period or place.

And so when something new was happening that is a part of God's plan, God would set his seal of affirmation on that through the use of these unbelievable, metaphysical, supernatural miracles.

And so when a new prophet would come from God, God would give these prophets in the Old Testament something to say, he would give them prophecies about the future.

We're going to talk about prophecies in a few weeks in our know God series.

And then through these individuals, he would do mighty works and miracles, signs and wonders, and it would make people sit up and pay attention that he is in fact God.

We also believe there is a supernatural realm that is happening.

And in this supernatural realm, there are enemies of God who are standing up against God.

And so when the message and movement of God goes somewhere new or moves in a new way, um, God steps up and he supplants his supremacy in that area.

And so in the modern West, where the church has a billion plus people who claim the name of Jesus, it would make sense that the divine miracles, signs, and wonders that we see are fewer and further between because God has already cemented his presence through his church, which means, and I say this, and some people don't like this, but I say, you are the miracle, you are the church, you are the movement of Jesus on the earth.

And God wants to use you and your testimony and your life to reach other people.

Where we tend to see miracles in the modern day or reports of miracles, is the exact environment you would expect if miracles are a way of God um just affirming his messengers and affirming his message in a new place, in a new way, in a new space and time.

And so when missionaries go into unreached people groups who have never heard the name of Jesus, that is often where you will see signs and wonder type miracles reported today and from people who I tend to trust.

Francis Chan and I have some disagreements theologically, but I think Francis Chan's the real deal.

I don't think he's a liar.

And he's reporting on these unreached people groups over in Asia right now, and that they are seeing actual biblical type miracles.

And I don't really have a problem believing that because it's the exact environment.

If you look at the pattern of how God used miracles as his seal of affirmation on his message and his messengers, that's what we would expect to find.

So that's what miracles are in a biblical worldview and a biblical grasp.

And people would really get in trouble in scripture for just like demanding these signs and wonders from God.

It's like, no, no, no, you're missing the point.

Like, God is not supposed to be our genie.

And so you will hear people who are even atheists who will say, like, man, you know, God does all these miracles in scripture, which is definitely a uh a sample bias.

You know, the scripture is reporting on the miracles because miracles are worth reporting about, but they're spread out over thousands of years.

It's not like miracles were happening all the time.

But an atheist will read the Bible, there's miracles all over it.

So they'll say, if God exists, have him do a miracle.

It's like, number one, if God is God, the spaceless, timeless, immaterial, all-powerful, personal, perfect seat of morality, um, I'm not his boss, you know.

Um, I am servant to God.

Uh, God is not servant to me.

And second of all, you're you're missing the point of the miracles.

And so uh that's my take on what miracles are, and maybe that's helpful for you because I pray for miracles all the time.

And when someone is sick or has cancer or is really needing something or praying for something, I'll join them and ask God directly for a miracle.

And I don't make any excuses about it.

He's God, he's our father.

I think he wants what's best for us.

And so I ask him for miracles.

And also, I always affirm that he's God and I'm not.

And more than the miracle that I want, I want God's will.

So let's get into um whether or not miracles are actually possible.

So, what we just talked about is what miracles are on a Christian world view, um, my view of miracles specifically, someone who isn't falling into the false dichotomy of either God cannot do miracles anymore or God has to do miracles anymore.

It's like, well, God is God, and historically, God uses miracles to give affirmation to his message and his messengers.

And so um, now we have to move just to the practical realm, and that's really what we're doing in this no God series is asking these big questions because I think there are a lot of people who have walked away from the faith or who've never considered faith, maybe they're on the fence, because they haven't really had anybody from the Christian side try to contend with any of the arguments that are out there.

So, are miracles possible?

And this is big because in week two, we're talking about the resurrection, and if miracles aren't possible, then it rules out the resurrection before we've ever even read the story.

There is a history of people believing and disbelieving in miracles, and we can trace some of it back.

More ancient people didn't really have a problem believing in some form of miracle, and part of the idea is that, you know, we've moved beyond that, we have advanced beyond that, we're too wise for that, we have too much knowledge for that.

And so one of the first people who made like an actual deductive argument against miracles was Benedict Benedict Spinoza.

This happened uh somewhere in the 1670s.

I'm gonna look at his argument now and uh see if we can spot the flaw in it.

His argument said that miracles violate natural laws, natural laws are immutable, it is impossible to violate natural laws, therefore, miracles are not possible.

Okay, so premise one: miracles violate natural laws.

Well, that's true.

Um, by definition, that's what makes a miracle a miracle, is it goes beyond the natural, it is in the realm of the supernatural.

His premise two is that natural laws are immutable.

And this is the first premise of his argument where we really have things that begin to break down.

The natural laws are descriptive of the four natural forces that govern and guide our world.

They are descriptive of things that we have discovered, such as gravity.

Gravity is one of the natural laws, and the natural law of gravity describes what we have discovered about gravity and how it interacts with our world and our atmosphere and the environment at large and the moon and all of the things.

I mean, gravity is one of the four fundamental forces on Earth.

So it's it's very, very, very important.

But it is not prescriptive.

A natural law doesn't say gravity has to do this.

And so the premise that natural laws are immutable, written in 1670, which is before most of modern technology has existed, um, doesn't take into account the fact that we do have within our power ways to counteract the laws of nature.

Look at gravity specifically, we know that everything we drop will fall.

However, however, in 1670, we weren't shooting rocket ships into outer space.

We weren't flying airplanes, thousands of airplanes overhead at all times, flying around us, getting in an airplane in San Antonio and landing in New York City.

All of these ways that we've been able to counteract in our own very limited power.

And so on the Christian worldview, where there is this big cosmological question that at one time there was nothing, and now there is something.

And out of that, we believe someone made something out of nothing.

That if there is that creator God, then if we can get around some of these immutable laws and actually counteract them, then surely an all-powerful God who created the universe could do that as well.

So natural laws are immutable.

Very few people believe Benedict's Spinoza's or whole to this as their claim against miracles anymore, because um natural laws are mutable in certain ways and in certain capacities.

Premise three says it is impossible to violate natural laws.

Now I want you to notice something because this is something really important to be able to spot when you're looking at arguments for and against things like the resurrection or God or justice or relativity or objective reality.

Premise one says miracles violate natural laws.

Premise three says it's impossible to violate natural laws.

And so within your premises, you're already drawing your conclusion.

And so the question is, are miracles possible?

And when you have your question, you then state your premises and then you come to your conclusion.

But begging the question is when you state a theory's conclusion in one of your premises.

And so what he's saying is it is impossible to violate natural laws because natural laws are immutable, which means there can be no miracles.

But inside your premises, before you've even drawn your conclusion, you have already assumed that miracles can't take place.

This is circular reasoning.

It's begging the question that you're asking.

Miracles violate natural laws.

It's impossible to violate natural laws.

Well, those are just premises that are restating the conclusion you're already going to come to.

And so that means it's a weak argument.

Circular reasoning and begging the question are logical fallacies.

And so a logical fallacy can't uh really stand up under the weight of the conclusion that you're trying to draw.

So that's begging the question.

That's Benedict Spinoza.

He tried, he did a pretty good job.

It's not his fault that he was alive in the 1600s.

Um, but David Hume came, you know, around 100 years later, less than 100 years later, and he took and made Spinoza's argument way more sophisticated.

This is his argument um against miracles.

And David Hume, it's worth noting, um, he really laid the bedrock for the enlightenment.

And the enlightenment is seen as this moment where we became so enlightened within our own selves that we no longer needed these silly fantasies about God and miracles.

We could do everything through science and reasoning.

And one of the big reasons that everyone was able to dispense with that is because they leveraged David Hume's argument and said we no longer need miracles.

This is what David Hume said.

He said, a natural law is a description of a regular occurrence.

It's something that happens often and consistently.

Premise two, a miracle is a rare occurrence.

Premise three, evidence for the regular is always greater than evidence for the rare.

And premise four, wisdom bases belief on greater evidence.

His conclusion, therefore, is wise men should not believe in miracles.

A natural law is a description of a regular occurrence.

A miracle is a non-regular occurrence by definition.

Premise three, evidence for the regular is always greater than for the rare.

And so wisdom bases belief on greater evidence.

Um, what he's doing here is he is confusing probability with believability.

The question is whether or not miracles are believable, whether or not a miracle could in fact take place.

And what he is saying is that a miracle is not probable.

In fact, by definition, a miracle is the least probable occurrence.

So that can be true that it's the least probable occurrence.

And It can still have happened.

It cannot be probable, but if you actually weigh the evidence, it could be believable.

And what David Hume's argument has done is people have loaded that up in their six shooters and they pull that out and they use it as an excuse to not accurately weigh the evidence and to close themselves off to any metaphysical reality.

And so when they weigh the evidence for anything like the very uh widely agreed upon facts surrounding the resurrection, they don't even really have to consider whether or not resurrection from the dead could be possible, because evidence for the regular is always greater than evidence for the rare.

Now that is a premise in his argument that is simply not true.

A natural law is a description of a regular occurrence.

That's premise one.

That's true.

A miracle is a rare occurrence.

That's premise number two.

That's true.

It is supernatural, it's metaphysical, it is unrepeatable, it's all of those things.

However, evidence for the regular is always greater than evidence for the rare, and that simply is not true.

We can look at a few things we've already seen in this series, like the cosmological argument.

We know scientifically that at one point the universe did not exist, and in the least probable outcome of all time, now the universe that is unbelievably expansive does exist.

So that happened one time.

It's unrepeatable, it is not a regular occurrence.

In fact, since then, the idea that something can come from nothing has never been repeated ever.

People try to make an argument from um like quantum mechanics and quantum particles and these quantum particles that seem to appear out of nowhere at the quantum level.

And yet, if you actually look at what's happening, it's not an issue of something appearing out of nothing.

Um, it's an issue that we don't we don't, like I'm a physicist, that physicists don't understand very well.

Um, but it is something.

It's starting with something, it's just a lack of predictability about when and where the quantum particles will emerge.

And um, one of the best hypotheses out there right now is they actually tend to move once you view them, which is something that's very difficult to understand, but it doesn't um belittle the point that is at hand.

So evidence for the regular is always greater than for the rare, which means that we can't believe the beginning of the universe.

Like at that point, we're in simulation theory, the the universe doesn't even exist.

Evidence for the regular regular is always greater than for the rare, simply isn't true.

And it's once again a very sophisticated way of begging the question.

In other words, he's saying for miracles to be believed, that event, that miraculous event must happen more regularly.

In order for us to even consider weighing the evidence of a miracle, that miracle needs to operate more like a natural law.

That that miracle needs to happen over and over again.

The reason that's begging the question is because if a miracle happens over and over again, it's not a miracle anymore.

It's just another regular occurrence that could be scientifically studied.

Probability and believability are two very different things.

And the question around the resurrection of Jesus is: do we have any good reason to believe it?

Not if it's probable, it's not probable.

Scripture tells you that Jesus is the first fruit of many brethren.

He is the first resurrection, and all of the other resurrections aren't coming until the end of the world.

It's never happening again until the curtain closes and the proverbial fat lady sings, which is probably a saying we're not supposed to use anymore.

But evidence for the regular is always greater than for the rare.

I want to tell you about a very rare occurrence.

In fact, it's only happened once.

Um, it has never happened again.

Odds are it never will happen again.

It was so unbelievable that if we didn't have some really good, good evidence for it, then you know it probably wouldn't be worth considering.

And this is gonna sound silly, but I think that it might actually have some very close parallels to whether or not the resurrection itself is reasonable.

Um, years and years ago, there was an NBA game.

It was the Knicks versus the Warriors.

Now, here's what's unbelievable is this was like an all-star game level scoring.

The Knicks scored 147 points.

That is an incredibly high scoring game.

I think the Warriors scored 142 the other night versus the Grizzlies.

Super, super high scoring game.

The Knicks scored 147 points.

The Warriors had nine players playing for them.

Eight of those nine players only scored 69 points.

If it was just the Knicks versus eight of the nine players on the Warriors, it would have been 147 to 69.

The highest score was Al Addles, which is a name I don't even know, and I'm a pretty big NBA fan.

He scored 17 points.

He was high scorer for the Warriors, 147 to 69.

And yet, the Warriors won by 22 points, 169 to 147.

Now, if we take Hume's argument against the miraculous, then we have to assume that either this game didn't actually happen, we have to assume that there was maybe some players that didn't make the roster.

We have to go out of our way to find some explanation that has a regular occurrence attached to it.

Like maybe they didn't report all of the people on the roster.

They actually had 15 people playing, and each of those seven people all scored 15 points.

That'd give them 105 points and they'd be over the hump.

Something had to have happened.

That's a regular occurrence because evidence for the regular is always greater than for the rare.

And for one person to make up the difference between a game that's 147 to 69 has never happened, and it'll probably never happen again.

And in the basketball world, it kind of borders on a miracle.

And yet, that is exactly what happened.

They won 169 to 147 because Will Chamberlain scored 100 points in that game.

By himself, he scored 100 points.

The other eight guys on his team only scored 69.

That is so crazy.

It's really in the just being a basketball player, it's difficult to understand.

If you've ever scored 20 points in a game, you know how hard you had to work for those 20 points.

To imagine multiplying that by a factor of five, how?

How do you score a hundred points?

And yeah, there is good evidence for it.

There were eyewitnesses to the game.

There were people who recorded what had taken place, printed it in their newspapers, even though they knew that someone scoring 100 points is quite unbelievable.

And in fact, there were many people who read the paper the next day and had to assume that this was a misprint, that there had to be a more natural explanation.

And yet the people who were there would tell you, I saw it with my own eyes.

There was a 100-point game by Wilt Chamberlain.

For miracles to be believed, they must happen more regularly.

This is arguing in a circle.

What Hume is saying is that for a miracle to even be weighed in the evidence, it can't be a miracle.

It has to be a natural law.

He's completely cut out any option for the believability of miracles without ever having to take a metaphysical reality seriously in the first place.

This isn't how you do good science.

What you're doing is you're taking the scales that you weigh against the natural and the supernatural, and you're just cutting off half of that scale.

You're saying I'm only going to weigh the evidence that I can put my hands around, even if they don't make the best sense.

If you had a friend who was uh impoverished, they had a hard time making good choices, they were constantly going into more and more debt, they would lose jobs all the time because of their attitude.

They drove a broken down car, they lived in a broken down house.

All of a sudden you saw them and they were driving a Ferrari, they invited you over to their mansion, uh, they took you on their private jet.

Something had to have happened.

And so what explains that?

What is this windfall of money and where did it come from?

Well, you know them and you know their family, you know they didn't get an inheritance, but you also know they play the lottery.

Now, the lottery has like astronomical odds, you know, one in hundreds of millions of chance that you're gonna actually win the lottery.

But if you had eyewitnesses who saw them go down and purchase that lottery ticket, if they had the lottery ticket with the winning numbers on it, if they had evidence and proof and eyewitness testimony, you would have to come to the conclusion, even though that is like the rarest thing to go from poverty to wealth, then you would believe they had won the lottery.

Because even if something's exceedingly rare, you have to honestly weigh it against all of the best available evidence.

And when you follow Hume's argument, it does not allow you to do that.

So are miracles possible?

Miracles are possible.

They are possible on a philosophical level.

And the philosophical arguments that have made against them are all begging the question.

They're arguing in a circle.

And what they're doing, and it's so interesting because often you will hear, especially people from the atheist side, and I'm not trying to caricature all atheists, I don't believe this uh generally, but many of the spokespeople for atheism will talk about just how close-minded religious people are, just how close-minded the Christians are.

And yet, when it comes to issues like this, like Hume's argument and Spinoza's argument, what you find out is that an intellectually honest Christian will be open to both the natural and the supernatural realm, the physical and the metaphysical realm.

And it is in fact the atheist who has closed themselves off to any supernatural or metaphysical reality.

And there's some real problems with that because we don't we don't fully understand all of the things that are metaphysical.

For example, we don't fully understand consciousness.

Even the leading researchers in this are really struggling to understand exactly what it means to be conscious creatures, to be able to plan for our future.

We can think in great detail about a future that doesn't yet exist.

That future is a metaphysical property.

Our thoughts are metaphysical properties, our dreams are metaphysical properties.

And so to say we're just going to close ourselves off from anything that isn't tangible, that isn't material, or exists in the natural observable world is really to cut ourselves off from the source of thought and reason in the first place.

All right.

So are miracles possible?

While they are not probable, they are possible.

And so we're talking specifically about the resurrection of Jesus, which would be a bona fide miracle.

And since miracles are possible, and if the world came out of nothing into something, which we know happened, that's the miracle of miracles.

If there is a being who took nothing, no space-time or material, and made this expansive, unbelievable universe, then that God coming to earth, dying, and rising back to life is honestly kind of light work when you think about the expansive work it would be to create the universe that it happened inside of.

So what I want to do is I want to look at really what are the counterarguments to the evidence, the historical evidence around the resurrection, like the missing body, which is the empty tomb, the appearances of Jesus that were reported and claimed, and the movement that began from a bunch of cowardly quitters who had given up all hope once Jesus had died.

So, what are the counterarguments and how do we assess the arguments for them, assess the evidence for them?

There are many ways that you have to do this forensic science, this forensic uh history where you're looking back and taking all of the evidence that you have, um, whether that be the eyewitness testimony, the ancient articles, the facts, um, the geographical evidence, um, all of the evidence that you can find.

And you pass it through several filters.

There's five of these filters that are usually used forensically.

I think the three most important ones are number one, explanatory scope, which explanatory scope means that your theory will explain a broader scope of the facts.

Number two is explanatory power, which is what makes your evidence more probable.

So a theory that puts forward that has explanatory power makes all of the different lines of evidence into a fact pattern that is more probable, and that your theory must be less contrived, which means you give the simplest explanation that accounts for the given evidence.

Um, this is uh really related to a principle called Occam's razor.

Occam's razor says that the simplest explanation is usually the best explanation, or at least the first explanation that you should explore.

Um, the less contrived your story can be, the more probable it is that it happened.

And so when it comes to uh any story, you have to train yourself to assume the simplest solution.

So if your teenage son came home and you know that he had been at his friend, been at his friend's house, and he left that morning for school and then went to his friend's house and then came home and he left that morning, he had a very nice haircut, and when he came back, he had a a very different haircut.

His haircut was all crazy and it was dyed, all kinds of different colors.

You would have to make your best theory about what had happened.

Well, you know he didn't go to a barber because you didn't get an alert on your phone that he had used his debit card, and you know, because you've got a little stalker app on his phone that the only place he went was was school and to his friend's house, and you know that his friend also kind of has crazy hair.

And so the best theory, the simplest possible solution is he went to his friend's house and his friend cut his hair.

I mean, that's the simplest solution.

That is passing Occam's razor.

Um, what you don't want to do is say, well, it was probably an alien.

An alien came down.

Um, aliens like crazy colors in the movies, and so they dyed his hair crazy.

Like, um, that is the most complex, most contrived option, most contrived theory.

And so we have to try and do the same thing and and pass the arguments for what happened to explain the evidence around the resurrection of Jesus and what explains it uh in the most um in a way that has the greatest explanatory scope, the greatest explanatory power, and is uh the least contrived.

So I want to look at some of the primary arguments that are given to explain the missing body, the meetings between Jesus and hundreds of people, as reported in scripture, and the movement that has started that is still going strong today.

Uh, one of the first is the stolen body conspiracy.

This is a conspiracy that's even talked about in the pages of scripture.

In Matthew's gospel, chapter 28, it says, as they were on their way, some of the guards came into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened.

After the priests had assembled with the elders and agreed on a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money and told them, Say this to his, say this.

His disciples came during the night and stole him while we were sleeping.

And if this reaches the governor's ears, we will deal with him and keep you all out of trouble.

And they took the money and did as they were instructed.

And this is what Matthew says to in verse 15.

And this story has been spread among Jewish people to this day.

So that is the stolen body hypothesis.

Now, first, there is absolutely zero historical evidence for this outside of conspiracy theories that were first pushed by enemies of Jesus and the movement of Jesus, and later adopted by people who were making a case against Christianity.

There were no eyewitness accounts, there's no corroborated sources.

Second, the disciples did not know that Jesus was going to physically rise again.

As Jewish people, this went against everything that they had been taught.

Resurrection of someone physically from the dead is not something that was in their cultural context.

Resurrection for Jewish people came at the end of the ages, which means at the end of the world.

We are viewing this argument through a historical perspective, and uh that is retrospective.

And it's it's just not accurate to think that this would have been an easy conclusion for the disciples to come to to fabricate a story about resurrection.

Um, last, and we talked about this in the sermon, if they were going to steal the body and then create this conspiracy, the last thing they would have done, which they do in all the gospel accounts, is make women the first witnesses of the empty tomb.

Women were lower than second-class citizens, and they were not valid testimony.

They weren't even allowed to admit testimony in the court of law.

And so, if you wanted a conspiracy theory that was actually believable, the last thing you would do is have women as the key discoverers of the key factor of the empty tomb in your story.

So when you look at the three ways we assess evidence, when you look at explanatory scope of the stolen body conspiracy, it does have good explanatory scope.

It explains the empty tomb.

It's uh a conspiracy where it explains, you know, them saying that they had seen Jesus.

Now, it doesn't quite explain the hundreds of other people that the Apostle Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians, um, but it also somewhat explains the movement that would have started.

Um, however, when you get to explanatory power, what makes the evidence more probable?

This really, really begins to fall apart because it goes against many of the facts that we know.

Number one, that the disciples had completely given up hope.

It goes against the cultural context of Jewish people who had no context and really no legate uh legacy, no lineage, um, no legends for them to base this idea of a resurrection from the dead on.

Um, it doesn't explain the movement that started on the other side of this because if they did in fact steal the body, they knew that Jesus was dead.

It doesn't explain those same disciples being tortured and giving their life for a lie that they created in the first place.

And it doesn't explain a group of men who had just watched the leader of this movement get killed, start a conspiracy to start a religion that they knew would guarantee they would be persecuted and hunted down for the rest of their life.

And when we look at what is the least contrived, this is not a simple explanation.

It has a psychological miracle of all of these disciples who don't show any evidence of a lack of moral judgment or character, all of a sudden putting together quite an evil conspiracy to try and fool everyone around them.

It has us having to read the minds, thoughts, and intentions of these disciples, even against what is actually known historically, which is that they were despondent and quite bereaved by this.

Um, it is fully contrived in the fact that the disciples were able to sneak past Roman centurions, the greatest trained assassins that walked the earth that day and steal that body, and that in their circle, everyone was able to keep that secret, even to the point of death.

The stolen body conspiracy simply does not hold weight when you look at it through the same lenses that everyone uses to try and assess the veracity of claims and theories in the ancient world, uh, explanatory scope, power, and what is the least contrived.

Uh, the second is the apparent death theory.

The apparent death theory simply states that Jesus didn't actually die on the cross.

This is also called the swoon theory, that he just apparently died and was still actually alive up there.

Now, first of all, the eyewitness testimony from the cross said that not only was he beaten 39 times with a cat of ninetales, a cat of ninetales is a whip that has nine uh leather whips that come off the end of it.

And inside those whips, they would actually braid in things like shards of bone or metal so that when all nine whips came around you, they would dig into your skin, and as they would pull out, it would actually pull out chunks of flesh from you.

The actual punishment was 40 minus one lashes, because 40 lashes was known to kill a grown man.

And so they literally whipped Jesus to within an inch of his life.

Then they hung him on a cross.

And usually the way that people would die on a Roman cross is they would actually suffocate on their own bodily fluids.

They would drown in their own bodily fluids, drown hanging out in the air.

Not only that, but eyewitness testimony also says, and this was common practice for crucifixions, that um to make sure that Jesus was dead, a Roman centurion took his spear, put it through his side, past his ribs, and they would plunge it into the heart of the person on the cross.

So, first of all, what we have to believe is that these Roman centurions who were phenomenally trained killers, like they knew if someone was dead, that they got it wrong.

Um, and then we have to believe that Jesus survived all of that.

And then the problems aren't actually over because Jesus would have been embalmed with about 75 pounds of wrapping.

And so Jesus was laid in a tomb with 75 pounds of wrapping constraining every movement of his body.

He'd been bleeding out for the entire day.

His ankles were shattered from seven-inch nails that had gone through his feet in order to hang him onto a cross.

And somehow he got up, walked to the entrance of the tomb, removed a stone that took multiple men who had not just been beaten to within an inch of their life and was able to escape on their own.

So this theory, while it has been put forward, especially starting in the 1920s, it just doesn't hold weight.

Um, on explanatory scope, it does have the scope of explaining both the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus because he actually died.

It doesn't explain the movement starting on the other side of that at all, because the movement began based on disciples believing Jesus was God and they believed he was God because he came back to life.

If Jesus had just apparently died and he somehow made his way out of that tomb and back to the disciples, then they would have known that he was just a very lucky guy, just like them, who escaped death by a mere fraction of an inch, and they would have nursed him back to health and apparently he died somewhere down the line.

They wouldn't have started a movement just because their buddy got lucky.

In fact, they would have been scared to death still that that same fate might befall them.

They probably would have taken Jesus back to Nazareth, dropped him off there, and gone about their lives.

The explanatory power is very low for this.

Um, it is Once again, based on evidence and goes against the face of the evidence that we have.

Um, the probability of Jesus not dying, um, if not immediately when he was on the cross, very soon after, in a world where there was no antibiotics, um, there was no modern medicine, there were no surgeons.

I mean, it the explanatory power is very, very low, and it doesn't have the power to explain the movement that we call church.

And it is a very, very highly contrived idea because it is not a simple explanation.

In fact, it is a huge jump in biological uh uh evidence, it'd be like a biological miracle for Jesus to have survived that.

Um, and then it would just take uh an extreme psychosis for these disciples to continue following Jesus just because he barely escaped death.

So the apparent death theory, it just doesn't hold when we look at the forensic lenses that we try to try to find veracity through.

Um, the next is the hallucination theory.

I mentioned this briefly, so I won't go into great detail on this.

Um, the hallucination theory is trying to explain um the appearances of Jesus.

When you look at explanatory scope, it does nothing to explain the empty tomb.

As a matter of fact, it assumes that Jesus was in fact dead and uh probably still in that tomb.

The problem is that all the leaders of Jerusalem hated Jesus.

And if people were just hallucinating these experiences of him, all they had to do was go to the tomb of Joseph of Aermathea, pull Jesus out of that tomb, display his body to his followers, and they would have proof positive that Jesus had, in fact, not come back to life.

The other problem with the uh explanatory power of this is we know from modern science, neurology, and psychology that hallucinations are things that happen inside of one person at a time.

They're a neurological phenomena, they're localized inside of one person.

So even in the extremely rare circumstance where two people have a similar hallucination around a similar time, their actual experience of that is very different.

If we go back to our example of Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 points, if you interviewed a hundred people who are at that game and they had all hallucinated it, then they would describe the game in vastly different ways to you.

They might have seen the game played in a different arena.

Um, Wilt Chamberlain might have been described differently, the color of his shirt would have been different, the way he scored his points, whether they were dunks or or sky hooks or jump shots, everything would be different because the hallucination would be localized in the same way we see all at the same time, and them all having the exact same experience, seeing the same action, hearing the same words.

We see Jesus showing up to hundreds of people at a time, and all of the people having the same experience.

Hallucination just doesn't work that way, which means the explanatory power is very low.

And this is wildly contrived to believe that people had some mass hallucination, which would be a psychological, uh phenomenological miracle, something that has not happened since and and um that hadn't happened up to that time.

And so that fails on the merits as well.

And last is the displaced body theory.

This is the idea that while Jesus may have been, as reported by eyewitnesses, um, buried for a moment in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, that later it was just a holding place, and Joseph of Arimathea came back and then just moved Jesus to a communal graveyard, which uh a communal burial ground, which was actually very common in that day.

And so, um, number one, this uh this does explain the empty tomb.

It doesn't explain the appearances or the movement that started on the other side of it.

The explanatory power is very low because Joseph of Arimathea was around Jerusalem.

The disciples could have just come and found him.

People who push forward this have to add an extra step, which says, well, after Joseph of Arimathea did that, he died very soon after afterwards.

That is just another layer of contrived nonsense that you have to add on top of that.

Here is what's true.

When we ask, is the resurrection reasonable?

We have to not fall into the trap of David Hume and say we're only going to weigh the evidence that is regularly occurring, that is physical and natural.

If we're willing to be truly open-minded and say the universe came from nothing, the origin of life came from nothing, there are all these things that are miracles, rare occurrences.

If we can hold our minds open to metaphysical properties and probabilities, then we can weigh the evidence fairly and in a balanced way.

And when you look at what actually explains the facts that are agreed upon historically by scholars all across the ideological spectrum, the thing that actually has the greatest explanatory scope, power, and is the least contrived is that Jesus actually resurrected from the dead.

That explains not just the empty tomb, it explains the appearances to many people at the same time who all had the same experiences, heard the same words, saw the same actions, the same image of Jesus.

It explains the physicality of Jesus' experiences where he would actually eat things that can't actually happen in a vision.

It has the greatest explanatory power.

Um, it explains how the tomb was empty and why you don't need any of these other contrived steps of conspiracies or stolen bodies or misplaced bodies or swooning apparent death theories.

It also is the least contrived.

Now it does have one supposition that you have to bring into it, which is that miracles are possible.

And yet, if we start at the cosmological argument where we started in week one, a miracle is possible.

There was nothing and now there's something.

So the question of that miracle is was it guided or unguided?

I happen to believe it's way more reasonable that someone took nothing and created the universe that we are in.

And if that is true, then there is a creator who can create a universe.

Having that creator come down to his creation, die, and raise back to life is a probable experience.

Now, if you are going to discount miracle right out of the bat, discount any metaphysical properties right from the jump, then you're not going to be able to believe in the resurrection.

But if you're not able to believe in the resurrection, you are going to have to go way past Occam's razor to have all kinds of conspiracies and all kinds of non-eyewitness, non-corroborated, non-attested to factors to try and explain the moment in history that whether you like it or not, changed the world forever.

In week three, we're going to talk about justice.

And here's the truth justice depends on the equality, dignity, and worth of all people, all races, genders, and classes that did not exist in human history until someone who claimed to be God died equally for all people in all places, in all times.

He started a movement that sought to reach all people.

The apostle Paul said, there's neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave or free.

We are all one, all people in all places.

That changed the world forever.

And in over time, we're going to talk about some very tangible ways that started that.

The explanation for that will have to be massively contrived, have low explanatory power, and minimal explanatory scope.

The resurrection of Jesus fulfills all three of those.

You have to weigh the evidence of our supernatural claim against the lacking evidence of any natural theories.

And if you can do that, I think, not that we can prove the resurrection, but I do think that the resurrection is, in fact, reasonable.

The body was missing.

There were meetings between Jesus and many people, and a movement started from despondent, bereaved, cowardly quitters who were all of a sudden the most courageous and impactful men and women who ever walked the earth, who changed the world forevermore, and created all of the ideas of ethics, morality, dignity, value, worth, and justice that we stand for today.

This has been overtime.

We're talking a lot about miracles.

I want you to know that you can go online, medichurch.tv slash know God, K-N-O-W-G-O-D, and you can find out just like all that we're doing in this series.

You can watch the Sunday sermons, you can watch all of the overtimes.

We're going to keep this going throughout our series.

I'm hoping if there's other series that have a lot of content, we can come back, do some more overtimes.

You can also follow along at the Clayton Tyner podcast on YouTube or on audio podcast platforms.

And if you are in the San Antonio area, I would love for you to come visit us at MetaCurch.

And maybe you're saying, look, I'm not a church person, you know, that's not really what I do.

And let me tell you, MetaCurch is the perfect place for you.

We created this to be a safe place, a community where you can belong somewhere, even if you don't believe what we believe.

And so, man, we're calling on all people to come and to be a part of this.

We need you here.

And um what you will find is a place that loves you and accepts you, um, that you can come and uh and really wrestle with the biggest questions of life and faith and spirituality.

This has been Overtime.

I want to thank you guys for listening.

I love you, and I hope to see you next week.