Deductive Reasoning

One thing that surfaces in almost all discussions I have with atheists is that they contrast faith and reason. Christians don’t, and logically the two should not be pitted against one another. Rather, the opposite of faith is unbelief.

Jesus identified “witnesses” to His identity as Messiah. In John 5 He named the following as witnesses: John the Baptist, the works that He did (such as feeding 5000 with a few loaves and fish, healing lepers, casting out demons, stopping a storm with a word, raising a dead man, and others), the Scriptures (specifically Moses’s writing), and the Father Himself.

The author of the book of Acts starts out by saying this about the resurrection of Christ: “To these [the apostles] He also presented Himself alive after His suffering, by many convincing proofs, appearing to them over a period of forty days and speaking of the things concerning the kingdom of God.”

I could go on, but the point should be clear: God never intended people to check their brains at the door and enter into some kind of “against all reason” state in order to believe. Quite the opposite. In fact, the first five books of the Bible are history. They include genealogies and place names and natural events and historical figures that would anchor the circumstances in time for the people who lived then.

And for those of us who were not alive at the time? How are we to know that these things really happened? There are a number of tools we can use: science (much to the dismay of those who embrace scientism, or a belief in only natural phenomenon—I’ll go into this in more depth in another post), archaeology, prophecy, the unity of Scripture.

The point is this: all history has been pieced together, and the events of the Bible are no different. Some things have not been verified by some extra-Biblical source, but some things, like the resurrection, which could have easily been demonstrated to be false, has no record of such—only accounts of witnesses.

The real problem is that some approach the Bible with a bias against the supernatural. That’s scientism, not science. Science would come to the issue with an open mind, not with an assumption that the supernatural does not exist.

And yet, time and again, “experts” who oppose the Bible admit that they simply do not entertain the possibility that what they cannot see does in fact exist.

The double irony is that those same people claim that the universe came from . . . they know not where or how. But definitely not from God.

This is where deductive reasoning comes in. When someone is piecing together evidence in order to determine the truth of a matter, all the facts are considered and the most reasonable explanation is the one left standing. In other words, by eliminating the things that are not possible or reasonable, the actually can be determined.

One article that addressed the issue of the reasonableness of the universe coming into being on its own includes this statement:

A system requiring such a high degree of order could never happen by chance. This follows from the fact that probability theory only applies to systems with a finite possibility of occurring at least once in the universe, and it would be inconceivable that 10(158) different trials could ever be made in our entire space-time universe.

Astro-physicists estimate that there are no more than 10(80) infinitesimal “particles” in the universe, and that the age of the universe in its present form is no greater than 1018 seconds (30 billion years). Assuming each particle can participate in a thousand billion (10 [12]) different events every second (this is impossibly high, of course), then the greatest number of events that could ever happen (or trials that could ever be made) in all the universe throughout its entire history is only 10(80) x 10(18) x 10(12), or 10(110) (most authorities would make this figure much lower, about 10[50]). Any event with a probability of less than one chance in 10(110), therefore, cannot occur. Its probability becomes zero, at least in our known universe. (“Probability and Order versus Evolution”)

The thing about numbers, they can be massaged and manipulated to say pretty much anything. But deductive reasoning is not so easily fooled. Does life come from non-life? I have never heard of that occurring. Do matter and energy come from nothing? That postulation doesn’t seem reasonable. Does intelligence come from non-thinking? That hardly seems possible—how could something lacking intelligence even conceive of intelligence, much less come up with a way to develop it. To think that the intelligence was a mere quirk, a mutation, is perhaps as great an improbability.

In short, without going into much depth, deductive reasoning says there has to be something or Someone who brought about the universe. It simply is not credible to believe it manufactured itself.