Note: Last Updated 7/9/2025.
N. T. Wright:
…If the world is the chance assembly of accidental phenomena, why is there so much that we want to praise and celebrate? Why is there beauty, love, and laughter?
(N. T. Wright, Surprised by Scripture: Engaging Contemporary Issues, [New York: HarperOne, 2014], p. 111.)
How is it that a lifeless, unconscious, irrational universe, totally devoid of meaning and purpose, gave rise to living, conscious, rational beings, who are obsessed with meaning and purpose? To quote the age old philosophical dictum first propounded by Parmenides (in form if not in figure): οὐδὲν ἐξ οὐδενός (better known by its Latin collocation: ex nihilo nihil fit), that is: “out of nothing nothing comes,” or as the lyrics from the song “Something Good,” in the film The Sound of Music, so eloquently expressed it: “Nothing comes from nothing. Nothing ever could.”
Hans Christian Andersen is purported to have said: “The whole world is a series of miracles, but we’re so used to them we call them ordinary things.” Yet the world is anything but ordinary.
Timothy Keller:
Every religion has a prophet who is pointing people to God. Jesus is the only one who says, “I am God, and I am coming to find you.”
Timothy Keller:
Jesus is one of the very few persons in history who founded a great world religion or who, like Plato or Aristotle, has set the course of human thought and life for centuries. Jesus is in that tiny, select group. On the other hand, there have been a number of human persons over the years who have implicitly or explicitly claimed to be divine beings from other worlds. Many of them were demagogues; many more of them were leaders of small, self-contained sects of true believers. What is unique about Jesus is that he is the only member of the first set of persons who is also a member of the second.
The first group had a great impact on millions of people largely because of their brilliant teaching but also because of their admirable lives and characters, which, of course, included humility. Buddha emphatically said he was not a god, and Muhammad, of course, would never, ever have claimed to be Allah, nor did Confucius identify himself with heaven. The second group consists of those who claimed to be God but never were able to convince anyone but a small number. Why? Because it is virtually impossible to live such an extraordinary life that most people would be forced to conclude you were not merely a human being. In the whole history of the world, there is only one person who not only claimed to be God himself but also got enormous numbers of people to believe it. Only Jesus combines claims of divinity with the most beautiful life of humanity.
(Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical, [New York: Viking, 2016], p. 237.)
Malcolm Muggeridge:
One thing at least can be said with certainty about the Crucifixion of Christ; it was manifestly the most famous death in history. No other death has aroused one hundredth part of the interest, or been remembered with one hundredth part of the intensity and concern.
(Malcolm Muggeridge, Jesus Rediscovered, [Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1969], p. 93.)
N. T. Wright:
Only in the Christian story itself—certainly not in the secular stories of modernity—do we find any sense that the problems of the world are solved not by a straightforward upward movement into the light but by the creator God going down into the dark to rescue humankind and the world from its plight.
(N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, [New York: HarperOne, 2008], p. 87.)
Sheldon Vanauken:
Christianity—in a word, the divinity of Jesus—seemed probable to me. But there is a gap between the probable and proved. How was I to cross it? If I were to stake my whole life on the Risen Christ, I wanted proof. I wanted certainty. I wanted to see Him eat a bit of fish. I wanted letters of fire across the sky. I got none of these. And I continued to hang about on the edge of the gap.
Davy and I, sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, were reading Dorothy Sayers’s tremendous series of short plays on the life of Jesus. In one of them, I was forcibly struck by the reply of a man to Jesus’s inquiry about his faith: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’ Wasn’t that just my position? Believing and not believing? A paradox, like that other paradox: one must have faith to believe but must believe in order to have faith. A paradox to unlock a paradox? I felt that it was.
One day later there came the second intellectual breakthrough: it was the rather chilling realisation that I could not go back. In my old easy-going theism, I had regarded Christianity as a sort of fairy tale; and I had neither accepted nor rejected Jesus, since I had never, in fact, encountered him. Now I had. The position was not, as I had been comfortably thinking all these months, merely a question of whether I was to accept the Messiah or not. It was a question of whether I was to accept Him—or reject. My God! There was a gap behind me, too. Perhaps the leap to acceptance was a horrifying gamble—but what of the leap to rejection? There might be no certainty that Christ was God—but, by God, there was no certainty that He was not. If I were to accept, I might and probably would face the thought through the years: ‘Perhaps, after all, it’s a lie; I’ve been had!’ But if I were to reject, I would certainly face the haunting, terrible thought: ‘Perhaps it’s true—and I have rejected my God!’
This was not to be borne. I could not reject Jesus. There was only one thing to do, once I had seen the gap behind me. I turned away from it and flung myself over the gap towards Jesus.
(Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977], pp. 98-99.)Sheldon Vanauken:
Did Jesus live? And did he really say
The burning words that banish mortal fear?
And are they true? Just this is central, here
The Church must stand or fall. It’s Christ we weigh.
All else is off the point: the Flood, the Day
Of Eden, or the Virgin Birth—Have done!
The Question is, did God send us the Son
Incarnate crying Love! Love is the Way!
Between the probable and proved there yawns
A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd,
Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse,
Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns
Our only hope: to leap into the Word
That opens up the shuttered universe.
(Sheldon Vanauken, “The Gap”; In: Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, [San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1977], p. 100.)
W. H. Auden:
If a man who is in love is asked what gives his beloved such unique value for him over all other persons, he can only answer: “She is the fulfillment of all my dreams.” If the questioner has undergone any similar experience, the subjectivity of this answer causes no offense because the lover makes no claim that others should feel the same. He not only admits that “she is beautiful” means “she is beautiful for me but not necessarily for you” but glories in this admission.
If a man who professes himself a Christian is asked why he believes Jesus to be the Christ, his position is much more difficult, since he cannot believe this without meaning that all who believe otherwise are in error, yet at the same time he can give a no more objective answer than the lover: “I believe because He fulfills none of my dreams, because He is in every respect the opposite of what He would be if I could have made Him in my own image.”
Thus, if a Christian is asked: “Why Jesus and not Socrates or Buddha or Confucius or Mahomet?” perhaps all he can say is: “None of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him’.”
(W. H. Auden, “Purely Subjective,” The Chimera, Summer 1943; In: The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose: Volume II: 1939-1948, ed. Edward Mendelson, [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002], pp. 196-197.)
Cf. David Dark:
This is the opposite of knee-jerk sanctimoniousness. Auden feels compelled to try to seek the kingdom of God made known in Jesus precisely because he finds the life Jesus invites us to so revolting, so contrary to what he’s inclined to want, so against his own, all-too-loud sense of what’s appropriate. The mere thought of Jesus left him feeling unhinged or, rather, more in touch with a habitual unhingedness exposed and scandalized by an encounter with the Man of Sorrows/Prince of Peace/the One in whom, Auden believed, the fullness of the deity was pleased to dwell.
(David Dark, The Sacredness of Questioning Everything, [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009], pp. 65-66.) Preview.
Cf. E. B. White:
“Have you heard about the words that appeared in the spider’s web?” asked Mrs. Arable nervously.
“Yes,” replied the doctor.
“Well, do you understand it?” asked Mrs. Arable.
“Understand what?”
“Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider’s web?”
“Oh, no,” said Dr. Dorian. “I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.”
“What’s miraculous about a spider’s web?” said Mrs. Arable. “I don’t see why you say a web is a miracle—it’s just a web.”
“Ever try to spin one?” asked Dr. Dorian.
(E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, [New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1999], pp. 108-109.)
John Chrysostom:
For if He did not rise again, but remains dead, how did the Apostles perform miracles in His name? But they did not, say you, perform miracles? How then was our religion instituted? …For this would be the greatest of miracles, that without any miracles, the whole world should have eagerly come to be taken in the nets of twelve poor and illiterate men.
(John Chrysostom, A Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 1; trans. NPNF1, 11:5.)James Allan Francis:
He was born in an obscure village, the child of a peasant woman. He grew up in still another village, where He worked in a carpenter’s shop until He was thirty. Then for three years He was an itinerant preacher. He never wrote a book, never held an office, never had a family or owned a house. He never went to college. He never visited a big city. He never traveled two hundred miles from the place where He was born. He did none of the things one usually associates with greatness. He had no credentials but Himself.
He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against Him. His friends ran away. He was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. He was nailed to a cross between two thieves. While He was dying His executioners gambled for His clothing, the only property He had on earth. When He was dead He was laid in a borrowed grave through the pity of a friend.
Twenty centuries have come and gone, and today Jesus is the central figure of the human race and the leader of mankind’s progress. All the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, all the kings that ever reigned put together have not affected the life of mankind on this earth as much as that one solitary life.
(James Allan Francis, One Solitary Life, forward and reflections by Ken Blanchard, [Naperville: Simple Truths, 2005], p. 61. Cf. James Allan Francis, The Real Jesus and Other Sermons, [Philadelphia: Judson, 1926], p. 124.)
Alfred Edersheim:
…He was the One perfect Man—the ideal of humanity; His doctrine the one absolute teaching. The world has known none other, none equal. And the world has owned it, if not by the testimony of words, yet by the evidence of facts. Springing from such a people; born, living, and dying in circumstances, and using means, the most unlikely of such results—yet, by universal consent, the Man of Nazareth has been the mightiest Factor in our world’s history: alike politically, socially, intellectually, and morally. If He be not the Messiah, He has at least thus far done the Messiah’s work. If He be not the Messiah, there has at least been none other, before or after Him. If He be not the Messiah, the world has not, and never can have, a Messiah.
(Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah: In Two Volumes—Vol. I, [London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1883], Book II, Chapter VI, pp. 180-181.)George MacDonald:
My soul was like a summer evening, after a heavy fall of rain, when the drops are yet glistening on the trees in the last rays of the down-going sun, and the wind of the twilight has begun to blow. The hot fever of life had gone by, and I breathed the clear mountainair of the land of Death. I had never dreamed of such blessedness. It was not that I had in any way ceased to be what I had been. The very fact that anything can die, implies the existence of something that cannot die; which must either take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown dies, and arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to lead a purely spiritual life.
(George MacDonald, Phantastes, [London: Chatto & Windus, 1894], p. 271.)
Cf. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz:
Now, the sufficient reason for the existence of the universe can never be found in the series of contingent things, in bodies and their representations in souls, that is; because matter in itself is indifferent to motion or rest, and to this motion or that. Therefore we could never find in matter a reason for motion, and still less that for any particular motion. And since any motion which is in matter at present comes from a previous motion, and that too from a previous one, we are no further forward if we go on and on as far as we like: the same question will still remain. Therefore the sufficient reason, which has no need of any further reason, must lie outside that series of contingent things, and must be found in a substance which is the cause of the series: it must be a necessary being, which carries the reason for its existence within itself, otherwise we still would not have a sufficient reason at which we can stop. And that final reason for things is what we call God.
(G. W. Leibniz, Philosophical Texts, Oxford Philosophical Texts, trans. Richard Francks, R. S. Woolhouse, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], “Principles of Nature and Grace, based on Reason (1714)”, §. 8, p. 262.)
Timothy Keller:
Scientists are very reluctant to ever say that a theory is “proved.” Even Richard Dawkins admits that Darwin’s theory cannot be finally proven, that “new facts may come to light which will force our successors . . . to abandon Darwinism or modify it beyond recognition.” But that doesn’t mean that science cannot test theories and find some far more empirically verifiable than others. A theory is considered empirically verified if it organizes the evidence and explains phenomena better than any conceivable alternative theory. That is, if, through testing, it leads us to expect with accuracy many and varied events better than any other rival account of the same data, then it is accepted, though not (in the strong rationalist sense) “proved.”
In Is There a God? Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne argues powerfully that belief in God can be tested and justified (but not proven) in the same way. The view that there is a God, he says, leads us to expect the things we observe—that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains human beings with consciousness and with an indelible moral sense. The theory that there is no God, he argues, does not lead us to expect any of these things. Therefore, belief in God offers a better empirical fit, it explains and accounts for what we see better than the alternative account of things. No view of God can be proven, but that does not mean that we cannot sift and weigh the grounds for various religious beliefs and find that some or even one is the most reasonable.
(Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, [New York: Dutton, 2008], p. 121.)
Richard Swinburne:
The basic structure of my argument is this. Scientists, historians, and detectives observe data and proceed thence to some theory about what best explains the occurrence of these data. We can analyse the criteria which they use in reaching a conclusion that a certain theory is better supported by the data than a different theory—that is, is more likely, on the basis of those data, to be true. Using those same criteria, we find that the view that there is a God explains everything we observe, not just some narrow range of data. It explains the fact that there is a universe at all, that scientific laws operate within it, that it contains conscious animals and humans with very complex intricately organized bodies, that we have abundant opportunities for developing ourselves and the world, as well as the more particular data that humans report miracles and have religious experiences. In so far as scientific causes and laws explain some of these things (and in part they do), these very causes and laws need explaining, and God’s action explains them. The very same criteria which scientists use to reach their own theories lead us to move beyond those theories to a creator God who sustains everything in existence.
(Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], p. 2.)
Timothy Keller:
When a Russian cosmonaut returned from space and reported that he had not found God, C. S. Lewis responded that this was like Hamlet going into the attic of his castle looking for Shakespeare. If there is a God, he wouldn’t be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods. He would relate to us the way a playwright relates to the characters in his play. We (characters) might be able to know quite a lot about the playwright, but only to the degree the author chooses to put information about himself in the play. Therefore, in no case could we “prove” God’s existence as if he were an object wholly within our universe like oxygen and hydrogen or an island in the Pacific.
Lewis gives us another metaphor for knowing the truth about God when he writes that he believes in God “as I believe the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” Imagine trying to look directly at the sun in order to learn about it. You can’t do it. It will burn out your retinas, ruining your capacity to take it in. A far better way to learn about the existence, power, and quality of the sun is to look at the world it shows you, to recognize how it sustains everything you see and enables you to see it.
Here, then, we have a way forward. We should not try to “look into the sun,” as it were, demanding irrefutable proofs for God. Instead we should “look at what the sun shows us.” Which account of the world has the most “explanatory power” to make sense of what we see in the world and in ourselves? We have a sense that the world is not the way it ought to be. We have a sense that we are very flawed and yet very great. We have a longing for love and beauty that nothing in this world can fulfill. We have a deep need to know meaning and purpose. Which worldview best accounts for these things?
Christians do not claim that their faith gives them omniscience or absolute knowledge of reality. Only God has that. But they believe that the Christian account of things—creation, fall, redemption, and restoration—makes the most sense of the world. I ask you to put on Christianity like a pair of spectacles and look at the world with it. See what power it has to explain what we know and see.
(Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, [New York: Dutton, 2008], pp. 122-123.)
Fore more see: Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, [New York: Dutton, 2008], Chapters 8-9, pp. 127ff.
C. S. Lewis:
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
(C. S. Lewis, Screwtape Proposes A Toast: And Other Pieces, [London and Glasgow: Fontana Books, 1965], Screwtape Proposes A Toast, “Is Theology Poetry?” p. 58.)
Cf. C. S. Lewis:
We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else.
(C. S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, [New York: Touchstone, 1996], XIV: The Grand Miracle, p. 145.)Timothy Keller:
How should God’s people respond to these verses, and the dark view of humanity they give us? First, we will recognize that here is a picture which maps onto the reality of the world. All systems of thought must account both for the awesomeness of the cosmos, and the goodness of which humanity is capable; and for the brokenness of the world, our societies, and our lives and relationships. Why is there so much beauty; why is it so flawed? Paul’s answer is simple: God. There is a God who made it all, and made us in his image, to know and reflect his character. And that same God has, in wrath, given us what we have chosen: life without him, worshiping things which cannot satisfy. In the beauty of the world, we are to see God’s existence. In the brokenness of the world, we are to see God’s justice. As we do, we run back to the place where we see God’s mercy: the cross.
(Timothy Keller, Romans 1-7 For You, [The Good Book Company, 2014], p. 36.)Abduction.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
“We are coming now rather into the region of guess-work,” said Dr Mortimer.
“Say, rather, into the region where we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination, but we have always some material basis on which to start our speculations. . . .”
(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound Of The Baskervilles, [London: John Murray, 1953], Chapter IV: Sir Henry Baskerville, p. 53.)
Phyllis Illari, Federica Russo:
Inductive arguments. Inductive arguments allow us to infer a conclusion from a set of premises, but not with certainty. This means that the conclusion can be false, even though the premises are true. The reason is that, in inductive inferences, we move from content known in the premises to content in the conclusion that is not already known in the premises. So these arguments go beyond what is already contained in the premises. Inductive arguments are therefore called ‘ampliative’ and they are fallible. Inductive arguments can go from particular observations to generalizations, or to predict another observation… Abductive inferences. Abductive inferences share with inductive inferences the fact that the conclusion does not follow from the premises with certainty and that, in a sense, the conclusion expands on what is stated in the premises. However, in abduction, from a set of premises, we ‘abduce’ the conclusion, which is a proposition that purportedly best explains the premises.
(Phyllis Illari, Federica Russo, Causality: Philosophical Theory Meets Scientific Practice, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], p. 20.)
Douglas Walton:
Abductive inference, commonly called inference to the best explanation, is reasoning from given data to a hypothesis that explains the data.
(Douglas Walton, Abductive Reasoning, [Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005], p. xiii.)
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
You happen to know that Tim and Harry have recently had a terrible row that ended their friendship. Now someone tells you that she just saw Tim and Harry jogging together. The best explanation for this that you can think of is that they made up. You conclude that they are friends again.
(Igor Douven, ‘Abduction;’ In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. N. Zalta, [March 2011; revised May 2021], https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/.)
καὶ αὐτός ἐστιν πρὸ πάντων καὶ τὰ πάντα ἐν αὐτῷ συνέστηκεν ~ Soli Deo Gloria
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